CMU School of Drama


Saturday, February 28, 2009

Email: Simple Guidelines for Workday Quality Over Quantity


LifeHacker: "This succinct set of workday guidelines is a nice blueprint for getting productive on the important stuff and ruthless about cutting the crap. Written on a unknown 'major corp' whiteboard pictured here, they read:"

5 comments:

NatalieMark said...

This is a great tip for anyone who is working (even students). I know, at least for myself, that I want to multitask the tasks that I have every day. Setting a goal to focus on just three, singularly, a day is a good way to make sure work gets done well. Also, making it so that you check your email only three times a day is a good idea, I spend so much time checking it. This is a great list.

Katherine! said...

I wonder if this would work as a student. I find it hard to believe as students with so many projects going on that we could limit ourselves to only completing 3 everyday, but maybe it would work. I think checking emails less is probably helpful, but I love my blackberry storm and having emails wherever I go so I know when things are canceled or moved instantly.

David Beller said...

I totally agree with the 3 things a day idea, however, I find that if I sit down and take the time to check e-mail, I am actually less productive. As I have an iPhone, I am able to check and send e-mails on the fly. This means that in the 10 min in-between class I can return an e-mail making the actual "at the computer time" much less.

aquacompass said...

I f only if only....Like Katherine, I don't think this approach would work well for students -- perhaps the 9-5(30) office worker, but how many people in theater can every realistically follow this schedule. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to model the most effective way to work in the theater industry. I guess there's too much "it depends" all over the place, so this might never happen.

Ethan Weil said...

I think this schedule may be a really great option as soon as I drop out and change careers :/. I am intrigued by the mention of efficient use of a Wiki though. Perhaps this is something that could be useful in theatre when doing big productions. It certainly wouldn't replace our standard top-down mode of communication, but it could be a good way to keep a dialogue between design, engineering, and construction folks through big projects. This may be more and more useful now as a lot of drafting (at least in the technical phase) is digital. If nothing else, it is a rich repository with version data and the like for files.