When I’m talking to people about social web sites, one of the questions I often get asked (usually just after the one about whether you actually need to join all the social networks, just because everyone else is) is “how do you keep up with everything?” People are often concerned about the amount of time it takes to read all of those tweets or updates, and wonder how in the world they will be able to keep up with everything, while still finding time for their work or hobbies. My answer sometimes surprises people: you don’t have to keep up with everything. Read the rest of this entry »
We spend a lot of time talking about efficiency and productivity on this blog, but we also devote quite a bit of energy to writing about new social networks and social media. I talk to many people who are concerned about joining new social web sites because they fear that their efficiency and productivity will suffer. One woman recently asked me why she should join Twitter or Facebook when she would rather spend her time outside, or on her hobbies, instead of spending more time in front of a computer. My answer was something like this, “We all need to make choices about how we spend our time, and you should not feel pressured to join a social site just because other people have joined. Think about how you want to spend your time and decide whether or not you want to spend less time on another activity to make more time to participate on Twitter or Facebook. There’s no need for everyone to join.” Read the rest of this entry »
In my recent post, “3 Efficiency Tips for Using Dual Monitors,” I noted that I recently switched to a dual monitor setup, and will never go back to a single monitor. The post also delved into some simple organizational principles for using multiple running applications with dual monitors, such as using different tabbed browsers on each display. Readers wrote in with some interesting additional tips, some of them adamant that two monitors are just not enough, and, since doing the post, I’ve noticed some other related multi-monitor tips around the web, too. So, here are a few extra items of interest on this topic. If you’re still using a lone monitor, these ideas can give you a real efficiency boost.
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As a freelancer, I spend most of my time trying to manage information overload. Like Charles, I use spaces to quarantine focused work from other distractions, and I have some tricks for efficient RSS reading, creative uses of RSS to increase efficiency, and filtering techniques to help reduce the time I need to spend consuming information. Despite this obsession with efficiently gathering information, there are also times when I actively seek out information overload.
While a fire hose of notifications and feeds can be too distracting when I’m working on things for client, if I’m looking for inspiration for a new blog post or new venture of some sort, I want to see as much information as possible in the hope that something will catch my eye and provide the inspiration that I need.
Here are a few of my favorite tools for embracing information overload. Please beware that these tools are known to sap productivity and suck up precious hours that can never be regained! Use these techniques at your own risk. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ll admit, I haven’t always tracked my time when it comes to my clients and their projects. Although I always knew roughly how long things took me to complete, until recently, I never kept a more detailed record.
The longer I continue this practice, the more I’m coming to appreciate it. Here’s why it pays to track.
#1: It helps with finding the “time sucks.”
You might realize after tracking your time for a while that certain types of projects are less profitable than others. For instance, if you’re a ghostwriter, you might make considerably more writing blog entries than in-depth white papers. If so, you can adjust your pricing or service offerings to compensate. Read the rest of this entry »
New applications or enhancements to existing ones can provide big efficiency benefits, but there are also many simple tweaks, unsung tips, and new ways to think about the tools that you already use that can help you work better. In this post, I’ll share five ways that can help you accomplish more and experience less hassle. You can take advantage of many of these tips in minutes.
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I’ve done many posts on this blog about tools and techniques to proactively have information pushed to you via monitoring techniques, dashboards, RSS filtering, smart Twitter clients and more. However, I haven’t really spent much time on research methods for those times when you are seeking information rather than waiting for it to come to you. Most web workers spend at least some of their day doing research for blog posts, client work, or to learn something new, so I wanted to share a couple of my research techniques.
Yes, I know, you could just do a search using your favorite search engine and get tons of responses to your query. While this is a great first step, it can help to have some more targeted methods of finding information. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, I wrote about more efficient RSS reading through pruning, filtering, prioritization, keyboard shortcuts and more. After spending some time reading the comments on the post and thinking about how I use RSS, I realized how many of my feeds are outside of the typical feed used to read blogs or other news. While RSS is a great way to keep up with blogs and other news sources, it can also be used for so much more.
I try to keep updates out of email, so I push as much as possible into my RSS reader for those items that I want to keep track of. As a web worker, so much of what I do relies on being able to keep on top of new information and find the conversations that people are having about the many activities where I have some type of involvement (blog posts, organizations, my consulting services, etc.) I’ll illustrate this with a few examples.
I get many of my blog post comments as RSS feeds instead of email, especially for the high volume blogs, like WebWorkerDaily. While this is straightforward for single author blogs, it took a little work to get a feed of just the comments from my own WebWorkerDaily blog posts. I ended up writing a custom Yahoo Pipe to come up with a feed that worked for me.
I also use many vanity feeds to track mentions of the various activities that I’m involved with across multiple organizations. Most of these are complex Yahoo Pipes that track mentions across blog posts, Twitter, Flickr, video sites and more with filtering to clean up some of the noise. I even posted a two-minute video demo for how to create a quick and very simple vanity feed using Yahoo Pipes. However, vanity feeds don’t have to be complex. You can track the feed from a Twitter search and a blog search in your feed reader to find the most important mentions, without getting into more complex methods. Read the rest of this entry »
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
