This community consists of 12 units of single family houses that share the same garden area, each one with its own terrace, which allows them to be integrated and yet preserve their own individual privacy. Located in Christchurch, New Zealand, the complex was designed by the architectural firm Warren and Mahoney in 2015. It covers an area of 1,220 square meters, which not only includes the houses, but also a..
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PDF Like MacGyver: 5 Ways To Work With PDFs That Save Time, Money And Paper
As offices become paperless and more form-centered, we receive more and more PDF files in our inboxes. And the more PDF files we receive, the more headaches we experience.
If you’re not interested in buying an expensive license for Adobe software but you’d still like to edit PDFs, here are a few tips that will quickly make you the office MacGyver at converting, editing and mastering this popular file type.
Edit PDF files
Have a PDF with text on it that you need to edit?
Happy news: you don’t have to retype the content on a separate document to be able to change it.
Who’s got time for that? Do yourself a favor and convert the PDF to Word, so you can edit the text in a Word document before resaving it as a PDF. You can do this by uploading to Google Docs, which is a fast, free and fairly painless option for converting PDFs to a .doc or .docx file.
Sign a PDF
Need to add a signature to a PDF?
The old school method was to print out the PDF, sign it, rescan it and send it back. Unfortunately, that’s not cost or even resource efficient. With so much paperwork being sent and completed over email or file-sharing services, you don’t want to delay finalizing a business transaction or filing important legal or financial paperwork, all for want of a printer. Save trees and time by adding your signature electronically.
To add your John Hancock to a PDF, you can use a paid service like Docusign which is good to consider if you need to do this in a professional capacity. You can also check out this How-To Geek article with free options.
See Also: The Freelancer’s Guide to PDF Management
Turn a PDF into an image
If you’re frequently sharing image files or you’re a web developer working with PDF images, you may have already run into problems using PDFs. While PDFs offer sharp and high resolution, they can be heavier to send by email than a standard image file. This can make them difficult to open and view on mobile devices.
For website developers, using a PDF on a website requires that visitors have an external plugin installed. This can cause additional document download time and could prevent thousands of visitors from viewing the content.
Alternatively, you can skip the headaches and convert PDF to JPG format. While the image resolution will be visibly lower, as long as the file doesn’t need to be printed or enlarged, converting to a JPG file is a solution that works for nearly everyone. JPG files are easy to open, save and access on mobile phones and tablets. Most office applications are better equipped at handling image files rather than PDFs, too.
Another option for converting PDFs to images is a PDF to PNG converter. This is an especially useful feature for graphic designers who frequently need to edit logos or images with text.
Merge PDFs
At first glance, this doesn’t seem like a trick you’d need to use often, but it’s much more useful than it appears at first glance. The ability to merge PDF’s relates to how you can make impressive and comprehensive presentations to impress the management, your colleagues and even your clients. If you’ve ever wondered how to merge Excel spreadsheets, pie charts, graphic imagery and text into a document – and make it easy to share – this is the tip for you.
To merge multiple files, you’ll need to convert each file to a PDF first. Ideally, you’ll want to find a PDF editor that not only provides converter tools for the most popular file formats but also supports file merge so you don’t have to shuffle between different sites and tools.
Erase Existing Text
The ability to erase existing text and add new content is useful if you’re frequently filling out e-forms. It’s also important if you need to redact or mask sensitive information on a document before sharing.
Some PDF editors, like PDFfiller, offer editing tools that add shapes and images, in addition to customizable text. For example, if you’d like to highlight a particular section on the PDF, you could use an arrow or draw a box around it for visual reference.
Conclusion: Becoming a PDF Master
Today’s cloud-based PDF editing services offer a wealth of tools and information to help you manage and customize a variety of online PDF documents. Plus, many of the options featured here allow you to create your own account. This gives you the freedom to sign in and access your files on any device.
Working with PDFs isn’t just good for efficiency, saving you the time, cost and hassle of printing, annotating and rescanning documents, it’s also great for the environment. Whether you need to work with PDFs on a daily basis or rarely, you’ve now got the skills and know-how to master this popular file format.
See Also: 55 Bulletproof Productivity Hacks
The post PDF Like MacGyver: 5 Ways To Work With PDFs That Save Time, Money And Paper appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
May 2nd
#relationship #lovequotes #cutequotes #motivationalquotes #cute
#relationship #lovequotes #cutequotes #motivationalquotes #cute
Four Clever Ways to Improve Focus
You’re reading Four Clever Ways to Improve Focus, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
You have just 24 hours. And, you’ve got to do everything in these many (but few) hours. Practically, there’s a limit to the efforts you can put into a day, but then,
the paucity of time shouldn’t be a deterrent to achieving your goals.
You can achieve more by increasing your productivity which is contingent
upon improving your focus.
Focusing on the task at hand is the surest way to make the most of your limited
time.
Here are four clever ways to improve your focus
Don’t allow your mind to trick you
The human mind is a trickster. It’ll make you underestimate or overestimate
your capabilities. And, both of them are dangerous.
Your mind will trick you by suggesting that you can complete a task in less
time than you usually take. This is a fallacy that will make you allocate
two hours to do a job that may eventually take five hours to complete.
It’ll end up eating up more time than you initially planned and also drain
your energy. It will demotivate you to the extent that you may stop
planning your day.
Thus, understand your real strengths and weaknesses. Know your speed and do
a precise estimation of the work and plan accordingly.
Shorten your to-do list
It’s a good habit to make a to-do list. But don’t include every small task
in it. It’ll only increase your stress and distract your mind every time
you see it.
Instead, make a small list with just 2-3 most crucial things to do in a day
and assign sufficient time for each of these activities.
Keep your list short and succinct. Don’t overburden it with things that
aren’t going to add to your productivity.
Make a schedule for petty but important things
There are a lot of things which don’t add to your productivity but are
necessary.
Checking comments on your social media posts or wishing people on their
birthdays and anniversaries is not productive but required.
Watching or reading news, taking a coffee break, attending meetings, or
answering phone calls or emails are other things that consume a lot of
time.
But, you can’t avoid such activities. They don’t add to your output, but
you’ve to do them anyway.
Allocate time for them and make them a part of your schedule. What’s more
important is to stick to the schedule.
Take your two coffee breaks at the same time each day. Answer emails once
or twice a day.
For instance, I have fixed a schedule for all meetings, interviews,
responding to emails and queries, etc. between 12-2pm. For the rest of the
time, I focus on things that delivers output.
Do the hardest thing first
Do the most difficult or the worst thing upfront.
Mark Twain coined the term “eating the frog.”
If you’ve to eat a frog and you have the entire day to do it, when is the
right time?
The answer is first thing in the morning. Why? Because it’s the worst thing
to do.
If you keep avoiding it, it’ll linger in your mind breaking your focus.
Instead, get it done first.
Have a tough client to deal with? Meet him at the earliest. Have to
complete a complicated project that’s paying you well? Do it now.
Doing the toughest thing first will boost your confidence and also take the
thing out of your mind enabling you to focus on other things for the rest
of the day.
Conclusion
With these four clever hacks, you can improve your focus manifold.
By eliminating things that aren’t productive or those which are stressful,
you can focus better.
While doing so, aim at your long term goals but focus on the task at hand
in a manner that there’s no tomorrow.
This way, you’ll strive to achieve more, ultimately increasing your
productivity and chances of success.
Adela Belin is a private educator and a writer at Writers Per Hour. She shares her teaching experience with colleagues, students, and writers. Feel free to contact her on G+
You’ve read Four Clever Ways to Improve Focus, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
Here’s how Trump’s 100-day approval rating — the…
#relationshipquotes #lovequotes #relationship #inspirationquotes #motivationalquotes
#relationshipquotes #lovequotes #relationship #inspirationquotes #motivationalquotes
Six Encounters with Lincoln
How do we gauge the success of a presidency? The media has recently found itself asking this question. There are standard measures like passing durable legislation and responding well to crisis. Equally important, at least for the current president, are keeping campaign pledges and maintaining popularity through statements and speeches. President Obama’s goal seemed to be stability and incremental progress; President Bush (43) disregarded the headlines, content to let history judge his bold actions. Each administration seems to offer a new lens through which to view the office and its occupant.
When we evaluate the present, we inevitably measure it against the past. This raises an interesting question: just how effective were our most revered presidents? Take, for example, the man widely thought of as one of the greatest among them—Abraham Lincoln. He gazes out from iconic photographs and up from the pennies in our pockets with such reassuring benevolence that we tend not to assess his performance critically. The late writer and noted historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor urges us to do so in Six Encounters with Lincoln, her provocative final book.
An acclaimed biographer of Robert E. Lee and Clara Barton, Pryor found six overlooked episodes that reveal Lincoln’s character, his fallibility, and the awesome task he confronted, at times with mixed success. With them she seeks to replace the “mirage” that Lincoln has become with a living, breathing politician. “When we are aware of greatness we want to hear about it over and over again,” she writes, “but greatness does not mean perfection.” Lincoln’s blunders interest Pryor more than his moments of high inspiration.
Four of these six encounters involve interviews between President Lincoln and petitioners: a Union soldier, a Cherokee elder, a group of politically active women, and a southern businessman. The remaining two are set-pieces rather than conversations: a bungled flag-raising and a military review. Pryor uses each to illuminate some aspect of Lincoln’s presidency or character that is under-explored, or uncomfortable, or simply illuminating for its novelty. Several episodes are stretched rather thin, such as the brief interview with the soldier, during which Lincoln used the word “nigger.” This leads Pryor to discuss at great length a lamentable fact that was already known: that Lincoln used coarse and racially ugly language throughout his life. But other encounters are more telling.
The military review affords Pryor the opportunity for her most trenchant criticism: that Lincoln was ineffective as a wartime president. She offers it bluntly: “he blundered through military labyrinths with all the agility of an angered buffalo, while thousands of people died.” Shortly after Lincoln’s inauguration, a group of 78 Army officers came to the White House to meet their new commander in chief. Inexperienced in the customs of military pageantry, Lincoln shook hands rather than saluting, allowed his attention to wander during the ceremony, and generally struggled to project authority. It was a sign of things to come. During the Civil War, Lincoln “wrote orders himself, countermanded decisions, or sent mixed messages, without informing senior leaders—then wondered why his commands were not carried out,” Pryor writes. She also contends that his visible agonizing over the war projected indecision to the troops rather than the certainty that they needed. Worst of all, Lincoln had a talent for picking and promoting mediocre officers, culminating in the insubordinate leadership of General George McClellan.
These are fair critiques, yet Pryor does not tell the whole story. Lincoln of course relieved McClellan of his command, eventually recognizing and relying on the brilliant generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. He did not countermand their decisions. Lincoln proceeded from a key strategic insight: given the Union’s larger military and economic resources, time was on his side, despite individual Confederate victories. His military leadership was only part of his conduct of the war; political moves like the Emancipation Proclamation, preventing Maryland from slipping into the Confederacy, and securing passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery had military repercussions. Lincoln’s careworn face may have revealed indecision to some soldiers, but in a broader sense it reflected the agony of the nation’s most tragic hour. Brisk confidence would have been out of place. And, of course, Lincoln’s side won the war. Any fair discussion of his military leadership must show tally marks on both sides of the column.
The flag-raising encounter was a symbolic blunder that Pryor uses to explore Lincoln’s love of anecdote. Charged with christening a new Marine bandstand, he managed to pull the flag into a tangle between the pavilion and the flagpole. When the standard finally emerged it was badly torn and missing several stars: an uncanny representation of the fractured country. Lincoln might well have saved the scene for later use; he always had (or thought he had) the perfect yarn or homely story. In Pryor’s telling he told such tales strategically, deflecting opponents, delivering a cutting rebuke, or avoiding politically tense moments by taking the floor and then laughing uproariously. At other times Lincoln could be tone-deaf about his stories. A cruel political cartoonist has lady liberty asking Lincoln, “Where are my 15,000 sons—murdered at Fredericksburg?” To which the president replies, “This reminds me of a little Joke…”
Pryor uses other encounters to portray Lincoln as unsympathetic to women’s rights and indifferent to Native Americans. She closes with his interview with a southern businessman named Duff Green during Lincoln’s famous trip to Richmond at the end of the war in 1865. The two discussed Reconstruction, and by most accounts Lincoln was receptive to Green’s pragmatic suggestions for rebuilding the South. Yet Pryor is harshly critical of Lincoln’s conduct after leaving the ship that brought him to Richmond. He threw aside caution and toured the southern capitol while freed blacks surrounded him in adulation. White southerners seethed at the display, and Pryor seems determined to view the scene through their eyes, describing “an unwise victor, chuckling over his spoils in a most offensive manner.” But whose perception was more important: the vanquished South, which had after all caused the devastating war, or the liberated slaves, finally free after centuries of bondage? African-Americans in Richmond had earned their moment of jubilation, and so had the victorious president.
There is a difference between illumination and revision—between saying “he is more complex than you thought he was,” and “he is not as great as you thought he was.” Six Encounters with Lincoln walks this ridge and leaves too many footprints on the wrong side. A focus on his failures, paradoxically, casts the magnitude of his achievement into even stronger light. Lincoln proved himself both a political genius and a moral luminary—he freed the slaves, won the Civil War, and preserved the union. For all its trenchant analysis and graceful writing, Six Encounters with Lincoln manages to ignore these central facts. Perhaps Pryor thought them so well-established that they needn’t be repeated. Yet the result is a book that reads as a misguided effort to cut the great emancipator down to size. Pryor is right that Lincoln was not perfect. What she fails to say is that he was a close to perfect as any president we have had so far.
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A Man Alone in a Comic Book
Guy Delisle’s new book, Hostage, is his first nonfiction graphic narrative in which he is not a character. Christophe André’s first-person voice, matched to Delisle’s drawings tells the story of André’s nearly four months as a hostage after being abducted while on his very first mission as an administrator for Doctors Without Borders. He begins in the past tense but soon switches to the present, narrating day by day the moments and events that structure his experience.
Visual Tools To Boost Your Productivity At Work
Did you know that you can only be productive for about 3 hours in an 8-hour work day?
One good reason is the limited concentration of humans. Aside from that, there are other factors that can eat up your time at work. Just think about meetings, lunch breaks and having small chats with your co-workers.
If you aren’t careful, those 3 hours of productivity can easily go down the drain.
While there are plenty of methods and tools which you can use to organize your work and enhance your focus, not all of them are effective in generating positive results.
Increasing Productivity Through Visualization
Human beings are visual learners. In fact, they can process visuals 60,000x faster than text. This is why a visual tool can truly boost your productivity, especially when you need to organize your work and increase your focus.
But, first, why would visual methods or tools work better?
A tool or a method that is based on visualization has the power to engage both sides of the human brain. Such tools require the skills of the left brain for letters, sequences, lines and numbers as well as the right brain for color, spatial awareness, image and rhythm. This does not only enhance the thinking process, but it also stimulates creativity.
To help streamline your work and increase your productivity, you can use the following visual tools.
Mind Maps
A mind map is a tool that you can use to visualize an idea that is sprouting in your head. It provides a framework for gradually developing a concept or a strategy.
At the center of the mind map, you put down the main idea and, as you develop it, you can add the related information on the branches that fork out from the center.
A comprehensive mind map makes it easier to identify and analyze links between details that make up the concept. It is a great tool to use when planning out a strategy, event or a project. Use a mind map to schedule your day at work first thing in the morning, and you’ll see how it helps you estimate and organize your work properly.
Flowcharts
With a flowchart, you can graphically illustrate the sequence of steps in a process, be it the hiring, sales or the manufacturing process.
How does this help you increase your productivity?
Imagine you are working on developing a new sales process. With the use of a flowchart, you can easily picture how it should work out as well as identify the areas that need more careful planning. Plus, when it comes to pitching your idea to your team or seniors, a flowchart can explain at a glance what you will have to explain in a thousand words.
Flowcharts are also an effective decision-making and problem-solving tool.
See Also: 5 Key Steps That Will Improve Your Decision Making
Gantt Charts
A Gantt chart is a project planning tool. It helps a team visualize the project schedule and monitor and record the progress you make. It can also be useful when allocating resources or setting up deadlines.
A comprehensive Gantt chart provides you a quick overview of all the important details of a project, such as the due dates, task names and those who are in charge of them. When estimating your tasks and tracking their progress, a Gantt chart could be a handy productivity tool.
Organizational Charts
Traditionally, this type of chart is used to graphically illustrate the structure of an organization. While it illustrates job titles and responsibilities, it can also clear the reporting structure within or between departments. It can also be used to identify ideal employees when allocating resources and help new employees in understanding company hierarchies and departments better.
Fishbone Diagrams
Fishbone diagrams (a.k.a. cause-and-effect diagrams) help identify the root cause of an issue. It can be considered as a visual problem-solving technique. Drawn like a bone of a fish, the head of the fish represents the issue that needs to be solved. The bones, one the other hand, can be used to jot down the potential causes.
A fishbone diagram can be considered as a time-saving tool when used to structure a brainstorming session or a thorough analysis of an issue.
See Also: 55 Bulletproof Productivity Hacks
The right work strategy can help you improve your output by 25% and, with the right tools, you can definitely further the outcome.
Created with Creately.
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Sig Nordal 