3 Productivity Secrets: Sleep, Deep Work, No Multitasking (Work Management Roundup)

Welcome back to the weekly Work Management Roundup, where we collect the week's best reads in work, business management, and productivity to inspire you to work smarter. This week, we open with three articles that tackle why we're not performing at our best: we lack sleep, we don't schedule time for deep work, and we're addicted to multitasking. Read on! Employees Don't Get Enough Sleep, and It's Your Fault (Entrepreneur): The studies prove modern workers are sleep deprived due to work stress. And where's that stress stemming from? Missing info, unclear leadership, lack of collaboration, and ever-changing deadlines. It's quite real, and it's affecting our health. Talk to Your Boss About Deep Work (Cal Newport's Study Hacks): If your office culture expects you to respond ASAP to every instant message and email, then you're probably not getting much deep work done. Here's how to tell your boss you want to set apart some distraction-free time everyday dedicated to creative problem solving, deep thinking, and deep work. Addicted to Multitasking: The Scientific Reasons You Can’t Stop Juggling Work (Wrike): Many people know that focusing on one task at a time leads to much better results, yet we still find ourselves multitasking in an attempt to check items off our to-do lists twice as fast. Why is multitasking so seductive? And what can we do to make our propensity to indulge distractions work for us, instead of against us? How To Survive Working On An Underperforming Team (Fast Company): Each team has a unique dynamic, but even if the team performs poorly, there are three ways to maximize the effectiveness of your team. These involve: sharing a mission, finding everyone's roles, and engaging a mentor. How Big Data Creates False Confidence (Nautilus): The big problem with big data? The temptation to think that studies relying on big data couldn’t be wrong. Because there's just so much data to back it up, right? Unfortunately the bigness of the data can imbue results with a false sense of certainty. Many of the results are probably bogus—and the reasons why should give us pause about any research that blindly trusts big data.

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Productivity 3 min read

How to Prioritize Your To-Dos When Everything's Important (Video)

We’ve all been there: you walk into the office, take one look at your inbox or to-do list, and immediately feel the urge to run away. You’ve got a million things on your plate and they’re all important — where do you even start? The more requests come flying in at you from all sides, the less time and brainpower you have to discern which are actually worth your time. So you end up scrambling to do them all, perpetuating the cycle of eternal busy-ness. Stop. Take a deep breath and use a few of these prioritization tips from entrepreneur Lauren Perkins, NY Times bestselling author Greg McKeown, and Wrike's own productivity coach Errette Dunn to organize your day, get the most significant work done, and still have time for your own high-priority tasks. First hit 'play' on the short video below to learn the most important prioritization tip Wrike's Errette Dunn picked up from productivity pro David Allen, then keep reading for more expert advice: Tip 1: Define your deadlines. Tip 2: Get some space. At least once a quarter, get out of the office for a day to clear your head and re-focus on the big picture. Where do you want to be in a year? Three years? Reminding yourself of where you ultimately want to go will help you gain perspective and identify the projects and tasks that are instrumental in getting you there. Tip 3: Pretend you have half the time you actually do. Cut your work hours in half when you sit down to plot out your day. It’ll force you to be extremely picky when it comes to the tasks you agree to take on or contribute to. Bonus: it’ll give you time to make sure these high-priorities actually get done on time — and done well — and you’ll have time to tackle your own important to-dos, instead of just helping out with everyone else’s. Tip 4: Keep priority singular. When the word “priority” first appeared in the English language, it was singular, as in the one most important thing — and it stayed that way for close to 500 years. Only in the last century did we start identifying multiple priorities. So take back the word’s original meaning, and choose one priority for each day. It's likely you'll always have several important things going on, but if you don’t have a hierarchy with one single priority at the top, you'll always feel unfocused and pulled in too many directions at once. Tip 5: Learn to let go. Let go of perfectionism and the inclination to micromanage. If you always get caught up in perfecting every tiny detail of the project you're working on, you're only making more work for yourself and eating up more of your time. Learn to delegate tasks that don't absolutely need your input, and give yourself limits on the work that does so you don't start down the rabbit hole of nit-picking. How do you prioritize your daily workload? Share your favorite strategies in the comments below to add your ideas to our list! Sources: Entrepreneur.com, Inc.com

Productivity 3 min read

Beware of These 7 Productivity Myths (Work Management Roundup)

It's the day before Christmas and all through the hall, Not a worker is working, they're home one and all. Yet here is our Roundup, it will never fail. Cause when you're done feasting, you'll check your email. ;) We hope you've subscribed to our blog's daily feed So you get our blog posts — "Hey, a new thing to read!" If it helps you work better, our job here is done. So Happy Holidays to everyone! 7 Productivity Beliefs You Should Ignore (Fast Company): The problem with a lot of the productivity advice you read online? It's never a one-size-fits-all solution. Here are 7 productivity myths that experts say we should avoid, and why. How to Avoid the Most Costly Onboarding Mistakes (Entrepreneur): Matt Straz outlines four of the most expensive onboarding mistakes, including how to fix them in order to get the most from new hires. 5 Lessons Learned in Project Management for 2016 (Girl's Guide to PM): Elizabeth Harrin shares five hard-learned lessons from 2015 that should guide your projects into the coming year. How Product Hunt Really Works (Medium): One entrepreneur shares his personal research into successfully launching on Product Hunt. According to him, it's not the number of votes your product gets, it's still who you know. A Manager at Google Wrote the Perfect Email on Time Management (theHustle.com): An important reminder to all knowledge workers: you have to carve out deep pockets of quiet work time (aka "Make Time") on your calendar. Or else you'll be in meetings all day. More Work Management Reads Go Try This: How to Make Every Piece of Content SEO Friendly (Content Marketing Institute) 17 Productivity Tools Inbound Marketers Need (Sea Monster Marketing) How To Get The First 1,000 Users For Your Startup (Roy Povarchik) Sally Hogshead on How To Be Fascinating (Entrepreneur On Fire Podcast) Think About This: Why We Unsubscribed 250K People From HubSpot's Marketing Blog & Started Sending Less Email (Hubspot) Launching a Google App the Startup Way (Medium) Working Remotely: More Efficient or More Distracting? (Smarter Office Blog) The Uberization of Work...And How Businesses Can Leverage it to Scale Faster and Smarter (Cloud Factory) Browse The Work Management Roundup on Flipboard If you use Flipboard on your mobile device, then you can check out these links via The Work Management Roundup magazine. View my Flipboard Magazine.

Productivity 5 min read

Crazy Work Hours: the New, Unhealthy Status Symbol (Work Management Roundup)

Welcome back to the weekly Work Management Roundup, where we collect and curate the latest reads from around the web regarding work, productivity, and careers. This week, we focus on burnout, insane work hours, and caffeine — the three staples of exhausted knowledge workers around the globe. Read on! How Insane Work Hours Became a Mark of American Privilege (The Week): You probably have a coworker who brags about how s/he's working 60-hour weeks. (And if not, it's probably you.) According to research though, the jobs where people are most likely to work over 45 hours a week are highly-paid professional positions in law, business management, engineering, and finance. So yeah, it's become an unhealthy status symbol. The Start-Up Marathon: How One Founder Avoids Burnout (Fox News): Andrew Filev, CEO of Wrike, shares the 3 things that carried him through those initial 80-hour work weeks without burning out: his love for the mission, a sense of responsibility for the team, and managing his own limits. All That Coffee You're Guzzling Is Useless if You're Not Getting Enough Sleep, Study Says (Mic): And in case you're using coffee to fuel your insane work hours... well its effectiveness has limits. Apparently, if you're only getting around five hours of sleep a night, caffeine stops giving you a cognitive boost by the third day. Your parents knew what they were talking about when they said, "It's past your bedtime!" 5 Strategies for Forming Team Productivity Habits (Wrike): Not happy with how your team gets stuff done? Download our free eBook that outlining five concrete strategies for building a high-performance team, one habit at a time. 5 Ways to Love Your Open-Plan Office (QuietRev): Are you feeling vulnerable and beset by distractions in your open plan office? Here are 5 strategies you can use to subtly alter your space and make it work for you — without actually barricading your desk. 4 Helpful Books For Managing Remote Workers (Forbes): We all know managing remote team members is difficult ("Guys are we meeting on Skype, Zoom, Hangouts, or Slack?"), but these 4 books give you tips, insights, and powerful tools to help you make what may seem impossible actually quite doable — and maybe even enjoyable. Surreal artist Salvador Dali understands that fear will keep you from moving forward, especially if you aim for perfection right from the get-go. Face it, you won’t achieve perfection; but with enough effort, you will get to something great. And this is sometimes all the time we have before a new project lands on our desks. #creativity #quotes #Wrike A photo posted by Wrike (@wriketeam) on Jun 16, 2016 at 10:45am PDT More Work Management Reads Creativity/Productivity: The 1 Productivity-Killing Habit You Need to Stop Doing Now (Inc) - Stop thinking the hard, important things on our to-do lists take more time than less important items Top 11 Quotes To Get Your Creative Juices Flowing (Wrike) - Sometimes all you need to get inspired are wise words from creative geniuses How to Set Up Your Workspace for Maximum Productivity (Infographic) (Wrike) - Everything from lighting to posture to music to help you produce Business/Career: This Is The Real Reason Microsoft Bought LinkedIn (Forbes) -Not for its similarity to Facebook, but more for its similarity to Medium Meet the Companies Helping Moms Continue Career Building (Uncubed) - Helping women stay in or rejoin the workforce has become big business What LinkedIn Data Reveals About Who Will Help You Get Your Next Job (Fast Company) - Weak connections are sometimes more valuable than the people know you well + other networking mistakes Tools: 15 Productivity Tools Successful People Use to Work Less (When I Work) - Good listing of some new tools, plus the tried-and-true Browse Our Magazines on Flipboard If you use Flipboard on your mobile device, then you can read all the above links on The Work Management Roundup magazine. Check out some of our other magazines as well. View my Flipboard Magazine. View my Flipboard Magazine. View my Flipboard Magazine.

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3 Productivity Secrets: Sleep, Deep Work, No Multitasking (Work Management Roundup)

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3 Productivity Secrets: Sleep, Deep Work, No Multitasking (Work Management Roundup)

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How to Prioritize Your To-Dos When Everything's Important (Video)

Beware of These 7 Productivity Myths (Work Management Roundup)

Crazy Work Hours: the New, Unhealthy Status Symbol (Work Management Roundup)

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