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There is a major migration underway that you need to be aware of, lest it overtake you without your knowledge. Your calendar is being re-shaped, but it’s not only because of new technology…it’s because of your new habits. Up until 20 years ago, your calendar was only a paper item that was either stuck to your wall, found in your diary or sitting on your desk where it collected appointments. It was designed as an object on which you recorded meetings with other people using a pen or pencil. The dates were arrayed in columns, lists or as a matrix of boxes, allowing you to represent a time demand as an occupied space on the page. (A “time demand” is a commitment created by an individual to complete a task in the future.) Fast forward through the innovations of the past 30 years. Spreadsheets, email programs with electronic calendars, Palm PDAs, Blackberrys, iPads, Google Calendar, Microsoft Exchange…and when you arrive in 2012 you find habits and technologies that were inspired b...

You may think that you don’t have time to organize your office, but if you really knew how much time that disorganization cost you, you’d reconsider. Rearranging and moving piles occasionally doesn’t count. Neither does clearing off your desk, if you swipe the mess into a bin, or a desk drawer. A relatively neat and orderly office space clears the way for higher productivity and less wasted time. Organizing your office doesn’t have to take days, it can be done a little at a time. In fact maintaining an organized office is much more effective if you treat it like an ongoing project, instead of a massive assault. So, if you’re ready to get started, the following tips will help you transform your office into an efficient workspace.   Great Tips to Organize Your Office Space Purge your office – De-clutter, empty, shred, get rid of everything that you don’t need or want. Look around. What haven’t you used in a while? Take one area at a time. If it doesn’t work, send it out for ...

Fall is a time when career regrets tug more strongly than during the laid-back summer months. New jobs appear on job boards, and many colleagues and friends move on to new careers or go off to graduate school. If you aren't moving with them, you can become vulnerable to " should have " thinking. The should haves are hard to turn off. "I should have gotten that promotion." "I should have never chosen Public Relations." "I should have left my job long ago." These should haves eat at you, particularly if you are comparing your career to the careers of others. Dwelling what you should have done is especially destructive because it carries a feeling of futility. Once that happens, anger and resentment build up, and you quit trying. This is painfully obvious to others — you won't get the best assignments, and honestly, people avoid those who have palpably bad attitudes. Instead of toiling through the negativity, you have to change your t...

“Happiness is a how, not a what. A talent, not an object.” – Herman Hesse The older we get, the more that we experience life and the more that we learn what truly makes us happy. Personally, happiness has always been an intriguing point of interest for me. I have always seen happiness as the epitome of all success that life can bring. If you’re happy, then surely you’ve got everything sorted, right? What more could you want? Happiness comes in many forms. The good thing is it can be extremely different from person to person. Why is this a good thing? You can tailor everything you do in your life to bring out the happiness in you. There are however, a number of key themes that span across all individuals for finding happiness. To bring out the best in you and help you live a super-happy life, there are 10 things that you need to learn. Learn to say I love you. For some reason, this can be a hard one for many people, particularly with immediate family members. Generally,...

Do your employees have the skills to benefit from big data? As Tom Davenport and DJ Patil note in their October Harvard Business Review article on the rise of the data scientist, the advent of the big data era means that analyzing large, messy, unstructured data is going to increasingly form part of everyone's work. Managers and business analysts will often be called upon to conduct data-driven experiments, to interpret data, and to create innovative data-based products and services. To thrive in this world, many will require additional skills. Companies grappling with big data recognize this need. In a new Avanade survey , more than 60 percent of respondents said their employees need to develop new skills to translate big data into insights and business value. Anders Reinhardt, head of Global Business Intelligence for the VELUX Group — an international manufacturer of skylights, solar panels and other roof products based in Denmark — is convinced that "the standar...

Jeff*, like me, is a writer, a speaker, and the head of a consulting company. As far as I can tell, he's professional, well respected, capable, honest, and has a popular following. Someone we both know has asked us to collaborate on a project and there's clearly a mutual benefit to our working together. It all sounds great except for one thing: I don't like Jeff. Something about him rubs me the wrong way. He seems too self-serving or egocentric or self-satisfied. I don't know what it is exactly, but I know I don't like him. I mentioned that to the person who wants us to work together. She told me, essentially, to get over it. "You don't have to like him," she said, "but you'd be smart to work with him." So how do you work with someone you don't like? I'm not simply talking about someone who frustrates you because they communicate poorly or can't run a meeting. Sure it's annoying to have your time wast...

Creating your resume , but stumped for ideas beyond your job titles, places of employment, tasks, and education? Getting employers to pick up the phone requires a much stronger brand message! If you haven’t focused on your ROI – the benefit companies get when hiring you – your search can go on indefinitely. You might believe that recruiters or HR managers will “get” this message from reading about your past jobs or span of authority – but guess what? With plenty of resumes to review, most hiring authorities won’t take the time to connect the dots in your background. Therefore, if you’ve made a significant difference at past employers, but your resume doesn’t provide this evidence, you’ll lose your shot at winning an interview (while employers hire your competition instead). Consider adding these quantifiable measures of your performance to your resume: 1. Comparisons to Others Do you wear many hats at your current job? Employees who can perform more tha...

It's more important than ever to know how to balance a marriage and a career. Between 1996 and 2006, the percentage of two-income married couples rose 31% in the US. Now, 47.5% of all American married couples are dual-career couples. In Canada, the percentage of husband-wife families that were dual earners is roughly 70% , and approximately two thirds of two-adult families have two incomes in the UK. Many marriages fail for work-related reasons. And prominent articles like Anne-Marie Slaughter's recent contribution in The Atlantic , "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," and rejoinders like Froma Harrop's "News Flash: No One Can Have It All" have spurred critical conversations about what it means to practice work/life balance and how married people (or those in other long-term, committed relationships) can make their personal and professional lives work. We're part of that dual-career cohort, and we've had many discussions about ...

LinkedIn is, far and away, the most advantageous social networking tool available to job seekers and business professionals today. Far and away. So why is it that so many of us stink at LinkedIn etiquette? That’s right, folks. We stink at it. We send out lazy, generic connection requests. We ask people we barely know for recommendations. We ambush people, asking for favors before we’ve ever spent even two seconds of time building rapport. We shove our Tweets through our LinkedIn feeds, even though half the people on LinkedIn could care less about Twitter. You want to use LinkedIn to your massive networking advantage? Then you need to start working strategically and mindfully. And before you even think about logging on next time—you need to digest a few basic rules of etiquette. 1. Generic Requests are for Suckers I’m going to assume that you use care in selecting who you’re going to invite into your LinkedIn network (you should). Why then, do you send them this note: “Deb...

Have you ever felt like you’re constantly chasing your tail at work? Too many scheduled meetings and then there’s the emails flying into your inbox so fast you barely have time to look at them? And yet, at the end of the day you haven’t got much done. Nothing to show for the hours of ‘hard work’ you’ve put in. There’s nothing worse than having an unproductive day at the office. And yet in my opinion it’s pretty easy to waste a lot of time in an office environment. There are ‘unsaid’ rules that we abide by: Meetings are important. Email is king. We must ‘look busy’ even if we’re not. We must ‘look stressed’ — otherwise we can’t possibly be busy. The best thing you can do is throw all of these outdated rules out the window and replace them with one rule: Focus on output Not how many minutes or hours you ‘put in’, but the ‘results’ you ‘get out’ of your day. The thing is, a lot of people don’t really care about results – they just care about ‘feel...

There is no shortage of advice out there on how to make a good impression — an impression good enough to land you a new job, score a promotion, or bring in that lucrative sales lead. Practice your pitch. Speak confidently, but not too quickly. Make eye contact. And for the love of Pete, don't be modest — highlight your accomplishments . After all, a person's track record of success (or a company's, for that matter) is the single most important factor in determining whether or not they get hired. Or is it? As it happens, it isn't. Because when we are deciding who to hire, promote, or do business with, it turns out that we don't like the Big Thing nearly as much as we like the Next Big Thing. We have a bias — one that operates below our conscious awareness — leading us to prefer the potential for greatness over someone who has already achieved it. A set of ingenious studies conducted by Stanford's Zakary Tormala and Jayson Jia, and Harvard Business Sc...

Every day online, a pop-up or email from a major brand or frequently visited site implores me to answer a few questions about myself and them. I (almost) always decline. Not because I care about my privacy but because I don't care to waste my time. Whenever I've responded, invariably and inevitably, I'm confronted by a boringly designed survey with at least ten to twelve questions that, frankly, are of much greater interest and benefit to them than to me. They want too much for too little. I haven't got the time. Sorry. (Just kidding; not sorry...). I'm hardly atypical. You won't be surprised to learn that the response rates — and the statistical representativeness of actual responders — tends to be abysmal. People who value their time don't care to waste it on multipart questionnaires. But there's a simple yet powerful technique for dramatically improving response. I've seen it work magic.  Ask less. One Fortune...