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When Notifications in the Workplace Can Increase Productivity

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A few years ago you might have been scolded by your boss for goofing off at work. Nowadays smartphone usage seems to have become an accepted practice in the always-connected workplace. Whether it’s through two-factor authentication verification codes or JIRA SMS notifications, texts and push notifications have become a standard part of your workflow.

Even with the broadening acceptance of messaging and smartphone usage at work, the impact of this shift on one’s productivity is still unclear. Constant pings may offer essential info, or they can overwhelm you and reduce your efficiency. These outcomes surely differ by industry and personal preference, but it is up to you to figure out if this new notification paradigm is truly helping you get more done.

In this article we’ll examine how a notification-heavy workflow can impact and increase productivity, as well as learn about some of the most innovative implementations of text-improved workflows from platforms such as JIRA and RingCaptcha.

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

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

Humor in the workplace benefits:

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.

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3 Stages of Successful Team Bonding

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3 stages of team bondingYour team won’t stay together just because they work together. If you don’t give your team a chance to bond, you’ll spend more time handling workplace drama and politics instead of getting work done. You can use team bonding activities to encourage cooperation outside of the office and strengthen workplace bonds.

Team building helps everyone get to know and trust their fellow coworkers, but you don’t build trust overnight. Your team goes through gradual stages as they grow from a collection of strangers to efficient collaborators. Psychologist Bruce Tuckman’s team building model describes three stages — forming, norming, and performing—to show how teams can become more united over time.

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The Five Questions That Might Bug You the Most as a Manager

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Tom Peters on Management for I Done This“I need to give my notice. I’ve found another job I’ll be starting soon.”

Stunned, my coworker sat not sure what to say. Julia was one of his best team members, and he thought she was valued and appreciated. Yet, here she was moving on to another role somewhere else.

What happened? Unfortunately, what was satisfying for someone a year or two ago, may not be so today. Fresh, exciting challenges from their early days on the job can grow to become stale, and boring once mastered.

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Does Working in Pajamas Affect Productivity?

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Work remotely and people might ask you if you report for duty in your pajamas every day.

People who don’t work remotely think that those of us who do sleep in and then enjoy a few hours of gleeful twirling in an office chair while wearing boxer shorts.

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Not Mutually Exclusive: Small, Secure and Productive

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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.

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The Science of Stress Management: Your Brain on Cortisol

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Reticular Activating System Productivity CortisolYou’re swamped with a huge project when your boss suddenly asks you to complete another urgent assignment due tomorrow. Your heart’s beating a mile a minute and you’re wondering how you’re going to get this all done. But somehow you’re going to try to make it work.

Too much stress will overwhelm you, but too little stress leaves you bored and unmotivated. The right amount of stress motivates you to succeed instead of making you crack under pressure.

Your ability to thrive or choke under pressure is ultimately based on the Yerkes-Dodson Law: Moderate stress up to a certain point can actually improve your performance. But beyond that point, your performance suffers.

Stress management is actually built into your brain’s chemistry. Here’s the science behind your body’s stress levels so you can maximize your productivity.

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The Hidden Form of Procrastination That Is Killing Your Productivity

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You’re being interrupted every three minutes to handle something urgent. You have a report that’s due at the end of the day. But your coworker just called you into a meeting that will “just be a minute.” When you get back, you just have to send a quick email. After you start on that email, another coworker asks you to jump on a client call.

You don’t think you’re procrastinating because you’re busy every moment. But just because you’re super busy doesn’t mean you’re being productive. You’re actually guilty of a subtle form of procrastination known as priority dilution. This means you are distracted from focusing on your most important work. But it’s not your fault that you’re getting consumed with all these small disruptions. Your brain is actually hardwired to handle them. Here’s the science behind managing the small disruptions so you can be more productive.

Use I Done This to become more productive when you know how to manage distractions, which are the hidden form of procrastination that kills productivity.

Take a closer look at where procrastination originates in your brain, and you’re on your way to vanquishing the hidden form of procrastination that’s killing your productivity.

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The 15 Best Productivity Podcasts of 2016

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The average commute time in the United States is 25.4 minutes. Every hour of the day is precious when it comes to getting things done, which is why having to sit through a commute can be insufferable.

Rather than tuning out to the same playlist you hear every day, tune into a podcast — specifically about productivity. This list of productivity podcasts will inspire you and give you the tools to start forming better daily habits, so you get more done.

Make the most out of your commute by checking out some of the best productivity podcasts of 2016.Tim Ferris was one of the 15 best productivity podcasts of 2016

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How to Make Your Company Email Totally Transparent

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This is a guest post by Mathilde Collin from Front. Be sure to check out the Front Blog for more tips on managing team emails.

Transparency helps you move fast. Information isn’t siloed — it’s all readily available for the taking. You don’t need to ask questions, forward information about a customer, or attend a meeting to know what’s going on. Instead, anyone can get access to the information they need without having to jump through hoops to get it.

However, extending this transparency to email is tricky. It was initially designed for 1:1 conversation but has been adapted to team use over time. You can loop in the people you need on a single email with BCC or CC, but it’s hard to make email efficiently accessible to an entire team. At the same time, within every inbox is a goldmine of customer interactions, company history, and internal discussions — so not sharing that is depriving your team of valuable information.

Thanks to new tools, automation, and a bit of organization, you can turn your outdated email inbox into a fully transparent platform that will serve as a resource for your entire team. Here’s how to do that in three steps.

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