All of eirine's Comments + Replies
Using physical kanban boards.
I learned about kanban boards at EA NTNU during my undergrad, and it greatly improved my productivity in my studies. It's a physical task management system using a board (or just a wall) and post-its. It involves writing down all your tasks for the day on post-its (one task per post-it) and then moving each post-it between three different columns:
- To-do – this is a backlog of tasks where you place all your post-its at the start of the day, ideally prioritised by importance.
- Doing – this is whatever task you're doing a
Co-working with others.
This works so well that I sometimes don't want to do it because I know it will work.
Doing online pomodors (25 min working, 5 min break) is basically how I got through the pandemic without a huge hit to my productivity. Back then, I benefitted from co-working the whole day. Now, it's only counterfactually beneficial for a few hours each day or week, so I only do it a few times.
Peer-mentoring and coaching calls.
I'm not sure if this has made me work harder, but it's definitely helped me work better. There are two types of mentoring calls I've tried and found helpful:
- Coaching calls with someone more experienced. These have been really useful for learning about best practices and getting external input from someone who has experience with the types of issues I'm experiencing at work. For example, I first learned about situational leadership in one of these coaching calls, and that greatly changed how I did management and h
Frequently asking for feedback.
I realised a while back that if I don't know whether I'm doing a good or poor job, it increases the number of tasks I find ughy and how much I procrastinate.
To help with this, I've included a prompt in our weekly meeting templates at work to give each other feedback or "half-baked thoughts" at every meeting. We have performance reviews every 6 months, and I'll very often feel a boost in motivation and productivity after those. I also have a document bookmarked in my browser called "Feeling down?" with a checklist for what to do when I'm feeling particularly low mood, and asking for positive feedback is on that list.
Regular productivity check-ins.
The past 1-2 years I've had a 30-minute productivity check-in with the same person every week. These have increased my productivity on average, and because of them I very rarely have more than half an unproductive week.
Sometimes, the thing that helps most is just writing down what I'm thinking about, and figuring out a solution myself by writing. Other times, it's the other person asking questions like "How important is it?” and “What would you tell someone else in your position to do?”.
Frequently change and adapt the methods I use to be productive.
How productive I am changes substantially throughout the day, but also throughout the month. I think of myself as three colleagues: "Morning Eirin" who is decisive and internally motivated, "Afternoon Eirin" who needs a lot of productivity tools to stay on task, and "Evening Eirin" who enjoys deep work. They all need different tools, systems, and sources of motivation.
I'll also reliably have some days each month when I feel negative about everything and will have low motivation, sel...
I used to work at EA Norway, which is a fee-paying membership society, and thought it might be useful to share more on how our funding worked. This is just meant as an example, and not as an argument for or against membership societies. (Here's a longer comment explaining how we organise things at EA Norway.)
I can't speak to EA Norway's current situation, as I no longer have any position at EA Norway (other than being a paying member). However, I can say what it was like in 2018-2021 when I was Executive Director (ED). The total income from the membership ...
This is a tangent, but I thought I'd say a bit more about how we've done things at EA Norway, as some people might not know. This is not meant as an argument in any direction.
Every year, we have a general assembly for members of EA Norway. To be a member, you need to have paid the yearly membership fee (either to EA Norway or one of the approved student groups). The total income from the membership fee covers roughly the costs of organising the general assembly. The importance of the membership fee is mainly that it's a bar of entry to the organisation, ma...
Really love this, and definitely think you're on to something - thanks for posting! I'd also add that if there are certain things that you don't enjoy or find aversive, you should consider looking for co-organisers who find the those things fun and rewarding. Like with startups, you should generally be two instead of one. And for a lot of people, it's also more fun to do things together than alone.
I'm grateful you've asked this question, as I've been really curious about this myself and have considered asking the same question. I know I should be careful when comparing myself with others, but I only have experience from one organisation where I have also been in charge of deciding number of hours we should work and how to track it. It feels nice to know that what I've been doing isn't totally off.
Here's what we do at our ~3 year old organisation with 3-4 employees: We use Toggl for tracking hours we actually work and a separate spreadsheet to track ...
Thanks for sharing, this is great! I found it particularly useful to read how many hours you spend on each activity and the objectives and key results you've planned for 2020.
I was a bit surprised that you've used a quarter (250/932 hours) of your time on personally learning directly related to EA. How much do you think the hours you spent on learning have contributed to the positive outcomes of EA Toronto? You wrote "Finally, without independent learning, another wild guess seems to say that the other two thirds of EATO's strategy updates and insights wou
...Thanks for your feedback! We have ended up going for a 4-7 day camp for people with 1-2 years of experience. I've noted down your ideas for a future iteration of the camp.
And thanks for your offer! You've been very helpful so far, and it would be great to discuss more at a later time.
Thanks for explaining! I wasn't familiar with the term, but I feel like I know understand better what it entails and the different ways it could look like.
Thanks again for taking the time to comment! We've noted down all your points, and found especially the one about signalling fit and thoughts on the role of national/local groups very interesting and valuable.
Thank you for your comments! You've particularly made us think about the length of camp for the first group. We're now leaning towards something between 5-10 days. Your comment about potential risks is also greatly appreciated, and we will think carefully about how much we will make public moving forward.
Thank you so much for your comment! I really appreciate that you've taken the time to be so thorough. I also appreciate how structured your comment is, and it makes it easy to follow. You bring up a lot of new points that we haven't thought about before, and have made us think more about how we can better cooperate with MBA/ business graduates and HR managers. I also found your list of certificates particularly useful. I was wondering, could you explain more about what you call 'partnership streams'?
A few days ago we published another ...
This is very cool! Exciting results. We'll definitely look into doing something similar in Norway. Thanks for writing this up and sharing.
Just to check, does this link work for you? http://hexaco.org/hexaco-online
(Edit) Ah, sorry. So you don't get the results from the website?
Interesting, do you think there are ways to practice or increase value-alignment/good judgment? For example by doing an internship at the organisation in question? Or having a practice period either at the organisation, or through a training programme organised by someone else?
I think this hypothesis is similar to the points made by 80k in their post on why although EA orgs really value their previous hires, especially in operations, there is still a large talent gap. It seems like part of the constraint has to do with the organisations' ability hire new people. We're also really interested in finding ways to reduce the constraint on EA orgs by seeing how we can reduce organisational costs through, for example, contributing to the filtering process or providing strong signals about a person. This is something we want t...
Hi! Hope your meeting today goes well. I agree with Michal at the Local Effective Altruism Network (LEAN) and Alex at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), and think those two groups are the best to reach out to.
I'm from EA Norway, and I think it would be exciting to set up a call to introduce ourselves and see if we can help at all. I think just saying hi and explaining what we're doing in Norway and hearing what you're doing in the Philippines could be useful. Email me at eirin@effektivaltruisme.no if you'd like to set up a call.
I actually attended the launch of this report in Oslo. I have three main points about this report: 1) The results aren't really generalisable, yet they present the findings as if they were; 2) the actual findings of the report don't directly say that fundraising campaigns need to change; 3) although it might be a 'whataboutist' argument, I'd really like for SAIH to focus on something else.
As the report itself states: "this is a study based on a very limited selection of informants, and we cannot generalise from the findings o...
Do you think there are certain situations one could force or reenact in order for a person to develop the trait of taking responsibility, or discover if they have it? Do you feel like the perceived importance of the project is the only factor, or are their other factors that can induce this?
If you were to interview someone for a position, what type of work trial, case work, or other activities would you have the interviewee do for you to assess whether they have the trait of taking responsibility? Do you think just answering questions would provide enough for you to assess it, or could they do certain tasks or trials to test it?
Thanks for this addition! This is very interesting. Do you find that taking responsibility and being willing to do whatever you have to do is something innate to people, or something that is mostly acquirable? Do you have ideas for how to test whether you have this trait?
Thank you for this suggestion! I think there are three main benefits of brainwriting: to generate ideas in a very short amount of time, to build on others' ideas, and to have someplace to start when working on a project.
We've used it for getting ideas on articles we'd like to write and topics we'd like to discuss. We also use it before a meeting with someone if we're a bit unsure about what we'd like the meeting to be about. Recently, we have decided on which indicators we are going to use to measure to what extent we are rea...
I'm similar in some aspects: There are some things I find so boring or difficult to do that I need external accountability to do them.
In these cases, however, I wouldn't use the stakeholder to hold me accountable, but rather a colleague, friend, or other mechanism.
In fact, there are some instances where you want to be ambitious and say you'll do more than you think you do, e.g. when setting goals for yourself. However, I think that can backfire if you do it with a stakeholder.
Does that make sense?