time management | List Producer

How To Be A Team Player

April 13, 2014/in Benefits of List Making, Increase Productivity, Reduce Stress, Relationships, Tool for Success, Uncategorized/by Paula Rizzo

Business Meeting (Photo credit: thetaxhaven)

Working on projects with co-workers isn’t always a walk in the park. There’s always the slacker, or the Negative Nancy, or maybe you just can’t seem to find your place within the group.

1. Break the Ice: Working with new people for the first time can be a little awkward. Whether it’s your first day at a new job, or you’ve never worked with certain employees before, it’s always good to get to know one another. Before you dive into work, grab coffee or dinner with your team. This will reduce tensions, and reduce the small talk when it really is time to get down to business. Here’s a list to get the conversation flowing

2. Remember Your Strengths: Everyone within the group should bring something to the table. Just because you may not be the most outspoken doesn’t mean you don’t belong. Don’t forget why it is that you are a part of the team, and let your personal strengths shine through.

3. Be Reliable: Don’t make promises that you can’t keep! This will make others loose faith in your abilities and your ideas won’t carry as much merit. Also make sure you are always on time – time management is key.

4. Schedule Group Meetings: Things go so much smoother if meetings are planned out. Make a checklist of key points to hit, what everyone should accomplish, and what the next goal for the group is. Meetings can easily fall short if they aren’t organized. The same goes for conference calls – here’s how to make them more productive!

5. Confront The Slacker: The best way to deal with a difficult person in the group is to confront the issue head on. Be honest about the problem, but don’t be insulting or negative. That will just cause tension and awkwardness. Most of the time the person doesn’t even realize they are creating a problem in the first place and are happy to readjust the situation.

6. Stay Positive: No matter the situation is it always essential to keep your head up and stay positive! One bad day at work doesn’t mean that the project is turning into a disaster. Things happen, good and bad, and the group just needs to stay on the same page through it all.

How do you play nice on a team at work?

Say Goodbye to Distractions and Stay on Task!

February 13, 2014/in Apps, Fab Find, Increase Productivity, Learning With a List, Saving Time, Technology, Tool for Success, Uncategorized/by Paula Rizzo

(Photo credit: Out.of.Focus)

Apps, texts, cute puppy photos, prank YouTube videos, Facebook feeds, and delicious foods on Pinterest are just some of the distractions that I am faced with on the daily. I mean how can you focus at work when your friend just sent you the funniest Buzzfeed link?!

It’s hard to “turn off” from all this distracting technology to accomplish a task – so, for today’s “Fab Find” I found some awesome apps to help block out the “noise” of everyday life, and get focused!

Computer Apps

1. SelfControl
Some days it’s just too hard to be good and not check your favorite Twitter feed. This app will deny you access to your social media sites for the amount of time you choose. You are still able to access the Internet — just no more “liking” cute dog photos, at least for a little while.

Organize Anything With SpringPad

January 30, 2014/in Apps, Benefits of List Making, Boost Memory, Increase Productivity, Learning With a List, List Making, Reduce Stress, Technology, Tool for Success, Wine/by Paula Rizzo

A friend of mine is moving for a new job and needed to get a lot organized in a short period of time. She tried a few apps that I’ve suggested on the site, but even my hero app Evernote couldn’t keep up with everything she needed to do. She needed an app that would allow her to make notebooks that could include tasks, people, events, lists, location information, and important links. While I can think of the best apps to handle each of those things individually, I couldn’t think of any that handled them all together. Until we found SpringPad.

SpringPad is a multi-faceted personal organization tool that is designed to help you plan or organize anything. Create custom notebooks for yourself, or share them with others to collaborate. Then, start filling those notebooks up with “springs.”

A spring could be anything, like:

Movies – When I spring a movie title Springpad creates a small icon with the poster of the movie. The app notifies me when the film comes out in theaters (and will help me find showtimes), when it comes out on DVD, and even when it is available on Netflix.

Links – For links, I usually use the “Spring It” feature, a button that lives in the bookmarks bar and allows me to “spring” any website to my SpringPad account. It’s a great way to save articles and videos to watch later. Read more

5 Ways To Think About Time

January 26, 2014/in Happiness, Reduce Stress, Tool for Success/by Paula Rizzo

It was my goal when I started this blog that I would be able to help others become more organized and productive. I hope that if you’re using the tips and tricks on this blog, you’ve started saving a lot of time!

It can be so easy to use that extra time to get a jump start on the next day, start a new project, or shorten your to-do list, but I’ve realized recently that that “extra” time isn’t really extra at all. I’m going through some pretty exciting changes (we just closed on an apartment – yay!) and as I prepare to leave some old things behind to make way for the new, I’ve noticed a few important things about time:

1. Time is ephemeral – once it’s gone, it’s gone for good and you can’t save a single second for later use. When you decide to put your goals, your dreams, or the things that make you happy on hold for later, unfortunately time won’t save up until you’re ready. Read more

6 Productivity Shortcuts To Save You Time

January 19, 2014/in Benefits of List Making, Increase Productivity, List Making, People, Reduce Stress, Tool for Success/by Paula Rizzo

Recently, a friend told me she heard a statistic that claimed that the average American living in suburbia can spend up to 3 years of their life waiting at traffic lights. I live in NYC so this time-waster doesn’t apply to me directly, but it really got me thinking about how I might be wasting time even in my very productive life. I’ve written before on the basics – laying out your clothes the night before, having a plan for the morning, etc – but I believe that just like goals are achieved by focusing on the small steps, maximum productivity is achieved through shortcuts.

Here are a few of my favorites:

1. Using keyboard shortcuts – The tech experts at brainwave.com estimate that you save 2 seconds per minute when you use keyboard shortcuts (vs. reaching for the mouse). If that doesn’t seem like a lot of time – that 2 seconds per minute adds up to 8 workdays per year – that’s an extra vacation!

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