Five to Thrive 5/6/2019

UMD’s Thriving Workplace Initiative is making the University of Maryland a great place to work by providing tools and support to foster engaged, inclusive and empowered faculty and staff across campus.

Each Monday, its Five to Thrive list offers five strategies crowdsourced from research, experts and our own UMD community to help your workplace thrive.

As we enter the death throes of the spring semester, it’s crunch time. Here are a couple of thrive tips to help you save time at work:

• Brush up on your browser hacks: If you want to scroll to the top of a webpage, press the space bar and shift key together; if you close a tab by mistake, hit Ctrl- or Cmd-Shift-T (depending on whether you're using a Windows PC or a Mac) and it will reload the most recently closed tab. Use Ctrl- or Cmd-F to search for specific text on the current page.
• Batch your work by the skill or tool employed, such as sending emails, scheduling meetings or reading reports or papers. Bouncing between tasks requires your brain to switch gears and eats up time.
• Tackle one big project at a time. Don’t move on until it’s finished. Resist the urge to “break things up” with other work (but do take a mental health walk if you need it).
• Delegate. Spend your time on projects that play to your strengths and look for opportunities to delegate to others based on what they’re good at—they might do it better!
• Kill the one-hour meeting. Calendars default to one hour but consider scheduling your next meeting for 30 minutes. The shorter time frame keeps the pace high and the agenda moving.

TWI is accepting applications for Sharpen My Saw, a Thriving Workplace Initiative program providing yearlong, cohort-based learning for faculty and staff to develop knowledge, practice skills and engage with colleagues to create a thriving workplace. Learn more here!