Do you know any time-challenged parents who want to help their children use time productively? There is no question that kids can spend multiple hours per day on the internet, often to the detriment of homework. YouTube is one of the favorite spots.

Now there is another site growing, called TeacherTube, based on the YouTube concept, that is available to help children with homework and for exploring topics of interest. They get involved in the same video process while parents can be more comfortable with what their kids are seeing and learning. Topics cover curriculum from elementary school to high school. Many school districts and teachers are using this as part of their educational delivery, for daily lessons and for homework assignments.

It is one more avenue for busy parents, who often stuggle to fit in time for homework help, to explore. Children can be more productive and still spend time online. As with any internet site, the caveat remains that videos can vary in quality and educational value.

“Your lack of planning should not be my emergency.”

• Have you ever wanted to say that to someone?
• Could you be guilty of frequently interrupting others with a “Now!” issue?

There is no question that crises do arise from time to time, issues that require everyone to change focus. However they tend to occur much more frequently then needed. In so many situations, prior planning would obviate the need for last-minute rush efforts.

How can you start to make changes within your organization to limit the fire-fighting?

1. Do not wait until a project is almost due. As soon as you receive the project, list all the required small steps that will lead to the completed work. By breaking the task into manageable pieces, you are more likely to tackle it than if you wait to do it all at once.
2. Using your list of steps, work backwards from the due date. Mark the dates you need to have each of the steps completed, with a bit of wiggle room in case some emergency does come up. If you do this, you will have a clear picture of when to begin and what needs to happen each day or week.
3. Prioritize your next day’s work the evening before. Do not wait until the morning to start thinking about where your day is headed. If you have all of your tasks in one place (one system), it is easy to determine your daily priorities. On the other hand, if you have ToDo lists scattered around, you do not have one system. You end up with another list as you try to create the day’s schedule.
4. Avoid procrastination. When you keep stalling on a project, you end up with the last-minute pressure. If you predetermined what your biggest chore for the day was, stick to that instead of diverting your attention to small tasks that are easier to check off. See our previous post on the benefits of accomplishing your biggest task first thing in the morning.

With your own work prioritized, it is easier to determine the correct response to someone else’s emergency. Evaluate what you are currently trying to accomplish versus what they want to interrupt you for as you decide whether to switch activities.

In a recent post I mentioned that the Arawak Beach Inn confiscates your electronic devices upon checking in. It’s their way of helping to ensure that you have a peaceful, stress-free vacation.

However, not everyone is willing to go to this extreme. For those, myself included, who like a bit of outside communication at least once a day, bringing along a laptop to use on a limited basis is more feasible.

If you do travel frequently and need to keep multiple computers in more than one location updated with the latest files, a new service called SugarSync can help. SugarSync places the latest version of each file you choose to sync on each of your chosen computers. It also creates a password-protected web page that allows you access even when you are on a borrowed computer. Every time you make changes to any designated file, that change is reflected on each synced computer and on the website within seconds when you are connected to the Internet.

When bringing along the laptop on a trip, there are some precautions you can take:

• Have a secure password. Number and letter combinations are best. Do not choose anything obvious to someone who knows a bit about you.
• For confidential files, you can add an additional password to block access.
• Be careful what you transmit through unfamiliar networks. Reservations and online purchases can require more personal information, so try to cut down on the need to use these while you are out of town.
• Bring an ethernet cord with you. Wireless access may not be available in all locations, and this gives you another option.
• Never check your laptop in luggage, and do not let it out of your sight. Sometimes it means squeezing the case into a small restroom stall, but you want to keep it with you at all times.
• If you leave the laptop in your car, secure it in the trunk to avoid overt temptation for theft. Extreme temperatures can be harmful, so limit the length of time you pack it away.

Disorganization is a major cause of job dissatisfaction.

If the disorganization is your own, then you can choose to make changes. However, whether you are the disorganized one or the organized one working with a disorganized colleague, that lack of organization has an impact on you.

• Who does the disorganized person interrupt when they need something? Who do they count on to have a copy of the contract or to know what time the meeting begins? For every interruption that the more organized person has to field, it can take 20 minutes or more to get back into the flow of the work again.
• Who gets more stressed during the work day? What are the typical characteristics of the stressed person–irritability, anger, negativity? Have you ever had to “tiptoe” around someone, wondering what mood they are in today? It does not lead to a comfortable working environment.
• Who would your customers prefer to deal with? Negativity and irritability do not usually equate with great customer service. It either affects the bottom line or piles more work on the organized individual whose help is preferred.
• Who misses more days of work? Stress leads to absenteeism and illness. Who gets to cover for the stressed, disorganized person when they do not show up for work? And of course it is also harder to cover for the individual whose work is scattered everywhere and who has not set priorities before leaving the previous night.

When you are organized and in control, your attitude is more likely to be positive. 9 out of 10 people say they are more productive when they are around positive people (Gallup, 2004). Wouldn’t it be a great day if you only had to deal with positive people?

As soon as I finish typing this post, I am heading out to vote in Houston’s run-off primary for District Attorney of Harris County. Our recently resigned D.A., Chuck Rosenthal, was ousted, or outed, when his past years of emails were subpoenaed by defense attorneys in preparation for a trial.

Somehow the judge who granted the subpoena allowed press access to not just the messages relating to that case, but to all of the messages. Included were little “love notes” to his administrative assistant from the married D.A., along with humor forwarded to him that was racially focused.

When the situation first began unraveling, my only thought was, “What was he thinking?” Whether looking at it from the high ground or low, there were so many other avenues open to him.

High ground: You are charged with protecting our county’s citizens and enforcing the legal system. How could you let your friends and staff send this type of mail through the government systems?

Low ground: How hard is it to hit Delete and clean up your Sent and Received messages once in awhile?

Just contemplating the hubris of someone who has attained this position of authority and then somehow must think himself unassailable still boggles my mind after all these past months of turmoil. What toppled him did not relate to the initial case in question but to the indiscriminate little notes that are so quickly sent and then forgotten.

Is there anything in your email that you would not want exposed?

Job Advertisement: “Must be good at multitasking.”

Obviously the company that posted the above ad is not up-to-date on current research which shows that no one is good at multitasking. Now I realize that you are probably disagreeing with me right now, since you multitask throughout the day, but reality is that our brains are not good at executing demands to perform multiple activities simultaneously.

What actually occurs is a mental traffic jam where eventually one item breaks through, followed close behind by a second, and then a third. They may be so close together that it seems simultaneous, but in actuality one preceeds the next.

When MIT students were given two simple tasks to perform at the same time, identifying shapes and letters or colors, they could not do it and lost their composure. Once they were allowed to switch back and forth, they could do it, but it was very slow because they were forcing their brains to fire in different directions so quickly.

This mental traffic jam is causing stress as we pump adrenaline throughout the day. Over an extended period, there are both short-term (absentmindedness, since we are not focused) and long-term results (brain damage in our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus). Those two brain regions are associated with short-term memory and the abilities to assess and prioritize. The extended stress also ends up causing physical illness (80% of sickness according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

It can appear that teens and even younger children may have a better ability to mulitask. Again, reality is that they are not better at it, they just have more practice. If you must multitask, be sure that one of the two things you want to do can be done without any thought, like running and listening to your iPod.

There is an old adage that says if you eat a frog first thing in the morning, the rest of your day looks pretty easy. If you have two frogs to eat, pick the biggest, ugliest one first. Your personal “frog” is the project or activity that:

• Yields the most benefit for you in reaching your goals or has the most importance for a company’s development
• Is the item on which you keep procrastinating
• Will normally give you a sense of accomplishment in getting it off your plate

Some tasks may fit all of these descriptions and some may only relate to one. My personal biggest frog is working out. Even though it doesn’t take mental acuity, if I don’t get it done first, chances are slim that it will happen later in the day, although it still lingers in my mind as a difficult, pending activity for the day. Once I have that out of the way, it makes the rest of the day seem easier. Then when I start work, after I do some quick clearing out of small items that have come up, I turn to the project that is going to take the most time and have the most impact (my second frog). From there, it is a downhill slope for the rest of the day.

We often hear about “morning people” vs. “night people.” Our internal clocks certainly have some effect on when we can focus, but reality is that there is only about a two-hour difference in peak mental concentration between the two groups. When you have a difficult project to do, it is normally best to set up an uninterrupted block of time earlier in the day, and use the afternoon for more routine work.

Without a plan to eat that frog first thing, you can wind up saying, “Where did this day go?” You were busy non-stop, but you do not feel that you actually accomplished much, and that significant activity you put off is still looming and creating little nagging feelings of guilt and stress.

• Are one of those people who lament the lack of personal time to escape from work issues, yet cannot bring yourself to let go of the Blackberry, laptop, and cellphone even when on a vacation?
• Are you a family member who wants a vacation without those electronic intrusions into your spouse’s “free” time?

There is now an answer! The Caribbean island of Anguilla has a hotel (Arawak Beach Inn) that confiscates laptops and any other handheld devices when you check in. You are not permitted internet access and have no television or telephone in the accommodations.

Quittting cold turkey may be a bit traumatic at first, but sometimes it can be necessary to save a relationship. I understand they go out of their way to make it up to you in other ways, and you may find it very freeing after the initial withdrawal.

It says something for our society when a true escape requires that we seek help in eliminating any other choices.

“Where did I put that document?” is often a common plaint when desks are stacked with piles of paper. However the same thing may happen with our electronic files even though, being out of sight, they don’t scream for organization.

The best way of handling electronic documents would be to have obviously labeled folders, and then subfolders, and subfolders for the subfolders. Yet even in organized computers, you can forget what you called something, or where you put a file that did not easily lend itself to a specific category.

The first thing you might do is go to the Microsoft Search feature (Start/Search/For Files or Folders). Yet this often seems to be ineffective in finding that item you need. To remedy this, companies came out with independent programs that index all the contents of your computer (e.g. Easy Reach). Then Google realized there was a chance to gain a foothold here, and they began offering the free Google Desktop Search. The drawback to this is that they take your files onto their computer and index them.

Finally Microsoft woke up and noticed how effective a program called “LookOut” was, and they bought the software. Now you can have access to a free and fast search engine that runs through all of your Microsoft products. Within a second or two after entering a keyword, you have a list, with that keyword highlighted, of all documents pertaining to your term. Their search includes Outlook as well as Excel, Word, etc.

The download for this free link is: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/default.mspx.

It is far superior to the built-in Windows Search feature. Amazingly enough though, while it is easily available on their site, Microsoft doesn’t publicize this add-in. I suggest you try it. It is a good answer for those who don’t have time to create folders, as well as those who may be organized but still need a little extra help occasionally.

Two pieces of legislation, one from the House and one from the Senate, relating to mental health issues have recently passed. It is the latest step in a seven-year effort to craft a mental-health parity bill requiring insurance plans to match mental-health benefits with those for other medical conditions. The next challenge is to reconcile the two bills.

How do mental health issues affect productivity in the workplace?

• 222.7 million days of work are lost each year because of absences and problems pertaining to depression, costing companies $51.5 billion. (National Institute of Mental Health)
• Employees with depression who received support were 40% more likely to recover and 70% more like to stay employed, compared to a control group. (Journal of the American Medical Association 9/07)
• 9% of employees felt anxious or depressed, and those employees accounted for 40% of lost productivity. (Cisco Systems, Inc.)

Whatever form the final bill takes, it will cost employers more. However the payoff should come with increased productivity in the work place. From the study in the above journal, employees with the support program worked an average of two more hours a week than the control group. That came out to a $1,800 gain per employee, compared with the program’s cost of $100 to $400 per employee.