(Photo credit: iStock) Have you ever stopped to consider the amount of influence you have on other people as you go about your normal day? It was something I hadn’t really thought about, until one day in particular. It started out as any other workday, but on this day, things took an unexpected turn – all because of a colleague’s bad mood.

Photo: Pixabay/Unsplash Would you like a simple way to dramatically cut the time you spend on emails? According to a survey conducted by the McKinsey Global Institute, office workers spend 2.6 hours per day reading and answering emails. This equates to 33% of a 40-hour workweek.

By Stephanie Booth This story originally appeared on LearnVest. It’s hard not to resent Mondays. The day marks the end of the fun and freedom of the weekend—and that’s especially true during the summer, when ordinary Saturdays and Sundays have a carefree vacation vibe. Even if you love your job, the angst of having to go back to the grind on Monday can leave you disorganized and spinning your wheels all day, explains Richard Citrin, Ph.D.

Shutterstock Right now sleep is all the rage. It’s a top three research target with a booming multi-billion-dollar industry surging behind it. But while the sleep industry is doing well, our sleep is not (and that’s, of course, why the industry is doing so well). Sleep statistics consistently show that we’re shorting ourselves on this precious bio-commodity—next in importance only to food and water–and the sleep we’re getting is chronically interrupted.

There is a crushing disappointment that can hit you when you sit in the interview chair and watch a person floundering in the chair opposite you. They are trying to interview you for a job they don’t understand. They don’t understand the concepts.  They don’t know what would make one person qualified for the job and another person unqualified for it. They may have a script of interview questions they plan to ask you.

They say that form follows function. How can you design a tool before you know what the tool is supposed to do? We built the “modern” business framework about two hundred years ago. It is old and creaky now and unequal to its task in the new millennium. The old, stiff and formal business worldview is falling away. It has no place in this Knowledge Economy.

Shutterstock Paid vacation time is one of the most prized forms of professional compensation. So why are we so bad at taking advantage of it? A survey by travel industry organization Project: Time Off found that Americans took 16.2 vacation days in 2015, and 55 % left vacation days unused. The grand total of those unused days? 658 million.

Shutterstock When I ask leaders, “What’s the No. 1 thing that wastes your time and hinders your productivity?” the nearly universal answer is “meetings.” Whether it’s wasteful meetings that don’t resolve anything, meetings where everybody talks just to hear themselves speak or meetings where decisions never get made, meetings are often hated and typically wasteful. But the good news is that while meetings are generally reviled, they can also be fixed.

The problem with keyword-based resumes is that every job-seeker has figured out how to stuff his or her resume with keywords they’ve plucked from the job ad. When a recruiter conducts a search on the company’s Applicant Tracking System to find all the applications that include keywords taken from the job ad, there are way too many such applications for anyone to view them all.

Hubspot How do you speak to your employees? Seriously. Take a minute to think about it. Are you loud? Are you demanding? Are you friendly? Are you supportive? Are you funny? Silly? Mean? Complicated? Do you speak with them at all? If you’ve never thought about it, it’s time to start. The communication styles you use in employee interactions set the tone for how your company does business. Don’t believe me? Follow along. Communication shapes any interpersonal interaction.