10 Ways To Increase Your Productivity

Did you know?

1. Researchers at Hiroshima University conducted a study, called The Power of Kawaii (Japanese for ''cute''), which found that the positive emotions produced by looking at baby animals seems to trigger not only happiness but a ''narrowed attentional focus'', which in turn improves our ability to concentrate. They suggested workers be subjected to cute images to induce careful behaviour.
2. Everybody has the best time of day in which they are at their most productive. When is yours?
3. Our lives and brains are cluttered with too much information. Go on an Information Diet to eliminate unproductive Internet surfing.
4. Take a short break - it'll boost your output.
5. Do you work at your best when the room's silent or filled with soothing background buzz? Find out.
6. Reward yourself for finishing a task.
7. Use caller ID and voice mail to make sure the phone doesn't interrupt you unnecessarily.
8. Some people concentrate better when they nibble a healthy snack or sip water. Do you?
9. Prioritise your tasks in terms of urgency as well as importance. Remember, if you only ever do the urgent stuff, you may never get to the less urgent but more important things in life.
10. The light in the office may make you unproductive. Discover how.

Does it matter if girls do better than boys?

Welcome to 2011. To stimulate debate, we kick off with a controversial topic: Does it matter if girls do better than boys?

"Boys tend to do better in exams," says Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University. "Girls apply themselves to coursework and work more consistently throughout the year."

However, research confirms that girls generally outperform boys at school, even if boys do better in maths and science. In fact, girls in all-girl schools do even better than girls in co-ed schools, while boys in all-boy schools do worse than boys in co-ed schools.

Statistics from USA are equally worrying:

• Boys average a year to a year and a half lag behind girls in reading and writing skills
• Boys represent up to 70% of children diagnosed with learning disabilities
• Boys represent 80% of children diagnosed with behavioral problems
• Boys account for 80% of high school dropouts
• Boys represent less than 44% of America's college students

If you have a boy (or a girl) in your life who is at a risk of becoming a statistic, check his (or her) learning style using our one of Learning Style Analysis instruments.

Learning Style - “Help, my child is impulsive!”

Does your child prefer to give a quick answer rather than a correct answer? Is her mind very quick? Does it constantly create new ideas?

If that’s the case, it’s possible that your child’s learning style is impulsive. She might have difficulties concentrating and staying focused on her schoolwork, she might get easily distracted from doing homework or paying attention to a task for a length of time.

For an impulsive child to thrive at school, she needs an understanding teacher who’s willing to accommodate her thinking style by allowing the child to answer in her preferred quick way and not discouraging her when she gets the answer wrong.

Fast-paced, short and challenging assignments suit an impulsive child’s thinking style best. A method that often works with impulsive children, is to ask them the question upfront and then tell them to find the answer in the textbook or in the classroom display cabinet (as opposed to telling them a lot of facts first and then asking questions about it). Asking one question at a time might also be a good way of keeping the child’s attention focused.

Another way may be to offer small rewards for every correct answer, thus motivating the child to become more flexible in their impulsive thinking style. Note: this will only work with externally motivated children (to find out more about your child’s motivation, please click here).

Either way, because impulsiveness is a biological trait, your child is not likely to change her thinking style very much as she grows older. To enhance her learning success in an environment that does not accept her impulsive style, she needs techniques for coping with being wrong some of the time, or with being labelled somebody who doesn’t think before they speak. You can help her by making her understand that this impulsiveness is simply part of her learning style, and not the person she is.

In any case, in today’s fast-paced society, it’s not always a bad thing to be impulsive. Sometimes a quick decision that’s not perfect may be better than a perfect decision that comes too late.

Did you know?
Impulsive decision-making is just one of 48 elements that make up your child’s learning style. To determine the other elements, analyse your child’s learning style here with our free demo.