Are you working longer hours, attending more meetings, taking shorter vacations, answering more emails and eating lunch at your desk, if you eat lunch at all?
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Personal Productivity Advice for People who Work in Small to Mid-Size Organizations
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Bob Corlett
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Scooped by Bob Corlett onto Maximizing Your Productivity |
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"Hiring decisions have always been limited to a few imperfect factors, including what appears on a resume and what impression a candidate gives off in an informal interview. That's all changing... Using new tracking and analytic tools, researchers have learned to value things like adaptability, social and emotional intelligence, resilience, and friendliness, as well as raw intelligence."
Bob Corlett's insight:
This worthwhile article neatly debunks many hiring myths. Do grades and degrees and SAT scores predict success in most jobs? No. 
UUK L&D's curator insight,
May 22, 4:22 AM
Interesting article on the future (present?) of recruitment. On a personal level it's another good reason to be actively contributing online, as long as that doesn't mean photos of your Saturday night on facebook! Delete the scoop?
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The most extraordinary professional relationships are built by ordinary actions like these. 
Ivon Prefontaine's curator insight,
April 18, 7:24 PM
There are elements of serving, being mindful, and being present in building relationships. These people would be attentive to the needs of others. Delete the scoop?
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"... the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less. A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health" Delete the scoop?
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When I was younger I thought busy people were more important than everyone else. Otherwise why would they be so busy? I had busy bosses, busy parents, and always I just thought they must have reall...
Bob Corlett's insight:
Washington is obsessed with people trying to look important by being busy. But much of it is an illusion. Scott Berkun provides a healthy alternative approach. Delete the scoop?
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Using willpower to achieve goals may be futile without a clear picture of the future.
Bob Corlett's insight:
Want to make your New Years Resolutions stick? Check out this fascinating neuroscience research on what actually improves your willpower. Delete the scoop?
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Distraction at the office is hardly new, but as screens multiply and managers push frazzled workers to do more with less, businesses say the problem is worsening. Companies are experimenting with strategies to keep workers focused.
Bob Corlett's insight:
Businesses have praised workers for multitasking but that isn't necessarily a good thing, When you are focused on just a few things, you tend to solve problems faster. Delete the scoop?
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You wouldn’t deliberately dilute your own credibility. But it’s possible that some of your innocent behaviors are producing precisely that unintended consequence.Credibility problems can come in the form of trust busters. Delete the scoop?
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Eight out of ten employees now gulp a quick lunch at their desks, says a new survey. But not taking a breather during the day, even for just a few minutes, is a recipe for burnout. The paradox here is that by pushing people too hard, you actually make them less productive. But if employees learn to manage their energy better, partly by taking short respites from work throughout the day, they get far more done, and add much more value, in far less time. Delete the scoop?
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Procrastination is often what stands between you and the results you desire. Try this simple strategy to break free from it. Delete the scoop?
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Just how uneasy lies the head that wears the crown? Not so uneasy, it turns out.
A new study reveals that those who sit atop the nation's political, military, business and nonprofit organizations are actually pretty chill. Compared with people of similar age, gender and ethnicity who haven't made it to the top, leaders pronounced themselves less stressed and anxious. And their levels of cortisol, a hormone that circulates at high levels in the chronically stressed, told the same story. The source of the leaders' relative serenity was pretty simple: control. Delete the scoop?
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No matter how much you may hate it, negotiating is a critical skill. It is essential that you know the science behind negotiation skills and how they affect the other party's psyche. Based on psychological research, here are some negotiation tips that will help you to get what you want. Delete the scoop?
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In business, productivity doesn’t really have much to do with how often you’re working. It has to do with how often you’re finishing. In other words, the problem isn’t having multiple projects, the problem is having unfinished projects Delete the scoop?
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Is social media the future of work? A new report from McKinsey Global Institute makes the business case for social media. According to an analysis of 4,200 companies, social technologies stand to unlock from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value.
Right now, only five percent of all communications and content use in the U.S. happens on social networks, mainly in the form of content sharing and online socializing. But McKinsey analysts point out that almost any human interaction in the workplace can be "socialized"--endowed with the speed, scale, and disruptive economics of the Internet. Delete the scoop?
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I went through a number of great books on happiness and pulled together ten research-based tips that can help build a happier life. Delete the scoop?
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To say yes to the right things, you have to learn to say an effective no. Delete the scoop?
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If you think you're good at multitasking, you're probably just fooling yourself. That's the point of a new study in the journal PLOS One, showing that people who think they are awesome at multitasking are also the ones who are pretty terrible at it.
Bob Corlett's insight:
This is really bad news for me, because i love to mutlitask, so I must be lousy at it. 
Cynthia Kyriazis's curator insight,
February 1, 9:05 AM
If you're a multitasker, here's some interesting information ;) Delete the scoop?
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Most of us yearn for promotions, but we rarely think about improving our job performance. Georgetown professor Cal Newport suggest taking cues from elite athletes and musicians and deliberately set out to practice our work.
Bob Corlett's insight:
There’s a difference between doing things you already know how to do and doing things that force you to stretch and improve your skills. Psychology professor K. Anders Ericsson, a leader in this field, explains that to get better—and win the promotions and opportunities most of us dream about—we must set out to intentionally improve our performance. In studying why some people develop remarkable careers, this is a key unheralded distinction between the average knowledge worker and the stars at most companies: the former work hard while the latter systematically train hard skills. Ericsson called this type of structured activity deliberate practice, and in his decades of research on the topic he’s found it to be the key for expert performance in every field. Delete the scoop?
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Put an end to failed New Year's resolutions. The key to accomplishing a grand vision is to work your way there with small, manageable goals.
Bob Corlett's insight:
Collecting wins, no matter how small, can chemically wire you to move mountains by causing a repeated release of dopamine. But to get going you have to land those first few successes. The key to creating your own cycle of productivity is to set a grand vision and work your way there with a few, achievable goals that increase your likelihood of experiencing a positive outcome. “Your vision is your destination, and small, manageable goals are the motor that will get you there,” says Dr. Frank Murtha, a New York-based counseling psychologist with a focus on investor psychology, behavioral finance and financial risk taking. “Without the vision you’re on a road to nowhere. Without the goals, you have a destination but no motor. They work in tandem, and you need both.”
UUK L&D's comment,
January 4, 6:26 AM
I agree that small achievable goals make sense, but I think the link to the neuro science bit is highly questionable. The experiment mentioned is no more than skinner box grinding and suggesting that we don't learn from failure is plain wrong.
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Mastering new skills is not optional in today's business environment. "In a fast-moving, competitive world, being able to learn new skills is one of the keys to success. It's not enough to be smart — you need to always be getting smarter," says Heidi Grant Halvorson, a motivational psychologist and author of the HBR Single Nine Things Successful People Do Differently. Joseph Weintraub, a professor of management and organizational behavior at Babson College and coauthor of the book, The Coaching Manager: Developing Top Talent in Business, agrees: "We need to constantly look for opportunities to stretch ourselves in ways that may not always feel comfortable at first. Continual improvement is necessary to get ahead." Here are some principles to follow in your quest for self-improvement: Delete the scoop?
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It's often said that optimistic people are born with the tendency to see the glass as half-full. That may be true.But there’s another truth that’s more important: Optimism isn’t just an innate temperament trait — it’s also a skill that can be learned. Delete the scoop?
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Incessant exposure to negativity isn’t just a drag -- it’s actually bad for your brain, researchers say. Here are some ways to protect yourself. Delete the scoop?
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Now that information is ubiquitous, the obligation changes. It's no longer okay to not know.
If you don't know what a word means, look it up.
If you're meeting with someone, check them out in advance.
If it sounds too good to be true, Google it before you forward it.
If you don't know what questions to ask your doctor, find them before your appointment.
If it's important, do your homework.
I confess that I'm amazed when I meet hard-working, smart people who are completely clueless about how their industry works, how their tools work...It never made sense to be proud of being ignorant, but we're in a new era now. Look it up. Delete the scoop?
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One thing most self-taught (and self-made) people have in common is curiosity—immense, driving curiosity. If you can develop your curiosity and have patience, you can learn anything on your own. Delete the scoop?
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You need to routinize routine decisions to save your mental energy for important decisions. Delete the scoop?
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As you build your career, your initial progress is slow. But through deliberate practice, you gain traction, entering into a virtuous cycle that propels you into a sweet spot of accelerating competence and confidence. Then, as you approach mastery, the more habitual the work becomes, the less you enjoy the "feel good" effects of learning: these two cycles constitute the S-curve.
Understanding the S-curve of skill development can help you be less discouraged when you are acquiring new skills, and it also explains why you need to throw yourself a curve once you have achieved mastery of a skill.
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