Let’s face it: You can’t overhaul your personal efficiency overnight. You can, however, boost work productivity over time by adopting one or more of these weekly 10-minute practices. If you’re feeling especially ambitious, try at least one each day. 1. Declutter your inbox Dedicate 10 minutes each week to unsubscribing from useless or unwanted emails. They…

  If you’re thinking about becoming a self-employed freelance writer, you need to weigh up the pros and cons. Certain authorities on the subject will describe and exaggerate the positives – working the hours you choose, working from home, working in your pyjamas, working on assignments you prefer – without filling you in on the negatives…

It feels like the past 4 years of college have flown by and now with only one month of school left I have never felt the days pass more slowly. There is still a ton of stuff left to do for school-work and what I like to call “administrative” tasks like making sure important forms are…

What does it mean to be productive? The “gurus” have given us a few ideas — it means to “get things done”, to be “highly effective”, to know who it was, exactly, who moved your cheese. What things, effective at what, and who is bringing cheese to work anyway are questions that these books don’t…

This week marks the beginning of the Fall semester for me, and as usual, I have a crazy schedule. I thought I might share some of the things I do to manage the frenzy that the life of an adjunct can be, in the hopes that it might give you some ideas about how to…

The Web Worker Daily have compiled their Top 5 Web Worker Mistakes. Meaning, these are the most common reasons people who use the internet for business muck it up. It’s written for coders, but speaks to all of us. If you’re a web worker (as opposed to a web dilettante), you need to treat your work…

In this day and age, with communication being to easy through mobile technologies, it makes sense to work out of the office. If you are able to do your job from home, why can’t you? What is the benefit of traveling upwards of an hour each day, through stressful traffic, to enter the distraction-full environment that…

As I look back at this week’s postings on Slow Leadership, I notice that most of them were concerned with helping people stop wasting their time and energy on fruitless endeavors. Take the first post, entitled: To Succeed, First Forget About Leadership Technique. In it, I argued that belief that success—in just about any…

The German World War II general Erich von Manstein is said to have categorized his officers into four types. The first type, he said, is lazy and stupid. His advice was to leave them alone because they don’t do any harm. The second type is hard-working and clever. He said that they make great officers…

You’re driving along the freeway. The traffic is heavy and the weather is bad; there’s water on the road and occasional patches of ice. You’re already late for an appointment and you’re worrying that your boss is going to find out and get mad at you, so you’re driving way too fast for the conditions…

There’s a common saying that human beings were given two ears (and two eyes), but only one mouth to show that they should listen (and look) at least twice as much as they speak. I think that for managers and leaders that ratio is far too low. Looking and listening should happen maybe ten or…

Trust in other people is one of the foundations for creating a civilized working environment. Many managers are overworked primarily because of a lack of trust. They take on too much themselves, because they don’t trust their subordinates to do the work properly. They cannot allocate enough time to their own work, because they don’t…

Creativity is one thing, but capturing it into a form that’s useful (to your needs) is another. I’ve got an idea that I plan to implement for myself: mini process flows. Now, your jobs that you’ll need done are different than mine. I’ll just show you mine as examples, okay? Process Flow Basics Here are the…