Manish

I don’t know about you, but I get really annoyed when I speak to someone and they, instead of listening to me, type a text message or do something else that might be deemed as multi-tasking but actually is doing both things half-heartedly.

I also see parents out with their kids and instead of giving them their full attention they are on Facebook or Twitter. Or teens who seem to never look up from their devices. And I think it’s undeniably rude when someone at work is engrossed in his or her phone when you’re trying to have a conversation. I think kids, friends and colleagues deserve our full attention.

But it’s not just me; science backs this up to.  Some of the dangers of multitasking: 

• It decreases your ability to think creatively. Being creative is a higher function task, and if your attention is divided among many tasks, you literally won’t have the brainpower to see and identify creative solutions to problems.
• It lowers your ability to filter out irrelevant information.  Studies have shown that if a news program shows crawling text at the bottom with other headlines or sport scores, viewers have a more difficult time remembering what the newscaster was saying. The same is obviously true if you’re listening to your boss while checking your Twitter feed.
• It makes you a worse manager. Because you’re less adept at telling relevant information from irrelevant, you’re less adept at filtering out the important from the unimportant and making appropriate decisions when managing a team.
• It stunts your emotional intelligence. Research shows that if you’re a constant multitasker you’re more likely to want to engage with a text message than with the person in front of you — terrible for personal and work relationships.
• It causes increased mental stress. And countless studies have shown that chronic stress isn’t good for the brain — or your overall health.
• You can lose up to 40 percent of your productivity. This is called switching loss. Your brain takes a moment to reset whenever you switch tasks, and even if that reset takes only a few tenths of a second, when you’re constantly switching tasks all day long, you lose nearly half of your productive time.

How to stop multitasking.

How do you give up this bad habit? Simple.  Do one thing at a time.

Ok, maybe that’s easier said than done for a chronic multitasker. So consider these suggestions: 

• Turn off all the alerts on your devices.  This includes email and text alerts.  (Most phones have settings that allow text alerts only from certain people during certain hours if you’re worried about missing a panicked message from your teen or spouse.)
• Schedule time for your activities.  It’s actually a great productivity exercise to estimate how long a task will take and actually put that hour or two hours or whatever into your calendar as an appointment — and then stick to it.
• Process email only at certain times. Email is a huge focus suck if you let it be. Instead, try processing your email only a few times a day, maybe in between bigger projects. If necessary, insert a line in your signature that lets people know you do this, to train them not to expect an immediate response.
• Start small. If uni-tasking seems daunting, try it for just 10 or 15 minutes at a time to start.
• Clear your desk. It’s easier to focus in a visually uncluttered space.
• Download an app that doesn’t allow you to browse certain time-wasting websites at certain times of the day — if the siren song of Facebook or Twitter is too much to avoid.
• If you need to focus on a phone call or need to clear your head, turn and face a blank wall. No distractions mean it’s easier to focus on the one thing you choose to be doing.

Are you a multitasker or a devotee of uni-tasking? What have you tried to curb your multitasking habits? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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Thank you for reading my post. I regularly write about management, technology 
as well as the mega-trend that is Big Data for LinkedIn and Forbes. If you would like to read my regular posts then please click 'Follow' and feel free to also connect via Twitter, Facebook and The Advanced Performance Institute.

Here are some other recent posts I have written:

• 7 Things Truly Likable People Have in Common
• Career Choices You Will Regret In 20 Years
• The One Thing Successful People Never Do
• How NOT to Introduce Yourself
• 10 Sentences Good Managers NEVER Say - EVER
• Big Data Explained in Less Than 2 Minutes - To Absolutely Anyone
• How To Make A Billion Dollars From Big Data

Bernard Marr is a bestselling business author and is globally recognized as an expert in strategy, performance management, analytics, KPIs and big data. His new book is 'Big Data - Using Smart Big Data, Analytics and Metrics To Make Better Decisions and Improve Performance'. You can read a free sample chapter here.

Photo:  Shutterstock.com

 

Being a disappointed Lakers basketball fan these past few years, I’m watching the NBA draft and free agency season more closely than usual. Whether you’re a basketball fan or not, how the Lakers went about identifying whom they wanted to hire and then assessing and recruiting them, offers great advice for any manager who wants to build a great team.

Here are my five big hiring takeaways from the NBA Lakers hiring process.

One: Understand the team needs before hiring a bunch of similarly skilled individual contributors.

The Lakers need a big man in the center for defense and rebounding. They also needed a point guard who could quarterback the floor. They got one in the draft and hope to get the other through free agency. Each hiring decision impacts the next one.

Hiring Lesson: Too many hiring managers focus too much on a narrow set of skills and experiences, ignoring the fact that some people need to be great organizers, some need to think creatively and strategically, and others need to bring a multi-functional and user perspective to the team.

Two: Define the job before defining the person.

For any professional athlete the parameters of success are known. In basketball, the best players jump higher, run faster, shoot and pass better and put in more extra effort to improve. The job description doesn’t say they must have 5-10 years of basketball playing experience, have attended a Division I school, be responsible for scoring 15 points a game and have high EQ. Just because someone meets the skills criteria doesn’t mean the person will be a great pro NBA basketball player.

Hiring Lesson: Define the job as a series of performance objectives, not years of experiences and a list of required skills. Focus on outcomes and how the best people use their skills on the job, not the skills themselves. For example, some of the best coders know how to use off-the-shelf tools to quickly create robust applications and the best people on the help desk know what questions to ask harried customers.

Three: Make sure the person is performance-qualified first and a good cultural fit second.

For the Lakers a great number of players were invited for a pre-draft workout. They were then put through the paces to see if they met the minimum standards of performance. Those who passed these challenging tests were paired with others to engage in a series of 3-on-3 games to handle specific on-the-job challenges. A smaller group of these people then spent a few spent hours meeting with the coaches and team management to understand the person’s character and motivation. 

Hiring Lesson: Before making any judgment about fit and personality, determine if the person can do the actual work in the actual situation. To get at this in an interview dig deep into the person’s major accomplishments, then have the person present the solution to a problem likely to be faced on the job. Cultural fit will emerge from these performance-based questions.

Four: Consider talent an investment, not a transaction.

What I found most surprising was how much time was spent with each prospective player off the court in meetings, social sessions and having meals together. In addition, previous coaches were called to better understand the candidate’s character, work ethic, learning ability, how the person dealt with adversity and the person’s leadership ability. These are not soft skills. They’re the foundation of the person’s character and ability to succeed 

Hiring Lesson: Hiring the best is not a transaction that can be delegated, it’s an investment in each hiring manager’s future success. Given this level of importance, as much time as necessary should be invested in making the right decision. The reason most managers never have enough time to do it right is because they didn’t do it right the first time.

Five: Recruiting matters.

Think of the draft as the active candidate market and free agency as the passive talent pool. In the NBA, drafted players have only one choice. The best free agents normally make the same amount of money on any team that’s interested in them, but select the one that’s the best fit. The team that wants the best of any season’s free agents does the most recruiting. Everyone is involved in this including coaches, management and other key players. Those who do the best job of recruiting land the best passive candidates. FYI: The Lakers dropped the ball on this factor and lost a great opportunity to hire a great player.

Hiring Lesson: Hiring the best passive candidates and the best active candidates who have choices requires strong consultative recruiting skills, extraordinary recruiters and fully-engaged managers.

These are good hiring lessons whether you want to hire an elite NBA player or just one extraordinary person to improve the performance of your entire team. It starts by fully understanding the job and then finding someone who can do it extraordinarily well.

_______________________

Lou Adler (@LouA) is the CEO of The Adler Group, a consulting and training firm helping companies implement Performance-based Hiring. He's also a regular columnist for Inc. Magazine and BusinessInsider. His latest book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired (Workbench, 2013), provides hands-on advice for job-seekers, hiring managers and recruiters on how to find the best job and hire the best people. His new video program provides job seekers inside secrets on what it takes to get a job in the hidden job market.

John uploaded a PDF file in Google Drive and shared it with Peter. A week later, John updated the PDF file and uploaded the new version to Google Drive. Peter however still has the link to the old version and John will have to send him another email informing of the new version. Confusing, right?

You’ve probably gone through this situation where you have multiple copies of the same file residing in your Google Drive and, while you would like everyone to use the latest version, they are either not aware that the file has been updated or it takes too much work to locate it in the Drive.

When you have multiple copies of the same file in Drive, it not only creates confusion but the files also take up precious storage space in your Drive. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could simply replace an existing file in Google Drive with the new version instead of uploading it as a separate file? Well, there’s a solution:

Replace Files in Google Drive

1. Go to your Google Drive and select any file that you would like to update. This is applicable for files that are not in that native Google Docs format like PDF, images, text files or even videos.
2. Right-click the file, choose Manage Versions from the menu and then click the Upload new version button to upload the updated file to your Google Drive.
3. That’s it. The file name and the file’s URL won’t change and thus all the old shared links will now automatically point to the new version of your file.

You can use the same method to replace a file in one format with another format. For instance, if you have a video file in Drive that you would like to replace with a GIF animation of smaller file size, the Manage Versions option will do the trick. And the shared link won’t change either.

Also see: Create Download Links for files in Google Drive

Things are a bit easier for Dropbox users. If you would like to update a shared file in Dropbox but without changing the link, simply upload the new version of the file in the same Dropbox folder.

When you upload a file in Dropbox and another file with a similar name already exists, Dropbox will simply replace the old file with the new one while the shared link will continue to work. In the case of Google Drive, you can can have multiple file with the same name in one folder and hence the confusion.

Also see: Add Files to Multiple Folders in Drive

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The story, How to Update Files in Google Drive without Changing the Link, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 29/06/2015 under Dropbox, Google Drive, Internet.

As a job-seeker, you know that you're going to have to talk about money at some point. That doesn't mean you have to spill your guts whenever somebody asks you a question about your current or past salaries.

It's tacky as hell and completely unethical to demand a job-seeker's private salary information. It's the mark of a bad recruiter, whether it's a company recruiter or a third-party headhunter who works for an outside firm or for himself.

You don't have to give up your salary information, not only because it's personal information but also because it's irrelevant. What someone is paying you right now or what they paid you at your last job has nothing to do with what you're worth to a new employer.

You could be worth less. You could be worth more. It depends on a lot of factors. Recruiters ask for your salary information because it gives the employer negotiating leverage over you, and the honest recruiters who wrote to us about this issue said that right up front.

"Yes, when we have a candidate's salary history, of course there's power in the negotiation," said one recruiter, Mary Ellen, in an email message she sent to our office, "and that's what my clients pay me to get for them."

You don't have to give up your salary information when you're job-hunting (not even to automated recruiting systems, as I explain in this story) but you do need to have a salary target. You have to know what your talents are worth to various kinds of employers. At Human Workplace we say "Price yourself like a house."

You have to know your market. In the new-millennium workplace we are all living in now, you can't stay silent throughout the interview process and expect to be delighted with the salary offer you get. In the old days we were taught "The person who gives up a number first, loses."

That's not good advice anymore. If you keep your mouth shut through three or four interviews and wait for a job offer to start negotiating your salary, get ready to be disappointed! You're likely to get a lowball offer. Who could blame your employer in that case? After all, you didn't tell them what you were expecting to see in an offer!

You have to know what your background is worth and you have to talk about it during the interview process. You can use Salary and Payscale to do some compensation research, but that is just scraping the surface.

Those sites will tell you what employers are paying people in similar job titles to yours, on average, in your region. That's a good starting point, but you need to do more work than that!

A far better yardstick for a job-seeker's salary-target-setting is to look at the cost of the Business Pain you relieve in your work. Every business has pain. If they didn't have any pain, they wouldn't be hiring. They'd save their money. The pain costs more than your salary will cost -- many times more, in some cases.

You have to think like a business owner now, and make some assumptions about what your favorite brand of Business Pain is costing your employer right up until the minute you come on board to relieve it. You can't rest on the information "Marketing people like me get paid about sixty thousand dollars in this town." So what?

That's not necessarily relevant. If you bring much more to the table in tangible value than other people with similar experience to yours do, or people with similar job titles, then you can slip the bonds of a job title and price yourself according to the results you know you can produce.

You just have to be able to get your future boss to see things the way you do -- and you'll begin that sales process with your Human-Voiced Resume and a Pain Letter written just for that one manager, and sent through the mail.

You have to know your salary target and you have to speak it.

I don't blame you at all if a headhunter calls you and you say "What's the salary range for this job?" and the headhunter says "What's your current salary?" and you say "I'm not sure you heard me just now - I asked you what the salary range is?" and the headhunter says "I need to know your current salary" and you say "What's that? There must be static on the line" just as you hang up the phone.

You don't have time to waste with people who want to start a relationship by bullying you.

Still, you are going to go on job interviews, with or without recruiters in the mix, and you're going to have to bring up the salary topic eventually.

I recommend that you do it before your second interview. Someone wlll call you or write to you and invite you to the second interview:

SALLY, a COMPANY RECRUITER: Hi Adam! I wanted to let you know that our team really enjoyed meeting you last week, and they'd like you to come back next week - Thursday, if possible - and meet a few more people.

YOU: That sounds great Sally -- the idea of a second interview, that is. I have to check on whether or not Thursday will work. Say, I have a question for you. Are you the right person to talk about compensation with? I want to make sure we're in the same ballpark, so that none of us wastes our time on a second interview if we aren't. Do you have the salary range for this position?

SALLY: Um, what are you earning now?

YOU: I'm focusing on jobs in the $60-$70K range.

SALLY: Can you tell me your current salary?

YOU: Actually Sally, I asked for the salary range and you asked me for my current salary. I gave you my salary target, so it's your turn! What is the salary range for the job?

SALLY: I don't know. You can talk to Paula about it when you come back next week.

YOU: If we're not in the same salary ballpark, it wouldn't make sense for me to come back and meet more people. Can you please have Paula call me?

Sally the recruiter said they loved you. If Paula doesn't call you, move on! You already volunteered valuable information to Sally. If you think that Adam in the example above took too wimpy an approach, you can try it this way:

SALLY, a COMPANY RECRUITER: Hi Siobhan! I wanted to let you know that our team really enjoyed meeting you last week, and they'd like you to come back next week - Thursday, if possible - and meet a few more people.

YOU: That sounds great Sally -- the idea of a second interview, that is. I have to check on whether or not Thursday will work. Say, I have a question for you. Are you the right person to talk about compensation with? I want to make sure we're in the same ballpark, so that none of us wastes our time on a second interview if we aren't. Do you have the salary range for this position?

SALLY: What did you earn at your last job, Siobhan?

YOU: Wow -- there's a non sequitur. I was asking you about the salary range for the position. Do you know what that is?

SALLY: No -- you can talk to Paula about that when you're here next week.

YOU: I would hate to book Paula's time or my time without knowing in advance that we're in the same compensation ballpark. Can you ask Paula to call me?

Let's say Paula calls you the same day. Paula says "Our salary range is pretty open. What is your salary target?" Now you'll throw out that $60-70K range. Let Paula react to it.

Maybe (I doubt it, but maybe) she was planning to pay someone more than that in her new job. If that's the case, you'll hear her excitement in her voice.

"Okay, that will work! Let's get together right away."

Does that mean you're stuck? You have no way of knowing what Paula's budget is, and in our experience, close to a hundred percent of job-seekers who took their chances and waited for the offer to learn about the employer's target salary range were disappointed.

You are a business person -- it's appropriate and responsible to talk about money! You don't have to wait for an offer to open that conversation, and I don't want you to.

Let's say you threw out the $60-$70K number but as you get closer to the job-offer stage, you can see that the job is much bigger than what you had thought it was.

It's up to you to bring up salary again. You'll call Paula, your hiring manager, on the phone.

PAULA: Paula Jones!

YOU: Hi Paula! It's Siobhan O'Grady. How are you?

PAULA: Really good, Siobhan! What's up?

YOU: I wanted to touch base with you on a couple of things. I learned that Jack Smith, who's one of my references, is out of the country and unreachable. I wanted to let you know before you start trying to reach him...

PAULA: Thanks! I got his voicemail over the weekend but now I know not to bother. That's okay. I still have three other people I can call. It's not that I doubt you. I love talking to people, and we gain a lot through the reference-checking process.

YOU: It's fine. The other thing is that I wanted to check in with you on salary. We talked about a range of sixty to seventy kay, and I didn't know how firmly I might have planted that seed in your mind.

PAULA: I don't know -- pretty firmly, I guess. That's the range I've been working with.

YOU: It's the perfect range for the original job we talked about, the social media marketing job. Since then in our conversations, we've expanded the role a lot. I'm excited about it, but it's not a sixty to seventy kay job anymore, and as much as I'd love to work with you and your team, I wanted to let you know that.

PAULA: When someone gives me a salary target, I take it seriously.

YOU: So do I. I gave you that information based on what was printed in your job ad, and of course, we're many miles away from that role description at this point.

PAULA: What kind of gap are we talking about?

YOU: Probably twelve thousand dollars.

PAULA: Should we get to brass tacks? Twelve thousand dollars over the bottom of your $60-70K range is seventy-two thousand, and I could do that. Eighty-two thousand I couldn't do.

YOU: We can talk brass tacks if you want. I need seventy-five thousand minimum.

PAULA: Five thousand over your original target range.

YOU: Yes. Paula, you know that it's a good deal for the level of responsibility I'm going to have in the job.

PAULA: Let me think about it. Will we see you next Friday - that's what Sally told me?

YOU: Well, I am scheduled to come in and meet you then, but of course we need to work the numbers piece out first.

PAULA: Good, then that's my deadline.

YOU: You know what, let's make Wednesday the deadline -- if you're on the fence to the degree that this would be a really monumental decision for you, it would be silly to go forward.

PAULA: Wednesday, then.

Most of us are conflict-averse, but as a job-seeker you're going to grow new muscles! You're going to learn to step into conversations about money, among other wonderful new muscles you'll grow. Start by knowing your salary target. That's up to you, not anybody else! You're taking charge of your own career. Good for you!

Watch and Listen as Liz and Molly describe Human Workplace Four-Week Virtual Courses starting Saturday, April 4, 2015!

The bank sends me monthly credit card statements as password-protected PDF files mostly because they contain personal information. I archive these PDFs into Google Drive but, because these files are protected with a password, the text isn’t searchable inside Drive. Also, each PDF file has a different password so it’s impossible to remember them and takes just too much to find these PDFs later.

Removing Password from a PDF File

Since the Google Drive is already protected with 2 layers of security – password and 2-factor authentication – it should be OK if we remove the password protection from PDF files before uploading them to Drive.

Is there any software program available that can remove password protection from PDF files? One that doesn’t cost a dime and works on both Mac and Windows? Well the answer is yes and that too is already installed on your computer. It’s called Google Chrome.

Google Chrome has a built-in PDF reader* and a PDF writer and we can combine the two features to remove the password from any PDF document. Let’s see how:

1. Drag any password protected PDF file into your Google Chrome browser. If you can’t find one, use this sample PDF file – the open password is “labnol” without the quotes.
2. Google Chrome will now prompt you to enter the password of the file. Enter the password and hit Enter to open the file.
3. Now go to the File menu in Google Chrome and choose Print (or press Ctrl+P on Windows or Cmd+P on Mac). Choose the destination printer as “Save as PDF” and click the Save button.

Google Chrome will now save the PDF to your desktop but without the password protection. If you re-open this PDF in Chrome, it would no longer require a password to open. Thank you Ivan Sunga for the tip.

Alternatively, if you have enabled Google Cloud Print, you can choose the destination as “Save to Google Drive” in the print dialog and the unprotected version of the PDF will be sent straight to your Google Drive from Chrome.

[*] Open the special page chrome://plugins and enable the option that says “Chrome PDF Viewer” to let Chrome natively handle PDF files.

Remove PDF Passwords without Chrome

If you are not a Google Chrome user, download this free Windows utility called BeCyPDFMetaEdit to remove passwords from PDF files.

First launch the program and it will ask your for the location of the PDF file. Before you select and open the PDF, change the mode to “Complete Rewrite,” then switch to the Security tab and set the “Security System” to “No encryption.” Click the Save button and your PDF will no longer require a password to open.

See more tools for editing PDF files.

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The story, How to Remove Password from PDF Files with Google Chrome, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 01/03/2015 under Google Chrome, Google Drive, PDF, Software.

iOS: We all know text expansion is great, but sometimes it's hard to remember the abbreviations you make. TypeSnippets solves this by making it a more visual

 

I as luck enough to receive an invite to “preview” this really new and cool application called Sway. You can read about it at http://www.sway.com. Sway is basically a jquery driven web tool to quickly build out high quality presentations from data and content sourced from a variety of sources (with more coming soon) like .docx, .html, .pptx, images, and video files from YouTube. Sway creates a folder on OneDrive and stores much of the content there (good thing storage is now unlimited for Office 365 users). Here’s my first attempt at building a “Sway”. Just scroll to view and be sure to click on the stacks to view more images.

 

I built this out in about half an hour.

The post Sway, Microsoft Office’s Newest Application appeared first on Barbs Connected World.

Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc’s Twitter account was hacked overnight for about two hours, during which a series of offensive tweets were posted to the account, the company said on Sunday.

Hackers replaced Chipotle’s avatar with a swastika and tweeted a number of racial slurs and profanities, including ones directed at President Barack Obama and various U.S. government agencies.

“We apologize for the nature of the posts that were made during that time, and we are now conducting an investigation to try to determine what happened and who might have been involved,” Chris Arnold, a company spokesman, wrote in an e-mailed statement.

The Denver-based burrito chain took down the offensive tweets and has posted a message on its Twitter feed apologizing for “the very offensive messages.”

Reuters

The post Chipotle apologizes after Twitter feed hacked and ‘very offensive messages’ published appeared first on Tech2.