Adding generic buzzwords to your résumé and LinkedIn profile can be off-putting to potential employers. However, it's much worse when you recite them during an interview. Whether your interviewer asks you to "tell me about yourself" or "What are your greatest strengths?" the goal is to get a better idea of who you are and see if you're a good fit for the position. You don't want to come across as arrogant or inauthentic.

Generic buzzwords during an interview

Instead of saying you're a hard worker, convince your interviewers of your work ethic by showing them your capabilities. Talk about a major contribution you've made, the goal you've met or exceeded, or accomplishments you've achieved that illustrate how your hard work has paid off for your former employers.

Hardworking

Being a team player is more than getting along with others and being able to work in a group. A real team player can compromise when necessary, show respect for others, listen to the needs of their team members and work together. You can show you're a team player throughout the interview process by describing an accompishment that was a group effort and giving credit where credit is due. Speak of "we", not "I" when appropriate, to demonstrate that you have a team player mentality.

Team player

When you want to describe yourself as dynamic or passionate, show, don't tell. Show up at the interview full of positive energy and excited to share your ideas. To ensure you can express your dynamic personality and passion during the interview, do your research on the company and the position, so you feel confident.

Describing yourself as dynamic and passionate

Employers are interested in hiring professionals who can adapt to new challenges in the workplace. Instead of stating, "I'm adaptable", state that you're equipped to handle whatever workplace scenarios you may encounter by explaining how you successfully met challenges head-on.

Adaptable and flexible

Describing yourself as "creative" or "innovative" can come across as cheesy or obnoxious. <ul><li>Express your creativity and innovative spirit through an online portfolio or blog with your latest projects. Be ready to talk about how you’ve leveraged your creativity in your latest projects, and what was the outcome of those projects. </li><li>Explain why you like tackling new challenges and share recent examples of when you had to think outside of the box in order to solve a problem, learn a skill, or meet a goal.</li></ul>

Creative and innovative

career

Career

How not to describe yourself in an interview

Not all meetings are a waste of time, but meetings tend to take a lot of time, so it’s crucial to ensure that the meetings you call are worth everyone’s time. You can do this by setting a clear goal or agenda. 
Without a guiding agenda, a meeting is just people talking—and it’s possible you’ve sat through many such meetings yourself.

Wasting time: Meetings with no agenda

If you have far more important things to do but are laboring away at administrative tasks that could be delegated elsewhere, you might have fallen victim to a time waster. You may feel like you’re really working—but if there’s a better way to spend your time and another employee who can easily take over this work, this work qualifies as a time-waster.

Administrative work that could be delegated elsewhere

Poor communication can negatively impact a business, but even on top of these numbers, any failure in communication is also a waste of time. You not only have to account for the time lost based on poorly communicated plans, but you also have to communicate again to correct these errors.

Poor communication

Most of the time, planning is a great way to avoid wasting time. But there comes a point when it’s possible to overdo the planning process. Because it is possible to overengineer a system or a strategy to do more than you set out to do, increasing the complexity of the plan but not contributing significantly to the overall goal. 
Knowing when to stop planning and start doing ensures that you don’t allow your planning to morph into a dreaded time waster.

Wasting time: Forever planning

Possible scenario: you go to a coffee shop to work but end up not doing any work at all. Or perhaps you decide to rent a spot at a coworking space and end up researching nearby co-working spaces for hours.These distractions from work, no matter how seemingly trivial or distantly relevant, are time wasters. And they can negatively impact your focus, productivity, and your career.

Distractions

By definition, procrastinating means that you’re avoiding a difficult task—likely in favor of an activity that provides more instant gratification. 
But it’s not just the fact that you’re not working that makes procrastination a waste of time. It’s also the fact that often, procrastination is linked to a sense of guilt and poor emotional regulation.

Wasting time: Procrastination

Push notifications are interruptions, and interruptions are time wasters. It takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the original task after an interruption.What’s worse is that push notifications are not just any interruptions; they’re appealing interruptions, and it’s not difficult to imagine why. Research shows that humans are “hard-wired to follow the path of least resistance.”

Constant notifications

Busywork is work that seems productive but only serves to keep you busy. For example, you’re trying to show that you’re a hard worker and end up doing something that is of little value to the company but keeps you occupied. Busywork has many causes, but the result is that time passes and you have not done anything of real value. This is arguably the definition of wasted time.

Busywork

Nobody can truly do two things simultaneously and well. It makes us slower and less efficient. This is because what we think of as multitasking is often just really fast toggling between one task and another. And ultimately, all we end up doing is wasting time.

Multitasking

Everyone is vulnerable to wasting time. The good news is that once you’ve pinpointed the culprit, you can take steps to avoid it.

The worst kind of time waster is the kind that comes disguised as work. This is a guide to some of the most common time wasters and can help you spot and avoid them.

productivity

Productivity

timemanagement

Time Management

Top 9 Time Wasters and How To Avoid Them

Why You're Wasting Time: Top Time Wasters and How To Avoid Them

How a new product manager approaches their first month in a company will determine their success. In the first month, product managers should focus on these three areas: <ul><li>People</li><li>Product</li><li>Personal</li></ul>

The product managers first month

<ul><li>Set clear expectations with the CEO or manager. Your main goal in the first month is to effectively join a team.</li><li>Schedule a one-on-one with everyone on the team. This may take a few hours or the whole first month.</li><li>Ask everyone, "What can I do to make your life easier?" You'll show that you're here to help, not to command.</li><li>Take a load off their back. Take from them something that is cutting into their productivity.</li></ul>

People

<ul><li>Schedule time with your lead engineer to walk you through the product's technical architecture. Ask questions about things that are unclear.</li><li>Hold back a bit on changing things. Your ideas and thoughts will be better formed after you had a chance to settle in.</li><li>Get in front of your users. Spend more time with your users in the beginning. Go on sales calls and customer visits. Engage on forums and Twitter.</li><li>Fix something. Fix a bug or launch a small feature on your own.</li></ul>

Product

<ul><li>Read old OKRs, specs, design documents, wiki pages, and anything else you can get your hands on. Add missing documentation, and write up what you've learned and how you can improve things for the next hire.</li><li>Set some personal development goals. What do you do well that you want to continue to do? What is the one thing you need to improve, and how will you do that?</li><li>Configure your life support systems. Install essential software; create Slack and email filters; set up Google News Alerts for your product.</li></ul>

Personal

Congratulations, a product has found its product manager. How you approach your first 30 days will make a tremendous difference, setting you up for success or struggle.

product

Product & Design

What to Do in Your First 30 Days in a New Role | Ken Norton

With AI technology beginning to replace workers across several industries and sectors, choosing a career that won’t get caught in the crossfire of a technological revolution is vital; you must consider the possible impact that technology could have on your industry. It is estimated that a large percentage of workers will need to switch industries and acquire new skills to remain employable in the future. In fact, the McKinsey Global Institute found that 25% more workers than previously estimated will need to switch occupations.

Some jobs are headed towards extinction

The steady rise of tuition fees is making higher education less accessible.The stark difference of the median earnings between college graduates and high school diploma holders, as well as the higher unemployment rate observed in the latter group, makes having a college degree an essential qualification in today’s job market — despite the exponential cost in getting one.

Tuition costs are rising

An occupation’s earning potential is a major consideration for most when deciding on a suitable career. Choosing the right profession means that you will be able to have economic security — a factor that plays a key role in our overall well-being.

The way to economic security

Why is your choice of career more important than ever before? First, we must consider various factors, all of which should contribute to the decisions concerning our professional journey.

3 Reasons Why Career Choices Are More Important Than Ever

<ul>
<li>The first step is to ask yourself why you want to change your career and risk a secure job that is your bread and butter.</li>
<li>Find ways to get a feel for your new position to better understand the new role you are considering.</li>
<li>Be honest with yourself and think with an objective mind.</li>
<li>Keep the long-term vision in mind, thinking ahead about what could happen in the next 20 or 30 years with your decision.</li>
<li>Write your future autobiography in advance, with as much detailing as possible.</li>
<li>How we spend our days is how our life turns out to be, and each hour counts.</li>
</ul>

Making A Big Career Transition

There is a need to assess yourself by asking the following:<ol><li>What is my main goal or vision?</li><li>Am I doing the things that need to be done every day to achieve my main goal?</li><li>Will my future self regret my current career choices?</li></ol>We need to write down the steps that would make our old self proud of us, along with the problems that we may have to handle. We need to be aware, curious and adventurous in our approach.

What You Wanna Do

Instead of aiming for being a bestselling author selling millions of copies, or the most popular celebrity on the planet, we need to choose the alternative path of moderate success: Having a direct connection with a thousand true, devoted fans who genuinely appreciate our work.The ambition of having a thousand true fans(preferably paying customers) is more pragmatic and also more likely to happen.

A Thousand True Fans

<ul><li>Expect people to reject your work, and don’t get bogged down by multiple rejections.</li><li>Remember that you just need one door to be opened for you even if ninety-nine doors are slammed shut on your face.</li><li>At the same time, it is good to be realistic and not set any impossible timeframes.</li><li>Small actions compound over time, so we need to build a consistent routine with failsafe measures.</li><li>You can also have a Plan B if things do not work out.</li></ul>

When You Will Make The Mark

First think about the why, the what, and the when.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

business

Business

startup

Startups

The Right Way to Make a Big Career Transition

<ul><li>To-Do lists are useless. Schedule everything.</li><li>Assume you’re going home at 5:30, then plan your day backwards.</li><li>Make a plan for the entire week</li><li>Do very few things, but be awesome at them.</li><li>Less shallow work, focus on the deep stuff.</li></ul>

Cal Newport on better managing time

Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller. To check it out, click here. *** Some days the to-do list seems bottomless. Just looking at it is exhausting. We all want to know how to stop being lazy and get more done.

How To Stop Being Lazy And Get More Done

Getting caught daily in the endless cycles of productive work, we move towards extending and optimizing our productivity, not once thinking of stopping and taking a break.
The most overlooked key to productivity is to pause and rest, something that feels counterintuitive.

The Key To Productivity Is Rest

Productivity warriors are so past ‘rest mode’ that even watching a complete movie in a relaxed manner is a challenging experience. We need to intentionally and thoughtfully design a restful off day, something that is increasingly difficult.
It is especially hard when we have our work desks right in the bedroom, or even on the bed. We need mental and physical demarcation to help separate our work from our life.

The Dream Day: A Restful Day Off

We need to do a mental check up on how we feel mentally, emotionally and physically, taking stock of our current and upcoming workload. A few pointers:
<ol>
<li>Keep the media and news consumption on the lower side.</li>
<li>Turn on blue-light filtering and minimize notifications on your digital device(s), enabling the airplane mode with wifi on if needed.</li>
<li>Ward off any sleep debt by sleeping as long as you like, doing absolutely nothing even after waking up.</li>
<li>Eat and drink whatever you like, indulging yourself. You earned this day by working hard 24/7.</li>
<li>Do not worry about tomorrow.</li>
</ol>

Preparing For A Restful Off Day

You can design a super-restful off day according to what makes us enjoy our life. It can be a healthy activity or doing something that does not require you to use your brain. Self-care is also a good idea, with a hot aromatic bath or pedicure making you feel better and relaxed.
You may also do your normal routines like preparing a cup of coffee, simply because it is relaxing to you. It feels restful and nourishing to freely let the day unfold, without any pressure or expectation. An off day is supposed to help you just be, not just doing something as always.

Filling Your Rest Day With Activity

An evening stroll in the park or at the mall can be relaxing, as can be just staying in bed. The trick is to not let the normal work-related activities interfere with your restful off day. Do not measure this beautiful day with what you have accomplished, as that is missing the point entirely.
The purpose of this day is to help you feel better physically and mentally.

Ending Your Restful Off Day

health

Health

How to design the most restful possible day off

<ul><li>Task management. This one is most commonly taught and includes systems like Getting Things Done.</li><li>Knowledge management. This is embodied in systems like productivity educator Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain.</li><li>Priority management. Without this category, the first two will fail. You need to have your tasks and resources organized, but also know how to prioritize them.</li></ul>

Personal Operations Category

Prioritizing tasks at work involves getting all your tasks and commitments in one place.  Take a piece of paper and make a list of everything you need to get done. Questions to help you:<ul><li>Do you have commitments to others like your boss, partner, kids, or clients?</li><li>Do you have anything you need to submit? </li><li>Do you have any financial tasks that need to get done? </li><li>Do you have any planning that needs to get done? </li><li>Do you have any administrative tasks? Legal, insurance, staffing, or training?</li><li>Do you have any professional development tasks that need to get done? Training, areas to research, skills to develop, books to read or study, or classes to take?</li></ul>

What's on your plate

Find your goals. Without them, it is impossible to prioritize your tasks. Try to set 90-day goals, which is long enough to make meaningful progress. Questions to prompt goals:<ul><li>What’s the one thing you could do that makes everything else easier or unnecessary?</li><li>If you were giving advice to someone else in your position, what 1-3 things would you tell them to focus on?</li><li>What do you want to have accomplished over the next five years?</li></ul>

Brainstorm your goals

Prioritize your list of possible goals using and expected value (EV) calculation. Expected Value = Resources Required x Return on Investment x Probability of SuccessTake the list of everything you could potentially work on over the next 90 days and then rank them by these criteria.<ul><li>Resources required: This is your time and cash required.</li><li>Probability of success: How likely it is to work and how excited you are about it.</li><li>Return on Investment (ROI): Your 1 Year and 5 Year ROI. Some projects have quick payback periods, and others have long term ones. Try and keep a balance by having one long and one short term ROI.</li></ul>

Your Top 1-3 Goals

This method consists of ranking your tasks into five categories.<ul><li>A – Very important, must be done at all costs.</li><li>B – Pretty important, but the consequences aren’t as serious if it’s not completed.</li><li>C – It would be nice to have done, but with no consequences for not doing it.</li><li>D – Delegate this to someone else as it's not worth your time.</li><li>E – Eliminate. Not worth doing, delete it. </li></ul>

The ABCDE Method

The priority matrix allows you to look through your to-do list and categorize based on their urgency and importance.<ul><li>Quadrant 1 - Urgent and important. This is anything due soon or overdue. See what can be automated or delegated.</li><li>Quadrant 2 - Not urgent and important. This contains tasks that are beneficial to your career or business in the long run.</li><li>Quadrant 3 - Urgent, not important. </li><li>Quadrant 4 - Not urgent, not important. Everything else goes here.</li></ul>

Eisenhower Priority Matrix

Categorize your tasks by how much value they generate for you or your company. Tasks can be assigned as either $10/hour, $100/hour, $1,000/hour or $10,000/hour.We might think of the value of the tasks as linear, where some tasks are more important than others. But the difference in value can be huge. For example, one new product could dramatically grow the business while the minor website update might make a negligent difference.

The Marshall Matrix

Some examples of things that often waste time: <ul><li>Checking business stats (traffic, sales) every day if there is nothing actionable to be done with them.</li><li>Going back and forth in an email thread more than once in a day</li><li>Meetings before noon or without a clear agenda</li><li>Errands that can be outsourced</li><li>Social Media and Email on Phone</li><li>Responding to Emails more than twice a day </li><li>Micromanaging people instead of managing by KPIs and results</li></ul>

The Not-To-Do List

<ul><li>Maker Time: Maker work requires long amounts of uninterrupted time, like coding, designing or writing.  The peak energy part of your day is most suited for this.</li><li>Manager Work: This work needs to be done, but does not drive things forward, like meetings, email, or filling out tax forms. It is best to "chunk" this time too and do it after your Maker work.</li><li>Admin Work: This is work you can do when you feel otherwise brain dead, like organizing your office or data entry.</li></ul>

Prioritize by Energy Level

Update all the tasks on your list and prioritize them. Then put them on your calendar based around your energy levels. Ask "Given my current energy level, what's the most valuable task I can do now?<ul><li>First put your rest in your schedule, because it is the easiest to neglect.</li><li>Then add your exercise times. It's so easy to skimp on if not scheduled in.</li><li>Next, add the high priority work (Maker work or $1,000 - $10,000/hour work.)</li><li>Then add your learning.</li><li>Finally, add the manager and admin or $10 - $100 work.</li></ul>

The Beginning of Each Week

At the start of each day, look over your calendar and task list for that day, and quickly write down three things you are grateful for your priorities of the day.Writing on paper makes it less likely to keep adding as the day progresses. Crossing the tasks off as you complete them feels very satisfying.

Schedule Your Day

"Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." Dwight Eisenhower One of the primary frameworks I use in my work is something I call the business production function. It's a diagnostic tool that lets me quickly look at the four big categories of business and asks: which one of these is the current limit?

problemsolving

Problem Solving

How to Prioritize Work Tasks: The Ultimate Guide to Priority Management

Time is our precious resource. It is perishable, it is irreplaceable, and it cannot be saved. It can only be reallocated from activities of lower value to activities of higher value.
Time management refers to how you schedule and organize your time for different activities.

What Time Management Is

Your “frog” is your most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it.If you have two important tasks, start your day with the biggest, hardest, and most important task first. Focus on completing it before you go to the next one.

Eat That Frog!

We tend to confuse activity with accomplishment: we attend endless meetings and make plans, but at the end of the day, no one does the job and gets the results required.“Failure to execute” is among the biggest problems in organizations today.

Failure to execute

<ul><li>Develop a sense of urgency: the habit of moving fast when an opportunity presents itself to you.</li><li>Stop procrastinating: develop the time management habit of moving quickly when something needs to be done.</li><li>Work in real-time: do your work as soon as it comes up.</li></ul>

How to Manage Time Effectively

<ul>
<li>Think on paper: Always write down what you intend to do.</li>
<li>Avoid distractions: They make getting off track entirely too easy.</li>
<li>Make your list of written tasks the night before: The better plan you have, the easier it is for you to get started.</li>
</ul>

General Time Management Skills

<ul><li>Make a to-do list for every day: One of the best time management tools you can develop.</li><li>Make your to-do lists a habit: When something new comes up, add it to the list.</li><li>Check off your completed tasks: This activity gives you a sense of accomplishment and generates the motivation to keep going.</li></ul>

Make a To-Do-List

<ul><li>Answer all of your emails at the same time</li><li>Keep your emails short and sweet</li><li>Create email folders</li><li>Check your email twice a day.</li></ul>

Time Management Tools for Email

<ul><li>Not allowing enough time to complete your task: Add sufficient cushion time to complete every step of the project. </li><li>Assuming that everything will work out all right: Assume that you are going to have problems and schedule sufficient time and resources to solve those problems.</li><li>Rushing at the end: You almost invariably will make mistakes and do poor quality work that you'll have to go back and correct later. </li><li>Trying to do several things at once: You end up doing nothing well. </li></ul>

Time Management Mistakes

<ul>
<li>"A” items are most important: the things that you must do.</li>
<li>"B” items only have minor consequences: tasks that you should do, but they only have mild consequences.</li>
<li>“C” tasks have no consequences: they have no effect at all on your work life.</li>
<li>“D” for delegate: the things that you can delegate to someone else.</li>
<li>“E” for eliminate: the things you should eliminate altogether.</li>
</ul>

The ABCDE Method Prioritization Technique

For you to develop sufficient desire to develop time management and organizational skills, you must be intensely motivated by the benefits you feel you will enjoy. 
You must want the results badly enough to overcome the natural inertia that keeps you doing things the same old way.

Time Management Motivation

Success in almost everything involves time management. It seems like there aren't enough hours in the day to get everything that you need to do accomplished, but if you want to achieve much more than others in a shorter amount of time, you must improve how you manage that time.

Time Management Tips That Will Make You a Productivity Master

“Wisdom is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

<ul>
<li>Sensory distractions (External): The things happening around us, like colleagues talking, phones ringing, people moving around us, music playing, etc.</li>
<li>Emotional distractions (Internal): The thoughts that make our attention drift from what we’re doing. For example, remembering a phone call you need to make or thinking about a future meeting.</li>
</ul>

The 2 kinds of distractions

“It’s not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds.”

<ul><li>Remote work or a lack of social interaction.</li><li>Multitasking.</li><li>Unpredictable work environments.</li></ul>Emotional distractions are a symptom of our workplace culture

Main sources of internal distraction

Workplace isolation sends us to Twitter and Facebook. Or to check in on email and chat every 5-10 minutes to see if there’s a new message.
Solution: Creating a daily routine with time to connect with the people you work with and not just resorting to impersonal communication.

Lacking social interaction

Living in a space of constant half-attention causes our brain to lose focus. 
Solution: Adopt a work schedule designed around single-tasking. for that, learn to prioritize. Because distraction might actually be just confusion about what matters.

Our work environment rarely lends itself to focus. So get more comfortable with distractions.
Our brains are brilliant at noticing anything that doesn’t match a pattern. We’re drawn to novelty, which makes a distraction—like a loud coworker or hearing a one-sided conversation—in an otherwise monotonous workday very hard to ignore.

Unpredictable work environments

"Wisdom is the art of knowing what to overlook," wrote psychologist William James. Unfortunately, if this is the case then few of us can honestly say we're wise. Knowing where to allocate our attention has become the great challenge of our lives. And we're not making it any easier by exposing ourselves to so many distractions.

How not to describe yourself in an interview

Top 9 Time Wasters and How To Avoid Them

What to Do in Your First 30 Days in a New Role | Ken Norton

3 Reasons Why Career Choices Are More Important Than Ever

The Right Way to Make a Big Career Transition

Xander A.