XFER Blog

There are countless ways to boost your productivity in the office… at least, that’s what the Internet says. How do you separate the productivity champs from the chumps? It’s simple, really; just look for the tried and true methods that have been backed by thorough research. One such study, performed by Julia Gifford of Draugiem Group, claims that workers can be more productive by not trying to do as much office work as possible.

The road down entrepreneurialism is a long and twisted path, full of pitfalls that can lead you astray. However, there’s one companion who will never forsake you, and that’s your morning cup of coffee. While you might feel like you can’t get anything done without your morning caffeine fix, it can be holding you back from achieving your maximum productivity.

Have you ever felt like you aren’t sure how to proceed, or how to get yourself out of a rut? You surely don’t want your competitors to know about your weak points, but you feel so much pressure that you might think twice about asking for tips of the trade. After all, a hand once in a while can make all of the difference. This is when you might consider outsourcing a consultant.

In business, you need to be competitive to experience growth. Otherwise, your competitors might catch up and surpass you when you least expect it. When your computer network is reliable, you can know with certainty that your employees are operating at optimal efficiency. For a small or medium-sized business, this can mean all the difference.

You pay your employees to come to the office and perform their daily duties, but how much of that time is actually being spent working? Every wasted minute cuts into your daily profits, which can waste countless minutes. If you want to get the most out of your team, there are several technology strategies that the modern business can take advantage of to maximize productivity.

We talk a lot about how downtime experienced from a technology issue like a server outage can destroy your company’s productivity. Yet, we’ve not distinguished between the different types of downtime, with the worst kind being pure and unadulterated downtime. What is pure downtime and how can you dilute it?

For the modern-day business owner, moving to the cloud means to take advantage of the several strategic advantages it offers. Companies no longer have to restrict themselves by relying on physical servers, desktops, or hardware. Most businesses see the value that cloud-based operations can offer them, and they are racing to take advantage of this fairly recent development. In fact, Joe McKendrick of Forbes magazine says that four-out-of-five small businesses will be based in the cloud in the near future.

The office is a unique place designed solely for the purpose of getting work done. Therefore, no matter how your workplace is designed, there's always room to improve it in order to squeeze out a few more precious minutes of productivity from each worker. As productivity goes, every minute saved adds up!

Smartphones have revolutionized the way that we communicate with each other and increased productivity, but for some businesses, they are only making things worse. A perfect example of this is the restaurant business - in fact, one restaurant owner decided to take matters into his own hands, and has performed a study which examined their business before and after the mobile revolution.

In the same way that there are two sides to every issue, there are two sides to every IT department. IT departments of today are expected to both maintain IT infrastructures and implement new money-making solutions. It's like IT is a road with two lanes - a fast lane and a slow lane.

When it comes to productivity, the latest technology can be a huge boon. A proper word processor can increase your productivity drastically if you know how to use it. However, one of today's most ingenious writers - George R. R. Martin - is still stuck in the Stone Age of word processing technology!

You may think that you're awesome at multitasking, but according to cognitive psychologist Art Markman, "You are your own worst judge of how good a multitasker you are." This is because the same areas of your brain that monitor performance are the same areas activated by multitasking, which means that it's difficult to accurately evaluate your own performance.

As the top American collegiate men's and women's basketball teams are poised to take the court to decide national champions in 2014 NCAA tournament, local businesses are in a competition of their own; to turn a profit. There are three ways your business and your favorite team share a similar path to success.

You have worked hard to gather and develop the perfect team and build a profitable business. It may have taken years to train your team in the intricacies of your business, and teach them to work together as a cohesive unit. Then life happens and messes up everything. When life hits, what can you do to save your team?