5 TED Talks to Help You Work Smarter

If you only have a few minutes? Steal some tips from these brilliant speakers. Click on the headings to learn from these excellent presentations.

10 Top Time-Saving Tech Tips

Tech pundit David Pogue says you probably don’t know a handful of easy tech tricks that can help you save time when using your computer or phone. For instance, there’s a super-fast way to scroll down a page when surfing the web–just hit the space bar. Or, when using your cell phone don’t navigate to the punctuation keyboard to insert a period and end a sentence. Just tap the space bar twice to do it and automatically start your next sentence with a capital letter.

Got a Meeting? Take a Walk

“Sitting has become the smoking of our generation,” says Silicon Valley author and speaker Nilofer Merchant. She conducts 20 to 30 miles worth of walking meetings a week and gives loads of stats about how inactivity will kill you. “You’ll be surprised at how fresh air drives fresh thinking,” she says.

The Key to Success? Grit

Angela Lee Duckworth left a demanding management consulting job to teach seventh grade math to New York City public school students. The biggest surprise? Her best students weren’t necessarily the smartest. In graduate school she then researched success, studying West Point military academy cadets, National Spelling Bee competitors, effective inner city teachers, and salespeople making lots of money. She found that those who achieved the most shared one common characteristic: grit, which she defines as the passion and perseverance to reach very long-term goals. “We need to measure whether we’ve been successful and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned,” she says.

Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work

Inc. columnist and 37signals co-founder Jason Fried believes “offices are interruption factories”. When people really need to get work done they carve out alone time in a special spot, on a plane, or at odd times, like before anyone gets to the office or after they all go home. Creative types, in particular–designers, programmers, writers, engineers, and the like–need long uninterrupted periods of time to get things done. In the last three minutes of this talk he gives suggestions for how to cut down on office interruptions.

How to Make Work-Life Balance Work

Are you working long hours in a job you hate to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like? Only you can control what your life looks like and if you don’t design it yourself, someone else will. “The small things matter. Being more balanced doesn’t mean dramatic upheaval in your life,” says book author Nigel Marsh, who talks about how he accidentally gave his young son the best day of his life just by giving him a bit of time and attention. “With the smallest investment in the right places you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life,” he says.

Adapted from article by Christina Desmarais

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