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I've been on my computer for four hours today, and I'm not sure I've gotten anything done. This is entirely my fault, to be clear—I have deep impulse control problems. At the same time, this is happening by design. The modern internet is optimized to be as distracting as possible. Social networks and other websites are built by some of the smartest software engineers who have ever lived, and often the objective is to take up as much of your time as possible. I point this out not to make any kind of moral statement. A business, by definition, has to make money. That very much includes advertising-supported websites and apps that generate more profit the more time you spend scrolling. But it's important to realize this agenda exists—because it might not align with your personal goals. Maybe you want to be more productive at work. Maybe you want to spend more time being creative or learning new skills. Or maybe you just wish you spent more time communicating with the pe

You've likely heard that job hunting is a full-time job. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it's true: from resurrecting your dusty LinkedIn profile and updating your resume to scouring job sites and writing cover letters, job hunting is a time suck. When I suddenly found myself out of a job eight months ago, I thought job hunting would be easy since I suddenly had all the time in the world. Unfortunately, post-layoff depression is real and I found it difficult to function. While I can't write your cover letter or revive your LinkedIn account for you, thankfully there are automations out there that make the job-hunting process easier, whether you've been laid off or are trying to find a better gig. Figure out what you want in your next job There is no automation for this. Taking a few minutes to think about what you want in your next job will save you tons of time and potentially awkward interactions with recruiters and hiring managers. Are there aspects of yo

With hundreds of employees chatting every day, Zapier's Slack is a busy place . To keep things under some semblance of control, our People Ops team put together a guide to Slack etiquette at Zapier. This is that guide: we've kept it as close to the original as possible and only edited it to make sure it was rest-of-the-world friendly. How we use Slack Slack is for work-related and just-for-fun office chatter. You can join any public channel to listen in, ask a question, or interact with a certain group. Slack is for almost-synchronous, fast-moving information. It's impossible to keep up with everything shared in Slack, and you can't expect everyone to catch something you share in Slack. In many channels, expect messages to be buried within a few hours. If you need to share some information to last longer, consider using Async or Quip (then popping the link in Slack). "Default to transparency" and work in a public Slack channel as much as possible. Slack

In any knowledge work job, you're really playing two different roles at once: you're simultaneously the "boss" and the "worker". You're responsible for: Deciding what your work is (boss-mode) Doing the work (worker-mode) Dealing with new information inputs (worker-mode) and reacting to them to decide whether to change your priorities as a result (boss-mode) This creates an immediate conflict and serious potential for indecision about which role should have your attention at different times of the day: do you spend more time in boss-mode (thinking and analyzing your work, ensuring its success, planning your next steps) or in worker-mode? Naturally, the grass is always greener: the time you spend in boss-mode may remind you of all the things that you need to be doing in the trenches. Yet, while you're trying to crank through your to-do list, you'll be making mental notes about all the new projects that need some precious thinking time. This

What follows is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of Designing Your Work Life , the newest book from Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, authors of the #1 New York Times bestseller Designing Your Life . Available February 25, you can now pre-order the book here from your favorite retailer and access a special pre-order offer for an exclusive bonus download: the DYWL Get Started Guide. At the end of the workday, we are the one responsible for making our job feel challenging and fun. Whether we are driving a bus or driving a corporate merger, this is true for any and every job. And to make our job fun and rewarding, we need to again turn to the psychologists. The research on human motivation, called "self-determination theory," says that we are intrinsically motivated animals, and, in addition to responding to external motivations, a full understanding of human motivation requires an understanding of our innate psychological needs for A utonomy, R elatedness, and C ompetence (ARC). Now, s

I may seem efficient, but really, I'm just good at using snippets. Snippets are a form of text expander —they're basically a fancy version of autocorrect, which allow you to type some small amount of text and have way more text appear. For example, if you find yourself writing "Thanks for reaching out!" 48 times a day at work, your snippet will allow you to instead just type "thx" and have "Thanks for reaching out!" appear. I use snippets for everything—including my personal life. But we'll get back to that in a bit, I promise. I use Alfred , a Mac app, to manage my snippets; Phrase Express is a decent Windows option. But the tool doesn't matter—what matters is using it so that you don't have to remember and re-type the same information again and again. How I use snippets The internet always wants to know where I live. I could type out my contact information manually, like some kind of 13th-century peasant, but those are precious s

"It's time for our daily standup! Those are my favorite!"—said nobody, ever. If you're new to standups, they're meetings that a team has every day at the same time. Everyone is literally supposed to stand during the whole meeting, in order to keep it moving quickly. Each person answers the same questions: What did you do since our last meeting? What will you do before the next one? Are you blocked on anything? In theory, this works well. It's generally not disruptive because those questions can be answered fairly quickly and everyone can get back to work. But it's easy to quickly grow numb to the same questions repeated over and over (and over) and miss patterns that should be addressed. Also, this can happen: Engineer A: "Ok, yesterday I went to update the polling code for the Framistat service, but the bit twiddler was erroring out, so I'm blocked." Engineer B: "What were you sending to the bit twiddler?" Engineer A: &qu

How much time do you spend each day moving information from one app into another? If you use software at work, you’re probably moving data around manually at least some of the time. We think you should make the computers do that for you. Here are five things Zapier users automate. If these are things you do regularly, consider following their lead. Spend less time copying and pasting, so you can focus on the parts of your job that actually require—and deserve—human brainpower. Message your team about leads or customers If a lead comes in and nobody acts on it, did it actually come in? We can't answer that question—we'll leave that to philosophers—but what we can do is help you make sure this never happens. You could say it's one of the things we do best: Notifying teammates about leads is one of the most common ways people use Zapier. And it's a really simple automation to set up. All you need to do is connect whatever source you're getting leads from to whateve