Fresh ideas on technology, business, productivity, and culture - served daily by Minto Cafe.
Open-plan offices were adopted broadly across industries over roughly the past two decades, promoted enthusiastically as fostering collaboration, breaking down real communication silos, and reducing costly real estate costs all simultaneously. A considerable, growing body of research since then paints a more complicated, considerably less flattering picture of how this widespread workplace experiment played out … Read more
“Deep work” – the ability to focus without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks – has become a popular productivity concept, yet actually protecting real time for it remains stubbornly difficult for most people, even those who understand its value and actively want more of it. Understanding the actual underlying reasons why helps explain why willpower … Read more
The four-day work week has gone from fringe idea to mainstream conversation over the past few years, with pilot programs running across multiple countries and industries. The results, now that enough of them have wrapped up, are more interesting than either the enthusiastic advocates or the skeptics originally predicted – and the real story is … Read more
Someone glances at a notification mid-task, replies in what feels like a genuinely quick ten seconds, and returns to their original work only to spend the next real several minutes reconstructing exactly where their thinking had actually been before the interruption – that quick ten-second glance actually cost considerably more than ten seconds, and the … Read more