Time spent increasing motivation results in greater workplace productivity, reduced stress, and engaged employees.

Many organization, unfortunately, don’t understand the importance of motivating  employees.

Lack of motivation among employees reduces workplace productivity. Corporate profitability and revenue growth can often overshadow the importance of employee engagement. A workplace filled with unengaged employees more than likely will have a negative effect on corporate performance. Do you know the causes of low productivity among your staff?

Motivation is the greatest key to increasing workplace productivity.

• Learn how your employees tick and understanding their motivation factors
• Establish a process to personally recognize individuals for good performance
• Publicly recognize them for their hard work
• Not everyone is motivated by the same things; creating a variation of incentives is key
•  Job satisfaction is crucial and using an employee assessment can help the employee as well as the company in establishing the best job/employee match
• Avoiding micromanagement will instill trust, gives freedom and helps employee growth
• Engaging employees in the decision process will increase buy-in as well as increased ownership
• Personal development, training and increasing knowledge benefits both individuals and the company

Contact us TODAY for more information:

Cathy Sexton, St. Louis
Phone: 314-267-3969
www.TheProductivityExperts.com
http://cathysexton.com

Cathy is available for staff training, lunch and learns,conference speaker, program speaker and facilitates workshops on improving productivity, time management training, organization skills improvement, workforce development, process improvement, email management, goal setting, staff and individual coaching.

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• Boosting staff morale – how to promote positivity in the workplace

I Dream of an Organized Life, but….

Cathy Sexton – Implementation and Productivity Coach

January is “Get Organized Month” and all of us can use a little organizing in our lives at times, even me.

Are you one of the millions of people that commonly say “If only I had more time” or ” If only I were more organized”, ” There is no way I can get all this done” or “I need to get organized but I don’t know where to start?” With all that we have to do and the constant pressures of doing more, more, more, we find ourselves frustrated, stressed and wishing there was a magic wand to be organized and get it all done! Well I am unaware of any magic wand created as of yet. I promise I will keep looking and let you know when I find it. Until then, let’s look at the benefits of being more organized and a few false beliefs that may be standing in your way of having more time, reducing the clutter and creating a more organized life.

If there is no incentive, it’s easy to talk ourselves out of doing things. If we take the time to understand and connect with some of the common benefits of being organized it may make it easier to add getting organized to our To-Do or task list. (I personally think it needs to be the number one top priority item on the list – RE: do it first!)

Read more…

Contact us TODAY for more information:
Cathy Sexton, St. Louis
Phone: 314-267-3969
www.TheProductivityExperts.com
http://cathysexton.com

Cathy is available for staff training, lunch and learns, as a conference or program speaker, facilitates workshops on improving productivity, time management training, organization skills improvement, workforce development, process improvement, email management, goal setting, staff and individual coaching.

“Master The 10 Foundations of Personal Productivity” from IQTell.com

At the core of human desire, there’s the need for“more”.  Getting more done, experiencing as much as we can, and looking for the next big thing constantly. It pushes us.  It fills our lives with the Dopamine induced euphoric feeling of impending success.

However, while we have plenty of drive and motivation, we often miss rather than achieve our goals, how come? Well, as it turns out, like most things in human behavior…if it’s ruled by impulsiveness and lacks structure, then it fails to reach the light of day.

If you want to check off more success than failure and increase your personal productivity, then you’ll need to lay the proper foundation and structure.  You’ll need to set certain ground rules (or behaviors if you will) that will support you on your journey.  Are you doing all ten today?

1# Sleep

Consistently under-sleeping is a fool-proof method to undermine your productivity.  I’m not talking about the occasional all-nighter.  People who don’t know how to control their sleep cycles wonder around like zombies.  When you’re walking around without sleep, it’s difficult to focus thus making your work day useless and your personal productivity nonexistent.  (For those of us trying to lose weight, you eat more because your brain craves energy which makes you even more tired.)

2# Nutrition

Carbohydrates (aka “Carbs”) control our ability to concentrate and can supply great “ups” as well as drenching “downs”.  Simple Carbs like chocolates taste great and will give you a short boost but ultimately will leave you craving for more and lead to a sure energy crash when that snickers bar is done.  For a more moderate yet sustainable supply of energy eat complex carbohydrates like whole wheat foods.  You can  Learn more here.

3# Exercise

Keeping a healthy exercise routine has many benefits.  It regulates your heart rate, improves your metabolism, and if you have ADHD, is probably the only natural method to keep you not hyper.  Exercise also releases endorphins which affect our mood.  Our productivity is exponentially increased when our mood is positive and we have a calm and focused mind.

4# People skills

Unless you are a Buddhist monk, you’ll need effective communication skills.  Communicating within our environment will help set expectations as to what you will be delivering and what you expect those around you to deliver.  Knowing how to communicate properly will allow you to delegate and defer more naturally helping you to get more done with a little help from your friends. CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE IN ITS ORIGINAL CONTEXT…

As a productivity coach, trainer, speaker, author and radio host, I am passionate about helping individuals discover their personal productivity style so they can accomplish more with less effort. I use my passion and empathetic nature to help people live healthy productive lives! I know the health risks of being a workaholic; I have lived it. My purpose in life is to provide coaching, teaching, and tools to people who are hungry to spend more time with family, enjoy their careers and live a less stressed and carefree life.

Contact us TODAY for more information:
Cathy Sexton, St. Louis
Phone: 314-267-3969
www.TheProductivityExperts.com
http://cathysexton.com

Cathy is available for staff training, lunch and learns, as a conference or program speaker, facilitates workshops on improving productivity, time management training, organization skills improvement, workforce development, process improvement, email management, goal setting, staff and individual coaching.

Prepare Your Workflow for a Snow Day

So you may live in an area that hasn’t gotten much snow yet this year, or maybe you’re already a Snow Day Pro. This article has a lot of good information for having a productive workflow from home on a Snow Day, but really applies to any inclement weather situation (many employees were displaced after their offices were damaged by Hurricane Sandy, so that came to mind as well). Regardless of the situation, it’s always best to be prepared!

Once upon a time a snow day meant a reprieve from the labor of school and a day of freedom. As an adult, a snow day can still be fun, but it also throws a wrench in your work.

Don’t let a snow day—or any other kind of inclement weather day—throw your workflow out of whack. A little bit of preparation and planning can ensure a snow day is a fun chance to work from home instead of a headache that follows you through the rest of the month. The following advice would serve you well all year long, but especially when a winter storm could keep you home bound and your productive workflow at risk.

Have a Life Line: You need a way to work outside of the office. Whether this means being able to log into your corporate intranet from home or having your work laptop with you will depend on your work. Nonetheless you need to have both the necessary lifeline and the ability to use it. It won’t do you any good to be able to work from home if you’ve never actually tried out remote computing. The day you’re snowed in with deadlines looming and a mess back at your office is not the day to find out that you don’t actually know how to remote into your workstation. You might want to take a peek at the top five remote desktop tools, how to maintain a consistent workspace across multiple computers and free ways to synchronize folders between computers. Even if you don’t make it a habit to work outside of your office—good for you, excellent work-life balance!—it pays to be prepared to do so.

Don’t Leave a Disaster: You start off Monday on the wrong foot. You leave a wreck at your desk and a bunch of unprocessed notes tossed into your inbox to deal with later. A blizzard rolls through and you’re essentially locked out of your own office for 2 days while municipal services beats back Old Man Winter to free the city. By the time you return, the unfinished business of Monday has become the enormous pain in the ass of Thursday. What kind of work it will take to leave your office in an “At Ready” state to tackle the next work day—weather interruptions or not—depends on your work and how big of a mess you kick up every day. Taking a few minutes at the end of each work day to get things in order for the next day and not leave any unaccounted for business will make the next day go smoother, even more so if the next morning in the office gets delayed on account of snow.

Know Your Work’s Inclement Weather Policy: Educational institutions like high schools and colleges tend to have extremely clear cut inclement weather policies. Many corporations unfortunately do not. Check with your human resources department to see if your company has one. Inclement weather policies generally cover information like what would trigger an automatic closure of your office and so forth. If your company doesn’t have a policy, it would be a goo idea to bring it up at your next meeting and hash out with your boss what the informal policy will be. CONTINUE READING…

Contact us TODAY for more information:
Cathy Sexton, St. Louis
Phone: 314-267-3969
www.TheProductivityExperts.com
http://cathysexton.com

Cathy is available for staff training, lunch and learns, as a conference or program speaker, facilitates workshops on improving productivity, time management training, organization skills improvement, workforce development, process improvement, email management, goal setting, staff and individual coaching.

Dos and don’ts of Christmas cooking and holiday entertaining

Are you looking for baking ideas? Is it your year to plan Christmas dinner? Too busy to think about New Year? Well, read on — we have everything you need to know to keep baking for the holidays, cooking Christmas dinner, and New Year’s Eve entertaining stress free.

Before pulling out the mixer and preheating the oven . . .

•    Don’t be overambitious when holiday baking:  An afternoon of baking two or three different cookies can be fulfilling and elicit Christmas cheer, but too many can be a grueling chore!

•    Don’t choose too many complicated recipes: Especially if you are baking with kids, choose some simple ones as well. You will avoid baking fatigue as well as keep the kids interested in your holiday traditions.

•    Do your shopping before your baking day: Having all of your ingredients ready and on hand will make you baking go smoothly.

•    Do add something new to the traditional holiday cookie platter: Contribute to passing traditions along as well as creating some new ones of your own.

Tips to make your Christmas menu go smoothly
•    Do ask for help when making Christmas dinner for a crowd: If you are having a big crew over for dinner, have friends or family bring some of the side dishes, dinner rolls, salad or dessert.

•    Don’t let guests cook in your house: To make collaborative menus go smoothly, ask that dishes be brought finished and leave your kitchen free for last minute preparations

•    Do know ahead of time what items will need time in the oven: It will help to be able to time your turkey or ham if you know what else will need to be heated in the oven. Utilize the microwave or toaster oven as well for heating up side dishes.

Keep New Year’s Eve simple
•    Don’t forget that the New Year is around the corner: New Year’s Eve planning ends up being last minute and often anti-climatic after Christmas chaos.

•    Do keep at home New Year’s simple and festive: Low-key and stress free New Years Eve at home hits the mark. 12 last minute appetizers will keep things easy for New Years entertaining or an easy fondue menu just requires assembly and very little cooking.

•    Do banish stress and enjoy your entertaining!

View this article in its original context here: http://www.canadianliving.com/food/entertaining/6_dos_and_donts_of_christmas_cooking.php

Here is a great Getting Things Done article from IQTell.com:  

 Getting Things Done

Most of us have projects we want to get things done when we are home; ranging from huge undertakings like planning our financial independence or something smaller in scale like repairing the deck.

We’re all excited about our project and fantasize abotut how we’re going to do this or that.  But when it’s “go-time”, we tend to make excuses, drop a few balls, or miss a few deadlines; all with the goal of procrastinating.

Let’s face it; getting things done at home is much harder than in a structured environment like your office.  It’s easier to work efficiently when you have a dedicated space with specific rules that allow you to do the same things day-in and day-out without too many interruptions.

The real challenge begins when you go out of that structured cocoon. Unless you’re a kid, at home nobody will tell you that you’re late on your deadlines; there’s no team to support your efforts and there’s no boss over your head to help organize your daily tasks and objectives. Of course, those that are married may argue otherwise, but we can all agree it’s a bit different than work.

Bring your office productivity to personal projects by remembering that:

1# Projects are made out of the sum of their actions 

Most at-home projects get stuck or stay on “paper” because they’re being approached as a large unit when they’re actually made of manageable bite sized actions.

For some reason, at work, you never tackle a project all at once for all angles.  Most likely, first, you fully understand the objectives & timelines.  Then you start preparing a list of necessary actions, order of implementation, etc.  Well, the same must be applied at home!  Sit down and break your project into manageable actions and try to understand which action comes first.

2# You need a Personal Accountability System

When you’re in the office, you have colleagues that email you with pending tasks, a boss that reviews your actions (sometimes even before you hand them over) and a little voice in your head nagging you constantly to finish what you’re doing and head out home as soon as possible.

Alas, these productivity drivers are not available at home.  You need to find out what or who (more likely) can help you to be accountable at home.

Often engaging friends and family does the trick.  Just speaking about your project and its objectives creates a commitment that you don’t want to break.  For me, it’s sharing the project with my family, explaining that I need some time to do certain things alone, and figuring out with them how they can help me by:

• Reducing the endless stream of interruptions;
• Asking them for help on tasks I won’t be able to attend to during this project; and
• Strengthening my resolve.  After all, how can I stop in the middle after speaking about the project and taking help from them along the way?

Contact Cathy – Productivity Experts for help getting things done  cathy@theproductivityexperts.com 

Tips for a Happy Thanksgiving

Whether you love waking up at 4 a.m. on Black Friday or totally loathe the combination of those two words, the fact remains…it’s only one week away! Check out this article from MyUntangledLife.com and add some organization to your shopping spree! (View it in it’s original context: http://myuntangledlife.com/2-great-lists-help-organize-holiday-shopping/)

With the holiday season just around the corner, I have started planning all my shopping and gift giving. I am a HUGE Black Friday shopper, it is when I will get about 99% of all my holiday shopping done. Since it is usually an early morning of craziness, I try to be as organized and prepared as possible.

I started following Black Friday Ads on Facebook. They post the Black Friday flyers and specials weeks before. It helps to see what some of the deals will be and be able to compare with other stores.

Before I head out shopping on Black Friday, I like to have a plan in place because anyone who has shopped on this day knows how crazy it can be. I start compiling my list the first week in November with a list of people who I am purchasing/making gifts for. It’s not fancy, just a simple and quick list of names.

I then break each person down individually using a template I created that lists the Person, Gift, Store, Cost, Coupon, Price and Total.

CONTINUE READING…

There’s still plenty of time to get organized for the holiday season! Cathy Sexton, The Productivity Expert, will be appearing at many different events this Winter…and you should be there! For more information on events, visit our Events page or email cathy@theproductivityexperts.com

Holiday Organizing & Planning – Washington University – November 15th, 2012 – St. Louis

Time Management for Peak Performance – Lunch and Learn November 16th, 2012 – St. Charles, MO

Time Management for Peak Performance –  November 20th, 2012 St. Charles, MO

Organizing for Productivity – December 18th, 2012 St. Charles, MO

Organizing for Productivity – Lunch & Learn –  December 21st 2012 St. Charles, MO

Time management tips that will help you daily

As a small business owner, managing your time and expectations are extremely important if you want to maintain the proper focus. I struggle with this issue and can be easily distracted by a phone call or a tendency to check my emails more often than is probably needed.

Time management is one of those skills no one teaches you in school but you have to learn. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you can’t organize information well enough to take it in. And it doesn’t matter how skilled you are if procrastination keeps you from getting your work done..

I’m going to share some of my favorite time management skills in this post. I hope they will help you.

1. My personal favorite – cut the clutter. Keep a clean desk and desktop, clutter can be very distracting.
2. Use your peak productivity time well and make sure you get sufficient rest. Coffee will not assist you forever. It’s OK to take breaks throughout the day. Some of us are ‘morning people’ others are ‘night owls.’ You know what your strengths and weaknesses are better than me.
3. It’s most important to know how you structure your day and manage your time that makes the difference. Know the best days and times to target your prospective clients or targeted companies – which may be different than you first think.
4. Set daily goals for yourself and making sure you don’t work past your burn out time. This might include networking in person, making follow-up calls, writing a business proposal or putting a budget together – each day complete one specific goal – you’ll feel much better being able to check something off your ‘to do’ list.
5. It’s absolutely OK to block out some non-planned activities. Life happens and there will also be some unexpected event or emergencies to deal with. Or maybe you’re under the weather.
6. Plan for some specific time away from the computer and phone, 30 minutes a day. By that, I don’t mean a coffee break or to eat a meal. Talk a walk, run some errands, anything to take your mind off your business. Meet a friend for a cup of coffee.
7. Start your day by prioritizing what you need to get done (To-do list!). Block time out on your calendar each day to ensure you get work done.
8. When you are on a deadline and you need to finish something – Close your door (if you have one), put your phone on “send to voicemail”, close your email, and turn off the instant messenger. It is liberating! Not everything is urgent; yes, some things can wait until the next day.
9. Minimizing distractions – distractions are a big time waster. A lot of us have this constant urge to check our email every 15 minutes. There are many other common distractions and it is important to limit them.
10. Make sure social networks serve your purpose. Do you really need to be on all of them? Pick one or two that are really important and discard the rest. Be careful not to check your social sites while at work. It is a big time waster even if big brother is not watching.
11. Decide the time or times when you will check mail and stick to those times. There will always be some distracting message in your in box.Keep your emails short. That is how they are meant to be. Use the phone in preference to email where feasible.
12. Know your target company or companies whether it will be for job search or to find business partners. Starting out, that’s one of the most important things to consider. If you’re not sure what you want to do, it’ll be hard for you to communicate that to another client or company
13. Yes weekends are a time to take a break, but not entirely. Use weekends to review the previous week’s successes (and failures) which will give you the opportunity to prepare your upcoming week. The goal is to hit the ground running on Monday morning.

A great article! http://theundercoverrecruiter.com/time-management/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=time-management