Being Productive at Work | Mastering Team Productivity | Francesco D'Alessio | Skillshare
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Being Productive at Work | Mastering Team Productivity

teacher avatar Francesco D'Alessio, YouTuber & Tool Finder

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Being Productive at Work | Trailer

      1:10

    • 2.

      Why Team Productivity is Important?

      2:30

    • 3.

      Team's Knowledge Base & Tools

      4:38

    • 4.

      Worked Example: Knowledge Base

      3:12

    • 5.

      Class Project: Build a Team Knowledge Base

      1:23

    • 6.

      Capturing Open Loops at Work

      6:22

    • 7.

      Project Management: Selection Guidebook

      9:12

    • 8.

      Producing Deep Work States

      5:30

    • 9.

      Introducing Personal Productivity Tools

      5:00

    • 10.

      Pomodoro Timers At Work

      4:28

    • 11.

      Embracing Self Care & New Ways of Working

      6:07

    • 12.

      How to Best Work From Home Effectively

      6:50

    • 13.

      Congratulations & Thank You

      1:04

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About This Class

Whether at home or in the office, being productive at work can be tough. This class focuses on team productivity and looking at ways you can be more productive in and around work - without damaging your time, stress levels and results. 

This is perfect for managers, employees and freelancers - for introducing effective productivity concepts and techniques to gain better results and better manage work life balance. 

We're looking to actively build on this course. 

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Francesco D'Alessio

YouTuber & Tool Finder

Teacher

My name is Francesco.

I help people find the best productivity software, apps & tools.

We're on a mission with Tool Finder to help you find that gem of a productivity tool for work & life.

See full profile

Related Skills

Productivity Time Management
Level: All Levels

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Transcripts

1. Being Productive at Work | Trailer: Hello, everyone. And welcome to this skill share class. My name is Francesco D'Alessio, and I'm gonna be teaching you all about team productivity. We're going to be diving into a range of topics that will help you and your team to stay productive across the work day, everything from self care all the way to timers. An effective productivity techniques that might be helpful for you and your team to implement whether you're working from home or working in the office. So, as I said, my name is Francesco D'Alessio. I run Excite could keep productive, which helps people to find the most successful tools to help them get work and life done. We've helped thousands of people find the right tools, and I've worked in a range of businesses, is a freelancer as a employees and also now as a content creator. This class is going to be perfect for those managers looking to upgrade their set ups. For those employees looking to fine tune their productivity at the workplace and even for entrepreneurs and freelancers to create more freedom in their daily routine. I'm really excited. Be teaching this class on. It is going to be something very useful. Help you and your team supercharge your productivity 2. Why Team Productivity is Important?: so you're probably wondering, why is productivity important in the workplace? And, as you can imagine, there's a lot of data flying around out there about how teams work and how productive they could be on mawr. Less hours on different routines, different techniques. It's all very interesting. But what we have seen over the last couple years as a global economy is that respecting an employee's time can be very beneficial for you and your company. A combination of remote work, a combination off self care, a combination off different productivity techniques has proven to relax employees to also give them more time back in their daily routine and also provide them with more knowledge and insight than ever. Companies are actually starting to invest in this concept, and maybe this is why you and your company are watching this class because you're looking for ways to boost your workforce and approved the way that they work without damaging or ruining their daily routines and taking more time out of work. An economist called Bertrand Russell, back in the 19 thirties in a book called In Praise of Idleness, shared his thoughts about the working day. He said if society were better managed with only be able to work four hours a day to the necessities and elementary comforts of life. Whilst working four hour days sounds good, it equates to around 20 hours a week, which is about half of the global average. It's not just working hours that are being affected by productivity, but it's also our stress and anxiety levels. 55% of Americans are stressed in the workplace, and if you compare that to the global average, it's 20% higher than the global average. And although annual standard working hours are on the way down, knowledge work has increased the amount of time that we spend at work. Statistical research back in 2017 shed that 39% off. Those stressed their main source of stress was actually the huge amount of work load on their plate found. This class will be showcasing many different methods from producing Internets for you and your team to sharing useful tools and resources that already out there, we want to combine a class that will help you to grow as a company, but also embrace your employees time and make sure that you respect that 3. Team's Knowledge Base & Tools: so one off. The key elements of team productivity is being on the same page on one of the best, most recent techniques. To do that is to have a knowledge base for you and your team. Now you may have bean doing something like this on Google documents or inside of applications like Microsoft SharePoint, bringing together information, useful processes and guides that you and your company can use. But there are some more recent resources that can help you, and we'll touch on some of those tools in a moment. Going back to the concept. This is a very useful technique, and if you're not doing it, bringing together knowledge could be a great way to actually save and capture all of the useful information as part of the company. Now, when you're chatting in applications like Slack or Twist River Microsoft teams, they become siloed bits of information. If you don't have anything connected to it than information can be lost, for example, it could be one of your employees on boarding a new employees, which can be a very useful process and can also provide that person with a lot of insights . But with a team brain. It can actually help to condense that information and be evergreen content for you and your company as you move forward. So there are a range of tools that can help you do this. I'm gonna recommend a few, but you can use which Avital suits you and your company. Now one of the first ones is notion. This provides you with a nice hub for you and your teams information. What you could do is you could essentially create this like you would an Internet. You can start adding different pages with different bits of information, create different departments and sump pages within those pages. It's a very expansive universe because you can go ahead and create all the things that you and your team create across a day. This could be anything from how you upload an article to the website to how you deal with a client on all of the processes around that although notion is fairly simple, and it's a great way to build this sort of little bit of a network figure in your company, it's still definitely quite basic when it comes to the workflow side of stuff. So there were two ones, and I recommend if you're looking to connect other applications to your experience. Those two applications are called Process Street and Coda. They work in similar ways to notion you create what's called Wicky inside of these applications for its specific process. But the great thing with code and Processed street is you can kid necks up like applications like slack on under resources that you may already be using. Now, all of these applications are really beneficial for your team because you can capture these processes in line. And it means that anyone that goes into the company can be able to check in on them and see how they're doing on what's perfect. This you can keep them updated and fresh when new things arise. The great thing as well is some of these applications, like Coda and also Notion, have some project management abilities, which helps you go a little bit further when it comes to taking our team to the next level and keeping them organized. I think having a team knowledge base someplace where you and your company can go to find out bids of information, useful staff files, documents, links can all be very useful save time on valuable effort. Although there is some initial starting off the cat time capital didn't have to put in, it could be super beneficial for your team. Now we do want to recommend a few alternatives because obviously those are some good applications and you by not get along with them entirely. There is another one called almanac, which is fairly new, and this is more for playbooks, ones that you're going to create and share within your company. And this is a fairly new applications to those that I've recommended. It start and is also an application called Slight, which does something similar, but I believe they have some chat abilities for you and your team to communicate in. So building a team knowledge base is one of the most recommended things to do. It's a great way to collect learnings, build lessons for your company and improve the insights you and your team have. So it highly recommended creating a team knowledge base 4. Worked Example: Knowledge Base: so, folks, as we mentioned, we mentioned the team knowledge base in the last feature, and it might be useful to show you guys around what it working team knowledge base looks like and how it could be used across the day. Now this is an application called notion. Whilst I won't show you entirely how to use notion, we actually do have a full skill share class here that you can take advantage of. So pleased you check that out. Just type in notion, and I'm sure will come up in the top five that now, As you can imagine, this team knowledge base is shared. So as you can see up here for press share, I've actually invited Alice, who also works on team, to view and gain access to all that she needs inside of this area, which is perfect because she can see all of the information as I add it in real time. Now, very simply, notion allows the Antley since school blocks, if you press the slash command, you can add anything, whether it's taxed, whether it's very smart. Tables, databases, boards. It's very clever, and it's very similar to applications like Coda on to some extent applications like Slab and Slight, which other team knowledge based applications. Now let's take one example, and this is our get started guide. This is useful for new people, especially when Alice needs to reference learning about something. We've created these little pages for a So, for example, if Alice needs to buffer an article, then she can watch a video that I've proved created inside of here and also follow a short guide so you can start to see how useful is when information for new employees or even information for existing employees that you want to educate on Andi educate for the future can be brought together in an application like this. And you can see here it's the same with this uploading the article guide so you can upload guides there, which is a good starting point. We've also got some branding nines, some useful links and webinars, and we obviously are mainly a content platform. So we also have a area for upload in what sort of YouTube videos that were coming out recently. So for a press this, you can see that we've got a really nice calendar that has an outline of all of the videos that were planning and aiming to upload and share Joe. As you can see, it's really simple to navigate. It's very much like a wiki or an Internet like a website view on your team. You can do stuff as well, like holidays and time off. You can see here that we've booked out some holidays from last year, and these were just breaks said. We could inform each other what's coming up so that we don't interrupt each other during these periods of time. But there's so much more you can do with this application, and this is just a short introduction to it. So I do recommend that you take our skills class on it and also do explore how other applications like Coda, Andi Slight and Slab Almanac or work. So, guys, I hope you found that useful and will be adding a few more of these in the next couple of weeks. Cheers, folks, 5. Class Project: Build a Team Knowledge Base: So, folks, let's take a little bit of pause in this class toe. Take a look at the project. Now it's part of every skills class. You have a project, and we would like to focus on project on the Team Knowledge base, as this is a more common practice. Recently, teams looking to consolidate all of their information. I think this is a very good starting point of very It practice a little bit of an activity to get you rolling. So as part of the project, we'd like you to sent up a team knowledge based on one of the recommended platforms. That could be notion could be Koda. It could be slight. It could be slab and any of the other ones that we recommended almanac on DSO on in the previous video. Now our recommendation is to upload a screenshot of your home page of when you're finished off. What your team knowledge base looks like will share an example using notion that you can use any of the other different platforms that we recommended. This should hopefully give you a good starting point, even if it's something very simple. It's a great way to start building what your team knows and how to get out off applications like slack Microsoft teams where it's siloed. So hopefully you can take part in a school share class Andi project. And we're really excited to continue this class. Thank you, ever. 6. Capturing Open Loops at Work: So is many of you know that you may be an employee yourself. You could get overwhelmed and managers, your employees will get overwhelmed across the day. There's lots of different things coming into their system, from email from physical stuff that's coming in, and also from ideas that they may be having and cause that they may be taking. So making sure that you don't get as overwhelmed as you can be could be a very useful way to approach productivity. And you probably wondering like, how do I go about not getting overwhelmed during my day on? And it really is all about capturing new items that come into your system, and we're gonna show you a few techniques how to do that, using some recommended reading along the side as well. So one off the best books about capturing new items is a book called Getting Things Done by David Allen. It was written in the nineties, and it still has insisted the test of time as a way to capture items even in the digital age on what they do inside of this book. Getting things done or GT for short is they introduced some in court open loops, and it's something that is so natural to your productivity that you probably already know to sit happening throughout your day. The concept of open loops is very simple. If you get a new idea, a new thought, a new email that has an action attached to it, or a new item that has been recommended for you to do, it's important for you to capture it as it now open loop. Now we'll talk about the little bit of how to go about capturing it. But once you've got that open loop, it's important to get it down right away, both on the go and as a fixed location to doing that. Now, many people actually use a piece of paper or something like this to coordinate this bits of information. But there's lots of different ways you can do this. And if your company allow you to use something like a due to do list application, that could be very beneficial. So once you've captured a new idea or new thought, this come in, use an area called in Inbox and let's take two examples. The piece of paper can be a great one. You could have one piece of paper throughout your day dedicated to an M box for capturing those ideas, capturing those actions that you need to do but things that you don't necessarily want to process right now or do right now on the goal is to put them all there so that you have an open loop ready her process for later duty has a bit more of a advanced way of doing this. But we'll take you through how to go about bringing that into your system so you could use that piece of paper is an inbox, or you could use your own to do list application. A recommended one is to do ist and you can use the M box area to capture a new item. And you could, for example, say secure new sponsorship deal as a task, and you can add that to your inbox, ready to process for later. So once you've captured that ideal open loop is David Allen calls them, you can then go about processing it. For example, if you've captured those of items across your day, you may not want to process them until the end of the day. That's called patching. If you want to do something like that, that's a great technique, because you can just get all of your thoughts and ideas out on this piece of paper and then be able to organize them and where they go, where they're gonna be, do what you're going to do with them for later. But having an inbox could be very beneficial. Way to save your time and effort across a day. So a little bit of a working example. I used an inbox system when I was at my previous job on what I used to do is anything that came on my desk. I'd put in a little sort of cubbyhole, an in tray that was on my desk, and that would be all stacked. They're ready to process for later. If I was getting any ideas or recommendations that I didn't want to affect my current attention on the piece of work, capture it very quickly inside of my inbox inside it to do EST, and then I would go to that near the end of the day and work out where all of those items should go. Now if something came across your inbox, that you probably do in half a now or something like this. This is when you can process that item straight away. And that's where the features like that today area and to do it could help you to create a really simple to do list. I think like online to do lists are one of the most underrated team productive details. If everything your team had won on baby, you didn't collaborate on them. But you just used it as your personal to do list. It could be a great way to keep yourself calm and collected, and the same goes for physical notebooks. If you were to use a physical notebook to coordinate all of the information that's coming into your system, trying to capture all those tasks, it will be hugely beneficial to your brain and to reduce the way that you get overwhelmed. There's a great quote from getting things done, what we choose to focus on plays in defining the quality of our life, and I really believe that so true. And as you can imagine, we're gonna be focusing on some of the different ways that you can stay and put your attention on one task as you go across your day, Please do check out more about the open Loops concept. I'd recommend reading Getting Things Done by David Allen. It's such a smashing book and will be referencing some other books throughout. This whole concept of open loops could be a great way to coordinate. All of your information is coming in. Another recommended tip is well, is to do some sort of mind dump where if you've got loads of open loose, all stacked up in your head, maybe dedicate 15 minutes in the morning or 50 minutes in the afternoon to get them all on paper. Whether you just put the title of them or a little bit of an idea of what that concept is, just getting them out of your head and not stored in your head could be a very beneficial way to reduce overwhelmed. So, folks, I hope you found that useful. Please do take and embrace the open Lupus concept 7. Project Management: Selection Guidebook : so you and your team may have explored the concept of having a project. Management software and project management software can be a very good way to cape you and your team aligned on your work and what's actually getting done. Now they really do. I think they are in assisting, or they are complementary to the team knowledge base that we introduced at the start off this class. And as you can imagine, both working and having a team knowledge base on a way to see what and how you're working on projects and communicate slightly can be very beneficial. So let's talk about whether your team needs one first. And then let's talk about whether you're matched up to the right one. Because, as you can imagine, there were so many of them you may have jumped on board with one worked out. It maybe not slightly ideal for you. So let's first talk about whether your team needs one, and this is always a little bit of a tricky one, because teams automatically assumed they need a way to communicate with each other, and normally they get an application like marks of teams and slack and go that's it. That's all I need. And for some teams, chant, communication could be very beneficial. But a project manager is slightly different to a chat application. Waas. The chat application helps you knew communicate with your team. The project manager helps you to align what you're working on and help you to progress to the next project. There were some great project management applications out there like Monday. Click up asana and there were hundreds hundreds Mawr, and you may have seen many different adverts for them. At the same time, they continue to grow every single day. So does your team need one? If you were using a chat application, but you find that you and your team aren't necessarily aligned on the goals you have for the end of the month or the Ghozi half the next month, and you can find that out by simply in your next to meeting, asking all of your team members what's the goals for the next month? And if you have different answers from everybody, then you clearly not on the same page, so having product manager could help me to align to those goals. But if you and your team don't necessarily work while with the project manager you've tried in the past, and your team don't find it suitable, then that's a good advice to go off, because if you and your team don't like it, they don't find any benefit from it. There's no point in having it. But it's really important throughout this process to communicate with your team members about which one to go with. Because at the end of the day there, they're going to be the ones using it, so making sure you have a relatively aligned benefit to it. Or, for example, those team members enjoy using the application. I'll find it useful. War Have their workflow included in It can be a good way to move forward. So you may be with a project management software now and wondering whether it's still relevant or useful for you and your team. So here's a little bit of a guidance to see whether any of these things have pain points for you and your teams. So the first thing is bottlenecks. If you've come across some bottle necks with the experience of the project management application, for example, you find that this service is slow or you are getting lots of outage time on the application, then that could be a negative sign for a project management software. If that's happening routinely, Union team unable to keep communicated with it. That might be time to look or communicate with the staff at the company to see whether this is going to be happening more often. And it may be a sign that you may need to find a more reliable project management software . The next bottleneck could be a heavy feature. For example, if you and your designer marketing thing you team used figure mark on a routine basis, then you probably want a project management application that event fig, MMA, or it saves a bit of time communicating between the two platforms. So making sure you find an application that works with victim. It could be a great way to take advantage off a project management software. And there were definitely certain Softwares that work well with a certain industry on. You can definitely go on the lookout for those resources, and the third bottleneck could be education. If you are having to learn this new project management software at having a useful resource for education could be very beneficial. So taking advantage of YouTube tutorials that they may have uploaded or help centers that may having. But if that software doesn't have one and it's quite complicated to use, then maybe it's not the best to get fully invested into. So the second core reason why you might want to change a project manager is whether you and your team have changed your dynamic, and what I mean by that is you may, for example, have gone mobile. Recently, you may have tried to ditch mawr of your laptop. Use. Andi utilized your mobile is more often, and if you're current project management blind, it doesn't give you that experience. You can look out for ones that do, and there were some great applications than in Bend and take advantage of the mobile application Really well. The same goes to whether your team changes to remote. If you are, for example, during this pandemic, have gone from a office based company to a remote based company, and you're now actually looking for the long term to stay remote. Then it might be a good way on a good time to change your project manager. There was some applications that don't necessarily Taylor to a remote environment, and that could be a range of different things. Remote Matt project managers tend to include a synchronous communication, which embraces the fact that you may be on a different time zone. It also embraces the fact that you might know instantly communicate because you're in a home environment and there are lots of different features. So do look out for remote first project management software, especially if you've moved to that new dynamic. So the third reason when you could be changing the dynamic of your team could be the model . For example, you may have moved to a different subset of your audience or, for example, you may be changing your product or service entirely on moving. Models can also be moving work flows. So while some project management software allow you to blend or move your work, flows utilise different templates to target different areas. Some project management don't, and you can move to those ones that are a bit more flexible than, say, the more traditional ones. So the third corps reason where you whine you might want to move is because your team is finding its struggling, and that's probably one of the most important things, actually, is if your team doesn't get on with workflow or software, that's a real pain point, because your team will be the ones using every single day. So having routing conversations in meetings that you may be checking in on your team members about how they get on with the software could be very beneficial and actually speaking them to your team members one by one. If and at the end of a meeting, you just say, How do you find the project? Management software really will get an honest response versus asking a full team, because normally people just go along with what other people say. But it's good to get that feedback and start making notes on which ones more suitable for you. So now we've got an idea of whether you and your team should change project managers. There's also the concept off whether you should make it depart mental or just as a whole company. On. There are cases where different departments use different project management software's Andi, for example. The whole company can use just the same project management software, but I think it should be tailored to whatever needs that you and your team have. If you and your team, for example, your developers are eager to use Jiro on, they just want to be able to use that as the tool. They capture stuff and they want to use it with trailer award. They just want to use trail. Oh, then they can go ahead using that because it seems to work best for them. But if you want your whole company aligned on the message, and this tends to be when you've got smaller teams or teams that are able to scale with the application that the project management tools that is particularly flexible, that could be a good way to use one tool that fit all. And there were loads of different APS that a tailoring towards that I know that click up is a good example. Monday are growing, and trailer is also a great way to visualize what you and your team are working on. But the more flexible in application is, the better it's gonna be for a all in one useful your entire company. So project management tools can be really important, and they can help you and your team to keep the line on goals 8. Producing Deep Work States: so deep work is something that all employees should strive towards and his managers. You should help embrace that and his employees. You should try and advocate for long distance of deeper work. So for those who don't know, there is a fantastic book called Deep Work. My Cow Newport and the concept Off. This book is about working longer stints in uninterested periods of time. And when you get in this deep work state, you'll be able to produce better quality pieces of work and also be able to do it for shorter periods of time across the work day. Because you're not necessarily being interrupted, you're able to get into a good follow state and get that piece of work done, and this could be utilized across a range of different industries. For example, marketing you could be focused and dedicated and focus towards a PR campaign that you're aiming to release or if you're a designer, you're looking to produce the highest quality piece of work over said 90 minute period, and as a programmer, you could be looking toe work in deep work. State to help produce ah higher quality piece of code said there were so many different ways that you can use this deep work concept and isn't cracking line in the book, which goes something like this. Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don't see me. Orte Gnaeus Lee We knew your mind from a dependence on distraction. Now it's really interesting because the book does focus a lot on distractions and across the day we have so many of them, you can get distracted by your phone next to you from a colleague's looking to come over and talk to you. It could be really detrimental to your productivity. So speaking with your team about some of the biggest distractions could be really valuable as a manager. One of your role should be to help reduce distraction on your employees. And that could be anything from overwhelming them in email toe, overwhelming them in chat applications like slack as an employee. Your role is to reduce the amount of distractions that happened in the workplace that you can get on with the piece of work that matters most to you, and that could be using a range of different tools. And one of those tools is an application called freedom. This is a great one. It's a chrome extension that plugs in. This application allows you to block certain sites that you may be routinely visiting. That keeps you distraction. And also, if you download the desktop app, it helps you from using certain applications on your device. So freedom could be a great way to block out any unnecessary distractions and keep you focused. And there are lots of different applications that can help you do that, and it's well worth checking them out as well. If you and your team members of finding a little bit harder to say, find 90 minutes stints of work or stints that you can work in that a longer than, say, the average period that air uninterrupted, it's definitely recommended. Look at the Pomodoro. Time and technique will talk about that later in this class. So one of the very beneficial concepts that is out there is a concept called week thieving and day feeling. This is much more suitable for those who are able to control their daily routines. We will touch on this in this class, but as you can imagine, it's a great way to batch some of the activities you have. So, for example, if you are someone that does recording one day, for example, with this I would only try and do this on Wednesday. Get all the recording I need to done on the Wednesday said. I don't have to set up the equipment and resources around it. Plus, it's all out of the way for the rest of the week, and you can do that. For example, if you are a writer, you could be doing the research on a Monday. The writing on a Tuesday on the proof editing or pro editing through it on a Wednesday but actually batch ing a certain activity could help you to produce a better outcome with completing your task. And it also helps you to tune into a task and produce a better flow state instead of necessarily going from recording, editing and changing the type of tasked with doing in keeping in that mindset and focused mode. So that is called task matching. You can either do it through the week theme in concept, which is promoted by folks like Mike Body, who runs a fantastic local productivity ist, or you can use task matching where you do a certain set of type of tasks across your day, for example, when you could relate these to the energy level that you need to complete them. You could relate these to the type of task that you do. For example, could be the editing or the writing or the administration work. For example, that's something that I do across my week. Is I set? Mondays is my administration day, Tuesday's as my recording on Web days on Wednesdays as my main feature recording, and in Thursday and Fridays are normally editing or strategy days. And having the SAT days actually helps me to get in the zone in advance of the week and helps me to keep a little bit of a routine going. So I'd highly recommend to read Cow Newport deep work, check out applications like freedom and also explore concepts like week theme ing and task matching to go deeper in your work. 9. Introducing Personal Productivity Tools: so allowing your employees toe have some storm form of personal productivity could be a great way to strengthen your relationship with them, but also allow them more freedom in the workspace. Now, as you can imagine, there are ranged from productivity tools that you could use on your own outside of work. Help keep you organized. And I think embracing or introducing those tools to somebody can help you to produce better employees both inside and out of the office. Now, as you can imagine, every single day can be a little bit tricky. You've got a little bit of a work life balance to monitor, and sometimes when you get to work, you get an incredibly organized person that gets things done on efficiently and can be very well accountable because they're able to put it on. You know, these different project management Softwares, but then when you come out of work, they become very much a stressed, overwhelmed person. That isn't necessarily as well organized as they could be now, and you don't necessarily have toe all be very well organized people. But actually sharing some recommended tools to organize himself outside of work can be helpful and normally the applications. You should go for our A to do list application, a note taking application on the calendar application. And the reason is because these tend to solve the three core issues that could be one are working out what you're going to do to having a reference point for some information that you're capturing. And number three is your vented activities inside and out of work, and they can use this in the workplace if they want to. They don't have to use it if they don't want to. But I think having people that are more organized or at least prepared outside of work as well can help you to improve results because they won't be is less, stressed Aziz. They come into the office to start the week. That's just something I found particularly. I feel much better when I'm at least organized outside of the work on day at work, it helps you to keep a little bit comma, so let's start with a to do list application. There are so many of them you can choose to do ist tick tick. Any do is a good one as well. These are all very basic to do list applications, but they allow you to capture items in an inbox, start organise and organizing them in a today area. Things to do today on also plan ahead with the next 30 days off tasks inside of the application, and they're all three applications you get started for free on the mall. On they work well is a way to start tallying what you need to get done. And it's really useful because whether they're being able to tally, you know smaller things like, you know, things they need to follow up on, like orders or or home deliveries or even things like chores that they need to do around home. Having something like this could be very beneficial to capturing new items, and they can even organize them in projects in these applications, work in life. If you wanted to separate out like that, or work and personal whatever you decide to name the projects the next, there is a note taker. Now, as you can imagine, your employees may be getting with stressed because there's lots of things coming into their system lost a different paper trail. Items that are coming in that will end up getting sort of tied up on Do you can normally find them on email, But sometimes having a no take it can help you to do that. And even if you wanted to take notes at the same time, to be able to add to that list and they could be notes in, for example, dentist meetings or things like this learning about a new thing at home or something like this so and no taking applications, you could have an application like Evernote. There are other applications, like bear notes, which is good. One Onda. Also even notion is a good note taking application. My final recommendation is a said, is having a calendar application, and this is perfect for organizing events and activities there, inside and outside of work. And it could be particularly useful if you want Teoh batch items as well. There's a technique called calendar blocking, which allows you to plot out your calendar from the start of your day to the end of the day so you know what you're doing. Andi. It was. Sometimes it helps will keep it lined on what they're doing. It helps keep up healthy routines so there's definitely that to try out. But it's really important to have a calendar application, and in this case, I recommend Google Calendar is a great one that works all round. There's also a recent one called Woven, which I find very beneficial. As I said, it's not a must, but it's just something that I think will help your employees or even help your own productivity, to get organized inside and outside of your day. And it's definitely not something that can be intense. It could be something that just assists your enjoyable life that you have. 10. Pomodoro Timers At Work: So in the 19 eighties, a method called the Pomodoro Technique was developed by a another fellow called Francesco Francesco Chili Low, who actually developed the concept of working in 25 minutes stints with five minute breaks . And this technique was utilised to help people to work in more of a deeper work fashion, like we mentioned earlier in the cowl Newport's concept. Deep work at in focused stints of time on interest into time with a five minute break. And this concept was helpful for many employees in companies. There were spending way too long working three hours up until lunchtime, then getting very tired out or very distracted during this period of time and making negative encounters on their productivity. So this methodology is a fantastic one, and it could be used in all types of work. So let's explain how it works. So utilizing the Pomodoro method is very easy. All you have to do and you can get started with an eye Westheimer or I'm android time that you have on your phone, you can set a 25 minute timer on that is a whole cycle. That's a Hell Pomodoro cycle. So, for example, you can set yourself 25 minutes to start working on one piece of work. It could be one. Task it between two tasks, but be clear and intentional What you're going to be doing in those 25 minutes before you hit. Start on the timer. During this 25 minutes of focus time, it needs to be focused. You need to have no distractions. So you need to let other people around. You know that you're going to be lifting your head for another 25 minutes on in. Say that you've got five minute breaks. You can't hit chit chat after 25 minutes, even giving them the exact time if you want to. On Duren this 25 minutes, you have to focus entirely on the item. You can utilize applications like freedom toe block out those distractions so you don't get distracted. But during this period of time, it's a good enough period of time to keep your focus on the task, but also to keep you determined. Getting that done now, after these 20 minutes 25 minutes. Sorry. You need five minutes. Break on a five minutes break. Could be anything you like it could be going to get a cup of tea to be training with your friends. But make sure you're back in your deaths after his five minutes because you're going to start another cycle now when you can do up to four cycles in a row, so 25 minutes on 25 5 minutes off 25 minutes on five minutes off, except for four whole cycles. And that could be super beneficial. Because you're working in the stents, you are able to get more done, and it is very beneficial for your time. And there were loads of Pomodoro timers. I check them out on the different devices on Android's Google Play store, which has tons of them and also on IOS Apple store. There's loads as well now as you can imagine, You can use this in combination with other assisting practices, but I find this works really well for those who are working an office environment because you can have this really focused set up, but also allow yourself the breaks that you need to get the job done and is a manager. If somebody's you ting utilizing something like this, they can really you know, embrace it and help them as much as they can said that they don't ping them during this period of time or communicate with them only in their break times. Now the good thing is, after these four cycles, you got to take a bit of a longer break, maybe 15 20 minutes. Have yourself a lunch at those four cycles could potentially take you up to lunchtime, depending on when you start work. So that's a great way to start your own personal timer and get started with something like the Pomodoro technique. And it's something that has been going on for decades now, and lots of people being having former this application at this being an application that's been very successful, called Forest, which allows you to do the same thing on your phone but blocks out distractions on the phone, but the same time it creates his cute forest by reducing the distraction and the need to go another applications. So do check out that application on the concept. I think it will be extremely beneficial alongside the learnings you've taken from deep 11. Embracing Self Care & New Ways of Working: so self care is a very important element off the workplace and into become really prevalent over the last couple of years that you respect on. Also, embrace your employees time on also their stresses in life. As you can imagine, stress can feed through into every day at work life and, as you can imagine, and it could be very denture mental to your productivity. And we will brought up that statistic earlier that 55% of Americans felt stressed at work. And that was a study only done last year in 2019 by Gallup. Now the statistical 2017 research actually found that founded over 35% of people actually found that heavy workload was the focus off the majority of their stress in the workplace. So you can imagine that it could be damaging to your productivity, especially when you've got lots on your plate. So I think it's really valuable to embrace self care as you go across your day. It's important to get that balance across a day so that you're not doing too much self care and sometimes is important companies and employees to try and get that time in throughout your day so that a day doesn't brain fry you as you go across it. There's been many times when I came back from work brain fried, and that doesn't help the next day or the next day or the next day, it can reduce It can increase, burn out and actually have some damaging effects on your health. So it's important to keep a good balance and work towards having a healthy work life environment. So one of the most common things at to do when you're thinking about ways to embrace this is actually allowing time for your employees have a break to themselves, whether that is a meditation or with their colleagues, and you got to try and find a balance between this. But some companies don't even have ah, mid morning break. They tend to just have the lunch hour, and that is it. But introducing a little break between then can help bring and reduce the amount of time you are spending staring at a screen, but also, you know, potentially procrastinating. So actually planned time or breaks can help you, too, do better work, and we've even seen that in the concept of Pomodoro concept that we talked about last that actually planned breaks planned sessions can help you to almost forced procrastination to some extent, because you're actually getting some time off. The other thing that they could do with that time is meditate, and you could introduce a range of applications that can help them with that. There's absent ations like calm. These applications like oak meditation on balance, which all great for introducing a short 5 to 10 minute meditation to keep them focused and on task. Now, when it comes to the middle of their day, they may know, always want to have lunch with their friends. You might want Teoh share the concept of doing activities like yoga or even going for a run or taking a brisk walk. And it's important to challenge the daily norms that we have, because if you introduce him exercise in routine, it's definitely gonna have a good effect on the productivity in the afternoon because while people think that tires you out, actually gets your blood flowing in your body and helps to reconnect your brain, sometimes when you've especially bean brain fried. So obviously there's a concept of flexi time for many companies thes days around your employees to start and finish a little bit earlier or a little bit later at dependent on how and whether they complete their hours. But in reality, I think it definitely should be changed up. Introducing the concept of your employees could start or finish earlier and actually do an hour of remote worker home could be a great way to help them reduce the amount of stress as they finish their commute home. Sometimes if you're leaving in the car, we're going on the train. It's always busy ran about the time five oclock that you finish. But if you finished it for you could help alleviate traffic but also help to reduce stress of an employee by letting them go slightly earlier and allowing them to finish their final 45 minutes or an hour when they get heighten. Or they could even work in a coffee shop that's closer to home. These are all fairly new concepts, but at the same time they're ones that focus more on the brakes and the relaxation throughout the day without necessarily overwhelming this particular person. Now we know many managers are worried about introducing these concepts to team members because, well, for a fact, you probably think that every is gonna jump on them. One day they're available and you can introduce him slowly to your team. But share why you're doing this. How are you going to be tracking whether this is class for not on whether your team members would like to do something like this. So self care is also important when it comes to going home and switching off. So if you didn't next set necessarily want to finish for 45 minutes later on when you finished the regular time, you come home and sometimes you're checking your phone and emails constantly for other updates, even in the late night, 11. 12 PM before you go to bed. And that could be damaging. So introducing concepts where after five o'clock and this is an emergency emergency, switching off is really key. So lots of companies actually have a switch off time these days. But actually making sure that you and your team have won and have a protocol for if something goes wrong can be very helpful separating work and life and making sure that work doesn't come to much into the evening. Part of your day can be very helpful. So really, try and look at different ways you and your team could brace self care across the day. Self care is really about paying attention to the details on making sure you're looking for practicality and traditional sense of work, because that tends to be growing out of itself right now. 12. How to Best Work From Home Effectively: So you may have heard many stories about working from home as a great environment to get things done and there so many great positive stories and so many great negative stories. So what I'm gonna do is share some of the ways that working from hope could be beneficial to your productivity and some of the ways that it can be and how to address those elements . Now, as they said, working from home does get a good stick but also gets a bad stick and most recently, with people being forced to work from home. A lot of people have been feeling overwhelmed because it's such a big change to their daily routine. And sometimes there were some good things. The good things being that you've got your own environment around you, you've got no chance and offices. You know, that's sort of like work environment to go to. But there are some negatives you won't be seeing the people that you regularly see. You also won't be able to get that social interaction and also that consistent routine. Sometimes it's much harder to separate yourself from work and life then, because you're you know you're working from home. I've been working from home for the last 56 years on, but there were some pros and some cons. And of course it's important to work out what the pros are for. You jump in so they were lost benefits to working from home. Sometimes being an environment that you're more comfortable with can help you to ease into the day. But one of the biggest ones is the commute time. Saving on 20 to 45 minutes, which is normally the average commute time can be very beneficial. And that can even an upto 1.5 to 2 hours across your day, which could definitely be better spent. Whether that's having 20 minutes more kip or sleep, or whether it is doing some off your own projects or taking a little bit more time to get ready in the morning. The second benefit is well is saving money in terms of, for example, traveling in as an employee but also for companies on office space. There's definitely much better use off the home that you're in during the day when you're at home. There are some negatives, and probably one of the biggest negatives is that you're not able to separate work in life as much as you would be able to beforehand. So the other aspect is your environment as well. You may not be fully equipped to work from home because of your office equipment and things like that. So actually, taking time to get that prepared and getting a separate area at home can take a lot longer than many people expect. So let's talk about the practicalities of working from home now. One of things that I did when I first started working from home wants to get a desk and to put in a corner of a room. But looking back on that now is definitely something that makes it a lot harder. It actually get work done because sometimes you're in the only room you're in. And, for example, I was in the lounge, which, can, you know, definitely make in the evening less relaxing, because use tend to associate certain activities with certain rooms. Andi, for example, if you were to do in the bedroom, which could be the only space that you have, you sleep in that bedroom and you're doing work in that room, so it sort of feels that you don't get out much. So when it comes to your environment, one of the best things to do is to separate your work as much as you can. If you have the ability to add on a desk into a spare room, try to do so. If you don't have a spare room, try and separate it as much as you can try and put it in the corner of a room on. Do you know, for example, face it away from certain items like TV or sofa? So it's directed out a window because that will help you to really stop looking at those things that could be distracting you. I definitely try and doing this in our one bedroom flat, and this definitely helped. And the other thing that I find beneficial is if you're at the other thing, that could be beneficial as well. This after five PM, you could dry go for a walk after work for 15 minutes to help separate yourself from working life. So when you step back in the door, you know it's personal time and you've got that little bit of commute back now, one of the best ways to do that, if you're able to, is to go to coffee shops as well. Sometimes a local coffee shop is not only a great way to boost the local economy, but it's also a great way to separate yourself from working home all the time. Working from a coffee shop should be analysed or risk assessed. For example, when you're utilizing their wife, I make sure that you're set up on your company's VPN or you know your company's cybersecurity process. So keeping in touch with team members that can also be tricky because a lot of time it's for a video. Cool. But sometimes you want to trap with them in a more relaxed manner. And you could definitely send up things like water coolers in your applications, like slack or marks off teams, where you can communicate in a much more relaxed fashion and definitely chat when you want to. But making sure that you sat these up so they don't disrupt or distract when you're doing work can be very useful. Introducing concepts like the Pomodoro method and deep work can also be very helpful, especially without the distractions off office environments. The other thing is as well. I definitely recommend taking advantage of the additional time that you've made. For example, in the morning, if you feel like you want to introduce a 20 minute session of yoga, that would have been your commute, then. This is definitely something to do and something you can easily access to a shower and getting ready, really, for starting the day of work. A lot of people find that working from home can be tricky with the routine as well. So always introducing a good work attire on work times can help you to keep that routine without damaging how you go about walking around your home normally. Now, during this period of time, if you're working from home, whether you've negotiated it or you are now working from home due to other scenarios, you may want to check in with your manager on how you're getting on. They may have worked in the past at home or work environment very similar, so asking them questions about how we can improve or checking in on how you getting on with your goals could be a great way to keep on track. But keep regular communication with them. So it's around this class. We actually shared a fair amount of concepts that will be helpful for working from home, and they all apply in a working from home situation or scenario to make sure that you're open to reading about remote work and how you can work from home more effectively. There were some great Ross resources on twist remote guides. I always find that is a great talking point to go. 13. Congratulations & Thank You : Hello, ever and thank you very much for taking this class here on skill share. We were really excited to have you on day. Hopefully this class has enabled you to be more productive in the workplace. Now, we're really eager to be adding a few additional lessons to this. As the time goes on, we think that the work is ever evolving and especially working from home is is particularly important activity. And hopefully we can build on that with this class. So, folks, please do make sure to take advantage of the project thing. Activity that is attached a skilled share class on Also I please do review us as well if you get a moment to give us some feedback on also rate us on how you found the class, but a big week. Thank you. And I really hope you can take advantage of the other skills classes that we've got here. And you are being more productive at work. Thank you very much. It was your instructor, Francesca Blasio on there. It's been a pleasure