Category: Productivity

Office meetings – how to do them right even without an office #HackYourMeeting

Yes, I hate them too. So let’s do them the best we can.

Meetings are viewed as a fundamental element of every team’s communication. Everyone likes meetings, right? Because what’s there to dislike?

Meetings have nothing but advantages!

  • As a meeting participant, you gain the time to pretend you’re working while stroking your boss’s ego and, in the meantime, checking your email or social media.
  • As the organizer of the meeting, you gain a convenient way to avoid responsibility for decision-making. Don’t know what to do? Call a meeting! Hand responsibility over to the group!
  • Meetings are a cure for everything – the lack of ideas, direction, strategy… And, of course, they help build and strengthen the “team spirit.” Because frequent meetings are what makes a good team, right?
  • In addition, organizing meetings is easy – all you have to do is go through the company calendar in Google Calendar or Outlook and, as soon as you spot an empty time slot, fill it up! Add a meeting, invite all the “important” people, making sure no one is left out… or else they might feel offended!

Source: Office meetings – how to do them right even without an office

How to work from home effectively – the best tips

It’s been well over a year and the likelihood is that we’ll still be working from home for a while yet. Rather than just making do perhaps it’s time to think how best to organise ourselves for this.

Nozbe — to-do, task, project and time management application

Nozbe have some thoughts:

At Nozbe, we all work from home on a regular basis. We don’t have a physical office at all. Throughout all these #nooffice years, we’ve learned how to be the most productive while working remotely.

Work-from-home as the ultimate solution

Companies across the world are already encouraging more and more people to work from home. Businesses’ and employees’ daily routines don’t have to be hindered by switching to a home office system. Working from home in many cases can be even more effective than working in a shared office space, where people often work in noisy, open spaces and are constantly interrupted.

Our best tips for working from home

Here are our top guidelines for working from home and making the most of it.

Source: How to work from home effectively – the best tips

How to stop procrastination – BBC Science Focus Magazine

Sorry. I meant to post this last week.

You’re procrastinating right now, aren’t you? Don’t worry, we’re not judging. But we are here to tell you that you’re not alone: an estimated 20 per cent of adults (and above 50 per cent of students) regularly procrastinate.

In fact, procrastination – defined as voluntarily and unnecessarily delaying a task – is so widespread that scientists have even found evidence of the behaviour in pigeons.

So, why do so many people procrastinate? What causes it? And, most importantly, how can you stop procrastinating?

Procrastination Cycle (Procrastination, and how to beat it)

Source: How to stop procrastination, explained by a psychologist – BBC Science Focus Magazine

Top 20 Microsoft Word Tips and Tricks for 2021 // All the features you didn’t know existed! – #MIEexpert

A step-by-step tutorial on Mike Tholfsen’s top 20 tips and tricks for Microsoft Word. He covers many of the new Microsoft Word features that have come out in 2019, 2020 and 2021.

This is not your parents’ Word! These Microsoft Word tips and tricks include our new features based on AI and inclusive features like Editor, Dictation, Immersive Reader, Translation, and many more.

Use these MS Word tips to improve your productivity!

Tips from Google’s resilience expert on avoiding burnout

Helpful advice for these difficult times.

A college soccer player, Lauren Whitt was sidelined by two knee injuries that took her off the field during her sophomore and junior year. This was incredibly frustrating — she’d played soccer most of her life and had even won a Pan-American gold medal with the U.S. Youth National Soccer team. She realized she was going to need to find a way to cope.

“I began to study the idea of resilience more,” Lauren says. “How it changes your body and your life. It sort of became my personal mission.” A few years later, it became the subject for her doctoral dissertation — today, it’s the focus of her work.

Lauren is the head of global resilience at Google, a job that’s been crucial this last year. Even as vaccines become available, so many stressors remain: Searches for the term “pandemic fatigue” increased more than 300% during the past month in the U.S., and “job burnout quiz” was a breakout search over the past three months. These things are exactly what Lauren hopes to alleviate through her programs that help Googlers build resilience, deal with stress and develop skills to tackle new challenges.

But resilience isn’t only about helping people cope with the negative; it’s also about giving them more room to experience the positive. Lauren wants to help Googlers feel creative and productive so they can thrive at work. “I’m so passionate about this work because I think that while I’m not personally making something that launches us all into the future, I can help the people at Google who are doing that be their best.”

Source: Tips from Google’s resilience expert on avoiding burnout

The Importance of Scheduling Nothing

This is published on a Friday and that’s a great day to go to your calendar, find some free time, and schedule some reflective time.

If you were to see my calendar, you’d probably notice a host of time slots greyed out but with no indication of what’s going on. There is no problem with my Outlook or printer. The grey sections reflect “buffers,” or time periods I’ve purposely kept clear of meetings.

In aggregate, I schedule between 90 minutes and two hours of these buffers every day broken down into 30- to 90-minute blocks. Its a system I developed over the last several years in response to a schedule that was becoming so jammed with back-to-back meetings that I had little time left to process what was going on around me or just think.

At first, these buffers felt like indulgences. I could have been using the time to catch up on meetings I had pushed out or said “no” to. But over time I realized not only were these breaks important, they were absolutely necessary in order for me to do my job.

Heres why:

via The Importance of Scheduling Nothing | LinkedIn.