Artifacts of Productivity & Communication

By working in a manner that produces incremental 'artifacts' of both work product and communications, I've found that my personal productivity and team collaboration benefits.

Simple Lists

The most basic building block of my own personal organization is lists. That may sound trivial, but this simple practice helps me stay productive, and from having to keep too many things in my head.

I update these lists, move items between them, and add notes as I work. They provide a basis for when I need to switch context and come back to that train of thought at a later time. Or when preparing status updates, generating meeting followups, or adding version history to source code. They tend to include:

1. Problem outline
2. Todos / tasks / subtasks
3. Issues
4. Anything else that comes up (meeting notes, conversation fragments, code snippets, etc.)
5. Completed things

I use Evernote, or an appropriate team tool for this (see more below).

Tangible Iterations

Iterative artifacts and feedback inform the crafting of Japanese woodblock prints. By sharing status updates and other progress artifacts with the team, it gives the stakeholders (manager, team, or peers) continual, and iterative, feedback on the process. It reassures them of their investment in me, or my team - and helps defuse (or, at least, draw attention to) any stress points.

Equally important to any written communication updates, I like to share tangible work-in-progress previews, screen captures or video captures of any updates, or issues. I've found Snagit, Skitch, and Screenr to be useful.

The shared progress informs on the actual work as it is born into reality. This evolution may be unfolding differently than planned, anticipated, or expected, and agile course changes may be needed. If we end up not being on the same page about a task, or feature, these snapshots and artifcats provide an entry point for discussion, and help develop a common vocabulary for that conversation. They also leave a breadcrumb as to what decisions were made along the way, and gives a general sense of the level of effort involved.

Project Management Portals

When it come to team syncing, I prefer the discreteness, reference-ability and search-ability of asynchronous, written communications. Services like PivotalTracker, Basecamp, Zoho, JIRA, or GitHub provide project management features that can make these communication artifacts easier to share, maintain and navigate.

"Instant" Messaging

Playing back into asynchronous communications — for quick questions or informal triage within internal teams, instant messaging solutions work well. I'm a big fan of apps like Slack / Hipchat / Campfire which are good for keeping persistent group & individual messaging (among other features).

Reserved Real-Time

For any conversations that are just too nuanced for written form—I'll use voice, conference calls, or video/screen-share conferencing (my favorite). However, I prefer to use these channels sparingly, and always with a pre-communicated agenda, scheduling requests, and take-away goals.

Live communications can require quite a bit of coordination and/or distraction, and details shared are prone to being mis-communicated, or even forgotten, if not properly followed up with some type of artifact (e.g. meeting notes).

I prefer meetings to be used sparingly, at strategic moments, kept short, and only with vital attendees. I'm not opposed to meetings entirely, but they have the capacity to become debilitating. 37signals has gone so far as to write about how Meetings Are Toxic.

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