Hall of Fame productivity keynote speaker & author. The Productivity Pro (R). Also Founder of Johnny's Ambassadors Youth THC Prevention @JohnnyKStack
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Articles by Laura Stack
He was unrecognizable
My 23-year-old son struggles with Cannabis-Induced Psychosis. He began smoking THC regularly at age 15. I thought cannabis was safer than alcohol, so I wasn’t alarmed at first. Then, his school performance declined, and despite our pleas to stop, he became increasingly erratic. He went into a depression, lost interest in sports, and refused to finish his schoolwork during his senior year.
Should recreational cannabis be legalised in the UK?
Intended for healthcare professionals News & Views Should recreational... Should recreational cannabis be legalised in the UK?
What’s The Big Deal About Artificial Intelligence?
by Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE “Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.” ― Larry Page, co-inventor of the Google search engine.
What Happens When a Teen is Addicted to Marijuana and Tries to Stop?
If you’re officially addicted to marijuana, you’re going to have trouble quitting — no matter who you are. Despite what some marijuana advocates claim, withdrawal can cause intense physical and psychological effects that make stopping the use of marijuana very difficult.
What is the #1 Cause of Death for Youths Aged 10-18 in Colorado?
My forever-19-year-old son, Johnny, would have been 23 years old tomorrow, February 7. I was emailing with a friend about it, who also lost her son to suicide and is in the suicide prevention field now. She was recently attending a conference, where someone told her suicide was no longer the #1 cause of death for teens in Colorado as of 2021 — that it was overdose.
Achieving a State of 'Flow' at Work
You can watch someone in a meeting who is “somewhere else”, and they have a far-away, glassy look to the eye. You know they are not hearing a word of what is being said. They may be with you physically, but their minds are somewhere else worrying about this or that errand, trying to figure out what someone meant by a passing comment, or just plain daydreaming. By Laura M. Stack Contrast that with a time you were so immersed in an activity that time just stood still?
Leadership Characteristics of Great Prioritizers: Knowing When to Put First Things First
Laura Stack Laura Stack Founder & CEO at The Productivity Pro, Inc., LEADERSHIP USA, Inc., and Johnny's Ambassadors, Inc. Published Sep 17, 2014 Prioritization sits near the top of any list of successful leadership skills. This holds true whether the leader involved runs an army or the night crew at the local donut shop. It holds true everywhere on Earth and has for all of human history.
Becoming More Efficient by Laura Stack of The Productivity Pro on Time Management & Working Effectively by Optimal StartUp Daily
Laura Stack of The Productivity Pro on becoming more efficient. Episode 080: Becoming More Efficient by Laura Stack of The Productivity Pro on Time Management & Working Effectively Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE is an award-winning keynote speaker, bestselling author, and noted authority on employee and team productivity.
The Benefits of Coaching: Six Ways It Can Boost Productivity
Posted on 07/08/2021 by Laura Stack · by Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE “Coaching isn’t therapy. It’s product development, with you as the product.”—Fast Company magazine. Business experts often cite coaching as an effective way of enabling employees, by making sure they embrace their jobs and maximize performance.
It’s Not (Completely) What You Think: Five “New Age” Management Techniques
Posted on 06/01/2021 by Laura Stack · by Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE “To thrive in this new age of hyper-change and growing uncertainty, it is now imperative to learn a new competency—how to accurately anticipate the future.”—Dan Burrus, author, business advisor, and futurist When many people hear the term “New Age,” we think of crystals, magic mushrooms, and alternative spirituality. But when applied to business practices, the term takes on a different meaning.
NSCA Announces Keynote Speakers for BLC 2020
NSCA, a not-for-profit association representing the commercial low-voltage electronic systems industry, announced the speakers for the 22nd annual Business & Leadership Conference (BLC), to be held Feb. 26-28, 2020, at the Four Seasons Resort and Club in Irving, Texas. NSCA’s BLC is a platform for executive-level education and networking.
Just Say No to Your Inner Control Freak
Sep 12, 2019 By Laura Stack Are you a micromanager? Ask yourself these 10 questions to find out. (Warning: too many “yes” answers may mean you’re driving a stake through the heart of employee productivity). Having a forceful personality provides certain advantages in a competitive workplace. It can help you work your way up the ladder more quickly than you otherwise might. But fair warning: If your favorite management slogan is “my way or the highway,” expect a few delays on your drive to the top.
Doing the Same Thing the Same Way Isn't A Bad Thing
“Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.” – Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. “The Rock,” American actor. To some people, doing the same thing day in, day out is the epitome of boredom. It allows no room for spontaneity, and on the face of it, may hinder the growth necessary for you and your organization to thrive. I would disagree to some degree — routine gives comfort.
Are You Really Going to Do Everything on Your To-Do List?
As an experienced professional, you may think you know your way around a to-do list, but do you really? Possibly you’ve gotten a bit off track. Is that list you’re putting together really a to-do list, or just a big pile of things you wish you had time to do but don’t? Whether your list has just a few tasks tough enough to make you cringe, 37 tasks that don’t matter much, or everything is marked “high priority,” you may be doing it wrong.
Is Your Procrastination Laziness or Fear? Five Fears to Face to Find Out
“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an unfulfilled goal.” – American Philosopher William James. We all procrastinate sometimes, despite its negative impact on our productivity. The word “procrastinate” comes from the Latin roots pro (forward) and crastinus (belonging to tomorrow), which developed into procrastinat in English, meaning “deferred until tomorrow.” Perfect, right? So why do we knowingly put important things off that we know we need to do?
Reining in Your To-Do List Monster: Six Mistakes You May Be Making, and How to Fix Them
“Sometimes our stop-doing list needs to be bigger than our to-do list.” –Patti Digh, American self-help author. As an experienced professional, you may think you know your way around a to-do list…but do you really? Possibly you’ve gotten a bit off track. Is that list you’re putting together really a to-do list, or just a big pile of things you wish you had time to do but don’t?
Pilot Your Program the ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’ Way
In the business literature, especially in articles written by academics lacking practical experience, you occasionally see tut-tutting about those who just “throw mud at the wall and see what sticks” in terms of execution. This deserves eye-rolling, because that mud-flinging is what people outside the ivory tower call testing. More on that in a moment. For now, let’s go back to the origin of so many modern business practices: the military.
5 crucial traits to understand about Generation Z
Time for the generational changing of the guard. “Generation Z only knows a world that is hyper-connected, where by the tap of a smartphone, a pair of shoes can be delivered to their doorstep via Uber or a drone in less than an hour. To Generation Z, a phone will be broken if they cannot see the other person on the other end. It’s a brave new world that Generation Z is growing up in.” Ryan Jenkins The first batch of kids born in Y2K is starting college in large numbers.
5 crucial traits to understand about Generation Z
As these young people further their education, start internships and launch careers, those already in the workforce should be aware of their preferences and attributes. Time for the generational changing of the guard. “Generation Z only knows a world that is hyper-connected, where by the tap of a smartphone, a pair of shoes can be delivered to their doorstep via Uber or a drone in less than an hour. To Generation Z, a phone will be broken if they cannot see the other person on the other end.
Five Easy Cures for Information Overload
“Our brains would melt if they tried to process and store even a fraction of the information they are exposed to.” Face it: we’re drowning in information. There’s too much to do and see every day. Our brains are already busy in the background, filtering mundane sensory information; few take it into account, but in the modern world, even that’s already in overload. There’s so much more to experience in a modern town, in a modern nation, than there was when we lived in rural or woodland environments.
Five Things You Can Expect of Generation Z
“Generation Z only knows a world that is hyper-connected, where by the tap of a smartphone, a pair of shoes can be delivered to their doorstep via Uber or a drone in less than an hour. To Generation Z, a phone will be broken if they cannot see the other person on the other end. It’s a brave new world that Generation Z is growing up in.” – Ryan Jenkins, American business writer.
The Secret to Productivity May Be Air Conditioning
Call them dinosaur-brains or Neanderthals, there are people in every business who live to make us miserable. They aren’t necessarily actively toxic, but some are so rude, bureaucratic, and/or annoying, your automatic response may be to disengage from them and your work. As well all know, disengagement kills productivity. Hopefully, you’re not the Neanderthal in question.
Volunteers remove buffelgrass to save saguaros and prevent wildfires
As wildfire season approaches, volunteer groups work to remove an invasive plant species that thrives on fire and threatens the native plant population. Julia Rowe, an invasive-plant specialist at the Arizona Sonora-Desert Museum and leader of the buffel removal program, said buffelgrass and fountain grass are known to be hazardous to the Sonoran Desert because of how flammable and invasive it is.
Sometimes You Need to Eat the Frog Later
We’ve all heard or read that it’s best to jump on your toughest tasks early in your work shift, using as a guide this famous aphorism: “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” Mark Twain typically gets the credit for this line, though French writer Nicholas Chamfort said something similar about toads in the 1700s.
If Your Office Is Dim, So Are You
Do you find a dimly-lit workspace preferable to a brightly-lit office? Some people do. Perhaps you find it calming and relaxing; or maybe the setting makes you feel comfortable at a visceral level, because of its similarity to the firelit cave/camp background where humanity spent so much of its history. Either way, we may be shooting ourselves in the foot when we labor away in dim office caves.
5 Reasons Why Working Too Many Hours Is a Bad Idea
Editor’s Note: It’s an annual tradition for TLNT to count down the most popular posts of the previous 12 months. We’re reposting each of the top 30 articles through January 2nd. This is No. 7 of the 800 articles posted in 2018. You can find the complete list here. ∼∼∼∼ 24-year-old copywriter Mita Diran’s last Tweet, several hours before she lapsed into a coma and died.
Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect. Deliberate Practice Does
Per the classic joke, we all know how to get to Carnegie Hall: Practice, practice, practice. More recently, Malcolm Gladwell has distilled the concept of world-class ability down to 10,000 hours of practice, based on the work of psychologist Anders Ericsson, and suggests this “magic number” should take about 10 years to reach. While many have since disagreed with Gladwell, it’s blindingly obvious that talent isn’t enough for true success.
Celebrate St. Patrick's Day with Open Beta, a local Irish, geek fusion band
The members of a developing geek, folk and Irish fusion band, who juggle career and family life with their passions for music, are ready to jam throughout the Valley this upcoming weekend for St. Patrick’s Day. Each of the members have a day job and will be playing shows around the Valley to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day starting on Friday night.
4 Common Mistakes Made When Delegating
In a recent episode of the TV series Stranger Things, the four main characters, all young boys, show up at school on Halloween dressed as Ghostbusters. The problem is, two have dressed as Bill Murray’s character. When they argue about it, one boy tells the other, “We decided I would be Venkmann!” and the other responds, “You decided that. I didn’t.” This immediately made me think about delegation, the art of sharing responsibility with team members by handing off some of your work to them.
Top 100 Productivity Blogs For Better Work-Life Balance
1 alifeofproductivity.com About Blog - A Life of Productivity provides tips, tools, and techniques to become more productive. Frequency - about 3 posts per month n/a 7,305 191,615 2 thinkproductive.co.uk/blog About Blog - Think Productive are passionate about productivity.
How to Accelerate Your Team's Productivity
4 keys to your team's success from productivity expert Laura Stack In July 2015, I was honored to be inducted into the Speakers Hall of Fame by the National Speakers Association. To celebrate, my husband surprised me with a brand-new red convertible 650hp Z06 Corvette loaded with all the options, including a black racing stripe and a black-and-red leather interior.
Faster Together: Accelerating Your Team's Productivity
FAIRNESS IS THE SAME HONEST and straightforward treatment of each team member, regardless of their position on the team or in the organization. Because of its importance, we'll address it at the outset. On your mark, get set ... An individual in a client organization emailed me after a seminar and admitted that she could be far more productive, but she didn't feel she was being treated fairly, so she was purposefully withholding her best efforts.
7 Benefits of Positive Emotion in the Workplace
It should be obvious to anyone that when you’re happy, you’re more likely to do a better job at work. Clearly, some managers don’t care; we’ve all worked for such people. It’s equally obvious you don’t have to be happy to be productive. Aside from those of us who work best under pressure, many of us have learned to put our heads down, ignore our discontent, and just push until we finish the work on time.
Five Ways to Build a Better To-Do List
"Eat a live frog the first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day." -American humorist Mark Twain How do you eat Twain's live frog? Most people assume he meant to choke it down all at once, but on the other hand, we've also learned the only way to eat an elephant is a bite at a time.
How to Tell Who Is A Real High Performer
We usually know high performers when we see them, because their stars shine bright in the workplace. But how can you tell the difference between a high performer and a high potential performer? The latter have the talent, education, and training to become high performers, but haven’t yet proven themselves (often because they’re still new).
Four Ways to Intensify Your Focus |
"You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks."-Winston Churchill, British statesman. One of the characteristics of high achievers is the...
Practical business advice for entrepreneurs and top executives
While it's naïve to assume that failure now will guarantee your eventual success (as some suggest), it can help you succeed if you learn something from it. If you can pull an intact brick from the rubble — a seed of an idea, an object lesson, a before-its-time product, or a promising relationship — you're a step closer to succeeding someday. There's a reason "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again" and "the only time you really fail is when you stop trying" are such clichés.
The 1% Principle: How Small Wins Can Produce Big Yields
We’ve all heard the fable of the tortoise and the hare, the classic that teaches us to never underestimate an opponent. No matter how talented you are, hard work and consistency can still beat you if you’re cocky and complacent. Rationally, we know the hare will really beat the tortoise every time, because hares don’t suffer from laziness, complacency, perfectionism, or analysis paralysis. If hares ever had those traits, Mother Nature would have weeded them out ages ago.
Americans Are Working Longer, But at Least Some of That Is at Home
Americans Are Working Longer, But at Least Some of That Is at Home At the end of June the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the results of its 2016 American Time Use Survey (ATUS). For the second year in a row the press release emphasized the fact that workers are more likely to do some or all of their work at home. A new statistic added to 2016’s survey revealed 43% of workers with advanced degrees work at least part of their day from home.
Exceptional Performance: Four Tips for Extreme Productivity
“Once time is gone, it will never come back. That’s why it’s so bizarre to me that professionals often use their time inefficiently — by procrastinating, by perfecting an unimportant task, or by just sitting around in the office, trying to be seen. It seems to me that professionals should husband time as an irreplaceable resource.� – Robert Posen, American businessman and writer. If nothing else, productivity boils down to the way you manage the work time entrusted to you.
How to Make Sure You Have Engaged and Empowered Employees
How to Make Sure You Have Engaged and Empowered Employees When you have a lot at stake or a very high interest in an outcome, you’re more likely to do a better job (or at least try to). Your team members feel the same way. If they don’t enjoy their work, they won’t be motivated to spend discretionary effort on the strategic goals you set for them. Wouldn’t you rather be surrounded by people in whom you have full trust and confidence they will get things done?
Killer Apps: Five Collaborative Tools to Heighten Team Productivity
Thanks to recent advances in computing and telephony, we now have so many collaboration tools available that we can share almost any task with ease. Video conferencing, product management, document sharing, messaging—you name it, and there’s an app or ten. Or a hundred. In this blog, I’ll review five apps just about anyone can use, no matter how distributed your team. I’m sure some will seem as outdated as smoke signals in ten years, but today they’re either proven standbys or bleeding-edge tech.
The New Pragmatism: Seven Things You Must Understand About Millennials
“When we decided not to sell our business, people called us a lot of things besides crazy—things like arrogant and entitled. The same words that I’ve heard used to describe our generation time and time again. The Millennial Generation. The ‘Me’ Generation. Well, it’s true. We do have a sense of entitlement, a sense of ownership, because, after all, this is the world we were born into, and we are responsible for it.” – Evan Spiegel, co-founder and CEO of Snapchat.
Ducking the Crosshairs: Five Ways to Deal with Office Politics
As a productivity expert, I often write about how to avoid wasting time. But one time waster I’ve mostly avoided is office politics. Why? Because gossip, backstabbing, credit-stealing, and slandering others to get ahead all represent the kinds of creepy things I hope you never have to deal with. But this is reality here. Office politics happen, so in this blog entry, I’ve decided to take the bull by the horns and briefly discuss the depressing underbelly of office work.
Becoming a Productivity Lark: Six Ways to Effectively Deal with Night Owl Tendencies
To the great regret of those who love the night, who come alive late in the day and whose productivity skyrockets in the afternoon, the modern world is built around morning people. Most people do seem to function better in the morning, feeling liveliest before noon and producing more, and more easily than at any other time of day.
Unwritten Codes of Conduct: Five Rules You Won’t Find in the Employee Manual
Every workplace has written policies and procedures but the more impactful rules are the ones unwritten. These informal codes of conduct reflect the harsh realities some have faced: work isn’t a meritocracy after all, or that teamwork is important, but no one acts like it. In any workplace, you’ll almost certainly find some things people take for granted but don’t directly talk about—like these five common unwritten rules.
The 2016 American Time Use Survey: More and More, Home is Where the Work Is
On June 28, 2017, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the results of its 2016 American Time Use Survey (ATUS). For the second year in a row their press release emphasized the fact that workers are more likely to do some or all of their work at home. A new statistic added to 2016’s survey revealed 43% of workers with advanced degrees work at least part of their day from home. In the wake of the electronics revolution, it’s easier than ever to do our jobs away from our offices.
Six Tips for Coordinating a Virtual Team: Reaching Across Time Zones
The days when everyone who worked for the same business or division had to congregate in the same building are mostly over. We must learn to work well with remote contributors and virtual teams. Some might mourn the old days but I think this represents a natural evolution of the job environment, as sociological and technological change transform our society.
Why it's important to pay yourself first - The Business Journals
As you've built your business, you've probably gotten used to wearing multiple hats. In the beginning, you're basically the entire company. As a result, you may perceive the money you bring in as belonging to the business, not to you specifically. In any case, it's natural to want to plow anything you make back into the company - to "pyramid your profits" so you can build them higher. You may think you'll get a better return on your investments that way, and you may very well be correct.
One More Time: Three Effective Ways to Polish Your Time Management Skills
In the past few decades, as we’ve all taken on more work and become increasingly productive, time management has become a crucial part of every worker’s skillset. You’ve probably spent years learning how to implement and improve your time-management skills. Therefore, you may be wondering, “What can you possibly tell me I haven’t already heard before?” Maybe nothing.
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