New Guidelines for Greener Standards in Federal Procurement

Federal buyers are required by FAR Part 23 to buy environmentally preferable products. However, with 444 eco-labels being tracked in the market right now, it's essentially impossible to be familiar with all of them and makes it difficult for purchasers to find, evaluate and buy green products.

GSA and EPA co-led an interagency working group over the past couple of years to address this challenge of implementing greener standards in federal procurement. After considering the ideas and recommendations of federal buyers, industry representatives and outside experts, the working group developed draft Guidelines designed to determine if private sector standards and eco-labels are environmentally effective and properly being developed and managed. EPA has just released the draft Guidelines for public comment.

-From GSA Blog

For more information on the draft guidelines visit: http://www.epa.gov/epp/draftGuidelines

New Book Offers 10 Strategies to Improve Performance and Reduce Supply Chain Risk

AGU Named Military Friendly Graduate School - and receives high grades from enrolled veterans

American Graduate University was named to G.I. Jobs magazine's list of 2014 Military Friendly Schools for the fifth consecutive year. The list honors the top 15 percent of colleges, universities and trade schools which are doing the most to embrace America's veterans as students.

Across all categories, AGU received a grade point average of 3.9 out of 4 from the twenty-five veteran students/alumni who graded the university based on their experience with AGU in terms of veteran's resources, academics, faculty, environment and career services.

Schools on the list range from state universities and private colleges to community colleges and trade schools. The common bond is their shared priority of recruiting students with military experience.

"This list is especially important now because the Post-9/11 GI Bill has given veterans virtually unlimited financial means to go to school," said Rich McCormack, G.I. Jobs publisher. "Veterans can now enroll in any school, provided they're academically qualified. So schools are clamoring for them like never before. Veterans need a trusted friend to help them decide where to get educated. The Military Friendly Schools list is that trusted friend."

The list was compiled through exhaustive research. G.I. Jobs polled more than 7,000 schools nationwide. Methodology, criteria and weighting for the list were developed with the assistance of an Academic Advisory Committee (AAC) consisting of educators and administrators from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Toledo, Duquesne University, Coastline Community College, and Lincoln Technical Institute.

Criteria for making the Military Friendly Schools list included efforts to recruit and retain military and veteran students, results in recruiting military and veteran students, and academic accreditations.

GOING THE DISTANCE

Strategies for Getting Through Grad School

Where do the hours go?

By Amy Novotney

Procrastination researcher and Carleton University psychology professor Timothy A. Pychyl, PhD and other researchers have found that people tend to overestimate how long it will take to complete short tasks and underestimate the time longer projects will take. Then there's the fact that we forget to schedule time for the basics, says Pychyl.

"One of the biggest myths when it comes to time management is that next week always looks free," Pychyl says. "But if you put everything into the calendar that you have to do before you do anything else - things like eating, sleeping, buying groceries - you see right away that you really don't have a lot of time."

Time management is especially important for graduate students because they have so many concurrent projects, and that is likely to continue throughout their careers, Pychyl says. Get your schedule under control with these tips from several time management mavens:

Audit your time
Take a week to keep track of exactly how you spend your time, Pychyl suggests. Be it showering, eating or doing laundry, every activity should be tracked.

Nicholas Scheidt, for example, uses Google Calendar to schedule and color-code every single thing he does, from driving to sleeping, to going out to brunch on Sunday mornings. Even just tracking your schedule for a week gives you a much better sense of how you are spending your time, how long certain tasks such as grocery shopping or reading email really take. You can then build a more accurate schedule for yourself.

Find what works best for you
Experiment with a few different schedules, suggests Cady Block, a medical-clinical psychology doctoral student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. If you're a morning person, set aside a couple of hours in the morning to study. Block says she tends to work best by doing what she calls "chunking," where she does certain tasks on certain days.

Establish bright lines
Leave little room for negotiation once you put something on your agenda, Pychyl says. "There's no starting the task at 10:15 a.m. if you said you're going to start it at 10 a.m.," he says. "You have to honor your schedule as if it's set in stone, because otherwise you're setting the precedent that these things don't matter." If you must give yourself any leeway on this, plan two options for the time chunk - for example, either read studies or write a section of a paper. This strategy should apply to both work time and personal time, Pychyl says: "There needs to be a point in the day where you say, OK, I'm going to do some recreation now."

Just get started
So much of good time management is getting past the "I don't feel like it" mentality, Pychyl says. "The truth is that your motivational state does not have to match the task at hand," he says. "Very often, attitudes follow behavior, so just get started." You'll likely be surprised by your renewed interest in the task once you make a little progress.

Get (a little) help from friends
Block suggests enlisting another student to help keep you accountable and meeting with him or her often to review progress. "I know of students who put together 'dissertation groups' where they met once per month and reviewed progress on their dissertations," she says. "Your peers - even if in other programs from you -- can often be your key to success in graduate school, as long as you choose them well."

Use small chunks of time
How often do you think to yourself, "I only have 15 minutes before my next appointment - that's not enough time to write that memo/read that article/type up those client notes. I'll just surf the Web instead"? Pychyl suggests using that time to get started on the task. "You might be surprised at how much you can get done in a day by just using those small chunks of time to make progress on something," he says.

Use technology to avoid distraction
Social networking and email checking are a procrastinator's best friend. To help you stay on task, download a productivity tool that allows you to block certain sites on certain days and times of the week, such as Leech Block, Google's StayFocused or Apple's Focusbar app."If you know that Facebook or YouTube consumes a good amount of your time, these apps can help eliminate those distractors," says Sheila Modir, a clinical psychology doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Abandon perfection
As a busy graduate student, you don't have the time and energy to give every project your all, says Aileen Chang, a school psychology doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. If there's an assignment that's not crucial to your realm of study, but that you're required to complete, Chang recommends giving yourself only a set amount of time to do it. "Once that time limit is up, consider the product 'good enough' and move on to the next task," she says.

Reward yourself
It's important to plan breaks - and even an occasional vacation - to refresh your mind and spirit, Scheidt says. While he was writing his dissertation last year, Scheidt took day trips to the botanical gardens to clear his mind. As a bigger reward - and an impetus to stay on task - he scheduled a trip to Argentina for after the project was completed.

"You really need to have incentives like that to stay motivated," he says.

Amy Novotney is a writer in Chicago.

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