#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

Increasing your productivity is directly proportional to getting better results in your life/ business. Here's 9 productivity steps to ramp up your results.

If you look at the standard organizational model, the first thing you notice is that it’s a pyramid. It is narrower at the top than at the bottom. There are a lot of worker bees at the bottom of the pyramid — that’s why the base of the pyramid is broader than the top of the pyramid is. There are fewer managers than employees, and there are a very small number of executives at the top of the organization, calling the shots.

Since the typical organization has lots of non-management employees and only a small number of senior-level leaders, it stands to reason that every minute of a highly-placed executive’s day has great impact. The decisions C-level leaders make have huge ramifications on everything from the company’s stock price tomorrow to the firm’s existence or nonexistence five years from now.

It's bedtime and you still have two more hours of work to do. Should you stay up later to get your work done? Or just call it a day even though your unfinished work will mean you have more to do tomorrow?

Staying up an extra hour or two to finish your work can be tempting. But missing just a few hours of sleep today can have serious consequences tomorrow.

Here are seven reasons why the most productive people go to bed early:

Whilst I don't believe that the lifestyle I've ended up in is for everyone, the lessons I learned during this sometimes challenging, sometimes exciting and always heart-opening journey are likely to help you too -- without you having to learn them the hard way.

As 2015 winds down, most executives likely have turned their attentions to ensuring a fast start to the new year. They must prepare their teams to be sure-footed amidst uncertainty regarding economic conditions, geopolitical tensions, technological developments, and more — including the added complication of a U.S. presidential election. They need their organizations to be confident, nimble, and relentless in their shared commitment to excel.

So how can you as a leader bring this preparation to your enterprise? It certainly isn’t through top-down directives or yet another attempt to craft the perfect organizational structure. Business today is too fast-moving and complex for those options to work. Instead, leaders must master the duality of focus and agility. That is, there must be unity up, down, and across the enterprise on shared objectives, along with great flexibility to seize opportunities and overcome obstacles.

I used to work a lot — 60, 80, or even 100 hours a week.

I let my work be a big part of how I defined myself. I wore those insane hours like a badge of honor . . . I loved telling people how "busy" I was and how much I "had to do".

Sound familiar?

Looking back, I realize I used my work to try and fill a void in myself. The problem was that this void was like a black hole. No matter how many hours I worked, it never seemed to fill it up. If anything, it made me feel worse.

One day I’d had enough. Truth be told, I’d had way more than enough. I stopped and reevaluated my life, trying to figure out what was important to me, and what wasn’t.

I had to make a big change. I had to figure out how to work smarter, not harder. I needed to optimize my work process to do more in less time.

I needed the Pomodoro Technique. Here’s how this incredible simple time management system changed my workday—and ultimately, my life. I think it can do the same for you.

.

When Google acquired the online photo editor Picnik in 2010, CMO Lisa Conquergood and the rest of the Picnik team went, too. They worked on the site until Google narrowed its focus and closed Picnik in 2012. Still believing in the concept, the original Picnik team left Google and founded the photo-editing site PicMonkey.

However, during her two years' tenure at Google, Conquergood got a chance to experience the productivity and workflow in one of the world’s most successful companies.

After my lackluster morning, I decided to do some research and really figure out the right way to spend the first hour of my workday. And after a little practice, I learned just how productive one can be when you’re thoughtful about this. So grab some coffee and make these four things a staple in your morning work routine:

Robert Solow, Nobel laureate in economics, famously quipped in 1987 that “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Other than a brief bump between 1995 and 2000, the growth in productivity in advanced economies has not kept pace with the growth in IT spending.

Technology was supposed to free people for more productive uses of their time. But so far it has not worked out that way. Companies invested heavily in technology but not in true integration. They integrated the tools with one another but not with the way people work. As a result, they often made matters worse. The technology that was meant to liberate employees has insidiously trapped them. It is no wonder that, in 2014 in the US, 51% of employees reported being disengaged, while 18% said they were “actively disengaged,” a recipe for subtle forms of corporate sabotage.

Bestselling authors share what they’ve learned.

Getting organized is one of the most popular promises people make to themselves as they enter the New Year. But how can you keep your resolution instead of being part of the 92% of people who make them and fail?

Keep in mind that "a little better is a little better," says Fay Wolf, author of New Order: A Decluttering Handbook for Creative Folks (And Everyone Else). "Small steps are more likely to stick than trying to do over everything," she says.

Here are five things you can do to get organized and be more productive in 2016:

A retired Scottish footballer and a Silicon Valley venture capitalist don’t seem like the likeliest of friends and collaborators. But Alex Ferguson, the long-time manager of the ultra-successful Manchester United team, and Michael Moritz, the chairman of Sequoia Capital, have more in common than you might suspect.

Ferguson, whose team won 38 trophies in the 27 years he coached, and Moritz, an early investor in Google, Yahoo, and Airbnb, have both thought long and hard about the art of management. Together they’ve written a book on the art of management — Leading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United — that distills the lessons in leadership Ferguson learned while heading the world’s most successful sports franchise.

Over the past decade, we’ve studied the impact of a wide range of management practices on different dimensions of organizational health.1 This analysis, based on surveys of more than two million respondents at over 1,000 companies, has become a stable baseline for understanding the incremental contributions of specific organizational and leadership characteristics to the health, positive and negative, of the companies in our sample.

We’ve long inquired into the processes and structures that reinforce organizational stability. But from November 2013 to October 2014, we added questions, for the first time, on speed and flexibility. Our goal was to discover how often leaders and managers moved quickly when challenged and how rapidly organizations adjusted to changes and to new ways of doing things.

No one likes opening bills. Especially not when they remind you of the credit card payment you either forgot or couldn't afford to make the month before. Now you're hit with an insulting interest rate on top of your balance, plus penalty charges. The interest rate amounts to highway robbery, you think, and what's worse is that everything compounds. You wish you’d never opened up the account in the first place.

Faced with an important task, how often do you say to yourself, "I have plenty of time to do this later"?

Or "I'll do it first thing in the morning, when my mind's fresh"?

Or "I just need to [fill in the blank] first"?

These are all signs of a procrastinator. We all do it sometimes--maybe you're procrastinating even now by reading this article.

Procrastinators love distraction. And if there's one thing we're surrounded by in our current information age, it's distraction.

Whether you're online, tuned in to mass media, or communicating with others, there's always something else to do.

Researchers who study human behavior have found that bossing yourself around may hold the secret to getting things done.