Displaying All Posts from March, 2011

Listen Up! 10 Great Tips for Better Listening

“I like to listen. I have learnt a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.” – Ernest Hemingway

Whenever I am in the middle of a discussion, I try not to talk too much and always listen to the person conversing with me. But sometimes all of those words wind up transforming into a garbled mess. At that point, I realize I’m actually impatiently waiting for the other person to stop talking. That way I can start talking again, feeling that I’ve got all eyes on me. Not a good practice, but it happens to the best of us.

In recent studies by Dr. Ralph Nichols, he mentions that almost 40% of the day is spent on listening to others. What amazes me is that the efficiency of listening to what we hear is only at somewhere around 25% — and I’m not talking about the physical comprehension. Is your boss giving you some tasks and you find yourself in the uncomfortable position of asking again what the exact steps were? Do you sometimes find it hard to listen to people that you really don’t care for all that much?

As with many other skill sets, in order to become efficient and effective at listening you need to train yourself to do so. Here are 12 tips that will put you on the road to better listening.

1. Find common subjects and try to stick to them as much as possible.

If you take a positive stance towards a specific subject, you will find that in most cases there is enough information to enrich your knowledge. No matter how sterile the conversation may be, you can still get some valuable information from it. Try to exclude personal elements in these subjects, as this is counterproductive to efficient listening. For example, if you love basketball and the person you are engaged in conversation with is passionately talking about soccer, you will likely find yourself wanting to end the conversation (or leave the room altogether). Try to exclude your personal preferences and be as positive as you can when someone is talking about something that you can tell they are interested in. Look at your conversation as a way to educate yourself — even if it is something you don’t necessarily like. Who knows…you may even change your mind about your feelings on the subject matter by the time the conversation is through.
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Sign and Send Your Documents Anywhere, Anytime with EasySign

Abhijeet Mukherjee 7th March Software Leave a Comment

If you use an iOS device (iPod touch, iPhone or iPad) for business then it is likely that you come across PDF or Word documents that need to filled in and signed digitally. Sure, you could go to your computer and fill them out that way once you’ve received the documents via email, but that’s not exactly convenient.

With today’s ever-expanding mobile device usage, people are connected a lot more while on the move. It would be great to have an option that would let you fill out and digitally sign documents through your mobile device. There’s no straightforward way to do that on those gadgets.

Until now. Enter EasySign.

EasySign is an application that promises to make filling in and signing documents on an iPhone or iPad a cakewalk. In just a few easy steps, you’re good to send off any document that needs signing.
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Dealing With a Difficult Co-Worker 101

Jen Smith 7th March Office Life Leave a Comment

Most jobs involve working with other people to some degree or another. I have met some wonderful people through my work. However, like most of us, there have been times where I have worked with people that I have found difficult. The difference with meeting difficult people at work than in other areas of life is that we don’t always get a choice about whether to spend time with that person. So how do we deal with co-workers we find difficult? Here are some of the things that I have found useful.

Set Boundaries

Be clear about how you deserve to be treated and how you want to treat others. Listen to your intuition and if you feel uncomfortable about something, try and address it. You train people how to treat you. Believe in yourself and show people that you know that you are someone worth treating with respect. Not everyone will have your best interests at heart, so look out for yourself and stand up for what you deserve.

If this is a difficult area for you, take one step at a time. Start saying what you really think, rather than trying to please everyone. Step by step, you can learn to set boundaries and be assertive.
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The Hard Work Cure

Matt Herron 6th March Your Job Leave a Comment

“I would have to work hard tomorrow. Work could cure almost anything, I believed then, and I believe it now.”
— Ernest Hemingway

Hard work is many things. We live in a complicated, fast world, surrounded by distractions. Getting down to work can be a way to free yourself of all things extraneous. It can be a stress reliever, a form of meditation. Conversely, it can be punishment for enjoying yourself too much the night before. Whatever the reason, hard work is tunnel vision. While you’re working, the only thing that exists is you and the light at the end.

The quote at the beginning of this article is from A Moveable Feast, a narrative account of Hemingway’s time as a poor young writer living in Paris. The book is filled with advice on living, on writing, and on the importance of discipline and hard work. It also contains stories about his friends and contemporaries. But this quote in particular stuck with me — because I believe it, too.

When we embrace hard work, we find an immense release in it. At the end of the day and when work is over, the world returns and we are free to enjoy it. Now we can go where we please. Our feet feel light, our heads feel empty, our stomachs feel hungry. Another day of hard work has cured us of whatever burden we started the morning with.
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WorkAwesome Podcast: Episode 14 – Stever Robbins

Mike Vardy 5th March Podcast Leave a Comment

This week on the WorkAwesome podcast, our editor Mike Vardy had the opportunity to chat with Stever Robbins, better known as The Get-It-Done Guy.

Stever’s book has been reviewed here at WorkAwesome, and during this interview we dig a little deeper into the book, as well as other aspects of productivity and workflow that he offers on his website and his regular podcasts. Stever’s practical and accessible advice on productivity makes what many consider a dry topic more entertaining and still very informative.

In addition to the interview, we’ve started to implement some of our listener suggestions. This week we slowly venture into offering tips — with just one tip offered. But it’s a big one that can be challenging for many of us.
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Awesome Links #38: Focus, Forming Habits and Decision Making

Abhijeet Mukherjee 5th March General Leave a Comment

Monk Mind: How to Increase Your Focus
A great article by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits on how we can slowly and steadily increase our focus and keep working on the task at hand until we get it done. Productive work can only be accomplished if one can do it for a specific period of time with laser-sharp focus — and without getting distracted. Developing that focus is essential. Leo explains how to get there.

The Easy Way to Get Chrome’s Pin Tab Feature in Firefox
Chrome’s pin tab feature is an extremely useful one. Not only does it increase screen real estate, it also makes sure that the important tabs are nicely tucked away in the corner and don’t get lost in those large number of tabs you’ve got opened. This article at Guiding Tech tells you how to get that in Firefox.

45-Second De-Stress Tips
De-stressing is something that most of us need to do on a daily basis. Remember: Happy doesn’t always mean stress-free. Take a look at these tips on the Lifehack blog; I particularly liked the first one (read a poem). You’ll have to check out the link to see the others they discuss.
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The Netsetter: Reviewing Ad Spending for Competitive Intelligence

Andre Kibbe 4th March General Leave a Comment

You don’t always have to look at what your competition’s doing to be successful, but there are times when it makes sense. You might already have a website that’s plateaued in some way. It might get lots of traffic that doesn’t convert, or you might have a site that’s absolutely adored by a small audience that needs to grow by an order of magnitude.

Or you could still be in the stages of selecting a product or service to market, and you’re finding it hard to distinguish those that generate buzz from those that generate sales. Whether you’ll looking to increase your traffic, conversion rate, or your revenue, the simplest way to get actionable data is to look at your actual or prospective competitors’ performance, and model it. Let’s look at a couple of simple ways to check out the competition.

Look at Ad Spending

Just because certain products and services are widely offered doesn’t mean they’re actually selling. In the brick-and-mortar world, you can tell which kinds of restaurants do well by just looking at their customer turnout, but websites don’t volunteer their sales information. So how do you know if they’re making money?

Regular ad spending is a quick way to gauge how much money’s on the table. If a website is spending an average of $20 a day on AdWords, you can reasonably assume that it’s at least breaking even. After all, it wouldn’t make sense to advertise at a loss.

I just looked up “solar power systems” in the Google Keyword Tool, which reported 3600 local searches per month. Each click would cost me $3.61 if I were to advertise using PPC. So if I wanted to drive traffic to a sales page for a some solar power system products as an affiliate, would it be worth the advertising cost?
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6 Web-Based Alternatives to Microsoft PowerPoint

Connor Turnbull 2nd March Software Leave a Comment

Microsoft PowerPoint is the ubiquitous solution to presentations on most computers. But with a profound move to the cloud, there’s a range of alternatives (most free) based on the web. These solutions offer not only features similar to the desktop app, but the ability to load your presentation anywhere you get an internet connection and, in most cases, download a copy for offline shows and/or further customization in PowerPoint itself.

In this roundup, we’ll look at a range of web-based alternatives for PowerPoint and in a future one, look at alternatives for Excel.

Google Docs

Google Docs is, of course, the first solution that comes to mind. Google offers potential replacements for Word, Excel and PowerPoint in the form of their own, slightly-less-featureful web app.

The presentation tool is basic, but gets the job done in most cases. The interface links in with Google’s other Docs properties with the addition of presentation-specific elements such as the slide browser on the left.
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1. Find common subjects and try to stick to them as much as possible.

Set Boundaries

Look at Ad Spending

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