Multitasking: Is It Good And Can You Actually Master It?

For a moment, think about how many errands you juggle around in a day. From the moment you wake up till you lay your head on the pillow at night, you deal with a multitude of things, from helping kids with their homework to doing your office work at home, and from taking, and responding to emails while talking to your colleagues on the phone, etc. You are likely multitasking 24/7.

If you resonate with what was mentioned in the previous paragraph, you will be interested in the advice offered in this article.

This article aims at helping you master the art of multitasking by breaking things down so you can come to a useable solution. Buckle your belts to get answers to your queries and make your life simpler and enjoyable.

What is Multitasking?

In a human context, multitasking refers to performing numerous activities simultaneously, such as editing a document or replying to emails while participating in a teleconference.

We become less efficient and more prone to making mistakes when our brain continually switches gears to bounce back and forth. According to psychologists who study what happens to cognition, when people try to accomplish more than one activity simultaneously, the mind and brain are not meant for heavy-duty multitasking.^[1]

Psychologists compare the task to choreography or air traffic control, stressing that mental strain can lead to disaster in these and other activities.

Is Multitasking Possible?

The real question one should ask is whether it is possible to multitask.

It really narrows down to what people perceive and what it really is. People think that they are capable of doing many things at once. However, the fact remains that they are merely switching from one job to the other.

When Is Multitasking Not Possible?

Multitasking skills are founded on a myth, according to cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists all across the world.

Several types of research have been done to see how multitasking affects our brain. A study conducted to see if multitasking while driving was good or bad, concluded that performance is primarily reduced when there is a resource conflict.^[2]

Another study was done on the performance of older adults vs. young ones when multitasking during the driving, and it concluded that the performance of older persons suffered more than that of young ones and that capability to multitask depleted with age.^[3]

When Is Multitasking Possible?

As per studies, the only time you can multitask is when you’re doing two things and one of them doesn’t require your attention or mental energy, for example jogging while listening to music.

As per research,^[4] somewhat distracting activities such as listening to the radio can help improve the driving performance by providing a less distracting option. It concludes that you can multitask only when one of the two things doesn’t require your attention or mental energy. Just as in driving you don’t have to put in the additional effort or use mental energy to listen to music and so multitasking (driving and listening to music) is possible.

Is Multitasking a Good Thing?

The clear answer is NO when you are trying to do a lot simultaneously, and these things require your mental energy.

Multitasking negatively impacts our productivity across the board. It is a bad habit that has long-term, harmful effects on your health, well-being, and productivity:

Multitasking Can Harm on Health

Multitasking has a bad effect on health as it leads to depression and social anxiety. The brain’s grey matter, particularly in regions connected to cognitive control and the regulation of motivation and emotion, was shown to have decreased in frequent media multitaskers.

These people are more likely to face mental health issues such as depression. ^[5]

Also, persistent media multitaskers have poorer working and long-term memory, so their ability to retain information also curtails over a period. ^[6]

Multitasking Takes a Toll on Your Relationships

Besides facing issues such as depression and anxiety, people who constantly multitask also jeopardize their relationships.

Sometimes the tendency to multitask takes a toll on the relationship and the partner feels neglected. Imagine discussing something with your partner while he or she is constantly engaged on the mobile phone checking social media or email. How would that make you feel?

This so-called, technoference or interference of technology causes reduced relationship satisfaction. ^[7]

Multitasking Makes You Unproductive

Researchers investigated if multitasking increases our productivity and effectiveness. The findings showed that multitasking made individuals less effective and productive, which is the exact reverse of what most multitaskers believe.^[8]

There is a cognitive cost every time we go from one task to another, which reduces our productivity.

Multi-tasking implies you are constantly shifting your attention between multiple tasks. This may seem like the ultimate level of focus, but multitasking is no different from being distracted – worse, it’s self-imposed.

We’d like to believe that juggling numerous activities at once is achievable, but it comes at the cost of lowering the quality and amount of attention paid to each task. As a result, you’re less productive than someone who concentrates on one task at a time.

Multitasking Affects Your Performance

Studies show that performance almost always suffers. We become less efficient and more prone to make mistakes when our brain continually switches gears to bounce between tasks – especially when those tasks are complicated and require our active attention. ^[9]

This may not be as obvious or impactful when we’re doing easy and ordinary things like walking while listening to music or folding laundry while watching TV. When the stakes are higher, and the activities are more difficult, however, attempting to multitask can have a detrimental influence on our life – and even be dangerous.

Our attention is divided when we do so-called multitasking. It makes it more difficult for us to focus entirely on one item.

We lose time and energy when we switch tasks. A study found that when switching between different tasks, the amount of time wasted depends on various factors, and it could range from seconds to hours.

According to psychologist Gerald Weinberg:

Focusing on one task at a time = 100% of your productive time available.

Task switching between two tasks at a time = 40% of your productive time for each and 20% lost to context switching.

Task switching between three tasks at a time = 20% of your productive time for each and 40% lost to context switching.

This behavior decreases your focus over time and makes your mind more receptive to distractions.

How to Stop Multitasking If You’re Not Getting Things Done

If you find multitasking is dragging your productivity, try to change your habit with these steps:

1. Consciously Change Gear

Instead of attempting to complete two activities simultaneously, consider creating a system to remind you to switch your focus. Jerry Linenger, an American astronaut aboard the Mir space station, found this method effective:

As an astronaut, he had a lot on his plate every day. On a few watches, he set alarms for himself. He knew it was time to switch chores when a specific watch beeped. This allowed him to focus completely on what he was doing at any given time.

This method works because the alert reminds us of what will happen.

2. Manage Multiple Tasks Without Multitasking

Raj Dash of Performancing.com has devised a clever method for juggling many projects without multitasking. Before moving on to other tasks, he recommends spending 15 minutes getting to know a new project. Later, come back to the project and spend around thirty minutes researching and brainstorming.

Allow a few days to pass before completing the project at hand. While working on other projects, your brain was still solving problems in the background.

This strategy works because it allows us to work on multiple projects simultaneously without having to fight for your attention.

3. Set Aside Distractions

The open tabs on your computer, your smartphone, and your mailbox are all open invites to be distracted. Set aside time each day to turn off your notifications, dismiss your inbox, and delete unwanted tabs from your desktop.

If you want to concentrate, you can’t allow anything else to intrude on your mental space.

Emails are particularly intrusive because they frequently convey an unnecessarily high feeling of urgency. Some workplace cultures place a premium on timely reactions to these communications, but we can’t approach every scenario as if it were an emergency.

Set aside time during the day to check and respond to emails to avoid compulsive checking.

4. Learn to Say No

When you hear the phrase “learn to say no,” don’t take it to mean that you should be unpleasant to everyone. What it means is that you should hold off on saying yes.

The majority of issues arise when we say “yes” right away. Then we have to expend a great deal of effort figuring out how to get out of our commitment.

Saying “let me think about it” or “can I let you know later” offers time to consider the offer and allows you to return to your previous activity faster.

5. Make Technology Your Ally

Scientists are discovering the negative impacts of persistent serial tasking on our brains. Some businesses are working on programs to help people resist the urge to multitask.

Forest, for example, turns remaining focused into a game. RescueTime and other extensions let you keep track of your online activities, so you may be more conscious of how you spend your time.

What You Can Do Now

Download Forest or install the extension RescueTime to help you track your online habits to be more aware of how you spend your time.

The Only Multitasking Skills to Master

If you have a lot to handle and believe that multitasking is inevitable, these are the only multitasking skills to master for productivity:

1. Know Your Goal – Daily, Weekly, Monthly

Make sure your objectives are attainable. When you sit down to work on something, you should set a few goals for yourself and strive toward them. Make sure to break your goals daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. It would help you stay focused and get more work done without getting trapped in multitasking erratically.

Your goals can help you decide what’s important and what’s not. We often get trapped in doing things that are unimportant to our goals. Breaking your goals into daily or weekly segments, you get to stay focused so you can eliminate tasks that are not important.

Your entire energy and time would be dedicated to things that really matter – things that would help you achieve your final goals.

2. Prioritize Your Tasks Based on Your Goals

This is the key to effective multitasking, which is prioritizing critical tasks based on your ability to do them. If all you’re doing is listing down what must be done, creating a to-do list is simple.

However, knowing what has to be done and when and why one work should be completed before the other is equally vital. Not only will this boost your productivity, but it will also help you to multitask more successfully.

Learn more about effective prioritization here.

3. Outsource or Delegate to Allow Parallel Progression

People who multitask always tend to take most of the matters into their hands which results in a linear progression. It is a slow process. You can only do one thing at a time with full concentration.

Alternatively, parallel progression can be achieved when you outsource or delegate work. Parallel progression is when you assign a significant, time-consuming assignment that can be completed simultaneously with your other projects.

Simply doing a lot on your own doesn’t guarantee you’re being productive, as the author of The One Thing puts it:

“Activity is often unrelated to productivity, and busyness rarely takes care of business.”

Multitasking would hurt the efficiency of your work and could end in a negative outcome for your company. This is why it’s always smart to outsource your tasks in a smart way. Learn how to delegate effectively here.

4. Batching and Listing Management

Another important skills that you must try to master is listing and batching. You can list all your tasks and then try to find the ones that are similar in nature. Batching refers to clubbing similar tasks together and doing them at one go. It would help you save time and energy since you don’t have to switch mind-gears between tasks of varied nature.

At Lifehack, we use project management software Basecamp to keep track of all our tasks in Projects and To-Do Lists, where different tasks are batched and listed based on their goals. This allows different team members to keep track of different tasks effectively, while not being distracted from what they should focus on at the moment.

Also, having a singular platform to manage all my business tasks alongside deadlines, revisions and priorities allows our team to get a sense of direction.

What You Can Do Now

Look at your list of tasks now and think about which ones can be outsourced or delegated, and which can only be done by you.

Bottom Line

Multitasking is a myth as we are not super-humans capable of doing multiple things simultaneously. Constantly switching between tasks isn’t the way to go if you want to be productive.

However, you do can have multiple goals achieved by using the strategies I mentioned in this article, without having to get distracted by multitasking.

Featured photo credit: NordWood Themes via unsplash.com

Reference

[1]	^	APA: Multitasking: Switching costs
[2]	^	NIH: Driving and Multitasking: The Good, the Bad, and the Dangerous
[3]	^	Frontiers: Multitasking During Simulated Car Driving: A Comparison of Young and Older Persons
[4]	^	NIH: Driving and Multitasking: The Good, the Bad, and the Dangerous
[5]	^	SEMANTIC SCHOLAR: Media Multitasking Is Associated with Symptoms of Depression and Social Anxiety
[6]	^	NCBI: Media multitasking and memory: Differences in working memory and long-term memory
[7]	^	Psychology Today: How Cellphone Use Can Disconnect Your Relationship
[8]	^	ResearchGate: Does personal social media usage affect efficiency and well-being?
[9]	^	Cleveland Clinic: Why Multitasking Doesn’t Work

The post Multitasking: Is It Good And Can You Actually Master It? appeared first on Lifehack.

How to Break Down a Large Project into Manageable Task

If you’re working on a huge project, the magnitude of various tasks that you are supposed to complete on time can make you feel overwhelmed. This feeling hinders you from making progress because it damages your morale and makes your project seem impossible to complete. When you start thinking that a project is impossible to complete, you’ll start procrastinating…

Have you thought about breaking down large assignments into manageable tasks though?

Similar to consuming a large meal through small bites at a time, you can work on any task regardless of how complex or long they are as long as you break them down. Once you’ve done this, you can easily address these pieces. Instead of focusing on the entire project, focus on what you can do right now to make progress.

Learning the art of breaking down a project will improve your productivity and performance in the workplace.^[1]

How to Break Down Large Assignments

Before you start thinking of breaking down tasks into smaller components, you need to know the definition of a task. While this might seem like an obvious thing, you cannot create a solid plan if you don’t know what a task is.

Since you’ll need to outline your tasks, the difficulty lies in how well you split them. How you cut a project into several tasks is determined by how long you want them to take.

For instance, you could define “Write an email” as a task. However, you can narrow it down further into several steps such as “Write an email to George about project deadlines”.

“Write an email” isn’t enough to be a task. On the other hand, something like “Complete a presentation” is a big task that has to be broken down.

The Rewind And Reduce Method

If you’ve ever tried breaking down tasks to boost your productivity and performance, you’ve probably realized that there are a lot of methods that will help you learn how to break down tasks. While most of these methods are effective, not all of them are ideal for you.

The Rewind And Reduce Method is perfect for people who want to increase their productivity and achieve their biggest goals. This method not only systematically breaks down a project, but also set achievable deadlines that you can confidently achieve consistently.

Once you get used to this system, you’ll never find yourself thinking of other ways to break down tasks and increase your productivity.

Here is a clear example that demonstrates the benefits of the rewind and reduce method:

Before one of our managers tried the Rewind and Reduce Method, he used to take 8 hours to complete a work presentation.

Just one week after trying this strategy…

• He completed preparing for a presentation within 2 hours.
• His stress levels have gone down.
• He was able to achieve more at work without struggling.

To understand how to use the Rewind and Reduce method, we need to discuss the respective steps that you need to take:

Step 1. Rewind

The first step in our technique is to Rewind. This involves starting from the end by taking your final goal and working backward. This exercise will help you identify the main milestones and complete your project on time.

Every project has a goal. It could be generating more sales, improving business operations, reducing overhead expenses, or increasing customer satisfaction to name a few. Knowing the goal of your project will help keep you and your team aligned and increase productivity.

In one scientific study, 162 participants were asked to perform a hand-eye coordination test. The researchers found that there was a link between goal specificity and performance level. They found that individuals who set specific goals tend to have higher levels of productivity.^[2]

The project goal should define the results to give you a sense of direction. Setting clear goals and working backward will help you save a lot of time and energy in the long run.

For example, say I am planning to create a presentation on the overall organization strategy.

Well, working backward, some milestones that I identify are:

• Know my audience
• Brainstorm and come up with a good topic
• Plan my presentation
• Research extensively to find important sources of information
• Create clear presentation slides
• Practice the presentation

Step 2. Reduce

The first step helped you identify the main milestones that you should focus on to complete your project successfully. The second step is Reduce. You need to break down every milestone into bite-sized actions. Bite-sized means they are focused on one specific objective and are something you expect to finish within an hour.

Next, estimate the amount of time you’ll spend on every task. the more bite-sized the task, the easier and more accurate it is to estimate.

Step 3. Summarize

Finally, the third step is to add up all your estimates for each milestone to arrive at a relatively accurate timeline. Going back to the current example, say my deadline is the end of Friday, and I can only devote 1 hr a day to work on it.

• Plan my presentation and come up with an appropriate presentation angle – 1 hour
• Research extensively to find important sources of information – 1 hour
• Create clear presentation slides – 1 hour
• Practice the presentation – 30 minutes

Total Estimated Time – 3.5 hours

This means that I’ll have to start working on the project on Tuesday (latest) to complete it by Friday without stress. Pretty easy, right?

What You Can Do Now

Apply the 3 steps immediately with an existing project using this template:

Conclusion

Big projects can take weeks, months, or even years. There’s nothing more frustrating than investing a lot of time and energy into a project only to realize later that you are off track. This is why you need to use the Rewind and Reduce method to break down a huge project into smaller parts.

When it comes to feeling overwhelmed by large projects, the concept of breaking them down into manageable tasks works for everyone. If you tend to procrastinate, learning how to break down a project into tasks is very useful.

Featured photo credit: Kelly Sikkema via unsplash.com

Reference

[1]	^	National Library of Medicine: The Magical Mystery Four: How is Working Memory Capacity Limited, and Why?
[2]	^	SpringerLink: The Role of Goal Specificity in the Goal-Setting Process

The post How to Break Down a Large Project into Manageable Task appeared first on Lifehack.

How To Effectively Boost Cross-Team Collaboration: 5 Tips

March 2020 was when the world stopped, but people never did. The great pivot emphasized innovation within the virtual space.

We saw businesses closing physical locations after discovering the cost-effectiveness of doing business virtually. Companies pivoted from the classical board room meetings to using conference platforms like Zoom to conduct business. Teams fulfilled services and innovated from home.

Remote team collaboration became the priority, but this doesn’t always come easy.  There is also the cross-team collaboration that you need to consider.

In this article, I will discuss how teams can become successful at remote collaborations and how we can boost cross-team collaboration.

What Is Cross-Team Collaboration?

Cross-team collaboration is when multiple teams are working together to complete a common goal. It allows groups of people from different departments or companies to work together. Each team brings an expert skill set with them that increases the effectiveness of the overall group.

For example, the core team may be marketing experts but would need the expertise from the financial team to complete their goal. Or, your core team may be experts in human resources but would need the assistance of the logistics and planning teams to achieve a common goal.

These types of collaboration can be powerful. They often lead the corporation to significant improvements and innovative solutions.

Before we talk more about boosting cross-team collaboration, we should first recognize a few signs of what an unhealthy team may look like.

You’re likely suffering from poor collaboration if you notice any of these signs:

• Personal conflict across teams
• Misalignment of goals
• Lack of time and focus on collaborating
• Double work
• Information silos created by poor communication
• Lack of clarity in communication of responsibilities
• Micromanaging
• Unclear chain of command
• High emotional tension and isolation

If your team shows a higher number of these signs, then it is safe to say that they are not a healthy team.

5 Tips on How to Effectively Boost Cross-Team Collaboration

Unhealthy teams struggle to cross-collaborate. So, if your teams are showing some of these signs, then it is time to evaluate where your team is at and start using strategies to help them move from ineffective to highly effective.

Here are five tips on how to effectively boost cross-team collaboration.

1. Communicate Clearly

Communication is king. Say that several more times. Allow it to get into your soul. Communication is the lifeblood of all cross-team collaboratory success.

If you look at the statistical data on why relationships fail, why people leave organizations, or why there is a high level of mistrust among people in our government, you will notice one major trend: Communication was poor.^[1][2][3]

We can say the opposite as well. In the area where success was high, communication was good.

The more people you add to your team, the better the communication and the methods of communication need to become.

When your team was still small, you could get by on interpersonal communication. But the more members you add to the project, the greater the level of communication needed to be successful.

Poor communication creates problems, and good communication solves problems. Successful cross-team collaboration must be rooted in excellent communication if the team truly hopes to succeed.

Best Practice

Have weekly check-ins and monthly team meetings. The weekly check-ins are designed to be short meetings that allow you to be face-to-face with your team.

During these meetings, you will share the vision, talk about expectations and goals, answer any questions, and address problems.

Weekly check-ins are not designed to solve all the company’s problems. They are intended to be a quick get-together to ensure everyone knows what they are doing.

Monthly meetings are similar to weekly check-ins. However, monthly meetings will be a little longer as the goal is to inform and train your cross-collaborators.

2. Set Cross-Team Expectations

Managing projects can be challenging. The more teams and team members you add, the more complex the project can become. Instead of managing the project, you have the added stress of managing multiple teams containing various personalities.

Setting cross-team collaboratory expectations is the key to the team’s success. This ensures that each cross-team member understands the tasks, goals, behavior, communication, and roles under which they will operate.

Best Practice

As the leader, you will set the expectations everyone else will follow.

Do not take this task lightly. The team expectations will be the guiding force behind much of what you will accomplish.

One of the best practices for this is to take time and reflect. Reflect on how you want your team to behave. Think through the project goals, individual roles, tasks, budgets, resources, and the schedule.

Then, determine the desired level of work, task completion, and behavioral expectations the team will need. Write them all down.

Do not forget to communicate them clearly and regularly to the team.

3. Define Team Roles and Responsibilities

Confusion is one of the quickest and unhealthiest ways to ruin a cross-team collaboration. Success thrives on clarity.

When we are not clear, we subconsciously create mistrust within the team. Where there is mistrust, there is always a lack of success because there is a lack of growth.

If we are going to create trusting relationships with our cross-team collaborators, it starts with defining who does what and who answers to who.

There is a simplistic power when helping people know what they are there to do and who their direct supervisor is.

When you take the time to define these things, you are showing people that they can trust you. When they trust you, they will help the team become efficient and successful.

It may sound basic, but when we master the basics, we can win on all levels. So, do not hate small beginnings or small things, for that is the very thing that will carry you and your cross-team collaboration across the finish line.

Do the hard work of creating tools on the front end, so you don’t have to do damage control on the back end.

Best Practice

Create flow charts and write job descriptions. People do what they see and not what you say.

Also, it is essential to note that people rarely remember things when they need them. Keeping a visual of both the team flow chart and job descriptions where people can access them quickly and often will boost the success of your cross-team collaboration.

4. Create Systems

I heard it once said that a system saves you time, energy, and money.

If you think about it, the systems (processes) you create are the foundation for your team will grow. Everything in existence has a system within which it operates.

Take the human body, for example. It is a system that runs systems. The human body is a complex system that houses the nervous system, the endocrine system, and a slew of others. When these systems operate at their optimized levels, the human body is strong and healthy.

Why should your cross-team collaboration be seen any differently? The team will reach peak performance with a series of optimized systems.

To effectively boost cross-team collaboration, the leader must develop and implement systems within the team. You will need a system for everything you do.

For example, you will need a communication system, budgeting and spending system, a system for marketing, a system for follow-up, etc. The more systems you put into place, the better run the cross-team collaboration will be.

Best Practice

After you have taken the time to create each system, create a sharable document that houses all the systems. This will be a living document as systems can and often do change.

Allow the rest of the team the right to comment on how the system could be better. The greater the input from the team, the more buy-in they have, and the better the systems will become.

One thing to mention is that you do not make every change suggested. Instead, talk with the team members about the change and see how they believe it will improve the system.

If the proposed change makes the system better, then change it. However, if the suggested change does not improve the current system, leave it alone.

5. Be Transparent and Remove Informational Roadblocks

Trust is the rocket fuel that propels every cross-team collaboration. The lower the level of trust a person has in you, the lower the output you will get from them.

Some of the biggest things that degrade trust within a team are inauthenticity and ambiguity. When you see these two things present within the team’s leadership, the team begins to think that the leaders are wishy-washy and have something to hide.

That is not what you want your team to be feeling or thinking. Instead, you want your team to know that they can trust that you are who you say you are. You want the team to understand that the leadership has nothing to hide. It all ties back into clear communication.

If the cross-team collaboration leadership dared to be transparent and remove roadblocks to communication, you would see one of the healthiest and most effective teams.

Often, the refusal to be transparent kills team morale and limits the team from reaching its true potential. I cannot stress the importance of this tip.

Over the last 20 years, I have watched team after team fall apart because the leadership clinched to their need for secrecy. Instead of being transparent, they were living in secrecy. Instead of being communicative and brave, they were quiet and scared.

An insecure leader is the eventual death of any team. Don’t fall into the trap of feeling like you need to hide things.

Be transparent and bold. Own who you are. Show the team where the wins and failures are. Be the leader the team needs and one that others model.

Best Practice

Use your weekly check-in meetings to talk about the challenges you face with the team.

Be honest and transparent with where the team is in meeting their goals. Share the perceived challenges and weaknesses of the team. Apologize for any way you may have mistreated or disrespected any team member.

When apologizing, make sure you have thought through when and where this is needed. You shouldn’t be apologizing to them weakly. Yet, when you know you made a mistake, then own it.

Above all else, continually strive to be as transparent as possible with the team you have been given.

Final Thoughts

Cross-team collaborations can cause some level of anxiety. Working within one group is challenging, but working within one group that is working with several other groups can be overwhelming. If you implement these five tips on boosting cross-team collaboration, you will begin to see the success you are longing for.

It will take time, effort, and work, but you can do it. Work on the steps every day, and you will be on your way toward a successful cross-team collaboration.

Featured photo credit: Smartworks Coworking via unsplash.com

Reference

[1]	^	Huffpost: Poor Communication Is The #1 Reason Couples Split Up: Survey
[2]	^	SHRM: The Cost of Poor Communications
[3]	^	OECD.org: Transparency, communication, and trust: The role of public communication in responding to the wave of disinformation about the new Coronavirus

The post How To Effectively Boost Cross-Team Collaboration: 5 Tips appeared first on Lifehack.

7 Home Office Organizers Every Remote Worker Must Have

Maintaining the tidiness of your home office can promote increased productivity and concentration. Proper organization can also minimize anxiety, whether from procrastination or disorganization.

Everyone needs a dedicated workspace to make workflow streamlined and efficient, from your documents to any cables and cords. Searching under your papers for a pen isn’t exactly the ideal use of your time and way to maximize your productivity.

With some home office organizers and office accessories for any work-related task, setting creating a home office set up for remote or hybrid work is as easy as ever. We’ve listed some of our recommendations to help you achieve all your professional goals right from home.

Types of Home Office Organizers

Cabinets and Drawers

Cabinets and drawers aren’t just for your kitchen! Setting up some home office cabinetry can improve your workspace by providing more storage areas for different office supplies. You can set up your cabinets or drawers next to your desk space, on the walls, or anywhere else that works best for your workspace.

Desk Compartments

Your desk should provide you with enough space to handle your PC and anything else you need while working. Home office organizing ideas for your desk consists of:

• Keeping essential items nearby: Organizers can help you keep everything clean and readily available. So, you don’t need to waste your time searching for any stationery when you require them.
• Using storage space: Don’t litter your desk with items you barely use — store these things in drawers, cabinets, or shelves.

Tech Gadgets

One of the most creative and affordable home office organization ideas you can utilize is minimizing tech litter from your desk. You get more storage space by using metal or plastic gadget hooks to manage your cables and gadgets. Clips, catches, or holders are also available to keep everything organized and prevent any tangled messes on your workspace.

7 Home Office Organizers Every Remote Worker Must Have

1. Desk Organizer

Recommendation #1: Stackable Desk Tray Organizer 

The first part of home office organization is to collect and categorize items. The most significant complaints that office workers relate to are large stacks of papers, including bills, documents, files, and even random post-its. These items pile up so rapidly and are also very easy to lose. It would be best to get tiered trays like the HOYRR Desk Organizer.

This unit can work to store multiple items besides papers, like stationery, journals, or notebooks. People prefer stackable tiers to build so they can adjust accordingly. This desk organizer can be stacked up into two, four, or even six tiers that allow categorized organization based on urgency. Once you organize your documents with the trays, you get a neater-looking desk.

You can find plenty of other tier trays as desk organizers. But this specific model has a unique and chic aesthetic look that’s simple but eye-catchy.

Whether working remotely or in a hybrid setting, the organizer works for any desk, space, and building.

Recommendation #2: DESIGNA Stackable Desk Organizer

On the flip side, you may prefer a desk organizer that’s more heavy-duty. If you have a larger home office space or work in a hybrid model, you store multiple work items at home and the office.

This unit can handle large paper files, documents, pens, gadgets, etc. It also has extra partitions for pens, pencils, or other office supplies. DESIGNA is the pricier of the two mesh models since it also has additional file folders and cardholders.

The design isn’t the most modern, but its functionality makes it stand out. So, regardless of the home office environment, you’re getting a great organizer.

Recommendation #3: Yamazaki Desk Bar

The new age of home offices promotes minimalism for more productivity. Clutter and scattered pages don’t upgrade the most efficient workspace. This sleek model by Yamazaki is ideal if you want to save space at the home office or carry around a compact desk organizer on your nomad office journeys.

The desk bar works great for people who want something more compact and minimalistic. It provides essential organization and a design with clean lines to create an art piece rather than a regular desk organizer. The steel and wood give it a stylish look while allowing it to store anything from stationery to glasses and other gadgets like phones.

2. Cabinet/Shelf Organizer

Recommendation: LUMAMU 3 Tier Bamboo Desk Organizer 

Organizing the desk space is easy. But you have to accommodate your other office supplies, and sometimes a desk organizer isn’t enough. That’s where the LUMAMU three-tier bamboo shelf comes in. This shelf organizer has four partitions with three tiers to boost functionality and storage space.

Workers can also enjoy the bamboo material since it’s environmentally friendly. They can help add a touch of nature and style to an otherwise dreary workspace. The shelf and its two drawers also allow you to store multiple office supplies neatly for ease of use.

While not ideal for the hybrid or nomad worker, it’s a great addition to a home office space, especially if you want a specific style.

3. Drawer Organizer

Recommendation #1: BINO Multi-Purpose Drawer Organizer

Drawer organizers are also great for home organizing. The BINO model includes two packs of drawer organizers with four partitions each. The compartments come with a grippy rubber lining for people who favor an acrylic lining.

The drawers also have rubber footing to stop them from jiggling around when you open your drawer. And what makes it better is that the two packs are both quite affordable, so they’re sometimes a better organization option than bulky desk or shelf ones.

These drawer organizers are detachable, so you can enjoy them at the home office and use them in a hybrid and nomad capacity. While the design leaves something desired, it’s still convenient and promotes clean organization at an affordable price.

Recommendation #2: Expandable Bamboo Drawer Divider Organizers

Surprisingly, you don’t even have to purchase drawer organizers separately. Whether traveling, at the office, or working from home, you can make your organization system with these dividers.

Each one is made of bamboo to provide good durability and style, especially matching today’s home office wooden desks. The dividers are also detachable. You can use multiple partition variations to fit as many office supplies as possible.

The one drawback is that the dividers work well in more extensive drawers. So small compact office desks might not be able to fit them inside. But other than that, these are a great affordable drawer organizer option.

4. Tech Organizer

Recommendation: Vitacd Cable Clips 

You usually visualize paperwork and office supplies when you think of office clutter. But something many people overlook is the clutter your phones, computers, and printers leave behind.

Cables and chargers can also clutter your desks in the workspace, making working in a mess a hassle. You can use the adhesive cable clips to grip cords that always slide off the desk or fall out of reach.

They hold your cables firmly in place in an organized manner. You can also remove the self-adhesive back whenever you’d like, so you can use the wires however you please. The clips are easily portable, so you can set them up at home or take them on your travels or office.

Bonus: How To Organize A Home Office for Max Productivity

In addition to the above organizational tools, try the following tips to maximize your productivity in your home office:

1. Fix Your Lighting

Poor lighting can result in eye strain, weakness, anxiety, and other physical and psychological issues. One of the best things you can do to promote productivity is to change the lighting in your home office.

If doable, allow in some natural light—it provides good illumination, improves moods, and doesn’t cost a thing! If it isn’t possible to set your workspace up near a window, use indirect lighting instead. It’s still bright and won’t cause any eye strain.

2. Paint Your Walls

Color has a significant impact on our psyche and productivity. When it comes to working efficiency, white provides the worst environment. Like giving a variety of desk space setups, provide a variety of color environments suitable for different activities.

3. Control the Noise Level

Noise is the most common workspace issue, especially in a noisy neighborhood or home. Sound cancellation or white noise systems remove unwelcome sounds by producing sounds that can cover up noise pollution. Noise-canceling headphones are also an affordable alternative you can easily keep with you at home if you can’t get an entire system.

Check out some of our recommendations here: 7 Best Noise-Canceling Headphones For Productivity Boost

Conclusion

Organizing your home office is more critical than you may think. When you don’t manage the workspace, you can find that it affects your productivity. You can use multiple office organization strategies, like desks, shelves, drawers, and clips. The ideal combination makes your work more convenient and promotes productivity.

Featured photo credit: Slava Keyzman via unsplash.com

The post 7 Home Office Organizers Every Remote Worker Must Have appeared first on Lifehack.

Leadership Lessons: 5 Smart Pieces of Advice From a CEO

Leadership is a funny thing. Some people consider it an innate ability while others think it’s a talent you can develop with careful study and hard work.

But the truth is—based on my experience—it’s a mixture of both.

The reality is that not very many people are born leaders. At most, they have a disposition that makes them well-suited to working with and inspiring others.

But leadership goes well beyond those things. A good leader also has to know how to communicate, how to delegate, when to capitulate, and when to stick to their guns – things you can learn. Unfortunately, they’re also things that you can only learn with experience.

Consider getting these leadership lessons by finding a great mentor to guide you on the journey. While I won’t presume to be the be-all and end-all of mentors, I’ve had enough experience as a CEO to have learned some tough lessons along the way.

5 Leadership Lessons From a CEO

It is from those leadership lessons that I draw the following five pieces of advice on how to be an effective leader. You can take them or leave them, but I’m confident that they’ll be invaluable to you if you choose the former.

Here’s what they are:

1. Failure Is Often Productive, So Don’t Fear It

One of the first things that I learned in my leadership journey is that there’s no room for fear of failure. And there are a few reasons for that.

One is that fear, in all its forms, is crippling. It’s the kind of thing that will prevent a leader from taking bold and decisive action when it’s necessary. It’s also communicable.

When a leader lets fear creep into their decision-making process, it shows. Before long, the people you’re leading will allow your fear to infect their work.

Once that happens, your entire organization’s ability to innovate will suffer. After all, there’s always uncertainty in doing something new. And if you telegraph your fear of failure from the outset, nobody’s going to go out on a limb to find success.

Another reason is that fear of failure is simply wrong-headed. Failure is important. It’s how we learn. It’s how we make progress. If you’re not failing every now and then, you’re probably never leaving your comfort zone.

As Theodore Roosevelt so eloquently put it,^[1]

“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.”

In other words, failure is a sign that you’re striving to make progress—so don’t fear it, embrace it.

2. Give Credit Where It’s Due

In my travels as a CEO and entrepreneur, I’ve met more than my share of well-known business leaders and I’ve learned something very important by observing some of them at close range. It’s that the ones who lead the most effective teams are the ones who are the most selfless. They’re the ones who go out of their way to give credit to every team member when it’s due.

The ones who value the veneer of successful leadership—rather than the genuine article—are the ones who try and build a cult of personality around themselves. They’re the ones who take credit for everything their team does.

They’re the ones that are always looking for the next sound bite or media feature, and they’re also the ones that their teams secretly loathe working for.

When you make it a practice to give credit where it’s due, talented people will flock to you. Why? It’s because they’ll recognize that you’re running a real team, not a front for self-aggrandizement. And there’s no better way to inspire people to do their best work than to value that work.

In a world where competition for top talent is always fierce, a little honest recognition of the people you’re leading offers an immeasurable advantage.

3. Always Share Your Reasoning

Like it or not, being a leader means having the final say on every consequential decision. And no matter how much your team respects you, there’s always going to be one faction or another that disagrees with your choices. That’s just the reality of group dynamics. It’s a consequence of knitting a group of individuals into a team.

What matters most, however, is what happens after a decision is made.

Will the people who disagree with you silently root for you to fail? Or will they do everything in their power to make your decision work out for the best?

It turns out that how you handle the decision-making process in the first place makes all the difference in the world.

When you’re approaching a decision of import, don’t retreat into solitude. Discuss it with all of the relevant stakeholders and solicit their opinions. And when you make up your mind, don’t just share the answer. Let everyone involved know how you reached the decision.

You’ll find that explaining your reasoning goes a long way toward winning people over. At the very least, they’ll understand where you’re coming from and be more willing to see it your way.

In some cases, explaining your reasoning gives others the chance to point out things you might not have considered. And there’s nothing wrong with a leader changing their mind.

As long as everyone knows that you—and they—are pulling in the same direction, they’ll abide by whatever decisions you make.

4. Micromanaging Is Death

In my opinion, there’s nothing more catastrophic that a leader can do than micromanaging. It’s the opposite of leading.

Leading means delegating tasks and responsibilities and then trusting your team to get the job done. If you’re feeling the need to micromanage anything, something’s wrong, and you’d better find out what it is in a hurry.

Most of the time, leaders end up in this position for one of two reasons. The first is insecurity. When you’re responsible for the fate of a company, it’s not easy to take a hands-off approach. And yet, it’s what all good leaders do.

The second is that someone on your team isn’t getting the job done often enough that you’re perpetually concerned that a problem’s always around the corner. In this case, you can’t afford to dawdle.

Instead of micromanaging the situation, reach out to the team member that’s struggling.

But don’t chastise them. Ask them what’s holding them back. Ask them what kind of support they think they need to get back on track. And if nothing else works, replace them.

As a leader, you’re responsible for the whole team—and that includes making sure everyone is pulling their weight.

5. Honesty Is the Only Policy

The last bit of advice I have—and it’s an important one—is to make honesty your goal in everything you do.

I say that not to presume that you’d do otherwise if left to your own devices. I say it because being honest at all times when you’re a leader is far harder than you think.

If you don’t believe me, ask anyone who’s ever been laid off with little to no warning. I’d bet they’ll tell you that someone above them—their leader—either hid the truth of what was coming or deliberately misled them about it.

And the thing is, I understand why that happens.

As a CEO, you’re always balancing the needs of your company against the needs of the individuals that make it function.

Ask yourself this: If financial realities meant you’d have to let key employees go—people whose early departure could cripple your business—would you tell them the truth of the situation if it meant them departing earlier?

Plenty of people wouldn’t. But the best leaders trust their teams enough to tell them the truth.^[2]

The bottom line is that if you want to be a successful leader, the trust of the people you’re leading is essential. And once you lose it, good luck getting it back.

That’s why, for better or worse, you must be honest with the people you’re leading in every situation. If there’s bad news, share it. Let everyone know where they stand. If you can do that, you’ll be shocked at how far out of their way people will go for you.

It’s a way of letting your team know that they can count on you to look after their best interests. And they’ll reward you by giving you every shred of effort and hard work they’ve got to help create sustained success.

At the end of the day, that’s the true calling of a real leader. It’s to bring people together to do their utmost to accomplish shared goals—and that can’t happen without honesty.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, learning to be an effective leader requires more than having good people skills and being the boss. You also have to learn how to put yourself and the people you’re leading in a position to succeed at all times.

Sometimes, doing that will force you to leave your comfort zone or cede some of your authority to others. And that’s the true essence of leadership. It lies in having the confidence to take chances, trust your team, and put transparency and integrity above all else in everything you do.

If you can do all of those things, you’ll be the one giving out leadership advice before you know it.

Featured photo credit: Jason Goodman via unsplash.com

Reference

[1]	^	Wikisource: Citizenship in a Republic
[2]	^	Inc.: Instead of Laying off 20 Percent of His Company, This CEO Made an Unusual Decision. It’s a Lesson in Emotional Intelligence

The post Leadership Lessons: 5 Smart Pieces of Advice From a CEO appeared first on Lifehack.

How to Build a Digital Brain (Your Second Brain)

The human brain is a marvel with lots of capabilities. As more researchers study the brain, we get to know how much information the brain can store.

According to the Scientific American journal, The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. If each neuron could only help store a single memory, running out of space would be a problem.^[1]

What if you can not only store more data but easily retrieve them and make more room in the brain for problem-solving and creativity?

You can easily cope with the growing body of knowledge by building a second brain (what I refer to as a Digital Brain). Managing information effectively means understanding that you cannot use your head to store and remember every detail.

Information is essential in everything that you do. To develop a new skill, complete a project successfully in the workplace or start and run a business, you’ll need the right information. To achieve your career goals and improve the quality of your life, you need to manage information effectively.

Read on to find out how you can build a second brain to manage information effectively and achieve your goals.

What Is a Second Brain?

How many times have you struggled to remember an important point from an article or book you read recently? Have you ever wasted time looking for a file that you thought you had saved?

If you’ve ever found yourself in such situations, you are not alone. Millions of people across the world are struggling with information overload in our modern society. Information overload is overwhelming because it taxes your mental resources and leaves you anxious.

This is where the concept of the second brain comes in.

Building a second brain doesn’t involve creating a man-made copy of your mind or recreating the human brain. It involves building an external system that captures, organizes, retrieves, and archives the ideas and thoughts that come to mind. The second brain enables you to optimize how you record, organize and recall information.

While you can use analog tools to build a second brain, digital tools are superior in every way.

Digital tools are more portable and accessible compared to physical tools. Due to these advantages, we are going to focus on the digital ways to build a Digital Brain.

Digital Brain

A Digital Brain is similar to an external hard drive. You can store additional information if your hard drive is full. However, it records, organizes, and recalls. This means that you won’t have to struggle to improve your memory. This memory has a lot of elements.

From a computing perspective, memory involves three key elements:

• Recording — storing the information
• Organization — archiving it in a logical manner
• Recall — retrieving it again when you need it

Like a computer, having a Digital Brain will work in the same way as this memory framework to manage how information flows into and out of your brain.

For example:

When setting up a new account on a website, due to strict security settings, many sites require you to come up with complicated passwords with special characters that you don’t usually use.

As a result, you now have to memorize this new password (Record), associate it with the other passwords that are stored in your brain (Organize) and enter that password the next time you log in (Recall).

Even in this simple example, there are several parts in the process that will make it all too easy to forget. Because this new password is unique, we have a hard time recognizing it with our regular patterns. And if we don’t use the password every day, it’s easy to forget it after a few days. One day you’ll try to recall the password but enter the incorrect one over and over again.

It’s one of the most common things that happen. Is it because the information is complicated? Nope. A password is just a bunch of characters, numbers, and symbols.

It happens because our brains are not made to memorize. With a Digital Brain, you can delegate it to do the heavy lifting.

Why You Need a Digital Brain

Having two brains is optimal. The brain that you were born with is quite limited.

According to a Stanford Study, the cerebral cortex alone has 125 trillion synapses. The average adult human brain has the ability to store the equivalent of 2.5 million gigabytes of digital memory.^[2]

Building a second brain allows you to bridge the gap in your ability to learn and remember.

A second brain helps you to:

• Learn and store information effectively
• Recall information faster when required
• Organize information to reveal connections and patterns in your thought process

If you want to expand your knowledge and achieve your professional goals faster, you should build a Digital Brain. While building a second brain takes a lot of time and energy, you’ll get to manage your time effectively for important projects. You need a Digital Brain for the following reasons:

1. Utilizing Mental Resources Effectively

Like any other organ, your brain has limits. This is especially true when you are trying to solve a complex question or work on a task. If you are working on a work project and your mind keeps wandering, it will be quite difficult for you to concentrate and complete it on time.

The second brain helps you deal with distractions. Having a solid system in your life will help you solve complex problems quickly and stay on track in the long run. It’s easy to focus on your most important tasks when you are not thinking about other things.

2. Staying Organized

Life is all about balancing professional and personal obligations. With so many things to do at any one time, you can easily forget to work on important tasks. This is especially true if you are developing a new skill . A Digital Brain will help you stay organized and avoid a stressful life.

To succeed in life, you have to get things done. And to get things done, you have to be organized. Organizing the knowledge that you have will help you get ample time to work on your most important tasks.

You’ll get to complete your projects faster since you’ll be using valuable materials and effective methodologies. As you accomplish your goals, you’ll unleash your creative confidence. And this will allow you to take on bigger projects.

3. Establishing a Creative Process

Our modern world is driven by creativity. However, for millions of people across the world, creativity is mysterious and unpredictable. Immersing yourself in a pool of associations, triggers, questions, and ideas that others have collected over the years can spark your inspiration and creativity when you need it.

Building a second brain is the key to establishing your creative process and building habits that will help you achieve your biggest goals in life. You don’t have to be a perfectionist or overthink to unleash the creative process.

4. Transforming Your Knowledge Into Opportunities

This is the greatest age of entrepreneurship that has ever been witnessed. Today, you can publish your knowledge online, find an audience and create new streams of income.

Whether it’s a business or hobby, you’ll find yourself with lots of career options and countless opportunities. With ideas and insights at your fingertips, you can easily expand your economy with knowledge.

5. Improving Your Thinking and Uncovering Connections

In our modern economy, your career success depends on how you think. Instead of trying to be an overthinker or perfectionist, you can easily collect the best images, stories, metaphors, anecdotes, and observations in one place.

And this will improve your imagination and reveal connections between different ideas. Research studies have shown that improving your imagination can increase your chances of achieving your biggest goals in life. ^[3]

Your ability to uncover patterns will allow you to spot opportunities before others and stay ahead of the crowd.

6. Developing Credibility For a New Business Or Job

Your main asset is the knowledge you’ve gained over time as a result of experience. If other people cannot access this knowledge without taking your time, they’ll be stuck. Thanks to the rapid advancement of technology, you can make knowledge tangible.

This allows you to spend your time as you want while ensuring that others get the information that they need. When you build a Digital Brain, changing jobs or starting a new business becomes an opportunity to learn new things.

7. Utilizing Learning Resources Effectively

Millions of people are using online learning resources today to develop new skills and get more opportunities in life. There are a lot of online learning resources. They include books, forums, podcasts, articles, and webinars to name a few.

Most of these resources can be accessed for free or at fair prices. Breaking this knowledge into small bits and storing it can help you save a lot of time and money. Building a Digital Brain will help you stay on top of your learning process. Learning will become an enjoyable activity that will help you make rapid progress.

What Does It Feel Like to Have a Second Brain?

I’ve been managing my work and family life in a more productive and organized manner all these years thanks to my Digital Brain.

I don’t need to go through the trouble of painstakingly recalling passwords for my 1001 accounts. I never forget a single item from grocery lists my wife gives me.. I’ve never forgotten a meeting. And I’m able to retrieve and recall important information and documents easily, anytime and anywhere.

When you delegate the task of remembering to a second brain, you’ll minimize stress and anxiety because you’ll know what’s needed to be done with every piece of information.

You’ll gain confidence when dealing with information because nothing can be forgotten. You’ll manage your fears and anxieties better by getting them out of your mind and making solid plans to address them. You’ll make a sense of the volume of information that you encounter every day and have a clear mind.

How to Develop Your Digital Brain (Your Second Brain)

Does it cost a lot to build a second brain? The answer is no, and yes.

It doesn’t cost a lot of money, but it does cost some effort.

As mentioned earlier, develop your Digital Brain requires:

• Recording — storing the information
• Organization — archiving it in a logical manner
• Recall — retrieving it again when you need it

And we’ll dive into each of these elements:

1. Before Recording, Decide What Information Matters to You

To become an achiever in the modern world, you’ll need to manage huge amounts of information effectively. Every article, book, webinar, podcast, email, and text message has value. However, trying to remember everything is not only overwhelming but also impractical.

Think back to your purpose and goals, what information do you need?

• To grow
• To tackle your current challenges
• To achieve what you want

You need to consolidate ideas and develop a solid system that will help you achieve your goals. Developing your Digital Brain will allow your biological brain to imagine and create.

What You Can Do Now:

Take out your phone and go to your social media feeds. Unfollow stuff that provides information that doesn’t make you a healthier, happier, or smarter person. You don’t need unimportant stuff to overload your brain.

2. Record Information With the Right Tool

In most instances, we capture information without any preparation – we brainstorm ideas in a word processor, email ourselves an important note or take notes while reading.

However, we never use this information. Whether you are producing or consuming information, you need to store it in a centralized place such as Microsoft One Note, Notion, Evernote, and Bear to name a few.

These apps allow you to store small bits of information. You can save images, screenshots, hyperlinks, webpages, and PDFs. And access them using different devices.

Different kinds of information may require different tools:

• Note-taking — Note taking apps like Evernote is one of the best note-taking apps in the world. Users can add audio clips, Slack conversations, PDF documents, text notes, images, scanned handwritten pages, emails, and websites.
• Saving useful articles — Pocket is an amazing app that offers nice features and good organizational capabilities. You can sort your documents by image, video, and traditional text. Its new design has been optimized for the web.
• Information related to schedule — Calendar apps will not only remind you of your most important tasks but also help you manage your time effectively and boost your productivity. There are a lot of calendar apps. The best calendar apps are easy to access, have lots of amazing features, and can be accessed using multiple devices. They include Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Microsoft Outlook Calendar.
• Tasks — To-do list /checklist apps are essential if you want to stay on top of your tasks. When choosing to-do list apps, some of the factors that you should consider include ease of use, flexibility, your budget, and cross-platform compatibility. Some of the best to-do list apps include Google Keep, Google Tasks, and Apple Notes.

What You Can Do Now:

Download a To-Do app and put down everything you need to buy this week or month. Then, set deadlines and/or reminders based on the need of different items. Experience the benefit of not forgetting buying anything in your next shopping.

3. Organize Information With the Right Tool for Easy Retrieval

After capturing information, how should you organize it?

When you start collecting and organizing critical information, you’ll start noticing connections. An article on networking will help you understand online marketing. A business card that you saved a few years ago can help you follow up and get new clients.

You can easily organize information by choosing the right tools. Here’re some criteria in choosing the right tools:

• Is the tool available in different devices and that the information can be synced across the devices?
• Is it dedicated for personal use or for a team?
• Does it enable easy information retrieval, for example, with a search function?
• Does it allow easy categorization or data labelling?
• Does it allow users to create lists or collections for organization?
• Does it allow easy connections between ideas and information?
• Does it help with mind mapping and organize thoughts in a visual way?

There’re many ways to organize information and data effectively, if you want to learn more, check out this article.

For instance, at Lifehack, we use Notion to organize our playbooks and important databases. We choose Notion because it helps my team store different types of information in a very organized way. It allows us to create different collections of data, and share specific information with members according to their roles easily. It’s also available in different devices.

What You Can Do Now:

Download Notion and choose one of these templates to start organizing information — whether it’s for your work projects, or home projects!

Conclusion

Building a Digital Brain (second brain) allows us to save information systematically, come up with new ideas and turn them into reality. Your second brain serves as an extension of your biological brain. And it protects you from the effects of forgetfulness thus allowing you to take on bigger creative challenges.

One of the biggest challenges that people who love learning is feeding themselves information all the time without ever putting it to use. The experiences that would make their lives better get postponed every day until they are forgotten. Information only becomes power when it is put to use. But we can save that for another article: 7 Tips On Putting Knowledge Into Action

Featured photo credit: ian dooley via unsplash.com

Reference

[1]	^	Scientific American: What Is the Memory Capacity of the Human Brain?
[2]	^	Clinical Neurology Specialists: What is the Memory Capacity of a Human Brain?
[3]	^	National Library of Medicine: Imagining Success: Multiple Achievement Goals and the Effectiveness of Imagery

The post How to Build a Digital Brain (Your Second Brain) appeared first on Lifehack.

7 Easy Steps On How To Be A Better Mentor

Have you ever wondered how to become a mentor? Mentorship is a two-person relationship in which a more experienced or knowledgeable person guides someone less experienced or knowledgeable, resulting in a mentor and a mentee.

Mentors are important because they can be crucial in one’s personal and professional development. A good mentor will help you reach your goals and achieve success in life.

Similarly, being a good mentor allows you to touch other people’s lives and help them in their personal and professional development. But if you want to be able to do this, you first need to learn how to be an effective mentor.

7 Steps on How to Be a Better Mentor

There are seven most important steps on how to be a better mentor. They are the following:

1. Build communication
2. Listen
3. Set goals and determine what is the end goal
4. Gain trust
5. Motivate your mentee
6. Give feedback
7. Create opportunities for the mentee

You have to follow these seven important steps if you want to have a good mentor-mentee relationship. The best experts and mentors not only have flexible minds, but they also remain humble, and fine-tune and tweak their models to remain relevant to those around them.

1. Build Communication

Communication is very important in this relationship, especially during the first meeting with your mentee. You want to ensure that your mentee feels comfortable and relaxed.

The first meeting is very important because this is where you will be building the foundation of your relationship. Get to know each other, ask good questions, and let the mentee also ask you questions as well since they have to get to know you as their mentor. Let the conversation flow so that the mentee will also be more than willing to open up to you.

Be willing to share the skills, expertise, and knowledge that you have developed over time. You need to openly and honestly share as much as you can with your mentee.

If you are mentoring someone who is your colleague, you already know something about each other. You can build a conversation about work-related issues, which is a good start.

2. Listen

You don’t always have to give answers or ask questions. Sometimes, it’s important to just sit back and listen because the mentee wants to tell you something.

If your mentee needs your opinion or an answer to one of their problems, they will most likely ask you for your opinion or what you believe is the next best step. Otherwise, it is perfectly acceptable to sit back and listen and demonstrate that you understand where they are coming from.

As a mentor, you should ask questions that will reveal certain aspects of the mentee’s life—whether personal or professional—or whatever you are discussing and where your mentor-mentee relationship has taken you.

3. Set Goals and Determine What the End Goal Is

Remember, the reason for a mentee to come to you is that they trust that you can help them develop themselves, perform well at work, and be something different. For that, you want to set achievable goals for your mentee.

When your mentee achieves those easy goals, they will be more comfortable and open to new goals. As a mentor, you can help your mentee grow and develop in a specific area by agreeing on a specific task to be completed at a specific time or period and then moving forward by focusing on bigger and more ambitious goals. That is what mentorship is all about.

Another way to demonstrate transparency and build a relationship with your mentee is to share your own goals as well. If you share your personal or career goals with your mentee, they are more likely to take their own goals seriously because they have bought into your goals, and vice versa.

Setting goals with your mentee at the start of the relationship helps set the tone of the relationship and create focus in the relationship. It gives both the mentor and the mentee something to hold each other accountable for in the relationship. It establishes the groundwork for proactively addressing problems.

4. Gain Their Trust

Trust and respect supports the mentor-mentee relationship through transparent and honest communication. It’s easy to overlook trust when it’s present, but when it’s missing, it’s nearly impossible to think about anything else.

Build your mentoring program on a foundation of trusting relationships to ensure its success. As the mentor, you must earn your mentee’s trust for them to feel free to open up to you, and the only way to do so is through conversations with them, allowing them into your life, and being honest with them.

Meeting face-to-face is recommended by most mentors online as another way to build trust with your mentee. It can be done through emails and chats, but the most important one is to schedule regular face-to-face or video meetings.

5. Motivate Your Mentee

If you want to be a better mentor, you must learn how to encourage other people. If you see someone you are mentoring, the first thing you should say is something positive—some sort of acknowledgment, words of praise, or gratitude.

Praise choices and behavior rather than natural talents. It is far more powerful. That will encourage the mentee to continue doing what you just praised them for.

As a mentor, it is critical that you praise, acknowledge, and encourage people regularly. Send them an email as a reminder, or send them a video clip for them to listen to and later discuss at your next meeting.

Being a great mentor, you must always be willing to encourage others on the good they do, no matter how little it is. Keep in mind that the mentor-mentee relationship is a two-way street; you will learn something as well, so be open to receiving feedback.

You can also work on a task yourself and have your mentee outline what you did well and where you did not. Give them a chance to give you feedback in return. By doing so, you are giving your mentee more freedom, and motivating them to grow and be more willing to take on tasks.

6. Give Feedback

Great mentors take their time, have a plan, are extremely encouraging, and know when to offer corrections and instructions. This is crucial.

You must bring corrections while remaining kind and relaxed. You should look at the mentee and say, “This is a good way to do it, but how else can we go about this?” or “This is incorrect. Let’s look at this again, together.”

A great mentor must be able to provide constructive feedback while also actively listening to determine what the mentee needs for growth. The mentee should be open to feedback and use active listening to ensure that they understand what is being communicated to them.

You have to give constructive feedback so the mentee can learn. When giving feedback, plan the next step on how you’re both going to overcome the problems and analyze what you could have done differently in hindsight.

Always provide feedback when possible to help your mentee grow more quickly.

7. Create Opportunities for the Mentee

The goal is to assist your mentee in achieving personal and professional goals. Mentorship is important because it helps people realize their potential skills and development. This allows them to reach their goals more quickly than they would on their own. This is because it’s easier to tap into your potential with the support and guidance of an experienced mentor.

Mentees can broaden their network and gain access to new people through mentorship in a variety of ways. Mentors can share their connections with mentees directly.

A mentor may also introduce a mentee to one or two key individuals who can assist with the mentee’s career development or goals.

Benefits of Having a Mentor in the Workplace

• Mentees receive expert advice on how to navigate the company and perform better at work.
• Mentees who are new to the organization or position have a shorter learning curve than others, resulting in a smoother transition.
• Being a mentee entails receiving personalized career advice from a professional.
• Employee training, professional development, and culture change can all be achieved through mentoring programs. One or two team members can be put in place to ensure that the program gets off to a good start.
• The mentor can schedule regular opportunities for mentors and mentees to interact. These could be activities like group discussions, professional development seminars, team-building exercises, or guest speakers.

Final Thoughts

Mentorship is important because it helps people realize their potential skills and development. This allows them to reach their goals more quickly than they would on their own. Being a mentor does not only mean knowing the skills needed to succeed in life, it also means being able to communicate and share these skills with other people.

If you’re wondering how you can help other people by mentoring them more effectively, you should start with these seven easy steps on how to be a better mentor.

Featured photo credit: Austin Distel via unsplash.com

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