Etchings on the Attic Wall

Highly Effective Work Habits:  Use Video Conferencing / Chat

In this day and age, with travel costs becoming more expensive for companies and the existence of cheap, reliable video options, it is becoming more important to try and connect with people via video conferencing or video chat.  There are, of course, large conference room systems [...]

Highly Effective Work Habits:  How to Ace a Job Interview

I came across a good article the other day about how to ace a job interview.  In this article, the author presents 4 techniques to keep in mind:

Do your homework.  You need to know something about the company and position you are interviewing with.  It [...]

Highly Effective Work Habits:  Choose the Appropriate Methodology
Do you get involved with a lot of project work that takes weeks, if not months, to complete?  In most situations, it is difficult to run a project smoothly without a methodology in place.  As projects grow in size in terms of people, resources, and time, you need [...]

Highly Effective Work Habits:  Water Cooler Chat: Dos and Don’ts
Salary.com recently posted 7 Dos and Don’ts that you should consider when chatting with coworkers around the “water cooler”.

Do – Sunday Hike.  Sharing your hobbies and interests can help people get to know you.
Don’t – Sunday Service.  Keep religion out of the work place.  It is [...]

Highly Effective Work Habits:  Testing is Critical

Whenever you build something whether it be a new process, tool, or application, you need to make sure testing is a critical part of your plan.  Unfortunately, this is an area that is usually either skipped or limited due to time constraints or budget.  I can’t tell you [...]

Highly Effective Work Habits:  Set up an ergonomic workspace

It is awfully hard to concentrate at work if you are in an uncomfortable environment.  Long term, this can also negatively effect your health.  Some of the problems you may develop are back pain, eye fatigue, vertigo, carpal tunnel, and neck strain.  To combat these, you may [...]

Highly Effective Work Habits:  Choose a Mentor

No matter what your position at your company (unless you are the CEO), make sure you select a mentor.  This is someone you look up to that you can learn from.  This could be someone in the same department who has a similar position you want to eventually [...]

Highly Effective Work Habits:  Take Your Vacations

Most jobs will either give you about 2 weeks of vacation when you first start or you earn hours as you go.  And usually those benefits will increase the longer you stay with a company.  If you’ve got vacation time, take it!  Working hard is all well and [...]

Highly Effective Work Habits:  Conformity of the Dress Code

Every workplace has this policy – the dress code.  Depending on where you work, this could be business professional, business casual, casual, or no dress code at all.  I had never heard about the latter until recently.  At this particular company, they have employees coming to [...]

Highly Effective Work Habits:  It Is OK If You Don’t Know Something

I’m sure most of you out there want to try to work on things yourselves without any help.  There isn’t anything wrong with this – unless you spend too much time here spinning your wheels.  At some point, you have to ask for [...]