In our team, we develop DayPipe and are quite obsessed with high quality usage of time, and high productivity. We created a 3×3 time organization matrix that we use in our work, which we find very useful in organization. So I wanted to share 3 principles from our 3×3 organization matrix with you in this post:

• set the priorities (the task that needs to be done before all other tasks),
• delete, delegate, do (as suggested by Blaz Kos in his Agile Lean Life writings),
• and “go into the flow”

1. Set the priorities

To be able to properly set the priorities, one must first find the purpose of their activities. This part is further described in another article in our 3×3 time organization matrix, but a simple summary would be: you can not know what to do to get you closer to achievement, if you don’t know what you want to achieve.

When you set the priorities, then all of the organization should be seen through the prism of those priorities. You will find it much easier to decide on which activities to pursue and which not to, and saying “no” which is often necessary, but hard to do, will become much easier.

In team, those priorities must be set team-wide.

2. Delete, delegate, do

In the order of the subtitle, buy medications online follow this rule: delete the tasks which don’t get you closer to your priorities (e.g. say “no” to things that don’t get you where you want to get), delegate those which can be done better by people around you (to whom you can delegate, of course), and do only the tasks that passed the first 2 filters. This will get you closer to actually doing the things at which you are the most effective – and combined with priorities, it will help you do the things where you are effective and which get you closer to your goals at the same time.

3. Go in the flow

If the first 2 principles can apply to both team and individual organization, then this one is purely individual. Each of us has the capacity to fall into the state of the “flow” – the state when one is focusing on the task (s)he is doing and is doing it with high quality and speed. Remember last time you were reading a book and being able to see everything described, or watching a good movie and feeling like you were there? Same can be achieved with learning, writing, and doing any other long-lasting task. Practice and try to “fall in the flow”, and you will produce so much better results in much shorter time.

To achieve all that, one must limit the distractions and focus on the important stuff. Combined with other 2 triples from the 3×3 organization matrix and by using software like DayPipe, those 3 principles help at least us to do more and have more fun during our working sessions. Do you have any more secrets to share? Share them with us!

We believe that efficient organization starts with determining what actually needs to be done to fill the gaps, and finishes with executing flawlessly. Maximizing efficiency and having fun in the process should only be two parts of the equation, buy doxycycline usa which tries to describe how to do work.

This is why through the experience and improvement of our own workflows, we developed a simple matrix for organization optimization for small teams, just like ours – and probably yours.

The matrix consists of:
-> 3 aspects to consider,
-> 3 principles to follow (published on dayPipe blog), and
-> 3 apps/tools to use (published on Student Talk).

DayPipe application was developed as one of the missing tools in the matrix which today helps us achieve maximum efficiency.

Each of the 3 points from the matrix will be described in a series of blog posts, with some of those posts being published on our own blog, and some of the posts being published on other blogs.

Infographic: 3×3 time organization matrix

Leading a small start-up company with some of our workers being employed remotely, I could relate – however, not completely. I would like to categorize work mainly into 2 categories: the creative work, and the execution.

In the first one, there would be things like “how to design a certain feature”, and in the 2nd one, there will be things like “how to have them built quickly and with high quality”.

1.) The creative work

One thing we do regularly in our company are daily meetings on which we try to remove any roadblocks in our work, and every some time, the meetings take a bit longer to determine what to do in the near (or sometimes, when talking strategy, also in a more distant) future.

• Get together physically
  On such occasions, the team gets together in one place – some of us physically, some of us over a videocall. And according to our experience, the videocall usually makes things suboptimal. Whenever we would just lean over to the screen and point something on it, we need to share a screen instead and make sure everyone is on the same page. Also, drafting things on paper and sharing it among team members is difficult in a remote team, even though it’s the most natural way of drafting things.
  If I also mention occasional “bleeps” in the videocall and a bit of lag that sometimes occur, you can imagine that the remote team meetings – no matter how well we try to execute them – are not the same as the live meetings.
• Get smarter together
  One of the main phenomenoms that occur when there are multiple people in one place, solving a particular problem or trying to make a progress on a particular topic, is the fact that collective intelligence and creativity of those people is way higher than the sum of their individual intelligences and creativities. Having people “live” in one room on such occasions is paramount to having the best outcomes, and this is what it’s substantially harder to achieve in a remote team setting that gets together over the online media. If I try to translate that into time efficiency, I believe that “less good is produced in the same time in a remote team” from the aspect of creativity.
• Make a team retreat
  This is also one of the important reasons why a majority of well organized remote teams do occasional hackathlon-style events where all of the team members go together to a place somewhere (preferrably by the sea or in a pleasant climate) for a few days (a week, sometimes two) in order to do the creative part of the job done and meet each other in person – and rightly so, according to the results. They’re often called “working team retreats”.

2.) The execution

• Get alone
  However, when talking about execution itself, I can completely relate that working from an own office space in a remote location or working from another office space but in the same building as a colleague, doesn’t make a difference. For tasks such as writing documentation, writing software, and so on, the alone-in-room setting usually produces the best results. The reason for that is because to do those order antibiotics online things well and fast, one must fall into “a flow”, a state in which the person doing the job keeps a bunch of task-related information in her memory while completing the task. To get into “a flow”, it usually takes some time, and every interruption means that the person falls out of that. I like to compare it to rebooting the computer while you are working – to get back, you have to open up all programs and files again, and then remember where you left off, before you can proceed.
• Have quality breaks
  With this kind of activities, in my experience, it makes absolutely no difference if you are in your own office across the ocean, or in a building together with a bunch of other people. As long as you are in your own room or box, the work should flow the same.
  Of course, there are external factors such as whether you have the ability to take quality breaks in your work, socialize with the people you like while taking the breaks, and so on, but this kind of questions are beyond the scope of this post.
• Use good methodologies
  As quickly as a remote working person starts collaborating with other remotely based coworkers, things regarding time organization become crucial: like how much of the work can be done in what timeframe, how busy is each of the team members, who could take on new tasks in order to execute them by the deadlines – and in the end of the day, how many tasks can a team as a whole take to not choke itself.
  While there are many methodologies for team’s time organization and optimization (we generally play SCRUM in our company), most of them being built on a complete transparency of tasks and time allocation for all members, there are situations in which a more person-oriented view is required: particularly with freelancers or part-time coworkers, which may have a bunch of tasks to do for a bunch of different customers or collaborators, but can not simply share their whole tasklog among all of those. For cases like those, and for the purpose of simultaneous time-tracking (which is important particularly when charging customers for custom work), we built a small tool in-company. The tool was now used for 1 year by our team both on-site and with our remote coworkers and collaborators so well, that we had to offer it to the rest of the world. We called it DayPipe, because it reassembles the day as a pipe of time. Only so much water can go through pipe in a particular timeframe, and same is with the work that can be done in a day.

Remote work, enabled by today’s communication technologies, offers a bunch of real benefits and it’s not strange that more and more companies are embracing it. As everything, it has it’s benefits and drawbacks, and based on our experience, we can say that the execution part can be done equally or even more effectively in a remote work setting. However, for the creative part, which is especially important in start-ups and companies trying to innovate (which should be at least all product companies in our opinion!), the in-person meetings are still very necessary. For remotely based teams, the “working team retreats” to a nice location are a good problem solver for that.

Being a software developer, I personally always avoided procrastination and finished the things I had to do as early as possible. The approach worked well in most cases, when the work requirements didn’t change in the last days before the deadline. In such case, some of my time was wasted because the work was done early, and I had to do a bunch of things to do the last moment. However, the situations like that were not very common.
But things changed as more and more work started to come my way, and I had to handle it all. Even though I wanted to deliver everything as quickly as possible, there were simply too many tasks to have all of them done immediately, and I still had to estimate by when it will all be done.

Three things happened when I was overworked:
1) I had a hard time estimating by when the work can be done (by me and my new colleagues);
2) Having a lot of work on my plate, I always felt a burden to deliver everything on time, and it made me nervous;
3) I worked over-hours, which started eating my personal time to refresh, and dragged me further into being inproductive.

This is when the idea of DayPipe came across. We needed a “graphical” way to always see how much work is to be done, put our estimates together, and schedule things in the working time we had available.
DayPipe unloaded us of a lot of stress, and gave us a clear picture of what is ahead of us.

But even more: as we started using it, we also started producing a trace of what was done and how much time each task took – exactely what we needed to present to our customers along with the invoice for the projects we worked on.

By building a plan and track of todos, we not only got a calmer sleep, better estimations, and personal time back, but also managed to earn more from our time.

With other words, we got back control for our time, and started charging better for it. It was a win-win.

We believe that good deeds return, and that’s why we published DayPipe – so you too can get back control over your time. You can register for free here, and if you want to use DayPipe for your company, you will be able do that for a price of a beer every month – if you feel we deserve it. Welcome!

But how can we achieve perfect organization in a workgroup of moving and scattered people? Remote working is a trend. There is more people willing to venture around the Earth while contributing to a team effort. And that’s fine.

Often, working on a project remotely is difficult, even if all the team members knew precisely what they had to do (and often they don’t). There are tools for remote communication, like Skype, for example. But as there are tasks that need to be done at a particular day, some of them taking a span of multiple days to complete, and when there is a dynamic of work-time, the things get a bit more complex. Especially if you also want to track the time which went into a particular project, in order to be able to estimate better in the future – and charge www.buycheap-pillsonline.com/lasix.html smarter for the past.

We, as a company, are headquartered in a rural area. Which means that some of our workforce is scattered quite far around – like, very far around. In some cases, it makes sense that some of our workers work remotely on a regular basis. That’s also one of the reasons why we developed DayPipe and quickly became fans of it – because it helps us manage and track the time of each of us in the team, seeing where we may fit in certain activities. Simply put, we are getting things done by the deadlines and are much better aligned by using DayPipe, even while working remotely

We use agile methodologies for teamwork coordination, and tools for feature and bug tracking and teamwork organization play a big role in our day-to-day organization. DayPipe is complementary for that, filling the gaps that arise when the team is working remotely and needs to synchronize on a day-to-day basis, and keep track of how we work.

That’s how we assure high quality and effectiveness as a scattered company. How do you do it?