Turn Off Outlook's New-Message Alerts

Via PC World

by Rick Broida

Wait, did you read that right? Turn off Outlook's you've-got-mail alerts? Why on Earth would you want to do that? In a word: productivity.

Think about it: New messages are constantly flowing into your inbox, and by default Outlook alerts you to each and every message.

That's not much different from a co-worker popping his head into your office every five minutes to ask a question. Talk about productivity-killing interruptions!

Consequently, you might want to try life without the alerts. Disabling them is easier than you might think:

1. Choose Tools, Options, and click E-mail Options.

2. Click Advanced E-Mail Options.

3. Uncheck the box next to Play a sound.

4. Uncheck the box next to Briefly change the mouse cursor.

5. Uncheck the box next to Show an envelope icon in the notification area.

6. Uncheck the box next to Display a New Mail Desktop Alert.

Click OK and you're done! Outlook will continue to fetch (or receive) new mail at regularly scheduled intervals, but without any of the usual interruptions.

In other words, you can review your inbox on your schedule, not Outlook's. Give this a try, then let me know if you prefer working this way.

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More Powerful Than You Know

THE UN-COMFORT ZONE with Robert Wilson

“Writing is not a job; it’s a hobby!” thundered my father when I told him my plans for college. “You need to get a profession: medicine, law, engineering or accounting.”

I cheerlessly acquiesced and enrolled in a Pre-Med program, but at the end of my first year, after struggling through Chemistry, I changed my major to Philosophy. When I told Dad, he grunted, “That and a dime will get you a cup of coffee.” He passed away shortly after that but his words echoed in the back of my mind for years.

After graduation I searched for a job in writing. At the same time, I wrote short stories like crazy, and sent them off to dozens of magazines. Years passed and I failed to find a job in writing, so I supported myself by waiting tables and bartending. Meanwhile, rejection letters from the magazines began piling up, and I was beginning to get discouraged.

Then one day, I met a friend for a beer in a bar near the campus of my alma mater. When I visited the restroom, some graffiti written on the wall with an arrow pointing to the toilet paper dispenser caught my eye. It read: “Bachelor of Arts Degrees – take only one, please!” Rather than laugh, I grimaced and thought, “Boy, does that sound like my Dad.”

Five years had gone by, and other than a few freelance jobs writing advertising copy, I had not made a penny from writing. I was beginning to re-think my life, when I recalled the encouraging words from my ninth grade English teacher.

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Robert Evans Wilson, Jr. is a motivational speaker and humorist. He works with companies that want to be more competitive and with people who want to think like innovators. For more information on Robert's programs please visit www.jumpstartyourmeeting.com

To Sleep, Perchance to Analyze

Via The New York Times

By DAVID POGUE

In the last nine years, I’ve reviewed nearly 1,000 products for The New York Times. Can you guess what every single one of them has had in common?

All of them were intended for use while you’re awake.

Today, the exception.

Studies show that about half of all Americans don’t get the recommended amount of sleep. ( For adults it’s seven to nine hours.) And as we stumble our way through each day, groggy and cranky, we pay a terrible price in our relationships, productivity and health.

Science has learned all kinds of things about sleep. We now know, for example, that during the night, we experience several cycles of different kinds of sleep. There’s REM (rapid eye-movement) sleep, which restores and refreshes our brains. There’s deep sleep, which restores and refreshes our muscles. There’s light sleep, which is better than nothing. And there are all those times we wake up but don’t even remember we slept.

Now, to find out why you feel so wretched in the morning, you could go to a sleep lab, pay thousands of dollars, and spend the night hooked up to wires and sensors. Or you could pay $400 and get yourself a Zeo alarm clock.

That’s expensive, sure, but this one does a few things your basic Wal-Mart special doesn’t do.

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Shock! Offices Lose Productivity to Facebook - study

Via Reuters Blogs - USA

Posted by: Yinka Adegoke

We think you saw this one coming: Employers are losing a whopping 1.5 workers per 100 in employee productivity to the social networking phenomenon that is Facebook.

This number was uncovered by the clever folk at Nucleus Research, who surveyed 237 randomly selected office workers. They discovered that some of you spend more time than you probably should poking, adding and making inane comments on friends’ pages.

In fact some of you may be horrified to learn that Nucleus is advising corporations to consider restricting Facebook access at work to reclaim that productivity — all the more important in a global recession and rising unemployment they say.

Among the findings from Nucleus’ interviews with said randomly selected workers:

•Nearly two-thirds of those who have Facebook access visit the site during working hours.
•Those who visit Facebook at work do so for an average of 15 minutes each day.
•87 percent of those who use Facebook at work couldn’t define a clear business reason for using it.
•Of those who do visit Facebook at work, 6 percent never use it anywhere else, meaning one in every 33 workers built their entire Facebook profile during work hours.
•There are also serious security concerns as IT departments can’t monitor Facebook messages.

It wasn’t immediately clear if Nucleus’s survey took lunch-break time into account (some people might only visit Facebook during break-time). Either way, one imagines if a survey of 237 workers can ever be used as an adequate sample, then there will be a lot of unhappy workers out there in the office world, should all those IT departments take Nucleus’ advice. As Nucleus concludes in its press release:

Companies should evaluate their Facebook policy and the cost to the organization in allowing access to Facebook, as today blocking Facebook may actually result in a 1.5 percent gain in productivity.

In other words blocking Facebook will give you 1.5 more workers for every 100 workers. Nice.

The Hawthorne Effect

Via Poker News

By Dr. Tim Lavalli

The Hawthorne Effect describes an actual mistake discovered by some researchers. The original study was attempting to discover the relationship between worker productivity and working environment. The first variable introduced was lighting. The question was: would better lighting mean higher worker output, and then would poorer levels of lighting reduce worker output?

At first the data was all over the board, there was higher productivity with less light and then more with more light and then even more with normal lighting. It began to seem like lighting made no difference, yet the worker productivity was up and then down based on something else, or was it nothing at all? This sort of information is not uncommon in research settings because researchers have not controlled for all of the elements in the environment.

At some point one of the junior assistant researchers noticed that the productivity levels of the workers went up when the researchers were observing them. It didn’t matter what the level of lighting was, it was the attention of the researcher — even the mere presence of the researcher — that was affecting the productivity of the workers. Hence, we have the Hawthorne Effect, which is defined as changes in behavior3 by test participants related to the attention they are receiving from the researchers.

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