Category Archives: Definitions

The smell of fear

A smell you sometimes smell in offices is fear. It seems now that humans can actually smell this according to this article in The Guardian:

“People can unconsciously detect whether someone is stressed or scared by smelling a chemical pheromone released in their sweat, according to researchers who have investigated the underarm secretions of petrified skydivers.”

The research was funded by US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency and the military might want to use it as a weapon…

Dr Lilianne Mujica-Parodi at Stony Brook University in New York State stated that: “We demonstrate here the first direct evidence for a human alarm pheromone … our findings indicate that there may be a hidden biological component to human social dynamics, in which emotional stress is, quite literally, ‘contagious’.”

Yet another reason to inject some WorkVitamins in the office!

Clean desk

I’m terrible at this, my desk’s always a mess, but the secret is rather simple. The secret of a clean desk is that everything should have its place. If everything that you use has a place and if you place it back after using it you don’t get a situation like the image below.

Office diseases: 8. Clutter

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Clutter is a class of diseases characterized by uncontrolled aggregation of paper and stuff on one of the employee’s desks and the ability of this stuff to invade other desks and office areas, either by direct growth onto adjacent tables or desks (invasion) or by migration of the stuff to distant sites (metastasis). This unregulated growth is caused by a series of acquired or inherited mutations of alien files within storage units (often from employees who have long left the company, or are still there but have been long forgotten), damaging  information that define the business functions and removing normal control of the business operations.

Treatment:
It should not be confused with Functionalitis, The first step in getting treatment for the disease is getting a correct diagnosis. This is important to do quickly because our WorkVitamins research has shown that the sooner you get diagnosed and treated the better the long-term outcome.

 

Getting things done

From David Allen‘s book called Getting Things Done

From 43 folders:

“The book describes a relatively simple methodology for dealing with the “stuff” in your life, where “stuff” may be things to do, people to talk to, appointments to keep or projects to manage and complete. The book has a strong focus on what is termed the Next Action: the very next thing you have to do on a given project or activity.

The core of GTD consists of a sequence of routines for dealing with incoming claims on your time. These routines are intended to provide a system for dealing with tasks that takes things off your mind by being external and trust-worthy:

  1. The Collection stage is where all stuff is gathered together in an unstructured manner. This stage involves writing down whatever things one can think of that needs doing (possibly using trigger lists), and all places where relevant information might accumulate, such as in folders and drawers, are emptied into one place.
  2. The Process stage is where these items are sorted, and the further activity needed by them is decided. For each item, one asks:
    • Does the item require further action? If so, we can either (i) do it now, recommended for tasks that can be completed in under 2 minutes, (ii) delegate it and place it on a monitor list, or (iii) defer it, by assigning a next action to it and placing it on an action list.
    • If not then we should look for any value the item has. Might the item suggest future action given further thought? Then we shouldincubate it, putting it on a sometime/maybe list. Does the item have archive value? Then file it.
    • If the item demands no action, is not a spur to future thought, and does not have reference value, then it is junk and you can junk it.
  3. The Organize stage takes these sorted items and puts them together in a form than can be used through the day for allocating tasks to time.
  4. Regular Reviews ensure the organisation is a system that can be trusted, by scheduling collect & process stages to ensure that nothing escapes, ensuring that projects are associated with sensible next actions, pruning action lists of irrelevant actions, and looking over sometime/maybe lists for new spurs to action.
  5. Finally, through the working day, the Do stage uses the organised task lists to get things done.”

Why do we work?

Why indeed? A question I posed at Linkedin. Todd Gates is posing a lightly different question when he asked: “Why do we have to work” in his book Hunting, Gathering and Videogames. Watch him explain his ideas below, very interesting indeed.

“PART I: WHY DO WE HAVE TO WORK?

Chapter One
*Hunting, Gathering, & Videogames* gives a historical overview of why we’ve always had to “go to work,” tracing the common link between the workday of the prehistoric hunter and gatherer, the first millennium B.C. farmer, the first century A.D. pottery-maker, the nineteenth century assembly line worker, and today’s videogame programmer. ”

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