The key to being better at your job is not working harder. It’s learning how to work smarter.
Cement is our favourite productivity tool for getting better at your job. Cement helps you focus on the things that matter by helping you organise your work and automate boring, repetitive tasks.
We created this blog to help you get better at your job with Cement. We want to share our best tips for freelancers, solopreneurs, consultants and anyone who wants to be more productive. We’ll also give you a behind-the-scenes look at how we use Cement to build Cement.
This blog is intended to serve as a guide to preparing and delivering professional presentations. The blog format allows for an ongoing discussion with readers who may have additional questions or concerns not fully explored in the original article. This post is part two of a two-part series on how to be better at your job using cement.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell when you’ve done a good job. Your boss may not give you a pat on the back. But it’s important to recognize when you’ve been successful. If you don’t, you’ll get discouraged and make mistakes.
Here are some tips for recognizing a job well done:
Look for positive feedback, such as a thank-you or an email of appreciation. We want to highlight that here at Cement, we take the time to regularly send out such emails. We know how important it is for you to be recognized for your work, and we make it a priority to do so in order to keep up morale and productivity in our office.
Review your completed tasks from the previous week or month. This can help you set goals for yourself in the future, as well as give you a sense of accomplishment from seeing what you have achieved over time. Remember that every task matters, no matter how small!
Ask your supervisor if he or she has any feedback on your recent performance. You can also ask if there is anything specific they would like to see more of in the future—this lets them know that you care about doing your best and want to improve.
Don’t forget employees who work under you! It’s important
We are in the business of enabling our customers to build better. Concrete is a material that is at the heart of infrastructure, and we make the most used man-made material in the world. We make billions of tonnes of it every year, and each tonne has the same basic ingredients: cement, aggregates and water.
We manufacture cement at more than 50 sites across six countries: over nine million tonnes’ worth every year. As well as cement, we also produce ready-mixed concrete and asphalt and operate a quarrying business. We supply products from our own quarries, with around 80% of our aggregates coming from our own sources.
And while making concrete is pretty simple, there’s a lot to know about what goes into it, how it’s made and how it performs. That’s why we’re launching this blog: to help you understand concrete better.
This post is going to be a bit technical, but it will develop some intuition. The intuition is that there are two types of words you can use to talk about how big a number is.
There are scale words and exponent words.
Scale words are easy: they tell you how many of something there is. If I say “I want to buy five apples,” you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. And if I then say “I want to buy another apple,” you’ll know that I still have five apples in my mind, but now I want six instead of five. You can add scale words together and subtract them from each other.
Exponent words are harder: they tell you how many times something has been multiplied by itself. If I say “I want to buy two squared apples,” you might be able to imagine what that means (two apples multiplied by two apples), but if I then said “I want to buy another squared apple,” it would probably be hard for you to figure out whether the square would apply just one time, or three times, or whether we were squaring the total number of apples rather than adding two more squares of apples.
So when you’re talking about how big numbers are, stick with scale words whenever