This is just an excellent blog from another blogger. 

Rather than copy and paste

it all here I'll give you an excerpt then a link to the full article.  In time I'll replace this with my own thoughts eventually but I want time to process...

"The Myth of “Good People”

By Rich, June 21, 2010 10:36 am

I often hear the phrase, “We hire the best and brightest.” It leaves me wondering who hires the “worst and dimmest.”

In order to experience real success every team needs to determine how they can achieve extraordinary results with ordinary people. When I teach our Agile Explained class, I reference the six focus areas of Six Sigma. These include Environment, Measurement Systems, Methods, Materials, Machines, and People.

My belief is most management teams first look at the people as the key to solving their most pressing problems.  “If we only had better people things wouldn't be this bad.”

Don’t believe it. We have good people in our industry. The people in our industry are smart, dedicated, educated, and diligent. It’s not about the people."

Link to full article...

It takes 15 minutes to fully recover from conversational interruptions

I’ve known about this study for about 6 years. When you are working, it takes 15 minutes to fully engage your mind into a single task. When you are interrupted, even for a moment, it takes 15 more minutes to be fully engaged again.

So, 4 interruptions an hour can nearly cause zero productivity for that hour.

Relationships matter, so this might not always be bad, but this is something to be aware of.

A company I worked at used to have a policy called, “the cone of solitude”. This was a period of time where our phones are turned off, email is shut down, and we committed to not interrupting each other.

I’m thinking about instituting this for myself at work for 2 hours a day. I think it will be a shock to my co-workers, because I'm as chatty as the next person, so I’ll go easy on them but I also believe it’s a good practice.

Microsoft Research Article...