Web Worker Daily

I’m one of those fanatics who goes out before dawn on the day after Thanksgiving, to wait in line for the doors of my favorite stores to open so I can snap up the best deals before they are gone. It sounds really crazy, until you see my receipts and calculate how much money I’m saving for my effort. Read the rest of this entry »

Last spring, I bought my first Mac laptop to replace my aging Windows laptop. Mac fans may say the result was predictable: My shiny new MacBook quickly became my primary computer while my desktop PC gathered dust.

That change left me with one problem I hadn’t anticipated, though. My office wouldn’t function as well with a laptop as my primary computer. I had to rethink the whole layout. How did just changing from a desktop PC to a smaller MacBook manage to make my office totally dysfunctional? Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes it seems like the world is divided up into two camps: the people who neatly arrange every file, folder, report and receipt — and can find them at the snap of a finger — and the pile people. You can tell a pile person by the 3-foot-high stack of paperwork on their desktop and the masses of magazines shoved into the corner of their office. I’m sure you know at least a few of these pack rats. You may even be one.

But regardless of which end of the clutter spectrum you fall on, too much clutter can cause your productivity to take a powder. No, really; it’s true. According to one poll conducted by About.com, over a third of respondents avoid going home because of the overwhelming mess. So if you work from home full-time or telecommute part-time, clutter can have a noticeable impact on your productivity. Another research project from Pricewaterhouse Coopers found that businesses spend 150 hours a year looking for incorrectly filed documents. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you ever wonder what is keeping you from making progress toward your goals? Perhaps you’ve set up a schedule for yourself, outlining the things you need to do each day so that you focus on the most important tasks related to your business, but somehow, you still seem to be falling short. Maybe the solution is not in the lack of planning and foresight on your part, but rather the lack of clarity around the things that need to be done. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently came across a video by Jon Larkowski entitled, “The Way I Get Things Done,” in which he outlines his personal productivity system. He offered several useful tips for increasing productivity, but the two phrases that really stuck out to me were that you need to firewall your time and guard your attention.

Time is our most precious resource, and how we spend it ultimately determines how successful we are in life and business. Read the rest of this entry »

I came across an idea about keeping a one-sentence journal to improve happiness, and thought they could be helpful for improving my business, too.

I’m very intimidated by the thought of keeping a personal journal. I’ve tried to do it many times, but I can never keep it up. I always end up with a lot of (nearly) blank notebooks and journals lying around.

The one-sentence journal concept seems a lot more manageable and possibly even more helpful, at least in one sense. When I have kept a journal for any length of time, I don’t really go back through it, but it would be quite easy to flip through a one-sentence journal for ideas and inspiration.  (Plus, it provides an excuse to buy several of those tiny journals in a variety of styles or colors.) Read the rest of this entry »

How many times do we allow the sideshows to run our lives? What do I mean by “sideshows?” Well, sideshows can be many things: Read the rest of this entry »