Where do you go when you really want to get something done?

That's the question at the heart of this bit of video. The answer, interestingly and significantly, is rarely "the office" which is supposedly created for productivity. Here, we hear why (in effect, we go into the office to be interrupted! Or to be monitered by a distrustful management who have bought into an ideology of 'dstraction') ... and why the answer should reconfigure the way we work and the way that organisations resource their workforce. My answers are 'a coffee shop' and 'the train' occasionally it's the office. ... it turns out I'm not alone.
Also mentioned is the role of sleep and the analogy it gives to the way we might work. (I'm increasingly thinking that 'sabbath' is a key motif in theology and theological anthropology -and that relates to this).
Twitter and Facebook are not the distractions that they are supposed to be: managers and meetings are. Managers are for interrupting people. Managers call meetings which are toxic -and they procreate! Ten people in a one-hour meeting is 10 hours of company time.
It's a cartoon, but with enough truth to get us to think about 'received practice' and perhaps make offices work for work.
Three suggestions: 'no talk Thursdays'; good use of passive communication; just erase meetings.
On the passive communication; the warning would be that in some cases they can be too open to misinterpretation and need a good infrastructure of trust and respect to cradle them otherwise they become as toxic as the memo can be. On erasing meetings, we've just moved to a regime where faculty meetings are not automatic; some have been erased. We seem to be discovering that agendas can expand to fill the meetings called. One manager I knew used to believe in 'corridor meetings' that is that some of the most effective work gets done in chance meetings and in two minutes between things ... it's worth considering, because I've seen it work sometimes ...
JasonFried_2010X.mp4 (video/mp4 Object)