Weekly Round-Up #218: What’s Your Bestseller? How To Prepare For A Speech And Gardening In Small Spaces
In this week’s Round-Up, we take a look at what books were the best sellers in the year that you were born, why you don’t need to full memorise your next presentation and how you can garden in a small space.
Welcome to this week’s round-up, I hope you’ve had a fun and productive week. Today (March the 8th) is International Women’s Day and I hope you’ve been able to take a couple of minutes out of your busy schedule to pay tribute to all of the fabulous women that have played an important part in our lives, histories and cultures.
As your news feeds are probably full of items on Women and International Women’s Day so this is one of our standard round-ups (barring a small mention) of all things productivity, life hacks and interesting facts.
In this week’s Round-Up, we take a look at what books were the best sellers in the year that you were born, why you don’t need to full memorise your next presentation and how you can garden in a small space.
The Best Selling Books By The Year You Were Born – Wordery
A lot of people post memes about the song that was No, 1 in the charts the year they were born. This is a great way to look back at old music and feel glad that you were too young to understand how cheesy/rubbish/generic it was. Mine was an ABBA track so it ticks all the generic boxes there
No-one has ever asked me what the top-selling book during the year of my birth was. Well, thanks to Wordery.com celebrating International Book Day that took place this week you can now find out! Mine is the Thorne Birds which I have never read but I will put on my Reading List Right Now!
The Biggest Industries For Women – Instantprint UK
Sticking with “Things that are happening this week”, March 5th was International Women’s Day (please don’t troll about when International Men’s Day is – it’s the 19th of November okay?
There are a few interesting tidbits in these infographics, most notably when you get the the “Fastest Growing Industries” – I’m going to ignore “Transport Support” as that’s basically a ticket booth operator or someone who sorts truck driver’s routes on a computer. Look at the next three though – Computer programming, Head Office Management (great assuming it’s not all HR roles) and Security and Investigation. Say What? Yep, we’ll hack your PC and beat the crap out of you at the same time boi!
Why Very Smart People Are Happiest Alone – Big Think
I really like my alone time in fact I do really struggle sometimes when I have been on my own to interact with others. Apparently this means I’m “smart” according to a new study – I just think that I’m a bit miserable bit I’ll take smart I guess!
Remind Yourself To Take Breaks At Work With This Chrome Extension – Lifehacker UK
We all know it’s important to take regular screen breaks – 5 minutes every hour is the UK Government recommendation. When you’re engrossed in your work though, it can be difficult to remember to take a break so this Chrome extension may help.
How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation – Buzzfeed News
If you’re a millennial, apparently if you’re not enthused by something then you’ll put it off, and off, until the deadline has passed and then feel a bit crappy about it.
One of the examples given is registering to vote. Now, being in the UK I don’t know how the US system works but have to periodically send stuff off and while I’m not enthused by voting I realise it’s my right and I can’t complain about anything if I don’t exercise my voting rights. This article goes some way to explain the fear millenials feel about “adulting” but I’m afraid there’s no excuse for certain tasks.
How To Benefit From Using Gantt Charts And Time Tracking Software – Timecamp
Call me a geek or a nerd but I am a big, BIG fan of Gantt charts. There are some people in management when given a nicely formatted word document or a bullet list of tasks simply glaze over and can’t understand the project workflow, timescales and dependencies.
Give them a nice visual Gantt chart though and immediately you can see what needs to start when, what is dependent on what, and they have no excuse for saying “Well I didn’t understand the timescales”.
It’s all well can good putting together a great Gantt chart but if it’s not aligned with real-world timekeeping your carefully laid plans can go to waste.
How To Konmari Your Browser Tabs – Lifehacker
I don’t really have a problem with having too many tabs open in my browser – although I can understand why people do.
If you’re like an internet Magpie and are drawn to link-after-link, opening them in a new browser window for the content and figure it won’t be distracting – well, you’re wrong!
Finding Balance: CIOs Share How They Prioritize Work And Family – The Enterprisers Project
You might think that balancing work with a successful family life are at odds with each other but apparently you can be in charge of a big electric firm or the Secret Service and still manage to maintain a great work/life balance – no excuses for you lot then!
Getting Strict On Early Bedtimes For Your Kids Has Scientific Benefits—Including Your Own Mental Health, Mama – Motherly
Think you’re doing the right thing by being a “cool” parent and letting your child dictate their own bedtime? Well, you could be doing more harm than good – not only to them but yourself as well.
Why Do Some Websites Block VPNs? – HowToGeek
We’ve spoken in the past about the importance of online security and one of the tips we recommend is using a VPN to ensure that all of your web traffic is secure
But, as much as you want to ensure that you’re safe online, some companies may block you using certain security techniques such as VPNS. Why would they do this? Read the How-To-Geek article to find out more.
Use Mandy Moore’s Script-Memorizing Technique To Make Your Work Presentations Award-Worthy – Well And Good
Do you need to be word-perfect in your sales pitch or meeting speil? Not according to actress Mandy Moore you don’t! You don’t even need a script (which is a terrible thing to use during a presentation) and can leave the cue cards and pictorial reminders to one side – while these are great to use as reminders they can take you attention away from your audience – no, the advice from Mandy Moore is quite different indeed!
How To Use Container Gardening When Your Growing Space Sucks – Gardening Mentor
It’s spring in the UK so our thoughts are now turning to the garden. While I have quite a large garden I don’t have any flower beds – they lead to weeds and weeds lead to hard work! This doesn’t mean I don’t grow anything though, I grew salad items all summer long in containers last year. You don’t need a lot of space and the maintenance is a lot less than a flower bed so if you’re new to container gardening Gardening Mentor is here to get you started.
9 Ways To Boost Productivity In 5 Minutes Or Less – ZeroCater
Want to be more productive at work? Who doesn’t? Whether you’re an entrepreneur or work at a Fortune 500 company, getting more done in less time is often the ticket to excelling on the job. This infographic from Zerocater gives you some solid things you can put in place in under 5 minutes to start getting stuff done.
Global Broadband Index – Compare The Market
We’re just getting “Superfast” broadband installed at the FlippingHeck.com HQ next week. We’ve not bothered before because of the cost but we were offered a deal too good to refuse! That being said, our “superfast” in the UK isn’t really that fast when compared to other countries. Check out how your country stacks up the the Broadband Index from Compare The Market.
Bezos’ Peaks: Wealth, Four Comma Clubs And Rockets – RS Online
It’s been a year of ups and downs for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He seems to be a guy that’s very busy savvy but has the habit of saying some rather odd things – check out his 2018 year in review where he hovered round being the richest man in the world and predicted we’d all live in space one day.
Agile Vs Kanban: What’S The Difference? – Guru99
If you’re into manufacturing then you may have heard of the Kanban method and if you’re in software development you’ll probably heard of agile principles. Both methods can be adapted to all sorts of different production methods and in this article Guru99 looks at the two different methods and how they can make you more productive.
Have A Great Weekend
I hope you have enjoyed this round-up, as always if you have any links you like to share with me and my readers please contact me through the website or send me a tweet.
Until next week, Stay Productive!
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