Successful people don't trade personal satisfaction for professional achievement. They know high performance depends on both. You work hard all day at work and then go home —to the second shift —the one you don't get paid for. To avoid the peaks and valleys of productivity created by balancing the urgent demands of work and personal life, professionals must be able to balance both without sacrificing either. When you discover the right mix of time and accomplishment in both arenas, you'll rediscover vision, vitality, and meaning in your life!

The most effective time management system in the world won't do a thing to improve your productivity if you can't focus on one thing. For many of us, the problem isn't a lack of willpower; it's the ability to refuse distractions caused by other people, the environment, and your mind. With noise, interruptions, people, and instant messages, so many things compete for our attention that it's often very difficult to concentrate. This seminar will improve your ability stay on target and focus on the task at hand.

Do you ever feel like you're doing things the hard way? That it takes you twice as long as it should to complete a task? If you ever say to yourself, "There HAS to be a better way to do this," then this class is for you. Learn the skills of efficiency, and you'll spend less time working and will get things done more quickly, with less effort.

If you keep more than a screen shot of email in your in-box, you need this program! Email has become the productivity bane of modern corporate employees, the ball-and-chain that keeps them stuck at their desks for hours every day. They wade around, desperately trying to sort, respond to, and organize messages. Pending items fall through the cracks. Email for long-term projects sit in the inbox and collect dust. Employees hit "Reply to All" to 17 people and create hundreds of "Me too!" responses that add nothing to the conversation and waste everyone's time. ENOUGH! Take this course and get and stay on top of your email, once and for all.

How much energy and vitality do you have throughout the day to accomplish the things you want to do? It's hard to be productive when you just want to put your head down on your desk and take a nap. You have the potential to dramatically impact your productivity by paying closer attention to your energy behaviors. You'll learn the factors that contribute to low energy (the "energy bandits") and how to reduce their effects. Then you'll build up and renew sources of positive force (with "energy boosters"). This seminar will guide you in making the changes necessary to give you vitality and productivity every day!

Without Making Them Hate You or Quit. If a mountain of deadlines and a staff that surfs the Internet for pleasure is keeping you awake at night, bring Laura in for guidance. Good leaders understand that time management is not about squeezing more into the day; it's about you and your people spending time productively toward the accomplishment of organizational goals. Managing the clock isn't the answer —teaching employees to manage themselves is. This innovative program discusses three key time management principles for leaders: (1) avoiding organizational "speed bumps," (2) eliminating activities that waste people's time, and (3) modeling effective time management behavior.

Do you get 100 emails every day? Do you feel like you're slowly drowning in a sea of paper? Does the sight of your messy office and overflowing email in-box frustrate you? Then this course is for you! You may work hard. But if you're disorganized, every step is a struggle. In this age of downsizing and a do-more-with-less mentality, efficiency is more important than ever before. This course will help staff members, professionals, and managers stay on top of it all. You will gain scores of new tips and techniques for bringing order into your life, both personally and professionally!

It takes a lot of work and discussion to get a team to function productively and effectively. Tapping a team's creative power can only happen when team members recognize and value each other's contributions and strengths. This course helps you realize the impact of your time management style and personality on others and relate positively as a team. During the program, the team will generate its own code of conduct to guide future relationships and behavior. Through fun team-building activities, they will leave with increased cohesiveness, cooperation, and trust.

We've become dependent upon computers, email, voicemail, the Internet, Blackberries, PDAs, cell phones, and pagers. These devices connect us to the world of work. Today, you must be technologically savvy. Technology can undoubtedly improve your productivity, but it can make you LESS productive if you're not careful. This seminar discusses how to use the latest technologies to your advantage, without letting technology take advantage of you.

Do you find yourself continually racing against time? Do you feel that you have so much to do that it's difficult to get anything done? Time management is much more complicated than making a list and checking things off. Managing time effectively is the key to managing your individual performance. Learn how to set priorities and focus on what's truly important, plan and schedule your day, and organize your calendar and tasks.

Laura will show-n-tell her favorite hardware, software, accessories, peripherals, gadgets, and websites that make her office hum like a well-oiled machine. Buy the right gadgets and software that save time, not waste it. Automate manual processes and be more efficient. Do things more quickly and tighten up processes. Discover websites and apps that will save you time and reduce keystrokes.

Are you slowly drowning in a sea of paper? Does the sight of your messy office frustrate you? If you're disorganized, your daily activities won’t run smoothly, and you won’t operate efficiently.  Entrepreneurs are so excited by the “fun” activities of their businesses that they dread doing the important foundational work, like setting up systems. You will learn what you’ll need to succeed in business:

Social networks and other social media tools are great resources but lousy masters. Social media can expand the reach of your organization, but it can make you LESS productive if you’re not careful. You could spend all day hopping around to different sites, updating your information, and connecting with people all over the world. But how does that add to your daily productivity? This course teaches you how to take advantage of social media, without it taking advantage of you. You’ll learn how to emphasize the positive aspects of social media without letting it kill your productivity.

This course is for anyone using social media in business, especially professionals in small or large corporations who use social media, including sales, marketing, branding, and PR;  first level supervisors, mid-level managers, and key executives who use social media at work to communicate with consumers, clients, vendors, and prospects; entrepreneurs and business owners who are creating networks for business and reputation building; and service firms, either in private or group practice, who face a need to build strong connections with prospective clients.

I fly over 100,000 miles a year on United Airlines.  It’s a job hazard as a professional speaker.  I dislike parts of it and enjoy others, such as working uninterrupted on a plane.  But my trips are made easier because I’m productive and organized.  I know not everyone has the natural ability to live out of a suitcase or do business from a laptop bag.  However, with a little practice, you can learn how to make the most of your travel time.  It’s amazing what you can get done when you put some miles between yourself and the usual distractions of everyday life. This webinar will share tips and tricks that will help you make the most of your time away. 

How many hours do you spend wading around in your email inbox each day? If you let yourself be chained down by your email instead of letting it help set you free, you're never likely to get much done. I will present my top best practices to take advantage of your email, without letting it take advantage of you. As a Microsoft Certified Application Specialist in Outlook, I will give the instructions in Outlook 2007. If you’re using a different email platform (such as Lotus or GroupWise), the principles remain the same. Learn how to keep the inbox empty; how to correctly poll a group of people on email; establish automatic follow up and reminder systems; automate manual actions and reuse your best information; create forms and templates that all employees can use…and much more.

Based on Laura's fourth, upcoming business book of the same title (Wiley, August 9, 2010), you’ll learn how to achieve peak performance in the workplace. The new mantra is "buckle down!" These times are about a return to quality rather than quantity—all of us must learn to be competent—and not just plain, old-fashioned competent, but SuperCompetent™.  In this competitive economy, just being able to do your job is no longer enough. Competence is expected; you’ve got to be SuperCompetent to get an edge. Whether you’re an employee, an entrepreneur, a team leader, or all of the above, SuperCompetent will give you proven methods to reach your and your team’s maximum potential and achieve breakthrough results. You’ll get to your productive best by mastering six keys to peak performance:

Using software to maintain your schedule can be extremely effective, but if you're not careful, it can turn into a real waste of time for both you and everyone else involved. Try to keep the following factors in mind when scheduling your day in Outlook, Lotus Notes, or GroupWise (demonstrated in Outlook).

The pressure on every aspect of a salesperson’s job has increased dramatically over the past few years.  Customers are more sophisticated, more demanding, and harder to see.  Really good salespeople are already good time managers.  However, all salespeople don’t focus on time management, because many traditional guidelines have little application for the salesperson.  This course offers salespeople realistic productivity strategies to help them sell more and be more effective creating and keeping customers.  Learn how to gain the competitive edge and make every second count! 

Whether you are remodeling your basement, coordinating a social event, or managing a new software release, the competencies and skills of project management are the same.  Everyone manages projects at least part-time.  In fact, many people in an organization simply pursue a number of projects as their job.  This course will help you carry out your projects productively with proper planning, scheduling, and monitoring.  The complex tools you’ve heard about in project management are refreshingly absent. 

Microsoft is admittedly the reining software powerhouse, but it insists on producing infinitely useful programs like Outlook, and then refining and broadening their capabilities in further releases. The 2010 version of Outlook is no exception. It's a big, complex program, but the new features in this version more than make up for the learning curve you'll have to face after you install it. One feature you'll recognize is the ribbon interface, which was used only in some Outlook windows back in the 2007 version; now it's all over the place. But that's not all that's changed! In this course, I'll introduce you to a wide variety of cool new tips and tricks you can exploit in Outlook, both when taking advantage of new features and when putting familiar features to work.

By the time you reach the upper tiers of management, you may think that you understand how to handle your time—but you'll soon realize that things look a little different from the C-Suite level than they did before. How you use your time, and who you give it too, undergoes significant changes. Priorities and responsibilities shift; sometimes subtly, often radically. While basic time management standards should still inform your approach to your job, the ante is higher now: your actions impact the organization in ways undreamt of before. More than ever, you have to focus on those high-value tasks that you do best, and leave everything else to others.

By Popular Demand: Time Management for High School and College Students. Both high school and college can, in their own ways, be as challenging as any job. So as you prepare yourself for your adult life, it's important to become well-grounded in one of the most significant aspects of any successful career: time management. Now, you can't really manage time—we all get the very same amount, no matter who we are—but you can manage how you respond to it, and you can certainly learn how to make the best use of the time you have. Not only will implementing these techniques help you do better in school while carving out more personal time for yourself, while you're still in school you'll have a test-bed where you can refine these methods in anticipation of the day when you step fully into the business world.

While it's great not to have to worry about the drama or indignities of the typical corporate job, the "solopreneur" faces certain difficulties that larger businesses don't—not least the fact that you have to wear all the hats at once. Obviously, that's not an impossible task; at last count, there were at least 20 million single-person businesses in the USA, accounting for a whopping 75% of all businesses. That does not, however, mean that it's easy. Running the show alone can be a real pain, much like juggling a dozen balls at once. But it can be done. If you're willing to put in a little effort, you can learn how to maximize your efficiency such that your solo effort is as efficient as any three-person business.

Dealing With Distractions and Interruptions: Strategies for Staying Focused on Important Tasks. More than ever, modern workers are bedeviled by distractions and interruptions that pull us away from the key activities of our jobs. If it's not your noisy office-mates, it's the siren song of the Internet, or an over-fascination with email. Therefore, it's imperative that you learn to trim your activities down to the bare necessities. Remember that you're in charge, not your technology; and stop making yourself available to all and sundry. You have to limit your attention to what's truly important, so that you can actually get your job done and become both the envy of your peers and the apple of your boss's eye. If you can do that, you can stop paying attention to work when the normal work day's over, and shift your attention to the other important parts of your life—especially family.

Too often, business travelers use their trips as opportunities to rest up for the next bit of work—but in the modern business world, that just doesn't cut it. The savvy worker doesn't waste travel time. Not only does she use travel opportunities to tidy up loose ends, she works to get ahead, so that she can finish up early and move on to other things. Sitting on the plane or in a hotel offers a unique opportunity to get work done with few distractions or interruptions. You should always be willing to take along a laptop, or at least a pile of paperwork that you can work through or read. Don't just listen to music or enjoy the latest by Grisham!

If you want to destroy worker initiative, blast a hole in productivity, and scribble the bottom line with red ink, there's no better way to do it than by micromanaging your employees. Not only does it waste your time, keeping your employees on a tight leash and constantly interrupting them ruins their ability to find thoughtful, profitable ways to do their jobs. If you're so distrustful of your employees that feel you have to keep an eye on them at all times, why did you hire them in the first place? The true leader quickly learns that the only way to get things done right is not to try to do everything yourself: true organization-wide productivity requires an engaged, informed workforce willing and eager to work toward the organization's mission and vision.

Assertiveness and Direct Communication: Your Wording Is a Critical Productivity Tool. Whether you're communicating with employees or superiors, say what you mean as directly as you can without being curt. Diffidence or timidity isn't going to get you anywhere, because it wastes time in a number of ways. So choose your words carefully. While there will always be some potential for confusion (we're only human, after all), solid, clear wording at all levels will ensure that such confusion is limited. Don't use a ten-dollar word when a nickel one will do; not only will people not have to waste time (and therefore productivity) trying to figure out what you're trying to say, they're less likely to mistake what you're trying to say. Again, mistakes waste time, so it's crucial to avoid as many as possible.

One of the chief bottlenecks of any workplace is what I call "dependencies": that is, having to wait for other people to do their jobs before you can move to the next step in your own workflow. Like it or not, you often have to depend on others for answers to questions, for approval or sign-off on work already done, for buy-in on projects or strategies, or simply to put work on your plate. Well, you can't just sit there and wait: in order to maximize productivity, you need to babysit both yourself and others to make sure that the workflow keeps moving along as it should. This requires you to create a "tickler" system that not only reminds you to track people down to give them the occasional nudge, but also ensures that you can track them down, no matter what.

Emergencies, Rush Jobs, and Unexpected Situations: How to Manage Crises Without Ruining Your Day. As much as we try to structure our work time, there's no scheduling the unexpected. The best that you can do with disruptions is to deal with them as they appear—or, in some cases, to learn to manage the people who cause them. If your boss insists that everything he gives you is top priority, then how do you decide which project is Priority One? That requires a different approach than determining how an urgent request for a report revision will fit into the work queue. Whatever the case, the real test of a work process is not how well it works when things are going smoothly; it's how well it performs when it's hit with unscheduled disruptions.

Given the recent online revolution, it's now both simple and cost-effective for some office workers to telecommute: that is, to work from home, setting foot in an office only when absolutely necessary. While many businesses are still resisting this option, others have begun to embrace it—and there's little doubt that the trend will continue. The benefits to both individual workers and businesses (if they're willing to realize them) are too positive to ignore, so you may very well end up working from home at some point, whether you initiate the change or your company does. Thus, it pays to learn how to create the most productive home working environment possible.

There's no way around it: in order to maximize your productivity, it's not always enough to just work smarter (despite the management cliché claiming otherwise). You may also have to work harder…and longer. In the modern high-pressure office environment, it's becoming common for the real go-getters to put in half again more hours than their 9-5 co-workers; and in many cases, it's becoming expected. The 40-hour workweek is more or less history. If you want to have a life outside of work -- or if you just want to survive that 60-hour work week -- then you need to buckle down and put some realistic goals and delimiters in place.

Make Yourself Do What You Need to Do, Even When You Don’t Feel Like It. Self-discipline refers to your ability to maintain consistent, productive behavior. Are you persistent in completing your high priority tasks, without getting sidelined by menial activities? Do you put your nose to the grindstone each day, or do you only work hard when you’re in the mood? Sure, everyone has an “off day.” But if you’re self-disciplined, you exhibit consistent focus in your day-to-day work, even if you don’t feel like it.

How Parents Can Help Their Children Get Organized: Teach Your Kids to Be Productive and Manage Their Time. Though much has changed in our children’s lives since we were their age, much has stayed the same. Our children deal with disorganized bedrooms, poor time management, lack of discipline, and stress.

Once you’ve set aside time to work on your key activities, you must focus on doing them. Here’s where the rubber hits the road and your nose hits the grindstone: you actually have to see a task through to completion! Concentration is a long-lost skill that separates the successful from the unsuccessful. Some people can’t stop the busyness long enough to work. No wonder they feel like there’s too much to do! Instead, focus, focus, focus. Laura’s special four-step focus process will help you stay focused, and you'll be amazed at what you can get done—and how good that will make you feel—when you actually see a single task through completion.