Productivity Bits: Juice up your Marketing, Startup Blogs, and be a More Effective Manager

It's been a while since I've posted the productivity bits I've found useful trolling the net in between the ranting. There were quite a number so I've picked out a few highlights:

• From B2BRainmaker - questions you should be asking about your marketing before you publish. I found the ideas to be highly useful. At their core, the questions will force you to distill clearly what you're trying to say and whether you're saying it clearly.
  
  
• A compilation of useful startup blogs can be found over at Venture Hacks.
  
  
• Improve interactivity and take the blah out of conference calls by simultaneously having an
  online chat room among other ideas as suggested by Seth Godin.
  
  
• The evolution of how we work, as told by office floor plans from Wired.
  
  
• Useful search engine optimization tips pulled from Gabriel Weinberg.
  
  
• Tips from LifeHacker for working through common productivity problems including procrastination, distraction, information overload, backlog, interruptions and being generally overwhelmed.
  
  
• A compensation structure for managing people in unstructured environments from Joel Spolsky @ Inc.com. A follow up on a variant of his system with mixed results from apenwarr. I'm a strong believer in compensating for productivity. I used to think that there existed a general structure that would apply to all businesses, but I'm beginning to believe tthat's not that's the case given that 'productivity' differs between different types of businesses. For instance, motivating frontline manufacturing employees will differ from engineers or creatives. Nevertheless, I thought these articles were interesting starting points but also warnings of how easily compensation plans that aren't well thought through can lead to unintended consequences.
  
  
• Finally, something more managers should do: treat employees like volunteers for better performance from Incentive Intelligence. There's a school of thought that to be a capitalist you have to be rabbid, autocratic micro manager. My thinking is that while you might get short term productivity gains, they're generally sustainable.