Kathryn Vandervalk - Author Articles

Quiz: What Productivity Personality Are You? How to Maximize Your Productivity in 2019

November 15, 2019 by Kathryn Vandervalk 1 Comment

A habit is something you’ve learned, through repetition, to do without thinking. You know your personal habits—whether you do the dishes right away, or if you throw your clothes on the floor—but you aren’t always the same person at home and at work.

productivity quiz

We put together this Productivity Quiz to help you identify what your work habits are. At the end of the quiz, you’ll see your Productivity Personality, which gives you personalized tips on how to be more productive by capitalizing on your good habits and eliminating your bad ones. Simply tally up the number of As, Bs, Cs, and Ds you answer and we’ll decipher your productivity paragon.

Whether you schedule every minute or go with the flow, you’ll leave with actionable feedback on how to make the most of your workday.

5 Strategies to Improve Your Sales Team’s Productivity

April 25, 2019 by Kathryn Vandervalk Leave a Comment

This post was originally published at the Zendesk Sell blog. It has been republished here with permission.

While many sales teams might think they’re productive, did you know that the average sales rep actually spends only 22% of their time actively selling?

To determine if your own sales team is productive, measure your productivity according to the definitions below:

How to Set Team Finance Goals that Don’t Suck

June 26, 2018 by Kathryn Vandervalk Leave a Comment

Goals are the glue that holds a company together. Setting the right business goals help all the people in a company—from customer support to sales—align around making progress and moving forward to a shared vision.

They don’t just help a company’s bottom line either. Research shows that goals help increase the drive and persistence of the people who are trying to achieve them.

Goals give your company the capacity to incentivize and motivate your team toward specific action.

For a finance department, though, setting team goals can be extremely tricky. Other teams in a company often have clear goals to drive the business forward: “Decrease churn by 20%” for your product team, or “Increase user sign-ups by 4x” for marketing. Within a finance department, it isn’t always clear how specific goals connect to the growth of the business—they’re often more focused around managing cash flow or containing costs.

For goals to succeed, you have to be able to connect them to the broader trajectory of what your company’s trying to do. You have to connect the dots between the bigger strategic goal of your company, the operational goals of your team, and the individual goals of your people.

Can Gaming at Work Increase Productivity?

July 11, 2017 by Kathryn Vandervalk 1 Comment

I Done This helps you and your team increase productivity

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Games tap into our inner desire to challenge ourselves. We love the thrill of scoring points and getting to the next level.

But games don’t always have to be a distraction from our everyday lives—they can actually make us more productive when used properly. Using a gamification strategy, you can help your employees get more done at work.

We’ve used psychologist Victor Vroom’s Expectancy Theory to explain how games can help your employees perform better. The theory includes three variables—expectancy, instrumentality, and valence—that describe how motivated employees are to do their job.

We broke down these three variables to help you design a gamification strategy that helps motivate your employees—instead of distracting them.

Humor in the Workplace: What’s Funny or Not?

June 12, 2017 by Kathryn Vandervalk Leave a Comment

Sending great gifs to your co-workers gives you more than just a laugh.

Humor in the workplace benefits:

Productivity. Humor replenishes your employees and makes them more productive.
Group Cohesion. Humor can increase a sense of belonging.
Stress Management. Humor is known for its “cathartic” emotional benefits that release stress.

Creating an office culture of humor can help you cultivate all these benefits. Keep in mind that humor can also go sideways fairly quickly, too. The wrong type of funny can lead to serious HR problems—there’s a thin line between goofy and unprofessional or between delightful and inappropriate.

Humor in the Workplace

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You want your company to be a fun place to work, but you also want to make sure that it’s fun for everyone.

Here’s our guide on how to improve office humor that makes everyone feel included and unified.

Not Mutually Exclusive: Small, Secure and Productive

April 17, 2017 by Kathryn Vandervalk Leave a Comment

Don't let security worries interfere with your productivity use RingCaptcha

Time is in short supply at every startup. Everyone wears at least four different hats, and you need every second you can get to make sure things get done.

You have to be as productive as possible—which is why it’s tempting for your business to neglect security concerns, or make them an afterthought. But at the same time, all your hard work can go away in an instant if you let yourself be vulnerable to a cyber threat.

This is the phenomenon known as the security paradox: you need time to create work worth protecting, but you also need time to protect that work. But in the growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) economy, security and productivity don’t have to be a tradeoff. You don’t need to hire an IT team or develop complicated code to keep your data safe—external services can do it for you.

I Done This: Short Post, Best Post?

October 18, 2016 by Kathryn Vandervalk Leave a Comment

The more you write on your “Done List,” the less likely your co-workers are to read what you write. 81% of educated people don’t even read what they see—they skim.

I Done This 2.0 automatically sets the default length of a Done List post at about 12 words. We’ll never limit the amount of words you post, but the default setting encourages you to fit your post on one line, like this:

idonethis1
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