The Source of Practical Action: What Is the Real Meaning of Thinking Smart?

        There have been a number of debates about what “smart thinking” truly means and how people can apply it correctly to their lives and business endeavors in order to achieve quick, positive results.

 

        Some, of course, would argue that, in order to be a smart thinker, you have to be able to make all the decisions yourself, especially if you’re a business owner. However, as many have learned from their own experience (the hard way), you need to become thoroughly informed before making any type of decision – whether by reading up on it or listening to your own company’s experts.

 

Strategic and Practical Thinking

 

        When it comes to elaborating on what “thinking smart” means, especially when talking about business endeavors, many are unable to explain the term.

 

        The simplest explanation, however, has to do with planning your best strategy while keeping your goals and resources into perspective. This means that:

 

  • You need to establish a practical goal or set of goals for whatever you want to achieve.
  • Afterwards, you need to keep all resources into account and use them to the best of your ability. Just like you don’t dip your finger in ink to use it as a pen, don’t be deaf to the opinions of experts who have studied a particular aspect and may know a lot more about it than you.
  • Timing is of the essence, so a clear boundary needs to be made between your work and leisure related activities.
  • Use your time intelligently to broaden your view and learn more about the niche your company operates in.
  • All distractions and activities that would hold you back from getting into the “zone” during the time you’ve allocated for your work or project need to be set aside.

        Essentially, then, smart thinking simply refers to the ability to channel your thoughts in such a way that you can resolve current problems related to what you can or should actually do.

 

        If, for artists, smart thinking might be related to their ability to refine their technique and connect to their creative side, for a business owner or an entrepreneur, the same principle applies, but to an entirely different set of mental tools and resources – namely, strategic, precise thinking and the ability to assimilate the correct information in order to properly outsource certain tasks and direct the work done by employees.

 

Adopt and Adapt

 

        Of course, when following such a path, nothing is set in stone, and you will find, sometimes, that market trends shift, employees get sick and all manner of unforeseen events occur that will set you back on your work.

 

        When this happens, the meaning of smart thinking shifts yet again, having to do with the ability to adapt to the current situation as quickly as possible.

 

        As such, larger goals may become smaller and damage control may be needed, but, with the right dosage of adaptability and flexible thinking, you can contain any potential disaster that may be in store for the company.

 

        To put it simply, then, you don’t really need to be an expert in all fields to think smart. All you really need is a small dose of awareness mixed with just the right amount of flexibility, confidence and a willingness to listen to others’ opinions.

 

A Complementary Perspective on Multitasking and Its Relationship with High Level Productivity

        In this day and age, being able to multitask is seen by many as a crucial requirement, especially in the fast paced world of business, where productivity is everything. But how productive is multitasking, and can it truly help you get everything done better and faster?

 

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Multitasking

 

There are, first of all, many perceived advantages to multitasking, especially when it comes to speeding up simple tasks:

  • When handling simple tasks one at a time, you can lose a considerable amount of time. Multitasking is a very good alternative for getting them done faster.
  • Even if you don’t make much progress, by multitasking, you can move several projects forward at the same time.
  • Multitasking will keep you active and help avoid mental stagnation – especially when it comes to long term projects.
  • You can reduce the effort required by working on the same project for hours on end.
  • Technology allows you to easily start and manage multiple tasks at the same time with minimal effort.
  • Finally, multitasking also helps you learn to cope with chaotic situations when you need to.

Now that we’ve seen the positive points, here are the negative ones:

  • Without a doubt, the main disadvantage of multitasking compared to mono-tasking is that it can diminish the quality of work, especially in the case of large, complicated projects.
  • Researchers have shown that, when shifting between tasks, it takes a considerable amount of time for the brain to adapt, since it needs to replace the rules of the previous task with those of the new one.
  • Multitasking can also be somewhat dangerous when, for instance, you’re trying to get something done while driving your car.
  • According to some studies, continually distracting yourself from one task and starting another can lead to slower responses, as well as issues such as loss of attention and memory.

Bringing the Two Together

 

        Since there have been so many controversies and discussions about multitasking and whether or not it actually is productive, some have suggested the idea of bringing mono-tasking and multitasking together, arguing that the only difference between them is structural, and can be bridged through associative thinking.

        

        The idea here is that you’re not actually doing many things at once. Instead, you’re attempting to complete similar mini-tasks belonging to different projects in the same general time period.

 

        For example, if you have a couple of hours at your disposal to manage your itinerary for the rest of the week, it might also be a good time to write those emails and text messages to friends or coworkers letting them know when you’ll be free.

 

        Of course, while there’s no reason to interrupt your scheduling session for a moment to type a few short text messages, trying to manage 3-4 difficult tasks at the same time may prove to be far more difficult, so you’ll need to assign them accordingly.

 

        Multitasking can be very efficient if you have a good sense of timing – and if seemingly stressful and chaotic circumstances don’t bother you. However, you always need to know when to stop and take a deep breath, while keeping things into perspective and reorganizing all your projects so that they can fit your allocated time and your time management abilities.

 

Preparing for Productive Work – How Do You Get in the Zone?

        Preparing for work or for any significant event or activity you may want to take part in is not always easy. There are many people who have lost great opportunities for advancement simply because they were nervous, anxious or they just didn’t feel ready.

 

        Of course, if you don’t know how to let go of all that and reach the elusive “zone” yet, there are many ways for you to learn that without much effort. Nevertheless, you will need to find your own unique way to reach that place where you utterly and completely lose yourself in your work.

 

Remember: Everyone Is Different

 

        Everyone has their own preparation rituals: politicians preparing for a speech, athletes getting into the “winning mindset” before an important race or artists who are just starting a new sculpture or painting, all have a specific way of reaching the precise state of being that would allow them to perform successfully.

 

        If you have observed these rituals, however, many of them may have seemed entirely different. Some simply sit still and meditate, while others like to repeat simple and empowering mantras, concentration methods or gestures to help them get into the proper mindset for the upcoming event.

 

        Similarly, you may also have your own original way of dealing with your insecurities and empowering yourself to feel strong and confident before a meeting, a performance or even when you just wake up to go to work.

 

        Of course, what works for others may not work for you, but, fortunately, there are a number of ways to find out exactly what the best approach in your case is and to fully exploit it.

 

Pinpointing a Favorable Mental and Emotional State

 

        The easiest way to get into a productive state is to think of a time when you have managed to use your cognitive and creative skills in harmony, to the best of your abilities and to get a difficult task done with ease.

 

        For example, this may include a time when you have convinced a new client to sign an important deal, when you won an important game at a chess tournament or simply when you have managed to finish your work earlier than usual.

 

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to determine exactly how you felt during those times:

  • What motivated and inspired you before the event started?
  • How focused and calm were you?
  • How did your feelings progress through it?
  • Was there a more challenging period you had to handle? If yes, how did you deal with it?
  • What was your response to any other people who were involved?

        By answering these questions, you will know exactly what your ritual needs to lead to and be able to break everything down into smaller goals that you can reach through a blend of breathing or relaxation exercises, working out, surrounding yourself with certain objects or anything else that you can think of.

 

        Although you can find your “groove” and set up a detailed ritual, you will not always know when you are ready or whether it will work in each case. Nevertheless, if you remain conscious about the way you feel when you are not entirely in the “zone”, it will be very easy to tweak small parts of your preparation in order to compensate for any seeming lacks.

 

Simple and Practical Techniques for Completely Eliminating Your Unproductive Days

Hidden In Plain Sight: Why We Have Unproductive Days

 

Even though many believe that circumstance has a large role to play in “making” you unproductive, people who have reached a certain level of success have always known that there’s much more to it than that.

 

The basic idea here is that your own attitude and mindset can be your greatest friend and your worst enemy; this means that most people end up wasting their time with subconsciously chosen thoughts and habits that reduce their daily productivity.

 

In order to counter this, a positive decision towards change, consciously reinforced over and over again, is the key, the solution to make your time increasingly more productive and pleasant with each passing day.

 

A Few Straightforward Steps for Becoming More Productive

 

In many cases, becoming more productive simply requires a shift in your perception towards being more decisive and taking charge of your daily routine. In order to achieve this, you can follow these simple steps:

  1. Make a simple list of all the major things that occupy your time during a typical day;
  2. Ask yourself “which of these actually helps me be more productive?”, then make a small sign next to the ones that aren’t of any help.
  3. As you look at all the things that are diminishing your productivity, some of them will be necessary – such as eating – while others are simply a reaction to outside stimuli – such as spending an hour changing TV channels before finally deciding to go to bed.
  4. Try to find the true reason for these activities no matter how “bad” they look. You might find, for example, that the reason why you arrive at work late is because you’re worried about an upcoming meeting.
  5. Consciously replace thoughts such as these with their opposites. For instance, if you spend a lot of time thinking about others’ opinions regarding your work, consciously reinforce an idea such as: “I am constantly learning and doing the best work that I can under these specific circumstances.”

What Will All This Accomplish?

 

As you continue to discover the ideas and habits that stand in your way, you will easily be able to lessen their hold on you. This way, not only can you let go of past activities that seemed to keep you tied up almost all day, but you will also find a lot of extra energy to dedicate to your work and projects.

 

The key here is to become aware of the way you are influenced to react to outside suggestions and tendencies. You can then consciously shift your perception to exclude those past reactions and deliberately fashion a more active, engaging and productive approach.

 

Regardless of whether you choose these methods or any others you might find in books, on the internet or on a life coach’s website, it is always crucial to remember that, when taking charge of your own productivity, you are no longer bound to react to the seemingly negative things around you. Instead, you will slowly begin shaping them into the successful life you have always dreamed of.

 

The Certain Way to Eliminate Distractions and Their Hold on Our Day-to-Day Activities

People wanting to integrate a more productive and fulfilling work schedule into their daily lives have long been searching for ways to reduce the influence of common distractions. What are the most well-known distractions, though, and more importantly, how can we counter them as efficiently as possible?

 

Sources of Distraction

 

Although outside noises, family visits and other “regular” and often unavoidable interruptions can account for many types of distractions, recent research shows that the most prevalent distractions these days come from electronic and mobile gadgets.

 

Leaving on your TV, computer, phone or tablet can often account for interruptions that may set you back more than an hour on your schedule.

 

Also, one particular study has proven that you can waste up to 20 minutes while working just by answering a simple phone call, and industry studies clearly indicate how employees are regularly interrupted about once every 15-20 minutes by calls or social media notifications.

 

Tips on How to Effectively Deal with Distractions

 

Although distractions of every type have literally become a part of our daily life, and some might say that they are unavoidable, studies have shown that some coping and avoidance methods geared to help you deal with certain types of distractions have proven to be quite effective in improving productivity, both at the workplace and when it comes to household chores or home projects.

 

Based on the details regarding the above mentioned distractions, here is a small set of guidelines on how to prepare for a productive work session and keep it productive in spite of all distractions:

  • First of all, before sitting down to start work, make sure your phone and any other mobile devices, as well as your social media pages or any other electronic means of communication are turned off.
  • Begin by organizing your tasks into a clear step-by-step process that you can refer to whenever you get interrupted.
  • When organizing your workflow, set similar tasks closer together. That way, you won’t have to interrupt your work in order to get acquainted with new types of tasks that often.
  • You can use some relaxing (yet invigorating) music to block out unwanted sounds such as outside traffic noises.
  • Avoid interrupting the workflow for trivial tasks by taking care of all of them before sitting down at your desk.
  • If you’re working from home and you need to keep close track of your phone calls and messages, ask family member to manage them for a couple of hours while you’re taking care of your project.

 

The Bottom Line

 

Of course, coping with distractions can be a very valuable skill. However, an even better method of eliminating distractions from your day-to-day lives completely is to simply choose a work area that’s already calm and peaceful and a timeframe when disturbing noises or unexpected interruptions are less likely to be a problem.

 

Also, people who have taken the time to research the impact of distractions on a busy work schedule and managed to follow some of the tips presented here have found that they not only gained an extra couple of hours to account for their productivity, but have also been able to finish their work with far more diminished levels of stress or anxiety.

 

Should I Be Obsessing About Load Times?

Google has announced that page loading time will now be included in the ranking criteria. As a consequence, a lot of SEO specialists are now obsessing over speed. A webmaster from Michigan is skeptical about this intense focus, though. He personally thinks that load times will have very little influence on the final rankings. Is this a correct assessment or should he be more worried like the other guys?

 

Matt Cutts says that this change is part of an effort by the company to promote better user experience. People don’t want to wait forever for a page to load so they are trying to encourage fast load times. Let’s assume that we have two identical sites with exactly the same content. However, one loads faster than the other does. All things being equal, Google will put the faster site ahead of the slower site in the rankings.

 

Yet this type of similarity is rarely seen in real life. There are a lot of differences between websites and Google has to factor those into the equation. Google considers over 200 signals for ranking. Speed is just one of them. Webmasters should strive to get a good balance instead of obsessing over a solitary factor.

 

What Is The Best Way To Check Your Own Site For Keyword Rankings?

Most site owners want to rank highly for certain keywords. They will try a lot of methods to achieve this goal. Once they are done, many are unsure how they should test their work. Some will simply type the keywords on a search box and see how their sites rank. In this video, Tommo from London wants to know if there is a better way.

 

Matt Cutts says that this straightforward test is effective for this purpose. However, he would like webmasters to rethink their SEO strategy. Rather than focusing their efforts on a few trophy keywords, they should look at their server logs and check the phrases that people are already using to arrive at their sites. They should concentrate on optimizing for these established phrases instead.

 

Matt also wants webmasters to think about metrics other than ranking. The conversion rate, for instance, may be even more vital to the business. They should study this and try to increase the percentage of visitors who actually end up buying their products, subscribing to their newsletter, or whatever it is that they ultimately want to achieve.

 

What Signals Are Used In Ranking Other Than PageRank?

Guillaume is bothered by the constant chatter about PageRank. From what he knows, it is just one of the many different signals currently being used to determine ranking. Getting obsessed with it is therefore counterproductive. Although Google has stated this fact many times, he thinks that it would be good for Matt Cutts to issue a public reminder one more time.

 

Matt affirms that PageRank is indeed one of over 200 ranking signals. It should be treated as a small fraction of the whole. Fixating on PageRank alone is not advisable when there are plenty of other signals that require as much attention. He mentions the anchor text, page content, page title, header elements, and keyword proximity as examples. Matt asks webmasters to study these things and make an effort to optimize them as well.

 

While he cannot enumerate all of the signals, he says that most of them are products of common sense. Webmasters should focus on creating a good website and high ranking will follow. For Google, the challenge is to weigh each in such a way as to produce relevant results for every query.

 

How Can A Website Compete Using Only White Hat Techniques?

Some webmasters are getting discouraged because spammers are dominating their industries. While Google does its best to act on spam reports, it could take months before concrete actions are taken. How are they supposed to compete using only white hat techniques when their rivals are not playing fair?

 

Matt Cutts points out that “black hat techniques” usually exploit weaknesses in the system. Once Google makes the corrections, their sites will fall very quickly. They are constantly being hunted down and they will not prosper for a sustained period. Matt encourages webmasters to pursue white hat techniques and slowly foster a good reputation. Over time, they will overtake the spammers in the rankings and lead them by a mile.

 

Webmasters should not hesitate to call Google’s attention if spammers are swarming their niche. They could blog about the incidents or even tweet Matt about the situation. The Google Spam Team will welcome the feedback. Another way to get ahead of the black hats is to create high quality viral content. Marketing savvy should be employed to enhance the public’s awareness of a site. The objective is to have them going directly to the URL instead of finding it by chance through a search engine.

 

How Do You Protect Your Blog From Hackers?

A Google user wandered into Matt Cutt’s personal blog and noticed that it uses WordPress. The visitor wonders how Matt is able to keep his site safe from hackers given the platform’s tendency to suffer from attacks. Matt shares three of his strategies:

 

Update Frequently

 

Hackers exploit known vulnerabilities in old versions of WordPress. The best way to prevent these attacks is to exercise diligence in installing the latest updates. These will contain fixes for old bugs and keep your blog shielded from attacks. Unfortunately, too many webmasters don’t bother to keep track of the newest updates. They are prime targets for hackers.

 

Customize the HT ACCESS File

 

The “.htaccess” file can be used to control admission to the WP administrator panel. It can be changed to allow only a very small number of IP address to have access to the admin directory. These may be explicitly listed so that those coming from unknown address will be automatically barred from entering the site. These people will get a 403 error code. On the other hand, those coming from your home IP and other listed addresses will be allowed in.

 

Use a Secure Password

 

Finally, Matt uses a fairly long and complicated password that’s difficult to crack for added security.