Somewhat related tip: prepend LANG=C to many console commands such as grep to speed up many tools processing large files, as they will assume ASCII input (which is probably what you have in most cases)
If you care about speed you would probably be using ripgrep rather than grep anyway, but doesn’t `LANG=en_US.UTF-8` give a similar speed on modern systems without any compromise on consistency of sort ordering etc and support for extended characters?
It's more common than we imagine. That's usually the start of many of the historical network incidents. The important part, as usual, is to make sure the remediations of such incidents focus on how to limit blast radius of small changes, and how to accomplish that without imposing artificial gatekeeping and bureaucracy into the change process.
I have around 18 hours per week of prebooked meeting time (1:1s, team meetings, planning, 1:1 with manager, sync meetings with different cross initiatives, interviews, candidate screening, etc).
I have observed that my biggest productivity killer are not those meetings (I try to make them useful for me and I try to make sure they are useful for everyone). The biggest problem comes when the time around them is very fragmented. For me, a week with 30 hours of meetings can be more productive than a week with 15 hours if I manage to defragment the time around them.
I have recently worked with my team and other peers to put an effort to defragment my calendar by batching predictable meetings together (this is a process I repeat every 6-12 months) and I feel an immediate boost in focus.
My rule of thumb is trying to make sure I get daily focus slots as close as possible to length X where X is:
X = ( (40 hours) - (prebooked hours in meetings) / (5 weekdays) )
In my case (40-18)/5 = 4.4 hours. I currently have two 4-hour slots monday and tuesday, a 5 hour slot on wednesday and a 3 hour slot on thursdays. Not bad. But that degrades quickly!
Standing meetings are also used to force procrastinators to report in frequently enough that they stop relying on "secret" all-nighters at the end of the week to get their work done
i am both the driver of my team moving to 15-minute stand ups, and the dude “secretly” pulling the occasional heroic all nighters. peak cognitive dissonance rn
We do, in a team of 10. We have a very strict rule of being prepared before standup and going through the standup list quickly (< 1 min each). We also make sure to keep our list of tasks focused. Any sidebar discussions are taken until the ending of the meeting and all stakeholders who care can be part of it.
I think for us at least, just having the team all aligned on wanting to finish the meeting as fast as possible helps keep it running quickly and smoothly.
One thing I did to combat this was refuse to allow any recurring meetings on Fridays. I almost always end up with a couple of one-offs but I can usually put those at the start of the day. Typically this results in 6+ hours of uninterrupted time on Friday.
The rest of my week is a fragmented disaster but at least Fridays are nice.
Thank you for posting this. I am also in a situation where I am a mid level manager for a globally distributed team. The advice of "just have less meetings" or "force an agenda for all of them" has already been followed -- you really do have to talk a lot of people in certain roles.
I love the idea of a regular "defrag" process. I haven't done this consciously but it's happened that way because I'm in Pacific time zone and we have a EU headquarters, so as a result there is a chunk between 7am-11am Pacific that is almost always booked. Leaves the rest of the day for working time. Not perfect but works for me.
I found this effective to handle fragmentation by accepting only meetings before lunch, doing only post lunch also works . Either mornings or afternoons are fully free to do focused work
I have tried this with limited success. Sometimes people respect the time you have blocked, most times not. So I end up feeling double booked and frustrated that my attempts to get time to do "real work" are thwarted.
I'm from Barcelona (but abroad now). The whole bus system is being revamped (for the last 4 years) and is being done gradually.
It's been a painless transition for most. In general, the amount of transfers to reach a destination has dropped, the average speed of bus routes has increased and the frequency of the revamped lines is better than the old ones.
Basically, the buses "adapt" to the grid following "horizontal", "vertical" and "west-east diagonal" routes (as much as possible).
The streets the buses run on are either main streets (those that will be the veins of the supergrids) or pacified streets with dedicated lanes (in some cases reverse direction lanes [such as Carrer Pi i Molist]).
The transition, as I said, is being implemented gradually, with very intensive campaigns informing impacted neighborhoods. IIRC, 50% of the new routes are in place. New ones are introduced twice a year approx.
Regarding your comment about the intersections in Eixample... I bet you will not find anyone in Barcelona who does not love them. They make the city open. And even if it seems impossible, there are occasions when they can be used to make the neighborhoods come together: http://eldigital.barcelona.cat/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/en...
I hate to be that guy, but I believe I need to share this. I was amongst the "lucky" ones who managed to get one of the phones of the first batch they sold (my Serial Number is lower than 1500). After using the phone for 20 minutes, I realized that the OS is _very_ far from being usable. I was able to spot more than 10 bugs that would prevent any regular smartphone user to use Ubuntu Phone as a replacement of a rudimentary smart phone.
I guess we will have to wait/help/contribute a lot to get it closer to an acceptable quality level.
In the meantime, I wonder if there is any way to install Android on the Ubuntu Edition E4.5.
> I was able to spot more than 10 bugs that would prevent any regular smartphone user to use Ubuntu Phone as a replacement of a rudimentary smart phone.
Please can you share the bugs so that others can actually judge usability for themselves? Have you filed the bugs?
No, you really don't. Because if that was the case, instead commenting here, why won't you go to Ubuntu phone bug tracking or whatever and give your feedback there where would be actually useful? Just a though.
Hey its useful to me. I am looking for a new phone in around that price range. This is the first I have heard of an Ubuntu phone being available, and useful to get an opinion from others even if it does seem negative.
LOL