Category: Donnas Blog

I recently spent time working with organizations in the beautiful Cook Islands helping them increase productivity and performance with Microsoft Office products. Many thought their skills were quite high but one of the realizations for many was the fact they didn’t know what they didn’t know. I regularly present at conferences, events and professional development days and am always surprised when someone comes up afterwards and tells me they thought they were and advanced user of applications but the attending the session made them realize that their assumption was less based on their true skills and more based on beliefs. …

I wanted to share with you my technology tip for the day. One of the best things you can do to save yourself time and frustration, and it might just be simple, is to close your email down when you’re not working on it. So when you’re not sending or receiving emails shut it down. What this enables you to do is focus on what is it that you need to do rather than be distracted by other people’s priorities. The University of London found that every time you are interrupted it can take up to 20 minutes for you …

I often have clients to say to me, it’s better if I do it myself rather than give it to one of my team to fix. But, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Whilst it’s common sense, we often forget that if you consider your salary and what it equates to on an hourly rate basis to complete a task, you might find your getting paid $100/hr to do a $10/hr job. Delegating to others where possible can reduce your workload and may also provide your team member with a rewarding professional development opportunity (providing you really do …

When I first start speaking with groups of people I was often asked “tell me everything I need to know about Excel” I have a bit of a chuckle every time I hear this. A lot of people think it’s about the volume of things you know about an Excel that will automatically make you more productive Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, if you want to be more productive sometimes it is better to go back to the basics. What are some of the common things that you’re no longer doing, or that you’d forgotten about …

There’s no shortage of apps programs and tools to help you increase your productivity, but in order to increase our productivity I suggest we go back to the simplistic.  That is having conversations with colleagues and agreeing on a code of conduct. What is a code of conduct? In terms of email it is simply a shared understanding of how you going to use email. Creating a code of conduct provides framework of expectations so we all know what the rules are. Common items such as we no longer going to send thank you emails internally, which for one of …

The very technology that was supposed to make our life easier has in fact created another layer of complication, more work, more stress, more frustration. If that’s a sign of your world today, maybe what you need to do is stop, sit down and think about what are the 1, 2 or 3 key things that would make a difference for you? Is it Word? Is it the fact that you have repetitive documents and you’ve never made the time to sit down and create some templates? Is it Excel?  Where you keep working on an existing spreadsheet but you …

I’m often told by clients “I don’t need help with Microsoft Word”, well let me ask you a question, when was the last time you looked at a document and found a spelling mistake and all of a sudden you made a decision that you weren’t going to deal with that company, that’s of course if you had a choice! Now these days, so many judgements are made upon every first impression, so what’s your documentation saying about you and your organisation?  Are you struggling with spacing out your documents, keeping them consistent etc. You can even use simple tools …