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Michael Sippey has some ideas gleamed from visiting grade schools (made a bit tongue-in-cheek) that are important for building the type of team that can accomplish more with less.

A few of my favorites from the list:

• Lots of wall art

  Too often work looks more like the morgue than a place that is supposed to inspire you to achieve great things. Don’t be shortsighted and save a few bucks when your employees’ productivity will shoot through the roof in a visually stimulating environment. When that potential client comes in to evaluate whether or not you’re worthy of her business, do you think a bustling, exciting, alive environment looks better or a drab, gray vacuum with a few posters?

• Morning meeting

  Isolation is a terrible way to spend a day - we’re social creatures by nature. Retail uses the “huddle” as a way to disseminate key info for the day and rally the troops but the office usually expects you to come in and file straight to your desk for 8+ hours of work. Celebrate your team’s victories from the day before and go through a brief rundown on each person’s goals for the day. When the everybody knows what other members are trying to accomplish for the day it gives everybody a greater sense of ownership & accomplishment of their own tasks. Your employees will also have a better grasp on the direction of the company, be better at brainstorming new ideas, collaborate easier… the 20 minutes of disruption (get those telecommuters on the conference line as well!) will pay off tenfold.

• Snack time

  It’s amazing how far a little food will go to spread the goodwill. While the huge catered spread put many a startup out of business back in the bubble (among other things…), surprising your team with a round of sandwiches at the picnic table can do wonders to recharge for the afternoon.

A couple of things not on Michael’s list that I think are important:

• Reading material

  Not only the trades relevant to your industry (hopefully you do at least that much) but books and magazines across a spectrum of genres. Allow everybody’s mind to break out of routine and wander - it may be the next big thing they wander to.

• Quiet time

  We are easily distractible creatures and the proliferation of technological attention-grabbers doesn’t help productivity’s cause. At one office I worked at they instituted a policy of quiet time, where nobody could drop by your desk or send you an email unless it was a matter of life & death (or losing a major client I’d suppose…). The result? For those few hours, that person made progress on tasks that require more than 5 minutes of focus and usually felt more successful about their accomplishments for the day. Nothing sucks like going home at the end of the day feeling you got nothing done because you were trying to get everything done.

Instead of the usual rotation of music, today I listened to all seven episodes of The Web 2.0 Show and was pretty impressed. For all the excitement about podcasting, I’m still having trouble integrating it into my life but I found Chris and Josh to be a great balance of informative and enjoyable. The interviews were all really well done (minus Skype audio issues), the banter relaxed, and the guys knowledgeable.

Probably the best feature of the Web 2.0 Show is that Chris and Josh have already perfected the style of audio commentary where I can listen to the show while working on something else and still follow the conversation with ease. One of my biggest problems with shoehorning podcasts into my lifestyle is that I don’t have a commute, and I don’t own a car so the times I am “forced” to just listen are pretty far and few between. I haven’t yet found the podcast that totally captures my attention and sells me on listening over being productive in other ways, but with the Web 2.0 Show I didn’t have to choose.

The success that the show has found seems to have happened incredibly fast, with only 7 episodes and some really high-profile people. I’m definitely looking forward to future episodes - you can subscribe to their feed here or through iTunes if you want to check them out.

How do you organize the applications you have/keep open? Do you always move the iChat window into the same spot, keep browser windows in the same place, stack the windows a certain way so you can always see a corner of everything?

I wish that all programs respected the last place you had them at. Sometimes I attempt to break away from my anal-retentive nature and let the OS just throw up wherever, but that usually lasts just a few minutes.

Do you allow for a more sporadic, “organic”, constantly changing OS environment or do you keep “everything in its place”?

An old quote dug up from the Inc archives:

‘Which brings us to a simple truth: deciding what to name your company is more important to your success than anything else you’re going to do, except, of course, deciding whatever it is that you actually intend to sell (not that the two need be related).’

I’ve got the latter part down, but coming up with a name I like is just not happening.

Quotes are taken from The Art of Looking Sideways, a great book for spurring your own imagination.

Making the switch from a PowerMac to a PowerBook has been one of the best moves I’ve made this year. I don’t even miss my old 19-inch LCD (most of the time…) but there is one aspect that is driving me insane.

The function key. Oh, how I hate that little bastard in the lower left corner!

I’m a person who likes to have a ton of windows open when I’m knee-deep in the muck - SubEthaEdit, Transmit, Photoshop, Illustrator, Firefox, Safari, Preview, etc. So when Apple gave us the gift of Expose, I celebrated by reaching new levels of productivity. Need to see everything at once? F9 to the rescue. Lots of tiny images in need of a tweak? F10 shows me everything I’ve got open in photoshop.

Since upgrading to the 17-inch’er though, F9 and F10 are now reserved for controlling the lighting level of the backlit keyboard. And I know, I shouldn’t be complaining. I mean, how many people have a laptop where the keyboard lights up for you - automatically - when light levels get too low? I know I’ve been dreaming about such a feature for years.

But the keyword here is automatically. Why can’t I make F9 and F10 control Expose like they used to, and fn-F9 and fn-F10 control the keyboard lighting? The computer is so smart it automatically adjusts the keyboard and the LCD backlighting dependent on external light levels. In the few months I’ve had this fine machine, I’ve had zero complaints with its intelligence on lighting control.

Why can’t I revert all the function keys back to their normal F-whatever status and use the function key for it’s “icon” purpose? I change the volume once every couple of days, I change the LCD backlight only when I unplug to conserve battery life, I don’t use NumLock at all…. but I sure would like to remap my xScope apps back to their rightful place. Clicking those little icons in the taskbar is annoying, not to mention how ugly they are up there! (But I’m a purist, I’ll admit it.)

I received a surprise gift in the mail from my mother - a copy of Jack Welch’s Winning. I’ve never thought I’d find much interest in Welch’s thoughts, mostly because of the size of the company he led (GE) - I’m always on the side of the startup, the little guy trying to make something from nothing, not something bigger out of what is already huge.

I shouldn’t be so quick to judge! So far (I’m 1/4th through it) I’m loving it, and have a new respect for Jack Welch and his accomplishments (not that I didn’t before… I just didn’t relate).

The business books I love focus my mind and set it spinning - it’s terrible for actually reading the book, but my imagination launches to so many other tangents that I might not have reached without it. Sometimes I have to re-read the same few pages over and over until my mind has settled down and I can digest the story without interjecting my own situation in between the lines. Winning is one of those books.

Crammed with ancedotes that span his entire career, I found the first quarter to be motivational and positive. Hopefully the next sections (Your Company, Your Competition, Your Career) will be just as insightful!