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Tag: time management (Page 1 of 4)

How to Be On Time Every Time

24/02/2021 /

People who are habitually late (or are late even once, when it counts) project incompetence, self-centeredness, and even a lack of integrity.

This article provides 10 useful tips to be on time every time:

  1. Have a central place where your time commitments are recorded, whether that’s an online calendar, Outlook, a smartphone, a dayplanner, or just an index card with your schedule on it.
  2. Don’t schedule events that aren’t that important to you. A lot of the time we let ourselves show up late because the event we’re showing up to isn’t all that important to us.
  3. Don’t check your email or voicemail right before you leave. That “last quick check” will almost always take more time than you think. If you thought there’d be nothing important in your email, you wouldn’t bother checking.
  4. Plan for trouble. Always add 25% to your time estimate to get anywhere or do any task.
  5. Set up the night before. If you are someone who has a hard time getting going in the morning, make sure you set up the night before.
  6. Set your clocks ahead a few minutes each — by different amounts.
  7. Learn to better estimate how much time things take. Use a time tracker app to learn how long typical tasks take you to complete. Record these times, and refer to your record when estimating the time needed for similar tasks.
  8. Schedule events 10 minutes early. Always have 10 minutes of work with you to fill the slack time.
  9. Set reminders. Use your calendar program’s built-in reminder function to send you text reminders at set intervals before each appointment.
  10. Schedule events for “off-peak” times. Learn the times that traffic or other factors might make you late, and avoid scheduling during those times. For instance, give yourself at least an hour to get settled in every morning before your first meeting, don’t schedule meetings immediately after lunch, avoid before-working-hours events, etc.

Image Source: Pixabay – Nile

10 skills hard to learn that will pay you off forever

02/12/2020 /

Fruitful skills at work can sometimes be hard to learn and practice.

Here’s some tips to boost your work every day.

  1. Time Management: planning is the first step and needs discipline. To do list and scheduling will help you to focus.
  2. Empathy: do you feel what people feel? That’s the key to foster the team spirit in your office.
  3. Mastering your sleep: Better sleep helps, as many medical studies confirm.
  4. Positive self talk: it doesn’t matter what others think of you, but what you think of yourself certainly does. Are you confident enough with yourself?
  5. Consistency: to maintain a top position you have to work harder.
  6. Asking for help: when you ask people for advice, you validate their intelligence or expertise, which makes you more likely to win them over.
  7. Shut up, if needed, but also listen
  8. Listening: along with shutting up comes listening
  9. Mind your business: it will take time, but will surely help the atmosphere at work.
  10. And finally master your thoughts, directing them to what you want to do and accomplish.

Read the full article: the 10 tips

 

Image source: Flickr – Raul Pacheco-Vega (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

10 Tips to Survive Going Back to Work After a Holiday

26/08/2020 /

Going back to work after holidays can be very difficult. Most people get what is known as the post-holiday blues, while others suffer from anxiety at the thought of having to return to their work. It’s been scientifically proven that getting back into our routine can lead to sluggishness and demotivation.

To help you out, this article offers a list of 10 tips that can help you deal with the post-holiday blues:

1. Embrace the Blues: The first step to dealing with this rather grey mood is to embrace it. Understand that it’s okay to feel sad and accept that the first couple of days back in your daily routine will be difficult.

Image source: Pixabay

An easy hack to put your smartphone away

04/03/2020 /

Smartphones are great. They connect us to the world, they allow us to find any information at any time, in any place, they help us find the best services available around us and they can also be a creative outlet. 

Smartphones are also overwhelming. They have brought us to fill every single moment of our life. Whether we’re scrolling the screen or listening through our earphones, there is always a flow of information streaming through our brains. This has terrible consequences on our physical and mental health. We’re more prone to burnout, to excessive levels of stress and to overwhelm. Our brains don’t have any more time to process what we’re feeding them. They don’t have time to elaborate, create and simply be.

The author of this article suggests an easy (and trendy) way to put your smartphone away: buy a fanny pack!

 

smartphone use

Picture: CC0 – Creative Commons  – Unsplash

 

The Bus Metaphor

22/01/2020 /

The right people in the right seats on the bus: this is the metaphor from the first Jim Collins best-seller ‘Good to Great’. In that book – published in 2001 – the author identifies what leaders need to do, in order to see their teams and organizations excel. And he uses the power of an image to communicate the following concept.

According to Collins, leaders who are able to transform their organizations begin not by setting a direction, but by getting the right people on the bus – and the wrong people off the bus.

Actually great leaders understand the following three simple truths:

1. If you begin with “who,” rather than “what”, you can more easily adapt to a changing world.

2. If you have the right people on the bus, the problem of how to motivate and manage people largely goes away, because they will be self-motivated by the inner drive to produce the best results and to be part of creating something great.

3. If you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won’t have a great company.

Assembling the team is the first crucial point. Then a leader has to develop a vision (the direction of the bus), to remove obstacles to high performance (that is, maybe people are not exactly in the right seats and need to be assigned to the right role) and to help people with diverse talents and interests building trust in each other.

It is an hard work, but leaders need it to accomplish objectives with the right people.

The right people in the right seats on the bus

Image source: Flickr

Discover what is the value of time

08/01/2020 /

What is the value of time? Imagine there is a bank that credits your account each morning with $ 86,400. It carries over no balance from day to day. Every night, it deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to use. What would you do? Draw out every cent every day, of course.

However, each of us has such a bank, not in dollars but in TIME. So this is the value of time. Every morning, it credits you 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off as lost whatever you have failed to invest to good purpose. There is no balance, no overdraft. If you fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss if yours.

There is no going back. There is no drawing against “tomorrow”. You must live in the present on today’s deposit.

The clock is running. Make the most of today.

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present !

(Thanks to Ed Gelbstein for this contribution)

 

The value of time

Image Source: Unsplash – Rula Sibai – (CC0 1.0)

5 tips for Working from home

27/11/2019 /

The number of people wornking from home continues to rise. Technology continues to bridge the gap between face-to-face and virtual work environments and organizations are increasingly focused on getting results from their workforce and not just hours of employment. Employees are also seeking these unconventional work arrangements as a means to greater work-life satisfaction.

The dream of working from home, however, can quickly become a nightmare if you aren’t prepared for such an isolated and unstructured environment. This article provides five skills that may help working from home:

1. Self-Discipline: the most important skill is to be able to resist the numerous distractions vying for your attention. Those who work from home must create a work schedule that is aligned with their physical and mental energy, and seek to stay on that schedule as much as possible.

2. Flexibility: While a rigid schedule is necessary to give structure to your day, don’t be afraid to rearrange your day when necessary.

3. An Outcomes-Oriented Approach: The danger when working from home is that you might get several non-work tasks done during the day and give yourself a false sense of accomplishment. When starting each morning, clearly identify what you’re going to create or develop before the day is over.

4. Critical Thinking: When working at home you’ll need to be able to think creatively on your own. Set aside time to think.

5. Effective Communication Skills: Make it a habit to reach out to others on your team to discuss and seek answers when needed. Utilize different types of technology (e.g., Skype, join.me) to collaborate and work with team members.

Image: Pixabay – Pexels (CC Creative Commons)

When to be fast, when to be slow

04/09/2019 /

In this very interesting article, we are told that “Most of life is better lived slowly.” Strange, isn’t it? In a world where we are always rushing, always thinking of the next task at hand, always engaged in some project, the idea of taking things slow has become almost impossible to visualise.

Yet many actions we do daily, from basic ones like washing the dishes, to more important ones like making decisions, would be much better off if done slowly and mindfully.

The author says we should behave like the Kung Fu Master: he is fast when needed, but the rest of the time he moves slowly and stays calm.

Life is already short, we are better off enjoying every moment of it.

Read the article here: Be Fast When It Matters

fu-3624167_1920

Source: Pixabay CC0

Top Productivity Secrets – Master Class

26/06/2019 /

Productivity is probably one of the most commonly used words today.

All of us are looking for ways to improve, increase, hack or boost our productivity, whether that may be in the workplace or overall lives.

Articles are constantly being published and appearing on our newsfeeds on the latest secret to increasing our productivity.

Yet in all this mayhem we can end up feeling overwhelmed, not knowing which tips to implement. And we end up not doing anything at all.

In this free Masterclass, Niklas Goeke provides actionable tips that we can adopt in our everyday lives to improve our productivity without having to turn everything upside down. It’s all about small steps!

Click here to sign up to the Master Class (did I mention it is free?): Master Productivity – 14 Day Course

home-office-336378_1920

Image: Pixabay (CC0 – Creative Commons)

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