How to write productive to-do lists

Writing to-do lists is a helpful way to keep yourself on track with everything you have to do that day, week, or month. From tasks at work to picking up groceries on the way home – lists provide a simple structure and help you to arrange the environment around you.

But there’s one trick – the effectiveness of a to-do list depends on how you write it.

There’s no use in writing a to-do list if you don’t actually check off any of the items you need to get done. It’s easy to overestimate what you can accomplish and to write down every little errand and thing you should do, instead of focusing on priorities.

5 business reasons to offer remote and flexible work options

Digital technologies continue to reshape the world and how we live in it. As a result, it should be no surprise that they are completely redefining how we understand work.

Specifically, the traditional 9-5, Monday-Friday job is beginning to slip away. More and more people are working remotely, and with the growth of the gig economy, we can only expect this to be a trend to continue.

As a result, to remain competitive in the labor market, more employers than ever are offering their employees the chance to work remotely.

By giving people the chance to integrate this perk into their life is about more than just recruiting and employee retention. It just makes good business sense.

Here’s why you should hire remote workers:

Time tracking integrations – what DeskTime integrates with and how to use that

Fully automatic, hassle-free time tracking is great.

But you know what’s even better?

The ability to connect your time tracking with other tools you use on a daily basis to effectively plan your workday, manage your team and projects.

For project managers, it’s important to see who is working on what, what time each employee has dedicated to specific tasks, how much time the team spends in meetings, etc.

DeskTime integrations are made to let managers see the whole picture – in one place, without manually copying and pasting the information from one software to another.

As a DeskTime user, here’s what’s available to you:

Project management integrations (Asana, Basecamp, Jira, Zapier)
Calendar integrations (Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar)

I used to spend hundreds of my working hours on Facebook, so here’s what I did

I never saw Facebook as a harm to my productivity. Until one month, after checking my time tracking data I realized that I had spent 13 hours and 21 minutes of my working hours on Facebook.

That’s more than 40 minutes every working day spent browsing the newsfeed, checking random profiles and giving thumbs up to every new status update that came up.

That was also the month I spent every second day working overtime and feeling burned-out. After my discovery, I blamed Facebook. So I did what everyone would’ve done in my place: I blocked the newsfeed.

How to prevent and fight job burnout

Most of us have experienced days of stress, demotivation, and exhaustion at work.

But how to know if these feelings are a normal part of the “ups and downs” that all of us sometimes have in our personal and professional lives?

Or are they a sign of something more serious, like job burnout?

What to do to avoid burnout and how to fight it once it’s already started?

To help you detect and tackle this worker’s malaise, we’ve consulted a psychotherapist and compiled a list of helpful strategies.

How to find your state of flow and be more productive

There are days when I spend hours writing one paragraph of a blog post, and days when I write the whole thing in half an hour.

I never knew what that was – the moment when time gets lost and everything is just flowing effortlessly out of you. Until I found a video by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a former psychologist at the University of Chicago, who calls this state of mind ”flow”.

How to Exercise when You’re Working 9-5

If there’s one thing that keeps a doctor away – besides apples, of course – it’s exercise.

In addition to improving one’s mood and shedding those extra pounds, being physically active on a regular basis helps prevent and manage a wide range of health problems, including stroke, type 2 diabetes, depression – the list goes on and on.

But I know what you’re going to say.

You’re spending long hours at work, so there’s no time to exercise. Kids happened, so there’s no time to exercise. You’re just so tired from all the side projects, duties, even the awful weather – so guess what. There’s no time to exercise!

How to keep employees motivated at work – and what’s fun got to do with it

Bosses have tough jobs.

As a boss, you feel a guilty compulsion to check your employees’ progress. You have to. It’s your job. But breathe down their necks constantly, and they’ll loathe you. Leave them be, and your next quarterly earnings report may not look very impressive.

The thing is, if you want your employees to do a good job, you have to make sure they’re self-motivated.

How to make an open-plan office more productive

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who like open-plan offices, and those who hate them.

Open-plan offices have been around since 1906 when architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Larkin Administration Building in New York. Besides other innovations like air conditioning and built-in desk furniture, this workspace was also open-plan, with few walls.

Today, almost 75% of all offices in the USA are designed with an open-desk plan. From small startups to large corporations and governmental institutions, offices without walls seem to be everywhere.

8 Reasons why your remote team needs to work out loud

Hiring remote workers is a way to take advantage of the best that the job market has to offer. Instead of being stuck to local recruitment pools, you can access experiences and knowledge from all over the world.

Unfortunately, working with a remote team comes with several downsides. From everyday communication being more difficult, to the inability to physically check in on your employees and see what they’re doing.

DeskTime blog