Archive for the ‘Productivity’ Category

Why You Should Kick the “Versus” Habit

A world painted only in black and white is a hard place to live or work

In our time-starved, action-obsessed approach to work and life, we easily drop into the habit of seeing every choice or decision in terms of simple opposites: good versus bad, right versus wrong, success versus failure, winners versus losers. Every choice must be one or the other, with no options in between. Macho management thinking… » Continue

May 7 2008 | By Adrian | Tagged: choices, Desision-making, efficiency, reality | 6 comments»

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»

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»

How to Ruthlessly Reclaim Work Day Time

When you’re starting a small business or working from home as a freelancer, you need to make every minute of time count; it’s a race against the clock to break even before your new endeavor uses up your savings and breaks you.

But there are always a million and one things that interfere with and take over your day. Your to-do list of twenty items that you intended to tackle by… » Continue

April 28 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: email, feedreader, freelancing, home office, housework, phone, Technology | 21 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»

10 Hacks to Improve Your Home Office Productivity

If you work from home, the central part of your work life is the home office. For some, that means the kitchen table, but most of us assign a specific room to be the base of operations and (try to) do our work from there each day.

Given that we must take into consideration strategy before tactics, it stands to reason that we should make it a room… » Continue

April 25 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: creativity, focus, home, ideas, office, workspace | 18 comments»

8 Ways to Be Ruthless With Your Time

There are a million and one demands on your time and, whether or not those demands are legitimate, it’s hard to carve out the time necessary to take care of your responsibilities. You have to be ruthless with your time — you have to take care of important tasks before handling issues that just aren’t crucial. You have to set up your own rules for deciding how to spend… » Continue

April 24 2008 | By Thursday | Tagged: procrastinate, schedule, time-management | 11 comments»

The Other Epidemic Of Obesity

It’s high time business slimmed down and stopped fooling itself with crash ‘diets’ of job cuts and outsourcing

The media are happy to keep reminding us that people in the developed world, especially the United States, are growing ever fatter; that obesity starts in childhood and continues thereafter to pump itself up on a diet of junk food, sodas, and ’super-sized’ portions.

Yet what we almost never hear about is… » Continue

April 23 2008 | By Adrian | Tagged: business, career, success, waste | 4 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»

Show Me the Money - Or Maybe Not!

Like it or loath it, we all have a relationship with money. We don’t really have a choice; it’s somewhat of a necessity. Unless of course you’re a skilled hunter, gatherer, farmer, living entirely off the land in your own hand-built hut, wearing animal skins and residing in some remote, exotic location. Who happens to have Internet access. Of course.

Part of the human experience

Money means different things… » Continue

April 20 2008 | By Craig | Tagged: Money, personal-development, self-improvement | 11 comments»

Are You Lifehacking Too Much?

Nick Cernis of Put Things Off recently declared that productivity is dead. He said that “our obsession with ‘productivity’ is getting in the way of our lives.” Nick started out by saying that the productivity industry is out of control, and that it’s making us less efficient, not more. I agree with Nick, and I can tell you why the productivity industry is like that: it’s about… » Continue

April 14 2008 | By Joel | Tagged: action, gtd, implementation, information, motivation, systems | 8 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»

I Need a User Manual for My Life!

I was doing something routine a couple of days ago — paying some first of the month bills online — and I got stuck. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the name of one of the people I send payments to. All the information is saved in my bank account’s settings, but I have to enter the name of the recipient, exactly as it appears in my… » Continue

April 7 2008 | By Dustin | Tagged: howto, manual, repetition, routine, tutorial | 29 comments»

« Previous Entries