Posts Tagged ‘joy’

Designers teach work psychologists 3 questions to ask about work or any plan or bossiness about people

Posted by: Jo Jordan on: March 4, 2010

Mood hoovering work

I am a work psychologist and we design work. We are brought up on a diet of (ersatz) experiments and (dated) statistics. That’s not all bad. We are good at operationalizing – taking an idea and saying “what exactly are we going to do“? We find Google Analytics easy to understand.

But we become very bad at people. We even joke that is why we become psychologists. Because people mystify us.

So we set out to learn from people who are good with people.

Psychologists learn from designers

Here are three questions that were blogged as a summary of Bantjes (see that training, pedantically precise!). If we are going to set up mock experiments and tiresome evaluations, I suggest we hold ourselves accountable to these.

Three questions to ask about work or any plan or bossiness about people

Does it bring joy?

Is there a sense of wonder?

Does it evoke curiosity?

Failed at the off

My rendition does none of these things. I can feel the energy hoovered out of me. So do look up Bantjes when the videos on TED Global 2010 come out. And let’s put the fun back into life. Being orderly is good. But being dispiriting is not.

Tags: Bantjes, curiosity, design, joy, mood hoover, TED Global 2010, wonder, work psychology

Tight planning or joyful priotizing for 2010?

Posted by: Jo Jordan on: December 18, 2009

Do you plan your time carefully?

When I was a young psychologist, I advised people to schedule their time. My boss, an organized goal-oriented man, disagreed. He said that as long as you are doing something important, then it doesn’t matter what you do.

Before we went to meetings with clients, he would go through the our goal and sub-goals, which he would put in a meeting planner. Clients were well aware that he had a check list because they could see him looking at it and ticking things off.

He also ran the office with tight deadlines. He would phone in that he was coming to pick up his overnight work and he expected someone to be at street level to hand it to him through the car window.

His work was returned in the morning and with a ‘rinse and repeat’ the next night, all our work was turned around in three days.

But he didn’t do schedules.

What is the alternative to schedules?

I read a long post today from someone who scheduled his time for a whole year – very precisely.

I think working out how much time we have available is helpful so that we can work backwards to sensible work practices.

We can find a daily, weekly, and monthly rhythm that is enjoyable and effective.
We can discover what is important

Yes, we have a year, a month, a week, a day or an hour to spend. What will we do with it? We have a year, a month, a week, a day or an hour to spend. What would be the most enjoyable and satisfying thing to have accomplished in the next hour?