Konversi Video Menggunakan Beberapa PC Server

May 23rd, 2013

Ripbot264 Distributed Encoding

Aug062012

I’ve been using Ripbot264 to encode DVDs and, more recently, Blu-rays for a few years now. I won’t call myself an expert or anything, but I am well versed in it by now. Despite Ripbot’s progressions and increasing features, I’ve pretty much maintained the same simplified usage of it as I did in its initial releases. After all, if you just want good quality at smaller file sizes, it does that well with little configuration. Well, my lack of tinkering with it ceased a couple of releases ago as an exciting new feature was included – Distributed Encoding.

Ripbot264 Distributed Encoding allows us to benefit from having multiple systems around the house by harnessing those extra CPU cycles and putting them to use – distributing the workload and allowing those extra systems to join in on the encode party! So far, I’ve done around a half-dozen DVDs using a single client and single server (two systems) and the performance increase has been quite substantial to me. This post is to act as a guide to help you set up your own distributed encoding network using the Ripbot264 engine.

The reason that I felt it necessary to create a guide is because there is no real documentation on how to set it all up. There is a YouTube video tutorial, but it is set to music, and there is absolutely no real direction to the video. I’m sure if you’re technically-minded enough, you could figure out how to set this all up using the video (I did, afterall), but it took me some trial and error to figure out a few steps. I hope to walk you through it all – beginning to end.

First of all, I’m not going to walk you through installing Ripbot264. I believe you are all competent enough for that. I’ll explain a few of my specific configurations as they pertain to distributed encoding, but that’s about it for Ripbot264 usage. I will begin the guide assuming you currently have a working install of Ripbot264 and now I will explain my specific install as it pertains to the distributed encoding feature:

My Ripbot264 installation directory resides in C:\Program Files (x86)\Ripbot264 as I’m on a Windows 7 64-bit system.
My Ripbot264.ini file has the TEMP directory set to X; therefore my true temp directory path is X:\Temp\Ripbot264temp. This is important as you will need to correlate my directions to your own true temp directory path.
All systems used within the distributed encoding network MUST USE THE SAME VERSION of Ripbot264. I also highly suggest you use the same versions of ffdshow, Java, AviSynth, etc. that the application requires.

Now, let’s move on with our guide with that out of the way. The first thing we want to do is begin on our client system. This is the system where you will initiate the encodes…it should also probably be where the files you want to encode reside. Locate your Ripbot264 installation folder and open the Ripbot264.ini file contained within using Notepad or something. At the very bottom of the file, you should see the entry

UseDistributedEncoding=0

You will want to change that “0″ to a “1″ and then save and close the ini file (you may need administrative permissions for this if you use UAC, but I’ll let you figure that out). That is the initial step to enable the distributed encoding client for use. All the other stuff in the ini file can be changed also, but that’s outside the scope of this guide. They are for setting default values within the application and are not necessary to modify…I do, but I digress.

Leave your Ripbot264 installation directory open, but minimize it…we will visit it later. Now we have to change some advanced sharing options, so let’s visit the Network and Sharing Center (remember, I’m on Win7). In the left-hand column, we want to visit the Change advanced sharing settings link, so do that. We have a single option to change, so scroll towards the bottom. We’re looking for the Password protected sharing section and we’re going to turn it off. Now, let me also say, Ripbot264 does include provisions for using password protected shares, but I’m not covering that. My home network doesn’t need them, so I don’t care so much about disabling this. If you require them, I don’t think it will take much work for you to figure out how to do it with the supplied options in the ini files. If you want to dig around in that client ini, you will also see there are accommodations for Wake On LAN support of target servers. Nice! Anyway, disable the password protected sharing and save your changes.

Password protected sharing

Next, we will need to create the temp directory as it currently doesn’t exist if you’re on a new install. If you left your default temp directory alone, then you are using the system specified temp directory. Let’s go there by typing %TEMP% in the Windows run box. You should get a directory similar to C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Local\Temp open up in Explorer. Within this directory, create a new directory named Ripbot264temp. Again, you may need admin privileges for this…figure it out. What we want to do now is share this directory out since this is where our work files go when creating a new job. So, right click your new directory and choose Share with > Specific people…

Share the directory

Now we need to share this directory with specified users. If you know what you’re doing, you can make this a bit more secure than this by adding specific users (this can also go along with the password protected sharing), but I have to assume you don’t in order to avoid answering a billion questions in the comments later. So, click the drop down and add Everyone to the shared users list.

Share with Everyone

We’re not done yet though…the permissions are no good. Our additional servers will need Read/Write access to this directory, so change that also before clicking the Share button.

Add Read/Write permissions

Click the Share button and you should have a successfully shared Ripbot264temp directory in your default, or specified, location. You should have something similar to this:

Properly shared temp directory

Cool, now for the fun stuff. If you don’t run Windows Firewall, this will be pretty easy as you won’t get any prompts. If you do run Windows Firewall, you will get some prompts, so just pay attention and things won’t be difficult. If you run any other type of desktop firewall, you may be in for a time if it’s not interactive with newly detected connections. Anyway, let’s move along and get this part out of the way. The system(s) we want to go to first are our additional encoding servers. These should already have a properly installed and working Ripbot264 installation. It doesn’t have to be configured…just detected as a working installation (launch it and make sure all prerequisites are met). Now, for each server, go to the installation directory and find the EncodingServer.exe executable. Launch it. My server is running Windows 2008 Server R2, so my firewall notification box looks different than Win 7, but you will get something similar to this:

Firewall DE server notice

You will want toAllow access to this so that it can be added to the firewall exception list. For Win 7, the box looks like this:

Firewall allow DE server Win7

Leave the encoding server running on all systems. It will probably be residing in your system tray…just make note of it for later.

Now, let’s go to our primary system – the encoding client. Locate the Ripbot264.exe in your install directory (we left it open) and launch it. Surprise! If you are running Windows Firewall, you will have received another notice of the encoding server needing access…it will look just like one of the two images above (2008 Server R2 or Win 7), so grant it access. You are now faced with the standard Ripbot264 application and it’s ready for you to add a new job. As I said, I’m not detailing that, so go ahead and add whatever it is you want to encode and get it ready until you have a new job listed in your queue.

Job ready in queue

Great..click Start and wait for it…

Allow encoding client in firewall

As with the encoding server application, the encoding client needs firewall access also, so allow it. If everything else went well, your encoding client will copy files to the share and start working. Unfortunately, it’s flying solo right now as we have not defined any of our servers yet.

Encoding client solo

So, let’s add our servers…remember, the encoding server MUST be running on all systems that will be aiding here or the connection will fail. It’s a graceful failure though, so it won’t ruin your job. Under Server 2 on the encoding client interface, type in the IP address of the first encoding server system and click the ON button. After a few seconds, you should see it take off:

Encoding client with help

For each running server you have, just enter the IP and hit that ON button…new chunks will be sent out and you will enjoy the extra time saved. From the server side, you should see something similar to this:

Encoding server working

One other little nice feature I happened upon while doing this guide was what happens when you click the Abort button. It allows you to save your spot!

Save progress

Well, that’s about it. Of course, the time saved depends on things such as how powerful your systems are and how many you have working. I haven’t run any comparison tests yet, but I use a 3.2GHz quad-core Core2Quad and a 2.4Ghz Core2Duo system and have seen very significant decreases in encoding time needed to completion. The quality of the results are just as they have been expected in the years I have used Ripbot264 – excellent.

Anyway, hope this helps some of you. Below is the YouTube tutorial I used to drive myself insane while figuring all this out. Maybe the two in conjunction will make it even easier for you.

Source : http://www.thehtpc.net/htpc-tips-and-tweaks/ripbot264-distributed-encoding/

Tags: Beberapa, Konversi, Menggunakan, PC Server, video
Posted in Free to use | No Comments »

Bossies 2012 The Best of Open Source Software Awards

May 23rd, 2013

It’s back — and bigger and badder than ever! Our sixth annual Bossie Awards call out more than 100 open source products in seven categories

Welcome to the sixth annual Best of Open Source Software Awards, otherwise known as the Bossies. If you’ve enjoyed our previous Bossies, you’re in for a treat: This year, with the help of our extended InfoWorld family of contributing editors, we’ve pulled together more than 100 Bossie-worthy products in seven categories, from application development tools to — for the first time –games and other fun stuff.

Just as the Bossies have grown fatter, so has the totality of the open source beast. Sourceforge claims more than 4 million downloads, 3,402 code commits, and 722 bugs were tracked on the day I’m writing this paragraph alone. The most popular by far is the VLC video player, which continues to beat many commercial players. And all it takes is a glance at GitHub to see that JavaScript code for the browser (jQuery) and the server (Node) continue to draw downloads and bug fixes like flies to flypaper.

We’ve taken it upon ourselves to plow through all that frenetic activity and dig up the juiciest, smartest, and most useful open source software available. If you’d just like to page through from beginning to end, start here. Stick around in this article and you’ll get a tour of the important trends in open source this year.

Hadoop: An elephant born tap-dancing
Nothing in open source is more exciting than the constellation of software around Hadoop. Technically, Hadoop is just a small part of a big stack of software that keeps a number of machines crunching together on a single problem, but as you may have noticed, your boss’s boss has learned to drop Hadoop as a buzzword. So we often overlook related programs such as Pig or Hive though they can be more useful than Hadoop itself.

Hadoop is the poster child for the big data. It began as a small experiment based on Google’sMapReduce technology and grew into a stack of code for those who need to do big things with data spread out across a rack of nodes. The tool has been so successful, we’ve heard rumors that the Google engineers who pioneered the MapReduce paradigm are jealous of the innovation going on in Hadoop. Google got the ball rolling, but the open source nature of Hadoop allowed the rest of the Internet to surpass the biggest dog in big data.

This is especially important to the perennial also-ran, Yahoo, which was one of the early believers in Hadoop and supported much of the original work. Open source believers point to Hadoop as a huge victory for the open source strategy: Yahoo shared with everyone else and everyone else shared back, yielding a whole new software ecosystem — one that’s driving the hottest industry trend today.

Embedded in Hadoop is the ongoing tension between open and proprietary. A swarm of startups have sprung from the open source Hadoop code, adding just enough proprietary contributions to attract and retain customers. This debate is being played out as one company alone, Hortonworks, tries to keep its entire platform open. Will Hortonworks succeed? One competitor told me archly, “It’s nice to see that Hortonworks finally got a platform out.”

Yet pragmatists see this tension as a creative force that fosters exciting new businesses. The core of Hadoop is still pretty close to a standard, which makes life easier for everyone. The extras keep everything running and pay for the upkeep of the core. Programmers need to eat, and the secret sauce is the best way to justify salaries, while the core remains open and improving.

From rows and relations to keys and columns
Hadoop and its satellites are not the only projects working to solve large and complex data problems — or simpler data problems for that matter. After decades of throwing every sort of data into relational database management systems, we’re now seeing a slew of open source alternatives to the traditional data store.

Call them NoSQL, not only SQL, or un-SQL, these alternatives range from refreshingly simple to startlingly sophisticated. Many of them offer high performance or horizontal scalability by trading away some of the power of the relational database. The differences often lie in the tradeoffs they’ve made to accommodate certain kinds of use cases.

For instance, key-value stores such as Couchbase and Cassandra offer high performance and high scalability where preserving relationships among the data isn’t a priority. Both will integrate with Hadoop, and serve as good analytical stores for semi-structured data. Cassandra offers a column-oriented solution, while Couchbase is evolving into a document database — yet another way to organize the keys and values.

A document database is nothing but a key-value store in which the values are JSON. Programmers like them because they fall squarely into their object-oriented paradigm. Plus, the elements inside the JSON document can be indexed to speed up searches. They’re a natural way to store clumps of related elements — like the makings of a blog post or a patient record — that don’t fit neatly into a relational model. All of this explains the popularity of MongoDB.

There’s a different project for each kind of problem. Some of the answers, such as graph database Neo4j, come into play when the relational powers of the traditional RDBMS aren’t relational enough. In the past, depending on the requirements, the architect would tweak the configuration of MySQL or Oracle in a different way. Now, the architect can choose a completely different project.

Puffing up the private cloud
With a private cloud, you can borrow technologies and architectures pioneered by public cloud providers and apply them to your own data center. A bunch of open source projects have emerged to offer software to accomplish just that.

The OpenStack open source project in particular has gained surprising momentum in the private cloud space. This stack of Apache 2-licensed bits provides a framework for managing virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources — with identity, monitoring, and self-service thrown in for the ride.

Billing itself as a “cloud operating system,” OpenStack was initially developed by Rackspace and NASA. Now governed by a separate Foundation, OpenStack claims more than 192 participating companies, including Canonical, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Red Hat, VMware, and a gaggle of cloud startups. Many of these companies plan to offer “packaged” versions because — as with the Linux kernel — the raw OpenStack bits are not something you’d normally download and put into production.

But OpenStack is not the only open source private cloud game in town. The best-known open source competitor to OpenStack is Eucalyptus, developed at the University of California and intended to mimic Amazon Web Services, with full API compatibility. CloudStack, an open source project launched by Citrix in April, is well-positioned for use by cloud service providers, with a great Web UI for administering cloud resources.

To the Internets and beyond!?
Open source is outgrowing the world of computers. The success of open source software means that developers are giving it a whirl for everything from automobiles to clothing.

Take routers — AutoAP, for instance, is a fascinating bit of code that can turn your wireless router into a node in a self-organizing network. It turns the once passive box for setting up Wi-Fi connections into an active participant that’s constantly looking to bond with any neighbor.

Most people are using this to set up self-organizing wireless repeating networks in their home, but from time to time the networks jump the fence and start mixing. Dreamers suggest that one day there will be enough AutoAP-flashed routers to meld together into a seamless internetwork that doesn’t need the big ISPs. People will have an “Internet” that simply exists and doesn’t need a central corporation to carry the bits.

This same out-of-the-desktop-box thinking is also powering XBMC, the open source “set-top box” software that wants to lead the PC army to take over the living room. XBMC already has a firm beachhead with a number of alluring plug-ins. All it needs is good, affordable hardware — which may be coming as people build cheap Android PCs with HDMI connectors.

There are even more radical applications of open source. The Arduino hardware projectcontinues to attract hackers who itch for more than just a screen and keyboard. Arduino hardware is being sewn into garments, attached to plants, joined to coffeemakers, integrated into model airplanes, and on and on. It’s going pretty much anywhere a laptop can’t go.

The hardware that began in a small Italian company is attracting the attention of big companies including RadioShack, which wants to return to its roots as a candy store for tinkerers. Some recent projects include mind-controlled robots, a glitchbox for playing music, and an Arduino-powered box that gives a plant the ability to water itself.

Then there are people exploring open source movie cameras like the Apertus Axiom, a design for a high-end video camera that the creators are hoping to crowdfund. Not to mention people building open source ham radios like the DStar, people creating open source instruments like the Zoybar, and even people rebranding the old recipe files as open source food.

The proliferation of all of this open source is why Sam Muirhead, a writer and artist, has vowed to make this next year his “year of open source,” in which he’ll replace all of the items around his house with real open source alternatives. If he can’t get the schematics and the rights to reproduce something, he won’t buy it.

Challenges await, but the good news is that there are still people who are willing to jump in and start everything anew. I’m personally looking around in my couch cushions for enough change to buy a Rally Fighter, an SUV that’s in the beginning of a 2,000-car manufacturing run. You candownload the 3D CAD drawings to build your own. Or you can just work with the designers in Arizona who will help you through a six-day-long “build experience.”

The open source movement has taken us on an astounding journey. What began as quixotic quest that all software should be free has grown into the engine of innovation and change that has already extended beyond the bounds of the computer industry.

This article, “Bossies 2012: The Best of Open Source Software Awards,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

Peter Wayner is contributing editor of the InfoWorld Test Center.

Bossies 2012 The Best of Open Source Software Awards

Source : http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/bossies-2012-the-best-of-open-source-software-awards-202465

Tags: 2012, Awards, Bossies, Open Source, software, The best
Posted in Free Open Source Software (FOSS) | No Comments »

Bossie Awards 2012 Now for something completely different

May 23rd, 2013

InfoWorld’s top picks among open source games and geek time-wasters

By InfoWorld staff, InfoWorld, September 18, 2012

Now for something completely different

For the first time, we went in search of games, time-wasters, and hobby tools to celebrate. While the open source world clearly has more to offer the data center and office than the living room and den, we like what we found. Tell us what we missed!

OpenRemote

Far and away the geekiest open source project on this list,OpenRemote started as a solution to “the rich man’s problem” — how to control your lights, your TV, and your air conditioning from your smartphone (or tablet) — but it has become much more. From home automation to “Smart (Office) Buildings” to accessibility solutions for the disabled, OpenRemote may drive the very closed and proprietary home automation and control system industry into the mainstream. OpenRemote costs tens of thousands of dollars less than an AMX or Crestron solution and puts the UI design into the hands of nonprogrammers. If you’re a programmer, this may be the coolest thing you can do with your free time.
– Andrew Oliver

0 A.D.

It’s impossible not to love the developers of 0 A.D., even though they made me eat my words. I never thought a really good and modern-looking game was sustainable in an open source model. Time will tell, but I’m too busy trying to stop the Persians from invading to be critical. 0 A.D. is a real-time strategy game in the spirit of Age of Empires and StarCraft. I highly recommend downloading a recent release from the website rather than an OS-provided package because the older versions are a bit slow. When the campaign mode is available, all of my articles will be late.
– Andrew Oliver

XBMC

Sure, you could buy a smart DVD player or something like Google TV, but what fun is a sealed box? XBMC turns your PC into a smart media center with plenty of flashy doohickeys to make it look cooler. Or if you don’t want a whirring PC with a loud fan, look around for some of the newer low-powered Android PCs that are ready to hack. If you’re not happy with what you get after unpacking the TAR file, there’s a robust community of plug-in developers who are revising and extending the tool to make it even better. You’ll have so much fun programming it that you won’t have any time for watching TV.
– Peter Wayner

Stella

If you love the classic Atari 2600 games, then the Stellaemulator is your open source tool for playing them again and again and again. Chopper Command, Space Invaders, Pitfall, and more are ready and waiting for you. Some people are even writing their own new games for the 2600 platform. It’s not refusing to grow up. It’s getting a self-taught Ph.D. in computer history.
– Peter Wayner

BZFlag

All work and no play make Jack a dull IT jockey. Cut loose with BZFlag, a multiplayer 3D tank shooter game. You can join in BZFlag games on servers across the Internet with custom arena maps. There are several modes of play online too, either with teams or as individuals. I like to play “rabbit hunt,” where one person is the rabbit and everyone else is a hunter. The hunter who kills the rabbit becomes the rabbit. How long can you last as the rabbit?
– High Mobley

Calibre

Launched as a personal project in 2006 by then Cal Tech student Kovid Goyal, Calibre (pronounced kal-eh-bur) is an open source e-book library management tool that supports converting across a wide range of formats, downloading and reading news and magazine feeds (over 300 sources in multiple languages). It even has a plug-in that allows users to shop for DRM-free books. At a time when platform lock-in seems to be growing, Goyal says his project “will always present an alternative for people that love to read e-books and want to be in control of their own digital libraries.” At an average of over 500,000 new downloads per month, it looks like many people share Goyal’s point of view.
– Mike Amundsen

Arduino

The Arduino is a small, open source, single-board computer that adds its numbers two at a time, much like every other computer. But the open source license has spurred plenty of experimentation and hardware hacking. If you want to, say, control the LEDs in your disco ball or build a security system for your garage, the Arduino board makes a great starting point. There’s also a burgeoning collection of add-on boards called “shields” that add even more functionality to the machines, making it possible to hack together any number of hardware projects in less time than ever before.
– Peter Wayner

AssaultCube

A standard first-person shooter, AssaultCube is faster in gameplay than Counter-Strike and slower than Unreal Tournament. It’s easy to learn, with intuitive controls, and it features a ton of game modes like one-shot one-kill, deathmatch, capture the flag, and knives and guns only. The single-player mode features bots that are totally stupid and get stuck in corners all the time, but there’s also a multiplayer mode, and AssaultCube’s surprisingly small 50MB package is easy to pass around. It’s the perfect gift for someone who loves to kill stupid bots.
– Deep Mistry

Freeciv

Modeled after the popular Sid Meier’s Civilization game series, Freeciv is an empire-building strategy game that runs on Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X Lion. Freeciv is highly configurable, with the ability to swap in different rules of play and even different tile and sound sets, and it features networked play where you can compete with other people via the Internet. Freeciv looks just like the early Civilization games, and it plays just like them. It’s not the latest and greatest, but it’s good enough for me. Have spear, will travel!
– High Mobley

Warzone 2100

Like most real-time strategy games, Warzone 2100 follows the basic gameplay formula of gather, build, maintain, defend, and destroy. Unlike most, there is no tedious micromanagement of resources, so you can focus on more interesting things, like unit design and weapons manufacturing. And instead of being limited to generic units available based on level or experience, you can create units with specific abilities based on what you’ve researched. An awkward detail about this game: Units never seem to find the correct path from point A to B on the map. The best feature: Definitely the 3D engine, which produces fully detailed topography and visual effects.
– Deep Mistry

Naev

Naev is a 2D space trade game that may remind you of the TV series “Firefly.” You start off with a simple trade vessel that needs money to get equipment. You embark on patrolling and trading missions. You engage in combat. The gameplay can feel a bit repetitive and simplistic: Better sci-fi missions would go a long way toward improving Naev, and packaging and installation could use some work before this hits the mainstream. This is clearly a work in progress, and though the project seems to move in fits and starts, it is moving.
– Deep Mistry

Lightworks

A professional-grade video editing and mastering platform with Hugo and many other films on its résumé, Lightworkswould tempt even the most avid users of Apple Final Cut Pro. An advanced UI streamlines editing with powerful timeline and trimming tools, color correction, and a host of onboard creative effects. Lightworks is not actually open source software — yet. A free Windows version is available, and the company says it will release source code for all three platforms with the forthcoming Mac and Linux versions. A Pro version ($60 yearly license) unlocks a rich set of codecs and team support.
– James R. Borck

Bossie Awards 2012 Now for something completely different

Source : http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/65168/bossie-awards-2012-now-something-completely-different-202541#slide1

Tags: 2012, Awards, bossie, completely, different, something
Posted in Free Open Source Software (FOSS) | No Comments »

Spend less time on routine tasks and more time on innovation

May 23rd, 2013

Would recovering 20-30% time in your day by spending less time on routine operations and break / fix activities interest you? Sure. Who wouldn’t be interested? The big question is how. While it’s an all too familiar story, businesses tell us that shifting resources from operations to innovation is still one of their biggest challenges.

A need for continued IT investment is one factor. A recent Information Week survey found that while IT has excelled at achieving cost-efficiency, there’s a downside. The focus on efficiency might have devalued IT in the eyes of the rest of the organization. According to the article, only 32% of IT respondents reported that IT plays an extremely important role in business innovation. Only 25% of non-IT respondents thought so.

Increased automation is also important. IT solutions, such as HP ProLiant Gen8 servers and the recently announced HP Converged Storage portfolio, are delivering tremendous automation that’s shifting the balance towards innovation.

However, the newly released, IDC Market Spotlight: Benefits of IT Training and Certification(January 2013), sponsored by HP, shows that IT skills can play a big role in turning the tide on the operations vs. innovation problem. The spotlight shows that skilled teams spend a lot less time on operations. That means they have more time to drive innovations through new IT solutions that increase business competitiveness and accelerate performance.

IDC found that:

High performing archiving and retrieval teams spend 28% less time “fixing” problems
High performing data backup and recovery teams spend 21% less time “fixing” problems
Teams managing endpoint security solutions have 20% more time to spend helping end users

In fact, IDC stated that certifying the skills of IT staff members is the single biggest predictor of IT project success. That’s a bold statement.

So what does that mean for you? It means that skills development could be one of the most important things you can do to break out of the operations and break / fix trap.

Read the report to learn more about the impact of team skill on IT project success, and how business can move beyond operations and cost-efficiency to become a source of organizational innovation.

For more information on optimizing your own IT skills, check out My ExpertOne for training and certification recommendations, plus free learning opportunities—all based on your interests and background. Already ExpertOne certified? Log in to easily track your certifications, upgrades and benefits available exclusively to HP certified professionals.

Spend less time on routine tasks and more time on innovation

Source : http://h30458.www3.hp.com/apr/en/smb/1296216.html?jumpid=em_taw_ID_may13_xbu_2059850_hpgl_gb_1300622_79&DIMID=EMID:1192675842&DICID=null&OID=10065790&mrm=1-4BVUP

Tags: innovation, less, more, routine, Spend, tasks, time
Posted in Entrepreneurship | No Comments »

The secret to being productive

May 23rd, 2013

The business world is a hectic place. And people with larger workloads need to be busier to cope with the speed at which the world works – or do they?

A number of studies have shown that being very busy doesn’t necessarily mean being more productive. Surprisingly, the most productive people are often more relaxed than average performers. It all comes down to how high achievers spend their time, or simply said, make the most of it.

By understanding how these top performers spend their hours you can learn ways to be more productive – and possibly less busy – in your daily work.

Practice makes perfect

A study conducted among a group of violin students in the 1990s revealed some surprising insights into different work styles and their consequences.

The students, divided into “Average” and “Elite” players, seemed to spend the same amount of time practicing. Yet, clearly the latter group was developing faster than the former. So what gives?

Giving the students a series of in-depth interviews, the researchers then gave them diaries which divided each 24-hour period into 50-minute chunks, and sent them home to keep a careful log of how they spent their time.

It soon became clear that the difference was in how they spent their practice time. The Elite group was spending almost three times as many hours on concentrated deliberate practice, whereas the average players spread their work throughout the day.

From here, two simple definitions followed.

“Hard work,” consisting of concentrated attention to a given task, may be more rigorous, but you are able to complete it within a clearly defined set of time. This style of work provides you with a clear measure of progress and adds to motivation, since you can complete a task fully within a single time frame.

“Hard to do work,” on the other hand, is work that you complete with difficulty, because of poor time management, interruptions or simple procrastination. Because you need to continually shift your focus back to the task, it causes a false sense of busyness and wastes precious time. It’s also harder to measure clear progress, and inevitably adds up to worse results.

Adapting working style to the business world

These two work models can easily be understood in the context of your own daily work. Ever spent a day running around, jumping from one project to the next, where you seem to make very little headway? Clearly, how you apply your efforts and how you spread your workload has an effect on your performance.

With that in mind, here are a few tips for creating a more concentrated work style to enable better results and reduce false busyness.

Don’t break your hard work up over the day. This makes for more stress and less productivity. With that in mind, and considering that harder tasks will take more effort, it makes sense to prioritise. Put your strongest efforts into these tasks first, as your energy will naturally wane as the day carries on.

Be wary of multi-tasking. It loses its benefits when you jump from one project to the next, distracted by merely being busy with projects instead of getting them done. For best results, work hard at something in a sustained manner to get the best results.

Define your time on social networks. With a lot to do, it stands to reason that wasting time won’t help you. Again, the benefits of a phenomenon like social media quickly turn to obstacles if it isn’t wisely used. As with any task, set aside some time for it during the day. While you’re doing it, do only that. But don’t let it keep cutting into your productive hours.

Nothing beats efficiency. Learning new skills can help you do more work faster. For example, learning the ins and outs of your word processing program can help you edit or create documents faster and more effectively.

Make lists. Nothing beats the simple pleasure and sense of progress of ticking off items on a to-do list that shows how you’re dealing with your day.

The world won’t come to an end if you can’t do everything today

Often, the secret to doing a lot is to avoid doing too much. In a competitive work arena we often take on any and all tasks, assuming it is expected of us.

But completing three or four tasks perfectly counts more than taking on a dozen and half-completing them.

Remember, you’re only human. You have capacity, to a point. Don’t take on something with a steep learning curve if you don’t have the available resources. Don’t try and complete everything at once, and don’t sweat the small stuff. Rather, plan, prioritise and then commit. Your results will show for it.

Bid farewell to busyness

In the end, productivity is good, but false busyness is your enemy. Fight it with concentrated effort by doing one task at a time, with full focus, and doing it well.

By working this way, you’ll be much more relaxed about leaving a task, knowing you’ve done it properly, and then moving on to the next one. In this fast-paced, digitalised world, an age old adage still rings true: slow and steady wins the race.

The secret to being productive

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