In the office environment where I now work our job is to deliver projects. This means that other people decide what projects we work on. The beauty of a hack day is seeing how the team will (hopefully) be very enthusiastic at the prospect of building something they choose to.

These are a couple reasons why I think office hack days should exist:

• The balance of control would also be firmly in the hands of the developers.
• Watch the team conceive, organise, plan and present everything without PM or BA involvement.
• It’ll show the full potential of the team members.
• Cheaper than an away-day or team-building event.
• They may come up with some awesome ideas.

There are probably 101 other reasons why hack days are good things so if you have any, post them in the comments.

The notifications bing, ring and flash. All techniques to draw your attention away from your actual ‘work’.

This isn’t a one-way thing either. We are all guilty of these.

An answer to help improve the environment: Don’t have these systems notify you. Turn them off, and only turn them on when it suits you. Is your second screen used for email and IM? Use it for something else.

Seclude yourself if possible. Close a door, find a quiet space, put some headphones on. It’ll reduce office distractions even more. Plus, you’ll ‘look’ busier and people may be less likely to come over and distract you. I’ve used this technique in the past with great effect.

You see that sign, you don’t disturb that person. Feel the wrath if you do, like a spectator stopping a marathon runner!

Meetings are harder to avoid, and probably the subject for another time. The only advatage to these are that they are scheduled so you can plan your productive time around them.

In the end, you are what you consume. And if you’re not doing your share of creating, you’re like a vegetable soaking up the sun in preparation of one day being harvested. By advertisers.

A healthy balance

Of course no one can just consume, or just create – a balance must be struck. There are numerous inspirational design sites, and you can find yourselves endlessly trawling through hundreds of brilliant shots on dribbble, but the key is to not let consumption get in the way of creation.

Not enough time? Make time!

I find myself filling up my day with my 9-to-5 work at HigherSites, but i’m actively looking for time outside of this to work on my own things; this blog, my portfolio, another venture to further my craft.

It’s all too easy when you say you are too busy to be a consumer, just watching this TV show, or browsing the latest must-see website

So, stop reading this post, and don’t just consume, create!

Could somebody just make an app to summarise every day what everyone I follow is talking about on Twitter?
Twitter is a passive consumption activity. If someone could condense all the best bits, and remove cat/food pictures, I’d be interested!
As brilliant as it is. Twitter kills productivity. No question. I think I’m going to try a week cold turkey during business hours.
Saying that, we should rename smoke breaks ‘social breaks’. That way we could hop onto Twitter and Facebook every so often during the day.

A couple of recent tweets that got me thinking about how we use Twitter (and Facebook).

Now I am a massive Twitter fan. My account was created over 4 years ago, and I have tweeted nearly 4000 times. I love using, but I do realise that it kills productivity. The issue is that Twitter is so real-time that you end up missing out on the good conversations when you catch up with it later on in the day. The interaction you get and the accessibility with members of the web community is something you just can’t get with email or IM. Everyone is so open and approachable on Twitter. That’s why I love it.

Having said that, sometimes the signal to noise ratio can be pretty high. With Instagram pics of cats, food, old signs and everything you care to name of it can be hard to find the nuggets in the masses of tweets. In the evening I tend to skim read about 200-300 tweets and favourite a fair few to read in more depth in the morning.

I follow some pretty prolific tweeters and I really have no idea how they manage to get any work done! But I guess they say everything in moderation, so I might try a ‘social break’ and pop on it a couple of times a day for 5 minutes.

I’ve never really asked this before, but I’m interested to find out other peoples Twitter habits, and how they manage their usage.

Chances are, if you are good at jQuery you will be pretty good at MooTools (after learning the new declarations etc). The same goes for in a larger extent SQL/MySQL/Oracle or ASP/PHP/Ruby etc.

This stems from when I was at college and we would write psuedo-code, programming without any actually code. Something like this:


if number is greater than or equal to 10 then
write "congratulations, you are a winner!"


Now this very basic bit of programming isn’t very complex, but when building up larger bits of code, the skill comes in how you construct your code, not what language you write it in.

note: I am still a huge fan of jQuery, but MooTools does look pretty awesome as well. Perhaps I’ll write my own little comparison once I’ve used it a bit more.

http://www.highersites.co.uk

We’re a web design company in Somerset, and although I have only recently joined the team in April, I have thoroughly enjoyed it so far – working on some great sites with an awesome team!

A web designer and developer from the UK. I occasionally blog, frequently tweet and often procrastinate.

The last part couldn’t be more true. With RSS feeds, Twitter and other social media, lots of time can be spent keeping up-to-date and researching – but it really boils down to procrastinating (postpone doing what one should be doing).

With the immediacy of these social media, links can come in at any time, easily distracting you away from the current task in hand. Staying ‘in the zone’ can be hard with tweets popping up and other distractions such as IM, text messages and phone calls; chances are you are reading this when something more important needs to be done.

The Solution

Taking a dedicated hour out of your day to deal with these can help alleviate this. You’d be surprised how non-urgent reading your tweets are when you don’t do it for a few hours.

So turn off your Twitter client, IM and sign out of anything which could ‘pop-up’ during your day and give it a go, perhaps taking time out in the morning and afternoon to check-up and see what’s gone on in the real world and see if your productivity increases.