Our office will be closed on Wednesday, July 11, 2012 for Jakarta’s Governor Election day. We will be back open the next day.

Yes, just like what the title said, starting this July, our office will officially be on a 4-days-a-week working terms, from Tuesday to Fridays, and no Mondays. Our office hour on Fridays have always been half of regular days, but we think it’s less effective than having a four-day work week. Some people asked “why”? The answer is because we can. No, we’re just kidding :)

This isn’t exactly an easy decision for us, and a lot of contemplations–as well as compromises and votes–have to be made. The idea was already there years ago, when we read about how 37signal instituted a 4-day work week and of course, their reasons for doing it. We were inspired by both the innovation (if we can call it that way) and the logic behind that decision. Without further ado, the following are some of the thoughts behind our call for “Mondays are Holidays”.

Nobody likes Mondays
Let’s face it, be it demographically, statistically, factually, or whatever we want to call it, despite of our best efforts to try liking it, Mondays in Jakarta sucks. Traffic is nuts and everybody seems to be on edge on Mondays. Maybe because people had to shift from weekend mode to work mode in a matter of hours. Sometimes they didn’t get enough sleep (which is hardly anything new in this city) and so forth, but yes, we don’t like the general idea. So why don’t we have longer weekends so we can get back to work freshen up on Tuesdays, and hopefully come up with fresh ideas as well? 37signals was right! Who knows that afterwards, we’ll love Mondays.

Most of the time, Mondays are the least effective day in our office
Most of our clients are overseas, in particular, in the United States. Therefore, once we reach Monday here, it’s still Sunday over there. Basically, except for emergencies, we have no work updates, no feedbacks, no emails, and most of our local clients are just recovering from their weekends, too. Why not, instead of forcing people to go to the office for practically nothing, we take that day off and leave people with ample time to do whatever they didn’t get to do on the weekends? Maybe some of us have passions that we keep putting off because we have no time to get it running, and maybe some of us didn’t get to pursue new ideas for the office because of that same reason. So now’s the chance.

The commitment to be more effective
Since the start of this company, we have never require people to follow a certain guideline of work to reach a specific milestone at a specific date or time. We understand that different people work differently, and we allow people to manage their time to whatever that suits best for each of them, as long as they get the job done. Some of us work from home from time to time, and some of us even work remotely most of the time. With this policy in effect, and given that we will soon have a shorter work week, that means we must cut the slack off and push ourselves to be more effective with our time. We think we can manage and hopefully, do things better.

So there you have it, the reason behind our decision which will take place on July 2. A nice month to make a change, don’t you think?

But will this actually work? Well, as confident as we may be, we don’t know yet. We will just have to be confident enough to make a breakthrough and make it work.

PS: In case you’re wondering, yes, in case of emergencies, we will still be reachable on emails on Mondays.

Our office will be closed tomorrow on Friday, April 5, 2012 for this year’s Easter holiday. We will be back open on Monday. Happy easter everyone!

After long hours of tests and codings in multiple devices, we’re finally releasing our latest redesign to our own website. Considering that the last time we did this was back in 2008, so yes, it’s been a while.

So what are the new features about this site? Well, there are a couple of huge things that we did. First of all, we are now basing the design on the 1280×1024 resolution, so that gives us a bit more room to showcase our work.

Second, yes, it’s finally a responsive website! Go ahead, you can try resizing your browser window and see the website resize in real time, and you can open the website on most, if not all, modern mobile devices.

We know that as probably with all things digital, improvements are bound to happen. For example, probably not all of the graphics in our website are mobile-optimized, and they won’t be supporting the new iPad’s crisp Retina Display until we can get a hold of the device ourselves. Releasing out a new website doesn’t mean that we can push out new features without getting worried that bugs don’t exist.

So what’s next for us in terms of designing websites? Now we can use our website as a test bed for our clients should they decide to create responsive versions of their websites, and hopefully, we can phase out our aging mobile website. We won’t be needing it anymore with our main website now being responsive.

To commemorate the Seclusion day holiday, our office will be closed on Friday, March 23, 2012. We’ll be back open again on Monday, March 26, 2012.

Happy Seclusion day to all who celebrate!