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Tackling your vastly over-filled Inbox can be as scary as ridding yourself of a ghost or poltergeist. You have probably noticed related behavior like: messages that suddenly disappear, attachments from strangers, e-mail that just sits in your Outbox, and spam that makes you feel as though if you inadvertently opened it, you would be covered in slime.
I’ll admit it. I’ve done some pretty time wasting things in the past. Most of these came from surrendering to the siren songs of thoroughness and efficiency. Doing things completely and quickly is a very desirable thing, unless it keeps us from seeing a way to do them more effectively. That was my experience with filing bills after paying them.
At one time, I would file bills by payee immediately after I paid them. This was efficient, but the time was not well spent since I almost never went back looking for the paid bills and would eventually have to handle them again when I ran out of storage space. I took myself to task for this when I realized that I could save a lot of time by putting all the paid bills for a time period in a box labeled with a beginning and ending date. Filing time dropped to almost zero, finding them again if I ever needed to was still pretty easy, and disposing of them when the time came was much quicker and easier. Soon my receipts were also going in the box.
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With all the talk of the recession and layoffs on nearly every news story available, I figured I would share some tips for you and your co-workers to help have a cumulative effect on the resources of your company.
What kind of impact can your little gestures really have on a company? I would say some, but not major, unless you get others involved. Think of it as your little penny savings plan.
Looking for easy ways to have a more positive impact on your enviroment while getting the needed materials for your office? When PC Helps opened its new office in Cleveland, OH we found more environmentally friendly workstations.
Here is a link to how we made an impact.
We would love to hear what your company is doing. Please leave us a comment.
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Often my wife, co-workers, and friends say that I have a really strange way of thinking and it is extremely difficult to follow the logic on the train wreck of thoughts running through my head. In fact, the most common expression I hear from people tends to be, “How did you get that when we started out with this?” To which I reply, “Do you really want to know how I started at A, then went to Z, then back to Y, on to 3 through 12, and finish on B and C?” Inevitably, after they ask the first time, they usually don’t ask again.
There is only one valid reason a business spends money and that is to make money. It is called ROI. Two significant expenses for most businesses are knowledge workers and the technologies to make them more productive. The ROI for computers, software and handheld devices is that they allow knowledge workers to do things more quickly, do things more effectively and do things they just couldn’t have done otherwise.
I found I was constantly irritated by clicking on short links in TweetDeck and not knowing where I might be headed. Yes I was transported more than once to somewhere I didn’t want to go.
Problem Solved! Found in the option for “Show preview information for short URLs”.
By turning on this feature not only could I see where I was headed, but found that my bit.ly links showed stats on how many click the link had (great for seeing if people are interested in your links).
Enjoy!
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So to start off this edition of the podcast, I want to first give you a definition of the word Group.
A Group as a noun is defined as:
I have spent the past few years watching my 6 year old develop social and learning skills and I’ve realized that there is some fundamental force in nature that compels everything, not just humans, to group and organize.
Many people associate the words “cold” and “efficiency,” but they haven’t met the Friendly Taskmaster. He reminds many of our staff of the best sports coaches they have had because of his unflagging enthusiasm for helping us perform better. Our staff thought his coaching would be helpful to you too and he was very happy to help. He offers productivity tips that won’t be like the treadmill that has ended up as a clothing rack. (more…)
What kind of iPhone app are you using to be more productive at work? Comment here or send us a message.