Productivity

Posted by Guest on August 28, 2018

Every morning it’s the same story. You open your inbox and it’s flooded with tons of unread emails, about work, promotional offers, news articles, blog posts, follow ups, personal to-do’s and more. By the time you’ve dealt with them, it’s noon already and you’ve lost your entire morning. How do you fix this problem and achieve the mythical empty inbox (also called inbox zero) ? Here are 5 ways to ensure that you’re not distracted by unnecessary emails and that your inbox is regularly empty. If you touch it, you own it Do you open promotional emails from sites like Amazon, thinking you’ll just have a peek and close them? By the time you’re done, you realize you’ve spent half an hour going through all their attractive offers and even clicking on some of them, which in turn, take you to the Amazon website, where you continue browsing more products. Happens with me all the time. The simplest way to cut through unimportant and non-urgent emails is to follow the rule “If you touch it, you own it”. If you open an email, you must do something about it – reply, delete, archive or file it. If you can’t do one of these actions, then you shouldn’t be opening that email in the first place. In fact, to make it more effective, you can even apply David Allen’s 2-minute rule to getting things done – if you can reply to an email in less than 2 minutes, do it now.…

Posted by Guest on June 21, 2018

Employee engagement is the personal investment and emotional commitment that employees have towards their company.  Engaged employees love their jobs! They work harder, stay with the company longer and are more productive. Gallup Studies indicate that higher employee engagement has a definite impact on key business outcomes, including a company’s profitability. That’s why companies around the world are always taking several measures to boost levels of employee satisfaction and engagement. They organize training workshops, one-one coaching, offer more flexibility such as remote work options and so on. However, remote teams have their own set of challenges which dampen morale and engagement. Communication can be confusing, team coordination can be weak and lack of physical proximity can lead to dampened team spirit, low trust and feelings of isolation. All these issues have solutions. Here are five smart ways to keep your remote team engaged. 1.     Use Agile to Manage Your Remote Team It’s not easy for remote teams to coordinate with each other while working on complex projects. Ineffective communication, unclear directions, poor intra-team and inter-departmental coordination lead to confusion, misunderstandings and conflict – all of which are bad for employee engagement. Implementing an agile project management approach can minimize these roadblocks and boost engagement. The agile approach is centered around the principles of adaptability, mutual accountability, continuous improvement, frequent communication and empowerment of every single employee. That’s why it’s perfect for remote teams. For instance, the agile methodology makes people communicate openly and frequently to discuss roadblocks. Team members can…

Posted by Christin on June 1, 2018

Postbox is a powerful, feature-rich email client that, despite its ‘short’ time on the market, has gained much popularity. The simple, clean user interface streamlines the management of your email accounts and inbox.  The email client also connects to third-party apps, including Evernote, Slack, Todoist, Salesforce, Mailchimp, and more. ‘Why are people searching for alternatives to Postbox then’ you may think. Unfortunately, these features come at a price of $40 per license per version (Postbox 5, Postbox 6 i.e.), though there are discounts for multiple use. It can be hard to justify the cost of Postbox especially with many free alternative email clients available for any OS on the market. Perhaps you decided to try the free trial but found that the features and experience didn’t justify the cost. Or it’s possible you’re a current Postbox user but have realized you don’t utilize all the features.  Maybe you need more licenses and don’t want to shell out the additional cash. Whatever reason you may have for switching to another email client, we’ve compiled a few recommendations for alternatives to Postbox that you can try below! Top Alternatives to Postbox Mailbird Postbox and Mailbird share many similarities. Mailbird also has a clean interface designed to streamline the user experience and make managing your inbox easier. You can connect a large library of third party apps to Mailbird, from messaging apps like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp to task management platforms like Todoist, Evernote, Asana to Google Calendar and more. Also, its Unified Inbox…

Posted by Guest on May 4, 2018

Emails are the most used means of communication today. It is literally one of the greatest inventions that came with the internet. Formal requests, informal invitations, business communication, file sharing and overviews of your conversations are all possible because of email. Email offers the world many opportunities for communication asynchronously. Email as a medium of communication is today still the #1 activity done online. 32 Insane Email Facts As a compliment to online communication, email has evolved as a great channel for many people and businesses to conduct online marketing. Great email apps like Mailbird (Windows) or Airmail (Mac) work alongside many advancements in technology. The use of the internet has made communication via email even more accessible from computers, tablets, smart devices and mobile. Apps like Mailbird take the next step and unify all online communication and productivity channels that are built on top of the framework of email communication. Declutter your email with Mailbird. Give it a free try now. Get Mailbird Free Mobile access to email communication is a must today, which has also led to a rise to spam or junk mail as well as the difficulty of managing all the information that comes through our inbox.  That’s where email clients like Mailbird come for the rescue. Mailbird reduces the stress of email overload, whilst increasing inbox productivity. There are 3.7 billion email accounts worldwide, and of that 3.7 billion, 86% of professionals prefer emails for communication. This infographic below by Webeeky shares astonishing facts about email which are…

Posted by Guest on April 26, 2018

Most of the students cannot imagine their lives without their smartphones. They use them for communication and entertainment mostly – however, that’s not the only ways smartphones can be used.  These days there are plenty of college apps designed to make our lives easier – and any student can indeed improve their lives a lot by installing some of these apps. Of course, it could be hard to pick the right ones as there are so many. That’s why in this article I want to offer you a list of apps that can make students’ lives more productive. 1. Spotify. If you enjoy listening to music, you should definitely install this app. Many students know Spotify as the place where popular music and latest hits can be found – but it’s not the only reasons why it’s great. Spotify has so many playlists you can listen to while studying. They are created by other students and help you focus on your assignments well enough. Of course, you might need some time to find the right playlists for you – but it’s still much easier than trying to create one by yourself. 2. Google Drive. Google Drive is one of the best cloud services that allow you to save the data you definitely wouldn’t want to lose. Sure, there are plenty of other good apps as well (Dropbox, for example) – but Google Drive offers probably the biggest amount of disk space available: 15GB for free accounts. This means that you are…

Posted by Guest on April 25, 2018

As is so often the case, there are far more ways to get things wrong than to get them right. This is true in love, life and work. The thing is, if you’re not alert to the ways that workplace productivity is being undermined then you might well be pursuing some practices in your company that end up undermining productivity. Similarly, you might simply not be aware that some of the practices that your company has are actually bad for how productive people can be. For that reason, let’s look at 12 things that undermine productivity and some quick-fixes that can quickly turn things around. 1. Lack of meaning You can be forgiven for thinking that meaning shouldn’t matter much to people. I mean, for two centuries during the industrial revolution owners of factories cared little for how meaningful screwing in screws or attaching wires was and yet they led to the greatest productivity boost in history. But of course, now we live in different times. The big gains of automation have already been earned. Now we have to focus on bringing back on making people feel like they are a part of something. There are many ways to do so, but one of the most effective has to be to give them back control. By giving them the feeling that it’s about more than following orders and that they’re input is respected, you can change them from people who see your company as a daily interruption to their free…

Posted by Guest on April 2, 2018

Returning back to work after a relaxing vacation? For many, getting back into a regular working routine after the holidays can be a struggle. The change of pace can take a while to get used to. However, there are many great benefits of taking time off work. Taking a vacation allows you to clear your head, de-stress and renew your energy for the next months of work. The best thing you can do is use this restart as an opportunity to supercharge your productivity. Here are a few tips on how to improve productivity at work after the holidays. Organise Your Emails Despite your Out Of Office Message, after returning back to work from a (long) vacation, you are likely to have countless unopened emails waiting for you in your inbox. One of your first tasks, when you return to the office, should be organising and arranging your emails in order of importance. Focus on tackling your most urgent emails first and set aside the others for a later time. Most email clients, like Mailbird have a Snooze Feature that will let you snooze emails and have them come back at a later time of the day, week or month. This is a great feature to get through your emails fast and to gain control over your inbox while working away on the emails relevant to your current focus. Another good tip is to set an automated reply message on these emails, simply explaining why it may take longer to…

Posted by Christin on March 14, 2018

Let’s be honest, the last thing on your mind before vacation is putting up an auto-responder email. Half the time, your out of office message is probably an “Oh crap!” moment after you’ve already left the office. Even though you might be soaking up the sun on the beach or tearing up the slopes, your coworkers, customers, and other business associates are still in the office and may not know that you’re unavailable. Failing to tell people that you’re out of the office could come back to bite you, especially if they’re expecting a prompt response. Before heading out on that much needed time off, it’s imperative that you set an out of office reply to let senders know you’re gone. If you’re feeling stumped, we’ve crafted 7 out of office message samples to inspire you. Check them out below! 1. Out Of Office Message – Basic Example Template Hi there, Thank you for your email. I will be out of the office from mm/dd to mm/dd and will have limited access to email / will not have access to email. If this is urgent, please contact [NAME] at [EMAIL] or [PHONE]. I will do my best to respond promptly to your email when I return on mm/dd. Best, We don’t always have time to be clever or creative… and that’s okay! At its core, a vacation responder email simply needs to inform the sender that you are out of the office and when to expect a response. The elements…

Posted by Christin on March 11, 2018

Technology has no doubt, metamorphosed every industry in this 21st century. Especially the communication sector, almost every single thing has changed. Be that as it may, one thing has remained torpid, email addresses. As a matter of fact, many businesses are groping their ways on how to find email addresses, to heighten their work. Still, you might want to write to your friend and by mistake, you deleted his/her email address. What will you do? Try the mindless Googling? Here are some great websites to help you search for any email addresses. 1. Email Hunter This fun software will find varied email addresses. Moreover, it will detail some derivations where it recouped the data. Above all, this is a polished app. Also, it’s a Chrome extension. It has free and paid plans. The paid version starts at $49/month, $99/month all the way to $399/month.   2. HeadReach Using HeadReach, you can find the email by name, Company or website. Besides, you can set the advanced feature to search email addresses by job position. From here on, once you get your candidate; hit find the name email and social profile. The email will get added to your contacts. Finally, this tool has a log for undemanding access to all your searches.     3. Anymail Finder The fun thing about this app is that it suggests emails using email patterns. All you need to do is click on the toolbar of the email address search from your Chrome browser. From here on, you find an email address either by the name or company website. Anymail Finder will then speculate the…

Posted by Christin on March 5, 2018

If you were to look through your personal contact list right now, it’s probably safe to say that the majority of your contacts will have an email address from one of two services: Google’s Gmail (@gmail.com) or Microsoft’s Outlook.com (@outlook.com). This is unsurprising, considering Gmail has 15.8% and Outlook.com has 6.7% of the email client market share. Both of these free email services are backed by tech giants—Google and Microsoft—and have become the top contenders when choosing what service to use for your personal or small business email needs. But with the two constantly neck and neck in the email race, how do you decide which one is best for you? Google’s Gmail service is the older and most popular of the two—it has over 1 billion monthly active users as of February 2016. Because it’s been around longer, and it has a bigger audience, Gmail is generally considered the industry leader in free email services. Microsoft, on the other hand, launched the free version of Outlook.com in 2012 and has been refining the service ever since. It now has more than 400 million active users and a robust suite of features that rival the competition. On the surface, Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Outlook.com seem pretty similar. It’s only when you look at the details that you discover just how much the two differ. And it’s in these details that you’ll find the features that matter most to you to help you choose the right option for your personal or…