Are you one of those people who feel invigorated by the smell of citrus? Do you immediately perk up when you smell coffee? Does the smell of pine or eggnog remind you of the holidays? Is there a certain perfume fragrance that reminds you of your friend? You probably said yes to one, if not all of these questions.

Fragrances do more than elicit a memory or an emotion. They can also affect our behavior and physiological response. For example, lavender scents help calm the nervous system and induce relaxation while peppermint revitalizes and helps keep us alert. A whiff of lemon makes you feel a bit cheerier while jasmine could very well be part of your evening routine as it makes you feel calmer. Rosemary helps you feel perkier since it is known to have stimulating properties that fight mental fatigue, exhaustion and headaches. If you lack clarity and focus, try peppermint – the scent is linked to greater motivation, cognitive stamina and improving overall performance.

Want to give aromatherapy a try? Here are some of the most common scents you can find in the market and what they are used for:

For when you want to have clarity and focus

• Vetiver, rosemary, peppermint, tea tree, rosemary 

For revitalization and invigoration

• Citrus – orange, grapefruit, lemon, line, etc.
• Minty – eucalyptus, peppermint, spearmint
• Woodsy – pine
• Clean – tea tree
• Herbal – thyme

For relaxation and calmness – or if you have trouble falling asleep

• Vanilla, lavender, sandalwood, jasmine, neroli, chamomile, rosewood, frankincense

For productivity and mental performance – helps if you’re taking a test or learning something new

• Rosemary, vetiver, coffee, lemon, jasmine, citrus, cinnamon, peppermint, ginger, pine, lemongrass, lavender

For allure and sophistication – if you want to feel sexy

• Nutmeg, clove, lavender, floral scents (patchouli, rose, lily, etc.)

For concentration

• Sage, lemon, peppermint, jasmine, cedarwood

For creativity

• Cocoa, coffee, tea tree, frankincense, peppermint, bergamot, tangerine, grapefruit, lavender, jasmine, spearmint, rosemary

For happiness

• Citrus, grapefruit, sweet orange, bergamot, lime, pine, fir, cedarwood, lilac, ylang-ylang, lavender, pumpkin, apple, vanilla, sandalwood, rose geranium, cinnamon, anise

So now that you know the most common scents, how do you use them? There are a couple of ways you can use aromatherapy or the power of scents to your advantage.

1. Buy essential oils – they’re not expensive – and add them to oil diffusers or you can also use water-based oils and add them to air diffusers or humidifiers.
2. Use scented candles but be careful about burning them and make sure to look after them
3. Get some reed diffusers – these are sticks of reed that diffuse scent
4. Even air fresheners or room sprays/linen sprays in certain scents can work
5. Use the real thing – imagine waking up to hot coffee or cocoa or keeping a bundle of herbs in the kitchen. You can also grow some lavender plants or have dried lavender and eucalyptus on your bedside table.

Do you use scents to improve your mood? What do you use? Share them with us in the comments. Remember to work smart and be a blessing to someone today. Stay safe and healthy!

Written by Jaie O. TheHelp

To delegate means to entrust a task or responsibility to another person. We talked about the importance of delegation as seen in the Eisenhower Matrix in this article and this article.

To recap, the Eisenhower Matrix is one of the productivity tools often used to improve focus and prioritization. The ‘matrix’ is a square that is split into four quadrants.

Label the quadrants like so:

Take a look at your to-do list and decide whether they are urgent, not urgent, important, not very important. Your urgent and important tasks will fall under the “do” quadrant. Your important but not urgent tasks will fall under the “decide” quadrant. Other tasks will fall under the “delegate” quadrant (who else can do it?) and the “delete” quadrant (these tasks are the ones you can ditch altogether).

Those tasks that fall under the ‘do’ and ‘decide’ quadrant are tasks that you can accomplish yourself. However, in order to make sure that you are efficiently making use of your time – it is also important to know when you have to delegate or pass the baton to someone else. A recipe for burnout is to try to do everything by yourself. You have to trust other people enough that you delegate tasks to them. This shows respect in their abilities to get things done and respect for yourself so that you can focus on doing things that you are good at and will turn out to be a more productive use of your time.

Delegation is not just about passing off work. You will have to use discernment in order to ascertain if the task is suitable for the person or if the person is up to par for the task. This isn’t just applicable in the corporate setting but at home as well. For example, an overwhelmed mom can ‘delegate’ gift wrapping of holiday gifts to the children. It will be a fun activity and might as well be a good learning opportunity for creativity and dexterity.

Here’s a guide to know which of your tasks could be delegated:

1. Tiny: delegate tiny tasks or tasks that are redundant but only take a small amount of time to accomplish. Examples are: deleting spam email, booking flights, taking out the trash, wiping counter tops, etc.
2. Tedious: delegate tedious tasks or tasks that require little skill but can be time consuming such as copy-pasting information into a spreadsheet.
3. Terrible at: listen, if you have ZERO design skills – don’t force it. Delegate that task to someone who has the knowledge and expertise to do it. You can be sure that they will do a better job and that will be a more productive use of both your times, instead of trying to figure it out yourself.
4. Teachable: Are there any tasks that you can easily teach someone? Delegate those to someone else. They could very well do a good or even better job at it than you can.

What tasks do you delegate? Share them with us in the comments. Remember to work smart and be a blessing to someone today. Stay safe and healthy!

Written by Jaie O. TheHelp

The holidays are coming up – weekends are filling up with errands, get-togethers, and holiday prep. On top of that, we still have work to finish, family to take care of, and responsibilities to attend to. It’s no wonder our brains are going a mile a minute. With all the worries and to-do’s buzzing around in our head, it could be hard to get some quality sleep. 

We all know the benefits of having a good night’s sleep. Not only does it guarantee more energy in the morning to be able to do productive things it also ensures that our body recovers from the rigors of the day AND helps keep our immune system at optimal work level.

Here are five sure-fire ways you can help yourself get better and more restful sleep:

1. Make the time: The most common mistake for a lot of people is falling to set aside 8 hours of sleep PLUS the time to prepare for it. Imagine this, it takes you an hour to 2 hours to get yourself ready for bed. If you plan to sleep at 10pm and wake up at 6, you have to be knocked out by exactly 10pm to get the full 8 hours of rest. Don’t forget to incorporate prep time in the mix. Give yourself at least a full hour to prepare for the restful sleep you so rightfully deserve.
2. Stay away from screens: Are you guilty of reaching for your phone if you can’t sleep? OR using your phone minutes before bedtime? Gadgets emit blue light that disrupt our sleeping patterns. Not to mention, social media is designed to stimulate the brain and capture your attention for as long as possible. If you plan on getting a good night’s rest, avoid the gadgets.
3. Avoid naps: The exception is a micro-nap, which is a 10-15 minute nap in the mid afternoon. But naps that go for longer than 15 minutes have a huge impact on how sleepy you feel and how ready you are to fall asleep at the end of the day.
4. Watch what you eat and drink: don’t go to bed hungry but don’t go to bed too full either. Avoid drinking caffeinated drinks after 3pm if you plan to be asleep at 10pm. Limit your liquid intake a few hours before bedtime so that you don’t wake up in the middle of the night because you need to pee.
5. Practice good sleep hygiene: invest in things that contribute to getting a good night’s rest – a nice firm mattress, comfy pillows, clean, soft sheets, some lavender-scented things, an eye mask, or even ambient sounds. Do whatever works for you. 

We should all strive to get the sleep we deserve. And we deserve sleep that is restful and rejuvenating. What are the splendid sleep tips and habits that work for you? Share them with us in the comments. Remember to work smart and be a blessing to someone today. Stay safe and healthy!

Written by Jaie O. TheHelp

Are you guilty of reaching for your phone first thing in the morning? Do you lose hours surreptitiously checking your social feeds? Does your phone hijack most of your time? Don’t feel too bad – it happens to the best of us. Social media is designed to be addictive and deliver instant dopamine hits with every click or tap. It is meant to capture and hold our attention for as long as possible. So much so that we end up wasting a lot of time that could have been used towards other, more productive endeavors.

Social media is not all that terrible. There are good sides to social media too.  We get to see inspiration and beauty. We learn new things. We get to reconnect with friends and family. We discover new things. As long as we use it deliberately and keep our intentions focused on the benefits of social media, we are not reduced to being just a passive observer. There’s so much we can learn and so much inspiration we can get online. But if we use social media to waste time or distract ourselves from more important issues, it’s not really beneficial nor rejuvenating.

To avoid the social media mindless scrolling, time wasting trap, here are some tips to be more deliberate with the time you spend on social media.

Question your intentions

When you succumb to the lure of turning to a social media app, here are 2 things to ask yourself:

1. What can I learn? – define the lesson/s you want to take from this interaction. Did you want to learn a recipe? Do you want to see the origin of “king cakes”? Did you want to see images of gift wrapping to inspire new ideas?
2. Is this important? If it’s not – it can wait. Bookmark the page or save the post if you plan on reviewing the information.

Avoid the pitfalls

1. Disable your notifications – it’s easy. Go to your phone settings > notifications > manage all
2. Reduce the number of accounts you follow or subscribe to – don’t follow all the celebrities, product pages, online stores, etc. Really think about who you want to see on your feed. Me? I limit myself to following only “real people”, since my intention is to keep abreast on how my friends are doing.
3. Enable your pop-up blockers
4. Check out social media blocker apps to help you stay focused and productive

Set boundaries

Determine how much time you’ll spend browsing social media apps

Determine how many platforms you’ll visit. Don’t just mindlessly cycle through all of your social media apps hoping for a thing that will catch your attention. 

Step away from social media

We all need a social media detox from time to time. Take a vacation from Facebook for one full day. Stop scrolling through Twitter for a full week. Limit your Instagram uploads to a theme (vacation pictures, food, pets, etc.) Take the time to reconnect with others in person when you disconnect from social media.

What are your tried and tested social media detox tips? Share them with us in the comments. Remember to work smart and be a blessing to someone today. Stay safe and healthy!

Written by Jaie O. TheHelp

Happy Halloween everyone! It’s that time of the year once again when we gather ‘round the campfire and tell urban legends and ghost stories that will make your hair stand on end and your blood rush. But that’ll be for later tonight…

Today, you’re in for a different kind of horror story. These scary tales also fall under the category ‘things you wish won’t happen to you.’ We’ll tell you horrific tales about personal experiences that really happened to us here at The Help. What follows are dark comedies, comedic tragedies, or borderline horrific experiences that we’ve actually had around the workplace. We hope they tickle your funny bone and make you cringe. 

Office hours are 9 to 5

Josh was excited to get to his new job as Corporate Communications Manager. He was up at 4 AM and couldn’t go back to sleep so he thought he’d just go to work early and enjoy the view from his new office. The office complex was a sprawling 8-acre compound with parks and benches. After a hearty breakfast at the cafe, he hung around for a bit to kill time and clocked in at exactly 9 AM. As he sat down to make himself comfortable, he was promptly called to a surprise meeting along with 20-ish other employees. Alas! They were getting laid off. He looked at his watch – it said 9:05 AM. He lasted all of 5 mins in his new role. This gave a whole new meaning to the term 9 to 5.

The case of the missing lunches

Annika’s husband can cook. He is a chef after all. He works for a fusion cuisine bistro and most nights brings food or special menu items home for Annika which she promptly packs to take for lunch the next day. One time, she brought chocolate infused chili con carne to work and shared it with her colleagues. Her lunches are always the talk of the workplace. Even the simple salads and sandwiches she packs for lunch are gourmet.

One day, her lunch went missing. Her beautiful thermal lunch bag was still in the communal fridge but her lunch wasn’t in it. She resorted to buying food from the canteen. The next day, the same thing happened. Her colleagues’ lunches were intact but her lunch was once again missing. On the third day that her lunch went missing, she decided to tell her supervisor. Was someone stealing her lunch? They checked the CCTVs to find out. It turned out that one (hungry) newbie heard about the legendary lunches and decided to try them out for himself. The newbie seemed to enjoy Annika’s lunch and was stealing them for 3 days in a row! Suffice to say, the newbie didn’t last long in that job.

Press record

Joe did systems training as part of the onboarding process. He liked to record his sessions so that newbies have a personalized copy to go back to in case they wanted to revisit a process. There was one particularly special training session for a new system that Joe wanted to capture on record. The session went seamlessly and Joe was pretty happy with how it went. When he went back to review the recording, he couldn’t hear a sound. It turns out, the screen recorder was using the camera mic instead of the headphone that Joe was using. The camera mic was extremely efficient in noise canceling that it canceled ALL of the sound it picked up during the training. What was left was akin to a silent movie.

Do you have any workplace “horror” stories to share with us? Share them with us in the comments. Remember to work smart and be a blessing to someone today. Stay safe and healthy!

Written by Jaie O. TheHelp