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.

This week we have someone who desperately wants to escape his soulless career and become a writer, but he's too busy to write. Should he leave his job so he can finally find the time to put pen to paper? Or will he realise that it's possible to make time for his passion if he's willing to dig deep?

Actors have a saying: You don't get 100 per cent of the parts you don't audition for. If you're an artistic type, or a writerly type, or even just someone who's looking for a job, you may have found rejections to be so painful that you've just stopped applying for things. Social media and streaming TV is so soothing - why would you put yourself out there for stuff you aren't going to get anyway?

The point of a holiday, however long, is to help you de-stress. And sometimes that means doing something instead of lounging around doing nothing. If you have a pile of personal to-dos that are weighing you down, using a leave day to get to those things you never seem to have time for can go a long way for your well-being.

I'm busy. You're busy. We're all busy. Sometimes, the sheer amount of crap you have to deal with can almost feel overwhelming, but a good way to get control of your chaotic to-do list without going crazy is to make sure you're getting enough downtime, too.

I have a bad to-do habit. I make big ambitious lists of things I want to do, then let them pile up in my to-do app until I'm so scared that I quit the app and start a new one. But I've found a way out of my to-do debt.

Starting a new job can be fun and exciting. If you're lucky, you can keep everything you do within the confines of the office. But let's be realistic: You're probably going to be working from home a little bit, either playing catch-up or sipping delicious drinks while you take advantage of your company's "you don't have to physically show up" policies.

As your personal and work lives start to intertwine, it can be tricky to manage the balance across your various devices. Here's how I did it.

The hardest part of doing most things is just starting. We often think about what a big project we have ahead of ourselves, and that's what makes it so daunting to begin. I know when I was writing my book, it seemed like most of my day was spent fighting the agony of just getting started. It was hard to ignore just how big a project it was.

Thankfully, I've found a great hack for getting started. It's called The 10-Minute Hack.

There's a lot to do. There always is. You sit at your desk well past quittin' time each day to ensure it gets all done, but in the end you suffer for it. It's OK to leave work on time, and these tips can help you make it a habit.

.

"Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things," writes Jenny Offill in her novel Dept of Speculation. "Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him." Women, instead, are forced to "balance" work and life.

When we think of leadership qualities, we generally think of the ability to rally the troops, a clarity of vision, and the willingness to coax the best work out of each team member. What we don't tend to think of is self-awareness. Self-awareness, in fact, has a certain new-age ring to it - what leader is lying on her hemp bedspread, staring at the ceiling and thinking deeply about whether she truly understands her innermost self?

We all know that sitting for long periods of time is bad for our health, but remembering to get up and takes breaks isn't exactly an easy proposition.

Sometimes (or maybe all too often), you have to churn out work to tight deadlines. The Done Manifesto is a set of working rules based on a sense of urgency. There's no time for careful deliberation - the key is to get it done and move on.

As we have argued in the past, email is not the problem - we are. And it's not just the productivity drain or the antisocial effects of constantly checking our phones and computers for new messages.

There are psychological ramifications too. By constantly looking for new information and tasks from other people, we are degrading the importance of the things we want and need to do. This flowchart explains what you're doing wrong - and how to fix it.