Team Taskmaster

It’s the last week of Team Taskmaster’s run, and I’m rounding up some of the most helpful and popular posts from the past year and a half. On today’s agenda: How to survive — and even thrive — when dealing with workplace meetings.

If you’ve been reading my posts for a while, you know my top pet peeve is wasteful or inefficient meetings, especially when they start stacking up like planes on a congested runway.

One way to avoid the curse of the adjacent booking is to end each meeting 10 minutes early. If Outlook makes you schedule a meeting for an hour, end the meeting at the 50-minute mark to give attendees time to “commute” to their next engagement.

If you find your attention slipping during a meeting, don’t beat yourself up; just break out your sketching skills. Why? Because doodling can improve your concentration.

Don’t forget your Emily Post guidelines even in a less-than-fab confab, of course; mind your meeting manners to help things go smoothly. (My number-one faux pas? Don’t multitask in a meeting!) Avoid using corporate jargon — it obscures clarity and makes it harder for everyone to understand what you’re really saying.

Whenever possible, avoid subjecting your meeting invitees to death by PowerPoint. But if you must present a slide deck, check out these four scientific rules for improving your PowerPoint

And finally, observe these eight ways to avoid meeting hell. Your team will thank you.

Have any other suggestions for making your meetings better? Add them in the comments section!

(image by markhillary via Flickr, CC 2.0)

The final days of Team Taskmaster are nigh, so I’m resurfacing some of the past year and a half’s most popular or on-point posts. Today, I want to talk about procrastination. (Yes, right now!)

I’m a fabulous procrastinator. In fact, that’s probably at least in part why I chose journalism as a career: Without drop-dead deadlines looming over me, I’d never get any writing done.

Since I recognize this tendency in myself, I’m also constantly on the lookout for ways to battle my “I’ll get to it later” syndrome.

Luckily, there’s plenty of fodder out there. I’ve discovered, for instance, that procrastination is an expensive habit. And that when I’m facing an onerous task, the best way to begin is to start small.

Keeping track of what you’re doing, and when you’re doing it, can help minimize distractions and detours, so check out these 10 ways to manage your time better. Viewing an Internet outage as an opportunity (or voluntarily turning off your connection) can also help keep you on track.

Plenty of people are fans of the two-minute rule for clearing out the small tasks that can derail your larger projects. You’d also do well to minimize distractions, especially when working from home — where it’s oh-so-easy to get led astray.

But don’t forget, while procrastination inevitably involves delays, not all delays are procrastination. And sometimes, procrastination can signal some hidden truths. And don’t feel as if your procrastination is a character flaw; turns out we can blame our brains.

In the end, while it’s great to work on minimizing your procrastination tendencies, work shouldn’t be a long, humorless to-do list. So don’t beat yourself up too much. After all, you always get more done when you’re having fun.

(image by der sich den wolf tanzt via Flickr, CC 2.0)

Folks, I have an announcement to make: Team Taskmaster is taking its final bows this week.

After a year and a half of sharing with you my take on productivity, leadership, and management, I’ve decided it’s time for me to move on. But I don’t want to leave you all high and dry, so for the next few days I’m going to recap some of the most helpful and/or popular Team Taskmaster posts.

First up: hacking your career.

• You already know you need a killer resume, right? Well, there’s plenty of fine-tuning you can do to really make it sing. First, decide if your CV should be one page or two (the experts like one). Next, apply five simple tips for improving your resume. Finally, make your resume kick ass by making it reflect who you are and what you do.
• When that resume is all spiffed out, it’s time to put it to good use. Start by using the rule of thirds for job-hunting. Be shrewd and get the most out of a headhunter. Be creative, but don’t try stupid job-seeking tactics that brand you as desperate. Play hard-to-get in your job search, at least a little bit. And when you land that coveted interview, make sure you ace the dreaded “What’s your weakness?” question.
• Hired? Great! Now get ready to put your career on the fast track. Take a page from recent research and try to think and act tall to get ahead in the workplace. Work hard to win over your new boss. Do five things to make your boss and colleagues love you. And think of strategies to maximize your productivity, like shifting your work hours or even working remotely.
• But be careful. For some people, a job can literally be life or death — just look at the rise in workplace suicides. You don’t want to get in that deep. If you hate your new job, it’s okay to quit. And remember your perspective: it’s only a job, after all. There are more important things in life.

Got anything to add? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Are you trying to cut costs by bringing, rather than buying, your workday lunch? Kudos to you. It’s definitely a money-saver — in fact, you could save over $1,000 per year just by brown-bagging it three times a week. You can even calculate the cost of your homemade sandwich to prove the savings to yourself.

But let’s face it: Bringing your own lunch can get boring, not to mention tedious. After all, you have to do the grocery shopping, engineer your meal every morning (or night before, if you’re a planner), and hope your goodies don’t get squashed on the commute.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Here are some ideas on how to hack your DIY lunch so your meal is a daily treat, not a trial.

Start a lunch pool. Find four other colleagues willing to participate, and have each one pick a day to make lunch for the group. It’s a great way to add some variety to the mix and skip four out of five days of prep work.

Spice up your spreads. If a sandwich is your stand-by, add a little sizzle with gourmet mustard, cilantro mayonnaise, sun-dried tomato spread, horseradish, hummus, spreadable cheese, or even salad dressing.

Up the crunch factor. Add seeds or nuts to your soups, salads, and pastas — even to your sandwiches. The texture will make your food more satisfying and seem more filling.

Warm up to the microwave. Even a boring sandwich takes on more personality when it’s got warm, melted cheese inside. And toasty leftovers beats cold sliced chicken any day.

Banish the sog. Wilted salads? Not any more. Just separate your ingredients into plastic containers (or plastic baggies) and assemble your salad at the office. Or invest in a special container, like the Fit & Fresh Salad Shaker, that lets you keep the dressing separate and the salad nicely chilled.

Recycle your dinners. Cook a little extra in the evening and voila — you’ll have tasty leftovers to bring to work in the morning.

Don’t skip the soup. A hearty soup can be incredibly satisfying on a cold (or tough) day in the office. Homemade rocks, but there are plenty of “just add water” packaged versions out there that’ll do the trick, too.

Go gourmet. If you can cook, there’s no reason not to make your bagged lunch a fine-dining experience. Build a panini, create a gorgeous pesto pasta, or grill up some seasoned veggies. Need inspiration? Check out these recipes for a better brown bag lunch from three New York chefs.

Think outside the (sandwich) box. Tired of two slices of whole wheat, mayo, mustard, ham, cheese, and tomato? Sandwiches come in infinite varieties. Try a different kind of bread - baguette, sourdough roll, ciabbata, focaccia, pita, tortilla. Swap out your American cheese for some brie, Havarti, or goat’s cheese. How about sun-dried tomatoes instead of fresh? Or turn to the doyenne of food for ideas: Martha Stewart offers 25 great sandwich ideas, plus new takes on salads and lunchbox treats.

If you’ve got other ideas for improving your brown-bag lunch, share them with the Team Taskmaster readers in the comments section.

(image by Melyviz via Flickr, CC 2.0)

If you’re looking to get ahead in your career, you already know you need to bring solid skills and savvy to the table. But what really separates the go-getters from the complacent are the so-called soft skills: traits and qualities that make good people great.

Amit Gupta, writing on Dumb Little Man, came up with a list of nine soft skills that can rock your career. Among them:

• Take ownership. When no one is willing to step up as a leader, it’s time for you to step in. A process with a good leader, input from others, and true direction has a much better chance of success than a project with multiple stakeholders.
• Have a solution-seeking mindset. It’s easy to complain or point out problems, but much harder to suggest solutions. Don’t take the easy way out. A positive mindset can garner you good attention, especially if you offer ideas to solve issues and put out fires.
• Be willing to help. Yes, you’re busy, but the business world works on a give-and-take system. Be ready to offer or provide help to others when asked — and they’re more likely to return the favor when you need it.

For the other half-dozen traits, read Gupta’s full post. And tell me if there are other qualities that can help make you a workplace superstar.

Are your PowerPoint presentations putting everyone to sleep? Is your business culture so steeped in slide decks that your audience immediately zones out when the lights go down? If so, you need to do something to spice up your slides and get people to pay attention.

Cognitive science to the rescue! Last year, Harvard scientist Stephen M. Kosslyn spoke in a symposium about the visualization of data and how people can best present information in a PowerPoint format. Writer Annalee Newitz summarized Kosslyn’s four rules of PowerPoint.

1. The Goldilocks Rule: Present a “just right” amount of data. Too much is overwhelming; too little won’t get your point across.
2. The Rudolph Rule: Guide your audience to important details, just as Rudolph’s red nose guided Santa. If you present a piece of key data in a list, make it a different color or size, point an arrow to it, highlight it, or circle it in red. In a pie chart, pull out the important sector. Our brains are wired to immediately notice what’s different, and this helps your audience distinguish what’s important from what’s background information.
3. The Rule of Four: Never offer more than four pieces of information at once. Why? The brain can generally only hold four pieces of visual data simultaneously — so when we take in the visual information on a slide, more than four items starts to overwhelm us.
4. The Birds of a Feather Rule: If you want to indicate to your audience that several items belong in a group, make them similar by giving them the same color or shape. Or group them very close together.

For more details, read Newitz’s full post, with examples. Or check out Kosslyn’s book, Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations. And happy PowerPointing!

Want to make yourself indispensable at work? You can help bullet-proof your career (or get yourself noticed for a promotion) with five simple steps, says Ali Hale of Dumb Little Man. The first three:

1. Do your job and do it well. Sound obvious? Well, it’s not. How many of us coast through some (or all) of the day, turn in an “OK” rather than “stellar” report, or tell ourselves something isn’t worth putting effort into? To become a company hero, you need to not only do your job, but do it to a high standard, says Hale.
2. Mind your manners. You’d never be intentionally rude to your boss, but have you ever snapped at a colleague? Or been snotty with a receptionist? How you treat others, from the janitor to the CEO, gets noticed. Make sure it’s for the right reasons.
3. Get positive, even if you have to fake it. Sure, maybe you’re not completely engaged with a project or a challenge. But moaning and whining about it won’t win you any points. Be the “can do” person, the one with a smile even when the situation gets difficult. Focus on the things you enjoy about your job and take the time to praise or encourage colleagues, suggests Hale.

Hale has two more tricks and some other helpful ideas, so swing on by and read her full post, How to Make Yourself Indispensable at Work. And good luck in becoming the office superstar.

When I wrote my sarcastic ode to PowerPoint the other day, one of my readers chimed in with a humorous comment defending the practice of printing out slide decks as meeting hand-outs. He (or she) wrote, “You gotta remember that PPT print-outs give your attendees an important opportunity to doodle on the pages — very important for business!!”

While the comment was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, it made me think back to an article I read in Wired magazine earlier this year. Believe it or not, doodling has been shown to improve focus and attention.

A study in Applied Cognitive Psychology found that a slightly distracting secondary task may actually improve concentration during the performance of dull tasks that would otherwise cause a mind to wander, according to Wired’s Brandon Keim.

Study co-author Jackie Andrade, a University of Plymouth psychologist, said in the article, “”It takes a large cognitive load to daydream. That has a big impact on the task you’re meant to be doing. Doodling takes only a small cognitive load, but it’s just enough to keep your mental resources focused on the main task.”

What does this mean in the business world? It means that my reader had a real point. Having paper in front of you and idly doodling while you’re in a boring presentation or meeting can help you pay more attention and retain more information than if you just sat there and zoned out.

Not the artistic type? Never fear; doodling is for everyone. Need a jump start? Find out how to draw a doodle at Squidoo.com.

Doodle on, dudes.

Ever find yourself struggling to complete a task because it seems so daunting? We’ve all been there. Envisioning all the steps that need to be taken to get to “done” can be overwhelming. But if you reduce the friction that’s holding you back, says Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, it’s easier to reach completion.

What’s friction? Things like procrastinating, distractions, meetings, or even being intimidated by a big project. Focus on the friction and eliminate it, and you’ll find yourself moving forward.

Even better, think small. Start by getting the small things done to build momentum. For example, Barbauta explains how he launched a new minimalism blog (mnmlist.com) in just three days:

One day to buy the domain, set up Wordpress, and find a theme to start from. Another day to tweak the theme to what I wanted and write a few posts. A third day to write more posts and announce it on Twitter and here on Zen Habits. Three days, and I was at Done.

Starting a new blog might seem like a big challenge, but it’s not so bad when you break it down into bite-sized pieces.

So think “small” to get your project rolling, reduce friction points where you can, and enjoy the fruits of your labors a lot more quickly and easily than you might think.

If you productivity hounds didn’t have enough to worry about already, here’s a new factor to take into consideration: Your favorite organization tool might be harmful to your health.

The Environmental Working Group has released a list ranking more than 1,000 cell phones and smartphones by the amount of radiation emitted. According to the organization’s research, the BlackBerry Curve (8300 and 8330 models) and the BlackBerry Bold 9000 were among the smartphones emitting the highest amount of radiation.

Why is this a concern? Although there’s still debate about whether cell-phone radiation is truly harmful, the EWG says studies find significantly higher risks for brain and salivary gland tumors among people using cell phones for 10 years or longer.

Well, you’re probably not going to ditch your smartphone, but here are 5 ways to reduce your risks from cell-phone radiation.

1. Choose a device that emits less radiation. Happily for BlackBerry aficionados, another model — the Storm (9530 and 9500) — is among the lowest-radiation choices.
2. Use a headset or speaker. If you use a wireless headset, take it off your ear if you’re not on a call (some models emit continuous, low-level radiation).
3. Talk less. Your phone doesn’t emit radiation when you’re checking messages, only when you’re chatting.
4. Text more. Texting uses less power (and thus, less radiation) than voice calling and also keeps the phone away from your head.
5. Call only when you’ve got strong signal bars. Using your phone in a weak-signal area requires more radiation to get the signal to the tower.