Category: 1-Minute Strategy

You’ve landed a sit-down with the company you’re interested in—now don’t create the impression that you need help figuring things out by asking for directions to the building. That’s why we have the Internet. Assure your interviewer that you’ll be able to find the site with no problem and leave it at that.

If you have a smartphone, you’ve also got a very efficient little voice recorder. End the week by pressing the record button and describing the week in detail without any preparation, then listen to the playback. Within a month or so, you’ll have picked up on several speech patterns you never knew you had.

Ten years ago, parcel delivery giant UPS learned through time studies that avoiding left-hand turns while making deliveries saved time, fuel, emissions discharge and accidents. It has designed many routes specifically to avoid left-hand turns to achieve razor edge efficiency. How many of your own processes that you might take for granted are ready for […]

Try this if you want to sharpen your editing skills, think outside the box, and maybe have a little fun: Take a news story off the Internet and go through it with a red pen until you’ve deleted every single word that isn’t absolutely necessary to express that information. Being as unforgiving as possible with […]

We’ve all gotten that email: “Does anyone happen to have a spare phone charger handy?” Get ready to see it a lot more often in the coming era. Think about ordering a few chargers for the office and keeping them on hand for the most popular cellphone (and perhaps tablet computer) types.

Always try rebooting your computer when encountering a tech problem that’s stopped you cold—even if it doesn’t seem like such a simple fix could possibly cure what’s ailing your system. (“Come on, how can turning this thing off and on again magically make the fonts in this PDF appear correctly?”) Chances are good that a […]

Email storage capacity in Gmail, Hotmail and most other free services nowadays is virtually unlimited, so emailing files to yourself is a very quick and easy safeguard against something disappearing. No cloud service, unfamiliar server or USB drive is required and your emails holding those valuable attachments will most likely be accessible for quite some […]

In our off-hours, we lay out a great deal of money to buy the things that make us comfortable, cheerful and content. Yet we tend to forget how much of our lives are spent at the office and simply accept its relative lack of amenities. Set aside some money from your budget every year to […]

There’s plenty of empty space on the front and sides of that big machine to affix cheat sheets and quick tips on changing toner and clearing easy jams, plus the number to call for help when you’re not around.

Or if that’s a bit extravagant, at least write them on a permanent, immobile structure to make sure they’re always exactly where you expect them to be—not hiding on rogue slips of paper, or in an online folder you might delete or whose location you could forget. Write them on a secret part of a […]