Tag: productivity

The “cult of done” pretty much involves half doing things…

Productivity is a modern idol. So too “getting things done”… Me. I just like “being effective.” That’s what I’ve decided…

Here’s a proposed manifesto for the getting things done movement. Illustrated.

The Cult of Done Manifesto:

  1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
  2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
  3. There is no editing stage.
  4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
  5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
  6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
  7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
  8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
  9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
  10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
  11. Destruction is a variant of done.
  12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
  13. Done is the engine of more.

What are your thoughts? Is prodigious production of products better than the production of polished products that do a job? I’m somewhere on that spectrum towards the polished product end. But I recognise that spending 80 hours on the last 20% of your product isn’t very efficient.

December 4, 2011

Pacmania: Google’s Pacman costs world billions

As reported the other day, to celebrate Pacman’s 30th birthday Google created a playable Pacman version of its logo. It’s now permanently available. The playable logo is estimated to have consumed 4.8 million man hours globally.

RescueTime is a program that monitors online usage. They extrapolated their data to reach that figure.

Here’s the baseline:

Our average Google user spends only 4 and a half active minutes on Google search per day, spread over about 22 page views. That’s roughly 11 seconds of attention invested in each Google page view. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but next time you do a search, count to 11- it’s a long time.

Here’s what the study found:

The average user spent 36 seconds MORE on Google.com on Friday.. Thankfully, Google tossed out the logo with pretty low “perceived affordance” – they put an “insert coin” button next to the search button, but I imagine most users missed that. In fact, I’d wager that 75% of the people who saw the logo had no idea that you could actually play it. Which the world should be thankful for.

If we take Wolfram Alpha at its word, Google had about 504,703,000 unique visitors on May 23. If we assume that our userbase is representative, that means:

  • Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)
  • $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate).
  • For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power.
  • $298,803,988 is the dollar tally if all of the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee.

    • May 25, 2010

    Time Management

    Had an interesting little meeting this morning on time management strategies. It was one of those “break out into little clusters and write lists of suggestions” type meetings. I think that’s ironic given the massive amount of duplication in the suggestions and the time taken to report back to everyone.

    But I wonder. Does anyone have any good time management ideas they can share? I spend a lot of time reading about how to be more productive and this hasn’t necessarily translated to increased productivity. I’m enjoying Ben Bathgate’s introductory series “Getting Things Done” philosophy – anyone who reads lifehacker knows about the GTD philosophy already. It seems like a good idea – and I’ll no doubt be sharing a lot of Ben’s posts via my shared links posts.

    The funniest bit of today’s meeting was that I was in the breakout group with our CEO – a noted perfectionist – and one of my “miscellaneous time management” suggestions was that the pursuit of perfection can be a time waster. The difference between “good enough” and “perfect” can be minimal but achieving perfection often takes a long time. She “agreed with the sentiment” but couldn’t find the words to describe it when we were reporting back to the team.

    Any good tips you’ve got for me – or others – share them in the comments

    February 16, 2009