Blog : productivity

Team insight180’s Summer Book Round-Up
insight 180 team

Team insight180’s Summer Book Round-Up

In honor of National Book Lover’s Day, we created a summer reading roundup of the books that are keeping us sane and happy this summer. Read on for our suggestions of great beach reads this summer and enjoy a little mental health vacation (even if you can only squeeze it in after a long day at the office).

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66 Days: The Time You Need to Form Habits
Wendy Baird

66 Days: The Time You Need to Form Habits

66 days…that, my friends, is the magic number of days it takes to form a habit, so the experts say. If you have the discipline to make a change, chances are it will take a little over two months to add it to your routine. There are so many tasks we already do on auto-pilot: brush teeth, make coffee, walk the dog, check email. These are things that don’t get missed because they are ingrained in our minds, bodies and routines.

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Overwhelmed? Seven Apps That Might Help
Wendy Baird

Overwhelmed? Seven Apps That Might Help

As another September approaches and the beautiful summer slips away, my head is exploding with ideas and possibilities. As much as I’m trying to hang on to the peace and calm of a wonderful unplugged vacation hiking in the beautiful High Sierras in July, I’m also energized by the thought of fall. We have actually had a very busy summer, a little less laid back than some, but we’re counting our blessings for being busy with some great clients.

So with the last quarter approaching — our last chance to pull out all the stops and exceed the goals set at the beginning of the year — I can work myself up into overwhelm. Sometimes I feel like I’ve got too many ideas! Add to that the daily demands of running a business, servicing clients, writing blog posts, speaking, networking, AND having a life outside of the office, it can feel a little overwhelming. So many ideas and meetings and calls require more focused concentration and organization, admittedly, not my natural strong suit.

So aside from doing the things I know help me be more present and productive each day — meditation, walking/working out, singing, gardening — I’ve also been looking into some apps that might help me — and maybe you — get organized. Still researching, but here’s a few I’m considering and worth pointing out.

  • Addappt: Addappt continually updates your iOS address book as well as updating your contacts when personal information changes. This automatic, and convenient, feature is great for the fast-paced business world, allowing you to focus on more important business tasks. While it seems like another one of those apps that aim to replace a basic function already built into the iPhone (why bother if I already have an address book?), it automatically updates contact information among its users, a convenience many people on the go will appreciate. However, the app is only available for iOS, therefore limiting other audiences who might be eager to give it a try.
  • Neverlate: Not just a navigation app, NeverLate helps you 24/7 by telling you when to leave home, work or any other place in order to get to your destination on time. Traffic issues? No worries, NeverLate will alert you based on the traffic situation telling you when to leave to be on time. You can always see the current traffic situation, including comparative traffic and what the drive time is right now on your regular routes. Pretty cool.
  • Evernote: Still use post-it notes and hand-written lists? Evernote draws me with the cool video demos that promise to give me the ability to sync all my notes, lists and reminders across any platform to one place. And then reminding my phone, computer or tablet when it’s time to do something. It looks fantastic, claiming it will help with research, keep sketches on file, plan your next vacation, but it also looks like it would take some time to learn and get used to. There are many features that I don’t know if I’d take the time to fully explore (as a creature of bad habits already)! But maybe. . .
  • Any.do: Any.do is an award-winning task list app. Winner of Apple’s 2012 “intuitive touch,” and Android best app 2012, for its clean & simple to use design and innovative features. This To Do list app looks simple and clean, and might just help me get rid of the manual notes. This also reminds me of another neat app called TeuxDeux, which has a beautiful interface (important to the designer in me). Simplicity is beautiful, so these both show promise.
  • Pocket:  I already use this app and love it. It’s a service formerly known as Read it Later for creating and saving a reading list that can be accessed online or offline. What I love, is that if I begin to get distracted by going deeper and deeper into the web, I can stop, click the “pocket” on my web browser and save the page (and categorize) to go back and view or read later. This is great for saving TedTalks, articles written by colleagues, anything that might distract you from the task at hand. And it syncs with my GetPocket iPhone app.
  • Tempo: A smart calendar app that syncs your calendars with the people involved in each event, as well as the correspondence with those people. Tempo connects with your existing accounts and displays information about your schedule for the day, pulls contact information from LinkedIn and correspondence information from your email. Also, the days of digging through emails for documents is over. Tempo collects all relevant documents and connects them with the corresponding meetings and topics. Tempo does a wonderful job explaining how the app works through the story below—look for the subtle dig at apple’s calendar!

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    Incentives: Dulling or Enhancing The Creative Process?
    Wendy Baird

    Incentives: Dulling or Enhancing The Creative Process?

    What drives one person to succeed and achieve is likely to be completely different than what drives the next. Therefore, not surprisingly there is something to be said about lack of performance in the workplace. In an effort to combat this problem, employees are often offered incentives, increased pay or bonuses for example, in order to spark the flame of creativity and get the ball rolling on productivity. However, what most leaders do not realize is that incentives are scientifically proven to dull thinking and hinder creativity. Scientists report that while incentives seem like the most logical way to boost productivity, not only are they unreliable but they also harm the process.

    Daniel Pink, thought leader and author of A Whole New Mind and his new book Drive, about motivation in business, was one of the speakers at last year’s TED Conference. This link is a glimpse into some of his findings on Motivation and worth the 20 minutes to watch. He talks about how there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. After some compelling examples and insights, he concludes that motivators seem to work only in surprisingly narrow circumstances; that incentive rewards often thwart rather than enhance creativity; and that unseen intrinsic drive to do something that matters is the key to high performance.

    From a creative’s perspective, I can relate. While an incentive (financial or otherwise) seems nice, what really drives this shop is to dive into an issue, diagnose it properly and come up with the best solution. Check out the TED video featuring Pink.

    –Wendy

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