Resources

Here are some other things you might like.

Blogs about Management:

• Pawel Brodinski on Software Project Management  (great for info on kanban)
• Johanna Rothman on Managing Product Development (agile project management)
• Rands in Repose (tech management and all things tech)
• Scott Berkun’s blog (management in general, although from a tech background)

Books about Management:

• Scott Berkun writes books, too. His book Making Things Happen is an excellent place to start learning about project management.
• Mindset, by Carol Dweck has good information about how to help others get to a growth mindset, which is a useful thing to think about as a manager.
• Robert Sutton has written several good books that reference the research on how to lead people. The No Asshole Rule is legendary. Good Boss, Bad Boss has a lot of good information for new (and not so new) managers.

Specific Articles and Posts:

• Rich Armstrong’s Be a Manager post is one of the best defenses of management I’ve ever read.
• Kate Heddleston’s series about how some work environments and standard practices hurt diversity, and why this matters for more than just diversity.
• A summary of some research about how letting your mind wander can be a productive thing to do.
• A really good interview with Jessica McKellar about being a manager.
• Sarah Green’s interview with Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic about the dangers of confidence really changed how I thought about confidence, both in myself and in the people on my team.

Research on Productivity:

• Most of the hard data on the relationship between productivity and hours is for factory work. Here is an IZA discussion paper reviewing one of the more thorugh studies, from WWI munitions plants in Britain.
• Evan Robinson’s classic “Why Crunch Modes Don’t Work” also reviewed some of the manufacturing data and argued for extending the conclusions to software, based on his own experiences as a software developer.
• In 2015, Sarah Green Carmichael reviewed the available research on the effect of long hours on knowledge workers and their companies.
• People who think they’re working really long hours usually aren’t… and there is data on that. Here is an article discussing how people overestimate their work hours, and that the margin of error gets larger as the number of estimated hours grows, using data from both the American Time Use Survey and a Belgian national survey.

I also have a Pinterest board for management and productivity. Inclusion in that library just means that I think the article is interesting, though- I may or may not agree with it.

Finally, a lot of the articles I write for Chronicle Vitae are about management and productivity, and most include links to other good sources.