Skyrocket Your Productivity with These 5 Apps for Your Smartphone
This is a guest blog post by Dave Willenberg, LEED AP Let’s talk about how technology has advanced productivity over the years… Eighty million and eight hundred thousand. The Apollo Guidance Computer did a great job of putting people on the moon, but that’s how many of them you’d need to match the processing […]
Effectiveness vs. Efficiency: Picking A Productivity Mindset That Boosts Your Results
“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” – Peter Drucker Our mindset drives everything we do. In Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, the reader is introduced to two mindsets: fixed and growth. From her research, Dweck has shown the mindset with which a person operates will determine […]
Don’t Leave Anything for Chance When Engineering Your Workflow Routine
I spent a very long time, writing down the tasks I wanted to do each day in a notebook as the main part of my workflow routine for a long time. I finally realized a few things one day that made me question my approach. I would forget to do things that I have to […]
5 Things You Can Do To Increase Focus in Your Engineering Career
One of the challenges I hear about from a lot of engineers is how to stay focused when there are so many distractions vying for their bandwidth. I can relate, the same problem exists for me! I think that any engineering professional today is going to have to come up with ways to protect their […]
Why Working Less on Your Projects Can Improve Engineering and Project Management Efforts
There is a stereotype in the engineering world that I would like to disprove and that is, to be successful in your engineering and project management efforts you have to work a TON of hours. I think this is totally false, and I think that this stereotype is causing a lot of engineering and project […]
Boost Your Engineering Focus By Eating A Frog Every Day
“If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.” ~ Mark Twain Normally I end my articles with a quote, but this time I’m starting with one instead. We’re […]
Learning Can Rapidly Advance Your Engineering Career – Here Are Four Steps for Learning and Implementation
I am a fast mover to say the least, and over the past few years, I think this has hurt me some. Don’t get me wrong, I get a lot of stuff done; however, I think at times I rush decisions just to keep a fast pace, and some of those decisions don’t best contribute […]
How to Avoid Getting Caught Up in Career-Development Details as an Engineer
Here’s a HUGE challenge engineers face in their career development: they get caught up in the details of day-to-day tasks and forget to look at the big picture and how all of their actions affect it. This is totally understandable. Our job as engineers, from a technical standpoint, is to make sure that all of […]
Engineering Productivity: How and When to Break a Task Up into Smaller Steps
If you read my blog regularly, you know that I often write about efficiency and productivity in the workplace, as I believe lack of these things is the leading cause of engineers working too many hours. I believe that one of the most important aspects of being productive is the ability to focus for a […]
Engineers, Everything You Accomplish After Lunch Should be a Bonus
I recently read a book called Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. The book details the daily routines of the most successful authors, screenwriters, and painters of all time. One of the recurring themes for most of the artists in the book was that they did their most productive work before noon. Some of them would […]
