You click the ‘Contact Us’ page. Nothing happens. First, confusion, then familiar frustration. It was a mailto link. Your computer slows to a grinding halt as a huge, archaic desktop mail app rises from the depths of your hard drive. Checking that the date on your computer isn’t 15 years out, you wonder why mail integration isn’t standard… and what year is it exactly?
I read an interesting post the other day by Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy about how he has been training his son to have a “growth mindset”.
Here is a quote from the post:
Researchers have known for some time that the brain is like a muscle; that the more you use it, the more it grows. They’ve found that neural connections form and deepen most when we make mistakes doing difficult tasks rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones.
What this means is that our intelligence is not fixed, and the best way that we can grow our intelligence is to embrace tasks where we might struggle and fail.
However, not everyone realizes this. Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University has been studying people’s mindsets towards learning for decades. She has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or growth. Fixed mindsets mistakenly believe that people are either smart or not, that intelligence is fixed by genes. People with growth mindsets correctly believe that capability and intelligence can be grown through effort, struggle and failure. Dweck found that those with a fixed mindset tended to focus their effort on tasks where they had a high likelihood of success and avoided tasks where they may have had to struggle, which limited their learning. People with a growth mindset, however, embraced challenges, and understood that tenacity and effort could change their learning outcomes. As you can imagine, this correlated with the latter group more actively pushing themselves and growing intellectually.
In short someone with a growth mindset will embrace challenges and be willing to fail multiple times before reaching their goal, whereas someone with a fixed mindset will not even try.
Love or hate Microsoft, if your company uses Outlook, you need it to check in with your team, communicate with customers, and coordinate events.
While it’s great to have your email and calendar automatically synced, you can’t rely on Outlook to automatically solve all your productivity woes. Instead, think of it as a platform you can customize and optimize to help simplify your workflow.
These add-ins let you set reminders, track whatever you send, and move important info to the right place sooner. They can even reduce the number of pointless emails you get.
Here are 16 Outlook add-ins, compiled by us here at Process Street, that will transform your inbox into an efficient machine.
We’ve all been there. A letter icon on your phone has a five-digit number in the top corner and your apprehension at tackling it grows stronger every day.
You’re drowning in emails.
“In 1993 I didn’t need a system for doing email… and yet, today, I feel like the only way you’re going to succeed at a job… is figuring out how to deal with a high volume of email.” – Merlin Mann, Inbox Zero Google Tech Talk
Lucky for you, there’s a handy method called inbox zero which you can use to blast through your messages and stay on top of your backlog.
Say goodbye to email hell; your easy (and free) solution has arrived.
Process mapping is a useful tool for what can be summed up as “seeing the big picture and little pictures at the same time”.
That may sound silly to you, but that’s really what it is.
The primary benefit achieved from mapping out your business processes is that you can accurately evaluate each of the steps needed to complete a certain workflow, while understanding exactly how each of them interacts with one another and contributes to the process as a whole.
This ability to evaluate all aspects of a process helps managers identify constraints, opportunities for improvement, and formulate strategies to implement changes without disrupting day-to-day work.
But how do you go about ensuring that the time and effort you put into constructing these maps translates into improved performance?
That’s the question we’ll be tackling in this post.
Before doing so, however, we must acknowledge that there is a huge range of complexity when it comes to methods for process mapping. If you are a small organization it can be as simple as drawing it out on a whiteboard, whereas enterprises use sophisticated mapping software tools like Appian and Lucidchart.
This point regarding complexity and different kinds of process maps leads us to another important sub-topic that needs to be addressed early on – the difference between process mapping and process modeling.
I meet so many people who love writing.
Whenever anyone asks me what I do and they find out I’m a writer, they almost always say some variant of the same thing:
“Oh, I would love to write more!”
“I wish I could do that – but I just don’t have time”
“I’ve been meaning to start blogging, but haven’t gotten round to it”
These responses are pretty consistent whether they come from a regular Joe or someone whose business and professional life would benefit from them writing more.
So many companies build a blog and intend to use it properly, only for it to fall into disrepair and get forgotten.
Why?
Because writing isn’t anyone’s core task and is then seen as less valuable.
So what if I told you that you could finish a blog post in 3 hours?
Would 3 hours a week, or even a month, be worth committing to give yourself or your company a functioning and marketable blog? Is that a small enough commitment to open up a new channel or boost your SEO?
It is. You know it. So let me show you how I do it.
Have you ever wished you could get some of those pesky work tasks done more easily while on the move, or out-and-about? Those routine tasks and emails that take so much time out of your day, that you would give an arm and a leg to be able to automate?
Or, picture this: you easily send a quick follow-up email, record meeting notes in real time, create new projects, send surveys, schedule meetings, and much more by simply talking to Siri.
You can do all of this and more with Shortcuts for iOS 12 in combination with Siri and Process Street, using the power of Zapier integrations.
Shortcuts, formerly known as Workflow, puts Siri in the control seat of your business workflows, with more power and usefulness than ever before. Using custom phrases recorded and added to Siri’s library of voice gestures, you can trigger a series of actions across multiple apps.
There are two ways to use Shortcuts. The best option is the Shortcuts app itself, which is where you can create your own workflows from scratch. The app also comes with a gallery of suggested shortcuts curated by Apple. Separate from this, Siri will recommend shortcuts based on your daily iPhone activity. You can see these in Settings under Siri & Search.
Here’s a quick list of all of the ideas I’ll be covering in this post, before we dive in:
“How did I forget to follow up with that client?”
There was a time when I used to think that as another golden opportunity passed me by. It’s tough enough being a freelancer and having to both find clients and secure them in such a competitive scene without adding human error into the mix.
Nowadays, I’ve largely mitigated the frustration that comes with making avoidable errors, letting me massively boost my consistency and productivity, and it’s all thanks to process documentation.
Having a documented process to work through is insanely useful. I’m here to tell you exactly why you need to be using processes in your work and give some freelance tips on how you can start noticing the benefits in no time. Let’s get started.
Effectively managing purchase orders is a critical component of any business with vendor relationships. And yet, according to the founder & COO of Procurify, Kenneth Loi:
“Many organizations unwisely forego purchase orders because they perceive the paperwork to be a hassle that slows things down.”
He’s right. Paperwork is a hassle and does slow things down. However, this is not a good enough reason to forego purchase orders, hence the word “unwisely”.
From creating a requisition to gaining approval and receiving an invoice from the vendor, there are up to 7 documents involved in the purchasing cycle. That is a lot to keep track of for a single purchase.
And this only gets more complex as a business grows.
Maintaining a paper-based system at the enterprise level is virtually impossible. For smaller companies, it’s do-able, just incredibly inefficient.
The frustration and inefficiency that comes with managing piles of paperwork is no longer an unavoidable obstacle to overcome. By establishing an automated purchase order workflow, you can centralize documentation, seamlessly track progress in real-time, and shorten purchasing cycles.
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Maybe you’re the sort of person who sits down at their desk for 8 hours solid and hammers out as much as possible.
Maybe you use the Pomodoro method or your own task management techniques.
I don’t know what sort of person I am yet.
I used to give it no thought — wake up, lob a coffee down my throat, sit down and start typing.
Lately, my tasks are harder to define and I find myself having trouble with time management and prioritizing.
Right now I’m using Pomello, a Pomodoro timer that lives in Trello and times my work on each card. Click here to get it.
Tomorrow I’ll probably be sick of it and defiantly hammering on the keyboard until it’s time to sleep…
In my seemingly neverending quest to get shit done, I’ve seen a ton of strange methods and lists. And, let me tell you, working at Process Street — a task management system for businesses — I’m making myself practice what I preach.
Here are some of the task management techniques I’ve come across.
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