+27 (0)79 505 8841
WB Consulting - Crafting Successful Brands
  • Home
  • About us
    • Resumes >
      • Wilna Beukes
      • Natalie Sokolich
  • Services
    • Website Design
    • Email Marketing and Newsletter Management
  • Clients
  • Contact
    • Newsletter subscribe
  • Blog

12 Highly Useful Skills You Can Learn in a Minute

12/10/2015

0 Comments

 
Everyone loves a good life hack, especially if it’s super quick to pick up. While one minute may not seem like a lot of time to master a useful skill, you’d be surprised just how much you can actually accomplish in 60 seconds or less. With the help of a Quora thread on the matter,
black-and-white-clock_one-minute

Everyone loves a good life hack, especially if it’s super quick to pick up.

While one minute may not seem like a lot of time to master a useful skill, you’d be surprised just how much you can actually accomplish in 60 seconds or less.

With the help of a Quora thread on the matter, here are are several handy life skills you can pick up almost instantly:

1. Start everything with ‘why?’ in mind.

“Always! Not only when it comes to business plans,” says user Charles Faraone. “Start with why for every decision impacting on your life, health, and happiness. Ask yourself why you’re eating foods that might not be healthy for you. Why you’re doing things the way you’re doing them. Why you’re avoiding doing what you know you should be doing. It’s an amazingly simple approach with huge potential payoffs.”

2. Save ink when printing.

When printing documents, user Veijay Jain suggests simply changing the text from black to gray. This will make little difference to the quality of what you’re printing, and will not only reduce the amount of ink used, but it’ll also increase the printing speed. “Needless to say that by using less ink, you will be slowing down the process filling the mother earth with used cartridges, helping our earth remain greener.”

3. Stop an impending sneeze.

User Alexander Freiherr offers a few methods for stopping a sneeze. “Squeeze your nose. Catch the part of your nose above the tip and stretch it out as if you are removing your nose out of your face. It should not be painful, but simply stretch out your cartilage, stopping the sneeze.

“Blow your nose. Use tissue and blow your nose when you feel a sneeze coming on. It should clear your sinuses of what caused the sneeze in the first place.

“Pinch your upper lip. Using your thumb and forefinger, pinch your upper lip lightly and press it upward toward your nostrils. Your thumb should head toward one nostril and your forefinger toward the other, bunching up your upper lip slightly.

“Use your tongue. Press your tongue behind your two front teeth, where the roof of your mouth meets the gum palate or alveolar ridge. Press hard with your most powerful muscles against your teeth until the tickling sensation dissipates.”

4. Build muscle at your desk.

Press your hands together as hard as you can, says user Ashwin D. Kini. You should feel pressure in your pectoral, shoulder, and arm muscles. This kind of isometric exercise requires minimal movement, but strengthens muscles.

5. Save time with computer shortcuts.

User Jhasketan Sahu suggests the following for smoother web browsing:

To open a new Tab: .
To close any open Tab: .
To move from one Tab to another: or.
To reopen a recently closed tab: .
To find specific text in a web page: .
To increase or decrease the size of the text: Hold   and press “+” or “-” respectively.
To open a link in a new tab: Hold and click the link.

6. Easily change text case in Word.

Highlight the text you want to change the case of and press Shift+F3, writes Suvam Behera. Doing this once will convert the highlighted text to all upper case, twice will convert the text to all lowercase, and three times will capitalise the first letter of each word.

7. Never prematurely send an email again.

“When you’re writing an email, fill in the addressee last,” says David Spencer. “This way, you will never accidentally click and send a premature email.”

8. Declutter your mind before bed.

“At the end of the day for one minute summarize your day,” writes Mihalache Catalin. “What you did, what you could do but didn’t because fear or laziness stopped you. Why you did everything in that day. How to improve what you do. Do this always before you sleep and you will have a good night sleep.”

9. Always know if you’ve taken your daily medication.

For medications you take twice a day, user Madhu Mita suggests flipping the bottle upside-down after you take it in the evening and flipping it right-side up after the morning dose.

For medications you take three times a day, place the bottle on the left side of you (you can do this with a bathroom sink or your desk) in the morning, in front of you at noon, and to the right of you after dinner.

“The pattern doesn’t matter, as long as you’re consistent: move the bottle after you take the dose, and you’ll be able to look back later and see if you’ve taken it.”

10. Conserve your smartphone battery.

User Ashok Kumar says whenever you are not using internet on your phone through Wifi, turn your Wifi off. When out of range of a network, your phone continually polls for a network, which drains the battery.

11. Have a more productive day.

“In the morning, when you get to work or school, the first thing you should do is to prioritise your day,” writes user David Palank. “Most people start by checking emails or phone calls. However, prioritising is the most draining on the brain and should be done when your brain is fresh! This is the first step to productivity.”

12. Know which side the petrol tank is on without getting out of the car.

“If you look at the little petrol tank indicator on your dashboard (instrument cluster), you should see a tiny arrow next to it,” says user Bharath Raj. “That arrow actually points to the petrol tank (fuel lid) side of your car. Now you’ll never forget where it is again!”
0 Comments

This Person Improved Every Tiny Thing by 1 Percent and Here's What Happened 

12/4/2015

2 Comments

 
In 2010, Dave Brailsford faced a tough job.

No British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France, but as the new General Manager and Performance Director for Team Sky (Great Britain’s professional cycling team), Brailsford was asked to change that.

His approach was simple.

Brailsford believed in a concept that he referred to as the “aggregation of marginal gains.” He explained it as “the 1 percent margin for improvement in everything you do.” His belief was that if you improved every area related to cycling by just 1 percent, then those small gains would add up to remarkable improvement.

Related: This One Habit Can Help Make You Smarter

They started by optimizing the things you might expect: the nutrition of riders, their weekly training program, the ergonomics of the bike seat, and the weight of the tires.

But Brailsford and his team didn’t stop there. They searched for 1 percent improvements in tiny areas that were overlooked by almost everyone else: discovering the pillow that offered the best sleep and taking it with them to hotels, testing for the most effective type of massage gel, and teaching riders the best way to wash their hands to avoid infection. They searched for 1 percent improvements everywhere.

Brailsford believed that if they could successfully execute this strategy, then Team Sky would be in a position to win the Tour de France in five years time.

He was wrong. They won it in three years.

In 2012, Team Sky rider Sir Bradley Wiggins became the first British cyclist to win the Tour de France. That same year, Brailsford coached the British cycling team at the 2012 Olympic Games and dominated the competition by winning 70 percent of the gold medals available.

Related: This Is the Most Important Habit for Business Success

In 2013, Team Sky repeated their feat by winning the Tour de France again, this time with rider Chris Froome. Many have referred to the British cycling feats in the Olympics and the Tour de France over the past 10 years as the most successful run in modern cycling history.

And now for the important question: what can we learn from Brailsford’s approach?
The Aggregation of Marginal Gains

It’s so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making better decisions on a daily basis.

Almost every habit that you have — good or bad — is the result of many small decisions over time.

And yet, how easily we forget this when we want to make a change.

So often we convince ourselves that change is only meaningful if there is some large, visible outcome associated with it. Whether it is losing weight, building a business, traveling the world or any other goal, we often put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about.

Meanwhile, improving by just 1 percent isn’t notable (and sometimes it isn’t evennoticeable). But it can be just as meaningful, especially in the long run.

And from what I can tell, this pattern works the same way in reverse. (An aggregation of marginal losses, in other words.) If you find yourself stuck with bad habits or poor results, it’s usually not because something happened overnight. It’s the sum of many small choices — a 1 percent decline here and there — that eventually leads to a problem.

Click here
to read more
Picture
2 Comments

    Wilna's Blog

    Staying relevant, delighting guests & crafting successful brands excites me.

    Here is a collection of articles that have interested me - definitely not all written by me, but all personally read and found by me!

    I hope you find them informative too!

    Categories

    All
    Advertising
    Brand
    Humour
    Leadership
    Marketing
    Motivational
    Namibian Insights
    Online Bookings
    Online Trends
    Self Improvement
    Service
    Social Networks
    Time Management
    Travel Agents
    Travel Trends

    Picture
    Thought Salad! 
     our monthly newsletter. 
    Subscribe HERE

    RSS Feed

    View my profile on LinkedIn

    Archives

    March 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    May 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    January 2014
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011


Home
Services

About us
Contact 

Resumes
Clients
Web Design
Blog

Photos used under Creative Commons from Martin Cathrae, Andrew Stawarz, laura padgett, Dave Dugdale