I prefer to schedule as many meeting as possible into concurrent blocks of time, rather than having meeting spread out over the whole week. This often results in one or two days of the week that are booked with meetings from start to finish. While you can't get anything else done on those days, I ...
Keys to Effective Communication
Effective communication is rare. If you work in the corporate world today, you are exposed to an amazing amount of completely meaningless words, sentences and messages. There is an ever-increasing use of "corporate speak", which includes turning nouns into verbs, using overly complicated language, and other otherwise nonsensical word combinations. Peter Drucker said ...
Interpersonal Communication
Interpersonal communication is defined in several ways, and so it is not always easy to understand. The most straightforward and true definitions are: Communication with few participants, who are in close proximity to each other Communication between two people who are very familiar with each other, and who deal with each other as individuals, reducing the ...
Assertiveness for Success
Assertiveness in your daily life, especially at work, can be tricky. For some people, it is too easy to passively accept what others are saying, rather than speak their minds. Others have difficulty listening to their co-workers, and don't take into account their thoughts and feelings when trying to convince them of something. ...
Delegation that Works
Whether you're in a formal management role or not, delegation is a powerful tool. Of course, it should not be seen as a way to slough off less desirable work to others; instead, it is a way to have others take on tasks that are better suited to them, freeing you up to work ...
Time Management in the Workplace
Lack of respect for time management in the workplace today is rampant. Between excessive breaks, unproductive gabbing between colleagues, and use of social networking sites, it is a wonder that some people get any work done at all. The human tendency towards laziness, combined with lack of motivation due to work that is not fulfilling ...
Mastering Public Speaking
When you think of public speaking, what most likely first comes to mind is standing at a podium in front of a big audience, eagerly waiting for you to deliver a formal, inspiring speech. But in the reality of the day-to-day corporate environment, this is one of the least common forms of public speaking. ...
Distributed Teams in Large Corporations
Automattic CEO Toni Schneider writes about why your company should be distributed. By distributed, he means that there is no central office, so everyone works from wherever they'd like, and can live anywhere in the world. Schneider covers many benefits of this arrangement, such as to employee satisfaction, as well as the workarounds ...
Task Management Software
Task management software, at its core, is simply designed to show you what tasks you have to accomplish, and allow you to add, remove, modify and mark those tasks as complete. When you consider how basic this functionality is, it may seem strange that there are so many different options for such software out ...
The Problems With Personal Information Managers
Most people spend the majority of their day in a Personal Information Manager--most likely, Microsoft Outlook. Programs like Outlook are designed as personal productivity tools, and yet ironically, most of us feel anything but productive with such tools. Why is that? There are a significant number of serious, intertwined reasons why this is the case. ...
