January 25th, 2012 by Amy Thomas
I have been a PC user for the majority of my working life. I have become increasingly familiar with all the usuals – Outlook, Excel, and Word. I could not have done the majority of work in my career without having a PC. Or so I thought…
Once I converted to the iPhone, though, I started to become more and more of an Apple “convert”. The Mac Book Pros were looking better and better to me for everything that we would want to do at home with our children and personal life. So we bit the bullet, dug into our wallets and got a Mac. My first thought was this is crazy, how am I supposed to do work at home with a Mac? My software program, SalesDoc Architect, is completely run on a Windows platform.
But it was such a nice computer and custom built that it was now ours. For six months it sat in my office, used only for occasional internet surfing and downloading pictures. I continued to stick with what I knew and kept using my slow, somewhat archaic Lenovo Thinkpad…until the day that we all dread finally happened. I went to log in from home to do some work on Thinkpad and…nothing. Dead as can be. So now what??? Read the rest of this entry »
January 14th, 2009 by Brian Cors
Most people view “procrastination” as a negative term. Usually, the word is used to describe the act of delaying or deferring to another day an action that should be accomplished today.
But in many cases, procrastination can actually be a good thing
How many times have you delayed taking action on something, only to discover at a later date that the action has taken care of itself or is no longer necessary? What appears to be urgent today often takes on a less urgent priority with the passage of time.
In fact, procrastination – when properly practiced – can help us to differentiate between what’s important (and maybe not so urgent) and what’s urgent (but not so important). Often, our perspective of the importance of completing a task changes after we’ve set the task aside to “percolate,” allowing us to view the task more objectively within the context of our entire task list.
Below are some thoughts about how you can use procrastination to your advantage.
Read the rest of this entry »
December 19th, 2008 by Brian Cors
Everybody has a different approach to keeping track of all of the tasks that they need to accomplish, projects they need to manage and people with whom they need to follow up.
In the old days, the only choices available to us were paper-based. The best systems out there were from Day-Timers and Franklin-Covey, and they helped you to organize yourself by encouraging you to group items into different categories that were separated out into different pages. They worked well, but the planners themselves were somewhat bulky and it was a laborious process to carry forward and reorganize your tasks as you went along.
Today, we have numerous options to electronically manage our tasks. Yet very few people systematically use electronic task management tools. The most widely-used tool is Outlook, which enables you to add tasks to its task management database, then filter and sort those tasks by due date, category (if you assign one) or other criteria. To me, this approach quickly becomes overwhelming as the tasks begin to mount, and re-prioritizing and re-dating the tasks within Outlook is a time-consuming process.
Read the rest of this entry »
November 10th, 2008 by Brian Cors
The cost of cyber-threats such as viruses, spyware and phishing schemes is truly staggering. The Consumer Reports National Research Center estimates that 1 in 4 people have encountered a major virus attack, resulting in an average cost of $109 per incident and a nationwide cost of $5.2 billion in total damage. Spam, spyware ($2.6 billion in estimated damage) and phishing schemes ($630 million in estimated damage) have also caused tremendous financial and productivity losses.
There are a variety of measures that everyone should take to protect themselves from cyber-attacks…
Read the rest of this entry »
October 28th, 2008 by Brian Cors
A few weeks ago, Jeffrey Zaslow published an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal that discussed two ways that people handle their email inboxes. There are the hoarders – those who keep every email that they’ve ever been sent – and the deleters, who religiously clean out their email inboxes and delete as many emails as they possibly can (then go back to the hoarders if they need to reference an email from the past).
Jeffrey’s original article hypothesized that your email inbox strategy reflects who you are and how you handle the rest of your life. He surmises that if you’re a hoarder, then probably you’re a hoarder and untidy in other parts of your life.
Read the rest of this entry »
October 2nd, 2008 by Brian Cors
For the past few months, I’ve been looking for a web-based calendar-sharing service that makes it easier to coordinate schedules with others. I also needed this service to be able to synchronize with Microsoft Outlook and my Palm Treo.
After months of searching, I’ve finally found a service called AirSet (www.airset.com) that meets these needs and works great. It’s also free (AirSet makes their money by extending the AirSet functionality to cell phones).
Read the rest of this entry »
September 19th, 2008 by Brian Cors
About a year ago, I purchased a Palm Treo 650 with the hope that the device would not only combine my cell phone, calendar, contact list and email inbox into a single device, but that it would allow these elements to interact in ways not possible with separate devices.
I haven’t been disappointed.
In particular, I like the way I can search through my entire list of contacts to find and dial the person I’d like to call. I also like the way that the Treo uses the phone number of an incoming call to look up and display the name of the contact who is calling, enabling me to decide which calls to answer and which calls to send to voicemail.
The Treo 650 uses the Palm operating system. Relative to what I’ve seen and read about with regard to Windows-based Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), the Palm operating system is much simpler to use and requires fewer stylus taps to accomplish the same tasks.
Read the rest of this entry »
September 6th, 2008 by Brian Cors
As I stood in a very long line on a recent Saturday at CostCo to return a faulty monitor that I had purchased there, I thought to myself: what a waste of time. I had picked the busiest day of the week to visit CostCo and, as a result, I was spending a significant amount of time simply waiting.
Obviously, I was not optimizing my time and my day.
Fast forward to a few days later. It’s mid-afternoon – the time of day when I’m least effective with sit-still “thinking” activities – and I’m trying to write an article for The Productivity Edge, but my mind keeps drifting and I can’t seem to produce meaningful prose with any efficiency. It’s taking me twice as long as it normally does to write the article.
Once again, I was not making the most effective and efficient use of my time.
Sound familiar? Without proper planning and discipline, it’s easy to fall into traps whereby you are not fully optimizing your time, talents and energy. The pressure in today’s society to do it now, have it now and have it all exacerbates the situation. By planning ahead and rationing our impulsive urges, we are better able to optimize our limited time and energy on a daily basis.
Here are some suggestions to help you optimize your time and energy…
Read the rest of this entry »
May 25th, 2008 by Brian Cors
Are you stuck in a creative rut, either as an individual or as a team? Does your linear thinking stifle your capability to come up with breakthrough ideas?
Unleash your creativity using a concept called “mind mapping.” Around since the 1960s, the concept of mind mapping utilizes several elements within the brain to stimulate more creative thinking. Mind maps combine words, images, colors, numbers, logic and graphical relationships to encourage non-linear, visual approaches to thinking and solving problems. The Mind Map Book by Tony and Barry Buzan (see our review) explains the scientific reasoning behind the approach, and provides examples of how mind mapping can be used for different purposes.
Until a few years ago, mind mapping was just a curiosity to me. For those (like me) who are artistically challenged, a graphical approach to thinking presents some challenges when those graphics must be hand-drawn. Moreover, hand drawings are very difficult to modify; adding content to a mind map generally requires squeezing in the new information using teeny-tiny print. Finally, for a person like me who likes to store (and back up) every piece of information electronically, hand-drawn mind maps don’t fit well into my filing methodology.
MindManager – developed by a company called Mindjet – eliminates all of the shortcomings of hand-drawn mind maps, and provides capabilities that extend mind mapping way beyond what could be done by hand.
Read the rest of this entry »
May 12th, 2008 by Brian Cors
In its March 20, 2006 issue, Fortune magazine interviewed several individuals renowned for their incredible productivity. Instead of focusing on productivity theories, the article’s authors spent significant time with each person to determine their day-to-day activities and how they really spent their time.
Each individual had their own approach to optimizing productivity and how they managed their day. I was able to read all of the profiles and glean good ideas from each of them. Some of the profiles also revealed bad productivity practices (in my opinion), but at least they allowed me to pick and choose what works for me.
What did they all have in common? As high-profile individuals, they are all over-saturated with information and requests for time. What differentiates them is their ability to focus on what’s important.
Some of the key highlights for me include the following:
- Meetings on a single-topic should be strictly limited to 90 minutes, with 50% of the time reserved for presentation and the rest for discussion (from Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Renault and Nissan).
- Determine the time of day when you do your best thinking and schedule that time to tackle activities requiring the heaviest-duty thinking (also from Carlos Ghosn).
Read the rest of this entry »
