Productivity Keynote Speaker Leadership, Sales, & Team Productivity Expert
Maximum Results. Minimum Time.®
303-471-7401

You are here: Home / Archives for Performance

Five Ways to Use Procrastination to Your Benefit: A Counterintuitive Productivity Method

Posted on 08/08/2016 by ·
Five Ways to Use Procrastination to Your Benefit: A Counterintuitive Productivity Method by Laura Stack

"Procrastination is a way of giving yourself permission not to do a perfect job, because usually a perfect job isn't required."—John Perry, American philosopher and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. In the late Robert Parker's Spenser mysteries, the main character's girlfriend, psychologist Susan Silverman, had an unusual way of ensuring her productivity: she deliberately made herself late for everything. Whether she had to meet a student in need of guidance or prepare for a class, she ignored the time she'd set to begin preparing, literally waiting until the last minute—and beyond—to get to work. Then she accelerated into a whirlwind of efficiency to ensure she arrived in time and turned in her maximum effort. Some people find this actually works for them in real life; … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Personal Productivity · Tagged: ,

Email Time Saving Tip

Posted on 08/03/2016 by ·

[TRANSCRIPT] So, part of the mindset that you have to get out of is that email have to be living in your inbox in order for you to do something with them. And by the way, you are all looking at me like deer in the headlights. Yes, your email program does this! Most people’s email training was, “Here’s your inbox—go.” If you spend some time understanding how to use the tools that are right in front of you, you’ll save a tremendous amount of time. Okay, back to the demo. After we do this task and mark it complete—oooh that feels good—it comes off your task list. If you ever want to see any of your completed tasks, you can view those. This is something we could easily dig into for a half day. The critical point to remember is you must pull the action out of the email and turn it into a task. … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Performance · Tagged: , ,

Announcing a Rare Public Seminar LIVE with Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro® on 11/2!

Posted on 07/27/2016 by ·

At The Productivity Pro, Inc., we average 100 emails a year asking, “When is Laura going to be presenting a seminar in my city?” On November 2, 2016, Laura Stack is presenting a half-day intensive open-enrollment workshop in Parker, CO, so here’s your chance to hear her latest thinking—even if you have to fly to Denver for the event! It will be another couple years before this opportunity is available again. DATE: Wednesday, November 2, 2016 TIME: Registration at 8:30 AM and Seminar from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM LOCATION: The PACE Center, 20000 Pikes Peak Ave., Parker, CO 80138 INVESTMENT: $199 (includes detailed workbook). Coffee will be served. SEMINAR: Workflow Mastery: Organize Your Time, Tasks, and Inbox with Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro CLICK HERE TO REGISTER … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Personal Productivity · Tagged: , , ,

Toward Greater Decentralization: Results from the 2015 American Time Use Survey

Posted on 07/25/2016 by ·
Toward Greater Decentralization: Results from the 2015 American Time Use Survey

"38 percent of workers in management, business, and financial operations occupations, and 35 percent of those employed in professional and related occupations, did some or all of their work from home on days they worked."—2015 American Time Use Survey, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Recently, I've written quite a bit about the trend toward workplace decentralization, which I expect to accelerate in the future. Interestingly, that's also the trend most publicized by the authors of the 2015 American Time Use Survey in their June 2016 press release. In 2015, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics interviewed 10,900 Americans from all walks of life for the American Time Use Survey. ( … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Performance · Tagged: , ,

The Power Of A Daily 1 Percent Improvement

Posted on 07/20/2016 by ·

TRANSCRIPT But, imagine the power if every single person woke up every day and said "what could I do to be one percent better today?" You would roughly double your ability every 70 days. Think about that. Think about the power of how that would compound. It can be something little. It can be saying you know what? Today, I’m going to pick up the phone instead of send an email. Today, that typical one hour meeting, we are going to reduce that to forty five minutes. Today, I’m going to learn a new function in my software that I don’t already know. Today, I’m going to sit down and talk to a coworker about a process that is making me crazy. Today, I’m going to think if I were the queen of the word and king of the world if I could make up some rules about how we can use email around here more … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Performance · Tagged: ,

Five Ways to Serenity: How to Dial Down Work Stress and Boost Your Performance

Posted on 07/18/2016 by ·
Five Ways to Serenity: How to Dial Down Work Stress and Boost Your Performance

"The time to relax is when you don't have time for it."–Sydney J. Harris, American journalist. Despite the many arguments to the contrary, stress isn't necessarily bad for you. A little stress forces you to get off your duff and try to improve your life. Every good thing that humans have accomplished—from starting fires, to figuring out how to break rocks to make stone tools, to traveling to the moon—has been triggered by a form of stress, whether environmental, physical, or mental. Psychologist call positive stress eustress. What really hurts us is strain: too much stress forced on us too quickly for too long, without let-up. That's what causes people to break. This does not mean, however, you should invite stress when you can avoid it, or take on more stress just for your own good. … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Performance · Tagged: , ,

Focus On The Things That Drive Your Company

Posted on 07/14/2016 by ·

TRANSCRIPT We had the leadership team, we only had about twelve people in there and the CFO got to talking about their expense report process. And he was explaining how they've got this all automated, and they can scan the receipts and they file their own expense reports and he was talking about how he was very proud of the fact that he did his expense reports and how efficiently he had his travel and I'm thinking. You're the CFO, they're paying you how much? This guy was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and he's filing his expense reports and booking his own travel. So he realized after that "you know that's probably a fifteen or twenty dollar type of activity isn't it?" and there's been a kind of a throw back. I have seen a resurgence, a resurrection of the … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Leadership & Teamwork, Performance · Tagged: ,

Five Ways to Tap into the Psychological State of Flow: How to Get into the Zone and Stay There

Posted on 07/11/2016 by ·
Tap Into State Of Flow

"It is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were."— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Hungarian psychologist. Have you ever gotten into a project so deeply and focused on it so intently, that you looked up to discover several hours had passed? You accomplished a great deal, and the time seemed to fairly fly by. We even have sayings about this phenomenon: "Time flies when you're having fun," and "I'm on a roll." But psychologists don't take such occurrences lightly. They've put a lot of time and effort into studying this occurrence and have a name for it: "the state of flow." When you achieve a state of flow, skill merges with practice and preparation in an almost magical way. (<---Click to Tweet) … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Performance · Tagged: , ,

The Increasing Demands Of Work

Posted on 07/06/2016 by ·

TRANSCRIPT The bar keeps going up. Customers are more demanding, we found that out. Your internal customers are a little more demanding now. Remember when we were in hotel rooms and there didn’t used to be coffee makers. Do you remember those days? Remember the first time you went to a hotel room and there was a coffee maker! I remember the first time this happened to me. I didn’t even drink coffee but I made it because it was so cool. Look at that, coffee. Now, if you go to a hotel today, and there is not a coffee maker, now what do you think? What is wrong with this place? I can’t believe they don’t have a coffee maker. So, the bar used to be here, no coffee maker. And, then you got a coffee maker. What’s this called? Perceived satisfaction. Now, here’s the bar, coffee maker. You go … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Business Productivity · Tagged: ,

Five Reasons to Set Impossible Goals: Don’t Be Afraid to Push Yourself Too Hard

Posted on 07/04/2016 by ·
Five Reasons to Set Impossible Goals by Laura Stack #productivity

"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible."— Sir Arthur C. Clarke, British science and science fiction writer. If you never dare to dream the impossible dream, you'll never know how much you can achieve. We all know this in our hearts, but many of us never apply it to our work lives. There's a saying that goals are just dreams with deadlines; so why should you ever hesitate to set impossible goals?  (<-- Click to Tweet.) No matter how impossible they may seem, goals offer solid targets for you to shoot at. They also stitch together intention, planning, ability, talent, execution, process, teamwork and more into a fabric of productivity you can constantly and consistently tweak higher, through the application of more and newer … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Business Productivity, Leadership & Teamwork · Tagged: , ,