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If you work in an open space, you will want to know what I'm about to tell you.

Is there too much noise?
If you need to concentrate and block the sound around you, try Noisli. The basic idea is that it provides different noise combos to stimulate the productivity or to help you relax. You can combine a lot of sounds, like birds, thunder, train, white noise. You can also set timers (remember time boxing?) and actually achieve something during that time. It helped me on numerous occasions. Give it a try, see if you like it.

Finding more privacy
If you are not comfortable talking in an online meeting while everyone else in the office can hear you, you have 2 options: 1. book a meeting room for the meeting or 2. try to find a spot in the office so that you don't see the other colleagues - or at most, see one of them. Try to be seated so that you don't constantly see people walking around. Out of sight, out of mind.

Change your "timezone"
A couple of months ago, I started coming at about 7.30 to work. By 9, when most of the people come to the office, I've already gone through the tasks of the day, ticked off some, drank some coffee and maybe also read an article. Somehow, the quiet office gives me a boost and I can achieve more, overall, during the day.

Most IT offices nowadays have flexible hours. Come earlier to work. Or leave later. It's just you and the tasks and no one can stand between you.

Have a productive day!

I bet there is not a single ear here who hasn't heard about Tina Turner and her famous "Simply the best".  Who is this lady who seems to have figured it all out? Someone who's got 11 Grammys.

However, for me, she's got 3 things:  killer voice, killer legs and well, killer horse.

Killer voice ...to kill a mockingbird

While not all of us dare to sing in public, all of us have a voice. It's about time we stop looking for the ultimate wisdom our voice should spread. Use your voice when you interact with others, and also when you interact with yourself.

Tell others your ideas, your comments, your worries.What you know plus what the other person knows might lead to interesting discussions. Why do you think TED is so popular? Because people tell what they think, what they do. You are not TED material maybe, but then again, you are not expected to talk on a stage.

Have regular conversations with yourself. Tell yourself what you are grateful for, what you are missing. That's the only way to know which way to move, evolve and grow as person and professional.

Walk the walk

To say is one thing, and to do is just the next natural step. It's not enough to just talk and dream. Take action. Connect the dots between where you are and where you want to be. Even if you don't get there, at least you are not stuck on the start position. Be persistent.

Imagine you are playing a board game, and throughout the whole game you are stuck in the start position. How happy were you to move just one position?

Complete the puzzle

Sometimes, talking and doing is not enough. That is why it's important to have the right context. If you remember Tina, we're talking about the horse now.

When the environment is complementing what we want to achieve, it makes our task easier. And we are more motivated. So, look for your right horse and make the most out of your ride.

Next, shall we talk about Dolly Parton's 9 to 5?

Ever since I remember,  I was proud of my multitasking skills. I could juggle with 2-3 projects at a time, plus some personal projects. For some reason, it was easy for me to just leave a task here, start another one there, go back to the third one. I had this system of post its, to do lists, calendar notifications. For some reason, it just worked.

Being a juggler works only in the circus

And then I found something that Gerald Weinberg said in his book Quality Software Management: Vol. 1 System Thinking. 




This means that if one person has 3 projects assigned, then from an 8 hours workday, a bit over 3 hours is time spent just trying to get in the mood of the next project. 

What amazes me is that even this book is quite old, from 1991 (so the finding is at least as old as the book), we haven't really changed our ways of working until only recently, when the idea of having small teams with high allocations for few projects started being implemented. I've heard about this idea via Agile, but maybe others heard about it earlier.



Imagine this scenario: you go to work, you have 2 projects that you are assigned to. So, you spend about 1.5 hours just flipping through emails/documents, trying to remember where some info is. What if you need to switch between the projects multiple times per day? You cannot really work in the morning for project A and in the evening for project B. Add to the mix some meetings and you've got yourself a full day of work, at the end of which your todo list is as long as it was in the morning.

Viewed from the lean perspective, this time is a waste, because it doesn't bring any value to the customer. That is, the customer would not be willing to pay for this. And still, this context switching time creeps up in our time reports and in the customer's bill. Something is not quite right.

Let's haggle the price

Until we all have the chance to actually work on one project at a time, is there something that we could do to reduce this time?

There are a couple of things that we could look at: the Pareto principle, the Parkinson's law and time management.

The Pareto principle

The Parkinson's law

Time management

When it comes to time management, I personally use a todo list that looks something like this:

Project	Task name	Urgent / not urgent	Big / small effort	When to do	Deadline	Status	Comment
name of project	name/description of task	is it urgent or not?	does it require a lot of work or is it something quick?	today / next / later	deadline of task	nothing / ongoing / wait / done / obsolete	any followup comments

The first things I ask myself is: how urgent is this task? how big is the effort? Based on that, I select when I want to do the task. All the time I have the list filtered, to hide the wait/done/obsolete tasks, and any other task that is not to be done today. Before I go home, I review the list, make sure it has the relevant info for "tomorrow". It makes my life much easier in the morning, and I know what to focus on.

A final word