The Productivity Pro(R) Blog - Time Management and Productivity Tips » increasing productivity

Increasing Productivity: Great Personal Productivity Podcasts

LauraStack — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:34:11 +0000

” Remember self-help tapes? You used to throw them into your car [stereo] or Walkman when you were going on a lengthy trip so you could ‘grow on the go’ and hope to return home all the better for it… Well, podcasts that discuss various aspects of productivity very well could be the evolution of those self-help tapes.” — Mike Vardy, Stepcase Lifehack.

“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.” — Paul J. Meyer, American motivational speaker.

“None of the world’s problems will have a solution until the world’s individuals become thoroughly self-educated.” — R. Buckminster Fuller, American author, designer, and inventor.

From a productivity standpoint, the relentless march of technology allows for all sorts of new opportunities for self-education. And make no mistake: you have an obligation to constantly hone your personal productivity skills, lest you find yourself suddenly overwhelmed by your workload as it evolves to meet ever-changing workplace conditions.

Fortunately, productivity training can be as simple as sitting around and listening to other people talk—which brings us to the topic of productivity podcasts. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, you can acquire a whole host of these simple audio presentations for free, and with very little effort. Some focus on specific professions, from the creative arts to software development; but many handle general productivity topics, often in gratifying detail. A good podcast can last anywhere from a few minutes to over an hour, making them perfect for filling up your downtime gaps or drive time that you might otherwise waste. Just download them to your MP3 player, and off you go!

A quick Google search will net dozens of these little productivity programs, whereupon the problem becomes which of the many to spend your limited time listening to. Luckily, you’ve got me to round ‘em up for you. In this exciting entry, I’ll give you the scoop on five productivity podcasts I believe you’ll find both enlightening and educational.

43Folders Podcast
Although the entries appear very irregularly and it hasn’t updated in a while, Merlin Mann’s 43Folders podcast is both helpful and fun. But this podcast goes beyond mere infotainment, because while he’s a pleasure to listen to, Mann’s recommendations have a lot of merit—and he uses them personally in his self-described quest to help you “[find] the time and attention to do your best creative work.” If nothing else, Mann’s exuberance can be infectious, stirring you on to greater workplace productivity.

Accidental Creative Podcast
Todd Henry, the author of The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant on a Moment’s Notice, helms this info-packed podcast. Henry posts new episodes about twice a month, and while he doesn’t joke around as much as Merlin Mann, he’s a vibrant speaker, interesting to listen to, and manages to snag some pretty good productivity experts as guest stars. In recent months, Noah Scalin, Michael Bungay Stanier, and Mark McGuinness have made guest appearances.

The Productivity Show
This Australian-based podcast starts from a Getting Things Done perspective, but ranges widely over the entire productivity field. It draws its guests from a variety of endeavors, including popular music, and often focuses on specialty software products designed to boost productivity. There’s a two-year gap between the last two podcasts in the series, but as of August 2011 the host, Tony Goodman, appears to be back in the saddle; and in any case, the archives make for fascinating listening.

Back to Work Podcast
For those who’d like more Merlin Mann (and prefer to get your fixes more regularly), I recommend Back to Work, which Mann hosts with a fellow named Dan Benjamin. These two enjoy great chemistry, and spend their podcasts exploring topics like personal limits, communication, and solving workplace problems in a chatty conversational style. But beware: these ‘casts often last an hour or more, so they don’t lend themselves to filling small pieces of downtime; they require a bit more investment.

Get-It-Done Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips
Stever Robbin’s brief productivity tidbits offer a sharp contrast to the Back To Work crew’s lengthier discussions. They rarely clock more than five minutes, making them just right for listening to while standing in line at the pharmacy or waiting for the traffic light to change. Robbins comes across as witty and interesting, and his to-the-point, time-saving tips make a lot of sense.

Bottom Line
Aside from staving off boredom, these and other podcasts will keep you thinking and questioning what you already know and do, making them valuable tools for refining your workplace productivity schema. It takes just a minute or two to download the individual ‘casts, and if you’ve got an iPod, you can subscribe to many of them via iTunes. So why not embrace this opportunity to better yourself?

Increasing Productivity: Telecommuting and Your Family and Friends

LauraStack — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:40:53 +0000

In this month’s newsletter article, Telecommuting: Creating a Productive Home Working Environment, I discussed some ways of keeping your home office productive. Here are a few more thoughts I’d like to share.

Although telecommuting has many advantages, it does have its challenges. One of the greatest lies in getting your family, friends, and neighbors to take your work habits seriously. They may (at least subconsciously) assume that just because you’re home all day, you’re not really working—and so you can do anything for them at any time. Allowing them to continue to think this way will play havoc with your personal productivity, so nip such tendencies in the bud right away.

Let’s look at friends and neighbors first. While some may respect your work schedule, others won’t think twice about interrupting you to chat or ask a favor—something they probably wouldn’t do if you were slaving away in your cubicle over at HQ. When it happens, politely but firmly point out that you’ve set specific work hours for yourself, and that you need to focus on work during that time and can’t afford any interruptions. Make it clear, however, that you welcome their visits at any other time (if in fact you do). While some people may think you’re a jerk, you can live with that if they’ll just leave you alone. Most, however, will get the point and back off graciously.

With family, just sit down with everyone and lay down the law about when, and under what circumstances, they can disturb you. If you don’t, they’re likely to trample down the borders between your work life and home life so badly they’ll cease to exist. The worst culprits here may not be your children, surprisingly, but your significant other. I know one worker who had to give up his first attempt at telecommuting, because his spouse always had chores for him to do and errands for him to run—reasoning that, after all, he had all day to get in his eight hours. That’s a recipe for disaster, and in fact it killed his productivity at work. He ended up going back to his traditional office after a few weeks, so he could get more done.

Many would-be telecommuters actually hurt their own workplace productivity by assuming they can combine telework with child care. This simply doesn’t work in most cases, because both efforts require focus and commitment—and no one can really focus on two things at once, as much as we might want to. If you have young kids at home, even for part of the day, send them to day care or hire someone to look after them, so you can get your work done. Your kids may not understand, but it’s best for everyone involved.

Productivity Minute Video: No Nosing In on Family Time

A Fun Little Tool for Increasing Productivity

LauraStack — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 07:35:30 +0000

It’s frustrating to want to print from a website when the formatting doesn’t work. It’s inefficient to try to copy and paste into another document to print. I found a useful little tool on the web that makes it easy to print from websites, so I wanted to share it with all of you! Check out PrintFriendly when you need to print from a website. It allows you to see a preview of how your printed page would look, and also allows you to print as a PDF. Just enter in the url you want to print from:

Click “Print Preview” to see what your page will look like, then select Print or PDF and you’re all set!

Increases efficiency, saves ink, and saves time. Very handy!

Increasing Productivity: HR’s Strategic Role in Improving Workforce Productivity

LauraStack — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 17:19:23 +0000

Please join me on August 31 for a special audio conference through the Workplace Training Center. The topic is HR’s Strategic Role in Improving Workforce Productivity: Working with Your Managers to Create High-Performing Employees
Employees are expected to be competent. But the really successful employees are SUPER competent—the ones that companies fight to get, fight to keep, nurture and develop, and see as future leaders in their business growth. How do you know who the “A” players are?

HR professionals are in a unique position to work with managers to identify productive employees and help them become even greater performers. Using a model that assesses engagement and performance of each employee, HR professionals can work with managers on improving individual employee productivity.

Sign up today to hear some of the best advice, tips and techniques from The Productivity Pro Laura Stack, best known for the business classic Leave the Office Earlier,as well as other titles, such as SuperCompetent: The Six Keys to Perform at Your Productive Best and What to Do When There’s Too Much to Do (coming out in April 2012).

Learning Objectives:
•Do you know how to increase headcount without increasing salary expense?
•Manage the 2 critical dimensions of productivity impact
•Find out what factors impact an employee’s experience and ability to perform
•Uncover the 5 productivity personalities your employees will exhibit
•Help employees perform at higher levels and foster an environment of excellence
•Discover 6 keys to gaining peak performance from your employees

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LauraStack — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 18:32:20 +0000

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LauraStack — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 15:30:42 +0000

Increasing Productivity: Five Things to Do at Work Every Day to Boost Productivity

LauraStack — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:50:31 +0000

“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.” — Paul J. Meyer, American businessman

“There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back.” — Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, authors of Peopleware.

“Putting off an easy thing makes it hard. Putting off a hard thing makes it impossible.” George Claude Lorimer, American pastor

Are you working at your maximum level of productivity?
That’s a question some people don’t like to hear; they get all prickly if you even suggest that they’re doing less than their best at all times. But as a productivity expert, I know how easy it is to get overwhelmed by minutiae. It happens to the best of us.

I imagine you’ve probably already adopted the big productivity solutions, and that’s great. But there are plenty of less obvious ways to boost your productivity, and they can be easy to miss. So today, let’s take a look at five simple things you should do every day at work.

Keep it Neat
We’ve all heard the story of the Tortoise and the Hare. Well, here’s a twist: they decide to have a cooking contest, Iron Chef-style. Hare rushes through his recipes and doesn’t worry about the mess, while Tortoise is careful and cleans up as he goes. So Hare races ahead, at first…but then his messiness starts hurting him. He runs out of mixing bowls, and has to wash dirty ones as he needs them. He can’t remember where he put the salt; he slips on oil he’s dribbled on the floor; and he’s so busy trying to catch up with the little things that he lets his side dish burn. Ultimately, he can’t finish everything he wanted to prepare…while plodding old Tortoise, who washed his dishes and put his spices away immediately after using them, wins the race again.

The lesson here is obvious: instead of letting a mess pile up and then taking time out to clean and organize all at once, organize as you go. Put your files and tools back where they belong as soon as you use them. If you drop something, pick it up. If you use up something, replace it. It doesn’t take long—and you don’t have to come to a screeching halt later because you can’t find what you need, or because you tripped on your stapler and sprained your ankle.

Stay Hydrated
Dehydration is a sneaky productivity stealer that can make you sick, affect your judgment, and lower your IQ. It’s surprisingly easy to become dehydrated, too, because you may not ever feel thirsty.

The culprit here is usually caffeinated beverages. Caffeine is a diuretic, so even if you drink coffee or sodas constantly, you can still take a hit from dehydration. Plain water is the best preventative. If you’re not proactive about drinking it consistently and often throughout the day, you’re likely to pay for it with decreased productivity.

Stop Being Such a Perfectionist
Some things require a high level of quality—final reports, presentations, and the like—but most tasks simply don’t. If you feel compelled to get everything right from the word go, all you’ll do is get stuck in the paralysis of analysis, and you may never really get started. That’s a colossal waste of time.

For mundane tasks, just do the best you can within a reasonable amount of time. Set practical deadlines for yourself, realizing that you have to stop somewhere so that you can move on to other tasks. And instead of agonizing over every last detail, give yourself permission to be imperfect; you are, after all, only human.

Quit Procrastinating
We all have things we put off, typically because we dislike those tasks, or we’re afraid of failure, or we don’t know where to start, or we’re paralyzed by perfectionism, or…well, there are a hundred excuses, all as valid as the next. But none of them will help you get your work done.

You have to dismiss those concerns entirely and get busy. How do you do that? By letting go of perfectionism, by eliminating distractions and interruptions in your environment, and by strategizing—that is, by figuring out how you can break down that task into discrete, manageable chunks, each with their own milestones and deadlines. Then get to work.

Visualize Success
I’m not a big fan of “The Secret,” which I feel depends a bit too much on happy thoughts. By definition, true productivity—and the success it brings—requires action, not just meditation.

That said, I do believe that there are times when visualization is a valid tool for boosting productivity. For example, it can’t hurt to spend a little time every evening thinking about what you need to get done the next day and how you’ll go about it, and then reiterating that process in the morning before you start working. This can help you burst through any lack of motivation and uncertainty, especially if you can demonstrate to yourself, based on previous performance, that you’re up to the task.

When you’re stuck or can’t seem to stop procrastinating, take a minute to visualize the outcome of accomplishing your task, and how well you’ll feel when you do. Then think about how what will happen if you don’t accomplish that task. I much prefer positive motivation, but negative motivation can spur productivity when nothing else works!

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