Posts Tagged ‘Productivity’

Helping the Family to Get Things Done

Ever had a conversation with your brother about how he feels like he never seems to get anything done beyond checking his email? Or talked to your mother about her difficulties finishing a project?

Have you ever tried to help them set up a system — make their lives a little simpler or a little more productive? And had that attempt blow up in your face?

My experiences with helping my family… » Continue

May 6 2008 | By Thursday | Tagged: family, help, Productivity | 11 comments»

Invoicing Web 2.0 Style: A Quick Guide to Your Options

Invoicing is a part of every self-employed or freelancing individual’s life. Many of us are still using clunky old Word templates and those strange antiques known as printers—but why go to all the hassle, when there are so many web applications that offer reliable and efficient alternatives?

Digital invoices eliminate so much time and hassle that it’s unbelievable. Eliminating the need to go to the post box and send off an… » Continue

April 30 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: freelancing, invoicing, Money, organization, Productivity | 15 comments»

7 Reasons to Borrow Grandma’s Egg Timer

If you’ve been looking for the edge in getting your task list done, you should consider investing in a timer. Picking up a timer stands out as the one thing I’ve done that significantly increased my productivity.
What’s so great about a piece of plastic with a couple of wires on the inside? After all, something that you can pick up at the dollar store can’t be a huge influence on… » Continue

April 29 2008 | By Thursday | Tagged: Productivity, scheduling, task, timer | 12 comments»

Fight Downhill Battles: Let Laziness and Inertia Make You More Productive

Did you know that you can cancel a magazine subscription at any time? Return unwanted Book-of-the-Month Club selections? Cancel unused credit cards? Put an end to unwanted junk mail?

You probably did know that, and yet you still receive magazines you don’t read anymore, have a stack of books or CDs from membership clubs that you’ve never even opened, pay yearly fees on credit cards you neither use nor want, and… » Continue

April 28 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: habit, inertia, laziness, Productivity | 8 comments»

How Your iPod Can Make You More Productive

The iPod is an incredible organizing device! It takes many shelves worth of CDs and condenses them into one tiny gadget, thereby reducing clutter. The iPod (and iTunes) also took away the classic dilemma highlighted in the movie High Fidelity: Should you organize your music collection alphabetically by artist? Or by genre first? Now you can organize it any way you want with a couple of clicks.

Looking at the… » Continue

April 22 2008 | By Lorie | Tagged: collection, distractions, ipod, music, organizing, Productivity | 19 comments»

Do You Read Too Many Blogs?

Ades of AdesBlog.com has a theory: that top bloggers don’t read other people’s blogs. To test his theory, he asked several big-name bloggers — Michael Arrington, Darren Rowse, Jeremy Schoemaker, and Yaro Starak — about their blog-reading habits. Except for Darren Rowse, they all said they read few or no blogs; Rowse said he subscribes to 700 but only skims the whole list occasionally… » Continue

April 21 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: blog, Productivity, reading, rss, time-management | 35 comments»

Working in Project Space

One of the givens in David Allen’s Getting Things Done is that you can’t “do” a project. Instead, Allen recommends you break projects down into immediate “next actions”, discrete doable chunks that can be “cranked through” with a minimum of effort.

While this approach works pretty well for a lot of tasks, it falls short for a lot of creative people for whom the “meat” of their work cannot… » Continue

April 14 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: creativity, distraction, gtd, procrastination, Productivity | 17 comments»

Happiness at Work - 12 Simple Ways to Make it Happen!

If you are a relatively junior employee at your company, though you carry out a very important role, you may not always be recognised. You might also face some of the following challenges:

Little fulfilment at work
Long working hours
Conflicting demands on your time and loyalty
Little balance between personal life and work commitments
Tight deadlines
Time management pressures
Strained relationships with the important people in your life
Tight personal finances
Lack of any say at

» Continue

April 11 2008 | By Arvind | Tagged: delegation, eating, fun, happiness, health, Productivity, time_management, work, work-life balance | 13 comments»

Give Yourself a Productivity Boost: Learn from Kodak’s Transformation

Kodak needed the ultimate productivity boost to avoid get shuttered out of business when the photography industry went digital. It is hard to imagine a worse case scenario than the one that was faced by Kodak. This 125 year old Fortune 500 company entered the new millennium with 70% of its revenue and profits coming from its traditional businesses that were based on manufacturing and selling film cameras… » Continue

April 8 2008 | By Tatsuya | Tagged: kodak, Productivity | 6 comments»

Getting Green Done

With Earth Hour behind us and Earth Day on the way, we thought April would be a good month for Lifehack.org to think Green. In the weeks ahead, you can expect to see posts reflecting all manner of perspectives on how to "Green up" your work and life.

Nowadays, you can hardly swing a free-range cat without hitting someone making Green claims. Products tout their 35% post-consumer-waste packaging… » Continue

April 2 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: environment, green, gtd, planning, Productivity, sustainability | 14 comments»

5 Ways to get out of faffing mode

Faffing - The art of doing something without achieving anything”
Faffing affects all of us, in all areas of life and it means doing something without achieving an outcome. It affects business, personal life, writing, internet surfing, and domestic life.

To give you an example: As I am writing an article I am aware that I have to do a bit of stumbling in order to… » Continue

April 2 2008 | By Steven | Tagged: faffing, gtd, procrastination, Productivity | 19 comments»

What’s Missing in Productivity Today?

This month, we asked Lifehack.org contributors — and you, our readers — to think about the things that are missing in today’s productivity systems. Not only the areas where the "Big Name" systems fall short, but the gaps in our own systems, the places where we as individuals fall down.

The Lifehack.org community rose to the challenge, offering a variety of thought-provoking posts and comments that… » Continue

March 28 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: advice, contact-management, failure, gtd, information management, perfectionism, Productivity, software, time-management, tips | 7 comments»

5 MORE Ways to Make Your Computer Work For You (And Not The Other Way Around)

In my last post, I focused on ways to automate tasks on your computer, from backing up to document writing. Automation is something that computers are especially good at — it is, after all, what they do.

An important part of mastering your computer, though, lies not in the software you use but the attitude you bring to the computer, the worldview that shapes how you interact with it… » Continue

March 26 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: automation, centralization, computer, internet, Productivity, tip, web-app, workflow | 8 comments»

Productivity maybe . . . but for what purpose?

Why choices about what to do with the time and effort you save are more critical

One reasonable definition of increased personal productivity is creating the ability to do more with less effort and in a shorter time. Nothing wrong with that — at least until you ask what you will do with the time and effort you have saved.

Not so many years ago, many people — including governments and… » Continue

March 25 2008 | By Adrian | Tagged: consumption, priority, Productivity, time-management | 4 comments»

5 Ways to Make Your Computer Work For You (And Not The Other Way Around)

Computers have the potential to vastly increase our personal productivity. They are also, of course, capable of becoming vast time-sinks, sucking our productive moments away in a haze of frustration and imposed patience. Alas, the line between one and the other can be exceedingly thin. Here, then, are five ways to keep on the “productive” side of that line and avoid the “time-sink” factor. I’ve focused here on practices… » Continue

March 24 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: automation, computer, file_management, internet, Productivity, tip, web-app, workflow | 13 comments»