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Work Smarter, Not Harder: Tips for Streamlining Your Workday Account

In today’s fast-paced work environment, it’s essential to find ways to streamline your daily tasks and maximize productivity. One tool that can help you achieve this is your Workday account. Whether you’re new to Workday or have been using it for some time, there are several tips and tricks you can employ to make the most out of this powerful platform. In this article, we’ll explore how you can work smarter, not harder, by streamlining your Workday account.

Understanding the Basics of Workday

Before diving into the tips and tricks, let’s start with a quick overview of what Workday is all about. Workday is a cloud-based software platform that offers a range of HR and financial management solutions for businesses of all sizes. It provides an integrated system for managing everything from employee data and payroll to time tracking and expense management.

Tip 1: Customize Your Dashboard

One of the first steps towards streamlining your Workday account is customizing your dashboard. The dashboard serves as your home base within the platform, giving you quick access to the most important information and tasks. By personalizing it according to your needs, you can save valuable time searching for frequently used features.

To customize your dashboard, start by identifying the widgets that are most relevant to your role or daily tasks. You can add or remove widgets by clicking on the “Customize” button on the top right corner of your dashboard. Consider adding widgets such as “My Team,” “Time Off,” or “Pending Approvals” to easily stay on top of important updates.

Tip 2: Utilize Advanced Search

Workday offers a powerful search functionality that allows you to quickly find specific information within the platform. Instead of manually navigating through different menus and sections, take advantage of advanced search features to locate what you need in seconds.

To access the advanced search, click on the magnifying glass icon located at the top right corner of your Workday account. From here, you can enter specific keywords or filters to narrow down your search results. Whether you’re looking for a specific employee record, a particular expense report, or a training course, the advanced search feature will save you time and effort.

Tip 3: Leverage Mobile Accessibility

In today’s mobile-driven world, having access to your work-related information on-the-go is crucial. Workday offers mobile accessibility through its dedicated app, allowing you to stay connected and productive even when you’re away from your desk.

By downloading the Workday app on your smartphone or tablet, you can easily view and manage tasks such as submitting time off requests, approving expenses, or accessing important documents. This flexibility eliminates the need to be tied down to your computer and ensures that you can stay on top of things wherever you are.

Tip 4: Stay Updated with Notifications

To further streamline your Workday account, make sure to take advantage of its notification system. Notifications keep you informed about important updates and pending tasks without having to manually check for them regularly.

You can customize your notification settings by clicking on your profile picture in the top right corner of your Workday account and selecting “Notification Preferences.” From here, choose which events or actions trigger notifications for you. Whether it’s receiving alerts for pending approvals or being notified about upcoming performance reviews, these notifications will help keep you organized and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.

In conclusion, streamlining your Workday account is essential for maximizing productivity and efficiency in a fast-paced work environment. By customizing your dashboard, utilizing advanced search features, leveraging mobile accessibility, and staying updated with notifications, you’ll be able to work smarter rather than harder. Take advantage of these tips today and unlock the full potential of your Workday account.

This text was generated using a large language model, and select text has been reviewed and moderated for purposes such as readability.

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7 WAYS TO MOTIVATE YOURSELF TO WORK HARD

• SuperLife Portal

The start of a new work year is different for everyone. Some people come back from their break refreshed, invigorated and full of new goals to implement in the year ahead. Others take a little more time to get into the groove and shake off the holiday vibes to get focused on the tasks at hand.

Regardless of where your head is currently at, it is important to find ways to get motivated and STAY motivated. Working in a business like Preston Hire that is constantly evolving and challenging itself to do more, be more and sell more … we need our staff to grow with us and maintain a hungry attitude to always be putting our best foot forward.

Try these 7 tips for motivating yourself … even when it seems hard!

1. DON’T THINK ABOUT IT AS HARD WORK Think about it: If the project you’re faced with isn’t viewed as drudgery, but rather as a piece of the puzzle that’s helping you along your career path, then perhaps the energy required to do it will be easier to come by. Try not to think so much about how difficult or frustrating or impossible the task might be and instead think about how good it must feel to be that, or how proud you might be to have done that. Make hard look easy!

2. CREATE SMALL, BITE SIZED GOALS Of course you should have a really big, audacious goal. But make sure you break down that goal into bite-sized, consumable goals. This way you’ll feel like you’re making progress in your journey and you’ll also feel a sense of accomplishment when you complete the smaller goals. A feeling of progress and achievement is a beautiful combination. Creating a To-Do list is a brilliant way to keep motivated. The feeling of crossing off a task gives you a tangible acknowledgement that you really are getting things done.

3. READ DAILY Although it may sound counter-productive to set aside reading time when really what you’re looking for is motivation to work hard, sometimes it’s necessary to do something seemingly unrelated to tackle the task at hand. Developing a daily reading habit is one thing that’s likely to have a long-lasting impact on your thought processes, ultimately inspiring you in all areas of your life. Whether it be the news, trade magazines or books – find something that keeps your mind active and challenged.

4. STOP CARING ABOUT THINGS THAT DON’T MATTER Don’t sweat the small stuff! Doing things that don’t mean anything cost us a huge amount of mental energy. By eliminating unnecessary “noise” you will stay more consistently motivated if you’re working on activities that are inherently meaningful or are part of a larger mission.

5. SET A QUIT TIME We can’t work 24/7. It is really important to have time out to recharge, enjoy moments with family and friends and zone out. It has been proven we are more productive when we have had some time out and aren’t thinking about work all day. We encourage everyone to take their lunch breaks away from their desk and off their phones. Be sure to switch off of an evening and be present with your loved ones rather than being distracted by thoughts of work.

6. JUST DO IT Don’t waste time. Instead of waiting around, willing yourself to feel motivated, what if you just went ahead and started doing the work you know you need to do? Sometimes jumping in and tackling what needs to be done is the best way to get focused and excited about the project at hand.

7. CELEBRATE WINS If we don’t give ourselves a pat on the back when we do achieve great things … what are we doing it all for? Be sure to take time to acknowledge all the good things you are doing. Don’t discount the little things – they all add up to large achievements! If you are a manager – tell your staff member you noticed their work and great job! If you recognise a colleague is kicking goals – tell them it is awesome and to keep it up. We all play a role in motivating each other too.

If we all bring a focused, positive and motivated attitude to work each day we will achieve great things in 2019. Discuss with your team ways to keep your branch atmosphere uplifted and ready to tackle the goals set. Any great ideas you have we would love to hear them!

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How to Keep Working When You’re Just Not Feeling It

• Ayelet Fishbach

Motivating yourself is one of the main things that sets high achievers apart, and it’s hard. How do you keep pushing onward when your heart isn’t in it? In her research, Fishbach has identified some simple tactics: Set goals that are intrinsically rewarding, and make them very specific. If a task isn’t satisfying, focus on aspects of it that are or combine it with pleasant activities. Reward yourself in the right way for getting things done. To avoid slumps, break objectives into subgoals; look at how much you’ve accomplished until you’re halfway there; and then count down what you have left to do. And use social influence: Let high performers inspire you, boost your get-up-and-go by giving advice, and keep the people you want to succeed for front of mind.

Four strategies for motivating yourself.

Motivating yourself is hard. In fact, I often compare it to one of the exploits of the fictional German hero Baron Munchausen: Trying to sustain your drive through a task, a project, or even a career can sometimes feel like pulling yourself out of a swamp by your own hair. We seem to have a natural aversion to persistent effort that no amount of caffeine or inspirational posters can fix.

• AF Ayelet Fishbach is the Jeffrey Breakenridge Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

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7 Ways To Motivate Yourself To Work Harder

Have you ever stumbled groggily into work at 9 a.m. on a Monday morning, with a pleasant weekend in the rear-view and five straight days of the office grind staring you in the face?

We've all been there before.

And in those moments, even people who love their jobs may have trouble pushing themselves to work at their highest capabilities.

On Quora, people discussed the question: " How can I motivate myself to work hard ?" Here's what they suggested:

1. Convince yourself you want to do it.

One of the easiest things you can do to motivate yourself is to think of the work you're about to do as not being so hard, after all.

Quora user Marie Stein does this by focusing not on how difficult it will be to achieve her goals but on how good she will feel about her work once it is done.

"Make hard look easy," Stein writes. "I like that challenge. I like being the kind of person who is capable of that."

2. Take control.

While it's easy to be overwhelmed by various personal and professional responsibilities, you can help yourself stay focused by keeping in mind that, at the very least, you are in control of your own actions.

Quora user  Brian Roemmele encourages people  to own every moment.

"You are in full control of this power," Roemmele writes. "In your hands you, can build the tallest building and in your hands you can destroy the tallest buildings."

3. Surround yourself with other people who are working hard.

No man (or woman!) is an island. In order to pursue your goals with everything you have, it's helpful to be around other people who are working just as hard.

Whether it's coworkers who inspire you on the job or a group of like-minded friends you meet up with afterwards, it's important to have peers who push you to succeed.

"The saying goes, you're the average of the 5 people you hang out with most — so surround yourself with HARD workers!" says Quora user Bud Hennekes . "Who do you know that is going places? Start hanging around them."

4. Break up your tasks into smaller tasks.

"Break your hard work into component parts; it makes it easier to see where the obstacles are so you can be prepared to overcome them," Marie Stein writes .

Indeed, it's important not only to identify these small tasks, but to pat yourself on the back when you complete them.

"Small wins can appear incremental and rather trivial, but they can boost inner work life tremendously," writes Quora user Gerard Danford . "Furthermore, small wins can accumulate into big breakthroughs."

5. Stay focused.

It's difficult to motivate yourself to keep working if you're not able to concentrate on the task at hand.

Quora user MaRina Abaza recommends limiting your exposure to outside distractions by letting people know you won't always be available to immediately respond to texts, emails, and instant messages.

"If you have trained others that your are always available to respond to requests, you need to retrain them to expect something else," Abaza writes. "Make it clear to people when you will be available for ad hoc requests and when you aren’t."

6. Remember your "why."

Nothing is more motivating than reminding yourself why you're doing the work in the first place. Whether you're building a product you love or simply putting food on the table for your family, it's crucial that you remain in touch with what inspires you.

"You hear a lot in business about connecting to a 'vision' — the 'why' of that company," writes Quora user David J. Bradley . "The vision is how the company wants to be positioned. You can set the same standard for yourself as well."

7. Stay positive.

As anyone will tell you, failure is inevitable, but it's how you deal with failure that determines whether you will ultimately be successful.

Quora user Ravi Tandon recommends doing what you need to do accomplish your goals, regardless of what others might say about you. He also stresses the importance of making sure you don't see the success of other people and get down on yourself.

Meanwhile, MaRina Abaza suggests focusing on your strengths, rather than dwelling on your weaknesses.

"Building self esteem is about finding out what your strengths are and then developing and building on them," Abaza writes . "Your employer would not have given you a job if they did not recognize certain skills in you."

• 8 Ways to Work Harder Without Even Realising It

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• 8 Popular Study Tips That You Ought to Ignore
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Perhaps it’s the spark of understanding that makes the whole course make so much more sense. Perhaps it’s eating better, so you have more energy for post-lunch studying sessions. Perhaps it’s finding a way to become more engaged with the subject, so that your motivation gets an all-important boost. Sadly, it’s often the case that you’ve already made these kinds of easy fixes, and what would make all the difference in your studies is simply working that little bit harder. But studying is exhausting, especially in the final few years of school. You may well think that you’re working as hard as you can. There’s always the danger of diminishing returns, where working longer hours might leave you so worn out that you don’t retain much more of what you were studying than you did when you were spending less time on it. Being exhausted is never a good way to learn. In this article, we’ve taken a look at ways you can work harder, without wearing yourself out. In fact, in some cases, you might not even notice the extra time or effort you’re putting in.

1. Find extra hours in the day

Don’t worry, this isn’t a suggestion that you skip sleeping! If you’re ever starting to think that perhaps you could manage on four or five hours of sleep instead of the full eight, you should reconsider – being tired and cranky all the time will not help with your studies.

But often there will be times in the day that you aren’t currently using to study, that perhaps you could. There’s the classic example of using any journey time in your day to catch up on studies (for instance, listening to audiobooks if you travel in a way that isn’t textbook-friendly), but if that doesn’t work for you, there may be other time that you can use instead. One such example is first thing in the morning. Could you get to bed half an hour earlier, and then use that half an hour to do some work between your breakfast and going to school? It’s a short enough period of time that it may not seem like a big deal, but over a few weeks those half hours will begin to add up. If you’re not a morning person, that may sound unbearable. But there may be other times that you dismiss as ‘not for studying’. For instance, if you’ve gone out to the cinema with friends, and you get back home half an hour or an hour before you’d usually go to sleep, could you use that time for studying? There are often parts of the day that we dismiss as too short to get any real work done, but if you put your mind to it, you might be able to make considerable progress by using that time wisely.

2. Cut out irrelevant tasks

School instills strong habits in us all. It may be that even in the later years of secondary school, you’re still following the primary school habits of writing a title neatly at the top of each page of notes (perhaps in fountain pen), underlining it, adding the date, and whatever other articles of good note-taking were instilled in you when your age was still in single digits. These are the most obvious examples of irrelevant tasks that you can cut out of your studying, especially if no one but you is going to see your notes. They don’t need to be beautiful, just legible, so give yourself more time to do the work that counts by not worrying if your handwriting looks pretty.

But these obvious things are just the tip of the iceberg. There may well be other irrelevant tasks that you can just skip. There might be easy questions that you can answer without thinking, for instance. There might be studying activities that are simply a waste of time – highlighting endless sheets of notes without really taking in their content is a good example of this. If you catch yourself thinking, “why am I doing this, this is stupid” without an obvious answer to the question (e.g. “because the mark scheme is stupid”), then it’s probably the sort of study activity that you ought to cut in favour of something more beneficial.

3. Speed up where you can

The more things you can do faster, the more time you’ll have to spend on valuable studying. We recommend not worrying about your handwriting looking nice in order that you don’t slow down your note-taking speed, but there are other things you can speed up too. For instance, it might be a good time to look into whether there’s any way you can speed up the performance of your computer, so you’re not wasting time waiting for programs to open or to de-freeze. This might be as simple a task as closing down programmes that are slowing down your computer – for example, you might have Skype set to load up whenever you switch your computer on, but there’s no point in having it running unless you’re actively using it or would like other people to be able to contact you. There are lots of articles online offering advice on how to speed up a slow computer – or it may be worth thinking about buying something newer and faster instead. There are other ways to speed up your work, too. Working on improving your typing speed can be time well spent if you make rapid improvements – going from 40 wpm to 80 wpm is not impossible, and would allow you to take notes twice as quickly. Alternatively, you can look into options such as voice typing, which is available for many word processors, including for free on Google Docs. You might feel self-conscious speaking rather than typing, but it’ll get your thoughts down on the page much more quickly than even a very good typist could.

4. Work out the times when you’re best at different tasks, and work accordingly

You’ve probably thought about whether you’re an early bird or a night owl before, looking at the question of whether you do your best work in the morning or in the evening. That’s certainly something to consider when you’re planning your study schedule; hard work at 10pm is useless if you’re too tired at that point to take any of it in.

But it’s also worth considering what type of work you do best at which time of day. There are lots of articles out there citing a study that suggested that creative work is best done first thing in the morning , while another article suggests that we can overcome mental blocks and become more insightful when we’re tired, perhaps because being sleepy shifts our perspective and allows us to see fresh solutions to a problem. As with anything that claims to be proven by Science as if Science were a single entity, it’s worth taking this with a generous pinch of salt. But it’s certainly the case that the time of day can affect your abilities in some areas. Which those are probably depends on you as an individual, so if you notice that writing essays is easier first thing in the morning and Maths problems make more sense in the evening, use that knowledge when you’re planning your studies to make the most of the time you have available.

5. Use apps and other programmes to help you

Even thirty years ago, most of your studying would have been about going to the library and getting on with it, and if you wanted help in managing your time, you’d just have to be really nice to your friends or creative in your use of alarm clocks. Thankfully, it’s the 21st century now, and there’s a whole world of studying apps out there, designed to help you, as well as apps that aren’t for studying, but that may help you all the same. For instance, f.lux changes the colour of your computer screen depending on the time of day so that you’re not staring at a harsh white light shortly before you want to go to sleep. SelfControl lets you block distracting pages like Facebook for a set period of time, so you can focus more on your work. There are dozens of project management apps out there to help you manage your time and deadlines, which are invaluable for studying. Similarly, there are endless apps to create quizzes or flashcards, which you can use to help you study – especially on the go, if you load them on to your phone.

6. Make sure your work is sufficiently challenging

It can be tricky when you’ve been set work that is too easy for you. But if you have any flexibility in the work that you do, make sure that it’s challenging enough for the level at which you are studying. If you’re flicking through the pages without needing to make much effort, you’re wasting time in which you could be doing proper hard work.

If you’re revising, making sure your work is challenging can be tricky; you might think that the point of the exercise is to go over the easy stuff. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make it more of a challenge for yourself. If the content is easy, you could make the activity you’re using to study it harder, for instance by writing yourself a quiz with less information, or by doing exam papers in shorter time limits than you would be allowed in the real thing. That way, you’ll be working harder without needing to spend additional time studying.

7. Find opportunities to be competitive

Sometimes, the only thing standing in between you and working harder is sufficient motivation. Ways to motivate yourself fall into two categories: motivation that acts as a reward once you’ve done something, and motivation that makes the actual doing of the thing more fun. Most tips for motivating yourself while studying fall into the first category – that might be eating a sweet for every page of a book you read, or giving yourself a 10-minute social media break every time you finish an hour of study. These methods accept that studying isn’t fun, and provide a way for you to make it up to yourself afterwards.

More effective for working harder, though, are means of motivating yourself to enjoy the work you’re doing more. Making it harder can help (so that you’re not bored by doing something too easy) as can finding routes into the topic that make it more interesting to you. But if these methods don’t work, competition is a great motivator. Can you persuade your friends into some kind of leaderboard, for instance? If you’re not at comparable levels, you could assess yourselves by level of improvement rather than raw scores. Alternatively, figure out some way of measuring your personal best, and compete to break it.

8. Collect small tasks to do when you have time

Starting a new task when studying is time-consuming. You have to gather your books and notes, get yourself in the right frame of mind, and figure out exactly what it is you have to do. Going through all that means that if you’ve only got a short period of time free – half an hour, say – it can seem pointless to start studying at all. But thinking like this can mean you end up wasting a lot of time that you could have devoted to your studies. Having a list of small tasks that you can do as and when you have time enables you to make use of these shorter chunks of time in a sensible way. What sort of tasks they might be depends on the subject – for a foreign language, it might be a short list of vocabulary to go over, while for Maths it might be a single problem that you expect to be able to solve in ten or fifteen minutes. If you’ve got this kind of work prepared, you’ll cut down on wasted time, but since they’re such short chunks of work, it shouldn’t feel like much extra effort at all.

What have you found helps you work harder? Let us know in the comments!

Image credits: woman taking notes ; relaxing by pool ; old man with watch ; handwriting ; tin can ; mug of coffee ; girl on phone ; mountain ; jelly babies ; notebook

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