Staying Motivated at Home

Subscribe to Work LifeGet stories like this in your inbox Subscribe Your colleague has been experimenting with a new automation tool and insists your team should use it to speed up some of your workflows. Everybody has reservations – this person has only used this tool a few times and there are complexities in these workflows that are difficult to automate – but your team member isn’t willing to listen to the naysayers. Confident, eager, and excited, your overly optimistic coworker charges ahead with rolling out the tool. It isn’t long before your workflows are a tangled knot and your team member is grappling with how things went so wrong when they swore they w…

Stop “using” AI. Start collaborating with it. Our latest research from Atlassian’s Teamwork Lab shows that when it comes to getting the most out of working with AI, mindset matters far more than adoption – and is key to maturity. Advancing past adoption Much existing research focuses on AI adoption rates, or how often someone uses AI. We take a different approach to instead look at how people work with AI. Our data clearly shows that employee mindset is the key to AI maturity. In other words, adoption matters far less than attitude when it comes to optimizing AI capabilities and improving work quality within an organization. Our data reveals two primary group…

When was the last time you conquered that mountain-high list of tasks within an 8-hour workday? Can’t recall? That’s okay. It’s common to feel like you live in a place where time disappears into the abyss, leaving you downright frustrated. But burning the midnight oil and working long hours to accommodate for incomplete work doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a productive person. You’d be surprised to know that lots of folks get their work done in less than 8 hours. For example in Europe, German knowledge workers have been praised for only clocking in 35 hours of work each week, Finns work under an average 6.5 hours per day, and a typical Dane ends their workday at 4 pm. …

France is a secular country, but there sure is one religion that all French people share—food and eating. With its rituals, omnipresence, and etiquette, eating is a pillar of French culture and social interaction. It not only has an impact on how families interact and bodies are fed but it’s a central part of our professional lives, from closing deals to building strong team relationships. So besides helping us enjoy a glass of wine with some cheese, what can French eating culture teach us about the importance of taking the time to focus on interacting with each other at the workplace? The Value Of The Ritual In 2010, UNESCO declared French gastronomic meals a part …

Motivational speaker and entrepreneur Chris Winfield struggled for years to make proper use of his time. After countless research, trial and error, facing sustained burnout, and a few bangs of his head against the wall, Chris has discovered that the key to living a permanently productive life is a 25-minute block and a simple timer. A little backstory: Desperate for a way to improve his productivity methods, resist distractions, and free up more of his time, Chris settled on the Pomodoro method. Invented by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980’s, the Pomodoro method maximizes efficiency by blocking out a 25-minute interval of heads-down work, free of interruption (also known as…

Did you know that when you first wake up in the morning, your brain is physically bigger than it will be when you go to sleep? It’s because our brains are the most hydrated after a period of rest. According to authors Dr. Robert Carter and Dr. Kirti Salwe Carter in their book, The Morning Mind, the best performing brain is a hydrated brain. So here’s the conundrum: If humans already have an inherent biological advantage to being morning people, why is it so (so, so, so) hard for so many of us to be chipper and productive at the crack of dawn? One way to channel your inner early riser is to mimic the habits of successful morning people: have a routine, meditate, exer…