Automation inspiration

y handpicking your own newsfeed, you can easily keep track of every content source that matters to you. Here's how to use RSS feeds to their fullest potential.

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How to use RSS feeds to boost your productivity

Productivity tips

Most of us can't last more than six minutes without a quick glance at our email or IMs. And unfortunately, these constant interruptions have a serious, negative impact on both our productivity and mental acuity.

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How to stop spam emails and filter out promotional emails

If you tend to put off important tasks, the eat that frog method helps you develop a habit of doing them first thing in the morning.

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Eat the frog: A practical approach to reaching your goals

Overwhelmed by your to-do list? Here are 10 task prioritization techniques to help you decide what to tackle first.

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How to prioritize tasks: 10 task prioritization techniques

App tips

Want to turn off cookie notifications and block ads on Chrome? Here's how to block them. 

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How to turn off notifications in Chrome

While you can find and message most anyone on social media, email is a more personal—and more professional—way to reach out. Of course, finding email addresses isn't always easy.

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Find any email address for free with these tips and tools

I mostly use Google Assistant at home to settle debates with my husband and daughter: "Hey Google, what year was Wall-E released?" (2008. I was right.

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Hey Google, how can you and Alexa increase productivity at work?

I'm not here to make a semantic argument, really. But there's a difference between being productive and being efficient, and efficiency wins every time. Productivity measures how much you do or produce within a given timeframe.

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Be Efficient, Not Productive

Recently, Basecamp posted five new job openings. For those five openings, they received more than 4,000 applications.

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5 Creative Ways to Stand Out When Applying for a Job

I've read so many articles listing the reasons why you shouldn't use your inbox as a to-do list.

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Why Your Gmail Inbox Should Be Your To-Do List

For most K-12 teachers, a standard teaching day is roughly 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.—but that's just time spent inside the classroom.

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5 Ways Teachers Can Save Time Using Free Google Apps

Perfect is the enemy of good. Done is better than perfect. The best is the enemy of the good. You've heard some version of this, whether it was in your college philosophy class or, more likely, from your Silicon Valley boss.

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When Perfect Is (and Isn't) the Enemy of Good

We've all been there: You tell people your commute is 45 minutes each way, but every day, there's a delay. An accident. A broken down train. Inclement weather.

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Your Commute Is Bad for You, Here's How to Make It Better

Business tips

When you want to start promoting your business, products, or content on social media, it's important to carefully consider which social media platforms to use.

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How to Choose the Best Social Media Platform for Your Business

A long to-do list can be overwhelming. Sometimes, you might want to take a step back and look at the day, week, or month at a high-level, visualizing what's coming up rather than just plowing through a list of to-dos.

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7 Creative Ways to Visualize Your To-Do List

It's rare for companies to pay freelance writers by the hour; instead, you're typically paid a per-piece or per-word rate. If you estimate poorly, you can end up earning a much lower hourly rate than you anticipated.

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What Is Your Time Really Worth?

App tutorials

Google Analytics is a website analytics platform that lets you track and measure visits to your website, actions taken on your website, visitor demographics, and much more.

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How to Use Google Analytics

When I set out to write a piece about multitasking, my goal was to review and present some scientific studies showing exactly how multitasking impacts productivity.

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The True Cost of Multitasking Isn't Productivity—It's Mental Health

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for measuring your website's performance, but if you've never used it before, setting it up to track your website isn't exactly the most intuitive process.

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How to Set Up Google Analytics to Track Your Website

Think of something you want to improve about yourself. How would you categorize the thing you chose: Is it a strength or a weakness? In all likelihood, you chose a weakness.

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Work on Your Strengths, Not Your Weaknesses

Work-life balance—or work-life integration—is a hot topic right now. There are dozens of articles published every week about it, and everyone has their own opinions on how to achieve it.

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Work-Life Balance May Have More to Do with Your Personality Than Your Job

A to do list can help you keep track of the tasks you need to complete. But when it comes to actually completing those tasks—that's a different story.

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Organize Your Life with the Agile Method

Monitoring how you spend your time leads to a wealth of useful information: It can tell you what time of day you're most productive, help you create better estimates for how long tasks will take, and show you what activities you'd have to cut...

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If Time-Tracking Apps Don't Work for You, Try a Productivity Journal

Regardless of your intent for adopting Jira—to use it as a to-do list, to manage software development projects, or to track tickets for your support team—taking advantage of the tool starts with creating a project.

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How to Create a Project in Jira

If you have tons of issues in your Jira projects, it's easy for tasks to slip through the cracks. Jira filters help you sort your issues to quickly find your most important tasks. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to create a filter in Jira.

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How to Create a Filter in Jira

Planning project work in Jira starts with creating issues. In Jira, "issue" is an all-encompassing term that's used for any work your team needs to complete, including to-dos, stories, bugs, incidents, epics, and improvements.

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How to Create an Issue in Jira

Over the last three years, I've painted five rooms in my house. The first room I painted was my bedroom, and I was convinced that I'd have the task finished in a weekend. A month later, I applied the finishing touches.

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Why We're Bad at Estimating Time (and What to Do About It)

Improving your visibility on LinkedIn is important whether you're actively looking for a new job or passively considering new opportunities: Eighty-seven percent of recruiters use the site as part of their recruiting process.

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LinkedIn Profile Tips: 18 Research-Backed Ways to Stand Out Professionally

In recent years, technology companies have set their sights on improving the recruiting process for employers, and it's resulting in many changes to how job candidates are sourced, reviewed, and considered.

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Job Search Strategies for the Age of AI

There's a lot of advice out there about the connection between timing and productivity: articles—including our own—suggesting "X things to do in the morning/afternoon/evening" to stay productive all day long.

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Find Your Chronotype and Schedule Your Productivity

There's a reason New Year's Resolutions are so hard to keep: Reinventing the way you live overnight requires a willpower that most of us don't have. And yet—many popular productivity systems ask you to uproot your work in just that way.

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Make Productivity a Habit with Zen to Done

Most projects start with a goal: Build a new website, create a roadmap, or write an employee handbook. Goals are easy to define. Figuring out how to reach the goal—that's the hard part.

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Jumpstart New Projects with Mind Maps

It's human nature to seek perfection. I learned that lesson quickly as a product manager when I was tasked with guiding web development projects from first idea to formal launch.

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How to Make Better Decisions with an MVP Mindset

Email helps us connect, communicate, and collaborate—but does it help too much? We receive an average of 94 business emails every day and devote almost one-third of our time at work to email management.

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Automate Your Inbox with these Tips, Tools, and Templates

Ever wish there was a tool that would remove extra spaces and line breaks in Excel with a click? How about an app that translates Outlook emails into another language? Microsoft Office add-ins let you do this—and much more—without switching programs.

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Supercharge Office: 22 Best Free Add-ins for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Online

My house is more than 100 years old. The original structure was only two rooms, built in the late 1800s.

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Scrum for One: How to Apply the Scrum Framework to Personal Projects

In college, I worked with the career center at my university to create my first resume—a simple Microsoft Word document listing my experience, education, computer skills, and contact information.

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Make Your Job Application Stand Out with These 12 Resume-Building Tools

When you imagine a millionaire, whom do you picture? Is it your favorite celebrity, a professional athlete, or a born-wealthy hotel heiress? Most millionaires are none of these things. Researchers and authors Thomas J. Stanley and William D.

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The 7 Traits of Millionaires (and 45 Apps to Help You Save Money and Build Wealth)

Do you have more than one Google account, perhaps one for work or school and one for personal use? Tired of switching between them or just want to consolidate those accounts into one? 

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How to Merge Multiple Google Drive and Google Photos Accounts

LinkedIn and Glassdoor are great places to search for jobs—if the companies you’re interested in are actively posting positions there.

Jessica Greene

Jessica's articles

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