Chris Starr, Author at Timyo Blog

Kant in the Cubicle: To Show Respect, Have Respect

Last week, we shared the article “Why is Respect So Important in the Workplace?” We’ve talked here before about the role of clear communication when it comes to showing and building respect in the workplace, and one quote I keep coming back to is from Glen Llopis in the Forbes article “6 Ways Successful Teams are Buit to Last.” Llopis is discussing the importance of teambuilding, and writes: “Being genuine in your recognition and respect goes a long way towards building loyalty and trust.” The key word here for me is “genuine.” It’s not enough to just show respect—you actually need… Continue reading Kant in the Cubicle: To Show Respect, Have Respect

PUBLISHED ON April 21, 2017April 21, 2017BY Chris Starrin life

Happiness Increases Productivity, and Productivity Creates Happiness

Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked about how to help your whole team be productive, as well as about the dangers of empty productivity. Today, I’d like to focus on another easily overlooked aspect of productivity: happiness. Obviously, productivity and happiness are key goals in anyone’s worklife (and life in general). However, they can often seem at odds with one another: to be productive (the thinking goes), you have to work really hard, which means being stressed, which means being less happy. Or followed the other way: being happy means having more relaxing downtime, which means accomplishing less, which… Continue reading Happiness Increases Productivity, and Productivity Creates Happiness

PUBLISHED ON April 4, 2017April 3, 2017BY Chris Starrin life

How to be productive for the whole team

We talked recently about Oliver Burkeman‘s fantastic article “Why time management is ruining our lives,” and specifically about how “Inbox Zero” creator Merlin Mann is an inspiration when it comes to recognizing the work-life boundaries essential to true productivity. Rereading the article today, one passage in particular stood out to me: “[Productivity expert Tom] DeMarco points out that any increase in efficiency, in an organisation or an individual life, necessitates a trade-off: you get rid of unused expanses of time, but you also get rid of the benefits of that extra time. A visit to your family doctor provides an obvious example.… Continue reading How to be productive for the whole team

PUBLISHED ON March 20, 2017March 17, 2017BY Chris Starrin tips

Merlin Mann for President: The Case Against Inbox Zero and Empty Productivity

Last week, our founder Fabrice shared a long, thorough article from Gulf News: “Time management is ruining our lives” . Author Oliver Burkeman sets out nothing less than a longitudinal history of time management, from ancient Greeks to productivity apps and life hacks. Ladies and gentlemen…Mr. Merlin Mann! One of the central figures in recent chapters of this story is Merlin Mann, father of “Inbox Zero”—the notion that maintaining an empty inbox is the best way to use email productively. We’ve talked about Mr. Mann here before, in an article called “The False Utopia of Inbox Zero.” So, context-wise, you can… Continue reading Merlin Mann for President: The Case Against Inbox Zero and Empty Productivity

PUBLISHED ON March 6, 2017March 7, 2017BY Chris Starrin email

Why You Can’t Fix Email By Fixing Email

I recently found one of my favorite passages ever written about email, in a select/all article from last year that I somehow missed when it first came out: “In fact, email’s simple strength is exactly why people mistake it for the real problems they face: It adapts to systems (and neuroses) so smoothly and transparently that it seems to create them, rather than enable them.” Complaining about email is like looking into a simple, well-made, perfectly smooth mirror and saying “Ewww, gross! This mirror has a bunch of pimples in it!” Sorry, man. It is not the mirror that’s blemished. We’ve discussed this… Continue reading Why You Can’t Fix Email By Fixing Email

PUBLISHED ON February 28, 2017February 28, 2017BY Chris Starrin email

The Ultimate Email Life Hack: It’s Time.

Have you ever seen a TV show or a movie and thought, “Holy crap, this is totally my life. It’s like the writers must be stalking me and my friends!”? This has in fact never happened to me. But I did get a similar feeling when I read Zach Hanlon’s fantastic new article at Fast Company, “The Only Five Email Folders Your Inbox Will Ever Need“: “Holy crap, this is totally Timyo! It’s like Fast Company must be stalking Fabrice and Alfred!” The title pretty much says it all, as the article delineates an easy and effective way to organize email.… Continue reading The Ultimate Email Life Hack: It’s Time.

PUBLISHED ON February 10, 2017February 10, 2017BY Chris Starrin email

No One’s In Charge Here—Why It’s On Us To Fix Email Together

A couple weeks back, we shared an interesting article at Medium by Tristan Harris, who, among other things, is a former Design Ethicist at Google. The article, “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds—from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist” is a wide-ranging read on how tech companies use a keen understanding of behavior psychology to “hijack” our attention and get us to engage with their products and services the way they want. For example, he discusses menu choice (i.e. the options available to the user on an offered menu) as a kind of misdirection which reframes our desires to better align with the… Continue reading No One’s In Charge Here—Why It’s On Us To Fix Email Together

PUBLISHED ON February 7, 2017February 27, 2017BY Chris Starrin email

France’s Right to Disconnect and the Freedom of Email

Just a quick follow-up post on the French “email ban” that we covered here last week and that has been generating a ton of press. Alissa Johannsen Rubin‘s piece in The New York Times—”France Lets Workers Turn Off, Tune Out and Live Life” offers some interesting insights. In addition to covering everything from divorce to pesticides and plastic bags (it all makes sense in context—go read it!) Rubin writes this of France’s newly enacted “Right to Disconnect”: “Though ridiculed in some quarters as a ban on work-related email after hours, it is not quite that. But it is born of the enlightened view… Continue reading France’s Right to Disconnect and the Freedom of Email

PUBLISHED ON January 31, 2017February 9, 2017BY Chris Starrin news

Email bans are the wrong way to go!

Fabrice alerted me to a good article at business2community.com that asks “Does Banning Out of Hours Email Increase Employee Engagement?” It’s an interesting question, very pertinent to Timyo’s mission. It’s also a question that’s been lately in the news, since, as per the article: “New laws came into force in France on January 1, which gave employees the choice of whether to open and respond to emails outside their normal working hours. The ‘right to disconnect’, part of a portfolio of new labour laws which have sparked protests across the country, aims, among other things, to prevent burnout.” Author Jill… Continue reading Email bans are the wrong way to go!

PUBLISHED ON January 25, 2017January 25, 2017BY Chris Starrin email

Email Tips from the Pros: CEO Secrets to Managing Your Email

Last week we shared a great article from Business Insider Singapore: “The email habits of Tim Cook, Bill Gates, and 16 other successful people”. It features a nice spread of founders and CEOs and gives some helpful insights into how these very busy people manage their email. The whole thing is worth a read, but here are a few Timyo-pertinent highlights: Jeff Weiner “sends less email to receive less email”. The LinkedIn CEO noticed that his inbox was becoming overwhelmed. According to the article: ‘Turns out, it wasn’t just [my colleagues’] emails that were generating all of that inbox activity—it… Continue reading Email Tips from the Pros: CEO Secrets to Managing Your Email

PUBLISHED ON January 20, 2017January 20, 2017BY Chris Starrin tips