productivity Archives - Uno Deuce Multimedia

Guest Post: Achieving Work/Life Balance: Here’s What You Need to Know

Working professionals are constantly aiming for the “holy grail” of the corporate lifestyle: achieving “work/life balance”. Experts argue back and forth about whether this balance truly exists or if it is a marketing ploy by wellness and corporate bodies to manipulate exhausted employees. Regardless of your opinions of work/life balance as a concept, all you need to know is how to improve your own sense of balance between your work and life. Perfection is elusive, but taking realistic actions to get closer to feeling your best energy levels will pay off in your personal and professional life.

Know What You Want

One of the fastest ways to destroy your sense of work/life balance is to compare your own journey and lifestyle to someone else’s. You may not feel like you are missing out on time with your family until you see another parent getting more. You may feel like you have freedom in your job until you see someone else working from home. Comparison to others’ work/life experience is a damaging habit that can easily be broken. All you need to do is get crystal clear on what your ideal lifestyle looks like, and then avoid beating yourself up for anything outside of your vision.

Get clear on what you want by:

Deciding what hours you’d love to spend at work and at home
Specifying which healthy habits are priorities for you
Learning how many hours of sleep are important to function
Deciding what a social life means to you

Set Healthy Boundaries

Getting clear on the exact lifestyle you want prepares you to set healthy boundaries in order to achieve it. If you have been feeling overwhelmed about your work/life balance, there may be specific actions and conversations needed to change your situation. Be confident in these approaches rather than shying away because your lifestyle and energy levels will reward you for advocating for yourself. Learning about boundaries and practicing the conversations will help you be proactive in the future if your work/life balance is threatened.

Examples of setting healthy boundaries include:

Asking your boss for mental health days or better hours
Communicating with your partner that they need to support you more
Saying “no” to events and obligations that damage your mental health
Asking friends to be flexible with activities to support your rest and wellbeing

Ask for Help When You Need It

Once you’ve established your ideal work/life relationship and practice setting healthy boundaries, you may realize you still need extra support. Mental and physical health play a huge role in your work/life balance including your energy levels, mood, relationships, sick days, and more. Being proactive about your mental and physical health can save you time and money in the long term as you navigate challenges that interfere with your work and personal life. By learning to ask for help when you need it, you set the tone for an interactive support system that can help you function rather than fall behind personally or professionally.

Consider these resources to help protect your physical and mental health:

Licensed psychologist or therapist
Holistic treatment centers for serious disorders or addictions
Support groups and organizations
Regular visits with your doctor
Check ins with your loved ones to ask for support

Maximize Your Time and Energy

Learning how to maximize your time and energy is a skill that will allow you to do more in less time. Growing your productivity skills allows you to achieve more at work while also saving precious time to nurture your personal life. The more you can do to take care of yourself while staying competitive at work, the more sustainable your lifestyle will feel. Balance is less about staying busy and more about cutting corners to increase the time you spend doing what you want. Learning how to organize your tasks and time in a healthy way can also improve your mental health at work, giving you less stress to bring home at the end of a long day.

Practice these productivity hacks to maximize your efforts:

Time batch so you can complete tasks uninterrupted
Delegate tasks that can be done by someone else
Hire support for housekeeping or babysitting if you are able
Prepare your meals ahead of time for more time spent relaxing at home
Take your calls on a walk to include fitness into your work routine

Work/life balance is less about achieving an ideal and more about taking small actions that bring you more joy and relaxation. Feeling fulfilled and setting boundaries in work and life allow you the proper rest and mental health to thrive in both. Consider these ideas the next time you feel like your work/life relationship can use improvement, and remember that the best routine is simply the one you want.

Author Bio: Patrick Bailey is a professional writer mainly in the fields of mental health, addiction, and living in recovery. He attempts to stay on top of the latest news in the addiction and the mental health world and enjoy writing about these topics to break the stigma associated with them. Follow him on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+: @Pat_Bailey80; www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-bailey-writer; https://plus.google.com/112748498348796236865

Guest Post: Business Growth: Tools Every Company Can Use to Increase Business Opportunities

Running a business is no easy feat. From managing manpower, maintaining a budget, dealing with deadlines, and everything else that comes with running a business, things can easily become overwhelming. That’s why it’s important for businesses to take advantage of any tool that will streamline their business processes and increase opportunities.

The Top Tools for Today’s Businesses

The business world of today is all about tech. If your business isn’t making use of the top software and apps, you’re losing time and money. Take a look at the following 10 tools that your business should start using right away.

1. Google Analytics

With Google Analytics, business can determine where their traffic is coming from, the demographics of your audience, as well as other important metrics you need to calculate. Use this tool to see statistics on your key numbers, traffic drivers, and other analytic broken down by day, week, month, and year.

2. Dynamic Inventory

Businesses that find themselves wasting time trying to keep track of their inventory are in need of an inventory management system. Dynamic Inventory is an inventory software that allows businesses to flexibly and simply manage their inventory.With this software, companies have an affordable solution for managing products, purchases, sales, inventory, and vendors.

3. Odesk

Now more than ever, businesses are turning to freelancers to meet their business needs. With Odesk and hire a freelancer for a project or you can hire someone on for a long time role working as a contractor. Odesk has professional freelancers that have experience in every industry. With Odesk, businesses have the ease of outsourcing their business needs from the comfort of their own office. Similarly, Odesk makes it simple to pay freelancers, eliminating the hassle of regular payroll or any bank paperwork.

4. OmniFocus

Many startups and small businesses face the challenging aspect of organizing their business so it runs smoothly. OmniFocus is designed to help businesses create a better work/life balance. OmniFocus collects your data like to do lists, notes, and any impending projects. The software then starts to organize the best information, helping you reach your goals in a more timely and focused fashion. With OmniFocus, date will be saved on their cloud server, allowing you to access it at any point in time from any location.

5. MailChimp

MailChimp is an integral tool for businesses to spread the word about updates, new product launches, or to reach out to customers for their thoughts. With MailChimp, businesses can create email newsletters that will then be distributed to their current list of contacts. With it’s easy to use interface, businesses can create simple yet aesthetically pleasing E-blasts. These E-blasts play a significant role in sending large amounts of traffic to business’ sites, social media, and brick-and-mortar storefronts.

6. Square

The small credit card reader that is Square attaches to any tablet or smartphone and is great for handling transactions on the go. Small businesses and entrepreneurs that are based online benefit the most from Square. Instead of missing out on business due to a lack of a credit card machine, Square allows tech-savvy businesses the ability to cash in.

7. HootSuite

Businesses that are looking to improve their presence on social media are turning to HootSuite to stay on track. Instead of juggling these platforms and content creation by themselves, businesses use HootSuite to streamline every social media platform they use. With Hootsuite, business owners can schedule all of

their posts between every platform, allowing them to effectively plan their social media campaign within one app.

8. Unitrends

Disasters happen, especially in this digital age. Instead of falling prey to a ransomware attack, deleted files or the havoc a natural disaster may cause, businesses should turn to ensure their business and data are safe. Unitrends offers sophisticated data recovery software and business continuity solutions that allow companies to put together an effective disaster recovery plan.

9. LastPass

LastPass is this generation’s solution to the problem of confidentially storing and sharing passwords. With all of the security breaches and information hacks, businesses must make confidentiality a priority. That’s where LastPass comes in. With LastPass, businesses can enjoy a seamless Internet experience by syncing all of their passwords to their LastPass password. Once logged into LastPass, you’ll have access to your emails, servers, websites, and more.

10. WordPress

While many people may debate the popularity of blogging in today’s world, businesses looking to drive traffic to their sites know how important blogging is. With WordPress, businesses can easily tie their blog to their website or make their blog their main site. Offering millions of templates, personalized plugins, and visual flexibility, WordPress is a leader in the blogging world for a reason.

Frequent blogging is a huge benefit to businesses. With well-written articles, businesses can establish themselves as an authority in their industry. Moreover, with blog posts designed for SEO, businesses can drive users using search engines to their websites.

Whether you have a small business or a successful company, it pays to use some of the best business tools on the market today. Be sure to try a few of these suggestions if you’re looking for ways to reach more people, boost your productivity or build a better business overall.

Susan Ranford is an expert on career coaching, business advice, and workplace rights. She has written for New York Jobs, IAmWire, and ZipJob. In her blogging and writing, she seeks to shed light on issues related to employment, business, and finance to help others understand different industries and find the right job fit for them – Strategics360.com

5 Apps That Help Our Productivity

We produce a lot of content. So, not only to we have to keep track of the content we publish, but what we are out producing as well. To keep track of the production pipeline if you will. There are several tools that we use to help us with that. Tools that we could not possibly live without at this point.

The best part of these tools as well is they are cloud based and so they can be used both by mobile and desktop. Some are just web and mobile apps and others can be stand alone applications. They send all of us notifications when things change. Which makes the constant communications key to know where we are and what needs to happen next. Let’s get into these apps.

1. Dropbox. This is the most indispensable tool that we use. We use this as an interface with clients to get feedback on videos, files to send to my accountant and general storage internally. We have a certain folder structure set up so that we know where to get files and where to send files from.

2. Wunderlist. This tool allows you to know what tasks are coming up and what tasks have been completed. The sharing function of this tool allows you to be notified what’s been done and when. I love this tool.

3. Evernote. We use this all the time for transfer of notes and to create something on the fly for different departments. It also houses all of our processes for quick reference and the sharing option is key for that. We keep all of our meeting notes on here for quick reference.

4. Trello. This is where our pipeline sits. This allows us to know what projects are coming and where they sit in the process. This works for both production and publishing. We constantly are in this tool creating notes for corrections and keeping abreast of where the video should be published next from week to week.

5. Slack. This is our quintessential communication tool. No matter if you need to communicate with an individual or as a group. It has supplanted any other group texting tool. It also aggregates notifications from our other tools, such as Trello and Wunderlist so that you get pinged there as well to know what else has been going on. This tool has been the MVP since we put it in play earlier this year.

So that is the comprehensive list of tools that we use to help with our productivity needs. What tools do you use to communicate, plan and succeed with?