My latest two videos are up at Fast Company: one’s on firewalling your attention with time blocking, and the second is on three ways to use Google Wave in your business.
The time blocking piece is actually a personal confession about my hermit tendencies. Sometimes I just shut everything off, fall off the face of the planet, and have some uninterrupted me-time. I’ve had co-workers say to me, “Um, where did you go today?” and the answer is usually “To my happy place, a distraction-free zone.” As you’ll hear in the video, at my last office job, I actually used to schedule a meeting with myself complete with a conference room to get away and focus on something for awhile. Here’s the 2 minute, 37 second clip.
Read the whole script at Fast Company: Avoid Office Distractions with Time Blocking.
The second clip is my quick answer to the age-old question about Google Wave: “But what do you actually use it for?” Here are three use cases for Wave in your business.
To dive deeper into Wave use cases, check out 8 more in Chapter 10 of The Complete Guide to Google Wave.
2 Comments
hurricaneMitch
Wonderful advice. What I find interesting about time-blocking is my coworker’s responses when I tell them I am engaging in my type of time-blocking. When I tell my coworkers that, for me, being distracted is not efficient they typically get offended. It’s like they feel that I am talking about them being inefficient, not that I need to be more efficient. So in the end I am just secretive about it. Anyway, great stuff thanks!
Wimmo van Geldrop
@HurricaneMitch: I experience the same thing. But that is because you tell them at the moment they actually are interrupting. If you let them know in advance that you are blocked from 10:00am until 11:30am (daily, or on a particular date) they’ll understand. It also works the other way around: by not interrupting you outside that particular time block, they won’t feel guilty about pulling you off your work.