<ul>
<li>Spontaneity is the state of being open to whatever situation is presented to you as it happens</li>
<li>This can mean anything from trying a new restaurant for lunch at your colleague's suggestion to waking up and deciding to go to the beach today.</li>
<li>Living in the moment opens you up to new experiences, which can boost happiness.</li>
</ul>

We Forgot To Be Spontaneous

<ul><li>Without moments of serendipitous interaction and activity, it's not a fully lived life.</li><li>Leisurely activities are often given concrete beginning and end times.</li><li>Constantly monitoring the time so you can make it to a friend's birthday party after your child's morning swim lessons distracts from the fact that leisure activities are supposed to be pleasurable.</li></ul>

The Curse of Overscheduling

<ul><li>Break out of fear-based responses, in which you feel threatened and make a choice to protect yourself.</li><li>Shift to more mindful-based thought processes to embrace spontaneity.</li><li>Have the time and space to be spontaneous: Don’t worry about money, you have expendable income.</li><li>Many off-the-cuff activities can be cost-free: Wearing an old band T-shirt you found in the back of a drawer.</li><li>Saying hello to other students at school.</li><li>Sending a text to a friend you haven't seen in a while.</li></ul>

How to Be More Spontaneous

A looser schedule can allow for serendipity.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

timemanagement

Time Management

Go ahead, be a little spontaneous

Since Spain started exporting oranges and other citrus fruit at the turn of the 20th century, it has developed a robust infrastructure producing fruit stickers, paper wrappers, and custom-printed fruit crates.These little gems of graphic design are now the subject of a new exhibition in Madrid. Featuring more than 300 Spanish brands, the aptly named Frutas de Diseño (Design Fruits) shines a light on the colorful history of fruit branding in Spain from the 1950s onward and the wild variety of graphics that have been used to market fruits there and abroad.

The World's tiniest Canvas for graphic designing

The use of branding on Spanish produce dates back to the country’s golden age of citrus exporting in the 1920s and 1930s. “They realized if they exported oranges with a name, they would sell more,” says Leandro Lattes, the creative director of Spanish design studio El Vivero, which curated the exhibition.Valencia oranges are famous around the world today, but when the export was booming, having a name like “Infinita” or “La Soculente” (The Succulent) helped businesses, often small family-run affairs, stand out from the crowd.

History of Branding

brands would hire artists to draw elaborate illustrations on the protective wrappers and sometimes even sign them. (After oranges were coated in wax to reduce spoiling, he says paper wrappers became all about the marketing.) To this day, some “Soculente” oranges come in a striking paper wrapper that portrays a slender hand complete with red nail polish and a sparkling ring holding half an orange over a juicer.

Noteworthy Designs

After World War II, the intricate illustrations gave way to more abstract graphics that made use of typography and striking colors. In recent years, some companies have continued to update their brand identity.The 1960s brand Filosófo, for example, once sported a paper wrapper with concentric circles, illustrated stars, and a serif typeface. Today, it features a more contemporary typeface and a pristine, watercolor-like rendition of oranges adorned with blossoms; the stickers are shaped like leaves).

Typography and Colors

Over the past few years, some companies have been experimenting with lasers, etching numbers, and brand names on the skin on the actual fruit. While in its early days, the practice might gain steam in countries like France, which banned disposable plastic packaging and produce stickers across 30 fruits and vegetables in January. (According to a report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports, the ban may threaten the United States’ exports thereof stickered sweet potatoes and grapefruits, which together amount to $28 million in annual sales.)

The Future

A new exhibition celebrates the grocery-store gems, which have been around for almost a century.  


marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

business

Business

product

Product & Design

The delightful history of fruit stickers, the world’s tiniest canvases for graphic design

Psychologists have long identified the desire to feel connected to others as a basic human need, and interpersonal relationships have a significant impact on our mental health, health behaviour, physical health, and mortality risk.
Our physiological systems are highly responsive to positive social interactions. Close relationships are linked to health as they build certain biological systems that may protect against the adverse effects of stress. In response to social contact, the brain releases oxytocin, a powerful hormone linked to trustworthiness.

The Science Behind Positive Relationships at Work

Positive social interactions at work directly affect the body’s physiological processes. Positive social interactions serve to bolster physiological resourcefulness by fortifying the cardiovascular, immune, and neuroendocrine systems through immediate and enduring decreases in cardiovascular reactivity, strengthened immune responses, and healthier hormonal patterns.

Our Psychological Health

Social interactions play an essential role in wellbeing, which, in turn, has a positive impact on employee engagement. 
Organizations with higher levels of employee engagement indicated lower business costs, improved performance outcomes, lower staff turnover and absenteeism, and fewer safety incidents

Employee Engagement

Social interaction can lead to knowledge and productivity spillover from trained to untrained workers in collaborative team settings or between senior and junior workers, particularly in low-skilled tasks and occupations. 
For instance, one research team found that productivity was improved when employees were assigned to work alongside faster, more knowledgeable coworkers.

Knowledge Sharing

Employees who are satisfied with the overall quality of their workplace relationships are likely to be more attached to the organization. 
Leaders who encourage informal interactions, such as after-hours social gatherings, can foster the development of more positive relationships and significantly influence and improve employee satisfaction

More Attachment To The Organization

A lack of social interaction in the workplace can have potentially negative consequences in relation to social support. Several studies have indicated that the sense of isolation that comes from this lack of social support is associated with a host of negative health consequences, including a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, compromised immunity, increased risk of depression, and shortened lifespan.

Lack Of Social Interaction at the Workplace

Strong within-group ties with coworkers (characterized by frequent social interactions) provide opportunities to facilitate innovative thinking. The strong ties developed by social interactions assist innovators in the search for inspiration, sponsorship, and support within the workplace.

Strong Bonds

Social interactions in the workplace help to ensure everyone in a group is on the same page. Peer relationships (also referred to as equivalent-status relationships) represent the most common type of employee interaction.These relations exist between coworkers with no formal authority over one another and act as an important source of informational and emotional support for employees. Coworkers who possess knowledge about and an understanding of their specific workplace experience are given opportunities to feel connected and included through the sharing of information.

Peer Relations: All In The Same Boat

Social interactions in the workplace have been found to increase self-reported positive feelings at the end of the workday.Repeated positive social interactions cultivate greater shared experiences and the gradual development of more trusting relationships.

Building Trust

The information collated through social interaction can help a team collectively improve its performance and the precision of its estimates.

Collating Information

Social interaction and positive relationships are important for various attitudinal, wellbeing, and performance-related outcomes. 
Employees in both low- and high-status positions reported higher levels of motivation when interpersonal relationships with coworkers were good.

Better Outcomes

At their very best, interactions can be a source of enrichment and vitality that helps and encourages individuals, groups, and organizations as a whole to thrive and flourish.Conversely, negative workplace interactions have the potential to be a source of psychological distress, depletion, and dysfunction.

Importance Of Positive Interactions

Positive interactions in the workplace have been shown to improve job satisfaction and positively influence staff turnover, as employees who experience support from colleagues are more likely to remain in an organization long term.

The Big Picture

According to the Society for Human Resource Management’s 2016 Employee Job Satisfaction and Employee Report, relationships with colleagues were the number one contributor to employee engagement, with 77% of respondents listing workplace connections as a priority.It is therefore crucial that leaders and managers determine ways to promote positive workplace relationships.

How to Foster Employee Interaction in the Workplace

With the advent of digital communication, we’re now only ever a few clicks away from contact with virtually anyone anywhere in the world. 
While the internet has facilitated communication on a scale hereto unrivaled, there’s a lot to be said for traditional face-to-face interaction. An email might be easier, but we lose the nuances of nonverbal cues and tone.

Promote Face-To-Face Interaction

The upward trend in telecommuting is expected to continue over the coming years, with more employees working from home (or otherwise remotely), posing fresh challenges for the relationship-centric organization.
Where in-person interaction isn’t feasible, face-to-face interaction can still be facilitated using social technology. Using video-conferencing software regularly can help to foster positive social relationships for remote workers.

Include Remote Workers

Dedicating time to specifically promoting positive social interactions in the workplace can be a powerful route to ensuring the relationship-centric approach doesn’t fall by the wayside amidst organizational pressure to achieve.
Set aside time for employees to interact; focus on interests and experiences out of work to direct attention to shared interests to allow for employees to discover commonalities and relatedness.

Plan Collaborative Events

Both employees and employers require meaningful relationships with others in the workplace, and yet these needs may be impeded by counterproductive and destructive workplace practices (Bolden & Gosling, 2006).
Organizational leaders should attempt to minimize negative interactions between employees by proactively mediating and resolving differences and building a culture of open communication that fosters trust and relationship building.

Effectively Mediate Conflict

By establishing consistent patterns of behavior that exemplify the desired culture, you can promote an emotional environment of inclusivity and positivity.Positive psychology founding father Martin Seligman’s (2011) PERMA model highlights five critical elements for mental wellbeing, which business leaders can adopt to promote a positive culture that encourages belonging.The five elements of the PERMA model are:<ul><li>Positive emotion</li><li>Engagement</li><li>Positive relationships</li><li>Meaning</li><li>Achievement/accomplishment</li></ul>

The PERMA Model: Leading By Example

We look at the science behind positive relationships at work, the importance of positive interactions, and their role in workplace wellbeing.

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Career

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Corporate Culture

communication

Communication

teamwork

Teamwork

The Importance of Positive Relationships in the Workplace

Upwork reported that 36% of the US workforce freelanced in 2020. The same report finds that 58% of traditional workers who started working remotely during the pandemic consider freelancing. Experts predict that the majority of US workers will engage in independent work by 2023. Many of these workers will fall into the category "solopreneur", an independent worker who works alone.

The solopreneur

<ul><li>The freelancer markets a specific skill-set to multiple clients - e.g. website creation, admin support, etc.</li><li>The creative is a sub-category of freelancers, e.g. graphic design, writing, etc.</li><li>The consultant advises people on how to do better.</li><li>The content creator monetises what they do in a way that does not require direct one-on-one services, for example, course creators, bloggers, etc.</li><li>The side hustler does any of these things while also working full-time.</li><li>The gig worker works for a company that has built its business model on independent workers.</li><li>The brick and mortar, e.g. personal trainers.</li></ul>

Common types of solopreneurs

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

The 8 types of solopreneur

We all need uninterrupted work time every day, regardless of our role. Unbroken work makes us more motivated and focused. Yet uninterrupted calendar blocks are hard to design into a schedule. 
We can't productively attend to meeting-heavy days while also spending hours on uninterrupted work time. We need to manage our expectations about what we can accomplish.

Manage your expectations

Accomplishing all your goals without burning out is a skill.
<ul>
<li>Know your internal clock. Your energy levels will change throughout the day. Schedule your focused work for when your energy peaks.</li>
<li>Chunk your time. Set time aside for uninterrupted focus time.</li>
<li>Get off the grid. Set work apps on Do Not Disturb outside work hours.</li>
<li>Rely on peers for accountability.</li>
<li>Reflect. At the end of each workday, observe how you spent your time and what you accomplished.</li>
</ul>

Balance energy and goals

<ul>
<li>Build a habit. Identify what you need to do to reach your goals. Practise those steps daily.</li>
<li>Communicate. Share your intention with your team, so they know when you're available.</li>
<li>Assess your work environment. Your teammates have equally important energy management needs. Design your work to meet your expectations and your colleagues' expectations of you.</li>
</ul>

Build systems for meeting your goals

productivity

Productivity

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Remote Work

Manage your energy to thrive at work | Zapier

Anyone wanting to start something new, like creating art, authoring a book, volunteering, or building their brand faces the problem of time constraints, unable to accommodate any space in the already busy and overloaded life.
We need to create a structure for all the existing stuff in our lives and then carve out space for the new.

Creating Space For The New

Our existing responsibilities can be overwhelming, the neverending tasks at home and work. This burdens the mind more once it is overdue and we are feeling behind. Creating structure and allotting certain time and days helps us deal with the workload.
We can allot different days for paying our bills, doing grocery shopping, doing administrative work, answering emails, and even allot time for self-care and playtime.

Creating Structure

Once we have all our workload listed and scheduled, we can observe the list and our working style to eliminate, join, delegate or simplify certain tasks:
<ol>
<li>Get out of useless commitments.</li>
<li>Say No to people who ask for obligations and favours that take our time and energy.</li>
<li>Postpone the work that is unnecessary but cannot be avoided.</li>
<li>Cut out all the distractions, like social media and mindless news reading.</li>
</ol>
Doing so creates space in our lives and o

Carving Out Space

Once we create structure and start to allow meaningful work to happen, we need to maintain it so that it is not hijacked by seemingly urgent tasks that keep cropping up. One way is to create focus blocks, certain times in the day that are completely allotted to a specific meaningful task, and it is non-negotiable.
When disruptions happen, and they will remember to not get angry, let it go, breathe deeply a few times, and return to the meaningful task with complete focus.

Focus Blocks And Disruptions

Focusing is hard when we are already drained and not having the bandwidth to face anything. We need to recharge our batteries, giving ourselves nourishment and nurturing. 
A hot bath, a good sleep, 30 minutes of walking in nature, or a Yoga session can help us get back to work with full life force.

Replenishing Yourself

Work is stressful because we don’t want to do it, but have to do it.
We won’t feel so drained and discouraged with our job if we could light up our dull routines with joy, freedom and vitality. It is something that needs to be explored, as everyone cannot leave their jobs and rush to do what they love to do, right away.

Freedom And Joy In Every Activity

habits

Habits

Wanting More Time for Your Meaningful Work - zen habits

When most people want to improve their productivity, they make small changes, like creating a daily schedule or waking up early. However, you can also increase your productivity by moving abroad.
Moving to a country with a less expensive cost of living can enable you to work less, thereby devoting your spare time to other projects.

Moving abroad as a productivity hack

If you run a business, moving to a cheaper country means hiring local experts for less. 
With the saving, you could employ people such as domestic help, allowing you to devote the time saved on household tasks to your work.

Moving abroad: saving on employee costs

If you can work remotely from your computer, you can take advantage of living somewhere where the time zone gives you a head start on your clients based on where you are now.
You could also have a few hours each morning to complete other tasks before your clients are ready for their working day.

Moving abroad: getting a head start on projects

It might seem like a crazy concept, but moving abroad could be the productivity hack you’ve been looking for in your life.

Is Moving Abroad A Good Productivity Hack? - Productivityist

It's a productivity system that teaches how to take a simple approach to improving your productivity, by encouraging you to focus on forming one productivity-boosting habit at a time.

Zen to Done (ZTD)

<ul>
<li>Collect: Get ideas and to-dos out of your brain and onto a list.</li>
<li>Process: Review your list daily and decide how to act on each item.</li>
<li>Plan: Pick a few high priority items to accomplish each week and every day.</li>
<li>Do: Schedule time to accomplish your selected to-dos without interruptions.</li></ul>

The Minimalist Habits of Zen to Done

To clear your mind and improve focus, get your ideas and to-dos out of your mind and onto a list. 
Documenting to-dos in the moment lessens the likelihood that you'll forget to do something and gives you a master list of to-dos to reference when you're trying to decide where to direct your time.

The Collect Habit

For your to-do list:
<ul>
<li>If the task takes less than 2 minutes to complete, do it immediately and get it off your list.</li>
<li>If the task takes longer than 2 minutes to complete, set it aside for later.</li>
<li>If someone else should do the task, send it to that person right away.</li>
<li>If the task doesn't require any action, delete it immediately to get it off your list.</li>
<li>If you just need to file the item for reference, put it where it needs to go right away.</li>
</ul>

The Process Habit

...says that when working on big rocks (the most important tasks), you need to minimize distractions as much as possible.
You're more likely to complete small tasks in a single working session, and more likely to make better progress on big tasks/projects that you need to work on over multiple sessions.

The Do Habit

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. Changing a single habit is...

Make Productivity a Habit with Zen to Done

There are two main mental biases which add stress to our lives:
<ul>
<li>Time Anxiety: The feeling that we are not utilizing our time in the best way or do not have enough of it.</li>
<li>Productivity Shame: The feeling that we are not doing enough, or that our work isn’t being recognized.</li>
</ul>
Though it seems radical, one can be indifferent and focus on one’s strengths, uncover one’s hidden passions and try to find meaning and purpose in life using self-reflective activities like mediation or journaling.

Building Mental Resilience By Using Indifference

Working on high-priority tasks can be hard, but it is even harder to stop working on them. One needs a weekly or monthly review and reassessment to check what is important to us and deprioritize certain tasks which are no longer serving one’s best interests.
There are various mental biases like the sunk cost fallacy, the completion bias, or the Zeigarnik effect that our brains can experience, making it hard to deprioritize certain tasks.

Don’t Do Stuff That’s Stressing You Out

<ol>
<li>Set a limit on the time one has to work on a certain task, creating friction using intervals.</li>
<li>Create a NOT TO DO list of the things you won’t do at all.</li>
<li>Review your priorities on a weekly basis, asking yourself if the task is still important.</li>
<li>Take out the impactful parts of the important tasks and do those first.</li>
<li>Ask someone about how they feel about the prioritization of the tasks.</li>
</ol>

How To Deprioritize Tasks

<ul>
<li>Just like the birds come out after the storm goes away, one can start to rebuild and refocus on what makes one happy, nurturing one’s creativity.</li>
<li>Find something impactful and make it into an anchor task, a pillar by which the rest of the tasks are supported. Try to make it non-negotiable.</li>
<li>Helping others is a great way to increase one’s overall happiness and satisfaction levels.</li>
<li>Doing work that is directly helpful to others makes you feel positive and passionate.</li>
<li>Do what you feel like, even if you just want to watch a movie on a Monday afternoon.</li>
</ul>

Rebuilding Passion And Curiosity

Many studies on productivity point out that we are only doing 2.5 to 3 hours of productive work on any given day. While most companies and managers expect the 8 to 9-hour productivity on a daily basis, we need to let go of this 9 to 5 office culture.
We need to build a new schedule that aligns with our body clocks and energy levels to best suit our work and has the work-life balance we always wanted.

Match Your Internal Clock To Work

We all have different Circadian Rhythms that make up our own chronotype, and are at our best if we work according to the same daily energy levels.
Our chronotype determines if we fall in one of the three types: A lark, an owl, or the third bird. Once we find that out, we can work our schedule to be the most productive, creative, motivated and focused.

Chronotypes: Our Circadian Rhythms

Our habits power our daily actions, but we all cannot build the same habits and have to find out what works for us in a scientific manner.
One can use a productivity tracker or simply write a journal tracking the activities, using the following method:
<ol>
<li>Question what you want to get done.</li>
<li>Research more on the question.</li>
<li>Pick one strategy and create a hypothesis.</li>
<li>Start experimenting while tracking your progress.</li>
</ol>

Discover Your Ideal Work Habits

As our digital tools can be used anywhere, there are no boundaries between work and the rest of our lives. 
We need to set a limit to the amount of digital labour (email, Zoom calls, phone message responses) we keep doing all the time, and focus on people, projects, hobbies, and ways to find meaning and purpose.

Minimum Digital Labour

The past year has been full of stress. Yet what we’ve learned is that when life becomes uncertain, the best thing to do is invest in yourself.

health

Health

problemsolving

Problem Solving

6 unconventional ways to build focus, resilience, and calm in 2021

Putting highly successful people on a pedestal can unknowingly hinder our own efforts. We get caught in comparisons and it’s easy to forget that they’ve had and still have their own set of struggles and challenges on their path.Use highly successful people as inspiration, not idols.

Copying successful people

Working well is not about maximizing every waking moment of the day, in order to get more done. And the focus on maximizing time may actually diminish our creativity.Instead, try identifying and focusing on the few hours of the day you are most productive.

Maximize every moment

To achieve sustainable productivity habits, it’s best to build up with easily achievable tasks.Small chunks of accomplishment will amount to something big eventually.

Setting Big Goals

Be selective about the apps and systems you use. Updating and optimizing our productivity apps and systems makes us feel like we’re accomplishing something. But there's a  catch in this: that “something” is managing our productivity apps and systems, not actually working toward our goals.

Optimizing your Systems

Rewards may work in the short term, but real mastery and success are due to genuine interest, not the lure of rewards.Cultivate intrinsic motivation. You should be able to enjoy the process with or without any reward.

Using Rewards

The theory of finite willpower has recently been called into question. Newer research suggests that willpower may be more variable, and based on context and culture. But although willpower is malleable, it’s important not to overdo work at the expense of leisure and relaxation.Developing small habits, or rituals helps build willpower over time.

Building Willpower

Visualization doesn’t inspire us to jump higher, but rather causes us to become complacent. People also become more easily deterred by setbacks because, in our fantasy version, nothing went wrong.Use your imagination, but realistically. For example, use your imagination for possible challenges and setbacks.

Visualizing your goal

Many people stay busy because that's the norm for them, and they cannot imagine themselves sitting idly. To avoid the busyness trap:<ul><li>Focus on just doing three important things each day</li><li>Have a one-hour electronic blackout period</li><li>Recognize your “bias for action.”</li><li>Say no to things that do not advance your goals.</li><li>Have a morning routine where you take time to reflect on how you will organize the day.</li></ul>

Being Busy

An uncompromising regimen will not necessarily keep you productive.Rather than being hard on yourself when you don’t meet your expectations, be more supportive of yourself and understanding of your challenges.Try changing the way you talk to yourself when you’re trying to build up the motivation to do something. Positive self-talk and self-support will help.

Having a harsh regimen

“For a few people who are successful by developing productive habits, many are unsuccessful in spite of using the same habits.”

A never-ending stream of articles each offer a new answer for how to be productive - or the same answer, re-packaged in a new way. And yet, no matter how many articles we read, most of us feel stuck in our same bad habits.

Go ahead, be a little spontaneous

The delightful history of fruit stickers, the world’s tiniest canvases for graphic design

The Importance of Positive Relationships in the Workplace

The 8 types of solopreneur

Manage your energy to thrive at work | Zapier

Cody