Tech Productivity Issue #127 (Work from Home & Productivity)

Issue #127 (Work from Home & Productivity) 07/19/21

If you're interested in how productive (or not productive) the work-from-home thing has been over the past year and a half, you'll want to check out the following study published by the Becker Friedman Institute:

Work from Home & Productivity: Evidence from Personnel & Analytics Data
on IT Professionals (PDF)

It's a 36-page document but the abstract will give you a good summary. The study was based on personnel and analytics data from 10,000+ skilled professionals at a large Asian IT services company.

Comparing productivity before and during the work-from-home period of the Covid-19 pandemic, the study determined the following (as quoted in the abstract):

Total hours worked increased by roughly 30%, including a rise of 18% in working after normal business hours. Average output did not significantly change. Therefore, productivity fell by about 20%. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably. Employees also spent less time networking, and received less coaching and 1:1 meetings with supervisors.

Probably none of that is too surprising, but I'm sure other similar studies would be useful to compare.

Now on to this week's hand-picked productivity links!

Tools & Apps

AirClick - A notes app for developer teams that includes a search feature, "spaces", topics, and integrations with VS Code, Slack, and Google Chrome.

Layouts - A Mac app to save and restore the layout of your windows. You can save different layouts by name and then restore them as needed.

TapeX - A free desktop screen recorder app for Mac and Windows with no recording limits and no watermarks.

Meetric - Chrome extension. Actionable meeting notes, automatically organized and connected to your Google calendar.

Superdense - A different kind of "compact" bookmark manager that that only uses icons, no text, categorized as you want.

Ship Embedded SaaS Integrations in Minutes with a Native iPaaS - Building native integrations between your app and your customers' 3rd party SaaS apps, such as Salesforce or Slack? See how a native iPaaS could save your team weeks of development and endless maintenance with this free guide. sponsored

Articles & Resources

How to Work Hard - A Paul Graham essay on how to get into the habit of working hard without having to be told to do so.

Good Meetings - This is an excerpt from an upcoming book that looks at ways to keep meetings coordinated and well documented.

What Deadlines Do to Lifetimes - How to find a balance between structuring your time and squandering it.

Suppose I Wanted to Kill a Lot of Pilots - Certainly the most bizarre article title you'll see. The premise here is that thinking about how to do the exact opposite of your goal is sometimes the best way to achieve it.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up Your To-Do List - Discusses the to-do list as an extension of your mind. Seems obvious but I've never heard it put that way before.

TLDR Newsletter - Byte Sized News for Busy Techies - TLDR is a free daily newsletter for developers with links and TLDRs of the most interesting stories in tech 📱, science 🚀, and coding 💻! sponsored

Suggestions?

Have a suggestion for a productivity-related tool, article, or other resource? Send me a direct message via X (@LouisLazaris) and I’ll consider including it in a future issue.

Stay productive!

Louis
techproductivity.co
@LouisLazaris

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