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Can Gaming at Work Increase Productivity?

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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.

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When Is It Time to Move to a Co-Working Space

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Google, Mattel, Apple, Disney and Harley-Davidson all have something in common: they started in someone’s garage.

Today, technology disguises the fact that your startup is operating out of your house, which buys you time before you need to start thinking about office space. You can hire a virtual receptionist, employ a remote workforce and implement enterprise-powered tools to run your business like an established company.

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This is an amazing time for startups to grow without worrying about burning through cash for rent and equipment. But for many, there comes a point when the work-from-home lifestyle begins to stunt progress. There is no formula based on headcount or revenue to determine when you should consider a change, but there are a few telltale signs.

Here are three indications that it’s time to consider moving your team into a co-working space.

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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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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 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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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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Why Your Productivity Software Has # Hashtags and @ Mentions

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Hashtags and @ mentions have created a renaissance in workplace communication.

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They may have started out as fun tools to help us engage with others on social media, but they’ve changed how we collaborate across channels and even between teams. These tools empower employees to keep their communication transparent, and to collaborate better and smarter.

@ Readers: Here’s a brief history of the # hashtag and @ mention, and how they’ve become an integral part of how we collaborate.

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