How to Speak Up In Meetings

Keep Focus and Be a Great Leader for Your Team

Smart Hacks for Optimizing Productivity in the Workplace

Improve Team Communication for Better Customer Experience

Smart Strategies to Evade Miscommunication at Work

Why It’s Worth Collaborating with Teammates (And How to Do It Productively)

4 Ways to Increase Productivity While Working from Home

Six Principles of Great Leadership at Work

How to Have a Productive Monday at Work

Why Decluttering Makes You More Productive at Work (And How to Do It)

Five Ways to Improve Your Time Management Skills

Tips and Tricks for Successful Telecommuting

How Staying Fit Helps Your Health and Makes You More Productive at Work

Improve Team Meetings for Better Collaboration and Higher Productivity

How Leaders Help Their Team Achieve Maximum Productivity

How to Increase Motivation for Millennial Employees

Four Strategies to Enable Peer Learning for Your Employees

Short guide to fighting procrastination

Procrastination is the archenemy of productivity. Some people waste hours and hours just avoiding the task they will eventually have to do anyhow. This goes from students who delay the moment they start working on their homework, up to top professionals who are overwhelmed by the amount of work in front of them. The purpose of this article is to provide helpful advice to better understand procrastination and how to overcome it.

The five typologies of procrastinators

There are lots of reasons why people put off work and choose to spend their time involved in more pleasurable activities. However, most of these reasons can be categorized into five main typologies. Keep reading and see if you can identify yourself in one of them.

1. The perfectionist

The perfectionist type tends to procrastinate because they are never satisfied with their work. They are mostly afraid of failure and of being judged by others, which makes them mismanage their time. Trying to get everything right, they spend too much time on one component of their project, leaving everything else for the last moment, or avoid starting the task at all until it’s too late.

In the end, they rush to meet the deadline, which makes them more prone to making mistakes and seeing their fears becoming reality.

2. The impostor

Greatest fear of the impostor is for others to realize they are not as good, or smart, or intelligent as they seem. People who fall under this category tend to have low self esteem and live their lives with the feeling that others have a good opinion about them because they posed into someone they are not.

So, when it comes to work and projects, they delay the moment as much as possible so they wouldn’t have to face the moment when those around them will see them for what they really are.

3. The disagreeable

These are the people who usually have no problem getting work done, unless it’s something they find boring or disagreeable. Simply put, they avoid doing things they don’t like, even when there is no way out of doing it. It’s in the natural state of human beings to resist activities that create discomfort.

4. The fatigued

Overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to do, the fatigued doesn’t really know where to start, or how to manage their time. So they put off the moment when they will actually need to make a decision and get things going.

5. The adrenaline seeker

Believe it or not, some people need to feel a high level of adrenaline pumping in order to work at their best. These are most often characterized as smart but lazy. Being aware that they are smart and having a history of pulling off difficult tasks at the last moment, the adrenaline seeker tends to procrastinate until the last day before the deadline. Getting away with it every time encourages them to follow the same course of action over and over again.

Once you have discovered the category of procrastinator you fit into, it should be easier to find solutions tailored for your specific problems.

How to defeat the procrastination monster

Each of the typologies described above can find the right tools to defeat their personal procrastination monster. Here are some strategies that might suit some types better than others but should, in the end, help anyone fight procrastination.

Learn to prioritize

This skill is particularly valuable for the fatigued. Prioritizing your tasks correctly will take off some of the pressure that makes you feel overwhelmed and leads to procrastination.

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Use the Eisenhower Matrix to classify tasks into 4 main categories:

• Urgent and important -> must be dealt with ASAP
• Not urgent but important -> can be done later
• Urgent but not important -> delegate it
• Not important and not urgent -> don’t do it at all!

This will help you take things one step at a time and guide you into the right direction.

Break it down

The perspective of a big project with a lot of work attached to it can be a huge source of anxiety for anyone. You can, however, trick your brain into seeing less of it by breaking your tasks into smaller chunks. Treat each of these pieces as a separate phase of a project, with its own deadlines.

This strategy will make even the most fanatic adrenaline seeker have their work ready on time.

Align your goals

Perfectionists, more than anyone else, need to feel a strong motivation to push them ahead. Making sure that your work is aligned with your medium- and long-term goals can give you the right motivation.

You need to remind yourself why you are doing what you are doing, and how it is going to affect your life.

Eat a frog

Mark Twain used to say that if you eat a frog every morning, nothing worse can happen to you for the rest of the day. In the world of productivity, the frog is the equivalent of the most disagreeable task.

Push yourself to solve that task first thing in the morning and anything else that would follow that day will seem pleasant in comparison.

Enjoy small victories

The impostor needs small and often accomplishments to remind themselves that they can actually do the job. One way to do that is by scheduling your day to add small victories among longer and more difficult tasks.

This will keep your self confidence up and get you through the day with a minimum of procrastination.

Never give up

Most importantly, you should remember that for most of us procrastination is a bad habit. And no one can get rid of bad habits overnight. Replacing the bad habit of procrastination with one of the strategies discussed might be the safest bet.

In the end, you should keep pushing yourself and celebrate every time you manage to do better than before.

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Refine Your Communication Skills at Work

Communication in the workplace is essential for the success of any company. Most than anyone else, managers and team leaders should master the art of communication, and be able to engage both their superiors and their underlings into meaningful dialogue. In this article we have a few strategies that will enable you to refine your communication skills at work.

1. Communicate constantly

Don’t wait for annual reviews to talk to your employees. Schedule monthly of even weekly one-on-one with your team members. Make a habit out of keeping in touch and knowing where everyone is headed.

Constant communication makes things easier for everyone involved by creating a connection between people. Communication is much easier between two persons who talk constantly and know enough about each other. Besides that, having a personal relationship with people in your team will help in more ways than just matters of communication.

2. Practice public speaking

Public speaking isn’t for everyone, but that doesn’t mean that not everyone can improve their skills. While it is true that some people just have it, anyone can become better through practice.

If public speaking is a huge issue for you, it might be better to start small. Talk in front of small groups of 4-5 persons on a daily basis. Then upper the scale until the thought of bigger crowds doesn’t give you nightmares anymore.

3. Learn how to ask

Asking your superiors to support your ideas is never easy, especially when that requires an attribution of already-stretched resources. In cases like that, most frequently managers say no than yes and you can’t really blame them for that.

However, if you truly believe that your idea is worth fighting for, what you need to do is learning how to ask. This requires a bit of strategizing. Try to anticipate the reasons why your proposal might be declined, and prepare arguments to address their concerns.

It is also important to frame your request in a manner that will show immediate benefits for the company and for your team, rather than distant wins that might or might not come. Emphasize on increased efficiency, improved productivity, or financial savings that your new idea might bring.

4. Make meaningful requests

Assigning tasks might seem like piece of cake to those people who don’t have to do it as part of their job. But team leaders and managers know how difficult it can be to ask people to do things, especially when the work requested is dull. People can get really frustrated, especially when they see less meaning in their work.

However, you can avoid that, and put some meaning into the tasks, by explaining the reasons behind your request and helping people see the bigger picture. Asking someone to scan books all day long is not the same as asking them to contribute to the preservation of culture and history. Think about that next time you need to frame things to give people the feeling that they are contributing to something bigger.

5. Master the art of feedback

Feedback is a sensitive issue. Its purpose should be to help people improve their work. However, a lot of times people turn the opportunity of giving into purely toxic criticism, or the opportunity of receiving feedback as an insult. For this reason, feedback should be treated as a sensitive balance that needs fine tuning in order to achieve its intended purpose.

First of all, you should never underestimate the power of positive feedback. Way too often managers are so focused on telling people what they did wrong that they absolutely forget to also praise them for the good things they have done. Even when giving negative feedback, you shouldn’t forget to mention the things that you liked, and the appreciation you have for the person on the other end. Make it clear that feedback is meant to be constructive and not a tool to put someone down.

6. Dissent is necessary

Surrounding yourself with people who think like you and always agree with you can only be good for your ego. However, in order to improve your work, you will need people who think differently and who aren’t afraid to challenge you or anyone else on the team.

This is why it is important to cultivate a team culture that allows disagreement and encourages people to speak their mind, even when their opinion contradicts everyone else’s. The first step to achieving that is leading by example. Find nice and polite ways to challenge those around you without making them feel like they did something wrong.

7. Address different generations differently

Creating a work environment that suits all generations should start with adapting communication to satisfy everyone’s needs and preferences. That is due to the fact that 30 percent of CFOs identify communication skills as the main difference between employees belonging to different generations. If millennials prefer texting via chat apps, generation X still puts everything in an email, while baby boomers would rather discuss matters in person or over the phone.

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Therefore, you need to stay flexible and open to trying different things. Luckily, team communication apps like Hubgets bring solutions that could satisfy everyone, by allowing communication under different forms.

9. Use your communication skills to create contacts

Creating contacts within the lines of your profession – also known as networking – is a crucial part of a professional’s life. Successful networking requires a high level of communication skills. In order to win allies easier, and growing your network faster, you should avoid overselling yourself. Unless there is someone in the room willing to do that for you, it might be better to stick to the basics: listen more than you talk and offer more than you ask for. Use anecdotes and open-ended questions to help people relate and engage in dialogue. From that point on, you can already start planning your follow-up strategy.

Practice, practice, practice

We all know the feeling you get when you replay a dialogue in your head and come up with a thousand things you could’ve said that sound a lot better than what you actually said. In the end, it all sums up to practice. The most frequent you find yourself into a given context, the easier it will be to handle the communication and say the right things, with no ulterior regrets.

So don’t let yourself discouraged if you don’t seem to handle communication like a pro yet. Keep doing the best you can, and each time try to be the best version of yourself so far.

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Stay Focused and Increase Your Productivity

We live in world that moves at an incredibly fast pace. So many things are happening at the same time, and so many of them require your attention. Distractions are everywhere, and everyone you know asks for your attention at one moment or another. Staying focused in these conditions sounds like mission impossible. However, there are some strategies you can apply to improve your focus and increase your productivity. In this article we are going to discuss some of the most useful ones.

Have a daily schedule

Getting through the day without a real plan is like going shopping without a list when you plan for a birthday party. You know the main items that you need, but always end up overspending on useless stuff and forgetting the eggs. In other words, it is a totally ineffective strategy. But with a little planning ahead, you could end up having a successful party.

Planning your day hour by hour is the best way to make sure that you make the most of your time and accomplish everything you wanted.

Eat a frog!

“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” – Mark Twain wisely said.

And not surprisingly, this is one of the most popular productivity advices. Starting your day doing the most difficult task allows you to spend the rest of the day doing simpler things.

Being done with the thing you disliked the most also gives you a feeling of accomplishment that will help you stay focused and be more productive all day.

Set hard deadlines

We are all tempted to stretch our deadlines, especially when self-imposed. If you can’t finish the work you scheduled for today, it’s all good, you will just do it tomorrow. However, this mentality actually encourages procrastination.

Try setting hard deadlines instead that will prevent you from stalling. If your project is not ready by the deadline you set, instead of extending the deadline, put in more effort and don’t leave your desk until it’s done.

Treat self-imposed deadlines the same way you do with those set by your superiors or clients and your productivity is guaranteed to be given a boost.

Prevent interruptions

Regaining your focus after being interrupted from work takes time and extra effort from your brain. Avoid wasting these valuable resources by reducing the risk of being interrupted to the minimum. Put a Do Not Disturb sign on your door, set your status to Unavailable on communication apps and completely log off social media. Or better off, use the Artificial Intelligence based status in Hubgets and “Let Hubgets manage my interruptions”

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Just putting your phone next to your keyboard won’t do the trick. You know you will be tempted to look every time you hear an incoming notification. So, even better, put your phone on silent and keep it out of sight, in a drawer.

To avoid interruptions even further, make sure you take everything you need before you sit at your desk. Grab your cup of coffee, the AC remote, a glass of water, and anything else you might need during the next couple of hours of deep focus.

Breaks are mandatory

Human brain has quite a small attention span. Besides that, it has the bad habit of perceiving as a threat everything that makes you feel stressed. The natural mechanism of self preservation makes it try to avoid the perceived threat. Therefore, when a task makes you anxious, your brain is trying to ditch it, which is the reason why we tend to procrastinate before difficult assignments. A great way to outsmart your brain is by dividing the big tasks into smaller chunks and treat each chunk as a separate task.

Use the Pomodoro Technique to manage your daily work and schedule your breaks so that you make the best out of your time.

Take time for yourself

It’s hard to stay focused when you are exhausted and you need to work all day long. If you also have a family and children on top of a demanding job, chances are that you have almost no time all by yourself.

One good solution would be to wake up very early in the morning. Going to bed early and waking up a couple of hours before everyone else in the house could allow you the time to do stuff for yourself. Exercise, try some yoga or meditation, go for a run, or anything else that might energize and put you in the right mindset for a productive day.

Exercise regularly

Recent studies have found that it’s not only your muscles that grow with physical exercise. It is also the hippocampus – the brain area responsible with verbal memory and learning.

Exercising improves mood, reduces stress and anxiety, and helps with insomnia, which enable you to stay focused and productive during the day. All of these can be achieved just by walking for one hour two times a week. Or 25 minutes every day. Easy, right!?

Organize your workspace

Having a well organized workspace can help improve your productivity and save important time. The average employee loses up to one hour per day due to disorganized workspace. A clean-desk policy will make it less likely to get distracted by random stuff lying around. It will also help you save time by not having to search through mountains of clutter when you are looking for a pen.

Adopt a system that helps you keep everything organized: use post-its and colors for your files, make a habit from putting everything back to its place after using it, and make sure to keep useless objects out of your desk.

It all comes down to habits

All in all, staying focused and increasing your productivity only require some good time management and organization. Practice the strategies presented above and try turning them into a daily routine. It might seem complicated at first, but once it becomes a habit, you will be able to stay focused and productive without too much effort.

We would be happy to read about your experiences! If you know other good strategies for increasing focus and productivity, share with us in the comments section below.

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