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Posts Tagged ‘productivity’

How Building a Custom Home office can Enhance Your Productivity

Studies show a correlation between attire and work performance. In order to increase productivity, dressing professionally can cause the mind to engage in a more serious business attitude. A number of office managers who instituted “Casual Fridays,” will state that having a casual dress code can produce a casual attitude that will cause production to decrease. If you have a home office, you have probably already seen the difference in how much you can get done when you dress professionally because you are meeting with a client as opposed to when you work in your pajamas and slippers because you won’t be seeing anyone.

Similarly, you get the same effect with your home office surroundings. How much work can you do when your computer is resting on a shaky table, and you continue to shift piles of paper around because there aren’t any file cabinets to put them in? How effective can you be when you are searching for a client’s invoice and it’s stored in a container that is better used for holding Christmas decorations in your garage?

Visualize entering your home office, and being greeted with a professional looking, custom built office, designed to match the physical space and your working style. Is your dream home office decorated with a cherry, maple, or other wood tone? Are there work surfaces in the best size and shape for top work performance? Are there cabinets for filing and storing important papers, allowing you to easily locate them when needed? Would you like cubby holes or shelving that are in easy reach and/or hidden behind tidy cabinet doors? There are endless options with custom home offices. You are only limited by your creativity.

Your choices are limited only to what you can dream of; the company you choose to work on your new home office will come with fresh ideas. Here if we need Sacramento home office furniture or a Sacramento Murphy bed store, Techline has been very good. An established and licensed company is the way to go; be wary of companies demanding upfront fees for a consultation. Many of the best companies operate a design showroom to show sample designs and discuss the specifications for your project. When you get an idea of the style that you like, the designer works with you to ready a 3-D design that meets your own personal home office desires.

After the professional installation of your new home office, it will amaze you how much it helps you work more efficiently. You will gain back valuable time and lower your stress level when you realize you can find important documents quickly and easily. Until you experience it firsthand, you may never understand the advantages a custom designed home office can offer to your career.

Goal Setting & Time Management

Time Management & Goal Setting Gear

While science is at its most advanced state nowadays, there remains to be a lot of things to juggle for a typical career-oriented individual. For most family-oriented persons, there is the burden of juggling work, career, family and other factors involved in one’s social life.

You can read more on Time Management & Goal Setting

The answer is Time Management & Goal Setting. Many highly successful persons are often asked what their secret to success is. And more often than not, they have the same response, and that is Goal Setting. However, although this is almost an expected response, many are still baffled at how Time Management really works.

Goal Setting is simply the proper allocation of time for certain tasks. First, the important tasks have to be arranged in a certain way where it is clustered into sectors and listed according to urgency and importance. For example, the important parts of your life are career, your daughter, your home, your art, and your family. You have to know which one to drop first whenever you need to do something.

After that, you will need help from some Productivity Tools designed to aid you in the correct process of prioritization AND remembering that order.

Quick-and-Easy Reminders

Goal Setting Tools & Time Management Techniques

There are a lot of persons who need lots of reminder when it comes to taking care of medium sized businesses. Often, they are too small that they are disregarded as unimportant. If you are one of them, buy some quick-and-easy teasers. What’s good about technology is you can probably put an alarm just about everywhere! Cellular phones nowadays have built-in organzing device of your choices, post-its are available in different sorts, and even the good old refrigerator door magnets have come in a lot of forms.

What is important is that the frequency of the reminding is now being increased. This is good for Time Management & Goal Setting because it keeps you aware of the things which you have to do especially if they’re urgent.

The organzing device of your choice + Watch Tandem

These are staples for just about every busybody from the college beadle to the corporate leader. The organizer is something that holds your appointments and it’s also a tiny little space for some writing. Busybodies usually have contact numbers of random people they meet, gifts for a not-so-relevant birthday party that he has to go to or some sudden brilliant ideas that come to mind. For these and more, you will need an organizer. It has to be a little agenda, just enough to fit in a small handbag, and should be made of durable material. You must bring your organzing device of your choice with you every day, in case you need to list something down as a reminder.

Moreover, the perfect complement to an organizer is a high-quality watch. You may have experienced running late for an appointment just because your watch didn’t work well.  What’s worse is that the person you’re meeting wouldn’t even believe you. This blunder can easily be avoided. Just get a high quality watch. Having a good sense of time is practically the first step in Productivity.

The Perfect mindset

It’s pressuring to know that you have a lot of things in your hand and it seems like you can’t even do anything about it. Don’t tip over.

Moreover, keep a be on your toes kind of manner of thinking as you maneuver your way into your busy life. Sure, there are times when you distance yourself from your organizing device of your choice. It is a painful reminder of the busy life they lead for some. It’s perfectly alright to feel some form of eternal urgency but take some time off once in a while. You must never neglect yourself in your list of tasks.

More on how to get more done

Why Do Employees Lack Motivation In The Workplace

Is Motivation Truly Motivation

All of us are born with motivation. It’s embedded within us. In fact, all of us have our own unique style of motivation and are driven by it each day. However, pop-psychology along with the sales training industry has decide for us what motivation is and have done so based upon their own biased research. We’ve all paid a price for the confusion, but employees and their managers more so. The reason, managers expect that these emotional seminars to create long term life changes within their employees. Most of the time, these seminars come at a high cost with only temporary results. What they have done is confused enthusiasm for motivation. What is enthusiasm?

Enthusiasm is defined as fervor, zeal, explosive eagerness, rapturous intensity, and intense conviction or worthiness. It is a temporary emotion. Temporary in the sense that it can only be sustained for a brief period of time until it is either replaced by another emotion or a sustained feeling. (See the article: “The Difference Between Emotions and Feelings” for more info.) Think for a moment about how long can you sustain laughter, or how long can a temper tantrum last? For how long can you cry? How long can one remain in a excited or thrilled state?

That is why you can go to any number of so called “motivational seminars” get really “pumped” only to have that enthusiasm and energy fade away after just a few days. A form of social hysteria is what you’re really experiencing at such seminars, albeit in a positive form but never the less very transient.These events should be more accurately called “Enthusiasm Seminars.”.

Employee Motivation

The workplace is one of the main areas where motivation becomes a case of discord. It begins with the gross profit numbers. When profits are down, the company usually looks for an internal cause. Upper management gets pressured and pressures middle management who then pressures lower management who in turn pressures employees to “Get Motivated!”.The solution is usually a motivational seminar, workshop, or other program to get everyone fired up and back up to peak performance.

And because of that, motivation is managed as if it were a learned skill of “doing”(See the article: “What is Motivation” for a more in depth discussion of true motivation). With such training however a process of failure begins, littered with stress, confusion and self-sabotage. As stated above, programs like “Motivational (Enthusiasm) Seminars” only result in temporary effects. You can only sustain your enthusiasm for just so long. Your enthusiasm will eventually diminish. As this occurs, you’ll usually ask: ‘What’s the matter with me?Lack of confidence and doubt follows as the stress builds. Does this sound familiar to you? Understand that there is nothing wrong with you and there is nothing to fix. You are actually behaving within the parameters of mental health. The complication rest with our cultures inaccurate view of what motivation really is. Motivation can’t be a learned skill. It is naturally present. It is the expression of your state of “being”. Natural motivation drives you to leave your bed each morning. There is a significant need for you to express your unique existence to the world.

Anyone who teaches motivation as a “learned skill of doing,” exhibits their lack of knowledge on the basic functions of motivation. This is the reason why so many people are confused about motivation and why pop-psychology continues to design inherently flawed testing methods, books, seminars, and workshops which sadly point people down the wrong path. That being said, some will find value in the information but only uniquely motivating to them.

Westernized cultures (Particularly Americans), live in a capitalistic society that cannot afford to define motivation as simply a state of “being”. That is why Motivational Gurus, do not use Mother Teresa as an example of what it means to be motivated even though she is a fine example of natural, authentic motivation. From their viewpoint, there is no profit in using her as an example motivation.

The Ultimate Answer to Employee Motivation in the Workplace

The key to employee motivation in the workplace is honest and consistently effective. If you like what your work, it is beside the point to seek out motivation because it is already present. If any professional feels the need to attend a “Motivational Seminar,” they should seriously consider another profession. Imagine for a moment that your surgeon is running late to your pre-surgery consultation because he or she has yet to return from a “motivational seminar”. How might you feel? For that matter, what might you do? Would you put yourself in jeopardy~Would you still go through with the surgery with this person at the helm}?

Motivation comes naturally to each of us from a deep level within. No one should have to go out and find their motivation. Your motivation is not somewhere out there, it’s intrinsic, It’s within you. Ask yourself why plumbers, carpenters, electricians, doctors, computer technicians, and in fact most professionals do not have a desperate need to attend motivational seminars in order to get fired up to do their job.

The real secret to all this, is to discover the exact style of motivation you already posses. We call this “Your Life Theme“. It is as though you view the world through a unique set of prescription glasses. It is this prescription which dictates how you should live life and what career you should pursue. Discovering it and learning how it guides you is vital in creating meaningful, sustainable change in your personal and business life.

It is through discovering who employees are at their very core that management will be able to generate natural and effective motivation in the workplace. Managers who discover their “Life Theme” as well as that of their employees, are capable of building dynamic, highly productive and profitable teams where everyone has a greater sense of fulfillment and sustained cooperation. Management will also know which projects should be delegated to which individuals in order to attain the highest level of productivity. Each person will be able to maximize their self-expression with each project, completely by-passing the typical, costly debating and negotiating process. No longer will ego-battles slow down production and cause inner-office struggle. This is the future of business. Discover Your Life Theme.

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