Displaying All Posts tagged with work flow

Four Strategies for Increasing Email Productivity

If you want to know what people value most, look at which email subject lines get the fastest replies from them. You’ll find that issues you consider priorities aren’t valued equally by others, and vice versa, which makes one-size-fits-all policies like “check email twice a day” or “turn off email notifications” awkward to implement company-wide.

Regardless of the medium, one person’s communication is another person’s distraction. So how do you get anything done in a culture where expectations for email turnaround are frustratingly vague? How do you deal with your own email overload? Click Here to Read Article …

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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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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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Killer Chrome Extensions for Productive Browsing

When it comes to pure speed, Google Chrome stomps all over other browsers. Still, Firefox remains a popular choice for power users due to its wealth of extensions for just about any browser task imaginable. Fortunately, extensions for Chrome are proliferating at a fast and furious rate. Let’s take a look at some Chrome browser extensions that will make your online productivity equally fast and furious.

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Full Engagement at Work

Most of today’s companies still value presence over performance. The amount of time employees spend in the office matters more than what they accomplish during that time. The expectation of putting in long hours, regardless of whether or not it’s warranted, breeds a habit of filling time by creating non-critical activities, drifting into excessive socializing, or getting caught up in trivial office politics. For those of us who actually want to be productive rather than busy, being surrounded by counterproductive behavior can be frustrating.

How do you replace busyness with productivity? One powerful way is by increasing your presence-to-performance ratio.

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Begin Your Work Day at the End of It

One of the best ways to get more done every day is to make sure you get your most important task done first, from start to finish, without interruption. Focusing on that one task exclusively can be simple, but not easy. The problem usually isn’t lack of effort, but lack of clarity. How do you decide what’s most important?

Maybe that’s not the right question. Perhaps it’s not how you decide, but when. I’ll suggest that the one of the worst times to decide your top priority for right now is right now. It’s usually more effective to have already made your priority decisions beforehand. If this is true, then the best time to decide what your first task should be in the morning is the day before — ideally at the end of the work day.

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10 Online To Do List Manager Solutions to Get Things Done

Microsoft Outlook still reigns supreme for to do list management in the corporate office. It’s favored by IT departments, integrates with company email, sports awesome calendar sharing, and has a ton of other features that most of us will never use.

But cloud-based task managers are becoming more compelling and practical every day. It’s not uncommon for employees to spend their professional and personal time between three computers: a laptop, work desktop and home desktop. Throw an iPhone or Blackberry into the mix, and synchronization across all of these devices becomes an unwieldy engineering project. There has to be a better way.

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Be a Google Wave Rock Star

After the novelty of getting onto Google Wave for the first time wears off, the near-universal reaction from users is underwhelm. By the time you finish this primer, you’ll still only know a fraction of what lies within Wave, but I guarantee that you’ll have some actionable points of departure for making Wave useful and fun.

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