Top 5 Apps For Busy Professionals

Top 5 apps for professionals

According to a study by eMarketers, in 2012 there were 115 million smartphone users in the US, and with hundreds of apps available we know it can be overwhelming and even confusing to know which are the best ones for you.

Stop playing Angry Birds! Here’s a list of the best 5 apps that will help busy professionals get the most out of their smartphone. 

• Reading business cards: Cardmunch is a free tool that will not only read a business card but will also convert it to a Linkedin contact automatically, showing all the profile information and contacts you have in common with that person. Very useful in conferences. 

• Organize ideas: Great ideas come when you least expect them, that’s what Evernote is for. A free app that will help you organize all those crazy ideas you might have. Save comments about an article you saw online, remind yourself to buy that book your friend had, take pictures and include them to that new project you’re doing and you can include tags to find them easily. 

• Be productive: A free app that will help you organize all your tasks is Toodledo. On a busy day you have a meeting, need to buy a birthday gift, pay your credit card, buy some groceries, finish the sales report and book a hotel for your next business trip. This tool will help you arrange your to-do list, add importance levels, share them with other people and activate alarms. 

• Storage: Google Drive or Dropbox allow you to share and access files from any device in the world. Whether its videos, pictures, presentations or any type of file, you can store them safely in the cloud. Basic accounts are free.

• Save passwords: The average person uses 10 passwords a day, and if you handle any company accounts that number might grow to 15. Having one password for everything is extremely risky, but having 10 different passwords is extremely confusing. LastPass is free on desktops or if you want to have it in your phone there’s a premium subscription. 

And one last suggestion that will also make your life much easier, when looking for an office for rent, call us at (866) 354-5478 or visit OfficeList!

Did we miss any useful app? Send us your comments and share with us any apps that make your life easier. 

The Secret Value of Mistakes and Failure

We’re all taught to avoid mistakes. Since school, the best students are those that have a perfect exam with zero mistakes. 

When we start working, it’s common to be nervous about our first days as no one wants to make any mistake that might compromise our new job or mistakes that could be felt directly at our bank account. 

But if you look back and think about how you learned things, you’ll find hundreds of failures before success. That’s what it takes to learn the right way of doing things. 

When we learned how to walk, we stumbled and fell a few times. When learning how to ride our first bike, we got ourselves some bruises. Thomas A. Edison failed 999 times before creating the light bulb. 

Yet some companies still penalize mistakes? 

Below we’ll give you a list of some of the best creations that were made by mistake: 

• Penicillin: Sir Alexander Fleming was attempting to create something different when he discovered penicillin. 

• Chocolate chip cookies: Chocolate was supposed to melt and create chocolate cookies; instead it got stuck and made the delicious cookies. 

• The microwave: While doing a radar related research, scientists discovered the other use that has made cooking and heating much faster. 

• Post it notes: While trying to create strong glue, weak glue was created, a colleague used it in papers to mark his workplace and that’s how Post Its were born. 

Consider every mistake part of the learning experience. If your company hires the wrong person, even if it has a cost, think of it as an investment as it helped you identify what you did wrong and the next person will be even better. 

If a business negotiation failed, take it as the cost for future negotiations of bigger deals. Reading a book, going to a conference or studying in a university will not replace that experience lived. 

Success rarely comes naturally; it is only the last steps of continuous attempts, of many corrections of a process. 

That is why mistakes and failure should not be penalized in companies. Creating the fear of exploring new ways of doing things will only limit your own company’s success. 

If you want to avoid mistakes when looking for an office, give us a call at (866) 354-5478 or visit OfficeList. We’ve learned from mistakes we’ve made in the past and have been perfecting the office search process.

Are We Becoming Less Humans?

Image Credits © John Lund/Blend Images/Corbis 

Each day companies try to optimize everything, be more efficient and save time and resources.

People have also shifted their behavior to try and go along with the optimization. Instead of making a call or talking to their colleagues which are just steps away, they usually send an email, a text or they just chat.

Because of costs, companies have reduced air traveling and replaced it with online conference calls or online meetings.

But if all those changes are indeed making us more efficient and better, how is that affecting us?

Although technology has made our life easier and things are done faster, we haven’t noticed we are losing the most important part of communication: Real human interaction. 

Not only because of body language, spontaneous reactions, maybe an authentic smile and even something as simple as shaking a hand.

We are not computers or machines. We need a joke, we need to smile, we need to listen to others, and we need to hear about other people life stories. We need to go back to our roots and change the hours we spend looking at a screen for hours we spend interacting with other people.

This article called The Upside of Inefficiency from the Harvard Business Review Blog shares an interesting story about human interaction. Sandy not only was the cause of devastation in New York, but also the opportunity for many of us to show our best parts as human beings. 

Business Books to Read: The Power of Habit

The Power of Habit.

Have you ever thought about your habits? Do you think they don’t influence in your work or the results of your company?

Maybe you should read The Power of Habit. A book written by New York Times writer Charles Duhigg. It shows how we unconsciously develop habits that can easily be changed and may have a huge impact in our lives and our jobs. 

Habits are usually triggered by a part of our routine and are looking to satisfy or reward our brain in a certain way. 

A habit may be repeating the same sales pitch over and over because it makes us feel comfortable and we feel we’re getting better every time we repeat it. If a sales doesn’t happen, then we tend to think it wasn’t the right customer but few times we question ourselves and try to think what we could  have done different. Changing that habit can be quite a challenge but it can have great results. 

Regardless if your habit is having a coffee every morning on your way to the office, repeating the same pitch daily or going for a doughnut after lunch, changing one of those habits can be the first step to changing other routines in your life, facing challenges and having a renovated mentality which can open new doors and give you a new life, a new project or simply a new way of enjoying life. 

The only habit you should keep is visiting OfficeList every time you are looking for office space. Call us at (866) 354-5478.