How do you stay focused?

Becoming a father helped because, priorities! Plus, I really like what I do. And I long-ago learned the value of unplugging and doing one thing at a time. Oh, and I almost completely ignore my email now.

“The important thing is the obvious thing nobody is saying.”

—William S. Burroughs

[via Minimal]

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say let your affairs be as one, two, three and not a hundred or a thousand… We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.

—Henry David Thoreau

[reminder from Minimal]

When management is petty, it promotes pettiness in the employees. If most of your employees leave with little or no notice, it’s because you’ve fostered that environment.

Our boss at my last firm was known to read everyone’s email when they left the company. We would see him leaning over people’s computers to read their IMs. He’d had other employees print screenshots of Facebook pages where someone had complained about her job in order to confront that employee or her friends.

The result: none of us respected him or saw him as a leader at all. So don’t be a dick. Curtail the Big Brother behavior. If you’re a competent and connected manager, you’ll know who’s working well and who’s not.

Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I’m talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.”

Sound familiar? Here’s the kicker:

But it’s one thing to associate with a group in which each member works autonomously on his piece of the puzzle; it’s another to be corralled into endless meetings or conference calls conducted in offices that afford no respite from the noise and gaze of co-workers. Studies show that open-plan offices make workers hostile, insecure and distracted. They’re also more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, stress, the flu and exhaustion. And people whose work is interrupted make 50 percent more mistakes and take twice as long to finish it.

Simplicity, among other things, is a conscious choice between inclusion and exclusion. Often the magic is in what you leave out. But this means that you need to be comfortable with saying no, to yourself and to others.

[via mnmal]

True eloquence consists of saying all that should be said, and that only.

—Francois de La Rochefoucauld

[via mnmal]

Everyone has their bullshit. You can simply decide whose you’re willing to tolerate.

Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.

[via kottke]

You know what we’ve found? Magical things happen when employees know they’ll get to be king for a week. Gone is the complaining about what management is forcing them to do, because rotating management gives them a clear perspective of both sides of the fence. Employees will step up and grow if you give them the chance.

– 37signals