DailyDirt: Improving Productivity

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There are only so many hours in a day. It'd be great to be able to get more done in less time, and people are always looking for easy (or any!) solutions that might boost their productivity. Some folks try polyphasic sleep schedules to try to get more waking hours, but that's cheating. (Sleeping less is probably not healthy, either.) Here are just a few other stories about changes that you can try to get more things done.

• Coffitivity claims that ambient noise (like the kind from a local coffee shop) can increase creativity with "enough noise to work." Rooms that are too quiet can be distracting, and obviously, rooms that are too loud can impair mental focus and concentration -- and there's some research to back it up. [url]
• Pixar's headquarters is designed with all the bathrooms in the atrium -- so that employees from different departments might have more opportunities to mingle. Hopefully, though, people aren't discussing their work projects while taking care of other business.... [url]
• The Hawthorne Effect was named after a set of studies at the Hawthorne plant in the 1920s -- where increased productivity was observed when the factory lights were brightened OR darkened. Basically, the workers were more productive, not because of the lighting changes, but because they realized their bosses were checking on them. (The dramatic effect of changing the lighting was apparently fictional, but the Hawthorne Effect is still a phenomenon that researchers try to account for when designing psychological studies.) [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: creativity, design, distractions, employees, hawthorne effect, management, noise, productivity, work
Companies: coffitivity, pixar

Intellectual Ventures Still Giving Tours Of The Sizzle To Distract Journalists From The Lack Of Steak

from the keep-trying dept

It never fails. Whenever more and more people start discussing what a downright dangerous company Intellectual Ventures is, and how its massive trolling operations are a huge hindrance to actual innovation, IV's PR people invite some journalists to "take a tour" of the part of the building where they have people "inventing" stuff, hoping they'll talk about what a miraculous special company IV is. It happened two years ago with Gizmodo, and this year, they had News.com take a tour. Thankfully, unlike the piece a couple years ago, News.com doesn't ignore the elephant in the room, and makes sure to point out much of the criticism surrounding Intellectual Ventures. However, it also lets claims like this one slide:

"We think of the problem we want to solve," says Tim Londergan, Intellectual Ventures' senior director of investment strategy. "[We] find great inventions and get them to market."

Um. And how many of them have they been able to "get to market"? The answer is exactly zero over twelve years. Despite $5 billion in investment money (using something of a pyramid scheme to get companies to pay up early to get some upside) and 70,000 "intellectual assets" (many of which were bought at fire sale prices from university tech transfer offices who were desperate to prove that tech transfer offices work, and who needed to get them off the books). A grand total of two companies have spun off, but neither has anything on the market, nor will they for many years. There's something to be said for not rushing ideas, but $5 billion and twelve years... if you're really looking for problems you want to solve and bringing the solutions to market, you'd expect a slightly higher hit rate.

Of course, given that investors in IV are also beginning to realize that their returns suck, you have to worry that IV is only going to ramp up the one part of its business that actually does make money: either shaking companies down by claiming they violate broad patents, or selling off patents to smaller shell firms that will do the same thing for them.

For all of Nathan Myhrvold's ridiculous talk of doing God's work, the company can't try to hide the fact that it's become a giant tax on companies who actually innovate, by hiring some scientists to do crazy experiments in fancy offices, none of which seem to have any likelihood of being useful. Innovation is about bringing products to market. Trolling is about forcing actual innovators to pay up for succeeding. IV has never been about innovation and is focused almost entirely on trolling. Having some scientists working on dopey projects that look good for the press doesn't change any of that.

Filed Under: distractions, inventions, journalists, patents
Companies: intellectual ventures

New Data Shows No Decrease In Crashes After Driving While Yakking Laws Were Implemented

from the how's-that-working,-then? dept

We've been suspicious of whether or not "driving while yakking" laws actually do any good. There are already laws against reckless driving, and picking out specific driving distractions doesn't seem likely to change things, since people just switch to other distractions. A study back in 2006 found that driving while yakking laws don't make the roads any safer, and a brand new study has apparently surprised researchers in showing no impact whatsoever on crash data even as studies show that fewer people are holding phones to their ears while driving (thanks Chirag). Now, there could be plenty of reasons for this -- such as that people are just switching to ear pieces which can be just as dangerous. Or it could be that common claims about driving while yakking leading to more accidents are wrong. Or it could be more complex, with other variables having an impact, but which is hidden in the data. Either way, it certainly seems worth investigating more seriously. If the goal is better road safety, then we should make sure that the laws actually lead to that result. If they don't, then it's important to understand why not.

Filed Under: accidents, crashes, distractions, driving, driving while yakking