Link: How To Rewire Your Brain for Positivity and Happiness

Ever go through a phase where you feel like every day is a Monday? You wake up, you hit snooze. Then you hit snooze again and you just don’t feel it?

Yes, I know that negative emotions can eat away at my productivity, creativity, decision-making skills. And yet, I have to admit that sometimes it’s really difficult to reverse the course of a slump.

The unfortunate superpower of the negative is that it has a stronger impact than the positive.

In fact negative impact of setbacks in your work is three times as powerful in affecting motivation than positive progress. It’s just easier to remember the bad stuff that has happened to you during the day than the good.

So why is it, that our brains have a such a negativity bias? The reason is quite simple: They’re actually wired to pay more attention to negative experiences. It’s a self-protective characteristic. We are  scanning for threats from when we used to be hunter and gatherers. But such vigilance for negative information can cause a narrowing, downward spiral and a negative feedback loop that doesn’t reflect reality.

Fortunately, we aren’t doomed by our natural disposition towards negativity.  What’s amazing is that we have the ability to break out of that negative feedback loop and we can actually rewire our brains to think positively. Understanding how the brain can refashion its own connections is the key to unlocking the durable power of positive thinking.

And that’s exactly what this post is all about. Let’s dive in…

Another nice post from the bufferapp blog that I felt was worth sharing over here..

Link: From Scrum to Lean:

Lean is a set of principles defined by the Japanese automobile manufacturing industry in the 1980s. The Toyota quality engineer, John Krafcik, coined the term, while observing the processes and tools used toeliminate waste in mass automobile production. It wasn’t until 2003 that Mary and Tom Poppendieck introduced Lean as a software development process in their book, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit.

Whereas Scrum is a set of rules and roles, Lean is a set of principles and concepts with a handful of tools. Both are considered Agile techniques, and they share the same ideology of delivering fast, while reducing defects and errors. I always emphasize Agile’s adaptability, but can’t ignore the fact that Scrum presents itself as a mandatory set of rules. In fact, Scrum’s religious fans would shout blasphemy for not following Scrum’s rules to the letter.

I wanted to post this article I came across, as Scrum and Lean are something we follow pretty heavily here…

Link: Why To Do Lists Are Failing us

If you’re like me, you switch task managers every six months at the point that you have added a bunch of items in your list that you’ll never get around to and can’t bear to be reminded of them again. At which point, you conclude that the app has failed you. It must have because you haven’t completed any of these tasks!

Task management tools fail users because they operate without context. How many times have you been to the grocery store and forgotten the dill pickles you were asked to buy? Or met someone and tens minutes later realized you forgot to ask an important question?

This rang true when I read it today. I’m an avid fan of To Do Lists, but they’re not perfect.

Here at The Interviewr, we use an Agile approach to our business, so we build out updates following sprints. Technically a sprint is a big To Do list of sorts, with User Stories and Tasks, but it works for us so we use it.

Sprints won’t work for all businesses. I know some that are big fans of Waterfall principles, but for us, where we’ve built the entire site on Lean Startup Principles and Practices, Agile has been the way to work.

Link: Why To Do Lists Are Failing us

If you’re like me, you switch task managers every six months at the point that you have added a bunch of items in your list that you’ll never get around to and can’t bear to be reminded of them again. At which point, you conclude that the app has failed you. It must have because you haven’t completed any of these tasks!

Task management tools fail users because they operate without context. How many times have you been to the grocery store and forgotten the dill pickles you were asked to buy? Or met someone and tens minutes later realized you forgot to ask an important question?

This rang true when I read it today. I’m an avid fan of To Do Lists, but they’re not perfect.

Here at The Interviewr, we use an Agile approach to our business, so we build out updates following sprints. Technically a sprint is a big To Do list of sorts, with User Stories and Tasks, but it works for us so we use it.

Sprints won’t work for all businesses. I know some that are big fans of Waterfall principles, but for us, where we’ve built the entire site on Lean Startup Principles and Practices, Agile has been the way to work.

2012 is about to close, and tomorrow we will step into 2013.

We’re sitting here brainstorming where the first quarter of 2013 will bring us and it’s an exciting time:

1. The new mobile apps will be in the app stores for iPhone, iPad and Android. They got slightly delayed as we decided to make them even easier to use.
2. Browser-based calling, so you can choose to have the call be handled directly from your browser to your interviewee’s phone, taking away the need to use your phone if you want to. This will be optional, and you will have two buttons to begin the call with, “browser” or “call your phone”
3. Video Interviews, we’ve finally got this one nearly ready to launch so you can conduct video interviews and store them to view later.
4. A few new subscriber features. We can’t give everything away, but trust me, you’ll like them

We’ve seen The Interviewr grow every month, with new users and more and more interviews being conducted every day. We’re seeing new features being used as they get added such as the new tagging system and our transcription service, and it makes us happy.

The Interviewr was built in 2011 because we saw a need that had to be filled. We created the world’s first Interview Relationship Manager, where people could properly organize, conduct and record interviews for the first time, and our focus has always been on improving that service.

So I just want to finish by saying Thank you for being along for the ride, and look forward to seeing you all in 2013..

Oh, and Happy New Year!

Link: Some thoughts on organizational complexity

Thinking about complexity
 
Knowledge Representation is a central topic in the field of artificial intelligence. Research in this area tackles the challenge of mapping the external world into simplified, machine-readable models. Creating a sufficiently sophisticated model is as important, if not more, than the algorithmic processing that occurs once the model is built.
 
The more external states that can be represented in a model, the morecomplex we could say it is. Simple models can cause people to falsely believe that successful results can easily be “scaled up” to more complex models. Unfortunately, it’s rarely that simple.

Interesting post from Dalton Caldwell…

We try to avoid getting too complex ourselves here, but I’ve been involved with companies where complexity was their bread and butter it seemed so I can understand where Dalton is coming from…

Question the question
 
The best creative solutions don’t come from finding good answers to the questions that are presented.
 
They come from inventing new questions.

Seth Godin

Link: How to do what you love, the right way

Every time I start a new job I take my dad to see my office. He loves seeing where I work, and I love showing him. It’s a thing. As much as I enjoy this unspoken ritual of ours, there’s always a predictable response from my dad that serves as a clear indicator of our large generation gap. At some point he’ll ask a question along the lines of, “So… no one has an office? You just sit out here in the open?” I’ve tried many times to explain the idea of co-location and collaborative work, but I don’t think it’s something that will ever compute for him.

Thoughtful article by Rian van der Merwe.

We use various tools to help make The Interviewr your premiere Interview location.

Some are web apps, some are installed apps.

This post is to give credit where credit’s due and introduce you to apps that can work well.

Tools built by others

• Intercom.io, is our first tool… This handy CRM helps us see how people are using the site and from where in the world they are from.. This helps us make decisions such as what languages to support in our upcoming localization update, and what features to keep, remove, build upon.
• IFTTT.com, If-This-Then-That lets us handle various functions such as sharing our blog posts to twitter and app.net via buffer app
• Coda 2, this installed desktop app is used to build our site and handle any coding needed. It’s handy site management features make it fast to switch between working on the front end of the site, logged in area of the site, or the API.
• WordPress, the front end of this site, and the blog are powered by WordPress.
• Twilio handles all of our phone work
• Box.net is used for secure cloud storage of all files uploaded by our users related to interviews and contacts. We also use Box.net for sharing files between various people as we work on bringing our users the best solutions we can.
• Basecamp is used for project management, notes, planning, communications, just about anything really.

Interesting presentation from Dropbox.com founder Drew Houston.. Being followers of lean startup methodology ourselves, it’s nice to see what other startups have done.