Imagine a company spending 300,000 hours a year in pointless meetings. This shocking figure comes from a 2018 study on a large company’s executive meetings: most of those hours eventually proved to be wasted time.

Honestly, this comes as no surprise: meetings have been long identified as one of the biggest office time wasters, as well as one of the most dreaded activities by employees. Businesses have so much on their plates that the idea of spending time stuck in a conference room seem pointless.

Meetings aren’t inherently bad, though: they’re just usually badly managed. Here’s an easy-to-follow guide for making sure your time is productively used, with tips to follow before, during and after the meeting.
Read More

It’s difficult to admit that your business may not be running as smoothly as possible. Whether it’s just yourself operating out of your own home or a gaggle of employees trying to meet the needs of an anxious consumer audience, it’s important to acknowledge when you might need to bring a new tool into the mix.

Life gets easier, after all, when you’re not alone in tackling your problems.
Read More

“You’ve got mail!”

Once upon a time, seeing the new shiny notification on your inbox made us feel happy and excited about having a magical electronic message. Since email surfaced to the mainstream in the 1970s, things have drastically changed.

Fast forward in 2018, we’re drowning in email. To have a productive day, what are the best email management tips?
Read More

Your employees are the backbone of your business.

No matter how innovative or unique your idea, without loyal workers you are not going to be able to run a successful business. The companies that grow are those that recognize their employees as their most important resource and treat them accordingly. High turnover has a negative impact from an economic perspective as well as on team morale.

As a business owner, you should be looking at retention strategies and focusing on ways that you can keep your employees happy enough to stay working at your company. If you do this, you are likely to retain top talent who can help your business grow.
Read More

More often than not, the word “deadline” is enough to generate rushes of panic and desperation in any work environment. Some people are able to work well under this type of pressure. Others, not so much:

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

– Douglas Adams

Still, there are several ways in which you can learn how to work on tight deadlines – and actually use them to be more productive.
Read More

The work day is equally defined by how much work a person can accomplish over a set course of time and by that chunk of time itself. From eight in the morning until five in the evening, or in any variation thereof, the folks who work for you have to see to it that they can complete the tasks that will keep the business afloat – and those hours pay off. Literally.

And still, punching the time clock is seen as one of those boring, unnecessary parts of the day. Why is it so difficult to convince the folks who work for you that their time is valuable enough to be recorded? How can you, as a small business owner, help them see the benefits of the practice?
Read More

Productivity is a matter of organization and focus. In order to get more things done in a day, you have to know exactly what you need to accomplish and have a clear plan of the things to do.

Things slip away, though, especially in the busiest days of the week. Heavy workloads can make us feel overwhelmed, besides it’s easy to lose track of the bigger picture if we work around the clock.

To avoid this, you could try a different approach by visualizing and organizing your work.
Read More