Displaying All Posts in the Office Life category

11 Gadgets You Should Have on Your Office Wishlist

Sometimes I get a case of the “gimmes.” I have a whole bunch of wish lists on Amazon.com for various different aspects of life: home, work, for the kid, Kitchen à la Alton Brown, and yes, I even have one called “for when I’m rich.” This is a list of what is currently on my work wish list. It’s a combination of fun things and useful things and one particular item that I want two of so I can have one at work AND home.

If you have any really great gadgets, tell us about it. I know I wouldn’t mind making my list a little longer.

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The Pursuit For Perfection

I spent quite a bit of time during my vacation watching the Olympics…I really got behind my home team doing so well across the board.

(Yes, I’m Canadian.)

All of the athletes really pulled together and put forth a herculean effort to make the most of their experience. This just didn’t apply to the Canadian athletes – it was a trend that held true for all participating athletes and nations. Working together for one common goal – to be the best at what they do best…and to do it for them and their country. This kind of thinking applies in the workplace as well.

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Bureaucratic Bellwethers & Barometers

Most of us would agree that our jobs are made less pleasant by all sorts of things we can’t control, from the fluorescent lights and gray cubicle felt to the cranky copier and the underpowered microwave. There are human problems, including bullies, liars, and people who watch soap operas on tiny TVs at their desk while eating the loudest, crunchiest pretzels in the universe. But we also have too many meetings, too many reports, too many forms, and too many emails that we don’t really need to read.

These are signs that your big company is less concerned about running a tight ship and more concerned about staying a big company. The more sloppiness and waste your company tolerates, the less it cares about actual work. That’s a bad thing. But there are other ways to measure how much common sense your company has sacrificed on the altar of bureaucratic nonsense. Click Here to Read Article …

Cut the Corporate Speak

Do your eyes glaze over with the vacant stare of a dairy cow when reading most company websites, brochures, case studies, and white papers? Once I interviewed with a company whose tag line was Trust. Value. Integrity. It took me forever to figure out what their business was. After scouring their site and search engines, I deduced they were loan origination technology developers. Can you imagine what this does to potential business? Their website was jargon-jammed with corporate speak and communicated nothing.  The powers-that-be who insist on cliché, jargon and words with no marketplace meaning undermine their own profit potential and branding power. As E.B. White wrote in  The Elements of Style, these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words. Let’s take a look at a few of the offenders.

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Meetings 101: Always Bring Something to the Table

During family dinners in my household, we’d all bring an item from the kitchen to the table. None was exempt from this ritual. No matter who cooked dinner that night, everyone ended up contributing to the meal because of what they brought to the table. What they brought was incidental–the fact they brought something was what was important.

The same applies in a work environment–especially in meetings. We all have different things we bring to the table. What we bring often depends on the role we have in the organization or the area of expertise we apply every day to our work. None of these are really any different than setting a dinner table – every part of the meal is important.

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Declutter Your Desk with a General Reference Filing System

First, a confession. I don’t do what I’m about to recommend, at least not anymore. My current job involves zero paperwork, but in my previous, paper-based job, I was able to manage a mountain of paperwork while maintaining a pristinely clean desk. If you’re willing to put in a few hours to set up the general reference filing system I describe, you’ll not only find it easy to keep your desk free of clutter, but you get to the point where seeing extraneous paperwork build up on your desk will feel as unsettling as not showering. Think of clutter management as information hygiene.

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Work Unplugged: Going Off The Grid

“Inaction speaks louder than words.” – Mike Vardy

I’ve always wanted to quote myself. Call it self-adulation or self-indulgence if you will, but there’s a truth behind it: not making progress on something often can’t be saved by reasoning or excuses. You need to see things through to the end.

Let’s face it…we are getting inundated with email, RSS feeds and other types of information on a daily basis – it seems never ending. Because it is. The web has opened up a floodgate of pertinent and trivial news stories that come at us from all angles, memorandums and tasks arriving in our email inbox at breakneck speed and an endless stream of voice mails begging for us to respond to thanks to that blinking red light on our telephones. I’m feeling overwhelmed just writing about it.

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The 4 Top Concerns of An Older Worker

For any of you who have gotten a little long-in-the-tooth, you probably have some of the same concerns as I have.  You may have friends or co-workers who have been let go under, let’s call them, sketchy circumstances. The party line was that there was a layoff or a re-organization, but it’s kind of strange how that person’s responsibilities now have gone to either a newly-hired employee or a younger one within the company. If you’ve been at a job for a number of years and realize that you are among the older workers in the company, you may have the following concerns.

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