Eliminating the Major Time-Wasters in Your Day

Eliminating the Major Time-Wasters in Your Day

What's sucking up your time and not getting you anywhere, and what can you do about it? (C) 2015 Laura Stack, All Rights Reserved. www.TheProductivityPro.com … [Read more...]

I’ll Pat Your Back

When you’re part of a team, each person impacts your productivity and contributes to how quickly or slowly things get done. When others are late in getting answers to you, you’re late in producing the final product. When you’re relying on your coworkers to review a document before proceeding, a month can go by before you have everyone’s input. It’s in your best interest to help your team members speed up and get things done more quickly, so you can produce better results, in less time, with less frustration. I learned this streamlining lesson from a flight attendant, who taught me a lesson in steamrolling obstacles. As a professional speaker, travel is a job hazard; I fly over 100,000 miles each year on United. I travel so much that sometimes I have to wait until the USA Today gets … [Read more...]

Increasing Productivity: I spend waaaaay too much time on…

I Spend Waaaaay Too Much Time on

I asked readers to fill in the blank on our last monthly survey and received some great responses.  There were tons of interesting answers, but it didn’t take long to start seeing some patterns.  Read on for the seven most common responses (and what you can do about them). 1. E-mail.  Let’s face it.  E-mail can be a phenomenal productivity tool, but it will eat your day alive if you let it.  Lots of people complain that their overflowing inbox is beyond their control, but here are three steps you CAN take to start getting a handle on it right away: Do you keep one eye on your inbox all day long?  What does that do to your productivity?  If you drop everything and attend to every e-mail that comes in throughout the day, you are derailing your productivity, over and over again.  Not … [Read more...]

Leave Your Name and Number at the Beep

It happens all the time.  You just want to get some brief information to someone but when you call you get sucked into a long conversation.  Sometimes you don't WANT the person to answer their phone – you just want to leave a voicemail.  It’s nice to catch up, but what if you just need to pass on some information and get to the next task?   Well friends, someone has come up with a solution for this problem!  Check out www.slydial.com. It lets you just leave a message – simple as that.  It is a free service, and they do offer some premium services for a fee.  It is well worth checking out.  While on the subject of voice mail - here’s a quick tip.  Before making a call, jot down the bullet points you want to cover.  This way you have an outline for the call, or if you do get voice mail you … [Read more...]

Time Keeps on Ticking: Log it!

We’ve all been there at some point—you look back on the week or the month—feeling that too much has been left undone.  You say to yourself, “Where did the time go?” It’s a common lament.  If this sounds like you, it might be useful to try a time log for a week to discover your patterns.  Time logs can help uncover wasted time that can be turned into productive time.  They can also show you when you tend to be most productive, so you can organize your days to take full advantage of those productive times.  You’ll quickly so who is interrupting you the most.  You’ll discover your bad habits and see where you let pleasurable activities take over high-priority tasks. There are numerous logging software tools available for download on the internet. These can be useful for those who spend their … [Read more...]