What comes to your mind when you think about efficiency and productivity at work? Well, some people normally think that they can be more productive and efficient by increasing their working hours or drinking various beverages such as coffee. In one way or another, these ideas might be helpful but not as effective as you’d want them to be. The process of becoming effective and productive at work needs a sense of dedication, will and more importantly, focus.

You don’t have to be a career consultant to realize that getting a job in the modern world is becoming one of the most difficult things to do. This means one thing; the moment you get the chance to earn a living, you shouldn’t ruin it. Try as much as you can to maintain your job because if your boss finds out that you have been sleeping at work or your colleagues seems to work ten times better than you, your chances of being fired will definitely increase. You don’t want to start writing CVs, cover letters or collecting recommendation letters and other documents all in the name of searching for a new job.

On the other hand, if you’re an employer, you don’t have to worry about losing your job but you should be worried about a greater consequence. When you start showing signs of inefficiency and laziness in the office, your employees will never take you seriously. Besides, your competitors will take advantage of the situation to beat you at your own game. This is why you have to rise to the occasion and learn how to increase your productivity and efficiency at work.

1.  Proper planning

No amount of coffee will be able to help you create a suitable work schedule. You need to take charge of your job and plan every aspect of it. If you are supposed to complete a particular task by noon, stick to your schedule. This is not the right time to create excuses because they’ll just make things worse.

2.  Time management

Even if you have the right work plan to guide you, you may not be as productive as you’d wish to be if you keep ignoring other crucial factors. You may even decide to skip your responsibilities by merely ten minutes and if you do so, what else will prevent you from skipping the next task for an additional ten minutes? Time wasted can never be recovered and that is why you have to stay focused!

3.  Analyze your performance

At the end of the day, you know what’s required of you, as an employer or employee. You can go through your overall performance and analyze every bit of it. Find out if you’ve achieved your goals for the day and if not, try and identify the things that prevented you from doing so, therefore avoiding them in your next day at work.

4.  Watch your dress code

This might sound somehow odd but truth be told; lack of a proper dress code affects your performance. Not only do you want to look good to boost your confidence and morale, but you should definitely be comfortable. If you have a comfy suit on then you would be fidgeting so much in the office. If you are a laborer then things like durable work suspenders or sturdy gloves can make all the difference. Set yourself up for the least amount of distractions possible so you can get to work!

5.  Watch your working environment

The appearance of your workplace plays a crucial role in determining your mood. If you work in a dull environment, nothing will prevent you from under-performing. You should always take your time to clear any type of mess in your office or regular working environment for better performance. If you work in an office, open the window curtains to introduce natural light since it motivates human beings compared to the artificial sources of light that might make you feel sleepy. These are some of the most important things to consider if you wish to perform better at work.

By Jay Harris

Picture this — You’re driving through a small business district looking for a store that sells lighting fixtures, and you spot two similar places. One shop has an antique wooden exterior door with a large glass and wrought iron window, while the other has a chipped metal entrance with a roll-down security gate. Which store do you stop at?

This may be an extreme example, but it does show how important image can be from your store, even before your customers walk in the front door.

Apart from general appearance — worn and damaged versus visibly cared for — the color and style of your front door can speak volumes to your customers. What message are you currently conveying with your shop entrance?

Color Me Happy

The psychology of color dates as far back as the time of ancient Egyptians, who studied and applied the natural energy effect that different colors have on mood. Although many of our reactions to different colors come from our personal history (the brown and yellow of grandma’s kitchen, the soft green of a first-remembered bedroom), others are innate reactions that are rooted in our most primal emotions.

Red, for example, is the color of fire. Dilute the color a little, however, and you have the sweet innocence of pink. Enrich it and you have a refined claret. Each of the primary and secondary colors in the color palate evoke a basic, animal emotion; so what do you want your front door to say about your business?

Red: This color is stimulating and exciting. Our instincts relate it to the color of fire, but also to aggression and anger. It can draw attention and pinpoint an observer’s focus, and is an excellent accent color.

Orange: Drawing from its red and yellow roots, orange depicts warmth and energy, though it is a color that many people feel strongly about, either loving or hating it.

Yellow: Brightness, optimism, happiness; yellow is the color of sunshine and positivity. This color tends to promote energy and inspire creativity.

Green: Depending on the type of green you use, green can evoke the calming, refreshing feeling of nature and the environment. Use too “hard” or bilious a green, however, and it might stimulate memories of hospitals and governmental institutions.

Blue: By far considered to be the favorite of colors, blue tends to make people think of trust and safety. It’s the color of the sky and the water; the elements that surround us constantly. It can stimulate feelings of calm and peace, but when the blue becomes stark or electric it can evoke feelings of exhilaration; if it becomes too hard, it can evoke a feeling of coldness. Indigo, on the other hand, seems to appeal to both men and women equality and stimulates a feeling of insight and communication.

Purple: A favorite of creative and edgy individuals, purple can convey wildly different emotions depending on the degree of red or blue undertone. More red in the purple tends to be more stimulating, while more blue is more peaceful.

Brown: The color of nature. Brown is strong, stable and reliable. The use of natural woods instead of paint can inspire these emotions more deeply.

Black: Because of its stark nature, black tends to be seen as either a color of authority or emptiness.

White: The color of cleanliness, white is a neutral that can either been seen as safe or sterile. The hardest part of maintaining white is keeping it clean, as a dirty white can also speak volumes to the casual observer.

A door with style

Apart from the color of your front door, the style also tells a story about your store and even a little about your own character.

• Do you have a repurposed antique entryway or a bright new art deco door?
• Do you have a window that lets in plenty of light or is it a solid barrier between your store and the outdoors?
• Is it purposefully chipped and faded in a shabby chic style or is it well cared for and scuff-free?

Whatever style you choose for your exterior doors, make sure it conveys an idea of what you have to offer. Shabby chic, for example, is perfect for an antique store or craft studio. A bright, open door works wonderfully for conveying a sense of open mindedness, and an antique entry can show good taste and a solid, traditional way of thinking.

What does your shop’s front door say about your business? Are you presenting your potential clients with a good visual idea of your wares or is your entryway telling a different story? What would you change about your current storefront, apart from the door color and style?

Jay Harris is a Home Depot “on the floor” sales associate and a regular contributor to Home Depot’s blog, His interests include providing tips to homeowners on exterior doors and patio doors.

Intro by Sarah Wenger:

Created by: www.OnlineGraduatePrograms.com

Seth’s Blog: Those people

At a recent seminar, a woman who helps run a community college stood up to ask a question.

“Well, the bad news,” she said, “is that we have to let everyone in. And the truth is, many of these kids just can’t be the leaders you’re describing, can’t make art. We need people to do manual work, and it’s those people.”

I couldn’t believe it. I was speechless, then heartbroken. All I could think of was these young adults, trusting this woman to lead them, teach them, inspire them and push them, and instead being turned into ‘those people.’

You know, the people who will flip burgers or sweep streets or fill out forms all day. The ones who will be brainwashed into going into debt, into buying more than they can afford, to living lives that quietly move from one assigned task or one debt payment to another. If they’re lucky.

No, I said to her, trying to control my voice, no these are not those people. Not if you don’t want them to be.

Everyone is capable of being generous, at least once. Everyone is capable of being original, inspiring and connected, at least once. And everyone is capable of leading, yes, even more than once.

When those that we’ve chosen to teach and lead write off people because of what they look like or where they live or who their parents are, it’s a tragedy. Worse, we often write people off merely because they’ve been brainwashed into thinking that they have no ability to do more than they’ve been assigned. Well, if we brainwashed them into setting limits, I know we can teach them to ignore those limits.

Inspired by my friend Dave Seah and his 30-day Product Creation project:

…to kick off this year’s Groundhog Day Resolutions, I’m going to commit to a crazy idea: make a new product for every day of the month.

Now, I don’t expect you to dig as deep as Dave did to come up with a new product for your business every day, rather I encourage you to find 15 minutes every single day for the next 30 days for Creative Work.

You can grab a piece of time in the morning or in the evening and write poems, do watercolor painting practice, arrange some flowers – you name it! What do you like to do? What gets your creative juices flowing?

Maybe you can work this exercise into your normal routine, perhaps while preparing a meal you add some colorful or interesting garnish or side dish.

Here are some tips for making this exercise more valuable:

• Keep a log of what you worked on in your journal or on your computer.
• Be sure to record the time of day, day of the week, and how you were feeling (happy, tired, stressed, etc). You can use these later to find patterns in your day or week (“I seem to always get tired about an hour after lunch!”).
• Make notes about whether you finished what you were working on, or not. Would you call it a success?
• Rate each day’s experience with a difficulty level and an enjoyability level. This can help you to find what you really enjoy doing.

Refer back to your notebook when you are working on something and find yourself to be stuck or uninspired. Perhaps a past activity will kindle new creativity!

Brand awareness. It’s one of those horrible, jargon-y terms beloved of business coaches and snake oil merchants the world over. So please forgive us the next few paragraphs, as we draw your attention to precisely that term, and it’s importance in propelling your business forward. If there was another term that summed up what we’re on about better than ‘brand awareness’, we’d use it. But there’s not, so you’ll just have to suck it up.

The best little business this side of Planet Earth can fall on its sword if nobody knows it exists. Footscray Sign-A-Rama is a business that will never suffer this indignity- they are, after, all in the business of signage- and they can help you to maximize your brand awareness, too.

Trade fairs are an excellent way of getting your business ‘out there’, representing a fantastic opportunity to showcase your wares and create excitement around your brand. Trade fairs are like the brothels of the retail world (if you can swallow such a crass comparison). You might consider your business a lady/fellow of the night. How will she/he draw attention to their unique qualities? How will she/he convey, in the blink of an eye, that they’re ‘the one’?

Back to reality now- at a trade fair a push up bra or a short-short skirt won’t do the trick. The professionalism is all in your signage and presentation.

So what kind of event signage might you consider? Bold graphics, creative design, counter displays, banners and even inflatable billboards. Seek professional advice to help you come up with the best possible signage for your business.

If you’d like to learn more about the variety of quality signage options available to increase awareness of your brand, contact the team at www.footscray.signarama.com.au.

When people think of productivity, tools such as time management, list, mind mapping, and other kinds of apps come up. So most of us who want to be productive end up thinking that we need to download a lot of “get things done” software to help increase our dwindling productivity.

Rarely do we give attention to one of the factors that easily affects how we do our work and at what rate we finish them — our environment.

Here are three ways you can use to increase your productivity without needing to use any kind of apps. All you have to do is to pay attention to your surroundings.

1. Use natural light when you’re working in the morning and early afternoon.

Researchers studying the effects of light exposure on performance discovered that natural light significantly affects cognitive performance of workers.

According to the study, those exposed to daylight in the early afternoon were observed to be more alert as they proceeded to work in the evening compared to those exposed to artificial light, who became sleepier.

Thus, it’s actually preferable to work using natural light as it has a positive impact on alertness, mood, and behavior. In effect, using natural light can improve worker happiness and, well, happy workers tend to produce more results.

So work near windows if you can and enjoy the sunshine. You can also get up early, before sunrise, and soak up as much sunlight as you can to help you get energized.

2. Keep your workplace nice and warm.

An ergonomic study at Cornell University found that warmer temperature in offices results in fewer (typing) errors and higher productivity. On the other hand, decreased productivity and more mistakes were observed when working in colder temperatures.

A cold environment distracts people from concentrating on their work because they’re focusing their energy on trying to keep warm. This isn’t really a problem when you have control over your working environment. You can always turn up the heat.

However, there may be workplaces wherein a cold environment is necessary to “keep the computers cool.” In this case, your productivity may depend on the outfit you wear and whether or not you’re brave enough to tell show your boss this article. Or you can use a personal heating pad!

3. Move a few things every now and then.

The way your workspace is arranged is also a big factor in your productivity.

Look around.

Are important and often-used documents or equipment within reach?

When was the last time you changed something about your work area?

Do you work at home? When did you last clean your home office?

The fact is most of us become so busy that we begin to neglect our surroundings. We keep putting off cleaning or keeping things away until “we have time.”

Simple things like getting up to look for your laptop charger (and then figuring out which outlet to use) can affect the flow of work. Move a few things around with convenience in mind. Arrange your work area ergonomically. Make sure the things you constantly need and sue are within easy reach.

More importantly, it’ll help to get rid of the things you don’t need anymore because a cluttered environment results in a cluttered mind.

Increasing your productivity doesn’t have to be expensive or totally software-dependent. Warmth, light, and a little rearrangement may be all it takes. And the great things is, you can easily get started on all three right now.

Make the time for these changes and let others know about it too!

Have any tips on productivity that you think very few are aware of? Share them in the forum!

Environmental Design for Enhanced Productivity

This is a guest post by Glori Urban from SkilledUp.com – the leading source of reviews, ratings and deals on online courses, with over 60,000 courses from over 200 providers available in every subject. Find online courses at SkilledUp.com to get skills and get ahead, and visit us on Facebook and Twitter.

My friend Dave Seah created a challenge for himself, based on learning from his efforts and failures:

A February Full of Promises | David Seah

…I have a pretty good idea now what is important and meaningful to me. I’m actually found a good spot to start building something, and thus 2013 is dedicated to doing the work. It’s been going around, this recommitting to work. In my case, it was coming to a conclusion about what I wanted that created the necessary confidence to move forward.

Anyway, to kick off this year’s Groundhog Day Resolutions, I’m going to commit to a crazy idea: make a new product for every day of the month. The time period will begin on February 2nd and end on March 3rd. Since doing my 715AM “start work” routine with my illustrator buddy Brad (who incidentally drew the Groundhog sketch), I’ve been experiencing a greater productivity and think it’s possible to sustain this pace. I also draw confidence from my experience doing the National Novel Writing Month challenge last November. To write 50,000 words in a month, I had to spend about 90 minutes every day producing around 1600 words. I learned, to my surprise, that the artistic process DOES work if you make it past the fog of uncertainty; just chipping away at it for a few minutes yields surprising and unpredictable results. Product-wise, I know I can make something in 90 minutes, and having 30 or so new products to potentially sell would be a huge jump in inventory. I think that would lead to some increase in daily sales, which is on the road to creative self-sufficiency.

I have to admit that I missed the whole thing, as my Lovely Bride and I were preparing to re-locate for her new job…February vanished into the black hole known as “Moving” for me.

I am going to be taking a good look at what Dave was working on and see if we can’t incorporate some of these ideas into the Creativity Workshop (which has been on hiatus but resumes on Friday!).

Education.

We used to think of it as ending when you got your college diploma.

This has to change.

In a world where you will average 7-10 jobs in your lifetime, where second, third, and fourth careers are commonplace, where Indians and Eastern Europeans can perform basic online or computer-based tasks for $3/hour, and where your dream job may be in a field that didn’t exist four years ago, education cannot just be something we do when we are young or in formal classroom settings. It must be continuous, and it must be easily accessible.

The good news is that there are a growing number of providers of high-quality education focused on helping anyone advance in their jobs and in their lives. Increasingly these providers offer the three key benefits that used to be restricted to a formal education: content (the skills and knowledge), socialization (the interaction with peers and mentors), and accreditation (the proof of knowledge contained in a transcript or a diploma).

The quantity, quality, variety and affordability of these offerings is expanding exponentially, buoyed both by demand for education, and the introduction of new tools that reduce the cost and barriers to entry for anyone with valuable knowledge to share.

So what’s SkilledUp?

At SkilledUp, we are on a mission to help anyone build their skills by providing access to the best courses and training available. While traditional colleges continue to rise in price more than any other good or service in our economy, there is a fast-growing wealth of online educational content that is affordable, easy-to-use, and can generate real returns on your investment of time and money. Whether you want to break into a new career area, get a promotion, or learn an additional skill for a company you are starting — the resources are available online to help you take the next step.

Until now, though, the best resources have not always been easy to find. Our vision is to organize, review and curate the world’s finest online educational resources. While we begin with online courses and content, our goal is to eventually cover the full spectrum of content, socialization, and accreditation. We want to fill the gaps in the traditional system by better connecting training to specific skills, and then those skills to jobs and careers, so you can make better decisions about your future.

What can you expect from us?

Everyone in online education claims to have the best training, the best courses, the best instructors and the best support system.

Well, we intend to find out what actually is the best. Our goal is to look at online education the same way we might look at Cars, Movies or Televisions. Products that offer value – to help you get a better job, get promoted or make more money — and have a clear cost — both in real dollars, and in your time and effort.

Our goal is to unearth the best educational resources for every subject area, but also to help you to use these resources in the best way – that means interviewing experts on how they got their skills, finding out the best way to learn any subject, and asking tough questions to those that aim to educate.

The way we once equipped ourselves for our careers is changing – SkilledUp is here to help.

Bio:

Nick Gidwani is the CEO of SkilledUp, the leading site for finding the best online courses. Previous to launching SkilledUp, he launched CarZen, the #1 Car Research App for the iPad. He has also worked at WebMD.com and Bain Capital. Nick graduated from MIT where he was the Chairman of the Sloan Management Association, where he helped his classmates prepare for recruiting.

Nick has been quoted in Time Magazine and the New York Times, and has appeared on Fox News, ABC News, NBC news and other programs speaking about the state of the economy and the automotive industry.

“Work-life balance” is an elusive goal that most working-age adults have strived for their whole careers. But the dream of balancing it all might now be in our grasp due to an emerging trend in companies across the U.S. – unlimited vacation policies.

A small but growing number of companies have done away with traditional vacation plans, instead giving employees–with the approval of their managers–the freedom to decide when and for how long to take time off.

While such policies still aren’t widespread – only one percent of U.S. companies offer them – proponents of limitless vacation days claim that by giving their staff the liberty to choose their schedule improves morale and employee retention. Put more simply, the policy improves workers’ quality of life.

Is an unlimited PTO policy something you should consider for your workplace? Software Advice explores the pros and cons of unlimited vacation packages on its blog, The New Talent Times.

Take our brief survey to let us know what policy your company has!