Archives for 2015

Becoming a smarter person is obviously a good way to get more done. However, we live with a bit of a myth that what we are born with is what we are stuck with when it comes to raw brain power. There are all kinds of aspects to this, but for today, I want to focus on one interesting experiment that involves mice. With two young kids, my family and I like to spend a lot of time at zoos. When we travel, we'll often try to visit the local zoo. If you've been to a zoo recently, you've probably noticed all kinds of strange things in with the animals. The elephants have colorful balls and even a car tire. The monkeys have plastic toys for toddlers. Even the otters have a pool of bubble bath … [Read more...] about Becoming Smarter and More Productive

1. Label Everything Make sure your cell phone, laptop, luggage, etc. have your name and contact information on them somewhere. If you accidentally leave your phone in a cab or a bag on a plane, you have a much greater chance of getting it back if people can tell to whom it belongs. For luggage, I like using engraved metal pet tags. If you look around, you can find them on the Internet for $2 or less. They are durable and won't rip or tear. If you get the "dog tag" style, they look more like a luggage tag and a bit less like something you'd expect to see on a dog or cat collar. 2. Plan for Taxi and Shuttles If you are going to need to take a taxi from the airport, it can be helpful … [Read more...] about Tips for Travel

In this post, we are going to talk about several ways to make your computer run faster. I've seen a lot of people buy a new computer when their old one was perfectly adequate, but had just gotten bogged down with too many things running at the same time. For your computer to make you productive, you want to reduce the amount of time you spend waiting on it to do something. Some of these tips can help. 1. Reboot regularly Some people leave their computer on for weeks at a time. The problem is that some programs will start other programs, and these don't always get shut down properly. They can consume memory or use the processor in ways that you might not expect. Doing a reboot will help … [Read more...] about Make Your Computer Faster

Whether you work from home or not, most people have some type of home office or place where they do work from home either for their employer or for themselves. In this post, we are going to look at five things to consider when designing your home office to maximize productivity. 1. Proximity Matters When you are designing a home office, make sure you put things that you need often near where you need them. For example, if you want to get better about shredding documents with sensitive information on them, don't put your shredder across the room or in the closet. It needs to be out where you can easily get to it. The more effort it takes to do something, the less often you will want to … [Read more...] about 5 Tips for a Productive Home Office

On a recent trip to Philadelphia, I was struck by how much paperless functionality is available in modern cell phones. The two things that appear to be driving this change are: Cameras built into every phone Constant network connectivity Let me walk you through a small portion of my recent trip to give you some examples of what I'm talking about. With a 6 am flight, we arrived the night before at a hotel near the airport. I had all of my reservation information in an email Gmail on my Android Nexus S phone so I didn't have to print it out ahead of time. Before going to bed, I confirmed the flight time on my phone, also using Gmail's search capability. In the morning, we used … [Read more...] about Mobile Paperless

When it comes to what you accomplish in life, how can you be extraordinary? In this post we are going to look at some habits and traits of people who get an incredible amount accomplished. 1. Perseverance What often separates "good" from "great" is the ability to push just a little harder, to try a few more times, and not to give up just a little longer. If 99% of people will give up after trying something 99 different ways, trying it one more time may very likely put you in the 1% that get extraordinary results. I've been in a lot of situations where my success had nothing to do with being skillful and everything to do with being stubborn. Years ago, I worked in the IT department … [Read more...] about Being Extraordinary

We have a large yard that takes a long time to mow. By large, I mean over two acres. By "long time" I mean three to five hours with our three-blade riding mower. This spring I found myself very short on time and went ahead and made an investment in finding someone who could mow it for me. It took a little while to find someone. The first guy that was recommended to us made it clear that he wanted to be paid in cash in order to avoid losing his disability benefits and his pricing seemed more like rolling the dice instead of somehow relating to the size of the job. Finally we found someone who seemed like they would do a good job. He just finished a few hours ago. I'm very pleased with the way … [Read more...] about Delegating and Outsourcing

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