Set Up An Office Space – By clearing defining your work environment, you can start to differentiate between being at ‘work’ and being at ‘home’ even though you are in the same place. Setting up an area that is comfortable and designated for work will help you to get into the mindset of work and also to separate you from the household. It is a good idea to let your family know that when you are in this office space, you are at work and not to be disturbed.

Set Up Office Hours – It is very easy to sit back and wait for inspiration to hit before you settle down and actually start working at home, there are many other little domestic jobs that you think you can do quickly before you sit down and start on your work. The easiest way to combat this is to set yourself office hours and define times when you should be at your desk and doing work rather that dealing with household issues. Of course, working from home will allow you the freedom to be more flexible and adapt hours to suit your schedule, but setting yourself work hours which suit you best will increase your productivity and help you to plan and structure your day.

Remove Unnecessary Distractions – It is very easy to be distracted by the goings on of everyday life when you are working from a home office. Turning off the television, radio, social networking sites and turning off your mobile phone will all help to keep you focused and working on the job at hand. Try to keep a separate phone line for work related calls and don’t answer the home phone during your ‘office hours’. By spending time purely focusing all your attention on your work you will be surprised to find how quickly and easily you can get things done and how many more accomplishments you can achieve without unnecessary distractions.

These are just some basic tips on different ways that you are able to increase productivity and limit distractions when working from a home office. It is not easy to change your mind set to adapt to different tasks while at working at home and it takes a lot of discipline and self control to make a home business successful. By applying these simple tips you should find that you are able to enjoy your work, home life and social life while creating a blossoming home business.

About the Author: Naomi Chamberlain currently works for howtotradecommodities.co.uk which provides information and advice for people looking to learn about trading commodities.

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2. 7 Tips on How to Cope with Stress to Stay Productive

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• What productivity lessons can be learnt from the past?
• Does anything apply to today’s modern workplace?

Machiavelli

One of the things about trade is that it is often subject to a Machiavellian attitude. The current world climate of a divided East and West – where China produces cheaper goods, all dipped of suspicions about workers rights, intellectual property theft and other issues and the West panders about nodding its head in disdain, yet still with its finger in the pie, is not ideal. As past conflicts have shown us, either you take a country onside and embrace it or don’t trade with it.

The Western world needs to embrace China and set aside all its fears, or do the opposite. Unfortunately the UK, Europe and America cannot compete with China in terms of manpower or production because of  employment laws and wages, driven up through bureaucratic production methods among other things. However, it is through innovation that West offers the answer to its problems.

• Keep innovating and learning from others
• Embrace other cultures and ways of working

It’s the Economy, Dude!

There is a certain fear of risk taking in the Western world at the moment. We live in near stagnant economic times – very similar to the 1940s. One thing we can learn from this similarity is that fear is not an option and risks need to be taken. Look at the period of creativity, change and investment the USA’s risks of the 1950s and 1960s heralded. The huge investments in science, the space race and other spectacular projects saw living expectations rise, medicine improve and an overall rise in wealth, health and life. All done by running a Keynesian deficit.

Private industry doesn’t necessarily do what is right for the long term – however it was with the attitude of exploration and creation for their own sakes that saw the enormous economic growth of the 1960s. This national investment created technologies no private company could create itself. It was the investment in the space race and other government led risky ventures that changed the world.

• Never stand still and stagnate
• Prepare to take risks, but make sure they are calculated

Lessons of the Past

The West needs to learn from this brave, somewhat haphazard attitude and research and invest in new and exciting products on the cusp of capability. Unlike China, Europe and America have the fundamentals for enormous  potential to delve into such audacious projects. This attitude will see creations, inventions, wonderment, which all trickles down to the consumer eventually. This then leads to increased wealth, increased production of consumer technology, an increased circular flow of income and all the benefits that come with this.

• Always push forwards

Golden Years

The sense of wonderment is also encouraged and people have more of a feel good attitude. This fostering of team spirit – just like we saw in the 1960s, is one that will encourage the Western world onwards and back to the fore of innovations, economics and out of a recession.

Such production methods and such spirit takes an audacious attitude , but offers exciting potential. In production methods and in government the West needs to be brave. It is the 1950s and 1960s we should look to for inspiration, these methods of production, the fearless attitude and the public investment in technology that seemed on the edge all created the world we know – with great bravery comes with a great reward.

About the author: Cormac Reynolds currently works for British Antique Replicas who produce a range of reproduction furniture including bookcases, office desks and replica sideboards.

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1. 5 Ways to Increase Productivity in the Workplace

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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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1. 7 Tips on How to Cope with Stress to Stay Productive

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However, as there are ways to reduce stress and worry at home, there are also decisions one can make to reduce stress and worry in business. By making the simpler choices in business, you can decrease workload, worry, and stress, leading you to a happier business ownership, healthier living, and more time for productivity.

Here are a few choices small business owners face and how making the right choice can help to succeed and remain in control.

1. Filings, Registrations and Requirements

If you are just starting your business or expanding, there are documents, registrations, licenses, and other requirements that must be obtained in order to legally run your business. Each state has different requirements on top of the federal requirements.

Trying to organize these documents, file the proper paperwork to the correct bureau or office, and track the progress of your certificates and registrations can prove to be stressful. With so many agencies trying to get their hands in your pockets and requesting documents, the task can be overwhelming.

There are options for simplifying the process and allowing yourself to work on other aspects of your business instead of worrying.

Legal services are popping up all across the country for new and existing business owners. LegalZoom.com is one of the most popular services. These companies will take your information and create all the necessary documents to get your business started.

Although the fee for their services is more than filing on your own, the comfort and peace of mind to know it is being done right and by someone else is priceless. These services can handle everything from setting up a LLC to filing annual reports to your state. Utilizing these services will allow you to concentrate on other aspects of your business and free up time to be productive.

2. Web Hosting Services

Whether you are doing business locally or looking towards an online start-up, you will need a website. Creating a website on your own can be a long and daunting process. Hiring a freelance web designer can make it easier to get what you want but may add to the stress if they don’t meet their deadline. Hiring a web design firm is simply expensive and often not worth the investment.

Most hosting companies offer web builders to quickly and easily create your webpage, and often at a fraction of the price. Instead of stressing over hired help, learning new web programming languages, or expensive design firms, take a look at the web builders and pre-made website templates your hosting company offers. You may find the site that is right for you without having to pay an arm and a leg or spending months waiting to get your web presence known.

When choosing your web host, you will need to take a few things into consideration. Ease of setup is important if you want to avoid hours of tedious clicking. Also be sure they have an up time of 99% in order to avoid the stress of your website crashing later.

Also speak to their customer service and sales department, not only to assist in explaining features but also to get an idea of how convenient their customer service is. This will help to choose a company that with knowledgeable, friendly and helpful staff in the event that you need them later on.

3. Merchant Accounts and Accounting

Unless you are a lover of numbers, accounting is the most tedious, mentally and emotionally draining aspect of business. Many have lost hair over making their numbers add up. Therefore, choosing the right merchant account and accounting software can mean the difference between stress and relaxation. The less time and energy you have to spend crunching numbers, the more time and energy you will have doing what you enjoy with your business and your family.

When choosing your merchant account you will want to look for extra service included with your account that will make it easy, efficient and less stressful to follow. Batch processing, real time monitoring, instantly downloadable reports and compatibility with your accounting software, and 24/7 customer service are a few of those services that will reduce headache and let you reap the benefits of extra time.

4. Shipping and Drop Shipping

There are two choices if you decide to start a business in e-commerce selling. Holding product yourself and shipping when ordered, or drop shipping. If you are looking for less stress and more time with your family, you may want to choose a company that offers drop shipping as an option.

Rather than adding the task of packaging and shipping your items, you can order each item sold from the distributor and they will ship it for you. This is a great way to reduce stress, manage your time easier, and is also an inexpensive way to get started. Since you are not holding stock or ordering palettes of items, you are only buying what you sell.

5. Time Management

Once you have made the decisions needed to streamline and simplify your business, it leaves one more task that is highly important. Time management doesn’t only refer to managing your business tasks, but also your family time, days off, and even vacations. Once you have a process for business in motion, schedule your daily tasks and stick to it.

Knowing what you have to do each morning and how to get them done quickly will help keep your stress lowered. Treat your business the same as you would treat your job. Set time aside for work, family and friends.

The business world is full of stresses, however, there are services geared toward making your business venture smoother and worry free. If you are feeling the effects of being pulled in several directions, you may want to look into outsourcing your most tedious tasks and concentrating on why you started the business in the first place. In choosing the right services you can assure a long, healthy, and happy life as a business owner.

About the Author: Tony Alvarez writes for Merchant Maverick, where you can find credit card processors comparison charts, as well as processor reviews for companies such as Merchant Warehouse.

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1. Be Flexible

Try to be less of a dictator and more of a buddy to your employees. While deadlines need to be met and work needs to get done, there’s no reason why you can’t be friendly. In doing so, you’ll be creating a laidback environment that people enjoy coming to everyday, which in turn increases productivity.

Think about it: would you want to come to a place you hate every day? Not likely. Would you be less likely to work harder at a place you hate? Absolutely. Employees will work much harder in a creative and casual environment.

2. Be Open to Feedback

While necessary to have your agenda be the main focus, don’t stifle your employees’ ability to problem solve and attack a problem on their own. Your employees are very smart people and would love to express themselves using their own ideas sometimes. If their own ideas are in the picture, they’ll be more likely to work harder because it’s their own personal project in a sense.

3. Organize a Lunch or Free Time Event

Your employees work their butts off every day for you, so the least you can do is set up some short but sweet event to bring everybody together for a little while. Even a short 20 minute event or lunch could brighten the day and get everyone in a good enough mood to push out work at a more rapid pace. Something like this also helps to break the mundane monotony week after week. You’d be surprised what people in a cheery mood can do in terms of productivity.

4. Walk Around and Shoot the Breeze

I wouldn’t do this too often at risk of annoying everyone, but once in awhile, take a walk around the office or place of work and see how your employees’ days are going. See if anything interesting is going on, talk about sports, talk about movies, talk about things you hate, just about anything. Obviously, keep the discussions short and productive, but if there’s nothing to talk about, don’t force it. If you force a discussion, it’ll be painfully obvious and it’ll look like a tactic to pretend to care about the morale of your workers. Be genuine. Move on if you lack anything real to say.

5. Decorate or Add Something New

One of the many complaints at work is that it’s the same old thing every day. What would change that? Making the office or place of work not look the same all the time. Of course, making it look like a palace or castle is out of the question, but you can easily spruce things up a bit with some new plants, pictures, furniture, beverages, or any combination of these. A change of scenery every so often is usually enough to induce a bout of creativity, at least for a short period of time. Any bit of inspiration that comes out of scenic change is absolutely worth it.

These are just some of the ways you can improve productivity in the work place. If you use these tips in tandem with other ideas you have, you can easily turn your workplace into a casual and creative environment that people actually enjoy coming to. While it might seem silly to think of work as a fun and easygoing place, it’s not that farfetched of an idea. Try these out and see for yourself if productivity increases. You might be surprised.

About the author: Joe Petchonka has been a writer for over five years, and has written for newspapers, websites and automotive dealerships. In addition to having an extensive writing background and bachelor’s degree in English, he has helped companies develop professional material to help them achieve their goals. He currently writes for Nexteppe a company helping dealerships sell vehicles (i.e. Brooklyn used cars) and more through the use of social media and web design (i.e. Online Classifieds).

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1. How To Type Faster and Increase Writing Productivity

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Learning how to type quickly is an important trait and can exponentially improve your productivity and save countless hours. If you’re interested in learning how to type faster, here are a few basic steps to help you meet your goal.

Get back to the basics

The first step to typing faster is getting back to the basics. While it might seem counterintuitive to go back to the beginning, if you’re typing the wrong way, there are natural limitations to how fast you can type. So, you want to learn how to type correctly with your left and right index fingers resting on the f and j keys respectively. There are numerous sites that offer free typing courses on the Internet that will teach you the proper way to type. Remember to first take it slow and aim for complete accuracy rather than speed.

Have a good posture when typing

While you’re re-teaching yourself to type better, be more conscious of your posture. You want to avoid slouching and having crowded or bent arms. Give yourself enough space, so your hands and arms on the same plane.

Get an efficient, ergonomic keyboard

Even though there have been strides in keyboard comfort, your keyboard may be a contributing factor to slow typing. Get a good ergonomic keyboard that comfortably fits your fingers hands. The more natural you feel, the faster you’ll be able to type.

Practice!

Once you’ve gotten started, thought about your posture and bought a good keyboard, you need to practice. This is by far the hardest part of learning how to type faster because it takes time and effort. Consider allotting a small amount of time each day to practice your typing. Free typing software is available around the Internet. Work on your accuracy and slowly start aiming for speed. Also, when you’re learning, start weaning yourself off your need to look down at the keyboard because if you’re concentrating on writing and words, you’ll be more productive.

Set goals

Nothing will make you work harder than setting and reaching for goals. Give yourself a reasonable timeline for increasing your number of words per minute. Then when you reach the goal, try to award yourself with a treat or personal prize. I’m sure it seems hard, but it’s also possible to make learning how to type fun with a variety of games and apps available on the Internet.

About the Author: Tim Martinez is a freelance writer and blogs about a number of subjects, including writing, bird houses and camping equipment.

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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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Here’s the synopsis of Noteberg’s talk about the famous Italian timeboxing method:

“You have so much you need to accomplish today. Your list is a mile long and you find yourself getting interrupted every other minute. You’d like to tell everyone to leave you alone, but most of the interruptions are coming from you! You think of a phone call you need to make or a web site you need to check and before you know it you’re answering email, checking twitter, and finding a million other things to occupy your time.

You need to focus – really focus.

The Pomodoro Technique puts you back in charge of your day. You’ll apply successful techniques from software engineering to identify what you should be doing today and to help you achieve your goals. Your mind won’t wander when it is fully engaged in short bursts of focused activity.”

Source: Parleys.com

Learn to work less and accomplish more using nothing more than paper, pencil, and a simple kitchen timer.

If you’re new about Pomodoro technique – read more about it here.

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One thing is certain: the most effective and successful people are experts in time management and they have the same number of hours in the day as you do. So time management has nothing to do with magically expanding time to suit your needs, but of using it effectively. It is a question of self-management rather than time-management.

Here are some tips on utilizing your time effectively:

1. Identify what is really important in your life and build your activities and goals around these big rocks. Having clear Core Values will avoid decision paralysis.
2. Identify what are your time wasters: how much time do you spend watching TV? How many activities do you do that can be delegated to others? Do you live in a cluttered environment that drains your energy? Which activities can you eliminate without any particularly important repercussions? How much time do you spend worrying over things that are not within your circle of influence?
3. Eliminate procrastination. Just stop it plain and simple. Identify why you are procrastinating and challenge your assumptions. Are you a perfectionist?- learn how to manage it. Do you create a huge To Do list that’s impossible to go through? – cut out on the list. Do you feel overwhelmed with some large tasks? – chunk them down in smaller activities… and just DO it.
4. Use a planning system such as a To Do list everyday. Having a To Do list will help you to focus on the Big Rocks of life especially if you prioritize well.
5. Plan the hardest task and DO IT the first thing so that you get over the hardest task early on when you have high energy levels- in other words, as they say: eat your frog.
6. Learn to time activities correctly. I find that people who are not outstanding achievers generally lack the ability to time activities effectively. If you do not time activities effectively you will find yourself sliding off your schedule and missing out on important activities.
7. Focus on the task at hand. Do not start doing many things at the same time. Chunk big jobs into smaller ones, focus on the particular task, get it done and then move on. And please – do not give me the multi tasking excuse. Yes you can multi-task but you have to be focused on the task at hand.
8. Do not handle an activity twice when you can finish it in one sequence. E.g unless you are sure you can take the time to answer an email or a letter right away- do not open it.
9. Give a strict time frame to meetings or activities. Make sure you come out with clear actions from the meeting as otherwise it is just a waste of time.
10. Drop tasks that you do not need to do or those which are of no benefit. Learn to delegate effectively. Make sure that you delegate to people who have the knowledge and skills and delegate a task completely. Offer help if required but don’t breath down people’s necks.
11. Avoid being distracted by requests or telephones during activities which you need to focus on intensively. Give clear instructions that you are not to be disturbed unless the office is on fire.
12. Never leave the scene of a situation that requires a decision without taking a specific action. Taking an action right away will ensure you save time in the future. If you keep procrastinating on an action you need to take it will come back to you with a vengeance and you will waste more time trying to solve the repercussions.

To receive a FREE Report that provides information on the 10 Vital Keys to Life Success and other resources visit http://www.insightzonecoach.com or http://www.insightzonecoach.com/blog.

Reggie Aquilina is the Founder of Insight Zone Academy. He is a Life Coach and works in the field of Adult Learning and Development. He is actively involved in providing e-learning resources related to Life Coaching and he is the creator of the Life Coaching Home Study Course: The 10 PowerKeys Program.

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Like most forms of communications, branding of your product will only be successful if the communication process can reach the intended target audience. PowerPoint presentations can be a great way of getting your message across but whether it can be achieved or not will depend not only on the design of the slides but also the person that is presenting them.

As such it is important that research is done after all it is your brand that you want to talk about, so who better to do it then yourself. Know everything that is there to know about your brand before you go out to present and try to predict the questions that your audience might have on their mind so that you can answer them, the last thing you want to do is fumble in front of your audience as this may be perceived negatively.

You might feel a little nervous at first but try to remain focus and channel that nervousness it something more productive. As mentioned earlier no matter how well you have designed your slides, it will fail to deliver its intended message if the speaker is not capable of doing it.

No matter how long you have done this, it is advisable that you do not get over-confident with yourself. This basically means that you should practice and not take anything for granted, look through the slides and make sure that it flows well with your presentation. If you feel that there are slides to add or you want to remove them then follow your instinct, the important thing is that you are comfortable with what you are doing and is able to effectively communicate your brand.

No one is perfect but everyone is capable of improving themselves, so if you feel that your presentation is not achieving the desired objectives then take pointers from those that are successful in what they are doing and the best examples are people such as Steve Jobs and Lawrence Lessig. Without a doubt you can find videos upon videos of the people mentioned earlier, so your job right now is to study them, see how they present their brand to the masses, once you have done that then take your time to digest it and create a distinct presentation style of your own. After all they must be doing something right if their brands are one of the most recognizable images in the world.

If you are unsure whether your presentation slides are doing what it’s supposed to then what you can do is test it out first. Obviously the people you choose should not be connected to you in anyway, what you want are feedback to see whether your brand has been successful in being communicated to them. If not then it is back to the drawing boards to think of a new strategy or rather back to the computer to create better slides or improve on the original ones. However if you feel that what you have can be used then take them to the clients and present to them your brand and make it a memorable one.

Picture courtesy of cloneofsnake

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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