Redfoo's 5 Wrike Tips for Business Success
Meet Redfoo: former member of LMFAO who has since become an independent recording artist and CEO of LaFreak clothing line and Party Rock Records. As a busy musician, he found it difficult to communicate with his team while traveling around the world, and his team had just as much trouble knowing exactly who was responsible for specific tasks. But since implementing Wrike, Redfoo has seen a total transformation in the way his team works. They're more productive, communicate better, and (most importantly) they have more time to have fun. Here are five of Redfoo's secrets for Wrike success: Tip #1 - Use Wrike during team meetings Redfoo keeps his team organized by having everyone open their Wrike accounts during meetings. Each task and every idea goes straight into Wrike as they move through agenda items, so it's clear who's responsible and what the next steps are. Some ideas: Brainstorm with your team in Wrike Add and assign tasks in Wrike while discussing upcoming events, projects, etc. Share links and upload the latest document versions so everyone has access to what they need Discuss overdue items with the team to uncover roadblocks and improve processes Tip #2 - Create Wrike tasks via email Wrike's email integration makes it easy to create and edit tasks on the go. Redfoo uses this tool extensively to turn emails into action items and assign them directly to his team members. Some ideas: See your Wrike @mention notifications in your inbox Reply to comments directly from emails Capture and categorize important emails by adding them to the proper folder in Wrike Tip #3 - Keep an ideas folder As an artist, Redfoo is constantly coming up with ideas for songs, events, and fashion designs. Wrike provides a secure, central location where he can archive every idea even before he decides what he wants to do with it. He knows exactly where to find his ideas and can rest easy knowing that nothing is lost or forgotten. Some ideas: Keep an "Ideas" folder to archive your thoughts Within the folder, create subfolders for better organization Add any attachments or links associated with the idea so everything stays together Tip #4 - Use the mobile app to track tasks on the go Wrike's mobile apps for iOS and Android let Redfoo stay in contact with his team even when he's halfway across the world. He can check project statuses, see the latest updates in his Activity Stream, and discuss progress or leave feedback for his team, minimizing project delays. Some ideas: Respond to comments and view the Activity Stream directly from the mobile app Use your mobile device's camera to attach photos to Wrike tasks Record voice notes on your mobile device and upload them into Wrike Tip #5 - Keep all project-related items in one location Redfoo's goal is to keep all work and ideas in Wrike. "If it's not in Wrike, it doesn't exist!" he says. Keeping everything in one place removes the stress of scouring countless emails and spreadsheets just to find a particular document, comment, or idea. Having all his project data consolidated also makes it easier to look back and see which processes worked and how to streamline. Some ideas: "Wrike it down!" Instead of capturing an idea on a post-it or in an email, just put it in Wrike Duplicate folders and tasks or mark them recurrent to create project templates Evaluate your process by reviewing completed projects and recording lessons learned Watch the video interview with Redfoo, where he tells you how he uses Wrike to get work done: How do you keep your team organized? What are your tips for keeping your team organized? Tell us in the comments! Read next: Wrike it Down with Redfoo: How to Manage Projects Like a Rockstar! Redfoo's Success Story 12 Ways to Use Wrike You've Never Considered Image Credit: Top photo by Tom Treanor
The sharing principle in Wrike
Most of the questions and debates between users and the support team come from the sharing principle. Let me explain it again. Example Every user has its own workspace in Wrike, and its own structure of tasks and folders. He can share any task or a folder with other users. In this case the shared item is visible, accessible and changeable for both people (or for more people if necessary). For example David and I share the only folder “New features”. Other folders we have are totally different, and actually I don’t know if David has any other folders. But I decided to include “New features” into two other folders for my convenience: “System features” and “Wrike Development”. In turn, David has no idea about my actions, because these two folders are not shared with him. If the task is shared with you, but its parent folder is not shared with you, such task is single and placed in "My Folders." I hope this example is descriptive enough, and you understand how to give access to tasks and folders while keeping your structure at the same time. View of the shared list by default Since the shared list for the task is inherited after the parent folder (if it is), it’s not visually changeable anymore. We have changed the view of this list to avoid any possible confusion. So if you want to add people to the task shared list, write their e-mail addresses in the field “Also shared with” (in the parent folder details). On the other hand, if you want to delete anyone from this list, you need to change the parent folder properties.
Tips for Introducing Granular Workload Organization to Your Project Team (Inspired by the Discussion at PMI LA Chapter)
Meet-ups with fellow project managers keep bringing up thought-provoking discussions and interesting ideas on how to maximize the efficiency of project teams. This time, I want to share some notes from the February dinner meeting of the PMI LA Chapter. After my presentation that focused on the ways of making distributed teams efficient, one of the most interesting questions that I heard from the audience was how to introduce a team to a granular work breakdown. No matter how talented and experienced your remote worker is, it might still be unproductive to assign him a huge, month-long task. There’s always some risk in thinking that he’ll do just fine figuring it out all on his own. This way, you severely limit your visibility into the work progress, and if the course goes wrong, you might discover it too late to clear things up. When you can’t discuss things with some of the team members directly and frequently, having more granular assignments might be a helpful tactic and make life easier for both parties. So how exactly do you make it work? Making a sliding scale work in planning First, you could use a sliding scale in planning. Your weekly plan for this week could focus on 5-10 things, just like your quarterly plan, but the scope of those things will obviously be quite different. You don’t have to build a detailed, upfront plan for 52 weeks on January 1st of the new year. If your only concern is visibility, then a weekly plan that only includes the current week is enough. As a new period of time comes, be it quarter, month, week, or day, you plan it, thus the term “sliding scale.” The closer this time period is to today, the more detailed your plan should be. You should however be aware of scope leap when using a system like this. When possible and reasonable, you should also delegate the planning to the employees who are doing the work. Most people feel more moral responsibility for getting the work done on time when they have promised the dates, not when the dates were imposed on them. This not only makes them more responsible, but also makes them happier. By the way, in our recent research on working habits, we discovered that sense of responsibility is the No. 1 productivity trigger: People feel stressed out when they feel no control over their life and work. By returning that feel of control back to them, you empower them. Did I mention that it also saves you from having to do the initial planning?:) It’s hard to come up with a better win-win. Of course, you should also review the plans and align them with higher-level objectives and other employees. Steps to building a new habit within the team Sure enough, it’s easier said than done, as some employees prefer murky schedules, so that they don’t need to report very often. Here are the steps that helped me introduce sliding scale, bottom-up planning: - Make sure to communicate your vision. Why exactly are smaller tasks a better option than bigger assignments? Make sure your team clearly understands the benefits and doesn’t see it as their leader’s new micromanagement whim.- Seed it by your own example. For instance, if you use a collaboration system with a newsfeed, when your workers see how you complete tasks one after another, this might give them a good deal of motivation. They wouldn’t want to lag behind. - When you want to implement some change, making it happen in one big swipe is often hard. Instead, support from a group of “pioneers” might be really helpful. Some employees are more open to new methods. Also, some might be more productivity-oriented than others. Form the “core team,” build the right productivity habit there, and it’ll be easier to later plug in others through peer pressure. - You can blend it into your team’s other working habits. For example, if you have weekly virtual meetings to discuss the work progress and the plans, how big is the difference between these two ways of phrasing the agenda? “Last week, we got 40% of the project completed” or “Last week, we got 10 tasks completed on the project, namely …” To me, the second version sounds way more concise, but it still plays nicely with the habit of discussing work progress every week. - In his awesome best-seller “Good to Great,” Jim Collins said, "Sustained great results depend upon building a culture full of self-disciplined people who take disciplined action.” If, after some time and persistent efforts, the new habit still doesn’t stick with certain employees, you need to look deeper into the reasons. Are they your best performers who try to set up their own rules, or are they your worst performers who try to hide that behind ambiguous schedules and obscure “percent completed” updates? Do they simply need some extra motivation, or do they drag and slow down the whole team? Motivation and other benefits of granular tasks The advantages of slicing work into smaller parts are supported by psychologists. For instance, Joseph Ferrari, a professor from DePaul University, says that when the scope of work looks overwhelming, you get captured by the feeling of “seeing the forest and forgetting that it’s made of trees.” In the opposite situation, we can get valuable small wins. Quoting another interesting book, “Small wins are something people can experience pretty regularly if the work is chunked down to manageable pieces” (from “The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work” by Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer). By the way, “small wins” have become a behavioral term, and they’re often discussed in literature. In “The Power of Habit,” Charles Duhigg concluded that a “huge body of research has shown that small wins have enormous power, an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves.” What else is there in the habit of granular work organization? In addition to the benefits of clarity, visibility and easier tracking, this approach to distributing workload might also be an efficient way to eliminate procrastination. Another revelation of our survey on work styles was that 21% of workers see procrastination as one of the most dangerous productivity killers. So they’ll most likely thank you if you give them a good weapon to fight this enemy :)
How to Create a Wiki Knowledge Base Using Wrike
We've recently been perfecting the way we house and organize documents so that our own sales team can quickly find PDFs and presentations when they're talking to people interested in Wrike. Most companies turn to a mix of knowledge bases, wikis, and content repositories, but nothing beats the simplicity of keeping everything in one place — like Wrike. Important information can be stored in multiple folders, and best of all, there's no need to learn a new Wiki markup language. Here's how we set up our knowledge base in Wrike. You can follow our tips to create your own Wrike wiki for better document and information storage: Wrike Wiki Basic Tenets One idea, one task: Each piece of knowledge (or best practice, resource, sales document, etc.) gets loaded into a single task and is included in the Knowledge Base parent folder. Backlog it: All of these tasks are set as active and backlogged (because there are no due dates associated with the knowledge), and then they're always easily available when someone needs to reference them. Give permission to add: Anyone with your permission can create a new task or edit an existing task description to add their thoughts and experiences to your Knowledge Base. Also, your permission level dictates whether you get to move files around or not. For very detailed, important folder structures (such as our sales information subfolder), we only have one admin managing it so that no files are accidentally deleted or moved around by regular users. Suggestion: Identify one person in charge of managing the department's wiki folder so that information doesn't get messy or mislabeled. Organizing Your Wrike Wiki Knowledge Base Decide on a folder structure: We organize the items into subfolders for each department and team. Since tasks can live in multiple folders simultaneously, we don't have to pick our own brains to remember where we placed a document. Information can be stored in the folder of every team that would find it helpful. Suggestion: Decide on your subfolders in advance and have your wiki admin regularly review the structure so it continues to make sense for your company. Attach your files: You can attach files directly to Wrike tasks from your hard drive. If storage space is a concern, you can also attach documents to tasks from Box, Dropbox, or Google Drive without taking up space in your Wrike account. Accessing the wiki: Your team can use Wrike's iOS and Android mobile apps to access the knowledge base anywhere and any time they need to. Have you created your own wiki using Wrike? This system works great for us, and hopefully it will help your team stay organized as well! Do you have any other Wrike wiki tips you'd care to share? Hit the comments to share your learning. Read next: Top 5 "Aha!" Moments When Using Wrike 12 Ways to Use Wrike You Never Considered Top image credit: Designed by Freepik
How Sales Teams Use Wrike: Q&A with Erik Kostelnik, Head of Sales
Erik Kostelnik is the Senior Director of Global Sales at Wrike. He has 10 years of experience in sales leadership and SaaS software. We spoke with him about his job here, and how our sales organization leverages Wrike to increase visibility and save time. What’s your role here at Wrike, and what does your day-to-day life look like? I’m in charge of the sales side our revenue operations. If you call Wrike and speak with a sales rep, that person falls under my umbrella. That includes our SMB team, our Mid-Market team, and the Enterprise team. My day-to-day can vary quite a bit. I usually spend mornings talking to our international team based out of Ireland, and during the U.S. hours I spend a lot of time trying to bring talented people to Wrike. There’s also a lot of projecting, and developing training programs to make sure our new hires know the product and can provide the positive service experience our customers expect. What’s the biggest challenge of managing that organization? For a little perspective, I came to Wrike a little less than 2 years ago, and at the time we had 4 sales reps — all very talented — but basically in the same position. So adding structure, defining roles, growing the organization, and developing those reps was a big task. Now we’ve got 75 quota-holding reps in 3 offices worldwide, and I think my biggest challenge is making sure our new hires are getting the one-on-one time they need to be successful. How does using Wrike help make that process easier? The value of using Wrike for onboarding new hires can’t be stated enough. We have folders in Wrike that serve as templates for each position. “Account Executive Onboarding” for example. So if we hire a new Account Executive, I can duplicate that template, and assign it to the new hire. Then I get updates as they complete those tasks or ask questions. At the end of the week, I can run a report to see what they’ve done and what they haven’t, so we can follow up if needed. Basically, the big picture here is that we ramp new hires and have them closing deals within 30 days. The standard for sales teams at other companies is 90 days. Using Wrike for training and onboarding doesn’t just save time, it actually boosts production from reps. How do you leverage Wrike’s Salesforce registration? The Salesforce Integration is a big part of our workflow, and makes it possible for our sales team and consulting group to work together. It gives reps visibility into each consultant’s workload, and allows them to delegate services to the person who has the best availability. If we didn’t have this in our toolset, we’d probably need another operations manager. The fact that it relays updates back to the reps in real time, without the need for them to leave Salesforce, helps them stay focused on selling. It makes everything really easy. How does your use of these tools benefit our customers? Anytime we can eliminate delays from our process, we’re able to serve our customers faster. Whether it’s scheduling a training or consultation call, or helping us follow up with a support ticket, the speed on our side makes us a more effective service and sales organization. How would you recommend other sales leaders use Wrike? In addition to onboarding reps, I recommend moving your legal and contract process into Wrike. Wrike’s revision tools for documents can show you who made what change and when. So if we’re redlining paperwork with counsel or reps, it’s easy to make sure you’re all looking at the most recent version. I also recommend creating a feedback channel between your sales and product marketing teams. Your sales reps spend more time talking to customers and prospects than anyone, and giving them a place to pass and discuss that feedback is a good way to ensure your product development is in line with the market. How is Wrike different from other companies you’ve worked at? I think the visibility we have here makes this company very different. If you want an answer, you can search Wrike and find it. We don’t waste a lot of time waiting for permission to execute. Everything you need is right in Wrike. Also on the sales side, our culture is amazing. Those 4 reps I mentioned earlier are all still with the team and in leadership roles, and having that kind of backbone keeps us all grounded. It also doesn’t hurt that we have an amazing product, because the value we offer to our customers is very real. What’s in the future for the sales organization at Wrike? Good times! More hiring, more opportunities for our reps to grow professionally, and more chances to make a big difference in the lives of our users. The future is very bright! If someone would like to join our sales team, where can they learn more? Our Careers page has a lot of listings for people at all experience levels, including recent grads. We’re hiring in Dublin (Ireland), Mountain View, and San Diego, and would love to hear from you. Check out opportunities to join our sales team on Glassdoor!
First-hand Experience To Succeed with a Distributed Team
This is exactly the case of Avi Cohen, CEO of Pacific54, who successfully manages the five offices of his company, spread around Latin America, the Middle East, Europe and the U.S. "We run multiple projects on online marketing strategies, and the main challenge for us was establishing a healthy workflow for all of them," Avi says. "As we managed to do it with the help of Wrike project management software, now we are able to reach markets of clients and employees that we never thought would be possible to maintain virtually!" Avi has shared with us the rules that helped him efficiently manage his remote team in order to attract more customers. If you are ready to see your business grow, take a look at these great tips: 1. Make sure all team members keep up with the deadlines Plans may change, and when the team is decentralized, it's tricky to ensure that everyone always stays up-to-date with the new schedule. Things have become much easier for us with the interactive Gantt chart that instantly provides all team members with a current project schedule wherever they are. When I create new tasks or reschedule existing ones, they always stay in the loop, receiving e-mail notifications about the changes. Also, on the online Gantt chart, I can instantly see who is responsible for which task and whether it will be completed on time. 2. Always stay on top of your team’s agenda When you manage several projects split between a numbers of remote workers, you need to focus on the most important goals one step ahead. That’s why I customize the widgets on my dashboard to show tasks and projects I am currently interested in and eliminate the others. With custom settings, I always concentrate on the most important items of the work, be it overdue tasks, tasks to do this week or tasks assigned to a particular person in the company. 3. Create a collaborative online environment Enthusiastic collaboration and idea exchanges are behind every successful project. When your team is separated geographically, you need to provide them with a convenient space for project-related discussions. For our team, that place is the Activity Stream. Here, we oversee all the recent updates and share our news, comments and files. And handy avatars make our communication more personal! 4. Dedicate enough time to each client Good customer relationships are the key to your flawless reputation! As all Pacific54 team members keep their time logs in Wrike, at the end of the month I can easily create time reports to see how many hours were spent on each client. Analyzing this information helps us assure that all customers are satisfied. 5. Let your customers see the project progress themselves! To make your relationships more productive, provide your customers with the full or read-only access to the project. This way, they will always have the most recent data available, while you will no longer spend a minute on keeping them up-to-date. A win-win situation! The viewer license feature alone saved me so many sleepless nights. Nevertheless, your team members' personalities are also important for success, so simply maintaining an efficient online communication isn’t enough. What can be better than a phone call when you need to talk over an emotional issue? Why not try some virtual team building games activities? Or how about occasional face-to-face meetings with your colleagues that will definitely help you build strong team relationships? You will be surprised to see how even one such meeting improves your team’s virtual collaboration! "Having tried many different project management tools, I was a bit skeptical about all of them. However, I was surprised by the ease of use and control over the projects Wrike immediately gave me. Now we leverage Wrike in our business in a way that saves us ton of time and money!”Avi Cohen, CEO at Pacific54 Pacific54 is a boutique online marketing agency that specializes in effective Search Engine Optimization, Social Marketing, Pay-Per-Click methods and much more.
What Can We Learn from Project Failure? 5 Lessons from Project Management Experts
When you run a project, there are a lot of components that need to be managed together: information, people, time, as well as specific challenges and threats. Speaking of threats – even if you’re a seasoned professional with extensive experience, you’re never immune to the smaller or bigger dangers of project failure. If you browse blogs and online communities, as well as glance at the agenda of offline events, you’ll see what a stirring discussion it brings up in the PM space. It’s usually analyzed from the “why” side – i.e., what are the reasons for project failure? But there is another equally important question that seems to be rarely discussed: How do we learn from it? When you run a project, there are a lot of components that need to be managed together: information, people, time, as well as specific challenges and threats. Speaking of threats – even if you’re a seasoned professional with extensive experience, you’re never immune to the smaller or bigger dangers of project failure. If you browse blogs and online communities, as well as glance at the agenda of offline events, you’ll see what a stirring discussion it brings up in the PM space. It’s usually analyzed from the “why” side – i.e., what are the reasons for project failure? But there is another equally important question that seems to be rarely discussed: How do we learn from it? Back in the 19th century, a Scottish reformer named Samuel Smiles said something that still holds true: “We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.” So, what discoveries should we make, and what’s the wisdom in project failure? To find the answers, I invited fellow project managers to outline one key practical lesson they’d recommend taking from such a situation. Lesson 1: Understand your stakeholders Bob Tarne, the voice behind the “Zen, Project Management and Life” blog and currently executive project manager at IBM, shared a valuable lesson on avoiding failure caused by misunderstandings with project stakeholders: “I thought of an example where I didn't take the impact of change on my stakeholders and ran into a roadblock. My project had executive support, so I was moving forward with the implementation. However, one stakeholder group wasn't on board. At first, I didn't take the time to understand their concerns... I tried to push the work through, but they kept resisting. I finally took the time to understand their particular concerns and was able to work out a way to meet their specific needs. So the lesson was that, even when you have executive support, you still need to take the time to understand all of your stakeholders.” Lesson 2: Ensure constant communication The lesson from Terri Griffith, Professor of Management and the author of “The Plugged-in Manager,” covered the communicative risks that may lead to project failure: “My key lesson is – ensure constant communication to avoid poor situational awareness. People want to do a good job and sync with other aspects of their project, but if they don't have situational awareness, then those good intentions are just intentions. At extremes, the lack of communication then results in misinterpretations of why things aren't syncing – Psych 101 teaches that if something is going wrong, it's the other person's fault; if it's going well, it's to my credit. With poor communication, root causes can be misunderstood, adding to a downward spiral.” Lesson 3: Share Elizabeth Harrin, who regularly shares her PM wisdom in A Girl’s Guide to Project Management, highlights how important your experience might be for fellow project managers: “My lesson would be: share. There is no point in not sharing. It is better for everyone if you are honest about the failure and what happened, and tell as many people as you can. Often we don't institutionalize lessons about project failure, and the same mistakes are made time and time again.” Lesson 4: There should be no project failure As for Peter Taylor, best known for his bestseller “The Lazy Project Manager,” the advice dives deeper into organizational reasons of project failure and gives a good deal of motivation: “I think the one, big lesson we should all learn from project failure is that there should be no such thing as project failure! Projects should deliver. Now they may not deliver what was intended originally, but they should follow one of three clear paths: Deliver the expected business benefits, Be adjusted to deliver some business benefits, or Be stopped because they are not expected to deliver the business benefits originally intended, at any level of success, or they are focused on business benefits that are no longer relevant. So project failure has nothing to do with individual projects not delivering, but more an indictment of the organization that allows such projects to ‘just keep going until the bitter end’ for some business reason.” Lesson 5: Discussion -> Root causes -> Actions -> Codification When I asked the question myself – there is something to learn in any failure. There are actions to take to prevent it from happening again, and as Terri and Elizabeth brought up, there’s a lot to communicate. Here’s how I’d put it into a simple, four-step process: Have an open and constructive discussion within the team about the failure. That serves both to communicate the lessons and leverage their collective intelligence. Analyze root causes together. Work out an immediate action plan to minimize the impact of the project failure. Codify the lessons learned into processes and practices: “The next time this happens, we do that.” This could be viewed as a long-term form of communication. We could call it DRAC for fun. :-) Discuss – Root causes – Actions – Codify. If you’re in the mood for creating acronyms, feel free to come up with your own. If you thoroughly analyze the mistakes, make conclusions and take lessons for your onward journey, a failure in one project might become a step toward much better results on your next one. Project failure is an abundant source of professional wisdom, albeit an expensive one. You can get a good discount on that price, if you carefully manage your risks through prototyping, pilot projects, smaller iterations, and studies specifically built to prove or disprove your key assumptions. Something that is a failure if it breaks an operational assumption of a big project instead becomes a data point if it’s an experiment by design. To wind it up with another great quote: Malcolm Forbes wisely noted that “Failure is success if we learn from it.” Big thanks to Elizabeth, Terri, Bob and Peter for sharing their great lessons.
Customer's Adoption Tip: Customize Your Own Wrike Manual
When adopting a new tool like Wrike, it helps to create a digestible document that can help your team understand the process and the benefits of using the tool. This is exactly what Lightspeed POS did. Find out how their customized "manual" helped.
A Quick Guide for Managers: How to Track and Report Work Progress in Wrike
Even if you heavily rely on the principles of self-organizing teams while managing your projects, you still need a handy way to track project progress and report on results. For all project managers, team leaders and Wrike fans, we’ve prepared an easy-to-digest manual with screenshots that gives you a quick overview of Wrike’s key reporting capabilities. You’ll learn how to create customized reports and save them on the dashboard for further use. For all project managers, team leaders and Wrike fans, we’ve prepared an easy-to-digest manual with screenshots that gives you a quick overview of Wrike’s key reporting capabilities. You’ll learn how to create customized reports and save them on the dashboard for further use. If you're wondering what is dashboard reporting for project management, it refers to how your dashboard's visibility can give a 360° view of your project's status, insights and data points, and act as a report for how the project is progressing. Pay special attention to the last section that shows you how to access reports and the Gantt chart from your mobile device (iPhone, Android or iPad). This guide is a great addition to Wrike’s adoption toolkit, supplementing it with a “How-to” reporting angle for managers. For further details on the features described in the guide, like the dashboard, filters, Gantt chart, etc., visit our help section or watch the video tutorials on Wrike TV. Wrike for managers: an easy-to-digest manual. Download pdf
Letting Users Take the Lead in Choosing their Tools Can Benefit the Whole Business
Recently I came across an article about how hard it can be to introduce new enterprise business intelligence technologies to a company. This article reflects an important corporate phenomenon: “mandating and forcing users to adopt a standard practice or technology will often create resistance and political backlash.” The author underlines that transforming and changing the way people do business is never easy, and she advises the heads of IT departments on the best ways to implement the changes.Why is it so hard to make users adopt the new software introduced by IT departments? One of the reasons is that sometimes the choice of software is made levels above the actual users. In these cases software is adopted without taking users’ opinion into consideration. Often users have no budgets and little decision power, and that is why all software vendors’ marketing efforts are targeted at top management and heads of IT departments, who make the final choice of software. Many experts agree that this fact is convenient for the IT departments, because they get as much control as possible over users’ operations. Top management sometimes may not know the specific character of their employees’ work. That’s why the managers’ choice for software may become an additional barrier for effective collaboration, instead of being a helpful solution. As a result, people can be forced to adapt to the imposed tool that does not answer their requirements and can be hard to master. They may have to spend weeks or even months on training. Still, after all the training efforts, the IT-introduced solution might turn out to be ineffective for successful team work. Information can often be hard to find, as it is kept in disconnected files. Sometimes lack of built-in collaboration vehicles in an IT imposed solution can slow down the whole business. Change in enterprise management software adoption All these factors are making the top-management of many companies change their views on the IT department’s role in the adoption of a new business solution. Now there is a strong tendency of transformation in enterprise software adoption due to growing user sophistication. Social networks, blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies people use at home help them find similar tools for more effective work in the office. People find new ways to work together and collaborate without any help from IT departments. These ways are Enterprise 2.0 technologies, and they turn out to be more efficient. Why? An Enterprise 2.0 online collaboration platform can make team-work frictionless, as it is more flexible. Second-generation software is designed with user needs in mind. Team members can customize their collaborative space and make it specific to their own needs. The new-generation software is easy to use. Simplicity has become a key driver of technology adoption, especially in the last 10 years, as advanced technologies have developed simpler user interfaces. For example, blogging can be called a revolution of simplicity. To blog, all you need to do is write a title and, some content, and then click publish. It is that simple to share your ideas with the rest of the team and get their feedback in the comments. Collaboration software can do even more for business productivity. It may be the key for streamlining the work process and may help companies avoid unnecessary paper work and phone calls. Everything is kept in one place – a collaborative space that can be accessed by all the team members. Many companies today realize these benefits and take advantage of them by letting their employees choose the software, which will correspond to the end-users’ needs. As an example we can take SightLines Consulting – a consulting company where employees had lots of complaints on complexity of their CRM software. The application was chosen by the top-management. The tool was stable, but end-users kept saying that the application is inflexible and hard to use. The sales people - the end-users of the software – tend to spend most of their working time out of the office, on the road. The major inconvenience was that the application was impossible to access any other way than through their internal network. However, “sales people are motivated to produce” says SightLines Consulting president Thomas Foydel. This means, that they are motivated to find ways and tools to be more productive. The end-users turned to Enterprise 2.0 technologies. When they found a solution that adds actual value to their everyday job, they adopted it. The result was doubling the speed of sales team work and improved customer satisfaction. The whole business became more successful. The top executives at SightLines Consulting are now sure that they made the right decision by letting the sales team choose their tools. Enterprise 2.0 software brings new ways of collaboration and is adopted according to different standards. It’s easy to use, effective and flexible. This software is brought to the enterprise the bottom-up way, and very often is suggested by end-users themselves. It’s no surprise that the second-generation software adoption and usage are more thorough than those of traditional software. Peter Coffee, a recognized software-as-a-service advocate, said that the software that end-users had before might have been stable, mature and predictable, but “it was not transforming people's ideas of how they do business”. I would add that it was not giving them enough space for implementation of their ideas. IT-departments should not ignore this fact. Changing IT-staff altitude towards the new-generation technologies will benefit the whole organization. IT departments need to learn to evaluate the new opportunities. In particular, IT needs additional competency in evaluating and administering service agreements. Enterprise 2.0 is not just software. It represents another way of managing IT. This means that IT departments should now shift their focus toward managing Enterprise 2.0 vendor relationships, as operational responsibility over the actual hardware and software moves to vendors. Some CIOs have already begun to move in this direction. For example, Alastair Behenna, CIO of Harvey Nash, says that their IT staff is looking into emerging technologies and trying to stay in the loop. “We have a lab where our team—from the help desk to the Web folks—is encouraged to spend as much as 10 percent of its time figuring out if there is commercial benefit to something [new] and doing a proof of concept if so,” - Behenna confirms. Of cause transformation of the software adoption process will be different in various companies. Some enterprises will still preserve the old ways of choosing software without taking the end-users’ opinion into consideration. Others have already realized the benefits of letting their employees take the lead in selecting their tools and making teams more productive. Examples of companies like Shell, Harvey Nash and many others, prove that allowing end-users choose the software according to their needs can make the whole business performance better.
Best Practices for Seamless Wrike Adoption from Full-Service Ad Agency
Scott Struber, the VP/Operations of Yamanair Creative, a full-service ad agency, deployed Wrike to his team in March 2012. Scott now runs easily 80% of the business in Wrike, effortlessly collaborating with a team of 20+ spread across the country. In my conversation with Scott, I asked "If your friend in another company or department was implementing Wrike, what advice would you give her to get up and running quickly?" His response was both insightful and helpful for any new or existing business using Wrike. Understand your Business Goals First, make sure you understand what you're trying to accomplish and how Wrike helps achieve that goal. Then, become as well educated about Wrike as possible. Stay aware of what your people need to know and need to do in Wrike. The users need to understand how this will work within the organization and at their team level. Finally, lead by example. You got to use it yourself if you expect others to use it. Be an ambassador for Wrike. Position for Productivity Positioning Wrike appropriately is very important. Don’t say, “Here’s something you need to learn.” Instead, roll Wrike out and share, “We found something that’s going to boost our productivity and allow you to move through the day with less stress, and go home without worrying about what you may have missed." Wrike is a tool we use to help make our jobs easier. Put another way, we let the software do the heavy-lifting when it comes to remembering. Be Firm on Team Adoption When implementing Wrike, it’s important to be firm about team adoption. As I shared with my team, “If it’s not in Wrike, it didn’t happen.” Not using Wrike was not an option. Simultaneously, encourage and help your people to get past the learning curve and they’ll be happier and more compliant. Empower your Users Make sure the users know where to get answers. Wrike offers great support through a variety of channels. Inform and empower your users to be self-sufficient or you’ll end up answering all of their questions. Ask for Feedback Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback. Work to figure out how well Wrike is working overall and how it’s working for individual people. Don’t assume the way you set it up is awesome and perfect and the one and only way to do it. Be open and flexible to changing the process. We have revised the work flow many times over, always for the better, and often using suggestions from team members.
Andatech’s Tips: How to Develop a Habit of Logging and Updating Tasks on Time
If you have just started using Wrike, at first some employees may forget to log and update their tasks in the system. Don’t worry, Andatech’s best practices will help you deal with this problem quickly!If you have just started using Wrike, at first some employees may forget to log and update their tasks in the system. Don’t worry, Andatech’s best practices will help you deal with this problem quickly! Andatech is one of our customers, and it wholesales a vast variety of innovative electronic products for home in Australia. There are several teams within the company that are working on completely different projects, and the same employees take part in several projects at once. Prior to Wrike, the general manager spent several hours every week on collecting updates across different projects and putting them together into a general overview. Now, every team member keeps their tasks up-to-date in the system, so it’s a matter of a click or two to see how things are going. This approach is beneficial for both managers and the team, as everyone is on the same page and is moving faster. We've asked Andatech's team to share how they managed to make logging tasks into Wrike a habit so quickly! Leverage e-mail integration Andatech managers wanted an easy way to track all work that has been done, especially by remote team members. So the first thing Andatech did was to create a simple rule: Any task that takes more than half an hour should be logged into Wrike. Making this happen was easy. A lot of the team’s communication takes place via e-mail, so logging new tasks from e-mails into Wrike is literally a matter of a click, thanks to Wrike’s Gmail gadget. “Most project management tools are hard to adopt right away because people think that it’s actually more work for them. But with Wrike, the biggest thing for our staff was understanding that it’s not just a separate platform. It naturally supplements other habitual tools, such as e-mail, easily converting e-mails into tasks,” says Sunil Joseph, the head of digital strategy at Andatech. If your team is used to communicating issues via e-mail, make sure everyone on your team knows the fastest way for them to turn e-mails into Wrike tasks. This means the add-ins for Outlook and Apple Mail users, the gadget for Gmail users and simply forwarding an e-mail to [email protected] for anyone else. Update tasks in Wrike after everyday standup meetings When tasks are logged into the system, at first people may still forget to update them. So Andatech managers decided to update tasks right after the everyday standup meetings. They created a folder called “Morning standup,” where the project manager puts tasks that need to be done today and prioritizes them after each meeting. After the meeting, team members also check that all updates they have reported during the meeting have been logged into the system. If they have previously forgotten to log something, it's high time to put it into Wrike, making sure the project picture is complete. This approach makes it easier to collaborate with remote team members, as the manager can quickly show them today’s agenda and the team’s priorities. The manager also sees the overall team’s progress in one place and can quickly measure the progress for any given period with the help of Wrike’s advanced filters. Suggest that employees create personal folders for the most important tasks Quick access to all current tasks is vital to set the priorities correctly and get things done in time. That's why every Andatech employee has a special widget on the Wrike dashboard with all tasks assigned to them (by default, you only have tasks assigned to you for this week). The widget automatically shows the up-to-date list of tasks with every login. If you want to create such a widget for yourself, all you need to do is go to “My folders,” click on the Descendants button, filter tasks assigned to you and click on the “Create a widget” button. This is a good exercise for all team members! :) The widget automatically shows the up-to-date list of tasks with every login. Sometimes there are too many tasks assigned to one person, so it's hard to quickly grasp the ones to focus on. Andatech's employees have come up with a solution! Some of them created the personal “Most important” folder (not shared with anyone else) and put the most important tasks from different projects there. This is easy to do, thanks to the ability to put one task in several folders in Wrike. Within personal folders, people can drag tasks up and down the list to prioritize, and then complete items on the priority list from top to bottom. Following these three easy principles, Andatech’s team adopted Wrike quickly and smoothly! In turn, Wrike helped them greatly with tracking work progress, prioritizing things and figuring out what needs to be done and when. Learn more about how the Andatech's team successfully uses Wrike for their workflow in our podcast with Sunil Joseph. What are your team’s best practices in making task-tracking a habit? Do you have any particular rules in using Wrike and tracking the progress? With Wrike, it gets easier to share and collaborate on any kind of data. We’re sure that the relevant people will see what needs to be seen, and things will get done in time.” — Sunil Joseph, the head of digital strategy at Andatech.
Use Wrike More Productively With These 8 Tips & Tricks
If you're new to Wrike, just getting your feet wet using the tool, and are wondering what productivity tricks there are in the software that can make you a more efficient worker, then this post is for you. We've collected 8 of the best tips and tricks (that you might not know about) so you can turbocharge the way you work in Wrike. Read on!
Conduct Lessons Learned Throughout the Engagement
A June 2010 survey that I personally conducted of project managers and project personnel showed that 57% of responders indicated that they conducted lessons learned sessions either not at all or less than 10% of the time. Now consider that more than 50% of all projects fail (as much as 76% fail as noted in one PMI survey discussed on LinkedIn) and that’s a lot of lessons that could be learned and shared. Think about all of the project dollars spent on those failed projects that could be more productively spent on successful projects if we were all learning from our mistakes and sharing those learning moments with other project managers. We have good intentions, but the problem is we’re all very busy in our professional world. By the time a project engagement is over either the customer is moving on to other things or the PM and team is or all of the above. We try, but it doesn’t always happen. Because I came to the revelation that it likely would be helpful to learn in mid-stream on a project and because so many of us have to immediately move on to the next project once we’ve completed the present engagement (not to mention continue to manage the other projects we also have going at the moment) - I’ve begun to think of lessons learned as an ongoing activity that needs to happen during the project. I’m not certain if this happens often or if I’m offering a ground-breaking idea here, but it seems to be working for me and my teams and customers as I’ve begun to incorporate it into my projects. Here is my process… Planning the lessons learned sessions into the project During the creation of the initial project schedule, I look at the statement of work and the tasks we need to accomplish and consider whether we’re performing a long project or one that is basically a phased approach broken into several sub-projects. If we’re performing a phased approach implementation – which is more common in the projects I generally lead - then it’s relatively easy to incorporate multiple lessons learned session into one project. At the end of each phase, schedule a lessons learned session – it’s that simple. If there are no such obvious stopping points in a given project, then it becomes more difficult to find appropriate places in the schedule to plan lessons learned sessions to discuss the issues we’ve encountered so far and the lessons we’ve learned along the way. On these types of projects, I look at key deliverables as the break point to insert lessons learned discussions. This could be the delivery of a functional design document for an IT project, or a draft of major marketing materials for a marketing campaign, etc. The important thing is to get them into the schedule and plan for them and to space them far enough apart so as to make them valuable sessions and not just re-dos of a session that happened two weeks ago. And be sure to actually conduct them…being lazy and having people communicate their ideas through a series of emails won’t suffice. Conducting the lessons learned sessions The actual sessions themselves should not be really any different than the post-deployment lessons learned discussions most people are used to. The big difference may be that you actually still have to work with all of these individuals and keep their cooperation and motivation going for the rest of the project. So be honest and constructive, but also be careful. Make the information you share and discuss useful – not just a waste of time. Commend individuals personally for accomplishments, but also provide critical feedback – in the proper manner of course – when necessary because you still must maintain the project momentum. The takeaway here must be to improve project performance as a whole – whether that’s on the next phase or next deliverable. The project-ending lessons learned session does provide the project delivery team and the customer with a nice platform to really dig deep into what was good and what was bad about the engagement. And that should still happen – it’s just not always possible. But incorporating several mid-project reviews can help keep the project on track and eliminate problem areas from continuing throughout the engagement. Summary As much as we’d all like to say we incorporate best practices all the way through a project and we never skip critical steps along the way, we know that’s just not true of all engagements. When the project is encountering issues or the project timeline is in jeopardy, the fundamentals are sometimes the first thing to go. It’s a bad idea because the information you can gain from lessons learned sessions could be invaluable to both your team and to other project teams in your organization. By breaking these sessions down and conducting them in shorter and more frequent meetings throughout the project you can both keep them momentum going and learn along the way to help you deliver even better right now…not just in the future. It may really make a difference in the overall success of the engagement.
Perfecting Your Startup Investor Pitch Deck: 3 Essential Links
One of the highlights of being an entrepreneur is telling people about the amazing startup you've built — whether to attract investors, users, or prospective hires. It's a highlight as well as possibly the most nerve-wracking moment of an entrepreneur's life: that moment when you're before an audience, alone with your pitch deck, trying to communicate why they should care enough to invest their time or money in your company. The art of creating your startup's pitch deck is one that has wrought a thousand and one blog posts. There is a lot of advice out there, given out by angel investors and successful startup CEOs alike. You can even access a host of decks written with startups in mind on Slideshare. Having combed through a myriad of resources, we've concluded that these three links below are absolutely essential to crafting and polishing your startup's pitch deck. Ignore them at your own peril. 1. Reid Hoffman & LinkedIn's Successful Series B pitch to Greylock A decade after it was presented in 2004, this deck is still essential. It's an amazing resource, showing each slide along with accompanying insight from Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn's co-founder (and current investor at Greylock Partners). Hoffman offers advice on how entrepreneurs should approach the pitch process, while providing context for the tech climate of 2004. Best Tips: Open with your investment thesis: what prospective investors must believe in order to want to invest in your company. Steer toward objections. There will be a few issues that could present problems for your financing — address them head on. 2. Guy Kawasaki's Pitch Deck Template Pitch Deck Template by Guy Kawasaki from Quintin Adamis Back in 2012, author, noted entrepreneur, and chief evangelist Guy Kawasaki posted an alternative pitch deck template on his blog. You can download the full PowerPoint here. He discusses the pitch deck formula in depth within the post, giving pointers that he says no investor will actually tell you, because it's always easier for them to smile and say, "That's interesting." Best Tips: When it comes to PowerPoint pitches for your company, think "Hot Or Not", not eHarmony. Your investors decide if your company is “hot or not” in a matter of seconds. According to Kawasaki, the best-case outcome of a pitch is not a request for money wiring instructions. There is a more important goal: rising above the noise and avoiding elimination. You want to “live another day” and get to the next stage: due diligence. 3. Crowdfunder's Investor Pitch Deck Template Over on Forbes, Chance Barnett, CEO of Crowdfunder.com, contributes a downloadable PowerPoint deck template that distills the investor pitch formula down to 11 core slides every deck needs in order to get its point across clearly. Barnett's pitch deck formula is based on his extensive experience raising money for his own ventures, as well as looking at over 10,000 pitch decks on Crowdfunder. You can download his Investor Pitch Deck Template (PPT) here. Best Tips: Including too much information in your initial pitch can be counterproductive. You want to leave some questions unanswered, hit the big points in a clear way, and avoid over-sharing. Put key numbers and traction at the very beginning. This grabs attention and clarifies the market opportunity, especially if the numbers are good. What other pitch deck advice do you have? Do you have suggestions of pitch decks that should join this list? Hit the comments and show us the light.
Dos and Don'ts of the Startup Pitch: Expert Advice from 5 Famous Investors
Entrepreneurs are generally confident people, and yet most confess to experiencing tremendous anxiety when it comes to pitching investors. Standing in front of a group of people who can make or break your company and asking them to invest money in your business is an intimidating prospect. How do you start your deck? How long should you present? What kinds of details do you need to include? How do you make a good impression? Well, who better to give advice than the very people you'll be pitching? These 5 serial entrepreneurs and veteran investors outline what you should and shouldn't do when pitching your business: Chris Sacca, veteran VC DO talk about why you are uniquely qualified to follow through on your business idea. What experience or expertise do you have that gives you an advantage over everyone else? What sets you apart from your competitors? DO instill FOMO: "fear of missing out." Most investors have passed up an opportunity that later went on to be profitable, so make them worry they’ll regret it if they pass you up. DO talk endgame. Investors want to know what your plan is for acquisition, ideally in 3-5 years’ time. Give an example of a company that would consider your business an attractive acquisition. DON'T ramble. Keep your pitch short, simple, and specific. You should have a 2-minute version of your pitch that conveys your basic business model, your "unfair advantage," and an exact funding target. You're not trying to raise "between $1.5 - 2 million." You're raising “$1.8 million.” Brian Cohen, Chairman of The New York Angels DO talk about your financial plan. What's your main revenue stream? Discuss why the problem you've identified is profitable, why your solution is viable, and how you're going to make money. DO discuss the market trends that are driving your product. Investors are curious people and want to stay on top of the latest, so satisfy that curiosity and make a good impression by teaching them something new. DON'T be vague when discussing how the investment will be spent. What are you raising money to do, exactly? And why now? Chance Barnett, CEO of Crowdfunder DO find someone in your network who can introduce you to investors (ideally someone with a strong reputation). Send whomever you’re asking to make the introduction a short email blurb with suggested language and a link to your online profile, so they can easily forward it along. DON'T present a series of bullet points. Tell a story instead. Barnett advises all pitches follow this general format: “There is a huge opportunity to do X as a giant business. We’ve cracked the code, and this is how my company is doing it and will dominate this market. Here’s who myself and my team are, and why we’re the only people to back in this space. It’s working, and now we need money for X and Y to grow.” Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist DO research the investors you're pitching. What businesses have they backed in the past? If you know what they’re interested in, you can tailor your presentation to give them the info they want. DO remember it’s more important for the right people to say yes than for everyone to say yes. Investors can offer more than just money — they can be valuable advisors too. So pay attention to potential investors who are asking interesting questions and are excited about your product, market, and the problem you’re trying to solve. DO show, don’t tell. Instead of saying you understand your customers needs, provide quotes from credible customers. Avoid superfluous adjectives and adverbs like “very.” Hoffman says these words act like a poker tell, signifying points you’re most nervous or unsure about, and that he's more likely to ask probing questions about those key points. So be specific and straightforward. DON’T shy away from areas that are problematic or risky to your business. Just because you don’t address them, doesn’t mean investors won’t see them. And by showing you've already identified and understand potential concerns, you’re building confidence instead of instilling doubt. DON'T end with a generic "Q&A" slide. End with your most important slide, something that you want on screen while you’re answering questions that will linger in investors minds long after the meeting’s over. David Rose, serial entrepreneur & angel investor DO keep it short. Angel pitches should be 15 mins; VC meetings less than half an hour. DO show your integrity, passion, and conviction to succeed no matter what. Investors are backing YOU first and foremost. DO prepare a handout with more detailed information on your business. Just remember: your presentation is not your handout. Your handout should stand alone without you, and give investors the chance to deep dive into what you’ve presented. DON’T read your speech or stare at the screen. You’re trying to connect with investors, not your PowerPoint slides. So make eye contact, pay attention to your body language, and follow good presentation practices. Are you ready for your pitch? Follow these tips to ace your pitch and impress investors. And remember, VCs and angels aren't the only source of startup funding. Check out this infographic for 5 other ways to raise money for your business. Sources: Ted.com, ReidHoffman.org, Forbes.com, Business News Daily, This American Life
44 Productivity Hacks to Turn Procrastination Into Action
If your to-do list is like mine — longer than the Great Wall of China — you’re probably desperate for productivity tips and shortcuts to help you squeeze a few more hours out of every day. Since we’re all about boosting productivity here at Wrike, we’ve compiled a compendium of productivity hacks to help you zip through your to-do list in record time. Without further ado: Focus 1. Unplug. Put your phone on airplane mode or Do Not Disturb (or use an Android app like Shush). Black out background browser tabs and notifications with an extension like StayFocusd, and mute your email with Inbox Pause for Gmail. 2. Tidy up. Did you know that the average worker spends 76 hours every year looking for lost stuff? Cleaning up your work area lets your mind focus. 3. Write distractions down. Free up some brain space by taking note of every reminder and distraction that pops in your head. It'll silence that nagging "I'm forgetting something..." feeling and let you focus on the task at hand. 4. Read/watch later. Use Pocket or the Wrike Chrome extension to save interesting links and videos that would ordinarily trigger a marathon link surfing session. 5. Take a hike. Periodic breaks refresh your brain, so go for a walk to boost creativity, sharpen your focus, and brighten your mood. 6. Change your scenery. Work from a coffee shop, library, or your backyard to improve focus and creativity without any office distractions. 7. Be healthy. Losing just 1.5 hours of sleep reduces alertness by 32%, and avoiding junk food can raise your productivity 20%. Exercise helps you better handle stress, makes you more alert, and gives you more mental energy. 8. Get comfy. An office that's too chilly or too warm (outside the 70-77 degree range) lessens productivity by 5%. The pleasant smell of lemons improves focus and reduces errors 54%. And sitting by a window keeps you focused 15% longer. 9. Go green. Houseplants improve creativity by 45% and overall wellbeing by 47%, while sharpening focus and concentration. 10. Grab some headphones. Listening to ambient music or white noise improves focus 35%. 11. Practice meditation. It teaches your brain to tune out distractions and focus longer. Even 5 minutes a day can have an impact! 12. Say "Awww!" Looking at pictures of cute baby animals or photos of nature increases your attention span and memory. Want to improve collaboration on your team? Start a 2 week trial of Wrike today! Save Time 13. Quit meetings. If you can't cut them completely, keep them to short stand-ups, or make at least one whole day a week meeting-free. 14. Say no. You can't do everything! Just make sure you say no the right way: “I don’t” is more effective than “I can’t”. 15. Delegate whenever possible. You've got a slew of talented teammates around you, so use them! Just don't dump tedious busywork on them — make sure every task you and your team take on is truly worthwhile. 16. De-clutter your inbox. Unroll.me compiles all your newsletters and subscriptions into a single daily digest. 17. Track your time. RescueTime shows how many minutes you spend using various applications. By productivity tracking, you'll get an accurate picture of your daily work habits and discover where you can improve. 18. Quit Facebook (partially). Move everyone from your “friends" list to "acquaintances" — you'll still get the important updates, but you'll spend less time scrolling through quiz results and food photos in your newsfeed. 19. Automate! Create standard email responses to common inquiries, set your browser to automatically open your favorite tabs, set up an RSS feed to monitor essential news outlets and use Zapier or IFTTT to automate other routine tasks. 20. Batch similar tasks. You'll get in the zone and power through several items in less time. 21. Quit typing. Try speech dictation software to get your thoughts down faster, or record new ideas and communications on the go. 22. Keep a "Stop Doing" list. It'll help you watch out for and eliminate the fruitless time sucks from your day. 23. Stop multitasking. Not only is it less efficient, it drops your IQ 10 points. That means more mistakes, which you'll only have to go back and correct... wasting even more precious time. Prioritize 24. Try the “Must, Should, Want” method. You identify three tasks that will help you accomplish your immediate and long-term goals, plus keep you from burning out. 25. Don't check your email first thing each morning. Instead, spend the first hour or two of each day tackling high-priority items. Too often emails derail our plans for the day, and what we intended to do gets pushed off or lost in the shuffle. 26. Do that ONE thing. Ask yourself: "If I could only get ONE thing done today, what would it be?" Do that first. 27. Pick 3 "Most Important" tasks. Write them on a Post-It, and keep it within sight all day long. 28. Prune your to-do list. If it can’t be done only by you and it's not important enough to delegate, rethink whether it's really worth doing at all. Don't waste time on unproductive tasks! 29. Do creative work first. Take advantage of a fresh brain and leave paperwork, meetings, and follow-up tasks for later. 30. Be picky about the work you accept. Write down your mission (or company's mission) in one concrete sentence, whether that’s “Build useful software” or “Bake beautiful wedding cakes.” Will that task help you achieve your mission? Only take it on if the answer is a firm “yes!” 31. Write tomorrow's to-do list tonight. List 3 items to jumpstart your day with a sense of purpose. And make at least one of those items something fun to get your day started on the right foot. 32. Use Stephen Covey's prioritization matrix to sort tasks. Important & Urgent at the top, then Important but Not Urgent, followed by Urgent but Not Important and finally Not Urgent and Not Important. 33. Ask yourself 5 questions: Does this get me closer to my goal? Is it important to my boss? Does it make me money? Does it make my life easier? Does it have to be done today? Sort your list based on the # of yeses. Get Motivated 34. Break big tasks into bite-sized pieces. This should kill your procrastination. Or, commit to working on a big project for just 30 minutes, and then stop. 30 minutes a day can add up to significant progress pretty quick! 35. Try David Allen's two-minute rule. If it takes less than two minutes, do it now. Yes, right now. Checking small items off your to-do list boosts motivation. 36. "Eat the frog." You know those big tasks you always dread? Crossing one off first thing in the day gives you a sense of accomplishment and makes you motivated to get even more done. 37. Find your “biological prime time.” This is the magic hour where your energy, focus and motivation align at a high point. Schedule your most important tasks for that window. 38. Make progress visible. Check off tasks or keep an anti-to do list (see #38). It’s easy to lose motivation when you feel like a hamster running on its wheel, going nowhere. Celebrate your successes! 39. Create an “Anti-todo list.” Keep from getting down on yourself for not completing your planned to-dos by keeping a running list of all the stuff you did get done. 40. “Don't break the chain.” Mark each day you accomplish an important task with an X on your calendar, and watch the chain grow. Then don’t break the chain! 41. Start a StickK contract. Name your task or goal, give yourself a set amount of time, and then put up some cash as stakes (optional). If you achieve your goal, you keep your money. If not, it goes to charity. 42. Strike a power pose. Think Wonder Woman or Superman — wide feet, hands on hips, chest out, chin up. The right body language can boost confidence, lower stress, and help you get "in the zone." 43. Eat some chocolate. You'll get a rush of dopamine, a hormone that boosts motivation. Chocolate also releases chemicals that promote calm and stimulate your brain, perfect for buckling down and getting things done. 44. Be happy! A good mood makes you 12% more productive, so joke with a colleague, watch a funny cat video, or chat with a friend. With these productivity tips bookmarked or pinned to your wall, your list of accomplishments will be more impressive than ever. Get Work Done - 17 Workplace Productivity Hacks from Wrike Related Reads:• 10 Encouraging Productivity Proverbs for Your Office Wall• How to Create Productive Work Habits (Slideshare)• 8 Lessons in Increased Productivity from Wrike Customers• 10 Free Productivity Apps for Getting Things Done
![4 Vital Career Lessons from Calgary's Worst Driver [Video]](https://web-static.wrike.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=900,format=auto/blog/content/uploads/2015/01/calgary-worst-driver-lessons.jpg?av=12dfacacd4b6c661c4c0c751de7b427e)
4 Vital Career Lessons from "Calgary's Worst Driver" [Video]
People at our Mountain View office were recently fascinated by a trending YouTube video showing what is allegedly "Calgary's Worst Driver" taking a painful four and a half minutes to pull out of a pretty standard parking spot. It's a video that leaves you with more questions than answers. BUT! What you see on the video isn't merely an incompetent driver trying to worm his or her way out of a tough spot. What you see is an enlightened guru with vital lessons to teach us about life, career, and the pursuit of efficient productivity. Read on: Lesson 1: Plan Before You Do. The driver kept at it for over four minutes, trying different patterns, each one more complicated than the next. We can't help but think the entire debacle could have been avoided if the driver had taken some time to think things through. Perhaps even stopping completely to step out of the vehicle and judge how close the surrounding cars were situated. When you get into a tough spot in your career, Nike's tagline won't always work; "just doing it" won't lead to success without first thinking things through a little. What are the repercussions of your actions? Which resources will you need to access? Even better, plan out your entire year in advance. Lesson 2: It's Okay to Ask for Help. If you are no expert at your task at hand — whether it's driving in snow, programming code, or writing a blog post — it is incumbent upon you to seek assistance. If you don't, you could cause serious damage to your surroundings and innocent bystanders. Humble yourself, grasshopper. Ask for advice. For example, talk to subject matter experts in a LinkedIn group. You're more likely to get out of a tough spot when you have input from those more skilled or more experienced than you. In the end, succeeding with help will hurt your pride far less than failing alone. Lesson 3: If It's Not Fun Anymore, It May Be Time To Walk. While perseverance is critical in the pursuit of your passions, failure to improve may be a sign that your heart just isn't in it. Our CEO Andrew Filev recently told a story about a time he had a heart-to-heart with a struggling software engineer only to discover the employee was reevaluating his career path — he wasn't enjoying it and it was leading to his substandard work. In the case of "Calgary's Worst Driver," their struggle is probably a sign for them to move on. It may be time for the driver to invest in a bus pass. Lesson 4: Admit Your Mistakes. Everyone messes up sooner or later. The difference between moving on with your dignity intact and going infamously viral is how well you handle the situation. If "Calgary's Worst Driver" had stopped their car and left a note after dinging that red car, we probably never would have seen this video. Similarly, if you make a mistake and miss a vital deadline, man (or woman) up and admit it. Then ensure it doesn't happen again. It's a small world, and your reputation as someone who dodges responsibility will follow you. If Karma doesn't find you, the internet definitely will. Some of life's lessons can only be learned the hard way. If you haven't seen the video yet, it's time to sit through 4 of the most painful minutes of your life: Hindsight is 20/20, so it's important that we keep looking back to catch those learning moments. If you have any embarrassing stories that taught you a great lesson, please share them in the comments — even anonymously! It's important to pass on your newfound expertise and prevent other poor souls from making the same mistakes.
Lessons on Success from the 2016 Olympics (Work Management Roundup)
Welcome back to the weekly Work Management Roundup. This week, we focus on success. With the Olympics starting in just a week and the impact of that powerful speech made by our stunning First Lady, Michelle Obama, we thought it appropriate to cultivate the top tips and news surrounding success and achievement.