1. Take a Walk

Often, drowsiness sets in when you’ve sat motionless at your desk for hours. This can especially become a problem after work when you’re digesting lunch, too. Stand up every 30 minutes and walk around. This doesn’t have to be far – just to the copy room or up and down a few flights of stairs in your building. By breaking the monotony of sitting at a desk and getting your blood moving, you can, hopefully, keep yourself from becoming sluggish.

2. Drink Water

Being dehydrated is an easy way to make you feel tired and grouchy. If you think you haven’t had enough water, this may be the root cause of your intense desire to nap. Even if your body isn’t short on water, drinking cold water perks you up. Keep a glass or water bottle full of ice water on your desk at all times. By constantly drinking, you also ensure that you’ll have to take trips to the restroom – a good leg stretch.

3. Smell Something Rejuvenating

Certain smells are proven to stimulate your senses, thus making you feel more awake. Peppermint and citrus are two of the top smells. Buy a candle in one of these smells and keep it on your desk to light when your eyelids begin to droop. Keeping a jar of peppermints to eat is also a great idea.

4. Do Something Mindless

You could feel distracted or unmotivated because of the task on which you are working. If it’s large or complicated, you may be intimidated, which makes you want to stop working. If this is the situation, switch to a smaller, less daunting task. By doing something routine and mindless, your brain can relax, while you’re still able to be productive.

5. Go Outside

Bright light stimulates your sense and, most importantly, regulates your internal clock. When you’re stuck in an office, especially a small cubicle all day, your body clock can get thrown off. Bright light will make you more alert, so try adding a very bright desk lamp to your space. Most importantly, though, walk outside at least once during the workday. Sunlight will immediately perk you up.

About the Author: Terry Carter, a freelance writer who frequently writes about Bayou Blaster Incense. 

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Managing your time more efficiently means that at the end of each day you have:

• spent time doing the important things in your life
• not spent time doing the unimportant things
• more free time for yourself to spend relaxing, doing things you love or with people you love
• the ability to go to sleep feeling good about what you have achieved rather than worrying about all the things still not done

Can anyone become more efficient at managing their time?

There are two types of people in the world; those with a clock in their head (time watchers) and those without (time enjoyers). If you are a time watcher then, yes, time management skills will come more naturally to you. Time watchers can be chronically early and find it pretty easy to plan their day in their heads. They tend to achieve more than time enjoyers. Time watchers do, however, find it more challenging to remember to live in the moment and enjoy the journey. They find it hard to bring their focus back from the destination to the ‘now’. They live in the future rather than the present.

Time enjoyers can be chronically late as they are unaware of time passing and can really focus upon and enjoy the moment. As a result, however, they don’t always achieve as much as they might like out of life… and compared with time watchers, may feel that they waste time.

Fortunately both types of people can learn the traits of the other:

• Time watchers can learn to enjoy the moment while still being aware of time. They can learn to be less driven by time while still achieving the same results.
• Time enjoyers can learn to make more efficient use of their time while still enjoying the journey and living in the present.

Regardless of which type of person you are, there are benefits to learning time management skills in our busy world.

Does managing your time mean you have to become rigid and lose the joy and flexibility from your day?

Not at all. If you are using your time management skills effectively, you will be:

• Remembering to focus upon the joy in every moment of the day; no matter what you are doing;
• Creating more free time for yourself in which you can be as joyous and flexible as you would like knowing that you feel happier having done all the tasks that needed doing in less time than it would have taken you previously.

What does it take?

There are 6 easy steps to managing your time and creating more free time for yourself:

1. Set goals
2. Prioritize
3. Know where your time is currently going
4. Prepare daily action plans
5. Defeat time robbers
6. Make efficiency gains

And the magical key to the whole process… HAVE FUN while you are doing what you are doing (regardless of what it is). It is wonderful to have time to enjoy the people and things you love, but it is a fact of life that there are any number of other things you will have to do in your daily life. The key is to be present and find ways to enjoy the moment while you are doing the things you both have to do and love to do. That way, not one single moment of your life is lost to unnecessary misery and you will have more joy and laughter in every moment.

Step 1: Set goals

Goals are the starting point of effective time management. Once you have them, you use them as your personal time management tool. If you find yourself doing something that doesn’t fit within your goals or doesn’t help you achieve the results you require, tell yourself that you don’t have time for it. It is the time we spend doing unimportant things that steals from us the time we could better spend on the important things in life (whatever they are). It is when we are not finding the time to spend on the things that matter, that we begin to experience time related stress.

If you want to do this step really well, you will force yourself into that space of ruthless honesty we rarely enter. Work out what is really important in life to you; not other people, not ‘society’; but you.

Step 2: Determine your priorities

Working out your goals isn’t enough. Once you have set yourself some goals it is time to prioritize them. There are goals that are critical to your life and other goals that are just ‘nice to have’. One of the key secrets to being a great time manager is to focus at least some of your efforts every day on the critical goals; the things that will really help to shape your life, business or career.

Step 3: Know where your time goes

Budgeting your time is like budgeting your money. The first step to being good at it is to understand where it is currently being spent. How do you currently spend your day?

Did you know, for example, that research by the A.C. Nielson groups showed that the average American spends more than 4 hours each day watching TV and less than 3.5 minutes engaging in meaningful conversation with their children? If you were unaware that such a large portion of your day was spent doing this activity, you might struggle to see how you could possibly fit in 30 minutes of exercise in your day.

How about the manager who keeps track and finds that he is spending 3.5 hours of every day in meetings, many of which do not produce outcomes or it is not necessary for him or her to attend? Knowing where the manager’s time is going, allows him/her to make choices about what is important to be achieved each day. If he or she made a decision not to attend even one of those meetings in a day, he or she may have an additional hour at the end of each day to spend with loved ones or relaxing.

Step 4: Daily action plans

Setting goals and prioritising them is not enough. You also need to plan the steps you will take to make them happen, the time you will spend on them and when you will spend that time. You may need to have a big picture plan if your goals will take several weeks, months or years to achieve. As well you will need to plan what you will do every day. This type of plan is called a daily action plan.

A daily action plan:

• Lists the tasks you wish to achieve today; AND
• Prioritizes them so that the most important one goes to the top of the list and the least important one goes to the bottom of the list.

The key then is to start with the most important item on the list and work on it until it is finished or you have done everything you can. When the first item is finished, then you move onto the second item.

There will be many more fun jobs clamouring for your attention, but with a little bit of willpower you will be able to push them to the bottom of the list, leave them there and focus your attention on the things that really matter. You will be able to do this because:

• If the important things are done in your day, you have had the best day possible;
• It doesn’t matter if the unimportant things aren’t done;
• Doing unimportant things first means that you will have less time in the day to the unimportant things;
• Doing unimportant things might mean that you have to spend an extra hour at working getting the important things done at the end of the day. This cuts into time you could have spent on yourself, doing things that are important to you or with people who matter to you.

Step 5: Defeating the time robbers

There are very clever sneaky things lurking in everyone’s day that attempt to rob them of time. Some of them are cunningly disguised as friends and work colleagues and others are cunningly disguised as ‘urgent’ tasks. There are two key steps to defeating time robbers:

1. Become aware of who/what they are. Step 3 should have helped you here. They can be people who drop in and chat, they can be your inability to say ‘no’ when other people ask, time spent in airports or the number of emails you have to go through. In the words of a wise counsellor I know, ‘A problem well identified is a problem half solved’.
2. Take steps to eliminate them from your life or reduce the amount of time they steal. There are any number of strategies you can use to defeat time robbers. Some are things such as, remove visitors chairs from your office to stop drop in callers staying very long, hold stand up meetings so they are shorter, use waiting time at the airport for planning etc.

The greatest time waster in many people’s lives is usually self inflicted… it is procrastination. Procrastination is a form of self inflicted punishment (usually guilt) before the reward (doing the job and feeling better). It is not a healthy activity to engage in. One way to overcome it is to be just as creative about finding reasons to do the job as you usually are about finding reasons not to do the job.

Step 6: Find ways to become more efficient

The last step to becoming more efficient at managing your time and free yourself up to become more efficient in the way you approach tasks. Don’t let the sound of this overwhelm you or make you feel bogged down in guidelines and rules. Becoming more efficient can be as simple as putting things back where you got them from, getting the children to clean up their toys after themselves etc. There is some amazing research showing the average number of days a year people spending looking for lost things at home and at work. You could, however, just bypass this process and put things back in the first place and free up the time you otherwise would have had to spend looking for it the next time you or someone else wanted it.

Other things you can do are simple things like batch jobs (do all of a similar type of job at the same time during a day), have clean working spaces, cook meals in bulk and freeze the leftovers and do all your shopping in one trip.

If you can implement these 6 steps for effective time management into your life, you will get more done in less time and free yourself up for the people and things that really matter to you.

- Sandra Rodman B Com LLB LLM Master Results Coach, Master Performance Consultant, Master NLP Practitioner, Master Ericsonian Hypnosis, Reiki Practitioner, Pellowah Practitioner and author of ‘Time Management: The 6 Easy Steps To having More Free Time’ shares the techniques she has used and teaches others to become more efficient time managers, take back control of their life and have more time for themselves and the things that matter to them. More information and order link www.easytimemanagementsteps.com

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Keeping your power point slides to a manageable size is a good idea as you will be able to edit and run the slides smoothly during your presentation. The last thing you want is for the slides to hang in the middle of a presentation or a meeting. You can avoid such problems from occurring by using smaller sized picture, compressing large file types and using features that you can originally find in the PowerPoint applications such as charts and diagrams.

Other feature that you can benefit from is the “align or distribute” tool which can be used to arrange the items in your slides. With just a click you can achieve this and you won’t have to go through the hassle of nudging the objects until you tire your eyes. This particular tool can be selected from the “draw” menu. Besides this you can also use the ‘guides’ to space and align the objects, the guides can be utilized to measure the distance as well as maintain the position of the elements across multiple slides.

Should you desire greater accuracy in what you are seeing then you can use the zoom function. Just select the object which you intend to zoom on before changing the settings on the Standard toolbar, this step will help you eliminate the process of trial and error.

If you are sending the presentation slides through email and want the recipient of the slides to see to what you want them to see, then you can try to save it as a Slide Show. So when your recipient receives the file it will automatically open in slide show view. To do this you will need to go to “file” and click on “save as”; here click on the PowerPoint show. Another great way to save time and stress is to package your presentation slides onto a CD (a feature which can also be found on the PowerPoint application).

Here you will be able to run the presentation including all the linked files for any recipient that has a copy of the CD, besides this another great feature is that even though the recipient’s computer does not have PowerPoint it will still be able to run the slides.

Using Masters can help you save time and maintain a consistency throughout your slides. You can achieve this by placing the intended elements on the Slide Master, which will result in it being automatically appeared on the slide layouts. However if you wish to hide certain elements from certain slides you can still do so. Making your slides consistent is a great way to promoting your brand or logo as your clients or audience member will be able to recognize it after the first few slides (but make sure you have something that is worth remembering).

Picture courtesy of dantaylor

Danny Lau is a freelance writer who covers myriad topics including finance and careers. He’s currently a guest contributor for Mindshortcut.

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If you want to create simple and efficient slides – it would take longer time to complete depending how many slides you need to include in your presentation.

You can actually prepare your slides fast and avoid losing your temper – it’s all about strategy.

How do you actually do it?

Step 1: Gather all your resources and tools before you start creating slides

How could you possibly start a task if you don’t have a proper guidance or reference materials? It’s like climbing a mountain – you have to be well-equipped (i.e. bringing along tools like head gear, climbing shoes, ropes, and other climbing paraphernalia).

I have some basic tools for my slide preparation:

• Flickr’s Advance Search Tool – You can “steal” images that belong to Flickr users that are protected by Creative Commons license. By using this feature, you can find content to use commercially or modify, adapt or build upon. You have to attribute the work of the owner as specified by the licensor.

For example, I’m searching for pictures related to “presentation” by using Flick’s Advanced Search.

Then, I’ll scroll down the page and check the radio buttons as shown above.

• Multiple tabs feature (Mozilla Firefox or IE8) – At this feature, you can view multiple web pages when you’re performing content research.

  
  Limit yourself by using up to 6-8 tabs within one internet browser. By using this tab feature, you’ll be able to scheme through different articles or web pages rather than having multiple tabs at the taskbar. You can also leave those multiple tabs untouched when you turn off Mozilla Firefox browser – read more about it here.

Step 2: Increase your productivity by setting your goals in advance

You can set your goals based on this method – How to Create Your Own Four-Quadrate Weekly Goal Plan. You can change the duration into forty minutes, four hours, four day and etc (make sure it able to be divided equally into four quadrates).

Step 3: Promoting visual thinking in your slides

Promoting visual thinking is by using less text and inserting related images in your presentation slides (read this post: Visual Thinking – Create your own Drawing in your Decision Making Process). You can create images on your own – by drawing on post pads or blank paper. You can scan your drawings and save it into your computer, so that you can insert it into your slides.

Bear in mind that your drawings have to be simple and clear. You can also use additional shapes like arrows or text boxes from Microsoft PowerPoint software to enhance your drawings. You can get some ideas about drawing simple diagrams here.

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• You had set goals that are impossible to reach
• You had set goals that could take longer time to succeed

Let’s talk about basics before you proceed further. In a month, there are four weeks – one week consists of 7 days; or 30-31 days in a month. First thing, you need to have three basic things before you proceed:

• A pencil or a pen
• A piece of white paper
• A ruler

Here’s how you set your weekly goals with ease:

• Let’s put it this way, you divide four weeks into four quadrates (refer to the diagram above).
• List down your weekly goals in every quadrate. For example, I’ve set 40 goals for this month – that means 10 goals for each quadrate.
• In the lower right of the quadrate, please allocate some small space for “Target” – for example, how many goals that you’ve achieved so far.

Here’s how you use this Four-Quadrate Weekly Goal Plan:

• After a week, you need to review your goals. At the “Target”, write down total number goals that you have accomplished.
• If you couldn’t complete all your goals in the first quadrate, strike the uncompleted goals and write them down again in either second, third or fourth quadrate. You have to sort out these uncompleted goals according to your own preferences.

  

  For example, earlier, I had set 10 goals for 10 goals for the first quadrate (or for the first week) and I’ve achieved 5 goals for the first week. However, the uncompleted 5 goals, I will strike them out and write them again in the second, third and fourth quadrates. You need to arrange it properly as there are unaccomplished goals at the second, third and fourth quadrates.

• If you have uncompleted goals in different quadrates, you have to push yourself real hard to accomplish it. If you don’t hard to succeed it, your uncompleted goals will accumulate at one or all of your quadrates that can make this plan go terribly wrong.
• Once you have completed this weekly goal plan, review your work to accomplish your goals and your problems that affects your productivity. You can bring forward those uncompleted goals to the following month. Repeat to the second point on how to sort out your uncompleted goals.

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When you receive a PDF document, you’ll see a new “View” link next to PDF attachments you get in Gmail. See how it really looks in Google Documents:

(via The Official Gmail Blog)

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You can eat your favorite hamburger in two ways – either with the ‘easy’ way or the ‘hard’ way. This actually symbolize how we do things – productive or non-productive way.

Meanwhile, I’m taking this opportunity to introduce the main characters of Mindshortcut comic strip. Introducing Jeezy, Jaden and Francis. Three of them opened an consulting company that provides various productivity related courses to various organizations. Each of them has their own working ethics or way of doing their jobs.

Here’s the summary of the main characters:

• Jeezy has a stylish outlook, versatile, and more open minded than the other two guys.
• Francis has a ‘Beethoven-look’, straight-forward person and much conservative than others.
• On the other hand, Jaden – who’s a GTD guy, and has his huge control of his time. However, he often mislead by GTD ideas that would affects his productivity at work.

Subscribe to Mindshortcut for more updates about them so that you can follow them to their working space.

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Most of the times we are very complacent with our current situation. Therefore, we tend to follow the path of others without any consideration. If you’ve this similar experience, it’s time to hang around with creative people – not with a bunch of losers or water cooler gang. Your creative-booster will be stimulated if get along with creative, thoughtful and motivated people.

About creating your playlist with your Gmail part – that’s true.  Sounds awkward but that’s how I handle mp3 files that were sent by my friends.

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Sometimes I just couldn’t tolerate with too much opinions – especially those which are baseless opinions. Therefore you should follow your conscience before you make any crucial decisions. In order words, your common sense is important in making fast decisions. Maybe you should try bittergourd and cabbage juice.

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