Business

Here's a simple three-step solution

Wake up. Go to work. Stay a little late. Come home. Make dinner. Go to bed. Do it all over again.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the daily grind. Before you know it, a week has passed, the month ends, the year is over, and you haven’t done a thing that mattered to you. Somehow, you managed to be busy and bored all at the same time.

So, how do you break the cycle? Is there a way to actually spend time on what makes you happy—to separate the urgent from the important?

Marika Reuling, chief of staff at Harvard University, might have a simple three-step solution.

Step 1: Start a Life Audit

At the 2015 Greater Boston Women in Leadership Symposium, Reuling spoke about completing a life audit once or twice a year to help her reevaluate how she spends and prioritizes her time. To get started, you’ll need a bunch of sticky notes, a pen, a blank wall or floor, and privacy. You should probably turn your phone off, too.

A life audit, as serious as it sounds, is simply the process of writing down every tangible goal or vague ambition, both professional and personal, on a Post-it note and sticking it on a blank wall. Ximena Vengoechea, after completing her own life audit, suggests shooting for at least 100 wishes for yourself.

Step 2: Define Your Vision

From there, try to place each of your goals into a bucket: travel, health, family, career, and more. Whatever theme comes up can have its own bucket. Move the sticky notes around until they’re all under the right theme, and consider whether these themes capture what you want your career and life trajectory to be. Continue adding more sticky notes, if necessary.

What you have in front of you now are guidelines for how to spend your time in a way that’s rewarding for you. For Reuling, this step helped her realize she needed something in her professional life that allowed for more artistry. Now, not only does she help manage resources and staff at Harvard, she co-runs a vineyard with her husband in Sonoma Valley, California.

Step 3: Design Your Day

Now that you have your guidelines, plot your day around these goals. Mark each note with an “S” for short term, an “L” for long term, or an “E” for every day. From there, you can decide how to work toward your short and long term goals. This is where you want to get specific. Set weekly or monthly goals and be exact about the time you hope to spend.

Reuling suggests using the Timely app (or something similar) to help you plan and keep track of how you’re spending your time. If you’re having trouble figuring out where you can actually fit more into your day, consider doing a time audit to see where you’re spending all your time and whether it makes sense or not.

Working toward a hundred goals big and small may sound like a daunting task—and it is, but no one ever said you had to do it alone. As Reuling concludes, “Think about your team, both at work and at home.” No one ever found success on their own, so don’t forget to lean on others as you try to break the cycle and refocus your goals.

This post is in partnership with The Muse. The article above was originally published on The Muse.

More from The Muse:

• The True Secret to Success? Quit
• The Scientific Secrets for Making the Most of Your Time
• This Strategy Makes Your Career Benefit—From Someone Else’s Success

Go for words that sound more like facts and less like judgments

Hiring managers all have their favorite interview questions, but they’re typically some variation of the common ones. For example, you might get, “How would your colleagues describe you?” or “Use three words to describe yourself.” Either way, your overall approach would likely be the same. The thing you need to be mindful of, then, is what words you actually use.

Or, to put it in another way, there are words that you should never, ever use.

1. Intelligent

You know you’re intelligent, and you know the hiring manager is looking for someone who is intelligent, but please don’t describe yourself as such. This is one of those words that you want people to say about you, but that you don’t want to say about yourself. Whether or not someone is intelligent is a judgment call, and you want to shy away from words like that.

What to Do Instead

Talk about the way you think, and use words like, “logical,” “quantitative,” “fast learner,” or “big-picture thinker.” You’re going for words that sound more like facts and less like judgments.

2. Likable

For the same reason you don’t want to describe yourself as intelligent, you want to avoid words like “likable.” That, plus it’s tricky to find supporting examples of why you’re likable without sounding weirdly desperate. (“Everyone says hi to me, laughs at my jokes, and misses me when I’m out sick?” Um, no.)

What to Do Instead

Use words that you can back up, like “team player,” “outgoing,” “enthusiastic,” or “caring,” and back them up with examples of how you pitched in, spoke up in meetings, or threw an office holiday party. It’s much more palatable when the evidence you give involves actions you took rather than the actions or reactions of others.

3. Successful

You can successfully do something, but you can’t just call yourself successful. It’s like saying in an interview that you’re rich and good-looking. Do you really think that’s a good idea?

What to Do Instead

Narrow the focus down from success on a global scale to success on a more specific skill. You can absolutely say that you’re good at what you do. In fact, you should. The difference is saying that you’re successful in all realms of your life and pointing out your relevant skills and experiences for the job. The first is annoying; the latter is necessary.

4. Obsessive

Even if you’re immensely passionate about your work, you still want to avoid describing this trait or any trait with words that have a negative connotation. Having to explain yourself means that you and the interviewer are not on the same page, and ideally, you could avoid all that.

What to Do Instead

There are plenty of words you can use to get across how invested you are in your work that probably are more specific and don’t require some awkward explanation. Words like “focused,” “detail-oriented,” “hard working,” or “dedicated” all work well.

5. Humble

It’s weird to brag about how humble you are. It just doesn’t work. Don’t walk into this unfortunate contradiction and try to talk your way out of it. The more you try to explain this, the more you wear down your interviewer’s trust.

What to Do Instead

If this is really something you want to get across in an interview, go with the “show don’t tell” strategy. Each time you need to brag about yourself during the interview (which will be often, since it’s an interview), only state the facts. Talk about what you did, what the result was, and what others thought, and leave the judging to your interviewer.

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule, and perhaps you can pull off describing yourself as intelligent, likable, successful, obsessive, and humble without cutting your interview short. But know that there are other ways to get your point across without causing your interviewer to spend too much energy trying not to roll his or her eyes.

This post is in partnership with The Muse. The article above was originally published on The Muse.

More from The Muse:

• 9 Ways to Be More Memorable in Any Conversation
• To Change Your Life, Stop Saying “But”
• 8 Questions You’d Better Ask Yourself Before Taking a Job

Iger is credited with discovering the tech company responsible for the robot character’s movement

A little-known startup got a big shout-out at this week’s Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim, Calif., thanks to Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger.

Iger, whose media empire bought Star Wars creator Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion in 2012, kept a low profile at the bi-annual gathering of the space saga’s hard-core fans. But he was sitting right in the front row of the massive convention center auditorium where a star-studded panel took place on Thursday morning, the first day of the four-day-long event.

One by one, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, director J.J. Abrams, actors Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill and others took the stage to disclose more details on the next installment of Star Wars, much to the delight of the lightsaber-toting crowd. When an adorable free-rolling robot named BB-8—a new character in the upcoming installment of the series—joined them in the spotlight, it too received a fervent round of applause. The audience went even wilder when Kennedy, who took over for company founder George Lucas in 2012, mentioned that BB-8’s graceful (and real-life) maneuverings were at least partly enabled by a small company discovered by none other than Iger.

Kennedy didn’t mention the name of the startup on stage, but when asked in an interview with Fortune she revealed that the company is Boulder, Colo.-based Sphero, which bills itself as a “connected play company, fusing digital and physical play by creating toys and robots that you control with a smart device.”

It turns out that the startup, headed by CEO Paul Berberian, was selected for Disney’s accelerator program last year, along with nine other companies. According to Disney’s website, the three-month-long program picks tech startups who want to “make an impact on the world of media and entertainment,” giving them upwards of $120,000 in investment capital. It also matches each startup with a mentor from within Disney’s executive ranks. Sphero’s mentor? You guessed it: Iger. When the tech-savvy CEO saw Sphero’s technology in action, he realized the potential application for BB-8 and connected the startup with the masterminds of the Star Warscharacters.

Executives at Sphero couldn’t be reached for comment, but the company’s website describes its signature product as an app-controlled ball that does it all. The same underlying technology, which was licensed to create the version of BB-8 that graced the stage at the Star Wars Celebration (Kennedy calls it the “Red Carpet BB-8″), allows the little bot to glide around on a ball-like structure, literally running circles around R2-D2.

What’s interesting is that Sphero also appears to be working with Disney on a Star Wars-themed toy (who wouldn’t want their own, fully-functional BB-8 rolling around their home?) It’s also worth noting that while Iger’s involvement in the film franchise has often been behind the scenes, he is deeply involved in many ways. At the same time, he’s managed to assuage the fears of apprehensive fans—Iger has a good track record when it comes to acquiring companies and letting them be, and so far he has protected Star Wars from any overt “Disneyfication.” He also has an admirable history withmaking bold bets on up-and-coming technologies, across Disney’s diverse divisions.

Sphero, of course, is still a relative unknown, and it’s not clear what other applications its technology may have within Disney or elsewhere. But after this week, the little company behind the adorable new robot might get a little more attention—and the effusive, laser-focused adulation of the Star Wars masses.

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com.

Less wasted coffee means fewer sales for roasters

Single-serve coffee can now legitimately be called “wildly popular,” with more than one in four Americans using the brewing machines initially popularized by Keurig Green Mountain’s K-Cups.

You might think that’s a boon to the coffee-roasting business, but it turns out to be just the opposite. Why? The machines are much more efficient. Just think about how often you make a pot of coffee in an automatic-drip maker, only to end up pouring some portion of it down the drain. The less coffee you waste, the less you buy.

On one hand, this is better for consumers who are saving money. Less waste is also better for the environment, especially in parched regions like California. But roasters are feeling the pinch. “The coffee market has lost its best consumer: the kitchen sink,” Hernando de la Roche, a senior vice president at financial services firm INTL FCStone Inc., told Bloomberg. “Roasters are telling us that single-cup coffee has been reducing demand.”

Reducing demand, reducing waste — the difference is academic when it comes to toting up revenues.

Meanwhile, coffee bean inventories are rising, putting pressure on commodity prices. That’s thanks in part to recent rains in Brazil — the world’s top coffee-producing country — that have reversed two sequential years of falling yields.

At the retail level, total coffee sales are falling lately, down about 1.5% over the past year. Single-serve pods represent the only category where sales have grown in supermarkets, drugstores, and other non-restaurant outlets. Whole-bean, ground, and jarred instant coffee sales are all flat or falling.

Americans still love their joe, of course: it’s the most popular beverage other than water. Still, consumption fell over the past year as measured by the number of Americans who drink coffee daily, down from 63% in 2013 to 59% in 2014, according to the National Coffee Association. Some of that drop is thanks to people — especially younger ones — switching to tea and other beverages perceived as being healthier.

Slack CEO thinks the funds will serve as "a good hedge about what might happen in the future"

Workplace collaboration platform Slack today made official what has been rumored for weeks: It has raised $160 million in new venture capital funding at a post-money valuation of $2.8 billion.

But one big question remains: Why?

Slack raised $120 million just last October at a $1.12 billion valuation and, at the time, didn’t even need the money. Instead, it simply wanted to join the (then less) exclusive unicorn club. So why go back to the well?

Company co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield explains: “We’re kind of in the best environment ever to raise money and while things could always get better and we’ll wish we had waited another six months, having a couple hundred million bucks in the bank is a good hedge about what might happen in the future.”

(If this argument sounds familiar, it’s probably because we put it forth last month)

Butterfield, who says Slack still has not tapped any of last October’s $120 million, adds that he’s not terribly concerned that macro pullback might lead to Slack later raising new capital at a lower valuation. “There’s always some downside risk to any business deal, but we’re very capital efficient and never really need to raise money again,” he says. “This valuation helps us recruit new employees and gives a high value to our stock when contemplating acquisitions… It would have been imprudent of me not to take it when it was offered.”

Does that mean Butterfield would raise another $160 million at a larger valuation in six months?

“If we could double our valuation again, I’d certainly think about it,” he says.

New investors on this funding round include Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures, DST Global, Index Ventures, Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners. Return backers were Andreessen Horowitz, The Social+Capital Partnership, Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com.