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Know The Fatal Traps That Logical Thinking LOCKS You Into (And Ignore Them At Your Own Risk) Part 3

3. Thinking Big

A Powerful Strategy To Improve Your Efficiency

Most people are under the mistaken thought that to gain a big result you must be working on a big project. This sounds correct but the contrary is also very true. That is, it is possible to gain a huge result by working on small or even micro-tasks. I bet you are thinking, “This should be good as I don’t see how that could happen!” This is because this idea is counter-intuitive. Let me clarify my idea for you. Huge results will not come from working on any old small or micro-tasks, but a special breed of small or micro-task. These special tasks are the ones that will repay you again and again and again. This is very important as that is how these tasks make you super-efficient.

I’m talking about targeting work to improve how you do small or even micro-tasks that are repeated often. This could be weekly, monthly or even daily. Let me give you an example. Say you spend 30 minutes reading but you do this three times a day (90 minutes in total). Now if you could improve your reading speed and comprehension by 10% you would definitely improve your efficiency.

Imagine you spent 3 hours studying and practicing to improve your reading speed by 10%. In the scheme of things 3 hours once-off is small or even micro-task. To see what benefits you get from this one idea it is best to benchmark your work first. By that I mean to keep doing things the old way with your reading for three days. Each day count the amount of time you spend reading and exactly how often you do that. This will give you a benchmarked baseline to work out how much time and energy you have saved.

Compound Time Saved To Supercharge Efficiency Improvements

Don’t forget even if you are only saving around nine minutes per day that would be amazing over the full year. Let’s see how the numbers crunch below:

Time Saved With Reading Efficiency

Wow, that is a serious amount of time saved in one year. Remember you will keep saving because of this improvement for the rest of your life. Now you can see what I mean about targeting small or micro-tasks that are repeated often paying you back again and again and again. Take a look at the return on time invested figures below.

Return On Time Invested

Time Saved & Break-even Point

This table shows that while all the work is done upfront it only takes 4 weeks to break even. After that time, you will be reaping benefits each week for the rest of your life. Yes, that is my kind of pay-off. Some people can be put off from having to do all the work upfront when working on efficiency improvements. Think of it as a way that you are working your way to being able to cope much better with high workloads without feeling too much pressure or stress. If your job is one where you have periods with high workloads and other times where the workload is lower. The lower workload times are the ideal times to do these small tasks that will allow you to work more efficiently in periods of high workload.

Multiply Your Benefits

You are building on two fronts when you increase your efficiency. Firstly, you become more valuable to your current employer or any employer as you can achieve more in less time. Secondly, you are investing in a way to improve your future by cutting down on pressure and stress at work which will also help you to greater efficiency. There are real bonuses to being more efficient at work. That is a deep sense of satisfaction you will gain by raising your value to all around you. This, in turn, will allow you to enjoy your work more and become more engaged at work. Employers love fully engaged staff.

Start thinking small today to give yourself a far brighter future and you will be developing skills that are valuable to all employers. These new skills (in developing efficiency) are transferable to any role that you may take on it the future, especially in new industries that will develop in the future. This will also help to keep you employed when up to 40% of jobs are automated by 2030.

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Eric Elsley

Work Smarter Not Harder

Copyright 2019 Eric Elsley

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Know The Fatal Traps That Logical Thinking LOCKS You Into (And Ignore Them At Your Own Risk) Part 2

2. Focus Is On The Past, Not The Future

Know That Resistance To Change Is High

In business there is a great emphasis given to maintaining the status quo. This is one of the main reasons that there is a high resistance to change.

A McKinsey study found that seventy percent of all change programs fail to achieve their goals in large part due to employee resistance. Logical Thinking is ANALYTICAL, interested in where an idea came from.

That is a backward use of information or a RETROSPECTIVE VIEW. On the contrary, Creative Thinking is PROACTIVE, that is interested in where an idea might lead to, this is a forward use of information or PROGRESSIVE VIEW. This trait of Logic makes it work against us when we are trying to be innovative and come up with a new idea or method.

Magnetized To The Past

When we use Logic there are times it spirals us into patterns from our past and holds us back from discovering the possibilities of the future. As we spiral, the patterns of the past become more and more entrenched making it harder and harder to break free from them. This is part of the reason that so many change programs fail. People like the status quo as it means they don’t have to start over and learn new things like new procedures and policies.

Major resistance to change often arises when the rate of change becomes too fast. Change driven at a fast pace is very challenging and is a main cause of turbulence with staff. Sometimes higher levels of management will implement important changes without realizing that there have just been major upheavals delivered by the efficiency initiatives of lower level managers and supervisors. This will really strain the ability of staff to cope with change. 

Make Staff Part of The Solution To Change

The way to break free of many of the problems of change is to arm staff with tools to assist them to cope. Creative thinking tools can be part of the solution. They provide us with a strong provocation which jerks us away from old patterns. Super simple creative tools can drive us to a very disciplined approach which is the key to making us work more effectively. When looking for a simple way to be more innovative try choosing a random word to help your team make new associations which are very effective and assist them to break free from old patterns. Try it out for yourself to see how useful it can be.

Ask staff to help build part of the solution. This will deliver much greater engagement to any changes that need to be delivered. That will really help staff get behind the changes rather than fight against them. It will make a world of difference and may just make the difference between a success or failure with the program. This does not mean that staff must assist in designing the program (which would be great if possible) but that they have some input in the best way to implement the program. As well as ways to smooth over the path to make implementation simpler and easier for staff. Remember acceptance by staff is the key to making any program not only work but work well and achieve the full potential.

Turning Staff Into Advocates

One of the keys would be to make sure staff are all trained well in the changes. This could include a buddy system where slower learners are paired up with fast learners. A second level to this is to carry the buddy system on once training has finished. Then back on the job pair the buddies up again for the first few shifts to make sure things learned in training are carried through onto the job. Once slow learners have mastered the changes, they will then become some of the best advocates for the changes.

There are stacks of other creative tools that one could choose from that will provide similar provocation to move away from current thinking (or patterns of the past). It is handy to have a range of creative thinking tools that deliver in different areas of our work. These are all designed to break through limitations of logical thinking in diverse situations. Creative thinking tools act like a template in that they are part of the solution (already created) and focus and guide our efforts so that we can become more productive.     

The other fatal trap of logical thinking will be covered in another post soon.

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Why Creative Thinking Is A Mystery To Most Workers!

1. What is Creative Thinking?

2. Why is Creative Thinking Valuable To Worker?

3. How Creative Thinking Adds Value To Your Work!

1. What Is Creative Thinking? Definition and Meaning

A way of looking at problems or situations from a fresh perspective that suggests unorthodox solutions (which may look unsettling at first). Creative thinking can be stimulated both by an unstructured process such as brainstorming, and by a structured process such as lateral thinking.

2. Why Is Creative Thinking Valuable To Workers?

Creative Thinking techniques are designed to improve on logical thinking in different situations. They have been designed to take the weak points out of our thinking. Most importantly, as a large amount of time has gone into the clever design of creative thinking techniques they are able to save us time and effort in the long run. As they are based on a different way of thinking it is vital to keep an open mind when it comes to learning creative thinking techniques. Their counterintuitive nature will lead to valuable workflow improvements and insights that increase efficiency at work.

To highlight how creative thinking is capable to improve our work methods try answering the following questions:

When was the last time you thought about how you think?
Have you ever thought about your thinking process?
Have you ever designed a new (simple) process that takes advantage of your thinking style?
Have you thought about the limitations to your current thinking style?

If you answered NO to most or all of these questions you would not be alone. People have been relying on logical thinking for around 2400 years. There has been little change to thinking productivity in all these years. Creative thinking has been developed over the last 50 years and is based on finding methods to improve our thinking.

Creative thinking works very well on a few levels. Let’s take a look at one of these. Many creative thinking techniques are super simple yet very effective as they are based on provocation. That is a series of techniques designed to provoke us to think in a different way and easily break away from patterns of thinking which we have used in the past.

As an example, I am a toastmaster and have written many speeches to give at our meetings. I decided to write a new speech with a completely fresh style and message. I started out well but it did not take long and I found that I had fallen back into old habits . My speech sounded just like many that I had given in the past. This was easily solved when I heard a speech from another toastmaster on how he used a simple creative technique to provoke him to write a fresh and amazing speech each time. It seemed a little more work in the beginning but the result was far superior. The technique was to use a random word which we had to try to associate each element of our speech with.


“Creative thinking inspires ideas. Ideas inspire change” – Barbara Januszkiewicz

3. How Creative Thinking Adds Value To Your Work

I look at the Creative Thinking landscape, as a way to create a clear difference from other businesses or even staff members. The versatility that creative thinking brings to any individual is staggering. This is because there are literally dozens of creative thinking techniques already existing that are extremely effective in improving workflow and thinking style. More importantly, these techniques have been the product of tremendous thought to allow them to improve one or more specific work functions. Their brilliance is in the framework that strictly guides our thinking while leaving the result open to the flexibility to provide endless possibilities.

Try this simple creative exercise below to see how creativity works.

2 .. 5 … 9 …. 14 ….. 20 …… X

Can you figure out what X equals?

How did you go? How were you able to figure out what X equalled? If you said that you found a pattern then you were using logical thinking as it works on recognising patterns that we know from the past. The pattern was created by adding 3 to the first digit, 4 to the second, 5 to the third and 6 to the fourth. So X would equal 20 + 7 = 27. Logical thinking is fantastic for recognising and linking to patterns of the past. But it can hold you back when you want to create new and more creative answers to any challenges.

Did you notice the second pattern as well where each gap had one extra dot in it. If you did now you have crossed over to using one of the most valuable tools in creative thinking. It is the skill of being really observant. Simple yet effective. Developing a high level of observation will be a skill that will repay you handsomely for the rest of your life.

For example, high level observation skills could allow you to pick up what the most efficient staff are doing where you work. This would allow you to emulate their best work practices to improve your own working efficiency. Doing this could save you time and effort as well. That in turn would help you cope with high workloads and also lower stress levels.

I hope you have found this article helpful and that it will increase your interest in creative thinking. To build a better understanding of how to work less and achieve more please read the other articles on my blog.

A small request: If you liked this web page, please share it?
I know some people don’t share because they feel that website owners don’t need their “small” social share. 
But here’s the thing… 
A share from you would seriously help a lot with the growth of this site. 
It won’t take more than 10 seconds of your time. The share buttons are right here. 

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Regards,
Eric Elsley
Work Less & Achieve More

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3 Steps to Turn Closed-Mindedness Into Open-Mindedness


Owners, managers and supervisors can create large efficiency gains in a business by turning closed-mindedness into open-mindedness. This will help develop valuable above average foundational skills which are essential for creative thinking.

3 Steps to Turn Closed-Mindedness Into Open-Mindedness

Definition Of Being Open-minded

Open-mindedness is receptiveness to new ideas. Open-mindedness relates to the way in which people approach the views and knowledge of others, and in the words of Dean Tjosvold “incorporate the beliefs that others should be free to express their views and that the value of others’ knowledge should be recognized.” – Wikipedia.org . I feel open-mindedness goes even further than this. If you are open-minded then you have the capacity to look at everything with the view that there could be a better way.

1. Understand Your Mind (Accept The Truth)

When studying something Stephen Covey says it is advantageous to study it’s opposite to gain valuable insights. That is why I have looked at closed-mindedness below.

Closed-mindedness is the opposite of open-mindedness. To me closed-mindedness is where one believes that they and their own opinion matters the most and certainly more than any arguments someone else may put forward.

This can be a major problem when trying to teach them new things. Not only that, but closed- minded people are really not interested in the views and ideas of others. This leaves them exposed to being left with second or even third grade ideas which could very well have been upgraded by listening to and developing on the views of others. Closed-mindedness causes people to shut down to a degree and pay less attention to what is going on around them. As a result this generates a domino effect limiting the urge to pay real attention therefore a lower level of observation and listen skills are applied. Look for the closed-minded people at your work and observe the domino effect for yourself. Test their listening skills out compared to an open-minded person!

Open-minded people on the other hand understand that their own knowledge is not all there is to know on a topic. For this reason they realize that efficiency could be enhanced by actively observing and listening to others. They are open to taking suggestions and feedback from others. This can be very useful as people don’t always view things from the same perspective. The perspective of another person could be completely different to yours. In turn this may deliver an even better idea by combining your original idea and the other person’s suggestions.

How Open-Minded Are You?

Most of us like to think that we are 100% open minded. Really it is actually hard to be and stay 100% open-minded. See how well you fair by truthfully answering YES or NO to the survey questions below.

  •  Do you think you are 100% open-minded?
  •  In meetings are you the person who never interrupts people who are speaking?
  •  Do you keep listening actively when others disagree with you?
  •  Are you open to the idea that others may have better ideas than you?
  •  When others are speaking are you actively listening or thinking about what you will say next which (equals a No)?
  •  Are you open to change caused by new ideas?
  •  When working in a team do you feel there is no need to stand out?
  •  Would you fully back an idea that you think is better than your own?

If you answered NO to more than one there is scope to improve your open-mindedness!

2. What Attitude Do You Want To Master? (Will Affect Your Mindset)

Your ATTITUDE will be affected by your MINDSET. A positive mindset will be a vast advantage to you every day. Being Open-Minded is foundational to maintaining a constant positive attitude. This may sound simple but it is really important.

Closed-Minded To Change

The crux of the matter comes when viewing how people react to change. Change can be challenging for many people and can affect their attitude to work. Change constantly creates new work which adds to current workloads. Think about all the abundant new technology that is around today that was rarely used 20 years ago. All these things have changed our lives for the better.

There is a tax that comes with new technology, that is the change and learning that is required to make it work. For example, the extra work to learn new procedures and policies which adds to current workload. When change happens frequently it is difficult to manage for many people. Not only that but new technology often renders obsolete old technology that people are good at. This can be a major cause of frustration as an experienced person has to start from the beginning to learn whole new ways of doing things now.This can be a major reason why experienced staff are tainted against change. Who can blame them, the point is that when changes are introduced with new technology they need to be managed extremely well or management will find that they receive a negative backlash. According to Forbes a huge 70% of change programs fail. Not only that but it can push staff towards becoming disengaged which has been shown to lower their efficiency.

Subject To Closed-Minded Thinking

People can have closed minds to certain divisive subjects. Let me give you a classic example. BITCION is often derided as a scam or just rubbish that should be band. If you think this way you will have a very closed mind on the topic. What this means though is that if there are any benefits to studying bitcoin then you will certainly miss them.

Bitcoin

I used to think this way for a while about bitcoin. Then after talking with some friends I decided to look at it more closely. The technology behind bitcoin is called blockchain. It is a super clever piece of technology which has been used for 10 years now but is still in the early stages of development. As with all newly released technology there can be a lot of bugs that need ironing out. This is still happening with blockchain technology.

Blockchain technology has the ability to positively impact all industries right across the globe. Not only that but it will certainly give any business that embraces it a distinct advantage over current ways of doing things. If you have a closed mind this will sound like rubbish to you. Do yourself a favour and do a little research about the blockchain and how it is and will go onto impact business for the next 50 years. Blockchain is really a type of clever automation that will revolutionise how industries function as much as the internet did in the last 20 years. That is the reason that many hundreds of multinational businesses are now finally embracing blockchain and cryptocurrencies via the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Multinational companies would not be wasting their time if they had not investigated the benefits of blockchain to convince themselves of the potential value to be unlocked.

3. Turning Point – Develop Open-Mindedness

To move from close-minded to open-minded thinking will genuinely be a watershed moment. It will be the turning point that allows anyone to gain much more from the same amount of thinking effort. Possibly even less thinking effort. If a person is closed-minded, they are relying 100% on themselves to do all their thinking. This may sound great but it is not. Simply by actively listening and observing others it can spark fresh ideas. Some of these will be your own new ideas and many will come from others. This is the basis of brainstorming which is a super powerful technique that has proven itself over many decades.

Watershed Thinking

Anyone with a fully closed-mind will be creating a permanent barrier to ideas generated from Creative: thinking, active listening, observations & techniques. The value of an idea will not reduce if it is not 100% derived from you, often the contrary is true.

Diverted thinking image

Remember that most of the brilliant ideas or even businesses started out as a small seed idea which has been fostered to grow and develop over time into something exponentially more valuable. They never started out as a large fully developed idea or business.

Lazy Person’s Tool

I’m not suggesting for a minute that creative thinking is being lazy. The point is that while creative thinking tools stop us from linking to the thoughts and patterns of the past, they save us time and effort. This is done because lots of effort has been put into the tools at the research and design stage. A Creative Thinking tool which has been designed for a specific purpose allows a vast amount of leverage to be built into the tool to amplify the value that can be extracted from it. Let me give you an example. Mind-mapping is a creative tool that will allow anyone to maximize their thinking power when writing essays, working on projects and the like. The brilliance of this tool is in the design. It is designed to allow us to use 100% of our brain power for each of the 3 steps involved. So simply by using a tool that breaks the work involved down into 3 pieces we are able to use all of our brain power for each step. This will triple our thinking power used for this task. Wow. Sounds a little basic and silly but it does work extremely well and has other advantages that I will not discuss at present. But remember that keeping an open-mind is vital because many really valuable seed ideas come from things that sound different, basic and sometimes a little silly.

Leverage Minds Of Others

This is a no brainer. If you use active listening and observation you will be able to catch more of the clever ideas and actions that others are doing. Why not utilize the best of what you hear and see? This is a simple way to leverage the minds of others. When in meetings don’t try to argue or refute the idea of others before you have spent at least a few minutes trying to find ways to strengthen them to make them better. This goes even if it is an idea that is in direct opposition to your own idea. If you keep doing things this way you will end up with much better ideas on average. Most importantly, these better ideas will most likely make things quicker and easier to do. Therefore, you will become more efficient. That in turn will make your work less stressful.

Solutions To Change

Managing changes is one of the most difficult things for executives. 45% of frontline professionals prefer to keep the status quo as shown by the chart below from Forbes.

Status Quo image

It is counterintuitive to say that the solution for businesses and staff from the
pressure and stress bought about by constant change is to embrace micro changes. Let me explain. The best way to counteract change in business is to keep ahead of the game. Firstly, remaining open-minded to change will help. Secondly, by implementing micro changes now before they are forced on you. Change is driven by the need for businesses to become more efficient. If all staff members are working actively each week at making micro changes to become more efficient then the need and pressure for change could lessen. There will always be some pressure for change. Fighting change at any level will often be a waste of time and energy.

That is why in most instances to maintain an open mind will yield many valuable benefits. The best part is that these benefits flow naturally from the clever design of creative thinking tools or talents like open-mindedness. If you are a business owner, manager or supervisor you will be able to multiply the value from open-mindedness by instilling these concepts into your team. By making your team more effective you will make yourself look like a brilliant leader. Isn’t that the name of the game? Everyone is a winner in this situation.

A small request: If you liked this web page, please share it? I know some people don’t share because they feel that website owners don’t need their “small” social share. But here’s the thing… A share from you would seriously help a lot with the growth of this site. It won’t take more than 10 seconds of your time. The share buttons are right here.

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Thank you so much!

Regards,
Eric Elsley
Work Less & Achieve More

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3 Secrets To Work Smarter Not Harder

1. Think Smart – to minimise your effort required with leverage

2. Work Smart – create small changes to make big time gains

3. Smart Bonus – increase efficiency to cut down pressure and stress

I believe that working smarter not harder is important for most staff. With the pace of technology change and the trend of continuous improvement it is important to know how to beat the working blues driven by too much change and uncertainty.

Even more important is to know how to become more efficient to keep your boss happy while minimising your own effort. Please keep an open mind as many of the ideas I am suggesting are counterintuitive. Make sure you read this whole post before you start to judge if you think this system will work for you.

3 secrets to working smarter PIN

PIN me, please

I used to work in the information technology (IT) section of a busy regional library service with 15 branch libraries.

Along with my IT work I was responsible for performance reporting which included delivering many statistical reports. Since much of my work with statistics had to be delivered within a short timeframe (generally 4-6 days), I felt the added pressure of a tight deadline which in turn increased my stress levels.

I was learning statistics and trying to keep up with changes in IT that were happening often. Stress built up and I had a heart attack. My ECG readout was called a Tombstone reading. That meant I very nearly died. Luckily for me I made it to the hospital quickly after my heart attack to receive fast treatment. I was sweating so much the nurses had trouble getting the ECG pads to stick to my body.

When they saw the ECG readout I was whisked away and was given a clot busting injection that saved my life. Later I found out I had a 90% blockage plus a clot. No wonder it was very painful. After I was stabilised, I spent some days in Intensive Care waiting and was eventually had an angiogram then a stent was inserted near my heart to solve the problem. That was brilliant and I was released the next day. The doctor gave me one week off work to recuperate. I knew that something had to change with the way I worked so that I did not get to stressed again.

1. Think Smart – To Minimise Your Effort Required With Leverage

An opportunity presented itself when I read a book called “80/20 Principle” by Richard Koch. It suggested that 20% of our activity gave us 80% of our results. To me this meant some things we do are much more productive than others. Richard showed me a smarter way to think was required first which would lead to a smarter way to work. That in turn would lead to efficiency gains in the long run.

My plan was to focus on the most important 20% of my work at the present time. For me this was the area in my work that was causing me the most problems which elevated the pressure and stress I felt. At the time that was my role keeping statistics for the 15 libraries in the service.

Statistics gathering was a task that I had to do each month and report them to my manager. It was repetitive work that required a high level of accuracy. That meant I had to be 100% focussed when doing these tasks. I was always removed from other rostered duties until I had completed my statistical reporting for the month as they were generally required urgently by my manager.

Let me give you an example of a 20% action that delivered an 80% improvement in results. After meeting my monthly deadline, I decided to evaluate my work with statistics to see where large efficiencies could be made with only small changes to my workflow.

When I exported statistics from our library system to excel a glitch would happen where 2 blank rows appeared between each row of data. Now consider that some of these reports were ending up 156 pages long with the blank lines included. It was a real struggle to delete all the empty rows and often took from 10-20 minutes per report. I decided to research on the web for a quicker way. There was a way which saved heaps of time but it was a little tricky. I persevered and found a way to make it work every time. Wow, the rows could all be deleted in around 45 seconds.

As I ran more than 10 reports each month with this problem the time savings soon added up. The 80/20 Principle that Richard wrote about was the factor that focussed me to smarter work practices. It also delivered huge leverage to my efforts by multiplying the return on my small workflow change. What I found was that not only did I save a considerable amount of time that month on all 10 reports but I also saved the same amount of time each month from then onwards.

2. Work Smart – Create Small Changes To Make Big Time Gains

It took me about 50 minutes to research my problem and test it a few times making modifications to the procedure to have it work brilliantly every time. This gave me a huge leap in efficiency (with top accuracy) which was a real help as statistics work was repetitious, tedious and always had tight deadlines as they were required for further reports to top level management.

I will show the approximate time saved by this workflow change.

Time Invested / Saved In First Month

Net Time Saved Per Year

Return On Time Invested

3. Smart Bonus – Increase Efficiency To Cut Pressure & Stress

The time saving also helped me to meet the deadline more easily. It reduced my stress levels which allowed me to work even more efficiently. Have you noticed that when you are stressed it slows you down…when I was stressed out, I could not work at my normal pace.

It has occurred to me that each time I make use of the 80/20 Principle it improves my efficiency, saves me time (not first off but in the long run). I found an extra benefit was to boost my morale and self-esteem because I had found a better way to speed up my work and deliver results faster without noticing an increase in pressure or stress.

Just imagine the difference you could make to your efficiency at work if you were able to implement one tiny 80/20 change per week or even per month. As change is happening very fast in business it seems counterintuitive to think that the solution to pressure and stress brought about by change is for us to embrace tiny changes in our workflow to make us more productive. This way we are counter acting the pressure and stress brought on by change and continuous improvement / efficiency programs.

I hope this article will assist you to work smarter not harder and still achieve valuable efficiency gains.

A small request: If you liked this web page, please share it?
I know some people don’t share because they feel that website owners don’t need their “small” social share.
But here’s the thing… 
A share from you would seriously help a lot with the growth of this site.
It won’t take more than 10 seconds of your time. The share buttons are right here.

Facebook Linked In Tweet Pinterest

Thank you so much!

Regards,
Eric Elsley
Work Less & Achieve More