If you want to use your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to go paperless, these apps have many basic business needs covered, helping you take notes, scan documents, sign contracts, send faxes, convert business cards to Address Book contacts and even process payments. Read More »
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Amber Singleton Riviere
Bio:Amber is the founder of Rock Your Genius, which helps its followers build lives and businesses by design, as well as Upstart Smart, a resource for small business owners and entrepreneurs.
My Focus
Productivity, Organization, Marketing, Motivation, Personal Achievement
Recent Posts
What’s wrong with email today? That’s the question posed to me recently on Twitter, and considering that I use email as a primary method of communication, I was happy to think of a few ways to help tame the inbox. Read More »
If you’re working remotely, finding ways to improve and streamline communications with your clients and team might seem like a never-ending chore, but with the right mix of tools, it’s possible to keep projects moving forward. Here are ten tools that will help improve your communication. Read More »
Your to-do list has taken on a life of its own, and after several failed attempts at taming it, you’re now looking for a way to peacefully co-exist. Fortunately, new apps and devices are being created almost daily to help us improve our productivity and collaboration. Read More »
Some gadgets help us be more productive, some are just cool, and some are both. Here are a few media gadgets that can help you organize and streamline your work, while at the same time letting you have a little fun with technology. Read More »
Today, I stumbled across a new prospect for email management, SaneBox, which can automatically prioritize and sort email into folders. Could this new hopeful mean the end of email insanity, as it claims? Time will tell, but it looks very promising. Read More »
In today’s world, an increasing number of negotiations are taking place remotely, and with digital signatures being as legitimate as those made by hand, the number of useful applications for revising, organizing and signing documents online is growing. Here’s a selection. Read More »
More Must Reads
Like it or not, these days, if you’re in public, you’d better be comfortable with anything you do being captured and possibly even posted online. I thought I’d provide some tips from the PR industry to help you feel better prepared for those impromptu publicity events. Read More »
Technology is rapidly changing and is quickly becoming a more social and integrated part of our lives. With ever-evolving devices, social networks, and online video capabilities, we’re increasingly moving toward an “always on” existence, which has implications for our privacy and our professional lives. Read More »
Being able to work online has its benefits, such as having the flexibility to work nontraditional hours with clients from countries around the world, but it’s also easy to get distracted. Fortunately, there are several tools available to help improve concentration and productivity. Read More »
Although our work is steadily moving to the cloud, we still have a physical space to maintain and keep in order, whether that’s in a traditional office, a home office or from the road. Here are a few gadgets to help you keep your workspace organized. Read More »
“Untethered,” for most of us, isn’t technical jargon, but rather the ability to work unrestrained, able to jump from one activity to the next without cumbersome tools slowing us down. But to become untethered, we must be willing to move away from old ways of working. Read More »
I’ve increased my usage of video and multimedia presentations and conferencing, both for collaboration with external business contacts and for internal product development. I decided I needed a better and more permanent setup in order to remain productive and comfortable, without constantly rearranging my workspace. Read More »
How can you prepare your business for a forced closure? In recent weeks in my home state of Louisiana there’s been a threat of severe flooding. When you’re anticipating a natural disaster, you can’t help but get a little nervous. Read More »
Every day, it seems, there are dozens of new applications available to help with different aspects of web working. It got me thinking. What is it we really need as web workers these days, and is anyone working to find solutions to those problems? Read More »
Increasingly, the information we use to manage our companies is moving to the cloud, and human resources is no exception. Here are several solutions that provide simple and affordable online employee management and tracking to save you time, money and effort. Read More »
Keeping up with Twitter, Facebook and all the posts and comments written about your company can be overwhelming. Postling is a centralized dashboard for organizing, managing and tracking all your social media efforts, so that you can engage with your entire online community from one location. Read More »
The first step to successful remote working is communication. Binfire offers distributed teams a free solution for online collaboration that makes it simple to stay on track, with several useful features that I haven’t seen in other project management solutions so far, including: Read More »
One of the biggest obstacles for a distributed workforce is the lack of personal connection; the effects of the initial disconnect can have a lasting impact. Here are some of the challenges of working remotely, along with ways to address them. Read More »
Most remote teams rely on several solutions to fulfill their collaboration needs: email, project management, database management and meetings, to name a few. HyperOffice offers distributed teams the benefit of all essential business tools in a single collaboration suite, as well as providing mobile capabilities. Read More »
If you’re working with a distributed team, you should be regularly gauging and improving your effectiveness. Here are a few questions to help you quickly zone in on problem areas with your virtual workforce, as well as some suggested solutions to help you correct them. Read More »
It’s interesting to talk with brick-and-mortar business owners who haven’t yet considered the possibilities of working remotely. The conversation quickly moves to ways to streamline work, increase the talent pool available to the company, and unique and exciting ways to promote the business online. Read More »
If you’re just starting to consider the option of working remotely, whether through flexible work arrangements with your current employees or by hiring new team members who will work remotely from the start, you’ll want to establish some guidelines to keep your team productive and happy. Read More »
If you’re working remotely, keeping your team on the same page with company projects and goals can be challenging. I stumbled on GTDagenda recently, and I am impressed with its ability to deliver as promised and actually help with getting things done. Read More »
It can be hard to feel connected and on the same page with employees and team members, especially when working remotely. By finding ways to relate to the people on your team, you can improve communications, build better connections and create an even stronger organization. Read More »
In last week’s post, I wrote about what it takes to become a virtual CEO, after speaking with Chris Ducker of Virtual Business Lifestyle. During our conversation, Ducker also shared his tips for keeping a virtual team happy and motivated. Read More »
I had the chance to speak with Chris Ducker of Virtual Business Lifestyle about what it takes to become a virtual CEO, and how he transitioned to the role in just twelve months. Becoming a virtual CEO, he says, starts with passion and a plan. Read More »
If you manage a virtual team, time zone differences can be a major source of confusion and miscommunication. Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned about dealing in multiple time zones that may help you stay in sync with your team. Read More »
In last week’s post, we began brainstorming some possibilities for marketing your business. This week, we’re going to discuss a simple technique that can help you turn those possibilities into a marketing plan that’s easy to create, implements and maintain. Read More »
Marketing is an area where many business owners flounder. You may have ideas for how you might promote your business, but figuring out if your strategy and tactics are worthwhile and then organizing your ideas into a workable plan of action can be overwhelming. Read More »
While there are definitely benefits to having the freedom of working from home, one downside for me has been the development of several bad habits. Breaking those bad habits is a real challenge, which in my case I knew would require a complete system reset. Read More »
I used to agree with the common recommendation that lines should be clearly drawn between one’s business and personal space. But my life as an entrepreneur is very different than those with “regular jobs.” I like the blurred lines between home life and work life. Read More »
Some of us make attempts to accomplish a few life and business goals. But how many people do you know who put everything on the line to pursue their deepest, most life-changing dreams? How many don’t wait until “someday” to go after the things they want? … Read More »
When there’s so many different things vying for our attention, and especially when we’re feeling more than a little burned out with our current efforts, a little “stick-to-itiveness” can go a long way. Here are a few ideas for developing the trait. Read More »
Generally, we come up with plans, ways we’re going to market our businesses, manage them, and keep things growing and moving along smoothly, but what are we missing? Are there blind spots that could potentially be fatal to the success of our companies? Read More »
In today’s workforce, it’s important to be able to call upon talent not only internally, but from the ever-expanding pool of what Grainger calls “the contingent workforce,” external people who possess specific skills needed for particular projects and tasks, but how do you find them? Read More »
At Net:Work, executives from CloudCrowd, Amazon Mechanical Turk, uTest, and LiveOps discussed the flexibility involved in crowdsourced work — both for the companies, which can expand the workforce to meet increased demand, and for individuals, who have greater choice in how and where they work. Read More »
As things get busier and busier, it’s important to work on what counts within your business. If we’re smart, we do this early on, even before things get busy, but if you’re like me, you prefer learning things the hard way. Read More »
“Action days” — days where you and some friends agree to check in with one another hourly to keep tabs on each others’ progress — are a great way to motivate yourself and keep yourself accountable. Here are some suggestions as to how you could use … Read More »
I’m working in my pajamas. Getting dressed makes me feel more “put together,” so it’s something I aspire to on most days; today’s not one of those days, and I’m OK with it. Here’s why, along with a few more advantages of being a web worker. Read More »
This morning I was reading an article on American Express Open Forum entitled, “5 Reasons Why You Need a Social Media Dream Team,” which got me thinking about my own company’s own “dream team,” the people I want on it, and how I’m building it. Read More »
If you run a service-based business, you probably have some horror stories to tell about bad clients and projects that have gone wrong. There are some things you can do to better manage client expectations, which can help keep these problems to a minimum: Read More »
The past few months have been filled with dilemmas; I’ve found myself struggling to find solutions to them on occasion. While figuring out how to move forward with something can be frustrating, there are a few strategies I’ve stumbled on to help me get unstuck. Read More »
Recently, I stumbled across a new service called Alice that lets you buy all of your household essentials online. Alice is awesome, and as soon as I figured out just exactly how awesome Alice was, I couldn’t wait to tell everyone I knew about the service. Read More »
ambition, n.: an earnest desire for some type of achievement and the willingness to strive for its attainment Thinking about ambition reminds me of Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement address at Stanford. The words “stay hungry” have followed me ever since reading them. Read More »
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