Posted on

60 Essential Keyboard Shortcuts

Of course, you may not need all 60 of these, but knowing them will make you flexible, fast, and ready to work with whatever tool you’re presented with, whether it’s a Windows PC, a Mac, an Excel spreadsheet, or a Powerpoint slideshow. Plus, there are extras in here for Gmail and Chrome to boot.

The graphic below has all of the shortcuts broken down by the application they’re useful for, and while some of them are ones you probably use every day, like Ctrl/Opt + C and Ctrl/Opt + V to copy and paste, some of them are more interesting, like F7 to start a spell check from anywhere in a Word document, Shift + F3 to switch case, and / Shift+J to mark a Gmail message as read. Check out the whole thing below, and see if you pick up anything new.

60 Essential Keyboard Shortcuts for Office Workers

Posted on

Quarter of People Admit to Checking Work Emails on Christmas Day

 

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, is calling for the UK to step away from their smartphones and put the heart back into Christmas – as the latest survey commissioned by Traidcraft, shows a quarter of the UK will check their work emails on Christmas Day.

  • Nearly a quarter (24%) of the UK admits to checking work emails on Christmas Day
  • 66% of people think that Christmas has lost its true meaning

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, said:

Show you care at Christmas“Christmas is a day of good news, a day of great joy and a day to give thanks. I would encourage all those not working on Christmas Day to focus on connecting with family and friends, to enjoy this time with loved ones. I love using social media and email because of the instant connection with the world they bring but have a ‘phone fast’ from work on this day!”

While a quarter of us will check in with our work emails, the Traidcraft survey results also show that we’re a nation of Christmas traditionalists who put human connection at the top of their Christmas list: more than three-quarters (77%) of people said that a hand-written Christmas card is the festive greeting they prefer over all others.

A similar amount (72%) said that spending time with family and friends was the one most important thing to them about Christmas. In a heart-warming gesture towards those who may be spending Christmas alone, around six in 10 people said they would call in for a cuppa to show someone lonely they care.

The Archbishop’s comments come as part of Traidcraft’s Show You Care campaign, which is calling on people across the UK to show they care and support its life-changing work by buying fair trade. When you buy from Traidcraft’s wide range of fair trade products, producers and artisans in some of the world’s poorest regions can be lifted out of poverty and supported to build sustainable livelihoods for themselves and their families.

Posted on

The 5 Types of Work that Fill Your Day

5 Types of Work

How much of your workday is spent reacting to events that happen over the hours you spend at the office?  How much is spent on planning and strategy?  Finally, ask yourself how much time is spent towards real problem solving, or getting to the root problems of the issues you spent the other few hours reacting to?

If you can sit down and successfully audit the amount of time you spend on a given day doing what kind of work, you’ll have a better idea of where you should put your efforts, and what you can expect your average day to look like.

Scott Belsky writes a great post on this at the 99U. The five types he discusses are:

  1. Reactionary work
  2. Planning work
  3. Procedural work
  4. Insecurity work
  5. Problem-solving work
Posted on

Miscommunication, empathy and email

how-to-express-empathy

This is a great post at the 99U. It starts:

When speaking face-to-face, it’s the verbal and nonverbal social cues that allow us to gauge the best way to arrange our wording in order to get our point across clearly. In email, we don’t get such real-time feedback. Once our message is in the hand of the recipient, we’ve lost all control.

This, of course, often leads to miscommunications, guessed intentions, and a total unawareness of whether an email was typed in red-faced anger or while sipping a martini by a pool. What really leads to those miscommunications is a lack of empathy….

“The most important thing is understanding each other’s language,” founder Drew D’Agostino said. “It’s not me completely adapting the way I communicate with you, but being aware and considerate of how you communicate best. Everybody’s different, and if we can just learn to recognize the communication styles of each other we can create much clearer interactions and productive communications.”

So how do we write emails that enable empathy—especially with people we might have never met in person before? And how can we be more empathetic when reading the emails of others? We asked D’Agostino to share Crystal’s best tips on how to bring more empathy to emails; both in the ones we receive and in the ones we send.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted on

Books I have read: How to save an hour every day

How to save an hour every day

I recently borrowed How to save an hour every day by Michael Heppell from my local library.

In a nutshell his book presents a variety of different ideas to help you be more effective and save time, with the aim that eventually you can save an hour each day, every day.  Heppell is so convinced that he boasts on the back of the book:

“I’m so certain this book will help you save an hour every day, I guarantee it.  If you’ve read the book, put the ideas into action and yet somehow haven’t saved that vital hour, I’ll personally give you your money back.”

The book has a range of smaller ideas that might buy you 5-15 minutes each day, up to bigger ideas or models which affect more than just one task. It must be said however, that as I flicked through the different ideas, none of them were especially original or revolutionary, but they do work, and that’s the important thing.

If you’re struggling with time management or procrastinating then this is a good book to flick through to change up the way you organise your life.

Posted on

“For 2014, Tweet Less, Read More”

Great article here in the NY Times.  His conclusion:

For more than two decades, there’s been a celebration of slow food. Over the last few years, we’ve proved receptive to slow TV. What we really need is slow debate. It would trade the sugary highs and lows of rapid-fire outrage for a more balanced diet. We’d be healthier. Probably happier, too.

Read the rest here.

Posted on

The Creative Freedom of Getting Older

I loved this article on the creative freedom of getting older – as someone who’s recently turned 30 it seemed quite a big step so it is refreshing to hear NYU professor and author Oliver Sacks writes about what it’s like to turn 80, and how old age has empowered him. A must-read for anyone who feels “past their prime:”

One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.

I am looking forward to being 80.

Read the rest of his essay here.

Posted on

Managing People

I love the advice Duncan Bannatyne gives in his book, ‘Wake Up and Change your Life’. The book is about how to start a business, but lots of the guidance in the book is relevant to leading schools. The chapter on ‘How to manage people’ is a prime example of this. It explains really clearly how to delegate effectively:

“If you’re part of a management team, you want to make sure that everyone’s roles are well defined and that you each know what you are responsible for, so that you don’t step on each other’s toes. These are my guidelines for effective people management:

  • Agree what each of you is responsible for.
  • set an achievable target.
  • Set a deadline for achieving those targets.
  • Meet at a regular time and place to update each other on your progress. 

Aside from that, leave each person to get on with his or her own job… When you’re all hyped about your venture, there’s a natural tendency to want to get involved in everything, and that leads to a natural tendency to want to get involved in everything, and that leads to meddling, a duplication of tasks, time-wasting and conflict. The people who work for you need to know what is expected of them, how their work will be monitored, what they have the authority to do without referring to you and the timeframes they are expected to work to. No one appreciates a boss who micro-manages their every move, and once the boundaries have been set, you should stick to them.”

Chris Gorman later adds in the same book:

“Sir Tom Farmer, the founder of Kwik Fit told us something that I’ve never forgotten: it’s all about people. You have to remember that your staff have lives outside work, and sometimes they might have had a bad day, but the more you understand your people, the more you get out of them.”

It’s vital to have a clear management structure with clearly defined roles, responsibilities and expectations.  Job descriptions for each person, including volunteers, should be clear, possibly tailored to the person who is most right for the job.  It is vital that you play to the strengths of your team.  It’s important to value the person as a whole so that expectations can be realistic yet forward-driven.

Posted on

Nicholas Bate on 14 routes to more business

I loved Nicholas Bate’s post on 14 Routes To More Business:

  1. Follow-up everything.
  2. Never lose touch with anybody.
  3. Treat every customer individually.
  4. Get the small stuff right from minute 1.
  5. Be a person they want to talk to.
  6. Make more calls.
  7. Send more proposals.
  8. Ask more customers for leads.
  9. Brainstorm at every team meeting: what’s working and how can we do more of it?
  10. Anticipate the market; predict the client.
  11. Make things easy for current customers
  12. Make money and invest it in (1) skill development and (2) product innovation
  13. Practise thinking differently.
  14. Never, ever, ever allow yourself to doubt that you can get a bigger slice of a shrinking pie.
Posted on

D.A. Carson on Productivity

D.A. Carson with three points on productivity:

  1. Learn to fill in the little empty periods that clutter each day.
  2. Don’t fritter. When you work, work hard; when you are not working, quit entirely.
  3. Discover how different aspects of your work can leverage other aspects of your work. For example, choosing your reading to feed into things that you’ll be preparing over the next six or nine months adds to godly efficiency.

Read the rest here.