Effective recruiting is essential to the success of any business.

The right team can make a good business great and a great business exceptional. On the flip side, unpleasant or dissatisfied staff and a toxic workplace culture can derail even the best businesses.

Bad habits can be a huge barrier to success.

At the very least, they waste our time and stop us from achieving our goals. At their worst, they can be truly debilitating. They can threaten our health, our career prospects and our financial stability.

Last month’s post, ‘How To Build Healthy Habits’, described some useful techniques for incorporating healthy habits into our lives.

It’s never been more difficult to retain your best talent than it is today.

For a range of reasons, people change jobs far more often than they used to. According to Harvard Business Review, Baby Boomers are likely to hold an average of 11 or 12 jobs in their lifetimes.

You are, to a large extent, the sum of your habits.

A habit can be defined as something you have become so accustomed to doing that you now do it almost without thinking. Research suggests that as much as 40% of our behaviours every day are habitual.

Most businesses in Australia are run through a company. Almost invariably then, if you’re a business owner, you will also be a company director.

You may even be a director of a company, but have little to do with running its business. For example, your spouse may have asked you to be a director.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of a good night’s sleep. In his 2019 bestseller Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, Matthew Walker writes that sleep “enriches our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions [and also] recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite.

It seems that every month brings a new suite of stories concerning data breaches and hacking attempts at besieged organisations across the world. In May 2019, hackers targeted the US Customers and Border Protection Agency, stealing photos of travellers and license plates related to about 100,000 people.

Choosing the right way to manage your time at work can supercharge your performance at work and help you accelerate towards the achievement of your goals. But it can also be difficult: peak productivity means managing your schedule, identifying your goals, and implementing organisation strategies, all while responding to a dynamic environment in which new tasks come thick and fast.

By some estimates, your career will take up around 80,000 hours of your adult life—and, whichever way you look at it, that’s an enormous amount of time. Little wonder then that most of us are preoccupied with figuring out the right career: how can we invest our own 80,000 hours in a way that feels meaningful, leads us toward our goals, and taps into our natural interests and talents?

Unfortunately, there’s no straightforward answer to these questions.

Congratulations on being offered an interview! That’s an encouraging step towards securing employment. However, for many candidates it’s an intimidating one too. After all, while some interview questions are more or less expected, other can seem, in the moment, like curveballs designed to catch you off guard.