Here’s how to find the time to…

You definitely don’t want decision overload. It seems obvious that making things easier is the answer. My company, Bizezia^TM do just that – make things easier. I don’t want any of my readers to suffer from decision overload. What’s needed is organisation. So, to start with, here’s a book recommendation:

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload Author: Daniel J. Levitin Publisher: Penguin Group

The author is a cognitive neuroscientist at McGill University, and this book is an ambitious attempt to bring research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology to bear on the more ordinary parts of our lives.

You can watch him on YouTube, here.

You never know, you might end up doing the really important things.

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This tool is useful for everyone from Mac beginners to experts, but it’s a bit hidden. It requires digging through your list of installed apps or just holding down the Option key as you click a menu.

To open this tool, hold the Option key down on your keyboard, click the Wi-fi icon on the bar at the top of your screen, and select Open Wireless Diagnostics. You can also press Command+Space and type Wireless Diagnostics to search for it.

By default, the tool opens to a simple wizard that helps you diagnose network problems. Select “Monitor my Wi-Fi connection” and click Continue to have the tool monitor your connection and attempt to detect any problems. You can also just select “Continue to summary” to see recommendations immediately.

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Certified Professional Organizer and productivity expert Tamara Myles has developed a simple model—the Productivity Pyramid—which provides an actionable framework for anyone to achieve better results. Based on a sequence of steps leading to peak performance, the author’s easily adaptable system consists of five levels:

• Physical Organization: from de-cluttering to filing—fool-proof strategies for handling incoming papers and ensuring information remains accessible
• Electronic Organization: from dealing with email to electronic file management options such as cloud computing
• Time Management: mastering the three P’s—Plan, Prioritize, and Perform
• Activity-Goal Alignment: breaking objectives into specific, relevant, and measurable daily tasks
• Possibility: identifying new life and business goals that will help you reach your greatest potential

By downloading this free book, you will need to agree to receive regular updates about books from AMACOM, as well as new tips from the author, Tamara Myles.

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You could always perform a search online to find the symbol and copy-paste it into the program you’re using, too. This is inefficient, but works for quickly inserting the occasional obscure symbol:

• Windows: You can quickly insert special characters on Windows using Alt key codes. These require a separate numerical keypad on the right side of your keyboard, so they won’t work on most laptops. They’ll only work on desktop PCs if you have that number pad to the right of your Enter key.
• Mac OS X: Mac OS X has its own Character Viewer, which is easier to access. In almost any application, you can click the Edit menu and select Special Characters to open it. Locate a symbol in the window and double-click it to enter it into the text field in the current application. If you use specific special characters frequently, you can add them to your Favourites list so they can be easily accessed here. The list is more organized than it is on Windows.
• iPhone and iPad: You can type many additional characters on an iPhone or iPad’s touch keyboard by long-pressing the appropriate key. For example, to type the word “touché,” you’d type “touch,” long press the e key, and choose the é character.
• Android: Android’s keyboard works similarly. Long-press keys on the keyboard to access related characters and symbols. For example, long-press the e to find the accented e characters. Long-press other symbols — like the currency symbol — to access additional related symbols.

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Written and edited for distributor sales professionals, Promo Marketing is dedicated to helping them increase sales.  Supplier products are showcased in a high-impact, easy-to-read format and feature topics are chosen to improve distributors’ selling opportunities.

Geographic Eligibility: USA (Print or Digital), Mexico, Selected International (Digital Only) Offered Free by: NAPCO Media

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With over 115 pages filled with tips, tactics and real-world examples, this ebook is an essential resource for marketers, developers, CMOs, and everyone in between.

You’ll learn:

• How to break into the crowded app marketplace
• Strategies for keeping users engaged
• Tactics to win ratings and referrals
• Opportunities to generate revenue

Download FREE here

Virtual desktops are hardly a new concept. They’ve been around for quite some time, especially on various Linux distributions, and now more recently, they’ve been added to Windows 10.

Apple’s own take on virtual desktops Spaces, has been around since the introduction of Snow Leopard in 2009, and in the latest OS X release, Yosemite, we find it alive and well.

Out of the box, Spaces works great but it can be so much better with a few simple keyboard shortcuts. To access your Spaces, you can use the Mission Control button (aka F3) on your Mac’s keyboard. If you’ve no idea what we’re talking about when we say “Mission Control,” then you should definitely read the Mission Control 101 article.

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The article covers, in detail, the following shortcuts:

1. Jump from worksheet to worksheet with Ctrl + PgDn and Ctrl + PgUp
2. Jump to the end of a data range or the next data range with Ctrl + Arrow
3. Add the Shift key to select data
4. Double click to copy down
5. Use shortcuts to quickly format value
6. Lock cells with F4
7. Summarize data with CountIF and SumIF
8. Pull out the exact data you want with VLOOKUP
9. Use & to combine text strings
10. Clean up text with LEFT, RIGHT and LEN

Two more resources:

• Already mastered these? Check out these lesser-known Excel shortcuts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lY7eYRSDUx0
• NOW WATCH: This is what separates the Excel masters from the wannabes

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Download the Twitter Social Marketing Strategy Kit to get:

• The Complete Guide to Twitter Measurement (eBook)
• The Simply Measured Q4 2014 Twitter Benchmark Report
• How to Build a Better Twitter Calendar (Guide)
• Must-read Twitter tactics from the Simply Measured blog

Download the kit

This FREE eBook will discuss how to:

• Share products with “Pin it” buttons
• Display product information with Rich Pins
• Expand with the new Promoted Pins

And more!

Download here

This number is no fluke. Facebook is putting serious weight behind native videos, which now autoplay in users’ feeds. Many marketers on Facebook have started to see more reach from videos than other media types, including photos.

While videos may be seeing more organic reach than photos, producing high-quality and relevant videos can be a much bigger task than producing photos, so many marketers are tentative to focus too much effort on this content type.

How do you ensure that your time is well spent on a Facebook video? Simple: You use your data. Facebook provides some crucial metrics that you may be overlooking when planning your videos.

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• What can a two-tier strategy do for your bottom line?: For organisations that have multiple sites and multinational locations, the decision to upgrade or transition to a new financial management solution can be complicated. This whitepaper studies the benefits of deploying a ‘two-tier’ financial strategy and how to find the right solution. VIEW SUMMARY Company: Infor
• 5 ways cloud security beats what you have on-premise: Cloud-based computing is often more secure than on-premise computing for businesses. It’s like elevating your security from a humble, DIY tree fort to the sophistication of Fort Knox. This white paper explores what cloud offers. VIEW SUMMARY Company: Infor
• Outperformance: What it means and how to achieve it: Have you noticed how some organisations do better by every measure? At Investors in People, we call these organisations the Outperformers. When we redesigned our Framework for 2015, we decided to focus on them. What makes them tick? And how can others become Outperformers themselves? VIEW SUMMARY Company: Investors in People
• How to grow your business: This short guide explains how accountancy practices are using the principles of automation, integration and collaboration to achieve sustained growth. There are links to customer case studies and two short videos. VIEW SUMMARY Company: CCH, A Wolters Kluwer Business

The conventional wisdom is that reviewers who are aware of a preparer’s positive or negative feelings toward a client will correct for those biases, not allowing them to influence the final audit. The reality, though, may be quite the reverse.

University of Pittsburgh researchers found in a paper published in The Accounting Review, the journal of the American Accounting Association, that a reviewer’s awareness of bias may cause them to rely more on the preparer’s judgments than they would without such awareness.

The study’s findings were derived from an online experiment involving 119 audit managers and senior managers from two Big Four accounting firms who had an average of 9.37 years of experience.

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Read more: Nine business books you should read today

Addressing 1500 entrepreneurs and managers yesterday morning, Collins distilled 25 years of research into “what makes great enterprises tick” into 12 questions that all business owners and leaders should seek to answer. The process of answering the questions will reveal the principles leaders need to make their companies great, he said.

“It’s dangerous to study success,” Collins said. “So instead we studied the contrast between great and good and endurance and collapse … those who thrive in chaotic environments and those who it gets the better of.”

“The answer isn’t circumstances … building a great company is not primarily a matter of circumstance, it’s a matter of choice and discipline.”

But before he revealed his 12 steps, Collins walked the audience through what great leadership is.

Collins says it is common for leadership to be confused with a big personality, but most of the leaders of great companies he has come across through his research had “a charisma bypass”.

Instead, Collins defines leadership as “the art of getting people to want to do what must be done”.

“First you have to decide what must be done,” he said.

Read the full article for the 12 steps and more

But which traits are common to all great leaders? There’s no need to guess – just download this FREE eBook, where we examine eight of the most common traits of truly great leaders, from empathy to decisiveness, from vision to calmness under pressure. Learn 8 common traits of the best leaders, then how to avoid doing the things that can bring it all crashing down.

Read this free eBook to learn:

• The domino effect of remaining calm under pressure
• How to develop great instinct
• How to loosen the reins on your employees

And more…

Download here

Named as one of the top 10 leadership thinkers in the world, Wiseman spent 17 years as an executive at software giant Oracle before switching to research and founding leadership research and development firm, the Wiseman Group. Among her recent clients are Apple, Nike, PayPal, Salesforce.com and Twitter.

Wiseman is also the author of Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter and The Multiplier Effect: Tapping the Genius Inside Our Schools.

On Tuesday she offered 1500 entrepreneurs and business leaders insights from the research that informed both books. In her research, Wiseman studied 150 leaders to determine what the role of a leader is in creating a brilliant team and the conditions under which people do their best work.

Read the full story to find out more

First announced in 2013, the requirements call on auditors to describe the assessed risks of material misstatement, materiality and the scope of the audit, which is beginning to shed more light and transparency on a process that had previously been described as a “black box” by investors. The profession’s watchdog hopes this trend will be converted into “improved justifiable confidence” in audit. Much of the FRC’s optimism has been gleaned from the contents of its newly published survey, Extended auditor’s reports: A review of experience in the first year.

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Empowerment is based on the idea that giving employees skills, resources, authority, opportunity, motivation, as well holding them responsible and accountable for outcomes of their actions, will contribute to their competence and satisfaction. It essentially flips the traditional hierarchy of an organisation on its head, from a traditional ‘top down’ management structure to one where responsibility is placed with the employee.

Many organisations will have an employee engagement expert as part of the HR team, which will work with staff to increase levels of wellbeing and productivity in an organisation; and employee engagement is the first step on the road to creating an empowered culture. However, it’s a big step forward, but one that if you get right can lead to a more entrepreneurial business, which in our service-driven economy, can lead to increased profitability. But where do you start?

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Acas has guidance to help:

• Step by step guides for organisations looking to grow
• Advisory booklet Recruitment and induction
• Recruiting an employee: a step-by-step guide
• Useful forms and templates for hiring staff
• Advisory handbook – Employing people: a handbook for small firms
• Recruitment and induction training
• HR for beginners training

Five top tips for recruiting the right staff

• Stand back and take a look where your business has come from and where it’s going
• Pinpoint the key tasks of a job, and the personal qualities and make these clear when advertising
• Advertise through at least two different channels
• Avoid interview bias by having at least two people interviewing candidates
• Offer the going rate for the job in your business sector

Social media in the workplace Using social media for recruitment is a growing trend as a cost-effective method to help widen your pool of candidates. Here are some tips on taking this approach.

Social media has had a huge impact on the workplace. As well as bringing great opportunities it’s also presented challenges, for example how organisations promote and control their reputation and how colleagues treat one another. It’s important to develop a policy on social media use at work view Acas social media guidance

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This FREE “How to” guide provides practical guidance for employers that are considering setting up a secondment arrangement. It covers:

• The issues that can arise;
• How to address them; and
• Example clauses that employers can use when agreeing a secondment.

The guide is published by XpertHR, the UK’s leading online resource for employment law, HR good practice and benchmarking, bringing together everything HR professionals need to stay compliant with legislation changes, operate cost-effectively and maintain a competitive edge.

Get the guide

Launching an employee advocacy program is a great way to expand a company’s digital footprint and reach a wider audience.

Download this FREE eBook and learn:

• Key elements of employee advocacy that successful programs share
• How to target and recruit the right employees
• Strategies to boost employee participation
• A list of key performance indicators to follow and set goals around

Download here

There is no definition of self-employment in law leaving businesses, individuals and HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to wade through case law to establish employment status. Special categorisation rules and practices help some but can create anomalies.

The consequences to employers of an incorrect decision can be significant tax and National Insurance Contributions (NICs) bills, leading many to hire contractors only through intermediaries.

John Whiting, Tax Director of the Office of Tax Simplification, said:

• The tax system is stuck in an out-of-date mind set. In the 1950s and 1960s the distinction between employees and the classic self-employed jobbing plumber was clear and easy. Nowadays working patterns are hugely varied, freelancing is a way of life for many and that simple split doesn’t work often enough.
• This causes uncertainty, risk and administrative burdens all round. We have heard from businesses about transactions being delayed or even abandoned due to the risk posed by employment status uncertainty.
• This is a difficult area with no simple solutions. We identify both direct ways of simplifying things – such as streamlining definitions – and indirect ones, which would take the heat out of the issue. Some should be acted on in the short to medium term, others are promising routes to reform that warrant further work but which would mean major changes.

The OTS recommends various improvements including:

• Better employment status guidance, in one place with more real-life examples;
• Help for individuals and small businesses on what action a business should take, and the documentation it should have, when engaging a self-employed individual, to preclude or reduce the burden of HMRC enquiries;
• Setting up a HMRC employment status helpline and allocating more resources to this area.

The OTS believes that HMRC’s Employment Status Indicator (ESI) tool is a valuable resource, but it needs to be expanded and protocols developed so it can be relied upon.

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