Mark Shead's articles

Many people just let their career "happen" to them. People who really get ahead usually take a much more proactive approach and intentionally manage their career. In this post, we want to look at some things you can do to plan ahead. 1. Keep in contact What you know is important, but whom you know may determine what opportunities present themselves. The whole idea of applying for a job where no one knows you is pretty antiquated. Yes, I know people still get jobs that way, but as the world becomes more interconnected, it is becoming more and more important to "know someone who knows someone" where you want to get a job. How many people have you worked with in the past that you … [Read more...] about Tips to Manage Your Career

Being productive shouldn't be about just spending more time working. Productivity involves accomplishing more for each minute of work. Let's say you can do 100 units of work in 8 hours, so to get more done you work for 16 hours and accomplish 160 units of work. Have you become more productive? Not really. Imagine that you were being paid $100 per hour. So for 8 hours, you were paid $800 for 100 units of work or $8 per unit. At 16 hours, you were paid $1600 for 160 units of work or $10 per unit. Someone paying you on the outside would quickly notice that your productivity lessened because it cost them more money per unit of work accomplished. However, since most of us don't pay ourselves an … [Read more...] about Sleep More–Do More

I lived in Michigan for the first half of the 2000s and saw a lot of people who had lost their jobs in the auto industry. What was sad is that the layoffs weren't much of a surprise to people looking in from the outside, but they were often very surprising for the people who lost their jobs. The thing is, those people were probably in a better position to understand what was happening than anyone else. It is very easy to overlook what today tells you about tomorrow when you are right in the middle of things. This post is an attempt to look at how work is likely to change in the future. Regardless of how accurate my predictions prove to be, the real value from this post is probably going … [Read more...] about Future Work

1. Banking and Bills My bank recently added the ability to deposit checks by taking a picture of them in their Android application. This saves me time, makes sure that my checks don't get lost in the mail and simplifies the deposit process. 2. Reading I'm still a big fan of physical books, but having a few books on my phone means that I can do something useful when I have an unexpected delay waiting for someone. I also use it to read to my kids at night because I can turn off the room light and still read the screen. With the light off they go to sleep faster. Recently we read Around The World In 80 Days and Black Beauty. We are currently reading Journey To The Center Of The Earth. … [Read more...] about 5 Ways My Phone Makes Me More Productive

In my last post, I talked about two experiments that showed how the expectations of teachers can make kids get better grades and how the expectations of scientists can make rats do better on mazes. My point was that if you aren't paying attention to how people perceive you, chances are you will fall short of your full potential. In this post, I want to look at three things you can do to manage how others perceive you and how you can influence their expectations. 1. Under promise / Over deliver CEO Craig needs two projects done by two of his direct reports. He asks Tom when he can expect Project T to be finished. Tom says he will have it done by Friday of next week. He asks Vick for the … [Read more...] about Managing Expectations and Perceptions

Let me start this post by telling you about two experiments. The first experiment involved rats. Scientists were given two sets of rats. One set had been "genetically modified" to increase their intelligence. The scientists were asked to test the rats to determine how much smarter the "super rats" actually were. In the second experiment, elementary school teachers were given two lists of their students. One list had all the students that were "gifted." The other list had the name of all the students that were just average. In both of these experiments, the thing that was being tested was not rats nor the children, but the perception of the scientists/teachers. In both cases, the … [Read more...] about Two Important Experiments

Regardless of what you call it, everyone knows what it is like to work in the "zone." It is the place in which everything comes together easily. You are focused, and sometimes it is easy to spend several hours without realizing the time is passing. Being in the "zone" is what you experience when you see that it is 3pm, you've been working since 9am and didn't even realize you missed lunch. So how do you create that mental zone? We asked a number of highly productive people: What method do you use to keep yourself in your most productive mental zone? One of the interesting things that stood out from everyone's answers was that "the zone" means different things to different people. I … [Read more...] about Interview: Productive Mental Zone

I asked a number of productive people the question: How do you use planning to increase your productivity? One thing that stuck out to me after reading all the answers is that planning is really the act of making decisions together, in a batch, ahead of time. Instead of making a bunch of little decisions as to what you are going to do throughout the day, you make decisions at least about the important things all at once when you are viewing your day, week, etc. as a whole. This lets you decide what you want to accomplish while looking at the 50,000 foot level instead of having your perspective influenced by the small stresses of your daily work. At least that is what I took away … [Read more...] about Interview: Increasing Productivity

For this post I sent out a questionnaire to a number of people asking about their single best tip for avoiding distractions. Most everything suggested falls into two categories: Controlling your mind Controlling your environment Obviously, controlling your environment is just another way of controlling your mind. What I liked best about reading all these suggestions is the number of different ways people have for creating a distraction-free work experience. Read on. I'm sure you'll find a number of tips that will help you be more productive. Make it difficult to be distracted. Turn off notification sounds and indicators on email, social media, etc. If your corporate culture … [Read more...] about Interview: Avoiding Distractions

Most people are familiar with the basic idea behind bill payment systems, but if you've never used one, you may not be familiar with the ways it can save you time. Even if you've used the bill payment system from your bank for years, you might not be familiar with all the features that are available from other institutions. The goal of this post is to look at some features and capabilities of bill payment systems and how these things can help make you more productive. For people that aren't familiar with bill payment systems, here is how they work. When you need to pay someone, you log in to your bank or bill payment system website, tell it who you want to pay, and send the payment. If … [Read more...] about Bill Payment Features

Moving from paper-based documents to paperless documents can offer a number of benefits. In addition to saving physical space, paperless documents are easier to search and to share. Paperless documents also don't have the same type of physical limitations of paper and enable workflow solutions that simply aren't possible with physical copies. For example, multiple people can view a paperless document simultaneously, while a single paper copy can only be viewed by a handful of people at the same time and everyone must be in the same room together. There are all kinds of different ways to create and manage paperless documents. It can be as simple as scanning in a sheet of paper and putting … [Read more...] about Paperless Document Formats

In this article we are going to talk about networking. Specifically, we want to look at how to "ping" people. I believe the term "ping" comes from the excellent book Never Eat Alone. A ping is defined as a small action that keeps the relationship with someone in your network alive. First let's talk about the benefits of pinging your network of contacts, then we'll look at how to actually do it. Benefits of Pinging Our brains organize information in a very efficient way. Imagine that our memories are a bunch of envelopes in a pile. The size of the envelope corresponds to the emotion associated with that memory. So you can easily retrieve the memory of your first kiss no matter how long … [Read more...] about The Art of Pinging

As video conferencing becomes more and more common, I thought it might be useful to talk about how to best configure your computer for doing video chats. Audio Is King The most important part of a video conference is not the video...it is the audio. This may seem unintuitive, but there have been some experiments done where people were asked to rate the quality of short videos. The videos that had good audio were consistently rated better than the ones with poor audio--regardless of the quality of the visuals. We are programmed to skip over blips and problems with video, but audio issues stand out. Make sure you have a good headset microphone and that your connection is fast enough … [Read more...] about Tips for Video Conferencing

5 to 10 years ago, managing your finances meant buying Quicken or Microsoft Money and dedicating a great deal of time to entering in all of your expenses. If you ran a small business, you probably looked at purchasing Quickbooks to track everything. While those are all great products, there are a number of free options that do a great job of integrating with your banks to reduce the amount of time you have to spend manually entering things. I know I'd much rather spend my time looking at my finances instead of putting all my effort into just entering in data. These four web applications are all designed to save you time and increase your productivity when it comes to financial … [Read more...] about Productive Apps for Managing Money

Chances are you have a smart phone, but does it actually make you more productive? In other words, do you have more free time and less stress because you have a smart phone than you'd have with a standard "dumb" phone? If not, you should probably rethink how you use it. Just because you can use a smart phone for something doesn't mean it is productive. In fact, smart phones will give you the capability of doing things that are extremely unproductive. If you aren't careful, you can end up worse off. So what are smart phones good for? Handheld mobile devices are great for filling in small gaps of time. If you have a 3 minute wait at the post office, you probably aren't going to drag your … [Read more...] about Productive Smart Phone

Are you having a difficult time coming up with a gift for that highly productive person on your list? Here are some suggestions: Extra Power Adapters Taking your power adapter out of the bag, crawling around under the desk to plug it in, then reversing the process at the end of the day just isn't fun or efficient. You can eliminate those problems from someone's life by getting them an extra laptop power adapter so they can leave one at their desk and one at home or in their computer bag. Related gift ideas include an extra wall adapter or car adapter for cell phones, an extra iPad charger, etc. More Computer Memory My mom has an older laptop and at one point, it was becoming so … [Read more...] about Gifts for Highly Productive People

There are hundreds and thousands of devices, apps and systems that promise to make you more productive. If you spend all your time looking for the perfect set of tools, you'll never get anything done. In this article, I want to look at one useful way to quickly evaluate tools to help avoid ones that promise to make you more efficient, but don't in actual practice. I used to work as the network administrator for two hospitals and a bunch of clinics. When I started, there were very few actual computers in use. All of the medical systems were accessed with dumb terminals and pretty much everything was done from text screens using the keyboard and arrow keys to navigate. Even when … [Read more...] about Integration vs. Features

I think it is interesting that many of the people most focused on productivity work for someone else. Why? Because even if you are well paid, you are always going to make less than the value you create. For one thing, salary ranges are very rarely tied to pure performance. If you work with 10 people who all do the same thing, it wouldn't be surprising if the top performer is 10 times more productive than the worst. However, it would be very surprising if the top performer were paid 10 times the salary of the lowest. The other reason that wide variance in performance doesn't translate into wide variance in pay is because jobs are designed in order to make a position replaceable. That … [Read more...] about Productivity and Self-Employment

Most people will agree that it is good to read, but not all reading is equal. Some people get a tremendous amount out of their reading and others get very little. Here are some tips for making your time spent reading as productive as possible. 1. Take notes. Even if you never refer to your notes again, the process of taking notes helps you sort out what you feel is important and will help you remember it. You'll have to choose between pixels or paper for your notes. Using something like Evernote or DevonTHINK will make it easy to find your notes later by subject or search. On the other hand, many people feel they recall information better when they had to write it by hand the "old … [Read more...] about Tips for Productive Reading

I used to drive an old white Jeep Cherokee and I kept forgetting to put the gas cap back on and close the gas door. (Fortunately, I always remembered to take the nozzle out of the truck and put it back on the pump.) I'd drive away from the gas station with the gas door hanging open and wouldn't notice until I parked and headed into my office. Finally I made a very simple change to my gas getting routine. Instead of putting the gas cap on the little slot on the gas door, I started putting it on the pump where the gas nozzle rests. When I finished and put the nozzle back on the gas pump, I'd have to pick up the cap. Once it was in my hand, it was hard to forget to replace it and shut the gas … [Read more...] about Powerful Routines

My biggest productivity tip is very simple. It isn't a fancy application for your computer. It isn't a complicated process. It is very basic and very easy. Here it is: At the beginning of the day, take out a blank piece of paper and place it in the center of your desk. At the top write the three most important things you want to accomplish for the day. These are the three tasks that are important enough that their completion will allow you to declare the day a success--regardless of what else gets done. That is it. It is simple and easy to do, but if you follow that advice you'll find your productivity will skyrocket. Your day is like a jar that you are trying to fill with three large … [Read more...] about Single Biggest Productivity Tip

If you work in an office, you probably deal with interruptions. Now, not all interruptions are bad--the whole point of working in an office with other people is so that interactions can occur. However, it is possible to get into a situation where your entire day is spent dealing with interruptions. If you need to cut down on the interruptions in your life, consider some of these methods. 1. No seating If you have your own office, you might consider getting rid of the extra chairs. People are less likely to come in and stay for a long period of time if you don't have a place to sit. You can keep a fold-up chair in a closet or behind your desk for situations where it is needed. 2. … [Read more...] about Interruption Prevention Strategies

Poor organization is one of the biggest productivity killers. When you can't find a tool you need or have to sort through a pile of outdated papers to find the one you are looking for, it slows you down and eats up valuable minutes that could be spent on something more important. In this post, we are going to look at some simple things you can do to help make your life more productive by organizing specific areas. Most of these are things where 15 minutes of focused effort will go a long way toward saving you hours in the future. 1. Clean out your closet You've probably heard the saying, "You can't see the forest for all of the trees." A similar, but less popular quotation is "You … [Read more...] about Simple Time Savings Investments

Summer is ending and students are headed back to school. But what if you are past college age, replete with family responsibilities, holding down a full time job, and still feel like some additional training would improve your career? Thanks to the Internet, there are all kinds of options for getting a degree while keeping your current job and still making it to your kid's baseball games. I recently completed an online master's degree in software engineering through Harvard's Extension School, and I can definitely say that in a world where you have to constantly retrain yourself with new skills, online education is the future. Most online degrees give you some flexibility regarding … [Read more...] about Going Back to College

With students all headed back to school, it is a good time to look at some ways to get the most out of college. College is a fascinating place and most people won't fully appreciate all the opportunities they were given until years later. With that in mind, here are some tips for students wanting to get the most out of their college experience. 1. Networking A large part of the value of a college education is the people you meet, but to really take advantage of that you are going to have to intentionally network with people. Don't be the person who sees every person as a potential "networking" opportunity, but do be someone who is friendly and keeps in touch. Facebook and LinkedIn … [Read more...] about Getting the Most out of College

Back in Mozart's day, music was a rare thing. If you had an opportunity to hear good music, it was a special treat and something you'd definitely want to take advantage of. Now days, music can be found everywhere. People listen to it while working, while driving, while exercising. Music can put you to sleep at night and wake you up in the morning. With access to music everywhere, the hard part is deciding what you are not going to listen to because there are just so many options. It wasn't that long ago that books were a rare treasure. They were difficult and expensive to produce. Even after the invention of the printing press, there was limited choice on what was available to read. … [Read more...] about Becoming Selective

I've been writing some posts for Manilla and they asked me if I'd be interested in working with them on an iPad contest giveaway for Father's day. The long legal rules are here, but here is how it works in a nutshell. Once a day from now until the day after Father's Day I'm going to tweet a question from @Productivity501 tagged with #manilladad. Tweet back an answer (also tagged with #manilladad, so we can track the answers) and you will be entered in the contest. It doesn't get much simpler than that. Manilla is going to handle contacting the winner, etc. If you want all the legal details, check them out here. Hope to see  your answers on Twitter! … [Read more...] about Father’s Day iPad Giveaway