The Greatest Productivity Tool You Never Thought Of: Email Autoresponder. Editor's Note: This story contains one of our 11 New Years resolutions you can actually keep in 2014.
For the full list, click here. When we emailed Kelly Hoey to ask her about why the autoresponder is a part of being a well-adjusted Internet person, we, fittingly enough, got this message right back: Hoey, a cofounder of the WomenInnovateMobile accelerator, started using an autoresponder about a year ago. It was partly for her own time management: She felt addicted to making immediate responses--rather than having a clear head to work on the most important projects, she found herself addressing more immediate, but less substantive tasks, like wading through her inbox. Cut Your Meeting Time by 90% 10 Essential Online Tools You Should Be Using. Is your workflow stuck in the past?
Check out the following tools to make your business more efficient: 1. Manage and collaborate more easily: Blossom Blossom lets you drag to-do items from one list to another in an intuitive way, using an interface that feels like rearranging Post-it notes on a whiteboard. Blossom is an easy way to track the progress of personal projects, bigger projects, and really anything that comes to mind. 2. Why collaboration is hard (and critical) “No one can whistle a symphony.”
HE Luccock Nearly five decades ago, Gordon Moore noted a phenomenon that’s survived the passage of time. Conversations Can Save Companies - Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind. Each period of business history has its own representative corporate type.
The 1960s were the age of the conglomerate. In more recent decades, the startup has achieved iconic status. But the kind of organization that marks our own historical moment is, arguably, the turnaround company. In almost every sector, there are once-dominant enterprises that find themselves on the wrong side of a shift in customer demand or the emergence of a disruptive technology.
You know their names: Hewlett-Packard. How to Avoid Virtual Miscommunication - Keith Ferrazzi. By Keith Ferrazzi | 11:00 AM April 12, 2013 Why is miscommunication common in the virtual workplace?
Lack of context. And it’s not just that e-mails and phone conversations lack a person’s visual reaction to what you’ve said. 5 Steps To A (Nearly) Paperless Office. Meetings as Organizational Practice - The Strategic Pivot. Meetings are often rated on a scale from necessary evil to antithesis of productivity and effectiveness.
So I guess it is not surprising that when I tell people that we have two obligatory (from summer interns to the executive director) staff meetings each week they usually look at me with a mix of incredulity and horror. Meeting can easily become a distraction from achieving organizational goals and when we made the decision to rethink our organizational structure, we realized pretty quickly that we had to develop a new relationship with meetings. Working in an environment where new information and ideas are constantly coming at us, and where, at first glance, distractions can look very much like opportunities and vice versa, meeting have become the bedrock of our organizational practice.
I am not proud to admit it, but in the past our meetings had many of the hallmarks of ineffectiveness. The power of preparation An effective and productive meeting begins with a well-designed agenda. How to Write a Convincing E-mail. E-mails are the most common document in the business world.
Unfortunately, many e-mails are so poorly written that recipients must struggle to figure out why they're reading the e-mail and what they're supposed to do about it. Here's a foolproof method to write e-mails that get the job done. 1. Have a specific decision in mind. Corporate Reporting Needs a Reboot - Paul Druckman. By Paul Druckman | 8:00 AM April 17, 2013 There is a clamor of voices demanding the rebooting of capitalism, from academics (such as Michael Porter) and politicians (like Al Gore) to investors (such as CalPERS) and Occupy’s street activists.
The common thread is that today’s model of capitalism overemphasizes short-term financial data and neglects information that gets at the true sources of sustainable value creation — things like innovation, brand equity, customer loyalty, and key stakeholder relationships. Corporate reporting today emphasizes compliance, boilerplate and legalese. As a result, we have a massive glut of filings, press releases, analyst reports and articles focused on financial data. The system has lost sight of the point of reporting: to give companies access to financial capital by communicating their value to investors. Email Is Not Free - Tom Cochran. By Tom Cochran | 12:00 PM April 8, 2013 My job description does not include managing email flow.
Yours probably doesn’t, either. But it’s increasingly a big part of the work we do. In fact, in a single week last fall, I received 511 emails and sent 284. Almost 160 emails a day is ridiculous. That same week, I further analyzed the activity in my inbox: 235 of my inbound emails were from people within the company, close to 46%.