Book: The Progress Principle

The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work gives some very interesting insights about the power of positive and negative work events. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer uncovered some very important insight into increasing productivity. Both managers and employees alike should heed the advice of creating a constant stream of positive work events.

But what are positive work events that should be maximized and what are negative that should be avoided?

Positive work events constitute events that accomplish tasks towards meaningful work and helping your fellow colleagues or your sub-ordinates to accomplish their tasks are two very powerful events that will greatly increase productivity for future work.

Negative event on the other hand, such as frequently changed goals, adversity in pursuing important work, and loss of independence.

I personally do research in optimizing the productivity of software developers by providing them with new tool and processes to be able to accomplish their work faster. I am currently wondering how much influence these tools and processes actually have.

If you want to know more about the progress principle you can find more at progressprinciple.com.