British Management University (BMU) in Tashkent is a rapidly growing higher education institution offering undergraduate, postgraduate, and foundation programs. As Academic Registrar, Christian Capone oversees all student records, enrollment, assessment tracking, and compliance with academic service level agreements across multiple departments.
Book Launchers is a full-service publishing company that helps aspiring authors turn their manuscripts into professionally published books. From writing and editing to design, marketing, and distribution, their team guides clients through every stage of the book publishing journey.
A global leader in healthcare investment, this firm manages one of the industry’s most diverse portfolios, spanning seed-stage biotech ventures through large public companies in equity, private equity, and private credit.
Operating across seven offices worldwide, the organization’s IT team plays a critical role in maintaining the infrastructure that powers its global investment operations, where precision, speed, and compliance are non-negotiable.
As humans, we tend to focus more on the things we need to do than the things we’ve already done. This so-called “Zeigarnik effect”, named after Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, means our minds are often swimming with all of the tasks, responsibilities, and mental notes that we think we should be focusing on. That’s where Prioritization Matrix can help!
All of these tasks and projects that need doing, this mental to-do list, without a clear hierarchy of importance can make it difficult for us to stay focused and actually get things done.
One way to combat all of this Zeigarnik noise is to note down everything. Make an actual to-do list. Studies have been done, and it has been shown that the very act of noting down tasks can quite simply “make you more effective”.
But, even with a to-do list, before you actually get anything done it’s necessary to have a clear idea of your priorities.
Sounds simple enough, right? Unfortunately, figuring out what to prioritize can be hard. It’s a complicated process that involves weighing up cost against value, effort against time, and for a lot of businesses, will likely involve many different stakeholders.
The solution is to work out a process for determining what to prioritize.
Self-control is over-hyped, according to Kentaro Fujita, a psychologist who studies self-control at Ohio State University.
Research suggests that the popular idea of self-control as the ability to resist temptation with willpower is fundamentally flawed.
“Our prototypical model of self-control is angel on one side and devil on the other, and they battle it out. We tend to think of people with strong willpower as people who are able to fight this battle effectively. Actually, the people who are really good at self-control never have these battles in the first place.” – Kentaro Fujita, psychologist at Ohio State University
How does this tie in with productivity? If you ask anyone what is the biggest challenge they face in trying to be productive, a likely response will involve something about a “lack of willpower”, or perhaps a difficulty staying focused.
These kinds of responses represent the popular understanding of what it means to exercise self-control.
The most productive people don’t necessarily have the best self-control, they just know how to work smart.
They’ve also most likely built up a lot of good work habits for saving time and effort, allowing them to alleviate some of the stress or discomfort that is one of the root causes of unproductivity.
In this article, I’ll outline 42 productivity hacks to help you understand how to work smarter, improve the quality of your work life, and build habits that will save you time, energy, and mental strain in the long-term.
Here’s the complete list of productivity hacks:
I recently hit the limit on my 100GB Dropbox account and after a bit of research decided to make the move from Dropbox to Google Drive. In this post, I’ll explain why I did it and some cool unexpected benefits that came from the move and give you a rundown of Dropbox vs Google Drive.
Dropbox and Google Drive are file storage services that sync files between a folder on your device(s) and the cloud. Making it easy to backup and access your files from anywhere.
Up until a few weeks ago I was paying for premium plans for both Google Drive and Dropbox.
According to Harvard Business Review, marketing executives are losing 10-15% of their time due to not automating simple tasks.
Task automation should already be saving you huge amounts of time and effort.
If it’s not, I can only assume that’s because you’re not using it!
If you’re a heavy user of different SaaS platforms, you’ve probably grown tired of having to jump back and forth from one to another to perform simple tasks.
Would it not be easier if you could click one button and the different platforms just spoke to each other and got the job done for you?
Yes, it obviously would be.
In fact, according to Chui, Manyika, and Miremadi writing in the Harvard Business Review, not only could a marketing executive be automating activities which account for between 10-15% of their current time using existing technology, but for 60% of existing US jobs, 30% of their time could be reduced by automation.
You can read the full report, Four Fundamentals of Workplace Automation, at McKinsey.
Note, that this important study is already over a year old, and the speed of technological advancements in available automation software has likely caused those given percentages to rise even further.
Task automation is where you doing one task results in multiple tasks being done. Bit of a mouthful, but let me give an example…
Or, if you want to watch a step by step example, check out this Process Street video about automating client onboarding.
This post is a collaboration between our Process Street Team and Corey Fradin, Founder of QuickBooost. Exploring topics like productivity, time management, and goal setting, QuickBooost helps you better utilize and take control of your time.
The pursuit of productivity is often simplified to a hero’s fable involving the conquest of willpower; the reality might be more about the systems we build around our work, and the clever things we do to make work easier.
You only have 24 hours in a day. You can reduce the problem of productivity to: How many tasks can I get done in that 24 hour period?
What you choose to do with your time – which tasks you prioritize, which you choose to delegate, which you choose to automate, all of these factors are directly the result of the productivity system you build around your work.
You already have a productivity system, you just might not realize. Even if you don’t feel productive, you can still look at what you’re currently doing and understand it in terms of some kind of system.
What that means is, you can break the situation into parts, like your goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics; how all of these things work together amounts to your productivity system.
Take for example David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. The GTD method is basically the idea of achieving mental focus by writing down your main tasks, and figuring out how you can break them down into smaller, more immediately actionable tasks.
This is a type of productivity system.
So, in this article, we’ll be looking at:
In essence a productivity system is a lot like a straightforward process that helps you break down your workload into smaller, more manageable chunks, and ultimately do more work, more efficiently.
Microsoft SharePoint is a bit like a Swiss army knife. It has a ton of different functions, some of which are useful, and some that aren’t. If you’re using SharePoint or one of several SharePoint alternatives and you’re not careful, you might wind up with a tool that’s so bloated with features it doesn’t really succeed at any of them.
As SharePoint consultant Jason Masterman says, “Customers are [implementing SharePoint] because they own it. It’s not that they’re doing research and choosing [SharePoint]. They’re doing it because they own it.” In a 2013 survey, only 6% of respondents reported completing a successful SharePoint project. In 2015, that number was up—but just to a mere 11%.
We think more than 11% of users deserve to be happy with their workflow tool. So we looked at 7 SharePoint alternatives and examined how they stack up in terms of price, capability, and user-friendliness. Here’s what we found.
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You need to start using a timeline template.
Why?
Whether you’re showing off your company’s milestones to potential investors, breaking down a project into individual tasks for your team, or just organizing your week to come, a timeline template will let you forget about formatting and get straight down to recording and using your relevant data.
Every single one of these is free to use and doesn’t require an email address, account creation, or anything of the sort – I’ve just collected the best templates from across the web in one place for you to have a wide selection. All 18 will be organized into one of four categories:
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