Get your brain in motion

Month: July 2019

Improve scheduling and make it more effective

We all need to improve our scheduling and make it more effective.

In our daily routine we are unceasingly exposed to facts and events that can easily draw our attention away from tasks which are essential for being efficient and fully productive at work.

Effective scheduling can help us prioritizing and preventing unfruitful struggles to cope with the demands placed upon us.

Geoffrey Whiteway on Coaching Positive Performance lists eight tips that – if daily implemented – can help us scheduling:

  1. Plan the night before: making plan the night before, will ensure you less anxiety and better night sleep.
  2. Select 1 key task: identify the most important task for each day and get that task completed.
  3. Key task first: Life is unpredictable and if somethings happens that plays havoc with your plans, getting the most important task done first will increase the probability for your day to still be effective.
  4. Context based lists: If you have more than 20 tasks to be completed, make a list and put specific tasks under headings based on the situation you find yourself in, or the resources available to you at the time.
  5. No agenda, no meeting. Avoid meetings which do not have a clear agenda, as they tend to be just “talking shops”.
  6. Establish rituals. Routines allow you to get important, repeated tasks completed with maximum efficiency and minimum thought.
  7. Only time specific tasks go in your calendar. Tasks without a deadline risk being continuously put off.
  8. Projects vs. tasks A task is something which needs to get done but has not been done yet. A project is something which needs to be done, but has not been done yet and will take more one task to get done. There is real benefit in thinking this way and breaking each project down into tasks.

Try these tips in your daily life. They might reveal useful to improve and make more effective your scheduling. They will help to improve your productivity and create some free time for you!

Improve scheduling and make it more effective

Image Source: Pixabay (CC0)

10 Tips to Work Under Pressure

Is your routine demanding and challenging? In today’s jobs timing and productivity are not just precious, they even need to go hand in hand. It is important to find the right balance, to take advantage of time and to be able to do our best in every situation. In this article Martina McGowan suggests 10 ways to properly face up pressure.
  1. Remain calm, always.
  2. Stay focused on what needs to be accomplished.
  3. Help others to get through their taxing day.
  4. Sidestep the drama and stay positive.
  5. Get help if you need it.
  6. Steer clear of too much caffeine.
  7. Take your breaks.
  8. Use your vacation time wisely.
  9. Join in with big projects.
  10. If you are feeling stressed, avoid letting it show too much.

Read the full article

 

Image source: Pixabay – qimono (CC0)

Read Less, Understand More

Nowadays, the information overloaded society in which we live forces all of us to face a huge amount of information that requires a lot of time. Read faster can help us to preliminary detect the useful information and to go more quickly through them saving time. For this reason, speed reading is a skill that everybody should learn to be more comfortable and more productive in our modern society.
In this TEDx video Jordan Harry CEO of StudyFast gives some practical advice to increase the speed reading without losing details.  He says that speed reading is not a superpower but it is a skill that everyone can learn and improve. The main aspect on which the people interested in achieving better reading performances must work concerns three bad habits:
  • SUBVOCALIZATION, that consists in saying words in your head while reading;
  • REGRESSION, that implies to get to the end of a page and realize you haven’t taken in what you read;
  • FIXATIONS, that tend to create spots on what we are reading which impede our speed.

Learn to Refuse to be more Productive

Everybody knows somebody that even if always busy figures out how to tackle unforeseen events. These people are able to be more productive and to get their job done also with a jam-packed schedule. They rely on some basic rules aimed at limiting the daily habits and practices which reduce our productivity.
All these rules revolve around a key principle: if you want to start to be productive, you must start to refuse.
In this article, Lolly Daskal explains what enormously productive people usually refuse to do:
  1. Refuse to pursue perfection;
  2. Refuse to become distracted;
  3. Refuse to let negatively drag you down;
  4. Refuse to allow others to make your decisions;
  5. Refuse to allow past failures to drag you down;
  6. Refuse to give mental space to self-limiting beliefs;
  7. Refuse to believe what you want is impossible;
  8. Refuse to become overwhelmed;
  9. Refuse to stop learning, developing and growing.
To read the full article click here
Image source: Flickr – Matt Gibson (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Winning the race

The Diplo calendar 2019 realized by Stefano Baldi presents a selection of quotes for better living and better working.

All the quotes are about animals and their behaviours, their instincts and the complexity of their social dynamics.

Here is the selected quotation for the month of July

Slow and steady,
wins the race
Aesop