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When Employees Feel Ignored at Work, Everyone Suffers

This piece was originally published in 2016 and has been updated to include new advice for teams in 2023.

What exactly does ostracism at work look like?

On the exclusion spectrum, you’ll find everything from accidentally leaving someone off a calendar invite to purposefully avoiding an individual in the lunchroom. Feeling ignored at work is a silent but hurtful experience.

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The topic may seem trivial — “Are adults really so sensitive?” you might ask — but it’s one that can have a serious impact on your employees’ job satisfaction, performance, and happiness. A 2014 study questioned if a lack of attention could be more painful for victims than bullying. Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is often yes.

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Why You Should Scrap Your Analog To-Do List

negative things

Bullet Journaling is the new trend piquing the interest of stationary lovers, productivity seekers, and the wanna-be-organized. Faced with an often overwhelming selection of digital tools in their workplaces, people are turning back to the traditional to-do list: a list of tasks on a piece of paper.

to-do list

The fascination is in its simplicity. Visit the original Bullet Journal website and you’ll find instructions for how to use a system of dots, arrows, and crosses to organize to-do items.

People are now used to downloading apps for work and learning to use them, synching them with a collection of other tools. To see a tool that simply tells you to “go buy a notebook” is such a blast from the past, it’s grabbing people’s attention.

It’s like the rise of vintage clothing and traditional teaching methods. In the quest for perfect productivity, people are tempted by the idea of a simpler time. Could going back to pen and paper really make us more productive than ever?

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5 Habits to Supercharge Team Productivity

Lebron James had a historic, MVP-level performance in the 2017 NBA Finals, but in the end, his team lost the championship.

At work, we sometimes get caught up analyzing individual performances when the metric that really matters is the overall team productivity. As the traditional silos quickly disappear, our day-to-day work has become a cross-functional, team sport.

Vince Lombardi, the famous NFL football coach, summed up what makes a successful team: “Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”

Managing a group of diverse personalities and skill sets can be daunting, let alone trying to figure out how to set everyone up for combined success. Luckily, we’ve compiled several research studies with insights that your team can incorporate to help them jell and improve their productivity:

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How To Work With A Motormouth

You walk into your office on a Monday morning and are instantly overwhelmed with the amount of work you have that week.

Just as you’ve figured out how to cram all your meetings and projects into your schedule, you look up from your desk and are instantly full of dread. Your chatty coworker is headed right toward you and has chosen you as his next victim. Well, there goes the better part of the morning.

chatty coworker

Of course, having a great social relationship can boost company culture. Once in a while, some water cooler talk can be a nice break from your hard work, but some people take this way too far.

Some will come by your desk every few hours, and even remote workers might incessantly ping you on Slack. According to a survey conducted by talent mobility company Lee Hecht Harrison, talkative coworkers are the #1 disruption at work.

Even though having a chatty worker in your office is different than difficult coworkers, you must know how to deal with them.

Here are the different kinds of chatty coworkers, and how to keep them from disrupting your day.

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The 38 Best Productivity Software Tools of 2019

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Productivity apps continue to pop up right, left, and center. If you’re trying to stay up-to-date, it can quickly begin to feel like you’re wasting time looking for the perfect software rather than actually working efficiently. At I Done This, we continue to improve our done lists and integrations to eliminate the need for meetings — but we realize that there are many more ways that you and your team can get more done in less time.

To spare you hours of Internet sifting, we’ve updated our collection of the 35 best productivity software tools for the New Year.

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

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.

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Not Mutually Exclusive: Small, Secure and Productive

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 Hawthorne Effect is the Simplest Productivity Hack You Never Heard of

Instead of worrying about what’s left to do and busying yourself with more and more tasks, spend your time wisely on what’s important, with the motivation and insight gained from your done list. Download our Busy Person’s Guide to the Done List eBook now and start your done list today.

Something as simple as asking your team how their day’s going can deliver a huge lift to productivity in the workplace. Sound too good to be true? Science backs it up.

productivity hack light bulb

This is something psychologist Elton Mayo, pioneer of organizational theory, discovered by studying American factory workers in the ’30s.

The experiment was initially set up to see which factory conditions make workers most productive. The researchers began by brightening the factory light, which increased productivity. But once they dimmed the light, productivity rose again. They soon realized that it didn’t matter what the change was—productivity would rise when any change would be made to the work environment. Employees felt like the managers cared about them and their work environments, so they worked harder.

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3 Project Management Methodologies That Create Better Work Culture

People like to dismiss project management methodologies (PMM) as frivolous techniques that won’t really improve their business’s productivity. While they’re wrong on that account, they actually miss the point completely.

project management methodologies

What people don’t realize is that PMMs are more than just process-improvement tools. Project management is really about changing attitudes to create a trusting, collaborative company culture. By adopting practices that encourage communication, unity, and openness, a company can instill positive values within itself and become a great place to work.

We’ll take a look at how companies can use project management methodologies to unify teams and encourage collaborative attitudes for a better work culture.

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3 Hidden Productivity Killers You Can Beat With I Done This 2.0

productivity boos

Your startup is on the rise. You’ve added four great developers, six customers have signed on, and you’ve reached a revenue milestone of $2.4 million ARR. But just as things are getting peachy, you notice the company isn’t shipping as much code as before.

What makes productivity problems so hard to deal with is that they’re hard to detect. They’re often so entrenched in culture and old systems that they seem invisible. At $2.4 million ARR, you are now far removed from the day-to-day routine of team members, making it difficult to spot inefficiencies on the ground.

productivity boos
We built I Done This 2.0 to help teams bring lurking productivity killers to light. We want to help our customers spot the most common production killers out there. I Done This empowers you to find out what’s going wrong with productivity and address the problem at its source. Here’s how your startup can track down invisible productivity killers and solve them with I Done This 2.0.

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