Recently in Productivity Category

Nintendo Wii sold out quickly when it was first released and its popularity only continued to grow. The interesting thing about the Wii is that it isn't just for video game fiends and the other usual suspects. Whether it's playing the guitar and drums in Rock Band, or working out with Wii Fit, there's something for everyone. And that's good--because Wii is everywhere. There's even a bar/restaurant here in Boston called Achilles Project, where you can play on a Wii while you have a beer (although, one might argue, that could be disastrous for your game).

At GotVMail, we knew couldn't come up with any good reason not to set-up a Wii Room at our headquarters, so we went ahead and mounted a nice LCD screen on an Ergotron cart and put it with the Wii in a dedicated room for people to enjoy.

So, how do you convince your boss (or yourself) to purchase and install Wii in your office? Use one of the arguments I've listed below.

• All work and no play makes for some really agitated employees. Everyone at GotVMail works incredibly hard, but sometimes people need a break. Easy way to blow off some steam? Play a fellow team member in a 10 minute game of tennis! (Of course.) Playing Wii is a good way to free your mind, let go of your frustrations, and think like a kid for a bit (and that's good for everyone's productivity).
• Wii gets employees talking. No matter the size of your company, there will be people who don't interact with each other on a regular basis. Wii brings a lot of people together, and during a few games, gets them talking, too. Wii lets up to four employees play at a time. This is crucial for community building in your workplace.
• We all could use some fun. These days, fun is hard to find. People are struggling. Why not make the workplace a little more upbeat? No, playing Wii won't solve the economic crisis, but it might help some of our bigger problems seem more manageable.

It's great to see people taking a break and having some fun playing the Wii in any of our offices in Boston or Austin. Our most popular games have been Wii Sports and Madden 09 in the quick 5 on 5 mode.

So send this blog post to your boss and get employees playing Wii to relax, socialize, have fun, and be more productive.

I think our pre-school and kindergarten teachers had it right: at a certain point in the day, you just need to close your eyes, and if possible, get some shut-eye. Even in the "adult world" of 9 to 5 work, there's just something about "shutting down" both your computer and your mind for about fifteen minutes per day that just re-starts your brain, and makes you even more productive when you wake up.

But why won't people admit that napping--a practice rooted in childhood--could actually boost productivity in adult environments? After all, the statistics are there to support the benefits of napping: according to the National Sleep Foundation, "[a] study at NASA on sleepy military pilots and astronauts found that a 40-minute nap improved performance by 34% and alertness 100%." Researchers at the Center for Sleep and Consciousness also discovered that sleep's basic function is to "remove the noise" accumulated in the brain from tasks performed each day, allowing the brain to "refresh" itself. The University of Wisconsin's Sleep and Medicine Program also states on their site that sleep is vital for proper brain function: "Some experts believe sleep gives neurons a chance to maintain themselves. Without sleep, neurons may become so overloaded by normal cellular activities that they begin to malfunction." Why not give our brain the help it needs with a fifteen or twenty minute nap each day to recover and consequently, be more productive?

We're a long way from providing an assigned "nap time" for those who work in offices, but I'm doing my part as a business owner and considering the benefits for our employees, all of whom stare at bright computer screens for more than eight hours a day, working on multiple projects. Even if the solution is something as simple as asking people to take fifteen minutes each afternoon to simply shut their eyes and recharge, something has to be done to beat the afternoon "drag" when the brain starts to feel the fatigue of the day. Who knows, we might even have to take one of our empty spaces here at the office and create a dedicated relaxation room...

Mechanical Turk was launched in 2005, with the purpose of completing Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for Amazon's internal business processes. Over time, the marketplace for this kind of task completion grew and external companies were allowed to post projects, too. But other than the obscure needs of a handful of businesses, what other uses does Mechanical Turk have? I wondered this when I returned to the site recently to play with the application. I already knew the app could be used for less than great purposes such as spamming and social bookmarking, but I discovered that Mechanical Turk could also be useful for image tagging and transcription, like those from Casting Words.

Two weeks ago I read a post on ReadWriteWeb about a company named SmartSheet and their new Smartsourcing tool. While I have used Google docs and a few other online document sharing services, I had never heard of SmartSheet. Even after using the application I still don't care about the online document management as much as the simplification, automation and ultimately, streamlined process for submitting and gather results of HITs. After reading that post and returning to MT, I had an epiphany: I could use SmartSheet with Mechanical Turk for real tasks.

So, how does it work? Recently, we had a list of names that we wanted to compile email and postal addresses for some outreach. While we could have spent the time to research each name and find the data ourselves, we tested the project out with Mechanical Turk. After the very easy data submission process, the results were fast and pretty cool: data started flowing back into the spreadsheet and one by one, our spreadsheet was filled with the email and mailing addresses we needed. There's no need to get the data from Amazon and manually enter it back in, and there's is even a nice little utility to reject what MT finds in case it doesn't meet your requirements, and it sends it back out for work.

While I'm sure SmartSheet is doing lots of cool stuff, and in some cases even better than stuff than Google, I don't care about that. Why? Because the draw of the application and their best source of revenue will come from the integration with Mechanical Turk.

Bottom line? SmartSheet better start promoting this and getting people hooked before someone comes along with a nice little tool that does the same and uses Google or another online document system as the backend.

At GotVMail, we make an effort to provide free, healthy snacks (that taste good) for our employees in addition to providing a wide array of beverages. Having better choices on hand makes it harder to pig out on bad stuff. We've had dried fruit in the past, but nothing beats the real thing. There's no other time of year when this is more evident than around the holidays, when we receive tons of fruit baskets. We always put these in our GotVMail kitchen, and the fruit is gone within minutes. Since it's clear our people like fresh fruit, last year I started to look for a good way to provide this year round.

There aren't a lot of options for fresh fruit delivery, and here's why:

• Fruit basket companies: Either include lots of non-fruit items or offer very expensive "branded" fruit (for example, Harry & David offers their special fruit that somehow needs to be vastly more expensive than the same kind sold in the supermarket)
• Supermarket delivery: Lacks selection and quality
• Famers' market: Requires time we don't have, and selection isn't consistently varied

While reviewing the options, I finally found a company that specializes in fresh fruit delivery for offices, The FruitGuys. Every Tuesday each of our offices (Boston and Austin) get a delivery of fresh in season fruit. It's a no-frills deal--just fruit, straight up. This has become so popular that by Thursday on most weeks everything is gone or sitting on someone's desk in the final ripening stages. Besides having a lot of nutritional value, having the extra fruit around means our people can supplement their lunches (along with our $5 lunch subsidy) or have an extra snack. Anyway you slice it, it's a good idea.

I recently found California Fruit Company who seems to be offering a similar service but limited delivery area.

Back in September I blogged about using two monitors to increase productivity at work. Seems like others are starting to catch on to this idea because just the other day, the New York Times ran a story about one reporter's switch to the two-monitor system. Farhad Manjoo wrote,

As every office worker knows, trying to get anything done on a computer that's connected to the Internet can be a test of wills. On my old desktop monitor -- at 19 inches square, it was the Honda Civic of displays -- the Web was a wormhole that routinely pulled me off track. I'd switch over to a browser window to look something up, but as soon as I did so all traces of my work would disappear from the screen and I'd forget about the task at hand. A half hour later, I'd wake up from a deep browsing trance, wondering how I ever got to, say, a page recounting the history of Adidas, or some other topic having nothing at all to do with my work.

A huge desktop didn't remove all distractions, but it blunted their force. Now I could keep my e-mail and the Web open on one screen while my Microsoft Word document ran on another. This kept me on task. Even if I did go off to the Web, my document was always visible, beckoning me to come back to work.

Having two monitors isn't just helpful for programmers (or CTO's like me), it's helpful for anyone who multitasks throughout the day (and really, who doesn't?). Manjoo brings up a good point about how useful two monitors can be for writers leaving their research and emails in one window, and then using another monitor for writing articles. The additional monitor serves as a physical reminder that duty calls--you can't "minimize" a 22-inch screen on your desktop, so there's nothing to do but pay attention to your work.

This blog post has been in my "tickler" file (I know, I know, odd name) since I started reading Getting Things Done by David Allen on a trip to Mexico. You'll understand what a tickler file is after watching the video or reading the book. David Allen effectively created a productivity industry around his GTD method, and many companies launched products based on the method; everything from online tasks lists to advanced filing applications. As Allen points out, it doesn't matter what tools you use, what's most important is that you are comfortable with them and trust them.

Personally, I use Outlook tasks, notes, and calendar combined with a Moleskine notebook that I carry around everywhere to take notes on anything that pops into my head--business ideas, ways to improve my current business, anything. My largest takeaway was getting everything off my mind to get to an almost Zen-like state where I'm most productive. For me this meant writing down everything I think of and reviewing it on a regular basis.

If you're like me, and reading seems to get pushed to the bottom of your list of priorities, then watch this video when you have some time (or watch it in 5 minute breaks you have here and there). It features great insight into the method I've just described, in around 45 minutes. I have shared this with a few GotVMail team members, and combined with Inbox Zero, one team member even purchased a notebook. This may not sound like a big deal, but he hadn't things down on paper for years, and he has since informed me that in only two days, he feels vastly more productive.

Every single day I see entrepreneurs, friends, and employees struggling with email and the related productivity challenges. I have to share with you part of my solution to this growing problem. In 2006, Merlin Man wrote Inbox Zero, a series of blog posts which have become very popular in certain circles, especially the getting things done (GTD) ones. The Inbox Zero concept that Merlin talks about is very powerful in dealing with the ever-increasing flow of email people receive each day. I cannot say I am an expert or have implemented the Inbox Zero concept exactly but I took what I felt was important and combined it with some techniques I had been using for years, such as weeding through my inbox and keeping it basically empty. As a result, my productivity increased. This becomes even more powerful when you use the tools provided by David Allen in the book Getting Things Done.

Just in the past few weeks, I have sent this video to three team members at GotVMail, two entrepreneurs, and my mom (seriously!). Everyone found it useful and saw immediate productivity gains. Very soon we will be offering this as part of our new internal learning program, The Academy, so everyone can take advantage of these helpful tools.

A couple of years ago, a GotVMail employee asked me if he could have a second monitor to increase his productivity, specifically stepping through and debugging code (that's the entrepreneurial spirit!). Within a week of giving him the second screen, I had requests from another quarter of the company asking for a second monitor for one reason or another. I didn't think anything of this request, and as the months flew by, the percentage of employees with two screens shot up to 90%. A year after setting up the second monitor for the employee who asked for one, I got the "ultimate request": "Can we make dual monitor setup part of our standard employee desktop build process?"

My answer? Well, I didn't have one right away. But it was time to think about the impact having two monitors made on productivity compared with the cost. That's when I realized I probably should've done this before supplying 90% of our employees with a second monitor (funny how that works).

The benefit of having two monitors is pretty straightforward: more screen space to do more things. While I can't monitor (no pun intended) the other "things" people do with their second screen (i.e., frequent checks of Facebook or MySpace profiles, along with healthy doses of reading on CNN, for example), I think can tell if having two monitors produces the same amount of productivity as just one monitor, or if it exceeds it, by just paying attention.

In the process of making my decision whether or not to institute the new "two screen policy" for all employees, I took an inventory of my own workspace: two 21" Dell monitors sit on an Ergotron mount which allows them to float above my desk. My Outlook is always open on the right screen and the entire left screen is for work. For me, this set-up just works. I can compartmentalize my on screen activities, and feel like my attention is focused solely on one project even when I might have about ten other things going on at the same time. If it works for me, I want to make that option available to my team, too.

If something like this has the potential to allow people to compartmentalize their work (and let's face it, a little of their play) then why not institute the policy? I know from personal experience that I was wasting a ton of time switching around from Firefox to Outlook, Word to Excel. Over the course of a day, this really adds up, and also crowds one screen. For those in engineering and operations, the multiplication of windows seems to be endless, and requires a solution such as viewing on two screens. So my answer to the "ultimate request" ? Yes.

How do you figure out when to schedule a meeting for six busy entrepreneurs that requires at least five hours out of the office? You could spend hours trying to publish online calendars, waste time sending emails back and forth, or break out your BlackBerry/iPhone/other mobile device and scroll through your schedule for an eternity to find a date and time all six of you can break free from the office.

Or you can Doodle.

What is this 'Doodle' I speak of? It's an awesome tool that really takes the onus of planning off of one person or the other, and puts it into the neutral hands of a simple online tool. All that you need to do is name the poll you'd like to create, select the dates and times if required, then send out the unique URL to the voting group. All the group has to do is follow the URL, vote for an option, and that's it.

I use Doodle on a regular basis for events and other obligations pertaining to Entrepreneurs' Organization because our members are spread out across the country, and around the world. Nothing is better than Doodle for arranging a conference call or an all day planning session.

What's cool about Doodle is that it's free, doesn't require registration, special technology, plugins, a specific type of OS or anything. A couple of competitors have popped up, but they've honestly added so many features that it defeats the purpose and singular genius of Doodle. In this case, less truly is more.

As an entrepreneur, you often find yourself with a jumble of different business ideas floating around in your head at any given point in time. If you settle on pursuing one of those ideas and start shaping it into a solid vision for a business, the next step is articulating all of the fundamental concepts that support your idea (e.g., a business plan). This can be really difficult for a lot of entrepreneurs--we're so excited to jump right into something new that we forget that sometimes it's important to be methodical.

A few months back when GotVMail was engaging in an executive level strategy session and crystallizing our core values, I had lots of ideas floating around in my head--but this time it wasn't about which business idea I wanted to pursue, it was about the amazing things still in store for the company. Despite the fact that my company is past its infancy and well into its childhood, as a team we wanted to ensure our collective focus was aligned, and actually effective when executed. We also wanted to nurture our identity from the inside out, to lay the foundation for the future, but it was difficult with so many opinions on the table.

Two weeks earlier I attended a talk given by Cameron Herold for EO Boston during which Collective Next produced an amazing graphic representation of the ideas discussed at his presentation. The way the facilitator visually deconstructed the ideas about creating a world class "work culture" struck me as incredibly useful and very productive. The even more amazing part was that Cameron and the facilitator never met before the event, or prepared any graphics in advance; they didn't require any interaction during the process, they just produced an amazing visual on-the-spot. (It's unfortunate there's no video of this, since the process is fascinating.) Since I'm a visual learner, "seeing the ideas" as we discussed them really helped me retain the overarching principles of the topic at hand. At that point, I knew that in order to drive the executive level strategy session, we had to do a series of graphic facilitation exercises.

This is how it worked for us: a really talented graphic facilitator we obtained through Collective Next came to our strategy sessions. With very little coaching or knowledge of the topics, she was able to create--in real time--a visual representation of all our discussion points, in one easy-to-share visual. As a result of the graphic facilitation, we were able to come up with lively and informative visual notes for the sessions. Individuals were able to review the documents at their leisure outside of the sessions, too, since we had the representations disseminated to key players via email.

Planning, strategizing, and articulating your core ideologies and goals isn't the sexiest way to spend your time as an entrepreneur, but if you don't do that in the beginning of your business, trust me, in order to grow, you will need to do it at some point. Our graphic facilitation exercises really helped us take that next step in growing GotVMail, and it helped us formulate our core values as a company.

We're now considering using graphic facilitation in a number of different areas. I recently discovered The Grove, a company that offers pre-packaged solutions as well as training in the graphic facilitation skill set. If you feel like you need a little help getting to that next level, I highly recommend using a process such as this.

Update: Kristen Schaefer of Grove was nice enough to provide a great resource for finding a local graphic record, Visual Practitioners Association.

Back in February we opened the Austin outpost of GotVMail. Besides being an awesome city with tons to do, Austin has an amazing--and growing--talent pool from which we were able to draw some very strong team members. But having a group located thousands of miles away from us presented some unique challenges, like finding a way to communicate in real time that still made the Austin office feel like a part of GotVMail, and not some far-flung satellite location.

We'd used email, IM, and GoToMeeting in the past to communicate with mobile members of the GotVMail team, but the Austin office was a whole group of people, not just one person, and they'd need to feel like they were a part of the teams in Boston because, well, they actually were. If that interaction felt awkward or one dimensional, it might impact productivity. And we didn't want that.

After a bit of searching, I came upon LifeSize, a company that was, coincidentally, based out of Austin, Texas. LifeSize allows people to teleconference remotely with any device--Macs, PolyCom, Tandem, all the way through free clients available via IM and similar applications. You might think, "Video conferencing is not new--why is LifeSize so special?" It's special because it is ridiculously easy to set-up and outputs in high definition, yet it's sold for less than standard definition systems. In other words, it wouldn't make sense to choose anything but LifeSize if you were looking for outstanding visuals. As an added bonus, it crosses over all of the aforementioned platforms.

We use LifeSize regularly to talk to our Austin people, and even set it up at our company meeting in Boston so that we could include our Austin office in the gathering. Our Engineering team meets every day with their counterparts in Austin using LifeSize. LifeSize's website describes the system as being as "natural as being in someone's office," and it's actually true. Even the sound quality is amazing because of the high end base station that uses about twenty microphones and noise cancellation. I don't really think there's any way we could be happier with our Life Size stuff--except maybe if they came out with a teleporting feature. ;-)

(And yes, that is a Nintendo Wii in the first picture that is connected to the 52-inch Sharp Aquos LCD televison. The local Austin team has gotten very good at tennis and golf. On my next trip to the office I will have to challenge them to a game of Mario Kart racing.)

With all of the strife people are experiencing due to the economy, it's only natural that we're seeing the resurgence of news stories offering ways to save money on everything from gas to your daily lunch. We'd probably rather forget the circumstances causing us to search for ways to save money, but stories like the one that ran in the Wall Street Journal last week--"Bagging Lunch: The Inflation Effect"--highlight the ways in which employers can step up and help mitigate the effects of the rising cost of living for their employees.

One of the companies featured in the WSJ article was my company, GotVMail. We started GotLunch, a program that gives every employee a $5 daily credit for use towards lunch from a variety of local sandwich shops and delis. Since we don't have a cafeteria in our building and lunch often entails getting in a car and driving to find food, we thought it would make more sense (and save people gas) if employees could just get their lunch close to home and for a lower cost, too.

We get all of this done via our VMeals interface, through which people order their meal for either one or two days or the entire week. The keys to success have been simple:

1. Easy - Online interface accepts credit cards (if employees go over their $5 allowance each day) and is automated, so no manual processing is required. Also, whether you order in the morning or order in advance, lunch is always there.
2. Lots of selection - Hot and cold options in addition to standard salads and sandwiches and from multiple vendors.
3. Free delivery - GotVMail's lunches are individually labeled and dropped off in our kitchen. GotVMail People never pay a delivery fee.

GotVMail's GotLunch program helps in the following ways (besides the obvious benefit of lower cost lunches):

• Lets people use their time how they want to. GotVMail People no longer have to go out to get lunch, and those who get their lunch delivered now have more time to do other stuff like take a walk, catch up with coworkers, or nap on one of the GotVMail couches or chairs (they're really comfortable).
• Gives people more flexible lunch options. Cuts down on the amount of brown bag lunches people have to bring, and offers those who normally bring their own the choice of additional hot lunch options.
• Supports local businesses. GotVMail People choose their lunches from menus offered by local delis and sandwich shops, so we're helping to drive business to other small businesses in the area (many of which are family owned and operated).
• Gives GotVMail People a chance to socialize. Since many people order lunch at the same time and pick it up in the same spot when it is delivered to GotVMail, it always turns into an opportunity to socialize and meet people from many different departments in the company. We've always felt strongly that GotVMail People need this sort of social release to be the productive.

Overall, the response has been extremely positive, and we're proud of the ripple effect it has had on team member morale and local businesses.

It's kind of unusual to have an epiphany while foraging for a snack. But that's what happened to me in GotVMail's kitchen one afternoon. After surveying the snacks--a smorgasbord of items that were either high in fat, sugar, preservatives or both--I realized it didn't have to be this way! I knew we could easily find healthier alternatives to greasy chips or provide protein bars instead of candy bars to GotVMail team members in need of something to snack on. The easiest way to do this? A vending machine, but not any old vending machine, it would be free for GotVMail team members and would consist entirely of healthier snacks.

Since I'd already been trying to find foods with fewer processed ingredients for myself at home, I was familiar with a lot of brands that offered healthier versions of favorite items like chips, popcorn, and candy bars. I decided to buy items like Cascadian Farms Organic, LesserEvil, Luna, and Robert's American Gourmet in large quantities on Amazon.com and stock the vending machine with those items and then see the response of GotVMail employees. Naturally, overhauling our snack offerings was a big change, but I had a feeling it would be a really positive change that would enhance our productivity. To make the new system easier to swallow, we decided to offer the healthier snacks in the machine for free, permanently. It just made more sense to supply our employees with snacks that could potentially provide the energy we all needed to get through our projects every day.

Since setting up the new, healthier vending machines, the response from GotVMail team members has been largely positive. Obviously, every now and again people just want a candy bar, and nothing else will substitute, but in terms of providing healthier alternatives to fill that daily, 3pm post-lunch void, the healthier vending machine has made a huge difference. And in addition to food in our vending machines, we continue to offer free drinks (the non-alcoholic kind!), coffee and espresso. Fresh fruit deliveries have also been added to the roster of healthier snack items at GotVMail.

The vending machine project at GotVMail launched around the same time as another initiative of ours, the GotVMail Lunch Program, GotLunch. Look for a post in the coming days about this innovative employee benefit.