There’s one thing I can count on having on me at all times, and that’s my iPhone. It stands to reason, then, that in a pinch, my Apple wonder device is what I turn to in order to keep track of stray ideas and thoughts that might otherwise go unrecorded, lost forever to the ether. Imagine where we’d be if the Snuggie inventor hadn’t been able to record that gem.

Idea Organizer is an app for the iPhone that I recently discovered that makes logging those ideas incredibly easy. There are other ways to do what it does, some via built-in tools offered by Apple itself, but no other solution brings all the features and functionality together in the same place.

Idea Organizer combines an audio recorder, a text notebook and an image capture tool to help make sure that you can not only keep track of any ideas that pop into your head, but also the ones you get from the world around you. You can create an idea using any type of media mentioned, and then add other types of content later to provide context.

The other reason I prefer this app to any other is that it keeps thing simple and has an intelligently designed user interface. The app opens directly to a screen that presents you with a button that gives you access to your most recent idea, and three big buttons that allow you create a new idea based on text input, photo or audio. Idea Organizer’s developers were clearly thinking about the fleeting nature of good ideas when they designed the app.

Finally, you can email any ideas to yourself at any time, for easier editing on an actual computer. You can also batch email all your ideas at once, which is a terrific convenience feature.

For $1.99, Idea Organizer (iTunes link) is great bargain for a very handy little app. Sure, you can approximate its function for free, but in many more steps and with a lot more hassle.

How do you make sure you don’t lose track of great ideas you have while out of the office?

There are times when things are so hectic that 9 am becomes 5 pm, Monday becomes Friday, and the first day of the month becomes the last before you can even turn around.

The days and weeks run together, and everything seems to be moving at lightening speed. Even though the impulse is to run as fast as you can to keep up, sometimes the best thing you can do is stop, see where you are, and adjust the course of a runaway train.

As a small business owner, it’s possible to have several projects going on at any given point, and unfortunately, there are many occasions where the one that makes the most noise and fuss is the one that gets the majority of available attention. Time goes by, and the most important things get pushed aside for the most desperate.

Getting it all back under control is actually pretty simple. It’s done with a weekly review.

Step 1: Stop

Pressing forward aimlessly just because there’s so much to be done can actually be counter-productive. Taking time to gain big-picture perspective and then purposefully resuming work can help you get more done in less time. Although it can be tempting to simply start fighting the next fire in your path, stop doing everything and commit to getting a better hold on your load.

Step 2: See Where You Are

You can’t evaluate and prioritize without knowing what’s on the radar, so you need to lay it all on the table for sorting. Go through your email, notes, open projects, and someday-maybe list to see what exactly has to be done. Next, make a list of what’s important to you. What is it that you want to do? What do you want to accomplish?

Be realistic about what’s on your plate. Assign deadlines to every project and decide what’s doable and what should be eliminated or delegated. Simply removing some tasks and projects from your to-do list can bring clarity around what’s left to be done.

Step 3: Re-balance Your Load

Now that you know what projects are left to be completed, figure out how to balance the load. Hire a VA to help with menial tasks or things that take you away from your core responsibilities and projects. Batch your work so that you reduce the times you have to switch gears throughout the day or week. Find tools and systems to streamline your work and make you more productive. One example, I do a lot of interviews for the Upstart Smart blog and podcast. Coordinating schedules is very cumbersome and requires a lot of concentration and care to avoid double-booking and overextending myself. By simply using TimeDriver, I’m able to set my availability once and then interviewees can pick the times that work best for their schedules, saving me tons of time and frustration. That one quick adjustment has made my life so much easier.

Step 4: Set Up a Schedule

Block out set times that you’ll devote to the big rocks you need to move each day. Create uninterrupted windows where you can give 100 percent of your attention to making progress on each project. This doesn’t have to be a lifetime commitment. You’re simply deciding how you’ll spend your time for the coming week. You’re intentionally laying out a plan that will help you move things forward. If things mess up or don’t work perfectly, you can adjust the schedule and course again next week.

Step 5: Abide by the Schedule

A plan does you no good if you don’t look at it on a regular basis. Your schedule should stay open every minute of your day so that you refer to it often. If you think you’ll get sidetracked by email or surfing the Internet, be realistic about it. Put that in your schedule, too. Set aside dedicated blocks of time for email or simply checking your RSS feeds. That way, you’ll know that you have time for that coming up, too, but that right now, your focus is on the project at hand.

Step 6: Rinse and Repeat

Each week, set aside dedicated time to evaluate where you are and where you’re going. Figure out your most important projects and tasks for the coming week and hold them in your mind. By clearly identifying them, you can quickly check in with yourself and see if you’re focusing on the right things and moving your business in the direction you want it to go.

How do you ensure that you make progress in your business? What tools and tricks do you use to keep a runaway train on track?

Image from Flickr by by doug88888

One of the reasons that I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard was the new ability to sync the Mac OS X Address Book with Gmail’s or Google Apps’ Contacts. This function has been around for a while, but for some reason, it was previously available only to iPhone users.

I really appreciate well-produced synchronization, because I’ve experienced firsthand how difficult it is to get right. It seems that software developers can never quite agree on how to organize contact information, so everyone’s databases are different. For a long time, for instance, one of the major makers of financial management software didn’t even create city, state and ZIP/postal code fields, opting instead for an address field where all of that information was run together, making the data very difficult to parse.

So I’ve been pleasantly surprised with Snow Leopard’s “sync with Google” function, especially because I have a fairly large address book, and most of its entries have photos associated with them, something that very few sync solutions even try to support.

With a little planning, you can easily sync your address book with Google. Here are some tips — some of which are also applicable to other synchronization systems, such as the one available for synchronizing data between Google and Thunderbird’s Address Book on a PC.

1. Clean up your contacts. It’s easy to get sloppy about how we enter information, so it’s worth looking through your Address Book to make sure that your data is accurate and well-formatted. Putting first names and middle initials together in the first name field can produce amusing results, as can forgetting to check the “company” box for such entries — I had one card titled “Daily, Web Worker”! I also discovered a bunch of messed-up entries that had apparently been caused by previous experiments with sync software and services. One such service must have been European, because I found lots of entries where the postal code preceded the city, as is standard in France, but which isn’t correct in North America or the UK. Be careful with international phone numbers, too. If you don’t precede country codes with the plus (+) sign, some programs will try to format the numbers in North American format.
2. Back up your data! At the least, use Address Book’s Export function, and save a backup in Address Book Archive format. If you want added safety, use a program like Address Book to CSV Exporter to save your data in CSV format, which can be read by lots of other programs.
3. If possible, don’t try to sync two sources with different data, at least for an initial synchronization. You’ll get best results if you can clean up your data in the Mac Address Book, and completely erase all your contacts in Google. However, if that’s not possible, the charmingly named Conflict Resolver will spring into action during the sync, and give you the choice of which records to keep.

Once you’re ready, enter your account information into Address Book’s Preferences. Go to Accounts, check the “Synchronize with Google” option, click “Configure,” and enter your Gmail or Google Apps email address and password. That’s really all there is to it. I’ve found that you need to be logged out of the Google web interface for the sync to start. You might also need to make a change to your Mac Address Book in order for the sync program to become active, but once it begins, the process is surprisingly fast.

The Mac-to-Google sync system does have limitations. It can sync with one Gmail or Google Apps account at a time, and although it offers sync with Yahoo Mail’s contact lists, I’ve never been able to get Yahoo sync to work. Sync is also available with Apple’s MobileMe service, but I haven’t tried that.

All in all, I’m quite pleased with the results, and am happy that I can have immediate access to my contact information in several different places. As far as I’m concerned, one can never have too many backups of this vital data.

How do you keep your contact data synchronized?

I just finished reading Twyla Tharp’s book “The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life.” Although it focuses more on creative types, much of the advice can be applied to solo entrepreneurs and small business owners.

One helpful tip was her organizational system: a box.

“Everyone has his or her own organizational system. Mine is a box. I start every [project] with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as [it] progresses, I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the [project].”

This resonated with me since I like to think of all of my work in terms of projects, and at any given point, I usually have several of them going on. I’ve modified the idea a bit for my purposes.

The box concept provides a way to become better organized so that capturing, processing, and actually taking action on information becomes seamless.

Step 1: Capturing Information

The first step in any organizational system has to be capturing information. I’ve tried almost every possibility, but the one that works best for me is simple pen and paper. I like to use a small binder (the kind that holds 8 1/2″ by 5 1/2″ pages) as my capture device.

Step 2: Purging and Organizing

Once I accumulate twenty pages or so (usually a couple of times per week), I purge my notes and put everything online into my favorite organizational tool Backpack.

• Article/Podcast Ideas. I use Backpack’s writeboard feature to file beginnings of article/podcast ideas. I put one idea per writeboard and title each writeboard by topic or idea. Then I write out any initial thoughts about the article or podcast within the writeboard. Once I’m ready to flesh out the idea further, it goes into a Zoho Writer document.
• Other Notes and To-Dos. Other notes and to-dos generally go into one of my Backpack “boxes” (see image below).

Within Backpack, my box pages are all tagged as “Boxes” and then removed from my sidebar so that I can just click on the “Boxes” tag and see all of them at once (plus, this keeps my sidebar clean).

I currently have eight boxes, and they’re based on my open projects. All other ideas go into my “Someday/Maybe” page. My open projects at this point are kind of context-based and fall into one of the three moving parts (or income buckets) for my business — coaching for solo entrepreneurs, web site design, and writing. I sub-divide the writing boxes so that I keep them separated by medium (blog, newsletter, podcast, writing gigs, etc.).

Within each “box” (or Backpack page), I have notes and to-dos related to each project. I generally create separate to-do lists for each sub-project within those boxes. In my radio page/box, for instance, I have each episode broken down into a separate to-do list, and I can then drag and drop the episodes so that I know which one is up next.

Step 3: Taking Action

Of course, all the organizing in the world won’t help, if I never take action on the information collected, so I use a couple of other tools to help me with this step.

• My Calendar. I have to take action on each of the boxes at some point each week, so I have time blocks to accommodate them within my Google Calendar (see image to right). When I get to a time block, I set an alarm for the time allotted, open the corresponding “box,” and get to work. I stop when the alarm goes off and move on to the next thing on my calendar. I’ve been leaving my calendar open all the time so that I check in frequently, which helps me stay on task.
• Gmail Folders. I also use Gmail folders (also known as labels) to organize action-related information (see image below).

For instance, I have an “Interviews” label, and when I line up a guest to be interviewed for an article or podcast, I mark that conversation with the “Interviews” label and archive it. Then I can go to my “Interviews” folder each day to prepare for upcoming interviews (without clogging up my Inbox). As I conduct interviews, I remove the labels and, thus, the conversations from that folder. I’ve been using red exclamation points to mark those that I must take action on before the interview, but I’ve started sending out standard guest packets, so I really take action on all interviews now and will eventually stop using stars within the folder.

Step 4: Polish and Refine

Naturally, it’s not completely flawless. It still needs some polishing, but it’s definitely working better than my previous organizational system. For now, I’m just trying to faithfully stick to the system, knowing that, in turn, it will faithfully keep me on track. As I see areas that can be improved upon, I know I’ll modify them, but so far, it’s working pretty well.

How do you “box” your information? What systems, tools, and techniques help you stay organized and productive?

Box image from Flickr by John-Morgan

I first wrote about the Springpad notebook organizer almost a year ago now and was immediately impressed by the offering. Since then, as improvements have come across my desk I’ve always revisited it and found it to be a capable part of any organizational arsenal.

And yet, I still haven’t been using it in my daily work. You see, a couple of years ago I found Backpack from 37signals and was smitten with it. I created Backpack pages for everything: tracking client information, article ideas, concerts I’ve attended, purchasing, research and more. If I started something new, it got a Backpack page.

However, as much as I loved Backpack, there were some gaps. I found the calendar lacking, instead using the Google Calendar. Reminders and To-Do items were much better handled by Toodledo, and the sheer volume of information I was managing with it often got unwieldy.

So when I had a look at the new iteration of Springpad that was released earlier last week, I finally took the plunge. Goodbye, Backpack … Hello, Springpad.

At first glance, the two products might seem very similar, but there is a fundamental difference between them. In Backpack I can create pages that are essentially containers for the items that I am trying to organize. On these pages I can add notes, lists, files, photos etc. I can move items around these pages, even drag and drop them between pages. But the various items I’ve created have no properties or tracking abilities of their own. Each item gathers its context only from the page on which it exists. It’s all about the pages. In a literal analogy, a page is a drawer and the items on it are all of the things you dump in there.

In Springpad anything I can create exists independently of pages. I can add anything to “My Stuff,” which is what it calls the bucket that all items exist in. These can be a note, a list, a task, a contact or business, an event, a restaurant — anything. When I find something I like or want to save, I just add it to “My Stuff.” What’s cool is that each of these items has its own properties, and can be customized further. I can add tags, notes and links to each item. Have a picture you want to add to a note? No problem. Want to add a file to a list? You can do that. So before I even start to organize these items (put them in their drawers), they already have all of the building blocks required to be useful on their own.

This is where apps and groups come in. In Springpad, these are the drawers. Custom groups can be created to associate items together, and various apps exist to help utilize and further organize your stuff. There are apps for GTD, budgeting, task management, date planning, and more. These apps help provide an additional layer of context for the items I’ve gathered, and each item can be assigned to as many groups or apps as I need.

For example, say I find an interesting web service that I think might be worthy of an article for WWD, and perhaps might also be useful for a few of my clients. In Backpack, I would note this web service on a single specific page, and there it would remain until I happened upon it again. But with Springpad, I can quickly capture the information from the web site using the “Spring It!” bookmarklet and place it in my unfiled bucket. This item might contain a snippet of text from the web site, a URL, and some notes for me to remember when I review it later. I tag the item appropriately with “WWD” and some client names. I add it to a “web apps” group and also to the specific client notebooks apps I have set up. The same piece of data is applied to multiple areas. This is like keeping the same screwdriver in both the tool drawer in the basement and and in the junk drawer in the kitchen. I can find it in either place, because it really should exist in both places.

Not only can each item appear in multiple groups or apps, but individual items can also be pulled together from these groups and apps and viewed in aggregate fashion. For example, for each of my current projects, I create an app (the “notebook” works extremely well for this) and then I add events and task items related to that project right to that area. With multiple projects running concurrently it might be difficult to keep track of all of these things, but Springpad will then aggregate these items to my calendar and master task list automatically. This allows me to view my work in overview, or drill down to a project level. I can store my data more contextually, without giving up the ability to pull everything together, or fear losing track of something on an infrequently accessed page.

While there are many apps available in Springpad,  I find myself using the “notebook” app for just about everything. It’s customizable, I can add tabs to help further organize it, and I can add any type of content I want to it. Some of the apps do allow for different presentation styles and I use a couple of them for specific purposes but generally the notebooks work well for just about anything. There are plans to introduce the ability for users to create and distribute their own apps in the future.

While I’ve focused mostly on the functionality that I use for business and other work endeavors, Springpad is equally adept at organizing other areas of life as well. It is getting tremendously popular in the food community as recipe sharing and acquisition is remarkably easy, and a recent partnership with Gary Vaynerchuk is introducing his Wine Library TV content to the system as well. Integration with Yelp allows me to easily add and track my favorite restaurants and the grouping and public sharing capabilities let me put together cool things like this quickie guide to some of my favorite places to eat and things to do in New York City to send to friends who are visiting there.

I’ve been working on migrating my content over to Springpad for a few days now and am still discovering new and interesting ways to put things together. I am finding a few things I miss from Backpack — like dividers and the ability to copy pages — but the benefits really outweigh these minor annoyances.

Registration and use of Springpad is free and works well in all the major current browsers. A mobile app is also available.

I’ve made the switch to Springpad — have you?

I am a big fan of the latest generation of smart phones. The variety of applications that make them so much more useful than the previous models, which were mostly focused on email usage with a little web browsing on the side. I have an iPhone, but I spent the last weekend helping my significant other get his Android phone set up. Once we got the basics up and running, the first thing we did was start exploring the Android Market and installing applications.

Playing with applications on an Android phone got me thinking about how I use applications on my iPhone. I’m always interested in seeing what applications my friends are using on their phones, so I thought people might be interested in reading about the iPhone applications that I use.

PDXBus and iBART: While I work mostly in an office in my house, I do have the occasional meeting or event to attend, and I enjoy taking public transportation instead of driving because it gives me a chance to catch up on email, Twitter or RSS feeds. I mostly use the PDXBus application to pick my route based on when the next bus will arrive, but when I’m in San Francisco, I use iBART to find times and fares for getting around the city.

TripIt: When I’m traveling, I keep track of all of my travel details using the TripIt application. If you travel and haven’t used TripIt, you should give it a try. You forward all of your email confirmations from hotels, airlines, car rental companies, etc. to TripIt, and it puts everything in a nicely formatted itinerary that you can share with other people. The iPhone application lets me quickly and easily review the details of my trip.

Evernote: I take notes from meetings or events or just jot down ideas on my computer, but I hate it when I can’t access them while I’m on the go. A few months ago, I started using Evernote to take notes because I like having my notes automatically synchronized between my laptop and my phone. When I jot down a few ideas on my phone, they appear in Evernote when I get back to my MacBook, and if I need to access my notes, I can read any of my notes from my phone.

Tweetie and TweetDeck: Although TweetDeck is my primary Twitter application on my computer, I mostly use Tweetie on my iPhone. Tweetie is fast and it does a pretty good job of handling multiple accounts and searches in addition to all of the basic Twitter functionality that you would expect in a Twitter application. However, I do occasionally switch over to the TweetDeck iPhone app when I want access to the groups that I’ve defined in TweetDeck. The main limitation in TweetDeck for the iPhone is that it’s a little unstable and not as fast as Tweetie.

Motion-X GPS and DailyBurn: We’ve written quite a few posts here talking about the importance of fitness for web workers who sometimes spend too much time sitting and not enough time moving. I use Motion-X GPS to track my outdoor running and hiking with times, distance, altitude and maps of where I went. I also use DailyBurn as the one place where I keep track of all of my workouts: outdoor running, walking, cardio machines at the gym, weightlifting, etc. Let’s face it, I just like to keep track of stuff. It helps me stay motivated when I can review my progress over time.

Just for fun: I also have quite a few apps that I use just for fun that don’t really impact my work productivity.

• Yelp to find nearby restaurants and Forkfly see if they have any deals available.
• Games and Sudoku for when I need a little diversion.
• Shazam to find the name of some random song playing.
• Facebook to see if my sister has posted any new pictures.
• Rimshot for when you need an annoying sound effect.

These are just a few of my favorite applications out of the many that I have installed on my phone.

What are your favorite smart phone apps?

I confess: I’m a terrible scatterbrain. It takes a lot for me to force my thoughts into a nice, orderly line and to keep them there — particularly in those busy times when I have a lot of competing priorities. In those times, I’ll often find myself working on one project while ideas for other tasks pop into my head at random.

Those thoughts can be as simple as “don’t forget to email Pete about that invoice” or as intricate as a new angle on an idea I’d been working on before. They’re basically the random things my brain spews out while I’m trying to focus on something else. I know I’m not alone — a lot of people experience the same thing.

Through a long process of trial and error, I’ve found that the best way to deal with these random thoughts — thoughts that are important and valuable, but unrelated to the task I’m working on — is to note them down. This way, I can be sure I won’t forget them, but I also reduce their interruption into my focus on other tasks.

For this reason, the handiest tool in my home office is a pen and paper. I’ve tried using online tools to note down my ideas, but I find that going online to add a task to my to-do list is like opening a door to the world: The temptation to check the news, weather, or my email is often too great to resist.

The problem with noting these random — but important — tasks in something as simple as my text editor is that, as a result of my scattered approach to work, I usually end up with so many apps open, and so many things going on, that I can forget I have my list hidden behind five other panes. Sometimes, I have trouble finding it at all.

My pen and paper are always at my elbow, so I don’t have any difficulty finding them. I like the fact that they’re physically separate from my computer: the place where I do my work. That physical separation helps me mentally divorce these thoughts from what I’m doing, which prevents them from distracting me from the task at hand.

My notepad is my “random thoughts” area, so I treat it as such; my tasks lists are online, well-planned and carefully formulated. But my notepad is a space that’s dedicated to shards of thoughts, germs of ideas that I know need more work and attention before I can do something with them.

And I do give them that attention — sooner or later. Usually, I try to take a look at my list when I get to a break point in what I’m doing. I can take the easy-to-do stuff, prioritize it, and add it to my task list immediately. And I can check my schedule to see when I can set aside half an hour for thinking more about the new angle for that previously concepted idea. Perhaps I’ll also take the opportunity to find my brainstorming notes for that idea and add the new thought to them, ensuring that I keep all the thoughts about that project together.

Once I’ve sorted through the items on my page, I turn it over and start a new page: a clean slate for new random thoughts that may occur in the next work period. So, my pen and notepad are the handiest tools in my home office.

What about you? What remote working tool do you value most?

Photo credit: stock.xchng user RAWKU5.

Online annotation and research service WebNotes has been a useful tool in my arsenal since I reviewed it last year. Since that time, the company has released a Pro version and has solidified the feature set.

In a move to further differentiate itself in the annotation space, the company has just announced the availability of a new service plan, WebNotes PR, aimed at public relations and marketing firms who need to compile customized reports, market research and daily scans.

WebNotes continues to provide the core features of adding annotation and notes to web sites, as well as its easy organizational tools to keep track of your work. The major functional additions to the new PR plan include media monitoring, and a revamped and customizable reporting engine.

Reporting has always been a tremendously useful feature of WebNotes. The ability to quickly pull together all of your notes and annotations into one convenient document for sharing and distribution is really well done. Rather than cutting and pasting items manually into a document, the WebNotes reporter does this automatically.

The PR reporting engine has been enhanced to allow for more detailed modifications and customizations including templates and branding. If you’re generating daily scans for your clients, you can automate this process and present a nicely formatted report with very little effort. Options let you limit items by date range and in-place editing lets you customize and tweak the results.

But presentation is only a part of the package, it’s the data that is important. That’s where the new media monitoring functionality comes in to play. In addition to the manual items you have always been able to mark up and track, WebNotes PR allows you to integrate keyword searches into your results. Import or enter in your own RSS feeds, like Twitter search results, and WebNotes can do a lot of the research work for you. It can also generate feeds for you from within the app.

While aimed at PR folks, I can see real value in this implementation for anyone who wants to take advantage of the monitoring tools to automate their research efforts.

WebNotes PR is launching with an introductory price of $300 per user per year with a two-week free trial. Along with this announcement, the prior Pro plan has been renamed WebNotes Academic with a $5 / month price for students or $10 / month without the discount. A reduced functionality, although still quite useful, free personal plan is also still available.

The launch of the PR-specific functionality helps to further differentiate WebNotes from other similar social bookmarking and annotation sharing services. By focusing on a core group of well-implemented services that can be focused and customized towards specific niches, WebNotes is keeping its product offering useful and easy to use.

How much time per day do you spend preparing research reports? Can WebNotes help you?

By positioning itself between traditional project management apps like Basecamp and personal relationship management apps like Gist, Liaise thinks that it has found a useful niche, which it calls “business interaction management.” It claims that it can do this with a very simple setup, no change in work habits, and without depending on others to be using Liaise.

The concept is intriguing: Using two components — a Windows desktop application and a plugin for Outlook 2003 and 2007 — Liaise automatically collects information about projects, deadlines and to-dos directly from incoming and outgoing messages. Liaise users can display a one-line “toolbar” at the bottom of each Outlook message that allows one to set and edit subjects, due dates and priorities for action items to be followed. The information is then fed into a user’s Outlook calendar, and to a popup where one can view, edit and search reports on work in progress. Users may also add and edit items manually. If others in a workgroup are also using Liaise, changes to priorities and due dates are synced to group members.

Due to feedback from early testing, the Liaise developers decided not to store customer messages in the cloud because of concerns about privacy and compliance. Instead, most Liaise information is stored on users’ local machines using Microsoft’s SQL CE database.

Liaise launches today at DEMOfall ‘09. The Liaise team plans to add components that will capture data from other email programs and platforms, and from mobile devices such as BlackBerrys and iPhones, IM and web-based services. Liaise is free during its beta period (sign up here) and will be offered at $4.95 to $9.95 per month per person thereafter.

As a Mac user, I haven’t been able to try this product yet, but Windows and Outlook users may find Liaise an interesting alternative to traditional project and task managers — you can see a demo video here.

Have you tried Liaise?

If you’re a small business owner or freelancer, you probably feel like you’re being pulled in about a thousand directions. Everything seems to be competing for your attention, and you can’t figure out what’s the most important priority for this very second. You have phone calls and emails to return, projects to complete, quotes to compile, and somehow, you have to figure out how to generate more business (that you really aren’t sure how you’ll keep up with).

At the end of the day, you feel spent, yet you don’t feel that you’ve made any real progress toward your goals. You’re left feeling frustrated, like you’re floundering and can’t find solid ground.

The good news is, it’s actually fairly easy to get out of this mess and start moving forward again. All it takes is laser focus and the willingness to let go.

Step 1: Get Focused

Here’s the reality. You can’t be all things within your business. Well, let me rephrase that. You can play multiple roles, but you’re going to have to limit them.

There are tons of things that could be done within your business, but what are the things that really matter? If you’re a graphic designer, for instance, you really only have two main roles, increasing awareness around your business (finding clients) and completing design projects (doing the work). Once you know your roles, you need to break them down into specific actions that you’ll need to do each day.

Your first role is to find clients, which means lead generation. There are tons of lead generation and marketing tactics that could be used to market your business, but what would be the most effective for you? Lay out all the options, but then pick the top four or five tactics that make most sense for your strengths and weaknesses, budget and availability. You might be tempted to try every new social media and networking tactic that glitters and sparkles, but the reality is consistency will win out in the end, so you have to have the “sticktoitiveness” to see the tactic to success. Find your four or five strategies and vow to stick with them for at least twelve months before moving on to something else.

For example, you might choose to:

1. Post a daily blog
2. Send a monthly email newsletter
3. Participate at your favorite social networks
4. Write for article directories
5. Host a monthly tele-seminar

That’s it. Those are your tactics. Each day, you’ll spend your time maintaining them.

Your second role is doing your work, and if you were a graphic designer, that would likely include:

1. Doing the actual design work
2. Compiling quotes for prospective clients
3. Communicating with current and prospective clients
4. Setting up new clients
5. Closing out work you’ve completed

Again, you’re limited to a handful of tasks that must be done on a daily basis.

Step 2: Let Go

Although it’s tempting to want to over-complicate the days with busy work, if you hope to be successful, you have to get to the meat of it and focus on those things that most directly contribute to your bottom line. It might not seem as interesting or exciting, but the key to success is doing what works over and over again. Everything else must take a back seat to your core responsibilities that you need to maintain each day. Distractions will present themselves often, so it’s helpful to step back and remember your primary roles within your business. In most cases, that will consist of the two main roles (finding clients and doing your work). Everything else is secondary and is a lot less likely to contribute to your long-term success.

How do you stay focused each day? What techniques do you use to make sure you stay on point, working on those few things that directly influence your bottom line?

Image from Flickr by antony_mayfield

In your quest for better efficiency, you’ve probably read books like “Getting Things Done” and “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” and tried to implement the strategies contained within them. Yet you know you can do better in managing your day and being more efficient.

For this post, instead of quoting yet more theories from books, I asked some experts and fellow Twitter users to share their real life tips for getting things done.

@bradshorr — Brad Shorr

“Always ask WHY am I doing this task, and HOW could I do it more efficiently.”

Sometimes we turn into zombies and forget to pay attention to what we’re doing and its effect on our work. Make a conscious effort to ensure whatever you’re doing has value. Fun counts, of course.

@Dana_Willhoit — Dana Wilhoit

“Once an hour, take a five minute break and get up and walk around.”

Web workers tend to spend hours in front of the computer. Give your eyes a break, and your body a little reviving.

@JaneFriedman — Jane Friedman

“Getting things done: Turn off email; check it only one to two times (and if necessary, tell people the times you’ll be checking).“

This is one habit I can’t break even though I know it would add more time to my day. As a compromise, I’m organized in other areas to make up for the lost time I spend compulsively checking my email.

@AmberCadabra — Amber Naslund

“I’m a ruthless email deleter. And I break up my day so I keep my brain fresh.”

Breaking up your day can involve doing different types of tasks. Writers, for example, can do email, edit, write, read, research and network to shake up their day.

@skydiver — Peter Shankman

“I get up a half hour earlier than I have to. Every single day. AMAZING what you can do in that first half hour.”

Some folks accomplish the most in the morning — that extra half hour can make a big difference.

@jonathanfields — Jonathan Fields

“Slow it down to speed it up. Hair on fire speed leads to mistakes and omissions that take even longer to fix.”

This reminds me of a discussion with my 7th grade teacher. I can’t recall the exact quote, but the gist was to take your time to do the task right the first time because it takes more time to fix it and explain yourself if you don’t.

@shel – Shel Holtz

“Best tip for getting things done: Celebrate task completions before moving to the next task. Check Facebook, watch a video. “

Be realistic about the tasks you assign yourself for the day. Trying to get 10 tasks checked off the to-do list puts you at risk of failure, and losing self-confidence. Pick three doable tasks — not projects — and celebrate every check mark.

@PhilGerb — Phil Gerbyshak

“I’m old fashioned: I use pen and paper, and write my to-do list out every day when I start my day. Works great and n0 downtime!”

Pen and paper never run out of batteries, or put a strain on your back as you carry them with you all day.

@PRsarahevans — Sarah Evans

“Mom’s advice, ‘Take one thing at a time and the rest will fall in place.’ Also subscribe (or try to) 7 Habits principles.”

Instead of focusing on the 10 things you need to do all at once and wasting energy, start on one thing. Put one foot in front of the other.

@djwaldow — DJ Waldow

“Best tip for getting things done is to hold ‘power hours’ or contests. Real examples below:  1. Power Hour: ‘In the next 42 minutes I am going to learn how to use widgetware.’ 2. Contests: ‘First to clean out your inbox’”

Nothing like a good clean fun competition to motivate you to get moving. Just be a good sport about it, whether you win or lose.

@ConversationAge — Valeria Maltoni
“Best tip: focus on what’s important to advancing your business.”

This goes back to making sure the tasks you do matter to your business.

@iwearyourshirt — Jason Sadler
“Don’t over extend yourself. Schedule time to focus on email, focus on blogging, etc. Don’t do it all at once.“

“Just say no” isn’t just a slogan for kids to shoo away drugs. It’s also a phrase we should all use when we just can’t add anything else to our plates. It’s okay to turn things down as long as you do it nicely.

I bet you have some tips of your own. I’d love to hear them in the comments below, or tweet me @merylkevans or @webworkerdaily.

We all have to follow never-ending streams of information to varying degrees. Small business owners and web workers have to keep their fingers on the pulse of what’s happening in their markets and with their customers and clients. Writers and bloggers read for inspiration and to follow the latest trends.

No matter what you do, there are probably a certain number of sources that you follow on a regular basis, and managing that information as seamlessly as possible is very important for your productivity, and to hold onto your sanity and not feel overwhelmed.

For me, the easiest way to streamline my information processing is to organize it by context so that I know immediately how to treat the information and, more importantly, how to act on it.

I currently have five tags (or folders) for separating my subscriptions. They are:

• Alerts
• News
• Scan
• Twitter Folks
• Twitter Replies

My “Alerts” folder contains all my Google Alert subscriptions. I’m notified anytime my name, company or web sites are mentioned anywhere online. I used to subscribe to these notifications through a daily email, but eventually figured out that it was easier for me to subscribe in my feed reader so that I could tackle the information at set times, rather than when it became available.

My “News” folder obviously contains all my news feeds. By keeping these subscriptions in their own folder, I can quickly “mark all as read” anytime I get behind or feel information overload setting in, because in reality, if it’s really all that important, it will continue to be reported on in the coming days, or I’ll hear about it through another source, like family and friends or when I watch the morning news (yes, I still do that).

My “Scan” folder contains all of my blog subscriptions. There are probably about 50 blogs in there, but by keeping them separate from my news feeds, it’s much more manageable. Usually, at any given point, there are no more than 20 or so new posts in this folder (since I check my feeds at least once per day, except on the weekends), so it’s pretty easy to scan them for interesting topics. Another advantage of keeping them separate from my news feeds is that I immediately switch gears when I hit this folder. I know that the folder contains potential blog fodder, as well as highlights of what’s going on around the web, so I start paying better attention.

“Twitter Folks” contains the feeds of my few favorite Twitter folks. I still haven’t wrapped my mind around Twitter completely, so this is a way for me to dabble in it without feeling overwhelmed or confused by it. I subscribe to a small group of people (in my Google Reader, at least) and follow their updates, just as I do my regular feeds. Up to now, I haven’t been compelled to reply to anything I’ve read in this folder, but sometimes I do get a good laugh.

“Twitter Replies” contains any replies to me on Twitter. Since I don’t really go over to Twitter that often, I was having trouble keeping up with replies to me, so I fixed this by searching Twitter for @AmberSR (my handle) and then subscribing to the search query by RSS. Now, when anyone retweets something I’ve posted, I can thank them right away (rather than finding out about it well after the fact).

I’m a minimalist at heart. Five folders are all I need to keep my information in order and relevant to me. I can go through my feeds quickly, and I know exactly how to act on something, making the whole process enjoyable rather than overwhelming.

How do you organize your information so that you make the most of it and so that you stay productive and efficient?

Image from Wordle

Which days of the week are the most productive for you? We all know that we have different ways of working, and that for each of us, a week (or given work period) represents a cycle, as Angus Kidman reminded us this week.

That cycle has highs, lows and plateaus, as well as the in-between bits that are not particularly good or bad for getting work done. Having a good idea of when you can expect to be at your best — and at the other end of the spectrum — can help you get the absolute best out of your working week. It can also make that work week a whole lot more enjoyable.

Of course, those working on-site have work rhythms too. But I’ve found that working solo in my own space has made the patterns much clearer. In an office I could rely on the unpredictable — office chatter, my manager asking me to action something immediately, a good excuse to head out and grab a coffee — to punctuate my day and create countless mini-highs and -lows. On the other hand, working remotely has far fewer interruptions for me, which means I’ve been able to get a pretty clear idea of my work cycle.

Now I’m learning to make the most of this cycle, and to feel less guilty about the lows.

Identifying Your Work Cycle

It’s not hard to identify your work cycle. All you need to do is think about the last few weeks and identify the points at which you regularly felt stressed, bored, aflame with enthusiasm, very productive, and so on. A number of factors can influence the way you feel each week, so take these into account as you go.

1. Natural motivation. The first factor is fairly nebulous: it’s your natural motivation. I know, for example, that Mondays are pretty good for me work-wise (the start of a new week!), as, perhaps perversely, are Friday afternoons — since the weekend’s in sight, I usually crank up and knock over quite a few things then. You’ll undoubtedly have times during each week that, perhaps inexplicably, are simply more productive for you than others.
2. Regular commitments. Regular commitments — at work and in our personal lives — help break up the week, and our attitude to these appointments can affect our motivation levels before and after them. For example, I have a regular meeting that takes up a good chunk of my late Wednesday afternoons. Because the meeting’s in my schedule, I tend to work hectically on Wednesday morning. However, since I know I can’t settle into a task for the day, those mornings end up being fractured, filled with small bits and pieces rather than large chunks of work.
3. Ad hoc commitments. For most of us, every week is different, as various ad hoc commitments crop up both in and out of work time, requiring us to adjust our schedules and plan accordingly. These commitments can further affect the way we work, and how productive our week is overall.

Try assessing your week in these terms, and you’ll find that certain times stand out as being better for certain tasks. As an example, since my Wednesday mornings are fairly fractured, they’re a good time for me to complete small tasks like sending and chasing up invoices, planning and so on. Since Mondays and Thursdays are good, solid work days following time I’ve spent away from my desk, they’re ideal for writing, research, pitching and larger tasks.

Make Your Cycle Work For You

Once you have a clear idea of your work cycle, you can learn how to make the most of it. For example, if this week I have a meeting scheduled for 10am on Monday, and I expect I’ll need to do some work as a result of it, I’ll know that I’ll lose some very productive, focused time from my week. I could schedule some research time into my week elsewhere, to ensure that I still get a chance to do some really focused work — even if it’s at a less productive time during the week. Of course, I’ll know not to schedule it on Wednesday morning, because I just can’t settle down then, and that’s the best time I have to plough through the smaller tasks my work entails.

The other benefit of knowing your work cycle is that you can accept the troughs in your week. I know, for example, that Tuesday afternoons are usually a bit of a low point for me, so if I find my attention waning, I have a raft of “easy” tasks to fall back on: I can catch up on my work-related reading, head out to a cafe to do some project planning over a coffee, and so on.

Previously I’d have seen this as “wasted” or “unproductive” time, and felt as if I should be doing more. Now I accept that it’s a low point in my work cycle. I no longer feel guilty about it, but it’s no wonder — I’m getting more done, and enjoying it more, than I would if I were staring at my monitor trying to force myself to “keep at it”. Also, because I have a good knowledge of my work cycle, I know that I can expect to settle down to a couple of days of very focused work on Thursday and Friday.

Are you aware of your work cycle? And how are you using it to your advantage?

Lately, I’ve been focused on arranging my schedule and splitting my work into chunks so that I can be productive for longer periods of time, while still having some flexibility in my schedule for the other things that I enjoy doing. One of the big benefits of being a consultant is that I can rearrange my schedule to do something fun, or to accomplish an activity by taking advantage of off-times. Working out is a good example. By scheduling my workouts during off-times, when the gym isn’t as crowded, I can get them done more more quickly. This week, my Mom is in town, and I have been able to arrange my work into some defined chunks so that I can spend more time with her while still getting my work completed.

I have a couple of specific techniques that have been working really well for me.

Meetings: I schedule all of my weekly client meetings on Monday, after 10am whenever possible. Meetings are very disruptive for me, since they interrupt my flow and make it difficult for me to fit work into the smaller spaces between meetings. By putting as many meetings as possible on one day, the rest of the week will have larger blocks of time available for work. However, I am now questioning the wisdom of using Monday for my meeting day. While starting my week by checking in with my clients helps to make sure that the work for the rest of the week is on track, Mondays are a big day for holidays. As I scrambled to move all of my meetings because of the Labor Day holiday, I’m thinking that if I had to do this over again, I might pick Tuesday.

Get up early (or stay up late): I have started getting up by 6am every day and starting work right away. This has resulted in huge gains in productivity for me, since I can work with fewer disruptions from meetings, incoming email, IM or other distractions. Specifically, I try to reserve 6am-10am every day for focused work, which means that I can get a huge pile of work done and have half of my day completed before many other people have started work.

Take advantage of off-hour chunks: After getting four hours of work completed before 10am, I feel better about taking a break before lunch to work out at a time when the gym isn’t as crowded. Think about those tasks that seem to take forever because of the crowds of people (groceries, errands, etc.) and find a time to fit those in when you can complete those tasks more quickly. Make sure that you can fit them together into a chunk of non-work if possible. For me, I tend to work out, shower, and eat lunch all in the same chunk of time, which reduces the switching time between work and non-work activities. By taking this little break in the middle of the day, I can start the afternoon feeling refreshed and ready to get back to work.

Chunky work blocks: I also batch my client work and other tasks into similar chunks. I save my tasks for a specific client and work on them all at once, which helps me stay focused on that client for a period of time and helps to avoid getting projects confused by jumping too quickly between clients. I also put my other work into chunks of similar tasks. Right now as I write this post, I am in a writing chunk, and this is the third of four pieces of content that I am hoping to finish before my next meeting. I also chunk some of my routine daily tasks together to keep up with email, feeds, Twitter and similar activities while not letting myself get distracted by those tasks while I do my client work.

Be Flexible: Let’s face it; reality and theoretical best practices do not always make a perfect pair. While I try to get my work to fit into these nice little boxes, there are plenty of days when everything falls apart for any number of reasons: client or personal emergencies, holidays, meeting schedules, etc. When my first choice doesn’t work, I have to be flexible and move things around to accommodate other people’s schedules. I still try to re-establish the chunks after moving activities; however, with this type of work, you need to be prepared for flexibility.

What are your tips and tricks for working in chunks?

Many organizations block access to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social networks. NutshellMail can deliver your friends’ updates to you in an email digest, which neatly sidesteps corporate blocking software, and could also useful if you just prefer keeping tabs on your social networks via email. Additionally, it can pull messages from other email accounts via POP or IMAP. NutshellMail collects the updates and messages into a digest and emails it to you.

Setting up the service is simple. NutshellMail connects directly to Facebook, Twitter and MySpace using their authorization schemes; you’ll need to provide usernames and passwords for LinkedIn and for email accounts.

You can specify when you want to receive messages — both by time of day and day of the week. You can also specify the order in which sources are presented within the emails NutshellMail send to you. You can even select a particular email message, and have it forward to you separately.

NutshellMail doesn’t operate like webmail: there doesn’t appear to be any way to view messages through its web site. You can, however, ask it to send you a digest at any time, showing activity covering one to five days.

Nutshell is in beta, but seems to work well. The service is offered at no charge; NutshellMail’s materials indicate that it will continue to be a free service. Privacy concerns are covered in detail on the NutshellMail web site; the service also makes it easy to suspend or delete an account.

NutshellMail will be appealing to those who cannot get web access to social networks because such sites are blocked at their workplace. It might also be useful for those using mobile devices, although the emails it sends are pretty heavily formatted and include such elements as Facebook photos. NutshellMail could also be another useful way of focusing on work during business hours; a daily digest could be less distracting that visiting various social sites during the day.

Would a daily digest of social network activity be less distracting than visiting sites for you?

Whether freelancing, or in the corporate world, we all have to contend with deadlines. Deadlines generally come off sounding like shlock horror villains: they inch closer, approach, loom and grow larger. I’ve worked in settings where deadlines were paramount, and followed rigorously, and in situations where they meant surprisingly little.

In this post I’m going to discuss deadline management. Successfully managing deadlines is part knowing why specific deadlines exist in the first place, part knowing which are soft and which are firm, and a big part relationship management. Striking the right balance depends on the situation at hand, but generally speaking, deadlines fall into one of three categories and should be managed accordingly.

First Type: The Faildate

Depending on the institution you’re dealing with, and the level of consultant or employee they’re used to working with, a deadline might actually be a test to see if your work is up to their standards. As a consultant taking on a first contract with a high profile client, for example, a deadline could be the point at which you’re no longer considered for future work. And that’s if you meet them, not exceed them.

To beat these kinds of deadlines, you actually have to beat them. Coming in early is the real key to success, but of course your product can’t suffer as a result. You’ll know when these kinds of deadlines are in play if you do adequate research before signing on with a new client or employer in order to find out about their corporate climate.

Sometimes these types of clients will also want frequent, regular status updates, either weekly or bi-weekly, but even if they don’t, it’s a good idea to micro-manage these deadlines by breaking them down into sub-tasks on a fairly small scale. Hourly goal setting might even be appropriate. Good tools for this kind of work include GTD apps that send you notifications on a schedule you set (Things or Remember the Milk are recommended).

Second Type: Firm, But Flexible

This sounds contradictory, but it isn’t. This will cover the vast majority of deadlines you’ll encounter. These are deadlines that are set as firm, and that should be met if at all possible, but that are susceptible to change depending on circumstances and when in conflict with other deadlines.

The key to successfully negotiating these deadlines is finding out why they exist in the first place. If, for example, a deadline exists for the group you’re working with because without that piece of work, another group is just sitting around waiting, then that deadline takes priority. If it exists because it’s based on a reasonable, pre-project estimate of how much time a task should take, then consider it flexible and move on.

Zen is a nice tool to use to track these kinds of deadlines, because it allows you to create custom groups for your different tasks, so you can make your own priority categories depending on the deadline source.

Third Type: Staledate

The final type of deadline isn’t really a deadline at all. It’s the date at which something ceases to really be a concern, and passes into a client or employer’s distant memory. Be careful, because no one you work for will likely admit that these kinds of deadlines exist, so identifying them won’t be easy.

The best way to go about finding your staledate deadlines is by watching ones from the second category you’ve flagged as low priority. Other signs a deadline may actually indicate when you can drop something entirely include a lack of ability to quantify what would result from meeting said deadline, a lack of client stakeholders associated with it, and lax reporting requirements.

Keep tabs on these as you normally would other dates in your usual PM tools, but don’t worry too much about following through until someone important starts asking questions.

Deadlines don’t have to be the movie monsters we make them out to be. Sometimes they’re just a way of saying “we would like this done within a reasonable period of time,” or even “we don’t care about this at all, but we have to pretend to until time X because the policy says so.” If you listen to your deadlines and monitor them properly, the won’t loom so much as pass uneventfully.

How do you manage deadlines?

Image by Flickr user wili_hybrid.