We’ll soon be into the new year and, as always, a new year brings us to wanting to better ourselves. Have you noticed that your facial expression or slumped shoulders have made you feel less than powerful? I have and know from experience that improving body positions and posture can make a huge difference. On that note, I want to share with you 7 Body Positions and Gestures that Can Improve Productivity. Who doesn’t want to feel better and be more productive, right? Have a wonderful time ringing in the new year and I’ll see you in 2015!
I’ve been thinking about how to gain momentum on certain projects and to even start on others. Paul Taubman of I Need Help with WordPress wrote a post on Building Your Business on Just 15 Minutes a Day that piqued my interest. I know I can carve out 15 minutes to work on something I truly want to do. And as Paul says: He’s got some great tips on making sure those minutes are used productively as well. It’s worth the read.
I’m lost without my phone. It’s not because of the constant connectivity, or social media – those are simply nice side benefits. The real reason is because it helps me remember so much stuff. Much of that, is captured using the phone’s camera. So what can you use your phone camera for? Try these: 1. Save Business Cards I like getting business cards because often, the information on them is not on people’s websites. Like their direct phone number, and mailing address. What’s not so fun is what to do with them after. Too often, I come home from an event with stacks of cards that stay on my desk. Eventually, they irk me enough that I simply throw them away – bad idea. Until the camera. There are many apps you can get now that will grab data from those cards and enter them into your contact list. 2. Scan Text Borrow books from the library? Save those golden nuggets, by using an app to scan the text. This can then be exported into another application. 3. Deposit Checks Many banks and financial institutions allow you to do this through their app now. I still get some affiliate payments in
No matter what you throw at them, some people seem to have the super-human ability to get things done. Not only that, they get it done fast! How do they do that when you’re struggling to find your energy from day to day? The good news is – there is no super human powers involved. Instead, just some simple habits that you too can cultivate quickly. 1. Eat Well You are already aware that getting things done requires energy. Thankfully, you can be in complete control of this. Cut out sugar laden food. Learn to choose and enjoy healthful, balanced meals. And get plenty of water. You’ll feel a big difference immediately, helps you be more alert, focused and able to get through your to-do list faster and precisely. 2. Shut The Door If your home office is in a room, make liberal use of the door. Make it clear to your family, when the door is closed, you are not to be disturbed – at all. Unplug the phone, silence your cell phone. Consider a do-not-disturb sign. If you don’t have the luxury of a home office, consider a noise reduction earmuff and tell your family when these headphones
My learning library is overflowing with videos, audios, audiobooks and more. The need to consume knowledge is real but who has time to sit around to watch and listen? It’s no secret. I leverage my workout time to gain back hours of my day. I’m still doing it. This is how I consume Coach Glue’s Sticky Passive Income course. It’s worked very well. What has not worked out well, is the hardware. You see, I have wired headsets. If you’ve ever done this yourself, you know it’s super easy to catch your hand on the cord while you’re walking or running. Thankfully I have not broken the iPad nor hurt myself all this time. I’ve been looking for the perfect wireless headset for a long time but they are either too expensive or just not very good. The answer came to me one day not in the form of a headset (surprise!) but a dongle, by NoiseHush. This device is a tiny thing – see picture below. It is bluetooth. That means, I first have to set it up to connect to the iPad. You can also connect to the iPhone, or Android device. Once connected, plug in your favorite headset into
Doesn’t Facebook and productivity sound like an oxymoron? Most people don’t go to Facebook to be productive. As us who are in business, the mere mention of Facebook sometimes mean hours of time suck with little or no rewards. Ah, but I beg to differ! Like the in real life, Facebook is about the company you keep. I’m in a few high quality groups where excellent resources are shared on a daily basis. Some help me hone my coding skills and others have information I would like to return to for a later project. There’s certainly some good stuff on Facebook and it can also be a time suck. Here are some things I’ve discovered to help me do, get in and out quickly until I’m ready to unwind. Bookmarking Posts Facebook doesn’t have a favorite or bookmark feature but guess what? Each post has its own URL. That means you can bookmark it. On the post you’d like to save, look for the date it was posted or how many hours ago the post was published. This is usually on the top right next to the photo. Click that and it’ll be taken to a page displaying this post and its
Ever seen a store you want to go back to but never remember where it is? Quick tip: Next time you are at that location, make a note of it in Evernote. In my case, it wasn’t a store. Like most people, there are things around the office and home we no longer use. Since they are in good condition, donating these items would be a good thing overall. There are donation drop boxes all over our area. You see them all the time when you’re out and about. That’s why it never occurred to me, I’d not be able to find one when I needed to. Murphy’s Law always proves me wrong. One day, I had packed my truck full with items to donate but could not find one where I thought it was. I rode around town looking too, without luck. That’s when it struck me. Next time I see one of those boxes, just take a snapshot and save its location into Evernote. This way, I can also write a note about the item and tag them to be easily found. When you create location based notes, Evernote can show you where those notes are made on a
Years ago, I worked for a paint company as marketing exec. In my office is a huge blue binder packed with nothing but corporate representation design details. It had a page detailing how the logo should be drawn, the height to width ratio and how it should be represented in black and white and color. On another page, there were Pantone and CMYK color codes for print. The web wasn’t big yet then or I’m sure they’d include that. Following that page, there were also more pages with perforated cards with color on one side and color codes on the other. You were supposed to tear these out to give to anyone you work with – printers, ad agencies, gift item people, t-shirt printers. And of course, being a paint company we even had pieces of metal painted in corporate colors with the exact mix to enter in the color mixing machine. I. LOVED. THIS. BINDER! It was my to go for everything and made my job so much easier. When I started designing websites, I quickly discovered key things that are always needed when working on a site such as… General opt-in form code Logo color codes Key website
During our productivity hangout, and an earlier post about health, I talked about how listening to podcasts at 1.5x to 2x speeds made me skinnier, healthier and a whole lot smarter. Personally, I enjoy the benefits of the acquired knowledge much more than the weight loss but the latter certainly helps boost confidence. Enough of that and let’s get on to the meat. Usually, playing Youtube videos are never an issue because I have a nifty app on the iPad it is called Swift Player. I can easily download or bookmark any video (or audio) on the Internet, even those purchased and locked behind membership sites into the app then play them at double speeds. However, once in a blue moon, I find myself on the computer and need to watch these videos quickly. It seems to me like the old Youtube used to have the option to have an option but it isn’t there anymore. With HTML5 all the rage, there has got to be a way. Then I found the secret link to turn it on. Here are the steps you need to make Youtube faster: 1. Visit the Youtube HTML5 Trial page. 2. Click the Join HTML5
We all have humongous projects that make us cringe and prefer to shove aside. “It’s just too large to think about now.” We keep saying that everyday and before you know it, months or years have passed. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. Ask any doer and they will tell you, all you need to do is chunk it down. That’s how you eat an elephant, one bite at a time. Break the project up into small steps. That is perfectly sound advice but I think it needs to go deeper. It needs to be broken down – ironically. Here’s what I mean. My coach advised me to create videos for each product on a site. My immediate reaction was OK! I can do that. However, when I sat down to do it, I realized I had 12 of them to do and if you’ve ever created videos you know it’s not something you can whip up in 5 minutes. You need to script it, get your copy down pat if you are selling something, then you rehearse. You prepare your materials – slides if you are going that route. Even if you do a talking head video, you have
