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Disneyland
may be the happiest place on Earth, but it's no walk in the park for its
hundreds of laundry workers.
Steve Lopez of The Los Angeles Times wrote about the "electronic whip" that hotels at Disneyland installed to spur productivity:
In the basements of the Disneyland and Paradise Pier hotels in Anaheim, big flat-screen monitors hang from the walls in rooms where uniformed crews do laundry. The monitors are like scoreboards, with employees' work speeds compared to one another. Workers are listed by name, so their colleagues can see who is quickest at loading pillow cases, sheets and other items into a laundry machine.
It should come as no surprise that at the happiest place on Earth, not all the employees are smiling.
Isabel Barrera, a Disneyland Hotel laundry worker for eight years, began calling the new system the "electronic whip" when it was installed last year. The name has stuck.
"I was nervous," said Barerra, who makes $11.94 an hour, "and felt that I was being controlled even more."
Previously on Neatorama: Neatorama Facts: Closed Disney Rides | The Early Days of Mickey and Minnie Mouse | The Dark Side of Disney
Want
to be more productive? Don't.
That's the advice from Leo Babauta, which is striking because his blog Zen Habits has been one of the top self-improvement blogs who used to dispense tips on how to be more productive!
Leo explains:
For at least a couple of years, Zen Habits was one of the top productivity blogs, dispensing productivity crack for a nominal fee (your reading time).
I’d like to think I helped people move closer to their dreams, but today I have different advice:
Toss productivity advice out the window.
Most of it is well-meaning, but the advice is wrong for a simple reason: it’s meant to squeeze the most productivity out of every day, instead of making your days better.
Imagine instead of cranking out a lot of widgets, you made space for what’s important. Imagine that you worked slower instead of faster, and enjoyed your work. Imagine a world where people matter more than profits.
Leo lists 7 productivity booster tips that you should toss out: Link (Photo: Shutterstock)
If you are reading this at work, then you may actually be boosting your productivity. At least that is what one study claims. I think a group of researchers was just looking for a way to surf the web and have a good excuse when their boss catches them. What is your take on it? Are you more productive in an office environment that isn’t constantly monitoring your computer activity?
“Browsing the Internet serves an important restorative function,” according to a report from the National University of Singapore.
So-called cyberloafing can refresh workers mentally after long periods of work, researchers said at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management in San Antonio this week.
Surfing the Web is even better for productivity than talking or texting with friends or sending personal emails, the study found.
And smart bosses would stop snooping, researchers said: Excessive Internet monitoring and surveillance only makes employees do it more, they said.
Where did the time go? If you’ve been sitting in front of your computer and hours went by like minutes but you’ve gotten nothing done, perhaps you’ve been sucked into the Bermuda Triangle of Productivity.
Drawn by Fuchsia Macaree:
I drew this one day after two unrelated friends complained about how they get sucked into certain websites instead of doing work, which is exactly what I do. I think….this maybe, possibly, maybe happens to some other people as well.
Link – via swiss-miss and about:blank
Surprise, surprise! The average American worker slacks off about 1.7 hours per work day. Almost half of them spent this time unproductively on the Internet (sorry, guys! I know Neatorama’s not helping your productivity!), 1/5th socialized instead of worked, and the rest … Oh, I’ll finish this post l8r.
Google’s celebration of Pac-Man’s 30th anniversary was fun, enabling people to play Pac-Man on their main search page, either as a one- or two-player game. And people certainly took advantage of the opportunity, spending approximately 4,819,352 hours on the game alone. The result is approximately $120 million in productivity lost, in one day.
Thankfully, Google tossed out the logo with pretty low “perceived affordance” – they put an “insert coin” button next to the search button, but I imagine most users missed that. In fact, I’d wager that 75% of the people who saw the logo had no idea that you could actually play it. Which the world should be thankful for.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by nmiller.
One of my favorite science comic artists, Jorge Cham of PhD Comics, nailed yet another one with this panel. Incidentally, it is 2AM on the West Coast when I post this one up.
Link | If you’re new to PhD Comics, go here for the good stuff
Next time your boss catches you reading Neatorama instead of what your job description specifies, tell him/her about this study from the University of Melbourne.
Dr Brent Coker, from the Department of Management and Marketing, says that workers who engage in ‘Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing’ (WILB) are more productive than those who don’t.
“People who do surf the Internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t,” he says.
“Firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos on YouTube, using social networking sites like Facebook or shopping online under the pretense that it costs millions in lost productivity, however that’s not always the case.”
(image credit: Flickr use Valerie Reneé)
