The Zone – Super charge your productivity
Posted on 01. Nov, 2010 by Dean Whitney in productivity and has 0 Comments
I’m sure you know what its like to be in “the zone”. That’s the magical place where you are working or playing and time disappears and you are 100% focused on the task at hand. You may experience the zone while writing, painting, skiing or working on a project. All of a sudden. Kapow! Something snaps you out of it. A phone call, a close call with another skier, an annoying colleague, a sudden realization that you were supposed to leave 30 minutes ago.
Most of us rarely enter “the zone”. The “Norm” is constantly checking email, answering calls, running from one meeting to another, checking our social networks, blogs, news etc. Most of us don’t even put work time on our calendars, if there’s no meetings we call it “free time”. For most of us our focus is far too fragmented across too many commitments. We think we are multi-tasking when in reality we are going from one thing to the next, or ’serial tasking’. (more…)
How to create a formatted email signature in Gmail
Posted on 01. Oct, 2010 by Dean Whitney in productivity and has 0 Comments
I’m a big fan of Gmail so when I started my agency I didn’t even consider Outlook for email. We set up a Google Enterprise account with email, calendar, pages, apps. The email is the same as Gmail with our own domain (@deanwhitney.com). This has been amazing so far and very cost effective. The one thing we hate about Gmail – the email signature functionality – or lack of. (more…)
Prepare healthy lunches for the work week in 10 minutes
Posted on 01. Aug, 2010 by Dean Whitney in productivity and has 0 Comments
Not too many of us can honestly say we don’t need to lose fat. To achieve this our diets should consist of a very high amounts of lean protein and green water based veggies, like sprouts, salad greens, celery and avocado. As for vegetables the closer to raw the better to deliver those healthy enzymes to our intestines to help with overall digestion and nutritional absorption.
If you are like me, when it gets busy at work your diet is the first thing to go. When we resort to fast food take-out, delivery, catered lunches typically equates to bursting buttons on your waistline. These foods are so irregular we tend to eat meals with the wrong mix of protein, carbohydrates and vegetables.
Often the meals have too high bread/pasta to meat/protein ratio. The cookies, fruit or high-calorie frappachino really throws the sugar/carb intake over the top. Furthermore we find ourselves dragging our feet or nearly comatose come 4PM. Our coffee intake sky rockets, water intake drops and the coffee is a diuretic making half of that water pass right through.
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Features Matrix Scorecard for agile project management
Posted on 15. Jul, 2010 by Dean Whitney in User Experience, process, productivity and has 0 Comments
One of the biggest challenges for agencies and clients is keeping interactive projects right-sized and avoiding scope creep. The Features Matrix Scorecard is a tool for managing technology, business and user experience requirements and selecting a software platform. The goal is to reduce the scope and complexity of the project; thus reducing cost and risk while greatly increasing the likelihood for a happy and successful project launch. In the IT world it’s been proven statistically that the higher the project cost the chance of failure increases exponentially.
IT projects above $500k have a 1 in 5 chance of failure. And the research shows that out of the successful projects the ranks aren’t all 5 stars; so it would be safe to say more than half are just above the ‘acceptable’ line. Today’s marketing and user experience projects have so much technology tied in these days its smart to use an agile approach and build up incrementally. When building a house you don’t start with the marble tile; you begin with the foundation. The Features Matrix helps you define a solid foundation to build your solution. Iterative enhancements can put your product on the road to success. (more…)
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