background preloader

Productivity

Facebook Twitter

80 Ways to Steal Valuable Minutes for Your Work Day : Lifestyle. How Can I Stop My Boss From Ruining My Weekends? I'm the IT admin at a company right now. I was hired under the assumption that occasionally I might need to stay a little late to finish something (typically restarting the server for some reason, or upgrading and pushing out some software). I try not to do that more than once a month, and only stay an extra 2 or 3 hours tops.

If they want me to stay more frequently or for longer, they need to increase my salary to take into account the time I'm working - if you work overtime and are salaried, essentially you're just working more hours for less money. I only give out my cell phone to the receptionist if I'm taking a sick day and tell her to only give it out if someone's having an emergency, like if the user's hard drive failed, simply so that I'm aware of it when I come back to the office.

If someone calls my cell phone outside of when I've told them it's okay, I don't answer it, and send it to voice mail, where it usually rots. Online Project Management & Planning Software. 7 Ways to Double What You Get Done Each Day. How To Read A Book In 15 Minutes. It’s Lewis a.k.a. Nerd #2. If you hate reading, you’re gonna love what you see here. If you love to read (like I do) and you’ve got 40 books laying around you have only read 1/3 of (like I do) you’re gonna love what you see here.

What Eben and Wyatt reveal here is how to take charge and ditch all the bullshit reading habits you’ve picked up over the years that have kept you in the slow reading lane. Now let’s get this party started by answering the question of . . . In the dis-educational world we’re given things called text books. George Bernard Shaw was known for saying . . . The dis-educational system has a hard time teaching reading because it doesn’t understand what reading is. If you learned to read this way, your reading ability has been limited because how fast you can read is restricted to how fast you can talk and this slows you down which is why it’s not the best way of reading. What reading is really about is making a movie in your head about what you’re reading. PS. How To Think Like An Entrepreneur To Help Your Business Thrive. What Is Entrepreneurship? The dictionary defines an entrepreneur as 1. A person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk; 2.

An employer of productive labor; contractor. Most of us can come up with the names of famous entrepreneurs who have made tremendous impacts to our society and the world at large: Henry Ford, Ray Kroc, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey and of course, Steve Jobs, to mention only a few. Here are eight key principles held by all successful entrepreneurs: 1. “Why NOW is the time to Crush It! The one common link among successful entrepreneurs is an unyielding passion for what they do. 2. “The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Hiring and Building the Team” by Ken Tanner Behind every great name listed above stands a whole lot of people dedicated to their cause. 3.

How to Build a Brilliant Team 4. Power of goals: 5 strategies for success Things can get overlooked in the heat of business. 5. 6. 7. 8. Standing: The One Simple Trick That Can Double Your Productivity. A subject of great interest to most of us is productivity. We want to be more productive, and we’re willing to do anything to achieve this, yet we spend a major part of our lifetime doing something that makes us less productive while at the same time posing the risk of reducing our lifespan.

Unfortunately, this particular thing is so common these days that a lot of us now see it as something normal. It is called sitting. While sitting isn’t a totally bad idea, spending the larger part of our day doing it can damage our productivity significantly. Unfortunately, in the digital age we are today, we now spend more time sitting than ever before; the average human being spends around 9 hours sitting every day, when sitting down for just 6 hours a day increases your risk of dying in the next 15 years 40% higher than that of someone sitting for just 3 hours a day.

Start Using a “Standing Desk” Well, there is standing. 1. 2. 3. What’s more? All the stats quoted above can be found here and here. 50 Motivational Quotes That Will Put Your Motivation on Overdrive. Let’s face it – no matter how excited you are about a new project or priority in your life, there will always be days when your motivation lags. Days when – despite all the progress you’ve made in the past – it just sounds easier to sit on the couch playing video games than to buckle down and crank out the work needed to meet your goals.

In order to be successful, you must be able to motivate yourself past these humps. So whenever you feel your drive and determination lagging, turn to motivational quotes from famous authors to provide the extra spark of passion needed to keep you on track. The following are some of my favorites, divided up into a few different categories. I hope you find them useful when it comes to sustaining your own motivation through difficult projects! Motivational Quotes for Work Great businesses aren’t born overnight. Goal Setting <img src=" Excellence in Work Determination and Persistence Success. 7 Things Highly Productive People Do. 11 productivity tips from successful entrepreneurs. When everything’s a priority, how do you maximize your productivity and continue getting things done?

We asked eleven entrepreneurs about their strategies for staying on top of mounting piles of work, focusing on what’s important, and otherwise holding on to their sanity while building a company. Outsource, outsource, outsource Everything may be a priority, but you are not equally brilliant at everything. Eliminate the unnecessary tasks and outsource your weaknesses so your time and focus is directed to where you’ll make the biggest impact for the business.

Kelly Azevedo, @krazevedo, She’s Got Systems Focus on one thing at a time It may seem like a no-brainer, but multitasking can actually cut back on your productivity. Steph Auteri, @stephauteri, Word Nerd Pro Take on what’s time-sensitive Do time-sensitive tasks, then divide into projects. Stephanie Kaplan, @stephaniekaplan, Her Campus Media Figure out your prime time Doug Bend, @DougBend, The Law Office of Doug Bend Get an outside perspective.

Management

Methods Map. Showing results for Qualitative research Showing 1-20 of 859 items Back to top Choose from the "Show content" menu to display related content here. Getting the Most Out of the Research Experience Brian Roberts While each research situation is different and no book can fully prepare the researcher for what they experience – this book provides a guide to what may be expected. The Handbook of Social Work Research Methods Bruce A. "`Not so much a handbook, but an excellent source of reference' - British Journal of Social Work This volume is the definitive resource for anyone doing research in social work. The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology Carla Willig & Wendy Stainton-Rogers The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology provides comprehensive coverage of the qualitative methods, strategies and research issues in psychology, combining 'how-to-do-it' summaries with an examination of historical and theoretical foundations.

Social Research is a bourgeoning field. DEG Consulting - The Official Blog: How I use technology to stay productive. The Weekly Review: How One Hour Can Save You A Week’s Worth of Hassle and Headache. Home. Console Recorder. Finally...a "black box recorder" for the cockpit of your plant: the control room! The Longwatch Console Recorder automatically captures HMI, SCADA and DCS displays and provides you with live and recorded images of exactly what was on the operator displays at any point in time (including the mouse tracks). The Console Recorder is a great tool for: Reduced Downtime: don't dig through alarm logs, operator logs, trends and reports - just play back what the system was showing the operator and you'll know what happened and how to fix it. Troubleshooting: it aggregates and associates the information in various databases - by showing you that data the way the operator saw it! Training: Just like the pros: use console recording as "game films" to show best practices for procedures, startups and shutdowns.

There are two versions of the Console Recorder: Value Edition - a basic screen recorder that provides live and recorded read-only images. It Exists! MIT Creates Tech For Moving Files Across Devices With A Swipe. Last week, we reported on a cool, if seemingly far-fetched, UI concept that’d let you drag files from your phone to your computer with a swipe of the finger. The idea is “so simple and clever, you wonder why it doesn’t exist already,” we wrote. Hours later, an email appeared in our inbox, subject line: “it exists!” The message came courtesy of Natan Linder, a PhD student in the Fluid Interfaces group at the MIT Media Lab. Linder and undergraduate researcher Alexander List are developers of Swÿp, a piece of open-source software that facilitates “cross-app, cross-device data exchange using physical ‘swipe’ gestures,” they write on their website.

Here’s the amazing part: They didn’t hack the iPhone and iPad with IrDA transceivers or anything like that, which would’ve enabled the devices to detect each other in 3-D space, a la Sifteo cubes. Why should we care? List started Swÿp, then Linder jumped on board. [Images courtesy of Natan Linder] Software and I: How to Manage a Self-Managing Team? As we all know, there’s no shortage in confusing and counter-intuitive ideas and practices in the Agile world, but the idea of a self-managing team has to be one of the best.

Indeed, the idea that a manager can manage a self-managing team sounds oxymoronic at best, and at worst – plain moronic. In this post I will try to clear the air and explain what it means for a team to be self-managing, and what is the role of a manager of such a team. By the way, this post is the fourth in my series of Demystifying Agile. If you like this one, you may want to read the others. What Does It Mean to Self-Manage? A self managing team, or as it is sometimes also called, a self-organizing team, is, above all, a mature team. The first thing such a team does is to take charge of how they do their work, which is to say, they define the tasks they will have to complete in order to deliver the solution (requirement / user story / feature). So What Do I need a Manager for?

What else? Wrong. Summary. How to Become a Focused Thinker. In his book Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends on It, marketing consultant Al Ries gives a tremendous illustration: The sun is a powerful source of energy. Every hour the sun washes the earth with billions of kilowatts of energy. Yet with a hat and some sun-screen, you can bathe in the light of the sun for hours at a time with few ill effects. A laser is a weak source of energy. A laser takes a few watts of energy and focuses them in a coherent stream of light. Focus can bring energy and power to almost anything, whether it’s physical or mental. Does every area of your life deserve dedicated, focused thinking time? 1. I’ve found that I need blocks of time to think without interruption. But since one lets us connect with people and know their needs, and the other lets us think of ways to add value to them, we need to value and give attention to both. 2.

Once you have a place to think, you need the time to think.Years ago I realized that my best thinking time occurs in the morning. 20 Bad Habits Holding Good People Back. The Lean Startup. A startup is an institution, not just a product, so it requires management, a new kind of management specifically geared to its context. This context is one of extreme uncertainty. Startups are human institutions designed to learn whether a product or service serve a market or, in fact, whether the market exists at all.

Traditional product development is about trying to create a solution to a known problem. By contrast, most startups have is they are trying to create a solution to an unknown problem. You may not know whether customers have a particular problem, or how many. You may observe a problem but not know how much customers are willing to pay for you to solve it, or whether your solution will be worth ceasing to do whatever it is they do now to address the problem. The Lean Startup methodology addresses these unknowns by proposing a set of management principles that seek to test assumptions and eliminate unknowns.

12 Universal Skills You Need to Succeed at Anything. Email There are a lot of skills you don’t need. You can be happy and successful without knowing how to rebuild a car’s engine, program a web application, or replace drywall. Sure, these are useful skills to have, but they aren’t absolutely necessary. There are other skills, however, that can’t be avoided – skills that tie into various aspects of everyday life, that are not only useful, but totally indispensable. In this article we’re going to skip the super basic skills like reading, driving, and using a computer, and discuss twelve slightly more advanced skills that are woefully under-taught, and universally applicable. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

What did we miss? Photo by: Zack Schnepf If you enjoyed this article, check out our new best-selling book. And get inspiring life tips and quotes in your inbox (it's free)... Workers, Take Off Your Headphones - Anne Kreamer. Technology, for a free-lancer like me, creates a powerful and not entirely mad illusion that we work in a peopled environment of rich diversity and experience. As I sit to write each morning, I draw upon the vast network of people (many in active chat windows) with whom I’ve worked in the trenches over the course of a 35-year career, while also having the benefit of opinions and insight by expert strangers a click away. I sometimes even wear earplugs that allow me to immerse more deeply into my subject matter, creating a bubble that blunts distractions and sharpens my focus. For me, it’s the best of both worlds. Alone, and yet truly interacting with people, even if they are across town or in a different country. But what about younger people just entering a traditional office environment?

The necessary and artful tango between inner-directed and outward-focused, first chronicled in David Reisman’s landmark 1950 book The Lonely Crowd, has been problematically transformed by technology. OmniFocus iPhone App Review. No matter what line of work you’re in, what your schedule’s like, and what kind of devices you rely on, you need to have a getting things done app on your phone. Getting things done, or GTD for short, is the productivity methodology envisioned by David Allen. In it, he describes the system he created to organize your life and get tasks done.

The GTD system is very popular, and there are many iPhone apps built around it. OmniFocus, a personal favorite of mine, is one of these apps. Now like any category of iPhone apps, there are ones that are minimalistic, and there are ones that are hardcore. OmniFocus is probably the most hardcore of them all, and really goes over the top in terms of features and functionality. Let’s take a look at what it has to offer.

When you first open up the app, you’re asked if you’d like to sync your tasks (don’t worry, this can always be changed later in the settings). When you add a new task to OmniFocus, it goes into your inbox. Developer:: The Omni Group. 10 Small Habits of Less Stressed People. Worker Productivity: Sweet Spot Is 40 Hours a Week. Multitasking Seems to Serve Emotional, Not Productivity, Needs.