Weekly Round-Up #59 – You need to be soft, An 8 Hour Workday Doesn’t Work and Bookbinding Is The New Skill We All Need
In this weekly round-up we look at how managers can improve their skills by being “soft”, why an evening routine is just as important as a morning one, how to use DropBox more effectively and why we need to go back to old school techniques like bookbinding.
Welcome to this week’s round-up. I honestly didn’t think I was going to be able to get this out to you thanks to my internet and phone line being down for a couple of days yet again.
Thanks provider who will remain nameless for your rubbish service! Luckily the Productivity Gurus smiled on me this week and my connection was back up and running in just enough time for me to put this and my newsletter together – hooray!
Anyway, technical disasters aside here’s this week’s round-up of interesting things I’ve found on the Internet this week. And don’t forget to sign up to my Free Newsletter so you can access
exclusive subscriber downloads and content.
11 Soft Skills Every Manager Must Develop – Your Next Seven
Managers sometimes (well, okay, most of the time) don’t realise they need a “people pleasing” as well as “ball busting” skill set. This infographic breaks down the 11 simple things you could use to be a better manager – and to be honest, a better person too.
I like item 3 on the list about controlling body language as we’re often too aware of what body lanuage we find off putting but forget we need to take our own bad body langauge habits into account too.
19 Incredibly Easy Ways To Get Your Sh!t Together – Buzzfeed
Any article that has a Batman GIF and a sprawled out cat gets my vote! Ignoring that, there’s some pretty decent advice which, while written in a light-hearted manner, can apply to most people – hey if you need an excuse to sleep more then read this post!
Here’s Why the 8-Hour Workday Doesn’t Work – Entrepreneur
I wrote recently about some of the history of our working habits including that the idea of an 8-hour day is an arbitrary figure thought up by 18th Century industrialists and Henry Ford (amongst others). In the world we live in where most of us are connected to the Internet, there’s such a level of flexibility that I don’t see why we’re still stuck in the same 9-5 rut as people were doing 30, 20 or even 10 years ago.
This article from Entrepreneur takes an interesting view citing a survey done where people are most productive working in 52 minute chunks and then taking a break of 17 minutes. Of course if you work out all these 17 minute “breaks” over the course of the day you’re no longer doing your full 8 hours, but does that matter if you’re getting more stuff done?
If you’re interested in tracking this sort of timing, check out my Introduction to Timeboxing or How To Use The Pomodoro Technique which may help.
15 Ways to Manage Stress and Learn to Relax – Business Insider
Stress is easy to come by and hard to get rid of. This post looks at 15 simple ways to relieve – or at least manage – the stress that you’re under.
The cartoon character in No 7’s “Remember to laugh” looks a bit like Barack Obama to me – comment if you agree!
Hat-tip: Lifehacker
4 Things You Must Know if You Want to Stay Organized – The Order Expert
I’ve started to get really organised in some areas of my life – some may say it verges on being O.C.D but everything having it’s place and everything being in it’s place really helps tidiness and productivity. This post gives you 4 little bits of info to remember if you’re trying to keep yourself on the organisational straight-and-narrow. I especially agree with the fact that organising is a concious effort. No amount of “Marie Kondo“* will help you organise yourself if your heart isn’t in it.
7 Everyday Habits Of Productive People That You Should Adopt – Bustle
There’s a lot about getting into a routine in this post – which is really important in terms of organisation and productivity – but this post is an interesting read to serve as a reminder of what we should be aiming for in order to be at our most productive.
The 7 Step Evening Ritual That Will Make You Happy – Barking Up The Wrong Tree
As this article states, a lot of people swear by their morning routine in order to be productive, but what about the other end of the day? This post looks at the seven things your should be doing of an evening that will make you happy, and therefore less stressed and more productive the following day.
Bookbinding with basic tools – Instructibles
I’m getting into paper-based task management and planning and it really galls me how much we have to spend on notebooks but it’s actually quite easy to do it yourself. Check out these instructions and you’ll be rivalling Moleskine in no time!
15 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do with Dropbox – MakeUseOf
Each month DropBox seems to add some new, great feature and this post lists 16 of them you may have missed. I was a big fan of DropBox and used it to back-up all of my phone contents, sync e-books and file share some items but when I lost the free space allocated to me when I bought my phone I couldn’t justify spending £7.99 a month for a service I wouldn’t get the full potential of – that and I’d just got 100GB free with Google Drive (and Google’s photo back-up is better and doesn’t count towards my account limit).
Anyway, ignoring my complaints, if you’re a DropBox user there are loads of great tips here like how to re-access shared folders and team collaboration (some items may require a paid account though).
Weekly Goal Setting Template
Disclaimer(s): You have to sign up to download this free weekly goal setting template, and you’ll also need Microsoft Excel or something like Google Sheets to open the file.
It’s a bit basic but as a starting point for tracking your goals in an on-going way this might be what you need if you prefer a computer-based format over a printed goal tracker like the one I creat
60 Ways To Make Life Simple Again – Marc & Angel Hack Life
Think your life can’t be simplified in 60 steps? Think again. There’s some really great tips here like only dealing with people with the same values as you to learning from (and laughing at) your mistakes.
Over To You
Any great posts or thoughts you’d like to share with us this week? Keep your suggestions coming in through email via the blog or through Twitter.
Have a great weekend and I’ll see you next week!
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