The idea of a “fresh start”—wiping your slate clean, tidying up your workspace, and resetting your mind—has been discussed on this blog before. We’ve talked about the concept’s numerous benefits, and we’ve also talked about the ways in which it might be actually overrated. After all, your desk and inbox are probably clean enough to get some good work done at any given time. And if it’s the third time you’ve cleaned it today, instead of writing your essay, that’s procrastination.

A Fresh Start

Look at it as a gift you’re giving your future self—the “you” that will be inhabiting this space 16 to 24 hours from now. Think about how much lighter you feel, how much clearer your mind is, when your space is clean. When clean dishes are available, in abundance, and right where they should be. When any shirt you could desire to wear on a random Tuesday is ready and waiting in your closet. Give your future self that gift.

The Day Is A Gift

One of the sneakiest leeches of your time and focus during a busy work week is food. There are twenty-one meals that need to be accounted for. If you’re trying to be relatively healthy, those meals will require some cooking or preparation. Sunday can be used as a grocery shopping routine, like most people do.Make dinner for yourself on Sunday, and make more than one portion. Put the rest in the fridge, and reheat it later in the week if you want. That’s it. If the ease of that resonates you, do it again next week, but double.

Get Food out Of the Way

From a practical standpoint, the most helpful thing you can do for your work on this day is make as detailed a plan as possible. Schedule things to certain days, and certain hours of certain days. If you have a day job or other obligations you need to work around, be judicious and precious with those few hours you have. And work your hardest throughout the week trying to execute on the plans that “Sunday you” made for you.But maybe also try making an incredibly ambitious, aspirational list. Write down anything that you can think of that you would want to accomplish, in a perfect world.

Moonshot Your Week’s Plans

Sometimes, what you need on the weekend can be to stay in bed. Or it can be ordering takeout from the unhealthiest, best restaurant you can think of. If you’re okay with it, it might even look like making a mess of your space for a creative or DIY project. The point is that Sunday is a blank canvas that shouldn’t be disregarded or disrespected, or underestimated for its power to shape your week.Work to reset your soul. Find a place of equilibrium that you can refresh yourself in, before you spring back out, ready to take on the world. Try meditating, or maybe yoga. Find your calm.

Find and Preserve Your Calm

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

timemanagement

Time Management

The overwhelming power of Sunday - RescueTime Blog

Your time outside of your day job is your own.You have the time to learn how to bake bread, learn to cook, or just do whatever you want, and there is no excuse for not being productive.But People get exhausted after the initial spike and let go.<ul><li>Why has there not been a flood of new Great American Novels clogging Amazon's self-published section?</li><li>Why have most of the new podcasts and TikTok accounts popped up in March of 2020, when people were at their most bored-why have most of them gone silent?</li></ul>

The Premise

<ul><li>Working diligently and consistently towards our dreams, especially if they're relative longshots, is one of the hardest things we’ll ever do, if we do it at all.</li><li>The self-confidence needed to believe in ourselves enough to try, and the dedication needed to maintain the discipline to keep doing it over and over again, even when it’s hard.</li><li>Without the structure of the workplace and other people relying on you, there is no necessary timeline for any project. No sprints to the finish line, no target projections to hit.</li></ul>

Meeting Our Own Deadlines Is The Hardest

Just as we have met deadlines in our jobs, why can't we do so when we are on our own?Your self-work should be as crucial as any office deadline. Remember: <ul><li>You are your own boss.</li><li>The person who hired you for this job liked you then and trusts you now.</li><li>They saw something in you that not everyone else sees.</li><li>Thanks to the charity of this person-this person being you-you got your dream job.</li></ul>

You Work For A Boss As You Fear Disappointing Them

<ul><li>Your boss, which is you only, don't expect you to push yourself to the max every day, but they want to see you improve consistently</li><li>Your boss has the unique ability to know when you're not pulling your weight, and they're not afraid to call you out on it.</li></ul>

When You Are Your Own Boss

Your boss knows the core of our issue with self-imposed deadlines. Here is a small exercise.<ul><li>Pick a task that is slightly challenging but doable.</li><li>Set a deadline for tomorrow, or sometime this week, at 9 am.</li><li>You can't change the deadline once you set it.</li><li>If you've set your output at something you know is manageable, it shouldn't be a problem.</li><li>Don't disappoint yourself.</li></ul>

Govern Your Self-Imposed Deadline

<ul><li>Being a professional is about taking something abstract (dream) & turning it into something more concrete (action).</li><li>We all should take our dreams seriously - we all have the capacity to be professional, and bring that kind of focus and energy to our passion work.</li></ul>

A True Professional

Setting yourself a deadline like your boss does.

productivity

Productivity

career

Career

How To Set Deadlines That Feel Real

Have you ever asked why it’s so difficult to get things done in business today—despite seemingly endless meetings and emails? Why does it take so long to make decisions—and even then not necessarily the right ones? 
Many organizations address these problems by redesigning boxes and lines: who does what and who reports to whom. This exercise tends to focus almost obsessively on vertical command relationships and rarely solves for what, in our experience, is the underlying disease: the poor design and execution of collaborative interactions.

Zero-Sum Game

In our efforts to connect across our organizations, we’re drowning in real-time virtual interaction technology, from Zoom to Slack to Teams, plus group texting, WeChat, WhatsApp etc. There’s seemingly no excuse to not collaborate. The problem? Interacting is easier than ever, but true, productive, value-creating collaboration is not. And what’s more, where engagement is occurring, its quality is deteriorating. This wastes valuable resources because every minute spent on a low-value interaction eats into time that could be used for important, creative, and powerful activities.

Wasteful Meetings

<a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-need-for-speed-in-the-post-covid-19-era-and-how-to-achieve-it">A recent McKinsey survey</a> found 80 percent of executives were considering or already implementing changes in meeting structure and cadence in response to the evolution in how people work due to the pandemic. 
Indeed, most executives say they frequently find themselves spending way too much time on pointless interactions that drain their energy and produce information overload.

Too Much Blabber No Real Results

We’ve observed three broad categories of collaborative interactions (exhibit):<ul><li>Decision making, including complex or uncertain decisions (for example, investment decisions) and cross-cutting routine decisions (such as quarterly business reviews)</li><li>Creative solutions and coordination, including innovation sessions (for example, developing new products) and routine working sessions (such as daily check-ins)</li><li>Information sharing, including one-way communication (video, for instance) and two-way communication (such as town halls with Q&As)</li></ul>

The Three Critical Collaborative Interactions

One of the key factors for fast, high-quality decisions is to clarify exactly who makes them. Consider a success story at a renewable-energy company. To foster accountability and transparency, the company developed a 30-minute “role card” conversation for managers to have with their direct reports. 
As part of this conversation, managers explicitly laid out the decision rights and accountability metrics for each direct report. The result? Role clarity enabled easier navigation for employees, sped up decision making, and resulted in decisions that were much more customer-focused.

Who Does What

We recommend a simple yet comprehensive approach for defining decision rights called DARE:
<ul>
<li>Deciders are the only ones with a vote.</li>
<li>Advisers have input and help shape the decision. They have an outsize voice in setting the context of the decision and have a big stake in its outcome.</li>
<li>Recommenders conduct the analyses, explore the alternatives, illuminate the pros and cons, and ultimately recommend a course of action to advisers and deciders.</li>
<li>Executers don’t give input but are deeply involved in implementing the decision.</li>
</ul>

How to Define Decision Rights

Routine working sessions are fairly straightforward. What many organizations struggle with is finding innovative ways to identify and drive toward solutions. How often do you tell your teams what to do versus empowering them to come up with solutions? 
While they may solve the immediate need to “get stuff done,” bureaucracies and micromanagement are a recipe for disaster. They slow down the organizational response to the market and customers, prevent leaders from focusing on strategic priorities, and harm employee engagement.

Creative Solutions and Coordination: Open Innovation

Successful empowerment, counterintuitively, doesn’t mean leaving employees alone. Empowerment requires leaders to give employees both the tools and the right level of guidance and involvement. 
Leaders should play what we call the coach role: coaches don’t tell people what to do but instead provide guidance and guardrails and ensure accountability, while stepping back and allowing others to come up with solutions.

Don't Just Leave Them Alone

All organizations should do more to improve the coaching skills of managers and help them to create the space and time to coach teams, as opposed to filling out reports, presenting in meetings, and other activities that take time away from driving impact through the work of their teams.

Teach The Managers

As you start this journey, be sure to take a close look at psychological safety. 
If employees don’t feel psychologically safe, it will be nearly impossible for leaders and managers to break through disempowering behaviors like constant escalation, hiding problems or risks, and being afraid to ask questions—no matter how skilled they are as coaches.

The Importance Of Psychological Safety

An increasing number of organizations have begun to realize the urgency of driving ruthless meeting efficiency and of questioning whether meetings are truly required at all to share information. 
Live interactions can be useful for information sharing, particularly when there is an interpretive lens required to understand the information, when that information is particularly sensitive, or when leaders want to ensure there’s ample time to process it and ask questions.

The Outlook On Meetings

Many companies are moving to shorter meetings (15 to 30 minutes) rather than the standard default of one-hour meetings in an effort to drive focus and productivity.
Meetings cannot go beyond 30 minutes. Meetings for one-way information sharing must be cancelled in favour of other mechanisms such as a memo, podcast, or vlog. Two-way information sharing during meetings is limited by having attendees review materials in advance, replacing presentations with Q&As.

Cancel Or Shorten The Meeting

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

If we’re all so busy, why isn’t anything getting done?

Toni Cowan-Brown is the Co-Creator and Co-Host of the Unapologetic women Podcast. She is currently on Lockdown while on a road trip in Canada with her husband and dog. She says she stays productive whilst away from home during the global pandemic.

I’ve Learned How to be Kind With Myself Whilst Still Expecting Progress

My day is broken down into three big working blocks. I personally do better with a structured day:&nbsp;<ul><li>I work until about 1:30Pm/2Pm at which point I do lunch, a gym session and/or walk the dog.</li><li>After lunch, I probably have another three hours of work where I try and take calls and meetings.</li><li>After dinner, most nights I go back to work and work on side projects.</li></ul>

What does a typical day look like for you now?

It’s impacted it a lot in some ways and also not at all. Let me explain.I’ve been doing the whole remote / WFH for the past five years so when this happened I was very acclimated already. I had a schedule that allowed me to be productive, and I knew already what worked for me and what didn’t.&nbsp;However, when COVID-19 hit my husband and I were taking a road trip to Canada with our dog. So we ended up being stuck in Vancouver and had to stay there for much longer than expected. The hardest piece for me was not being able to be ‘home’ during the lockdown&nbsp;

How has Coronavirus impacted your life/work?

Most of my collaborations happen on <a href='https://medium.com/u/b6818a729da?source=post_page-----ce5ad9c4faeb--------------------------------' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">Slack</a><a href='https://medium.com/u/c4c2efc9bc0a?source=post_page-----ce5ad9c4faeb--------------------------------' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">Zoom</a>

What productivity tips have you found useful whilst working from home?

The books I have been sharing a lot lately are:&nbsp;<ul><li>Wordslut by Amanda Montell&nbsp;</li><li>For the Love of Men by Elizabeth Plank&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell&nbsp;</li><li>Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>I also absolutely love Blowing the Bloody Doors Off by Michael Caine&nbsp;</li></ul>

What five books would you recommend during this time?

From a business perspective, I think people are going to realise that great humans can get the job done from anywhere. And the technology available to us today allows us to replicate the in-person feeling. But we can’t just count on the technology, we need to adapt and be willing to learn the skill sets needed to work remotely, collaborate across continents…

When this is all over, what will the opportunities look like?

Interview with Toni Cowan-Brown on working from home during the Coronavirus lockdown including productivity hacks and recommend books.

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

business

Business

Two companies asked young designer to do Take-Home Demo projects. Both companies asked her to do Demo projects on their own product. (right!) makes her feel a bit Queasy.&nbsp;There are better ways to confidently hire the best design talent, explains Daniel Burka, design partner at Google ventures.

Asking for Demo work on own product for Free

It's unfair to ask someone to do real work for free when you're dangling a carrot in front of them. Many great designers don't agree with you. If you ask a great candidate to do a Demo project on your own product, they might just walk away.&nbsp;If you ask a great candidate to do a Demo project on your own product, they might just walk away. Back to mail Online home. Back to the page you came from.

Unfair Practice

You know a lot about your own product. You know things that are proven to work, things that were tried and didn’t work, things that are easy or hard to implement. When an outside designer comes in and makes suggestions, you will immediately see the holes. "isn’t that great? that will help me choose the best candidate!" not really.

Ineffective Strategy

In-person design exercises are the second best way to gauge a designer's skills. You are hiring someone who can work with a team to identify the right problems, create the best solutions, and test the Real-World effectiveness of those choices.&nbsp;Work on a design exercise with the candidate and you will learn much more about her abilities.

Instead, work together in-person on a great challenge

There are better ways to confidently hire the best design talent, explains Daniel Burka, design partner at Google Ventures. This morning, I heard from a young designer who is looking for her first…

humanresources

Human Resources

Stop asking design candidates to redesign your product. It’s unfair and (worse) it’s ineffective.

Simply put, senior engineers are different, and the typical coding interview puts them at a disadvantage for a number of reasons:&nbsp;Senior engineers are more pressed for time and this becomes a perfect storm. Many senior engineers have inquired about the interview process at a given employer, and have declined to interview.

Senior Engineers Don't Like Coding Interviews

Senior engineers are far removed from the Bare-Bones development environments used in coding interviews. A coding interview abruptly pulls them out of their comfort zone, back into the world of standard libraries and simple text editors.

Back To The Drawing Board

Senior engineers typically make 3–5X more code than new grads. Expect them to produce 3–5X more code than a new Grad is not reasonable. Instead, you’re looking for them to enable teams of Junior engineers.Senior engineers are the lifeblood of any software organization. They are the most desired, most expensive, and most difficult to attract.Senior engineers hate coding interviews, and if you’re looking to attract the best, you should hate them too.

Don't Give Them What They Hate

The last thing you want is for a talented engineer to have doubts about the role. Ask coding interview questions does just that. They also have many other problems like:<ul><li>They take a ton of prep time to nail.</li><li>They push senior engineers to work differently.</li><li>They don’t really test what you’ll want them to do once hired.</li><li>They send a bad message.</li></ul>

The Trouble With Senior Engineers

Imagine that you’re a principal at a small K-8 school who’s looking to hire a new teacher. As you have less than 20 teachers, you have to ensure that each person you hire can teach any of the grades…

Why Senior Engineers Hate Coding Interviews

<ul><li>Create a job blueprint covering mission, outcomes, and competencies that the hiring process and interview questions align around </li><li>Perform rigorous short screening interviews evaluating fit against the blueprint — using the same questions for all candidates </li><li>Conduct detailed in-person interviews by the hiring manager with a walk-through of a candidate’s past and future evaluating fit against the blueprint — using the same questions for all candidates.</li></ul>

Best Practice Interviewing For Any Position

<ul><li>Strategic Thinking, including macro and micro level design making and problem structuring </li><li>Technicals, including engineering and design collaboration tools </li><li>Collaboration, including EQ and conflict management </li><li>Communication, including the ability to inspire others </li><li>Detail Orientation, including QA </li><li>User Science & Empathy, including qualitative and quantitative user research.</li></ul>

What To Interview Product Managers For?

<ul><li>Does the candidate understand the role? has she done the research to take the application seriously?</li><li>How does the candidate frame the role? Does the role feel important and ambitious? </li><li>Does the candidate remember to answer the second part of the question? Many don’t, even though the second half is more important! </li><li>Is this the type of person you want on your team now and in the future?</li><li>Is this candidate interested in product management because she’s a user-centered builder, or because she wants to add a Product Manager to her resume? </li></ul>

Evaluating Will: Top Product Manager Interview Question

Other ways product leaders ask this question: <ul><li>VP Product at Target.com, Sean Murphy asks about what people believe are their greatest professional accomplishments and then uses those examples to dig deeper into the candidate’s ways of working, judgment and product principles.</li><li>Matt from Workframe asks: “walk me through a time where you figured out what to build.”</li><li>The candidate led a project on Reddit. He covers Prioritization, Resourcing, Stakeholder management, conflict management.</li></ul>

Evaluating Skill: Top Product Manager Interview Question

I recently interviewed a candidate for a senior product manager role that needs a lot of user discovery for a Whitespace product. The candidate wanted to (and did) demonstrate strong execution, but missed the strategic thinking and User-Research elements of modern product management. He never once mentioned bringing users into the product discovery, development, and release process.

Product Manager Interview Case Study/Example

Reviewing responses from other senior product leaders about their top Product Manager interview questions, most questions fell into three buckets: <ul><li>“Why are you interested in the job/company/industry” to understand a candidate’s interests and ambitions. </li><li>“Walk me through your accomplishment” to understand a candidate’s displayed competencies. </li><li>"the conflict example" is either a hypothetical or historical example. Evaluators look for collaboration skills and use of user data.</li></ul>

The Third Big Product Manager Interview Question: Conflict

As the leader of a 50+ person Product organization, one of my biggest responsibilities is attracting, hiring, coaching, motivating, and retaining great Product professionals, primarily Product…

Interviewing Product Managers

<ul><li>Gmail kills the most important aspect of a job application: free writing.</li><li>Your cover letter reveals your persona to future employers. Gmail’s writing suggestions setting masks it.</li><li>The whole idea behind Gmail’s auto-suggest is to make people productive with their mobile email experience. What if you are typing during a commute or a meeting? It really speeds up the process. Except that it tries to replace/mimic the messaging experience.</li><li>It’s not your Gmail account — it’s the recipient’s spam filter:</li></ul>

The Gmail Email Writing Experience:

Google is in the hiring business too.<ul><li>Sent an email to your recruiter with a salary request? Gmail matches it up with their own employer database and uses it on https://hire.google.com/.</li><li>Did you just send an invoice to your client using Gmail? It could be used to optimize Google Pay for Businesses. </li></ul>

What Is in It For Google, Anyway?

Sending your CV via Gmail could cost you a career.

Why You Should Never Send Your CV via Gmail

A lot of industry newcomers are struggling to gain the right experience and make portfolios to match our foggy job definitions. Even worse, the companies hiring seem equally puzzled. This must be happening because everyone can barely keep up with the demand for design work. Companies are racing to fill seats and execute hastily-defined design processes without bothering to question if it’s all necessary for their particular business.

The Unnecessary Fragmentation of Design Jobs: UX AND UI, WHY OH 

Design requires a holistic grasp of problems, potential, and materials.<ul><li>If you’re only focused on examining problems, you’re not empowered to dream up the proper solutions.</li><li>If you’re only dreaming up what you could do, you’re not close enough to the ground-level truth.</li><li>If you’re only working on the nitty-gritty implementation, you know about the what but not a lot about the why.</li></ul>

Design (with a capital D)

Hey there, tech designer person. Have you noticed the increasing number of vague specializations we’ve invented for ourselves? Bleh. What’s the difference between UX and UX/UI and UI? Isn’t Product…

The Unnecessary Fragmentation of Design Jobs

A company prefers to recruit experienced developers. Their output is better. The solutions that they select are more robust, creative and scalable. The medium-senior developer understands the problems, and probably, knows how to avoid traps and how to minimize the number of bugs. Besides, these developers code is faster and they work independently.But money is the crucial resource in our world, and junior developers are cheaper significantly. In addition, there are a lot of junior developers, and it can be tempting to recruit one of them.

Experienced and junior developers

<ul><li>Not every medium developer can do this mission without guide and intention. </li><li>Many managers fall into the trap of recruiting of many junior developers to the same team. They think that if you put the juniors with a strong mentor, all the world problems will be solved. </li><li>A mentor is not a magician. Mentorship is a hard mission.</li></ul>

A junior developer needs a mentor.

Rule of thumb, when the mentors busy with the juniors, the others need to balance the equation.They get more core tasks and be the part that allowing the mentors to mentors and the juniors to study. They are responsible for the progress of the product. It can be a very burden to be such a developer over time

The burden of the experienced developers


Shuffling and shakes to the team are not natural and that it cost, sometimes a lot. You need to dose and do it carefully. If shuffling is necessary, be sure that they won’t happened less than nine months or one year one after the another. Be sure that your mentors are not grinding and the other developers are not exhaustive.

DOSE and do it carefully

In this article, we discuss the risky game of relying on a junior developers team, the influence of this situation about the experienced developers, mentors, product quality and more related stuff.

The overwhelming power of Sunday - RescueTime Blog

How To Set Deadlines That Feel Real

If we’re all so busy, why isn’t anything getting done?

I’ve Learned How to be Kind With Myself Whilst Still Expecting Progress

Stop asking design candidates to redesign your product. It’s unfair and (worse) it’s ineffective.

Randy Simmons