December is here, along with its festive atmosphere, packed calendars, and year-end pressures. For many of us, it’s one of the hardest months to stay productive. Between office parties, family gatherings, shortened workweeks, and the mental load of wrapping up the year, maintaining focus can become a real challenge.
Picture this: you’ve crafted the perfect to-do list, blocked time for deep work, and prioritized your tasks. But by 3 PM, fatigue sets in, your focus fades, and productivity stalls. What went wrong? You optimized your time but overlooked your most critical resource: energy.
In a culture that glorifies busyness and hustle, it’s not uncommon to avoid declining a request, at all costs. A strategic, intentional no, however, can actually be one of the most effective tools to boost your well-being and performance at work. For this month’s edition of The Productivity Box series, we are making the case to normalize saying no.
Xennials are, in brief, a cohort of older millennials. To clarify, Xennials are millennials born in the late 70’s and early 80’s. And, to some extent, this cohort is special. Xennials had analog childhoods, yet seamlessly transitioned to full-digital.
Work pressure makes your team underperform. People get sick more often, team trust and cohesion dissipate. Nothing works as well as it should. So, before trying to boost productivity in any other way, consider dealing with work pressure.
Besides, both work pressure and well-being are equally contagious. They can put down or lift up the whole team. That’s why random acts of kindness work so well. And that’s why team cohesion is important. It all comes down to what makes a team different from a group of people. Teams share goals and work to achieve them. They become a decisive unit.
Goals, productivity, and teams. What could be the secret ingredient that binds these three? We admire those that inspire. And nothing inspires us more than the pursuit of greatness. Tenacity. Resilience. The ability to keep going, no matter what. And it is people like these that we want to lead us. It’s no surprise that we tend to follow those who persevere.
Photo by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash
Ever felt guilty for charging your phone in someone else’s house? Well, don’t. The annual cost of charging a typical smartphone every single day is 25 cents. Not 25 cents a day, but 25 cents a year.
It’s not too different with your other gizmos. A tablet costs just over a dollar to charge annually, and that’s only if you plug it in every day. With a device like the iPad – which lasts for days without a charge – that number is even smaller. What about your laptop?
