May the day of celebration be a joyous moment for those who celebrate.

To commemorate the Eid Ul-Fitr holiday, our office will be closed on Thursday, August 16, 2012 to Wednesday, August 22, 2012. We’ll be back open again on Thursday, August 23, 2012.

Recently, Neuro-Designs was commissioned to design the identity and website for Cashmore+Co, a new investment company based in the Southeast Asia. The details of the project can be found here.

To find out more about Cashmore+Co, visit their website at www.cashmorecapital.com.

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

A few weeks back, we finished the design and printed our new business cards. It’s nothing much, really, except the fact that our old ones are 7 years old. I guess what they said was right, it’s easier to do designs for clients than to redesign yourself (which is also why our new website took quite a bit of time to design).

So, what has changed? Not much, but it’s a substantial move to reduce the clutter of our old cards. Here’s the old one:

And here’s the new one:

We reduced everything down. The office’s physical address, telephone, email, and even down to our logo. Because we wanted people to actually browse our website, what you see there is just the essential contact information of each person.

Besides, nobody wants to read an insanely-packed information in a tiny business card.

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.