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A Scientific Guide to Summoning Your Creative Juices

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Does this happen to you?

It’s Friday, and you’re sitting in an all-hands-on-deck staff meeting. The boss needs creative ideas for next quarter.
“Concentrate!” you’re told. “Be creative!”

You concentrate with all your might, but you’ve got nothing.

The next day, you’re outside cutting the grass. There’s the steady hum of the lawn mower and the rhythmic predictability of the mowing pattern. Your mind slows down. Wanders. Drifts off. But suddenly . . . light bulb.

Some creative idea nearly knocks you over. It’s brilliant. Where was that kind of thinking when you needed it in yesterday’s meeting?

The answer has to do with our creative juices and the science behind them. And although “creative juices” isn’t exactly a scientific term, there’s plenty of science behind what we understand to be creative juices.

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How to Master the Art of To-Do Lists by Understanding Why They Fail

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A watch and a phone on a desk. The phone shows a "To Do" list.

The to-do list is an inescapable, age-old productivity tool. It is our very human attempt to create order in our disorderly lives and an expression of our ability to impose self-control. Most of us, including to-do list haters, keep one, and the fact is, they can work when you find the to-do method that works for you.

I don’t love to-do lists but found it odd that I still continue to use them. I sometimes worry they’re just a form of self-flagellation. Is my list-making just a futile exercise in productivity-flavored self-torture? Is the to-do list just a blunt instrument to wield in the quest for personal productivity and getting stuff done?

Am I actually achieving more in a given day because of my list? We went to the data from our users to find out.

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3 Ways Productivity Increases When You Take Control of Your Health

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featured image for article "productivity increases when you take control of your health" Productivity increases when you realize that “productivity” isn’t a goal; it’s a side effect of being a healthy and happy person. That means the root of the problem isn’t laziness or lack of motivation, but the certainty that we’re human beings and we run out of energy. Our bodies shut down when they’re not treated properly—as do our minds, our motivation, and our productivity. We’re going to offer a few tips on how to prioritize your health, boost your workplace productivity—and do it all without going completely bonkers. Continue Reading

Unlock Intrinsic Motivation to Inspire Your Salespeople

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If your best tried-and-true motivational techniques don’t seem to be working on the otherwise talented members of your sales team, you might want to try appealing to their intrinsic motivations.

According to a recent survey, 95% of managers think money is the most motivating factor for employees. In fact, an adjacent survey of 12,000 employees found that emotional rewards led to greater performance.

Not every salesperson is motivated by promotions and money, and using the same old motivations may unexpectedly fail. That doesn’t mean it’s time to look for a new hire — it means you’ll have to break out a different tool from your managerial toolbox.

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Remote Work is Here to Stay

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remote work is here to stay

Remote work is increasing across the globe, in every industry that can manage it—and it isn’t just the pandemic that’s making it happen.

Sure, the pandemic forced an increase in speed and breadth of adoption, but this snowball has been rolling down the hill for years. Employees expect more flexibility; employers need to prepare for a massive change in the average worker’s schedule, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Industrial Revolution.

Whether you’re a team leader, an investor, or a business owner, you have to understand this: Remote work is here to stay. And it can be very effective, too—especially with the use of tools to help you and your workers maximize their morale and production, no matter where they’re logging on from.

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Asynchronous Communication Is The Future Of Work

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Asynchronous Communication Telephone exchange Montreal

Whether you fear its impersonal nature or thinks its the best thing since streaming television, asynchronous communication is here to stay

Remote work is rising and online education is becoming more accepted and commonplace, both due to changing attitudes and the pandemic. These factors are only going to increase the use of asynchronous communication to keep business, schools, and other organizations running smoothly when they no longer share the same space 100% of the time

But what is asynchronous communication, and is it really better than synchronous communication?

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3 Stages of Successful Team Bonding

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Your 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 Ultimate Remote Tool Stack For 2020

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remote tool stack

This is a guest post from Lisa Banks, an expert in workplace communication and writer at content marketing agency Animalz.

Choosing the right tools for your remote team is second only to hiring the right people.

Remote tools offer structure, streamline operations, and hold your company together as it grows. And you need a lot of them. You need remote tools for team communication, tools for talking to people outside your organization like customers and vendors, tools for managing the business, tools for hiring and development, and so on.

But picking the right tools for a distributed company is not easy with so many to choose from. I’ve whittled through every remote tool in the most common categories to pull together a list. All the following tools are ones my team uses or have come highly recommended by other remote teams.

If you’re setting up a distributed team this year, these are the remote work tools you need.

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How Distractions At Work Take Up More Time Than You Think

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people-feet-train-travelling copy Make an estimate on how many times are you are distracted during an average work day. Now take that number and multiply it by 25. That’s how many minutes of concentration you’re losing. It takes an average of about 25 minutes (23 minutes and 15 seconds, to be exact) to return to the original task after an interruption, according to Gloria Mark, who studies digital distraction at the University of California, Irvine. Multiple studies confirm this. Distractions don’t just eat up time during the distraction, they derail your mental progress for up to a half hour afterward (that’s assuming another distraction doesn’t show up in that half hour). In other words, that “30 seconds to check Twitter” isn’t just 30 seconds down the drain. It’s 25 minutes and 30 seconds. Continue Reading

How To Solve The 8 Causes Of Workplace Conflict

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Workplace Conflict Cover
The workplace is for work. You’re here to get things done, grow the business, improve the world and get better at whatever it is that you do.

It’s not a place for squabbling with coworkers, managers and subordinates. But that’s what seems to happen. Workplace conflict is everywhere, eating up productivity and taking precious time away from the things that really matter.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The causes of workplace conflict are recognizable. In separate articles on workplace conflict, psychologists Art Bell and Brett Hart identified eight common causes of conflict in the workplace. Think about the conflicts you’ve had in the workplace. You’d be hard-pressed to find on you can’t trace back to one of these root causes.
It’s important to see workplace conflict this way, as a symptom of a great structural problem.

That argument with the boss over coming in on Saturday isn’t really about coming in on Saturday. It’s about the misaligned expectations, structural problems, and poor communication that led you to have to come in on Saturday. In other words, the problem is bigger than the problem.

At best, it’s a symptom of a greater failure.

Thankfully, smart and innovative companies are changing the way we work — and eradicating the causes of workplace conflict at the source. Here’s a look at the eight causes and what great companies are doing about them.

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