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Humans Work habits

Two suggestions for the Portland work week

Mozilla is having a company-wide work week in Portland next week. It’s extremely rare to have this many Mozilla employees in the same place at the same time, and I have two suggestions.

  • Write down a list of people that you want to meet. This will probably contain people you’ve interacted with online but not in person. And send an email to everybody on that list saying “I would like to meet you in person in Portland next week”. I’ve done this at previous work weeks and it has worked well. (And I did it again earlier today.)
  • During the week, don’t do much work you could do at home. This includes most solo coding tasks. If you’re tempted to do such work, stand up and try to find someone to talk to (or listen to) who you couldn’t normally talk to easily. (This is a rule of thumb; if a zero-day security exploit is discovered in your code on Tuesday morning, yes, you should fix it.) Failing that, gee, you might as well do something that you can only do in Portland.

That’s it. Have a great week!