This makes sense because the more specific a customer’s need, the fewer people there are normally going to be to fulfill that need. And when there are fewer people to choose from, the price will migrate higher. Based on this, some of the most common advice for making more money is to develop more specialized skills, rather than only having broad ones. But as the work force gets more competitive, and as more and more tools become available to increase efficiency in the work place, it’s important to not just have one or the other: You need to have both.

A shift that has occurred over the last five to 20 years is that new tools are increasing the amount that can be done by a single person. For example, I was talking to an airline company a few years ago where the core management team consisted of about five executives and a single administrative assistant. Because of new tools and new technology, the company didn’t need a huge team. But 20 years ago, each executive would have had one or more secretaries. Fifty or 60 years ago, the executives might not have even been able to type themselves.

This shift is putting a certain practical limit on specialization when it is devoid of any broad-based skill, and it’s worth noting as you manage your career. Specialization is still a very good way to increase your lifetime earnings, but you have to be careful to make sure you have a foundation of broader skills, as well.

For example, a computer programmer who is an expert at one particular language but has to rely on someone else to set up a computer and get the tools installed to even be able to program is going to have limited potential. An executive who is very smart but doesn’t know how to use a word processor or fax machine may find it difficult to get much done if he tries to switch to a different job, where he might not have the support staff around to do those things.

The point is that while specialization can be very valuable, a broad base of knowledge is more important than ever, and it gives you the flexibility to handle shifts and changes in the job market. You need not only enough specialization to be valuable but also enough broad skills to support yourself in doing that valuable work.

It’s important to remember that there’s a difference between having supporting workers who help you focus your time on your valuable skill and requiring supporting workers because you don’t know how to do anything else. Choosing not to do a task and delegate it to others is not the same thing as having no idea how to do a task and requiring others to do it for you.

If your skill set puts you in a position where you are only valuable and productive when you have a certain number of people around to do support work, it might be worth considering whether you need to broaden your skills to keep yourself relevant, employable and valuable.

Being organized is a cornerstone of being productive. However, there is a lot more to being organized than just having a clean desk. True organization is a mental state and a way of thinking. An organized desk is often a side effect, but too many people focus on trying to look organized instead of actually being organized.

If you want to BE organized and not just LOOK organized, it requires you to spend some time really thinking about how you approach work and deal with stuff. You can’t shortcut this just by picking things up and putting them out of sight.

Here are some tips for becoming truly organized.

• Recognize that being organized isn’t about trying to get more stuff to organize the stuff you already have. That doesn’t mean you can’t strategically purchase something that will help you organize, but organization needs to start in your mind.
• You’ve probably heard the saying “everything should have a place.” While that is good advice, it is even more important for everything to have a purpose. Keeping stuff has a cost, so you need to make sure that the amount you invest in your things justifies keeping them around. Do you really need five staplers? Is it worth keeping around clothes that you haven’t worn in the last five years?
• To really be organized, you have to be able to articulate you priorities in life. If you don’t know your priorities, you can’t determine what is important. If you don’t know what is important, you end up keeping everything you acquire. It is impossible to organize and infinite amount of stuff.
• Being organized requires figuring out who you really are. This is not an easy question to ask. It is easier to just try to sort the things on your desk, or rearrange a closet. Asking “who am I?” is scary because many people are afraid to admit who they really are and don’t want to look. But if you aren’t willing to have that conversation with yourself, how can you get to a point where your stuff supports you? If you don’t know who you are, you’ll end up being owned by your stuff — instead of owning it.
• It is much easier to get organized when all you have are things that are important to you. So putting effort into getting rid of things is just as important, if not more important, than organizing what you have.

Sorting stuff and moving it around in your office or house is easy compared to actually becoming an organized person. Becoming an organized person means doing deep reflection and then making the stuff you have align with who you are. Usually that means getting rid of stuff.

Getting rid of stuff is hard. We tend to put a great deal of our identity into what we own. That is why it is so important to really figure out who you are — separate your identity from the stuff you own. It sounds silly to say that, but if you watch how people act, you’ll realize that human nature makes us extremely attached to our stuff. The whole point here is to keep the stuff that is important and learn to let go of the stuff that isn’t.

But all of that is going to be impossible, unless you are able to really be honest with yourself and who you are and what really matters in your life. Without doing that, you aren’t going to be able to really be organized on anything other than a superficial level.

I’ve always known that consequences are the best teacher and yesterday it was confirmed. I was chatting it up with a fellow and when he learned what I do for a living, he shared with me that he had never kept a calendar until after he went to jail. Some time ago he was arrested for an automobile-related infraction and ended up on probation. Recently he was scheduled to see a judge in court in regard to his probation, but he missed his court date. He swears it was an honest mistake, and that he didn’t intend to skip it, he just thought the hearing was the following Wednesday. The judge apparently thinks calendars are pretty important too because he sentenced him to 25 days in jail. Ouch.

Don’t laugh. I know it’s happened to you too. Maybe you didn’t go to jail and it wasn’t a court date, but I’ll bet you missed something important at least once in your life because you didn’t write it down. We’ve all done it.

Here are four tips to help you be sure you never miss a meeting, graduation, birthday or court date.

1. Choose a calendar, any calendar. Yes just pick one, but only one. Keeping two calendars is actually worse than not having one at all because you’ll still miss appointments and double book yourself, but now there’s work involved in writing it all down. Hilarious when you think about it. Keep ONE calendar.
2. Use it for everything. If you get in the habit of putting every single appointment in your calendar you’ll learn to rely on it, which lets your brain let go of your schedule completely. However, if you only put “big things” into the calendar, you’ll still have to remember all the other things and you won’t fully trust your system. Go all in and let your calendar do the remembering for you.
3. Be specific. I know it’s tempting to just write “lunch” or “meeting” on a particular date and time, especially if you’re in a hurry or not accustomed to relying on a calendar. Don’t fall prey to this bad habit. Take the (literally) two extra seconds to add enough detail so you aren’t wondering who that lunch or meeting is with, and where. It’s embarrassing to stand someone up because you had no idea who you were meeting or where.  Take the time to add names, times and locations to each appointment.
4. Be careful. If you’re a paper planner person, always be careful with your calendar because if you lose it, it’s gone. Include your full contact information on the inside cover so anyone who finds it can get it back to you. If you use a digital calendar there’s no excuse for not having a backup in the cloud. Hard drives crash, mobile devices fail (and fall into toilets), and it’s not a matter of if you’ll lose your data, it’s only a matter of when. One of the benefits of electronic over paper is that you can back up, so be sure you do it.

Your calendar, whether paper or electronic, should be your personal assistant. Instead of having your girl call my girl, why not just let your calendar do the heavy lifting? Then you can let your precious, fabulous, I-have-better-things-to-do-than-hold-your-schedule BRAIN focus on more important things like being creative, embracing challenges and solving problems. Like how to get me a dinner date with Jon Bon Jovi.

Monica Ricci is an Atlanta-based Certified Professional Organizer®, Productivity Expert, speaker & author who founded Catalyst Organizing in 1998.  A leader in her field, and winner of the NAPO Founders’ Award, Monica is passionate about teaching people to create simple, joyful, powerful lives.

Now days it isn’t uncommon for people to be working 60 to 70 hour weeks as a normal schedule. On one hand this makes sense. Maybe 40 hours of the type of labor that was being done at Ford was more exhausting than sitting at a desk. On the other hand, the work being done at Ford on the assembly line probably wasn’t as mentally exhausting as much of todays workers experience. So perhaps, we’d be more productive with an even lower number of hours per week.

The problem is that most people seem to think that an hour is interchangeable with any other hour. Well maybe people don’t think it, but they act like it. For example, the county commissioners where I live decided to move the employees that work on the roads to a 4 day work week with 10 hour days. The logic was that it would save in gasoline that they normally have to spend driving to the work sites in county vehicles. However, I wonder if those 40 hours are just as productive as the old 40 hours. If someone is working hard for 8 hours, I’m not sure you can just tack another two on to the end and expect them to perform just as well.

If you focus and work hard, how long do you think it would take you to finish a days worth of work? Do you think you could be done in 6 hours instead of 8? Maybe 4? The problem is that if you have to stay until 5pm there really isn’t a way for you to find out. You will mentally be “pacing” yourself based on the time you get to leave so even if you want to work faster, it might not be possible.

What is really productive for you personally may be different than what is productive for other people. Unfortunately the way most employment is setup doesn’t recognize this, however I think that is going to be changing in the coming years. Some companies are starting to focus more on what people accomplish than with how many hours they put in. This type of shift is going to be very good for productivity.

The change isn’t going to happen right away, but it is starting. Many teams at IBM have very relaxed vacation policies that allow people to take time when and as they need it. Their performance metrics are good enough that they rely on those for measuring what employees are doing–not the number of hours worked.

Your job may not give you that level of flexibility right away, but it is still worth taking the time to think through how you work most effectively and get the most done. Who knows, you may be able to move to a performance based job sooner than you think.

If you are in a situation where you have some control over your working hours, it might be worth experimenting to see exactly what works best for you. Throwing more time a problems doesn’t always result in more getting done and sometimes much shorter periods of very focused work and let you get a lot more done while leaving more of your precious minutes for other important non-work activities.

• Cameras built into every phone
• Constant network connectivity

Let me walk you through a small portion my recent trip to give you some examples of what I’m talking about.

With a 6 am flight, we arrived the night before at a hotel near the airport. I had all my reservation information in an email in Gmail on my Android Nexus S phone so I didn’t have to print it out ahead of time. Before going to bed, I confirmed the flight time on my phone also using Gmail’s search capability.

In the morning we used the phone to look up the weather report for our current location and decided it would be better to leave the car in covered parking because of a high chance of hail while we were gone. After driving the few miles to the airport, I took note of the row and level where we parked and entered it into Evernote. This time I just typed it in, but in the past I’ve just used the camera to take a picture of the sign where we parked.

After we got checked in at the airline, I pulled out the receipt from the hotel and added it to my expenses using Expensify. By photographing the receipt, it gets uploaded to my account, scanned and automatically associated with the charge on my credit card along with a few notes about the purpose of the expense and the category I want to put it in.

Once on the plane, I pulled out my Kindle to read a book I had recently purchased. The book was on my phone as well, so I could have just turned it on in airplane mode. But the Kindle battery lasts so much longer and I wanted to make sure I had enough power on my phone to make it through the day.

At my layover, I used the Manilla Mobile App to check to see if I had any bills coming up that I would be due that week and double check that my cell phone bill correctly reflected some recent changes I made to my account.

When we landed in Philadelphia, I used the phone to see how far we were from our hotel and to give the address to the cab driver.

I won’t go through the whole week, but even before we made it to our hotel I had used the phone to eliminate about half a dozen pieces of paper over the way I had to work without a smart phone.

One of the more interesting moments was when I left my phone in a cab. I was struck by the fact that while it was an inconvenience, all my data was still available. I could still get to all of my notes and email from my computer and I could even wipe my phone remotely to keep my data safe.

It wasn’t like that a few years ago. If you wrote information on a piece of paper that you misplaced, you lost all that information. Even if you stored it in your phone, losing your phone meant losing all the information on it. I quickly went through what it would take to get back up and running and estimated that it would take me about an hour to buy a new phone and get it set back up where I could be productive again with all my data–and most of that time would be spent locating a store and going through the purchase process. Fortunately a quick call to my phone got an answer from a very honest cab driver who came back by to return it.

It is kind of funny to think about how many promises for going paperless with expensive scanners and other equipment never really panned out. However, when we finally got sufficiently powerful cell phones it dramatically reduced the need for paper and my guess is that this is just the beginning.

1. Label Everything

Make sure your cell phone, laptop, luggage, etc. has your name and contact information on it somewhere. If you accidentally leave your phone in a cab or a bag on a plane you have a much greater chance of getting it back if people can tell who it belongs to.

For luggage I like using engraved metal pet tags. If you look around you can find them on the Internet for $2 or less. They are durable and won’t rip or tear. If you get the “dog tag” style, they look more like a luggage tag and a bit less like something you’d expect to see on a dog or cat collar.

2. Plan for Taxi and Shuttles

If you are going to need to take a taxi from the airport, it can be helpful to know a fair rate ahead of time. If your credit card company offers a concierge service, they can usually give you an idea of what to expect and sometimes recommend a shuttle or train that might be cheaper or even faster.

Don’t overlook transportation provided by your hotel. Paying a bit more for a hotel that offers shuttle service everywhere you need to go may be well worth it in saving on taxi fares.

3. Rental Cars

If you are going to rent a car, find out how your current insurance works for rental vehicles. You may have coverage through your normal car policy and can decline the coverage that the car rental place tries to sell you. Also, many credit card companies offer coverage for rental vehicles, but usually as secondary insurance to your auto policy. By knowing what coverage you currently have that applies to rentals you can keep from paying for coverage twice.

Pay attention to the fine print when renting a vehicle. Many companies make a lot of extra money by sneaking in additional charges. One of the oddest things I’ve encountered in car rentals was a policy that said if the car had been driven less than 50 miles and was returned on full, you still had to pay for 5 gallons of gas unless you produced a receipt showing that you had purchased gasoline. They said this was to prevent people from taking advantage of the car rental company by driving a short distance and not filling the car back up with gas. It seemed odd for a company that was charging $8.50 per gallon for gas to be worried about their customers taking advantage of them.

4. Hard Copies of Information

As much as I like to keep things paperless, I’ve found it is worth having a print out of my flights, hotel address/number, etc. If your phone or computer runs out of power after an unexpected layover, it is helpful to still be able to quickly find your information. One easy way to do this is to keep a document with all the details of your trip and print it out right before you leave.

5. Leave Home Energy Efficient

Don’t forget to turn off any unnecessary lights and turn your thermostat to something efficient while you are gone. If you plan to be gone for awhile, you might turn off your hot water heater. There isn’t any reason to keep the water hot if there is no one there to use it.

6. Keep Your Home Safe

While you are gone, you don’t want your house to look abandoned. Even something simple like putting a light on a timer can make a big difference. But don’t forget to plan for how to deal with packages, newspapers and mail while you are gone. Even with a light turning on and off at night, a pile of 10 newspapers on the front porch is a dead giveaway that no one is home.

Also don’t forget that what you post on social media may tell people more than you want them to know about how easy it would be to rob your house.

7. Luggage

With more and more airlines charging for checked luggage, people are trying to carry more on the plane with them. Be aware that some airlines have recently shrunk the size of carry on that they allow, so the bag you’ve used for years may not be allowed on your next flight.

Some credit cards and frequent flyer programs offer free checked luggage. If you travel a lot, it might be worth looking into some of those options. For example, certain American Express cards lets you pick one airline each year and any luggage fees from that airline get reimbursed to your card up to a certain limit.

So there are seven tips from my recent travel experiences. Is there anything you’d add? If so leave a comment.

A quick poll around the Manilla office, I got the following answers:

Sleep

Work out

Spend time with family

Learn Italian

We want to know, how would you use an 8^th day of the week? Leave your answers in the comments. We’ll send Manilla t-shirts to the people who give the best answers!

The panel discussion was enlightening, insightful, and inspirational, yet completely practical, lending itself quite naturally to a series of practicable steps to climbing up the ladder, rung by rung. Are you looking to rise to a position of leadership in your career? Take these seven steps and get started rising to the top: 

1. Earn your privilege to lead. Leadership is earned; it isn’t bestowed by virtue of having the word “manager” in your title or your level; it is the sum total of your words and actions — the interactions, behaviors, qualities and decisions you make every day.
2. Be authentic. Be honest about who you are — your attributes and qualities. If you know yourself, you can promote an honest brand. Ensure that your message is consistent. If it is erratic, it will undermine your efforts. Everything you do — and choose not to do — contributes to your personal brand, from the way you talk on the phone to the way you behave at meetings or write e-mails. And, don’t let the insecurities and biases of others turn opportunities into obstacles. I didn’t and don’t you either (check out my story)!
3. Make yourself visible. Build your profile internally and externally. Ways to do this include networking, signing up for high-profile or stretch assignments, showcasing your skills in presentations or workshops, writing for internal or external publications, volunteering for committees or panel discussions at a conference.
4. Getting ahead by working hard and working smart. Working smarter starts by prioritizing and having a plan. It also means keeping an eye on the big picture at all times which gives you the ability to add value and shape the direction of your work – and that ultimately helps shape the direction of your career.
5. Your actions need to match your words. You can promise people the world, but if you don’t follow through, your promises are meaningless. Your actions need to match your words. You need to be seen as someone others can count on in a pinch. Ask yourself these questions: Can you be depended on to follow through no matter what? Are you the go-to person who consistently gives more than is asked for? Are you able to multi-task with grace? Is your word your bond? Answer “yes” to these questions and you will deserve the confidence you’re seeking.
6. Raise your hand. Seek out mentors and sponsors, raise your visibility and seize opportunities that come your way. And, lend a hand to share your insights and wisdom with the next generation, as I’ve shared in a recent blog post of the same title.
7. Approach work/life balance as a journey, not a destination. Only you can decide what’s most important and what balance is “right” at any particular time. But, it’s up to you to “own” communicating the choices you make and letting people know when your situation changes.

Linda Descano, CFA^®, is President and Chief Executive Officer of Women & Co., Citibank’s complimentary online resource that provides expert content and commentary for women who want to enhance their financial acumen. Linda is a noted authority on wealth management and personal finance.

1. Reboot regularly

Some people leave their computer on for weeks at a time. The problem is that some programs will start other programs and these don’t always get shut down properly. They can consume memory or use the processor in ways that you might not expect. Doing a reboot will help make sure that you clear everything out and don’t have any of your resources wasted on things you don’t need to have running. Some people find it is useful to get in a habit of rebooting every day. For example, rebooting their computer when they leave for lunch so it is ready to go when they get back.

2. Clean off spyware

There are a lot of different things that can get installed on your computer without you knowing it. There are programs that will help clean this stuff up so it isn’t installed or running on your computer where it will slow things down. Lavasoft makes a nice free product called AdAware. Spybot is another one I’ve had good luck with. Microsoft makes a product called Windows Defender that might be worth looking at as well.

All of those products are for Windows. Macs and Linux typically have fewer spyware issues, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be careful what you let be installed on your computer.

3. Reformat and Reload

If you have the original disks that came with your computer, or a partition that you can restore from, you might consider restoring your computer to the factory settings once in a while. Back when I was using Windows XP, I’d typically do this once every 6 months. Since I’ve moved to OS X, I don’t do it as frequently, but I still end up doing it every few years.

The problem with this approach is that some computer makers now include a bunch of junk software as part of their “factory image.” Which means once you go back to the original settings you may have to spend some time removing software to get to a good state. Still if your computer is a lot slower than it was when you got it, this may be well worth it.

Before you try something like this, make sure you not only have backups of all your data, but also of any software you’ve purchased and will want to reinstall. You don’t want to wipe your hard drive only to discover that the software key you need to install a very important tool disappeared.

4. Add Ram

One of the biggest causes of computers going slow is not having enough memory. Adding memory on most computers isn’t to difficult and is well within the reach of someone who is handy with a screwdriver. In fact, finding the right memory for your computer is often a lot harder than actually installing it. Crucial has a good tool to help you find the right memory for your computer that I have found very useful.

These four tips don’t include anything earth shattering, but they have the power to extend the useful life of your computer and decrease the amount of time you have to spend waiting on your PC.

1. Proximity Matters

When you are designing a home office, make sure you put things that you need often near where you need them. For example, if you want to get better about shredding documents with sensitive information on them, don’t put your shredder across the room or in the closet. It needs to be out where you can easily get to it. The more effort it takes to do something the less often you will want to do it, so arrange your tools so it is easy to do your desired tasks.

Usually when my desk starts getting messy I can trace it back to the fact that I have something placed wrong. For example, if my scanner isn’t easily within reach and hooked up, I won’t scan documents into my paperless system and they start stacking up on my desk. If my trash can got moved across the room, I’ll end up with piles of stuff on my desk that should have been discarded.

2. Lighting Is Important

I had a friend who was studying interior design and I was amazed at how much time they spent just studying how lighting worked. Her studies covered everything from the color of the lights to the spread of the light at different heights and everything in between. If you are like most people, your home office isn’t something you had a professional design. So pay attention to lighting. One thing I’ve found helpful is to use daylight color balanced high powered CFL bulbs. The daylight color helps keep you alert because it matches what you’d have outside. A lot of people don’t like the CFL bulbs because they often seem under powered, but if you get an 85 watt CFL bulb you’ll get a lot more light than you’ll get from a 100 or even 150 watt traditional lightbulb.

3. Control Sound

Sound can be a big distraction in a home office, so think about whether you are trying to setup a workspace right next to a squeaky furnace fan or some other distraction. If you are in a room with a bare floor, you might find that putting down a rug helps absorb some of the sound and echoes. If you have a lot of traffic in a room above you head, you might consider insulating the ceiling to cut down on some of the noise.

If you have distracting sounds that you can’t block, you might consider playing some type of ambient sound to help cover up the distraction. This only works up to a point, but if you are trying to cover up a light conversation on the other side of the wall, ocean or rain sounds might do the trick.

4. Ergonomics

Typically you want your arms to bend at the elbows at 90 degrees, so adjust your desk or chair to keep from needing to reach up or down to type on your keyboard. Your wrists should be straight. Your monitor should be placed so you don’t have to tilt your head up or down to see it comfortably. OSHA has a lot of information on how to arrange an ergonomic workspace, but just paying a little attention to how your body feels and making adjustments can go a long ways.

5. Invest in a Chair

Go ahead and invest in a good chair. “Invest” doesn’t necessarily mean “spend lots of money on,” but it does mean to put effort into finding something that is comfortable and works well for you. My office chair is over 10 years old, but I remember it took me about 6 months to find one that I actually liked after I started looking. It has been well worth it not because it was an expensive chair, but because I made sure it was exactly right for what I needed. If you don’t like your chair, you won’t want to sit in it and it is hard to get work done if the piece of furniture you have the most contact with isn’t a good fit for you.