Category Archives: Office Management

Jul9

Visualize Your Work Day

Posted on by
Visualize Your Work Day

I use a large 36” x 24” whiteboard to keep track of all my work projects – I use the personal Kanban Method to manage this. Actually, the personal Kanban is a pattern – there is no set method and it is highly customizable.

It is simply a (highly organized and effective) management system to take care of your to-dos. The reason why it works so well for me is that it gives you a visual representation of your running tasks and your progress – kind of like a “tasks at a glance” system. It has its roots in the Kanban method used by lean manufacturing industries, specifically the auto manufacturing industry, which was developed by Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota.

Let me show you how to do it:
First of all, you need a place to layout and arrange your tasks. You can use a wall, a window, a board, anything that you can quickly refer to. Keep in mind that this has to be in a spot you can easily see and access.

Then you divide the board into “actions”. A basic board has three actions: To-do, Doing, Done. You can get creative on the titles…here are some suggestions:

● To-Do: Backlogs, plans, to execute etc.
● Doing: In-progress, on-going, etc.
● Done: Finished, Ended, Completed

To-Do:
These are the set of tasks that you aren’t currently working on but need to get done at some point. Move them to the doing list once you start on them.

Doing:
These are the tasks you are actively and currently working on. If you want to level up your personal Kanban skills, you can color code them according to project or according to priority. When you finish a task, you have the satisfaction of moving them to your done list.

Done:
This is obviously where you move your completed tasks to. Seeing how much you’ve accomplished is the most gratifying part of the personal Kanban method. I use a color-coded post-it system and it gives me great fulfillment to see how many cards I was able to move in a given time frame.

Two “rules”
The personal Kanban method is highly customizable but there is a framework to it – rules if you might say.

1. Visualise your work – this is why I highly recommend that your personal kanban space be a space you can easily see and access. My board hangs on a wall right beside my office desk. Post-its, magnets, and whiteboard markers are easily accessible in an organizer right beside it so that I can easily write down important points like notes, deadlines, and other needed assets.

2. Limit your work in progress (WIP) – Don’t try to do too many things all at once. The personal Kanban is all about prioritization. If everything is a priority, then nothing is…you get me?

You can set up a personal Kanban manually by using whiteboards and other surfaces (walls, windows, cork boards, etc) or you can use web apps (Trello, ZenKit, Asana, Plutio, etc.)

If you want to implement the personal Kanban, here are some further readings to check out:

● The Personal Kanban Blog
● Personal Kanban 101
● Personal Kanban on Facebook
● Personal Kanban In a Nutshell by Jurgen de Smet and Erik Talboom
● Udemy: Getting Started with Personal Kanban
● The Evils of Multi-Tasking and How Personal Kanban Can Help you
● Personal Kanban Gallery

Do you use this method? Care to share your success story using the personal Kanban method? Stay humble, hustle hard!

Written by Jaie O. The Help

Jun25

How to be more productive by taking up a hobby

Posted on by
How to be more productive by taking up a hobby

Working while on vacation has become the norm. But it is still wise to use your vacation leaves in order to recharge and make sure you increase your productivity when you get back to work. According to this survey from Wrike, 40% of men and 30% of women plan to work while on vacation.

So you’re back from break for a while but still feel that you aren’t achieving as much as you like at work. At this point, you can’t go on another 2 week vacation – but you really need to get your work mojo back. It might be time to try a different strategy. It’s time to pick up a new hobby.

Why pick up a hobby?
A study by Kevin Eschleman, lead author and assistant Psychology professor at San Francisco State University says that “the more you’re engaged people in an extracurricular hobby, the better you’ll do at work. Eschleman’s research concluded that you won’t do just a little bit better, your performance will improve from between 15% and 30% better!” Studies also reinforce the idea that we’ve known all along – the most productive and successful people we know often have a hobby that they enjoy outside of the workplace.

Having an interest in things outside of work can motivate employees to work on their interests making them more engaged and more positive when they’re at work. Having a hobby also makes for great conversation around water coolers. Hobbies also greatly reduce stress – which automatically improves the well being of an employee.

The science behind getting a hobby.
The thing about hobbies is that they help you relax and take your mind of some of the most pressing issues in your life. Just like meditation, immersing yourself into a hobby takes you to a place where your mind is still somewhat active but not actively thinking about stressful concerns. Now let’s break down your hobbies into 2 categories. There is such a thing as “active relaxation” and “passive relaxation”.

Active relaxation involves doing activities that you find enjoyable. Most exercises fall under this category. So if your hobby is running, doing yoga, hiking or going on nature walks – that falls under the active relaxation category.

Passive relaxation involves a less strenuous activity list. Reading, watching movies, gardening, going out for coffee, are all hobbies that fall under the passive relaxation category. They require less energy but are just as enjoyable.

Both forms of relaxation ease tension and put you in a more peaceful mental state. All of them are hobbies that you can enjoy outside of work and require a bit of time investment.

Make a list.
Here’s an assignment for you. Come up with 5 ideas for hobbies that involve passive relaxation. Some examples are: cooking, gardening, coloring (yes, those adult coloring books that were the rave sometime ago), painting, creating playlists. You get the idea.

Now, do the same for hobbies that involve active relaxation. Some examples are: biking, swimming, rock climbing, surfing, or diving.

Keep this list handy and refer to it from time to time. Pick one that you want to try out – or if you’ve already started – pick one to master and get really good at it!

What hobbies are you into? Share them with us in the comments. Stay humble, hustle hard.

 

Written by Jaie O. The Help

Jun11

Time Management Hacks

Posted on by
Time Management Hacks

No matter how intent we are at trying to manage our productive time, there will always be a cause for a delay that is due to forces beyond our control. The possibility of delay can stem from various reasons, some of them are due to lack of foresight, some are due to bad time management, and some…just terrible luck.

Time management is one of the major challenges of freelancers, contractors, and entrepreneurs. Without a regimented clock in – clock out system to keep them accountable for their productive work hours, it’s very easy to get derailed off of important work tasks. Even office workers who have regular 9 to 5 schedules lose productive time on distractions and ad hoc tasks that seemingly need urgent attention.

The trick is to understand your most effective work schedule. If you are a freelancer or entrepreneur, you have more flexibility over your schedule. This means you can tailor your time to optimize your calendar into your most productive days. That could mean shifting your work schedule from a “standard” Monday to Friday, to a more practical Tuesday to Saturday. Let’s face it, it can be more practical for freelancers or entrepreneurs to shift workday schedules as there can be more business during the weekend – especially those who work events. For office workers who work set hours, carve out a time when you can hunker down and do your most productive work.

Here are other tips to create your most effective work schedule:
1. Carve Out Specific “Focus Time” – Avoid distractions and get into the mindset of focusing on your work. Have a target of when you’ll finish the task. You can use the Pomodoro technique to maximize your productivity.
2. Figure out When Your Brain Is at Its Best – When do you do your best work? Is it in the morning, afternoon, or late at night? I’ve written about Chronotypes here. It explains why some people are morning Larks and some people are Night Owls. So if you work early hours and your chronotype is not exactly that of a morning person, you might want to shift your best productive work to later in the day.
3. Experiment with Prioritization – Try listing just a few priority tasks on your to-do list. I find 3 to be the magic number. More and you risk getting distracted and not being able to complete the task.
4. Stop Going to Meetings – I’ve written about the biggest time waster at the office here. Unproductive meetings cost US big businesses $37 Billion. It’s not only big businesses that are affected. In the UK, SMEs lose an average of £63,700 per annum on meetings. Chew on those stats for a while.
5. Create a Routine – Figure out a system that works for you. Start by clearing your workspace and clearing your mind. Reduce clutter to a minimum

You can read more about these excellent tips here: How to Build the Most Effective Work Schedule

Got any time management hacks for us? Share them with us in the comments. Stay humble, hustle hard.

 

Written by Jaie O. The Help

Reference:
https://www.clicktime.com/blog/how-to-build-the-most-effective-work-schedule/

Jun4

Stress and the Workplace

Posted on by
Stress and the Workplace

Our bodies have a pre-programmed response to stress. It has a built-in safety system that, in the olden days, was meant to protect us against predators and life-threatening situations, such as bushfires and tornadoes. This is our fight or flight response, and it is a natural and healthy response to any perceived threat.

Under stress, our bodies produce the hormone adrenaline to increase our heart rate and elevate our blood pressure. This makes sure we have enough energy supply. Cortisol is also produced to increase blood sugar and shut down deemed non-essential bodily functions that will hinder our reaction time, such as suppressing our immune system, reproductive system, and digestive system.

Times are different now. We don’t have to worry about bushfires or wolves trying to eat us. What we have now is a different kind of stress altogether. And it is just as dangerous.

Our stress response usually shuts down and returns to normal after the perceived stress is over. So, bodily functions go back to normal once that small kitchen fire is put out, or when you finally find that phone you thought you lost.

However, when you are constantly being bombarded by stressors your fight or flight response is always turned on, stress hormones are constantly being produced, and your bodily processes become disrupted. Your body thinks it is under attack and puts you in a prolonged fight or flight mode.

An example of constant stress is stress in the workplace. We spend ⅓ of our adult lives at work. That, (for most people) is 8 hours of each day at the office. It is like a second home, and so it would make much sense to try to keep the workplace a safe zone for everyone.

Situations happen when the workplace no longer feels like a safe zone for an employee. Some situations that can be deemed stressful and can be considered a cause excessive stress are: an employee being “exposed to a traumatic event in the workplace if the employee experiences violence, harassment, or bullying while at work, and unreasonable expectations from the employee.”

Excessive workplace stress is one major culprit of anxiety and depression. It can have serious repercussions on an employees health and wellbeing. If you are experiencing serious excessive workplace stress, talk to your HR or a trusted manager. If you feel like you have to explore other alternatives, you can read about other options here.

I’ve written about how to manage stress, here, and here. Stress is always present but it need not be chronic. Otherwise, your health will suffer. Prolonged stress compromises your immune system and makes you prone to a host of problems like anxiety, headaches, obesity, heart disease, and memory impairment, among others. It is always best to keep stress to a minimum and learn how to manage it.

How do you handle stress at the workplace? Share your best tips with us in the comments. Stay humble and hustle hard.

References:
https://www.hoganinjury.com/excessive-workplace-stress/
https://thehelpbyastrids.com/stress-be-gone/
https://thehelpbyastrids.com/a-mind-full-of-light/

 

Written by Jaie O. The Help

May28

Where Does the Time Go?

Posted on by
Where Does the Time Go?

Do you know what the biggest time waster at work is? No, it’s not checking your social media updates. Take another guess.

It’s meetings. A few years back, emails were the biggest time wasters at work. Sending and replying to emails takes the top spot of biggest time waster at 57%. But if you factor in the amount of time spent on preparing for, attending, and extending the meetings, that takes up a much larger chunk of time compared to reading, writing, and replying to emails.

Here are a few more cringe-worthy stats:
● On the average, employee attends 62 meetings in a month and half of those are considered as time wasted.
● 31 hours are spent on average in unproductive meetings in a month

In an average meeting, an employee has at one time or another:
● Missed it (96%)
● Daydreamed (91%)
● Did other work (73%)
● Complained (47%)
● Felt overwhelmed (45%)
● Slept (39%)

Unproductive meetings cost US big businesses $37 Billion. It’s not only big businesses that are affected. In the UK, SMEs lose an average of £63,700 per annum on meetings. With that amount of money going down the drain, something needs to change.

39% of staff fall asleep during meetings and the company can’t really do anything about that aside from providing free coffee. But a shocking 63% of meetings don’t even have a prepared agenda, and that’s where major improvement can come in.

Having a clear agenda before calling a meeting can help the host and all the attendees immensely. Going into a meeting with a vague idea of what you want to get out of it rarely ends on a productive note. So, start with identifying the objective of the meeting. Ask yourself what you want to get out of it and once you’ve set a purpose and a goal, you can start building the agenda from there.

Having an agenda will keep the discussions on track. Write down some focus points and discussion topics – keep those detailed to lessen the chances of veering off course.

Share the agenda with attendees before the meeting, at the very least, the day before so that they too can prepare their questions and suggestions. And ruthlessly cull out anybody who doesn’t need to be there. Most meetings are designed to make decisions and not just share information. If they can be just copied into an email that details the results of the meeting, then don’t invite them anymore.

Don’t be late. Attendees are expected to arrive on time. Meeting hosts are expected to arrive well before the meeting time.

Consider stand up meetings for agendas that have only a few focus points. People are more engaged during stand-up meetings and the time limit is more often followed. Obviously, this won’t work for longer meetings or planning sessions but works great for 1-3 discussion point meetings.

Stick to the agenda. It’s best to provide a timed agenda, if possible. Assign roles and have an idea parking lot which acts as a “repository” for focus points that would need more information or more time to decide on. Don’t forget to follow those up!

What are your teams meeting habits? Are they productive? What areas can you improve on? Let us know in the comments below. Stay humble and hustle hard!

 

Written by Jaie O. The Help