10 free online courses you can take to learn to be more productive

Invest some time in one or more of these courses to help increase your productivity.WOCinTech Chat/flickr

Increasing your productivity is a goal that many busy professionals, parents, students, and entrepreneurs share.

Finding enough hours in the day to accomplish all of your tasks or goals can be difficult.

Sometimes the day has slipped away and you have accomplished little, and you don’t know why.

It is also frustrating when you know that part of the reason you cannot get everything done is because you are not organized enough or because you cannot manage your time well.

Invest some time in one or more of these courses to help increase your productivity.

1. Create a Perfect Morning Routine

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Platform: SkillShare
Course Duration: 12 lectures
Time: 1–3 min/lecture

Everyone’s mornings can be crazy, but they don’t have to be. Having a less stressful morning can make you more productive throughout the day. Waking up earlier to focus on things that you really enjoy can also help your personal growth and overall mental health. Creating the perfect morning routine can give you the tools to get started on the right foot every morning.

Find it here.

2. The Science of Everyday Thinking

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Platform: edX
Course Duration: 12 weeks
Time: 2 hours/week

Your “self-talk” has a lot of influence on your daily life. If you train yourself with methods to improve your everyday thinking, then you can increase your productivity. This edX course will also cover tricks and techniques to help you retain information longer. It also goes through the basic psychology of changing people’s minds and recognizing reality from falsehoods. All of these can be great tools for increase overall productivity.

Find it here. 

3. How to Create a Productivity System

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Platform: Highbrow
Course Duration: 10 days
Time: 5 minutes/day

Having a productivity system that works for you is perhaps your best tool to increase productivity. Once you have a system, you can spend less time organizing and planning and more time doing. Your system can also reduce your overall stress levels and those feelings over being overworked as well.

Highbrow’s course is tailored to those who do not have much free time — each portion of the course is delivered in small chunks directly to your e-mail.

Find it here. 

4. Journey into Minimalism

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Platform: Highbrow
Course Duration: 10 days
Time: 5 minutes/day

Minimalism is a way to escape the excesses of the world around us — the excesses of consumerism, material possessions, clutter, having too much to do, too much debt, too many distractions, too much noise. But too little meaning. It is a way of eschewing the non-essential in order to focus on what’s truly important, what gives our lives meaning, what gives us joy and value. Subscribe to this email course and learn how to become a minimalist, day by day.

Find it here.

5. How to Make Better Decisions with the Matrix

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Platform: Highbrow
Course Duration: 10 days
Time: 5 minutes/day

Prioritization is a huge challenge for busy individuals. With so many things demanding your attention, it can be difficult to decide which tasks should be tackled first and which one can sit on the backburner.

In this Highbrow class, a fun emoji helps you learn strategies to help you prioritize faster and smarter, so you can save valuable time.

Find it here.

6. Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects

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Platform: Coursera
Course Duration: 4 weeks
Time: 1 hour/week

Learning information faster can help you be more productive. Memory techniques, illusions of learning, and learning best practices are all covered in this course. It even provides techniques to deal with procrastination.

This course from Coursera offers practical techniques that you can use at work, school, or anywhere where you need to learn a new subject or task.

Find it here.

7. Sit Less, Get Active

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Platform: Coursera
Course Duration: 3 weeks
Time: 1.5 hour/week

Your mental alertness and focus are affected by your activity level throughout the day. Sitting in one spot too long saps energy and creativity, and can have a negative effect on your overall mood. Once you learn how to sit less and be more active, you will have more energy to be your most productive self throughout the day. This course helps you monitor your current movement and set healthy goals for yourself.

Find it here.

8. Introduction to Time Management

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Platform: Alison
Course Duration: 1–2 hours

At the end of the day, do you ever sit and wonder what you did all day? You were working, but it seemed like you didn’t get anything done. Perhaps you need to focus more on time management to increase your productivity. This online course focuses on prioritization, distractions, interruptions, and working efficiently.

Find it here.

9. Effective Time Management — Get 10X More Done in Less Time

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Platform: Udemy
Course Duration: 9 lectures
Time: 5–7 min/lecture

Time management is especially difficult for small business owners and entrepreneurs. Perhaps that is why there is a course specifically tailored to this audience. Instead of managing time, this Udemy course is focused on deciding which tasks are “high value” tasks, so you get more of a return for the time that you have invested.

Find it here.

10. Achieve More in Less Time Using SMART Goals

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Platform: Udemy
Course Duration: 10 lectures
Time: 3 min/lecture

This Udemy course focuses on goal setting as a means to be more productive. Having your own goals helps keep you attentive and motivated to get more done in the limited time that you have. It also helps you learn to evaluate yourself when compared to the goals that you have set for yourself.

This course may also be helpful for those who want to teach others about the importance of goal setting and productivity.

Find it here.

Artem Zavyalov is the co-founder of Highbrow – a learning platform that sends people quick little email lessons and helps them develop daily learning habits.

http://www.businessinsider.com/10-free-online-courses-you-can-take-to-learn-to-be-more-productive-2017-6/#6-learning-how-to-learn-powerful-mental-tools-to-help-you-master-tough-subjects-6

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You don`t have to be crazy to start a business

Are entrepreneurs crazy? The question has certainly been asked. The costs of the start-up life can seem insanely high. You give up your salary and benefits and find yourself eating delivery pizza and living with roommates into your 30s. You never have a day off. You will live with the constant risk that everything could come crashing down around you, leaving you with no job, no income and a black mark on your resume. Economists have long believed that these costs are too high for a person who is both normal and rational. Barton Hamilton of Washington University found in 2000 that the median earnings of an entrepreneur were 35 per cent less than the median salaried worker. A team of University of Chicago economists found in 2002 that the financial return to entrepreneurship is no better, on average, than the return from putting your money in the stock market. 

This makes the decision to start a business look a little irrational. Entrepreneurs seem to be getting lower average returns with much higher risk something that economics says that normal, rational people never do. There have been many attempted explanations for why people might launch themselves into a start-up career despite these dismal average results. They might be irrational, overestimating their own chances of success. They might be lured by the small chance of a huge payoff, like a lottery ticket. They might simply love the lifestyle of running a business. Or they might be driven to find out if their pet idea really has legs. 

These things might all be true, especially of the type of people who chose entrepreneurship. But a professor at University of California Berkeley`s Haas School of Business has found another factor that may have been largely overlooked until now. Gustavo Manso realised that the payoff of entrepreneurship goes beyond the chance that your business will succeed. Starting a business is a form of experimentation that can boost your prospects later in life,even if the business fails. In his paper, Manso considered not just the current situations of entrepreneurs versus salaried workers, but their lifetime earnings. This is an important distinction, because most of the entrepreneurs we see at any point in time are simply experimenting with their new ideas. If the idea fails, they go back to a regular job, having lost only a few years of higher salary. If the venture succeeds, they can make a lot. In terms of lifetime earnings, that might not be such a bad gamble. To test this idea, Manso needed data that tracked the same sample over different points in time. He got it from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which followed young people for about three decades. 

Comparing the lifetime earnings of entrepreneurs and salaried workers, he found that entrepreneurs actually make more, on average. Sure enough, self employment tends to last only a short time, maybe two years on average people who fail get out quickly. What`s more, Manso finds that entrepreneurs experience only slightly higher lifetime earnings variance that is, risk than people who go the salaried route. In other words, the lifetime risk-return trade-off of starting a business looks pretty attractive after all. Of course, Manso`s data doesn`t distinguish between types of entrepreneurship someone who starts a corner store is treated the same as someone trying to launch the next Uber. So we still don`t know whether the high octane venture-capital-funded startup lifestyle that has become so celebrated in the media is a good economic bet or not. But Manso`s analysis has at least given us a better tool for making that calculation. So if entrepreneurship actually offers a better return than the salaried life, why don`t more people do it? The answer probably lies in human psychology. In most risky decisions stock investments, career choices you have at least some idea of the chances of success and failure. But when you try to create a new business, you don`t really know how likely you are to succeed. When Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to start a software company, he didn`t know whether his decision was a near-certain money-maker or a long shot. Psychologists and economists find that many people instinctively shy away from that sort of ambiguity. Only a few love it. These may be exactly the sort of people who become entrepreneurs people whose battle cry, in the immortal words of Han Solo, is `Never tell me the odds!

You don`t have to be crazy to start a business by Noah Smith, dawn.com 

By arrangement with Washington PostBloomberg News Service

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