July | Article Round Up

What you read, is what your interests are and I can clearly see from my reading list. 

I have tried to categorise them better this time around, so let me know if this is something that you guys are enjoying as well. 

Career:

1. All about Goal Setting
2. 10 Steps to Achieve any Goal
3. 4 Tips to achieve your goals (Ted talks)
4. Your career best effort ( again from one of my newly found blogger James Clear)

 Books:

1. Brene Brown's Digital Library
2. Books to read if you are suffering from Imposter Syndrome

Overcoming Challenges:

1. To know that you can actually do what you put your mind to, the writer tells it all how he photographed the Royal wedding.

Agile:

1. Spotify's health check model
2. Levels of Agile Maturity 
3. Success by being Agile

Working Moms:

1. Kids of working moms turn into happy adults
2. 6 Women share their return to work stories after maternity leave

Others:

I couldn't really find a category for it and I am generally interested in a lot of stuff when I read, here are some of the selected reads I thought might be interesting to this blogs audience.

1. Why you can focus more in coffee shops than open plan offices
2.  What the experiment of employees working 4 days a week found out
3. open plan offices reduce face to face communications
4. why liberal arts and humanities is as important as engineering
5. New York Stock Exchange gets it first women chief 
6. Only 25% of workforce is female in India 
7. Lauren Powell and her story of inventing her brand
8. 6 Pillars of Creativity
9. When a stress expert and author battles mental illness 
10. Surprising facts of why Women CEO's don't expect much support at home or work.

My favourite tweet for this month:

If you enjoyed this, you might want to look at the Article Round up for June.

Happy Weekend

(pic courtesy: Soma Bhattacharya)

Increase your Productivity- 3 Ways

We all have 24 hours in a day.

Some can work and use it like there's no tomorrow and some will procrastinate and be lazy and not get anything done. Which one is you?

The goal is to figure out how to maximise productivity. So, if you are someone who can't focus for 10 minutes straight without scrolling through your twitter or Instagram feed, here is some help for you.

Finding your Zone- athlete’s are known for getting into the zone, some visualise winning, some will pin their goals and re-affirm everyday and some will close their eyes and feel themselves winning. 

The “state of free flow” happens when you can replicate an emotion or the readiness by simply listening to the same music or reading your affirmations. One you are present in the zone you can do what you are best at without feeling the urge to browse or being distracted. Read more here about the state of free flow. 

The state of flow, will actually feel something like this for you:

1. You are completely involved in what you’re doing
2. There’s clarity:-you know what you have to do
3. You know that the activity is doable, that you have the necessary skills to complete the task successfully.
4. You lose your sense of self and all of your worries and concerns drift away.
5. You lose track of time and you’re completely focused on the present moment.
6. There’s an intrinsic motivation—whatever produces flow becomes it’s own reward. (Source)

Remove Stress- when you do what you love, you feel stress melting away. 

Work stress has been categorised into multiple stages:

1. Honeymoon stage

2. Full throttle stage

3. Chronic symptom stage

4. Hitting the wall stage

5. The opposite

Removing stress is a simple way to increase your productivity, no one tells you watch back back to episodes in Netflix, you can sustain it because you like watching it and to doesn’t stress you out. Only if you could replicate that feeling while working, you could easily work for hours. 

So, why are you stressed? Is it because you still have to found the right job or area of interest you would like to work in. 

Try these below points to try reducing the stress:

• Take Breaks- take whenever you need it, to focus on yourself, for self care or just to find your sanity. Psychology Today talks about how “When we work, our prefrontal cortex makes every effort to help us execute our goals. But for a challenging task that requires our sustained attention, research shows briefly taking our minds off the goal can renew and strengthen motivation later on.” Read more here . 

• Exercise- changes your thinking skills  and comes with numerous benefits. Personally, I think my best when I go for walks and have seen the benefits first hand. I even walk when I feel stuck in situations. 
• Plan your way to the ideal job- You should move if you don't like the mess you are in, you are not a tree. So, instead of being in a toxic environment, it's better to look for the next job. There are lots of platforms and ways to look for new jobs or find mentors who can help you. 

10,000 Hour Rule- efficiency is about how you have mastered the domain. This means hours of practice can not only make you efficient, it will also ensure you inspect and adapt your techniques or domains. 

To bring in more structure, the following strategy/tools usually bring in results:

1. Pomodoro technique- this is one of my favorite tools right now, specially when I am trying to focus amidst a million more things to do. When I try to finish a task whether its the research behind the article or writing a post I mostly always wander. Using the timer, I know that I have a set time during which I have to finish the task I have assigned  and in most cases I have been able to get it done. So, if you have problem focussing, give this simple timer a go. 
2. Breaking hours- a lot of people swear by their calendar and keep it every organised. The goal I think is very similar, when you break down the hours you are just increasing your focus because you time is limited and your work pin pointed. For me this simply translates to getting it done.
3. Dividing your work - you eat one spoonful at a time, taking a project doesn't mean you have to get it done in a day. So, stop stressing. divine your work, break it down to simpler tasks, where you can't slice to down anymore. Then you prioritise it and thats how you start. consider the total number of tasks, time it will take you to get it done and how much the you have.  don't tress abut tomorrow, just switch on the tomato timer and work on the first task for now.

What do you think? Have some secrets you want to share that works for you, leave them in the comments or share over twitter. 

(Pic courtesy: Free stock Photography and google images)

Happy Weekend

(Pic courtesy: Soma Bhattacharya)

Exciting News| Relaunching- Connect

Today, I want to share some exciting news with you all.

This goes long back, few years after I started the blog. I felt it was wonderful meeting amazing project management professionals from all over the world and learning from them and being mentored. 

I also knew that this is something that might be difficult for a lot of people to do, because you might not know whom to reach out to, or lot of times people are busy and perhaps don’t reply back to a mail of a newbie. I knew I felt very strongly about sharing the luck I had and how much I learnt just by talking to amazing people. And if I had the chance, so should so many others.  This is specially true for introverts, who might not be as comfortable meeting up people over coffee or cold calling them for a chance to be mentored or learning about the profession. 

Hence the “Connect” was born. It was free and the idea was to create an interactive design so you felt like you were at your work desk and had the freedom to be connected to newbies or experts from around the globe. 

The best part was you didn’t have to find them and figure out how to communicate with them, we did all that work for you. When the PMOT community signed up and amongst them lots of senior folks who were happy to mentor newbies. You could choose virtual mentorship or in your city mentorship, where you select from your domain of choice (media, IT, construction etc) and the city/country incase you want to have face to face conversations and not limit yourself to emails/skype calls. 

The site was launched because me and my two friends sat down and were super proud to get this done. It did well, lots of people signed up and it was still free. 

For me it was important that the purpose of creation stayed, for anyone to help themselves move forward in their career. You didn’t have to shell out on subscriptions or payments to get the opportunity.  

Paid completely with my own money, and encouraged and supported by many thats how it stayed, small tiny and humble. There was no marketing done except by word of mouth by people who used it or who wrote about it in there blogs. You could mentor here and probably claim PDU or SEU, saving you more money (if anyone had done it, can you please email us your story)

The site went down few months ago and honestly I didn’t even notice it initially and when I did, I had to take the time to decide if I wanted to bring the site back or let it go. There were people who had signed up (existing users),  communications happening and I just thought its really a good website, and even if it helps one student every month, one newbie every day to figure out their career I should bring it back. 

So, here it is- the site back and working. Yay!! The site stays as it is for now with new features coming soon. 

If you have ever used the site or benefitted from it, please don’t hesitate to tell your friends. If you or someone you know would like to collaborate or may be sponsor for the day or put ads in the site that would be wonderful because then we can bring in more amazing features to the site and keep on paying it forward. 

We are re-launching and yes it is still free. Thank you for your support. 

(Pic courtesy:https://burst.shopify.com)