Every week, we share the shortcuts, workspaces, and productivity tips of our favourite experts. This week, we’re going behind the scenes at Lifehacker. And “we” is “I”, current editor of this series. I’m Nick Douglas, and this is how I work.

Over the last year or so, there has been a push in some market sectors to reconsider the work week, moving from the five-day arrangement most of us "enjoy" to four days. Somewhat counterintuitively, it seems that spending less time at work means we get more done. And while more research reveals the benefits, it really signals that being outcome-focussed rather than time-focussed is the real key.

Switching between a number of different tasks during the day can make it hard to focus, and can make completing those tasks harder than they need to be. Instead of shifting your focus back and forth during the day, try and dedicate specific days to specific tasks.

One of the world's foremost computer scientists, Donald Knuth, gave up on email back in 1990 - before many of us had ever sent a message. By then, he'd been. using email for 15 years which he says was quite enough for one lifetime. Instead, he now provides people with a mailing address. Why would he do this? It's about the long-term value of uninterrupted concentration over the short-term convenience of accessibility. What can we learn from Knuth and his approach to email?

Every week, we share the shortcuts, workspaces, and productivity tips of our favourite experts. This week, we’re going behind the scenes at Lifehacker. I’m Alice Bradley, and this is how I work.

Every week, we share the shortcuts, workspaces, and productivity tips of our favourite experts. This week, we’re going behind the scenes at Lifehacker. I’m Alicia Adamczyk, and this is how I work.

Every week, we share the shortcuts, workspaces, and productivity tips of our favourite experts. This week, we’re going behind the scenes at Lifehacker. I’m Michelle Woo, and this is how I work.

Naps are a great way to recharge our brains and boost our energy, but we don't always have time for long siestas. Good news: Research published in Sleep suggests the best nap length is just 10 minutes - longer naps can lead to detrimental 'sleep inertia'.

Emmy-winning journalist Jeff Kofman has covered some of the world's biggest news stories for ABC, CBS, and BBC, including the Arab Spring, the Libyan Revolution, the invasion of Iraq, the trapped Chilean miners, and the international war on the drug trade.

Now he runs the company behind Trint, an A.I.-based automated transcription service that saves reporters, and many other workers, from hours of tedious work. He told us all about entering the business world, and learning how it works.

Let's get it out there - open plan office suck. They may help reduce real estate costs but the productivity and morale hit means they probably aren't worth it. Yet they persist as a staple of modern office environments.

Anyone who has spent time in one knows they can be a pain in the butt with people walking past, noisy coworkers, and even the smell of your colleague's lunch as they eat at the desk near you. In order to overcome some of those hassles, Panasonic has created a set of noise-cancelling headphones that also act as a set of blinkers that block out visual distractions in your peripheral field of vision.

During the opening keynote at the Telstra Vantage event being held in Melbourne this week, author Daniel Pink talked about how there are thousands of books that tell you how to be more productive. But there's very little well-researched and actionable advice on when is the best time to get things done. He sought to change that when he embarked on a research project to look at what times of the day are best for competing certain types of tasks.

For knowledge workers in the 21st century, efficiency and productivity are still integral to being seen as a “success”. We value writers who can produce 10 pieces of content each day, and we look to investing personalities for advice on what 10 trades to make to maximise our portfolios.

But what if we could reframe that perspective? What if instead of prioritising action and production, we emphasised learning, insight and quality?

"Done is better than perfect" is a maxim for all of us prone to endlessly tweaking our projects and never finishing them. Ben Barry, a designer at Facebook, calls it a favourite quote. The key to moving ahead is following through.

Whether you’re dealing with a bad boss or disgruntled employees (or a great boss and enthusiastic employees) you’ve got an opinion on the employer/employee dynamic.

With many of us spending the majority of our waking hours in an office, it’s never been more important for our workspaces to actually work.

We invited business coach and productivity expert Vanessa Auditore to offer tips and tricks on how to make our office better -- and explain what effects these changes would have.

According to Vanessa, there are three outcomes you want when looking to work wonders with your office - reducing stress, becoming more efficient and increasing influence.

How can the average citizen prepare themselves for having to speak to a hostile audience? The best people to answer these questions, of course, are politicians and former politicians, so I got Michael Dukakis, the three-term former governor of Massachusetts and the 1988 US Democratic presidential nominee, on the phone.

The data is in and we are all struggling to use our work time as effectively as possible. We are hit with notifications almost constantly, the number of different apps we use keeps growing and we're drowning under a rising data tide. How do we become more productive in the face of this tidal wave of busyness?

It's good to have a schedule planned out each week, but having too many appointments set for each day might be be more harmful than helpful. A recent study suggests the more self-imposed deadlines we have in a day, the less deep work we can get done.

Most people spend around 90,000 hours at work during their lifetime. When you remove sleep from the equation, that’s way more time then we spend in our home. It really makes you wonder… why on earth would we waste all this time in a poorly set up workspace?

We spoke with Vanessa Auditore, business coach, personal development specialist and Co Founder of Headspace and SuccessHQ about getting the most out of your workspace and why it’s so important to your productivity and wellbeing.