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10 Great Tips for a Great Night’s Sleep

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Tips for a great night's sleep|10 Great Tips for a Great Night's SleepTip 1: Make sure your bedtime is sacred. It needs to stay the same every single day even on weekends. This will help guarantee a better night’s sleep on a consistent basis.

Tip 2: Create a routine before bed that calms you down. This could be a bath, a book, meditation, yoga, anything that lets you relax and come down from the day.

Tip 3: Cooler bedrooms are better. Make sure to bring down that temperature before throwing on the quilts.

Tip 4: No one sleeps better with noise. White noise from a fan or rain, maybe, but not from a TV, music with lyrics, etc. Get quiet in your room to sleep better.

Tip 5: If you don’t have blackout shades for the room, buy them. It’s a life-changing purchase based on what it does to sleep patterns.


Tip 6: Find the right pillow and mattress combination for you whether that’s soft, medium, or harder for more support. Sturdy bed frames are a must for a good night’s sleep.

Tip 7: Don’t eat in the 3 hours before bed.

Tip 8: Exercise regularly, but do it early in the day. A good evening walk is fine as long as it doesn’t come right up before your bedtime.

Tip 9: Limit the caffeine and try to keep it before noon.

Tip 10: Don’t underestimate the negative effects alcohol and nicotine have on your sleep.

6 Ways To Improve Productivity In The Office

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Improve office productivity|6 Ways To Improve Productivity In The OfficeDriving office productivity is a ley task within every office-based business. Over the years, there have been many drastic attempts to improve productivity that have ultimately failed. More subtle, empathic models of productivity provocation typically bear the most fruit. Here are six ways that a business can improve office productivity.

Listen To Your Staff

Contented staff are typically productive staff. Employees will not work to their full potential if they feel like their concerns are not being listened to. Every responsible business owner needs to listen to employee concerns about bullying, office culture, performance roadblocks, and discrimination. Employees are working on the frontline – their perspective is extremely valuable and can help drive institutional change that ultimately increases productivity.

Accept The New Normal

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, many businesses have struggled to negotiate the transition back to office-based work. Many employees have simply quit their jobs when forced to go back into the offices they despised. The companies that are having the most success with the transition into a post-pandemic world are those that are able to see the benefits of a hybrid system. Allowing employees to spend some of their working lives at home or in the office is a perfectly good way of embracing the new normal while maintaining the ability to call workers in.

Hybrid working models are a great way to maintain pre-pandemic levels of productivity without simply embracing the bad old ways. It can only be implemented, however, when there is adequate security measures implemented to protect the company when people are working remotely.

Design Your Office Space Adequately

Good office design can go a long way. There have been some rather dismal office configurations popular in the past that have – quite understandably – driven employees to hate their jobs. The dreaded ‘cubicle office’ is perhaps the most famous example of a depressing office configuration. Human beings need to be in a pleasant and natural environment if they are to work to their full potential. Check out these five office design tips that can improve employee satisfaction. Modern office spaces that produce happy, productive employees are typically semi-open in design and feature live plants, places to relax, and the option of some genuine privacy. Make your office a place that people actually want to work in.


Offer Good Benefits

In order to cultivate a productive workplace, you need to give employees good benefits. Unless employees are well paid, their wages will not cover expenses during a pregnancy, dental or legal emergency. In the United States of America, companies need to cover some kind of health insurance as a minimum benefit in order to retain happy employees. However, if you want to retain loyal employees for a longer period and have lower turnover rates, then you should consider other benefits than just the bare minimum. This could include things like paid maternity and paternity leave, so staff can feel secure when they take time off to be with their new family, or regular recognition and small bonuses for high-performers – it doesn’t have to be a large amount of money, a small gift card can go a long way in making people feel appreciated.

Use Project Management Software

Poor project management is one of the most common reasons that businesses reach stumbling blocks in their schedule. No matter how simple a project seems, it will still involve multiple stakeholders, budgeting issues, multiple workers, and the need for accurate communication. More complex projects typically require regular reporting, complex data sharing, and multiple teams working in conjunction with one another.

Project management software makes projects far more efficient and cohesive by combining reporting, communication, monitoring, and just about every other essential area of project management. If you don’t use project management software in your office, you have fallen somewhat behind the times.

Don’t Push Multitasking

People working in offices are often expected to take on too much at once. While multitasking might seem like an acceptable way to drive up productivity in a workforce, it can actually damage overall productivity. Set guidelines for task delegation should be written up to make sure that managers do not ‘pass the buck’ onto their staff colleagues. In recent years, a great deal of academic attention has focused on the development of effective delegation styles. Read up on the latest organizational psychology research before committing to a set of rules.

Staff members that are allowed to focus on one task at a time are more likely to work efficiently and effectively. This will ultimately drive up productivity.

Warning: Entrepreneurship Is Hazardous To Health

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Entrepreneurship|Warning: Entrepreneurship Is Hazardous To HealthThese days, the culture heavily promotes the idea of becoming an entrepreneur. Society needs “game-changing” individuals who solve the problems we collectively face, supercharge the economy, and transform technologies into products.

And while it might all seem extremely glamorous, there’s a dark side. To actually achieve the things that many entrepreneurs do, they have to make extreme sacrifices, including their own health.

For instance, research suggests that entrepreneurs work around 63 percent longer than the average employee. So, if a worker has a 42.5-hour weekly contract, that means that the boss at their startup is putting in 70 hours per week.

The Health-Related Risks Of Entrepreneurship

So what risks are entrepreneurs exposing themselves to by working these insane hours and shouldering the pressures of an entire organization?

Well, studies that compare company leaders to the general population don’t paint a pretty picture. Entrepreneurs, for instance, have 200 percent of the addiction risk of regular workers, are 100 percent more likely to experience depression, and more than 500 percent more likely to have ADHD.

Given how prevalent these conditions are throughout the general population, they are almost ubiquitous among company leaders. The vast majority have health secrets that would probably shock their employees to the core.

Heart disease appears to be the biggest issue of them all. People working the longest hours appear to be at the greatest risk of developing heart problems when working long hours over an extended period of their lives.

What Can Entrepreneurs Do To Take Care Of Themselves?

All of this talk about entrepreneurs having health problems is rather gloomy, though. After all, business leaders are people who shake up the world and improve the lives of regular people. If their lives are being cut short just because of the work they are doing, that seems like a shame.

The trick here is for entrepreneurs to abandon traditional Western lifestyles and embrace something far more innovative. While keeping your Ventolin nearby, in case of asthma attack, is something you’ll need to carry on doing, eating pizzas and burning the midnight oil isn’t.

Entrepreneurs need to think of their lifestyle as a tool to make their bodies more robust. In reality, there is no reason why they should have higher disease risk than the rest of the population, as long as they adjust how they live to reflect the work choices that they make.

Here are some rules:

  • Maintain your circadian rhythm. Avoid the temptation to work deep into the night or get up at some ridiculous time in the morning, just because Mark Wahlberg does.
  • Avoid processed foods. Eat a diet of fruit, vegetables, whole grains and beans. If you don’t have time to prepare this type of food, get someone to do it for you. Alternatively, buy unprocessed instant foods. There are plenty available.
  • Prioritize sleep. The world’s second-richest man, Jeff Bezos, is on record saying that he prioritizes sleep, getting around 8 hours a night.
  • Take time out at the weekend. Don’t work 24/7. Instead, give yourself the luxury of having one day off per week where you don’t think about work at all.
  • Wake up at the same time every day. Get your body into the habit of waking up with the sunrise.
  • Avoid traveling through multiple time zones. Business travel can really wreck your body’s ability to self-regulate. If you can’t avoid it, try to go to bed and wake up using the time back home, not the time in the new location.

Of course, when you’re a stressed-out entrepreneur, lifestyle tends to take a backseat. However, you’ll find that when you really start to prioritize what you eat, it changes what you can achieve. The healthier you feel, the more likely you are to reach your goals.

Remember, a late night here or there isn’t going to make much of a difference to your health. Our bodies can recover from a couple of bad sleeps in a row. However, problems start to emerge when you lack sleep for days, or you eat pizza every night for a week. Once you go down that path, it is often only a matter of time before your body gives out and you start experiencing many of the health issues discussed above.

Managing stress is also important. Ultimately, you need to remind yourself that being an entrepreneur is all about play. You’re exploring the world, looking to create business systems that generate value. If they don’t, then you can always move onto the next thing. It’s not the end of the world.

How Entrepreneurs Find The Energy To Keep Going

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Entrepreneurs Energy|How Entrepreneurs Find The Energy To Keep GoingIf you run a business and you are keen to make sure that you are doing so as well as possible, there are many things that you might want to bear in mind. One of the most important of these is knowing and understanding how to find the energy to keep on going even when things get tough, or when you feel as if you are at the end of your tether. As it happens, there are many things that help entrepreneurs to find the energy they need to keep on going, and in this post we are going to take a look at just some of the most important and powerful of these.

A Good Diet

First of all, you really can’t overlook the importance of a healthy diet. Although you might find yourself thinking that this surely can’t be all that important, you would be surprised just how important it really is, and it’s something that is always worth focusing on as best as you possibly can. In general you are going to want to make sure that you are eating plenty of fruits and vegetables, so that your body has the required energy to keep on going when it needs to. That can make a surprising difference to how you act in business.

Helping People

If your business is designed to help people out in some way or another, you will probably find that this acts as a fantastic driver for doing what you do, and might inspire you to do it more effectively and with much greater levels of energy. So you might want to focus more and more on what it is that your business is doing for other people and if necessary get training through the Premier Practice Accelerator to ensure that you are doing so as effectively as possible. When you know that you are helping people with your business every day, you will find it so much easier to keep on going.

Rest & Recover

A lot of people think that successful people are those who work themselves to the bone day in, day out. While it does indeed take a lot of persistence to be able to find success, you also need to allow yourself plenty of opportunity to rest and recover as necessary. As long as you are doing that, it is going to mean that you have more energy to bring to each day, regardless of what you might be doing. This is a really important thing to bear in mind, so make sure that you are thinking about it if you are keen to make the most of your business from the start. Give yourself plenty of chances to rest and recover as necessary.

As you can see, there are a number of things that you might want to focus on in order to have more energy as an entrepreneur. Do these, and you should find that you are much more likely to find success as you need to.

How to Stay Motivated as You Build Your Business

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Stay Motivated|How to Stay Motivated as You Build Your BusinessWhen it comes to running a business, chances are that on the day you launched, you were full of motivation as the plan to get things going and really start hammering in on your work all finally came to fruition. Of course, after that initial period of adrenaline has worn off, you are likely going to find it a bit of a struggle to keep motivated as you work. You will find yourself feeling burnt out and it will feel like a lot of the work that you are doing is not actually resulting in any positive results. Does this sound like you? If so, then look no further, as this article is going to go into detail about some of the best ways that you can keep yourself motivated as you are trying to build your business.

Allow Yourself Some Time Off

One of the reasons that you might find yourself feeling a bit burnt out is because of the fact that you are not allowing yourself any time off. This could be on a short-term basis such as night by night but then also on a long-term basis. When was the last time you took a holiday? You need to ensure that you are giving yourself plenty of time when it comes to evenings and holidays to switch off. In doing so, you are going to feel a lot more motivated when it comes to doing work once again. There are a number of ways that you can switch off; one of the popular means is by gaming, which is a fantastic form of escapism. You can play something complex or subscribe to more classic rules, for instance, if you head over to the best high roller online casino, which comes ripe with classics such as slot machines and poker.

Expand Your Network

You are going to find it very hard for your business to operate or continue to grow if you are working within a bubble. You are going to need to ensure you are keeping and building on a connection with the likes of customers, vendors, employees and of course other entrepreneurs. This is absolutely vital when it comes to growing as a business; however, it is also vital when it comes to keeping yourself motivated. You find energy in people who are working in a similar way to you or in people who can help you grow, so expanding upon your network is one of the best ways to continue to feel motivated to keep growing. Be sure to attend different networking events and be active on social media to ensure that you keep meeting new people.

Focus on Your Goals

When you are working, you need to ensure that you know what your goals are and be aware how you will be able to achieve them. If you fail to set them for yourself then you will find it incredibly hard to actually achieve something. In business, the same as in life, you need to set yourself targets to stride towards.