Displaying All Posts tagged with efficiency

How to Take a Break

Knowing when to take a break is important, but a lot pf people don’t know how to take a break. Some would say that surfing the internet for a few minutes between articles will do the trick. Others profess that getting up and going for a walk fills the time nicely. While these ideas may seem on track, that’s not entirely the case.

A break is defined in several ways, but the one we’re going to focus on is:

A pause or interval, as from work.

It’s important to remember that you really do need to press the “pause” button when you take a break. That means if you work on a computer all day, you should get and get away from it during the break. If you work inside, go outside. If you work in solitude, find interaction of some sort. A break should not only be that interval you take to get away from your work, but give you a chance to break the pattern you have while working.

How you take your break is just as important as when. Do it right and you’ll come back recharged every time. Click Here to Read Article …

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The Rock Solid Reflection Plan

Mike Vardy 20th May Goals Leave a Comment

One of the best ways – some would say the only way – to keep tabs on where you’re at and where you’re headed in terms of being productive is by looking back on where you’ve been. It’s challenging to do this regularly. Really challenging. What’s more is that many people don’t do it at all. Doing this (or, rather, not doing this) is a recipe of mediocrity…or even organizational disaster.

All that aside, you can do this. You can review, reflect, revisit…whatever you’d like to call it…and you can do it regularly. I’m not going to outline what this consists of – there’s many different ways to do it and not one particular method works for everyone unilaterally. What I can do is present to you a plan on how to make sure you get to the act of doing it. Click Here to Read Article …

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What Can You Do In Two Minutes?

Andre Kibbe 19th May Productivity Leave a Comment

Two minutes might not seem like much, but appearances can be deceiving. There’s actually quite a lot you can accomplish in a two-minute window if you develop the habit if asking yourself if something takes two minutes or less. This habit was codified by consultant Dean Acheson (not the deceased U.S. senator), and later David Allen, as the Two Minute Rule. Click Here to Read Article …

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Why Being A “Jack Of All Trades” Works

Peter North 14th May Career Leave a Comment

In the workplace of yesterday, most jobs existed as a fixed set of clear-cut, unchanging duties. Rarely did the nature of the work vary, and in many cases a worker’s ability to repeat the same exact process and produce identical results was commended. Just ask an assembly-line worker or a railroad builder if “outside-the-box thinking,” or “creative innovating” was welcome in their workplace. They’d probably tell you that “thinking outside the box” is more likely to result in a factory-wide meltdown or a train wreck than a pat on the back or a promotion. Click Here to Read Article …

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Don’t Increase Your Willpower — Reduce Your Options

Andre Kibbe 29th April Productivity Leave a Comment

A little over a year ago, I started going on a low information diet. Rather than just reduce the number of feeds in my RSS reader, I dumped them all in one shot. I knew myself well enough to realize that I would open up the reader the moment I felt the need to postpone taking action on something important. So I still found myself opening the reader, but there was nothing in it that would serve as a tool for procrastination. Rather than just limiting my email consumption to one or two scheduled sessions per day, I added Gmail.com to Leechblock, a Firefox extension that blocks your access to designated sites for designated time periods.

The principle is simple: it’s easier to increase our concentration by controlling our environment than controlling our attention. By setting the conditions in which we operate on the front end, we spare ourselves the order of having to make moment-to-moment decisions for staying on task. I kept trying to open GReader and Gmail, despite my conscious commitment to the low information diet. The problem isn’t changing a behavior, it’s changing a habit, and a habit is much more deep-seated and has more momentum than a single action.

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Reading Blogs Like Books

Andre Kibbe 28th April Productivity Leave a Comment

In my last post, I talked about how I gave up reading blogs for a while by dumping all of my feeds from Google Reader. Initially I still found myself opening GReader, but since it was devoid of content, the habit died much more quickly than if I would have just tried to restrain myself from opening GReader.

A couple of months later, when I felt that I had the habit under control, I started adding a feed or two — or six or eight — to the reader, until I realized that I was back where I started. Whenever I was bored or anxious, feed reading was my crutch activity. So I dumped the feeds again and recovered.

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Break Hacks

Andre Kibbe 26th February Productivity Leave a Comment

How long should you work before taking a break? The typical recommendations I see in the blogosphere are (a) every 50-60 minutes and (b) every 90 minutes. My advice: take breaks when you actually need them rather than taking them on schedule.

Be careful with advice given by writers. It may not be wrong, but it may very well be domain-specific. In other words, a clerk in a copy store can probably work two or three times as long as a writer without needing a break. A construction worker may only be able to optimally work half as long. Think about the nature of the work you do and learn to rightsize your breaks accordingly.

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Calendar or To Do List? Two Task Management Tools Compared

Andre Kibbe 24th February Productivity Leave a Comment

How do you plan and track your daily activities, with a calendar or a to do list? Some productivity gurus claim that putting everything on your calendar ensures that it never gets done, or that you’ll cross off what you don’t get done and just reschedule it for the next day — which defeats the purpose of scheduling. Other gurus claim that putting everything on a list, where items aren’t tied to a time and date, ensures that they never get done, since they lack specific queues to get started or deadlines to finish.

If the choice is mutually exclusive, I think they’re both wrong. Calendars and lists are related, but serve different purposes, not unlike clocks and timers. You can use a clock as a timer, but it’s not the best tool for the job.

Click Here to Read Article …

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