In a recent Harvard Business Review blog post, Scott Barry Kaufman talks about the difference between harmonious and obsessive passion.

“Those with harmonious passion engage in their work because it brings them intrinsic joy. They have a sense of control of their work, and their work is in harmony with their other activities in life.”

… “those with obsessive passion perceive their work as representing a passion for them, and view their work as highly valued. A major difference is that they have an uncontrollable urge to engage in their work. As a result, they report feeling more conflict between their passion and the other activities in their life.”

I see a lot of both types of passion within the web worker community. I have friends who have selected a web working career because it allows them to travel the world and have the free time to have amazing experiences while others work constantly and can’t disengage from work for even an afternoon of fun without worrying about what they are missing.

Here are a few tips to help you shift your passion from obsessive to harmonious:

• Delegate. Spend some time with a coworker or employee that you trust and start training them on providing coverage for you when you aren’t available. This is the person you’ll list as the contact while you’re out, and you need to delegate the work to them while you’re out of the office. As a last resort, they can always contact you in the case of a dire emergency, but make it clear that it should be a real emergency before they call you on vacation. If you are a solo web worker, this can be more difficult, but you can usually work something out with your clients to cover some basic tasks while you are out of the office.
• Go cold turkey. Take an exotic vacation on a beach where your technology would be in danger of getting covered with sand and water. This forces you to leave that cell phone and computer up in the room safe. Just make sure to actually leave it there — don’t try to sneak up to the room to check email every five minutes.
• Buddy system. Just like in grade school, you can work with someone else and hold each other accountable. On vacation, you can give your significant other permission to help you enforce your no work time by making sure that you aren’t always checking into work. A helpful friend who can remind you to put your cell phone away can also help.
• Wean yourself off of work. Maybe the cold turkey approach won’t work for you, but you can gradually wean yourself away from work. Start with 30 minutes every evening where you read a book, go out with friends or go for a walk without checking email or other work and gradually increase the amount until you are spending a couple of hours a day — and more on weekends — away from work.

The key is to shift your obsessive work time into fun activities that you enjoy to help bring your work and life back into balance. At first, these activities may need to be fun enough to really distract you from your obsession with work, but eventually, you should be able to shift into a more harmonious balance.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user tashmahal.

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• Focus. Last week, I talked about minimizing distractions, which is a good first step toward giving yourself the space to focus on what you really need to accomplish. Having the willpower to focus and achieve a real state of flow helps you can accomplish a large amount of work in a shorter amount of time. So turn off all of those distractions, avoid multitasking and focus on the work that is important to you.
• Importance. Not all activities are created equal, but most of us struggle to balance the urgent work with the important work. We need to think about how we spend our time and the impact of what we do over the long term. Email is a good example of this concept: most people consider email to be urgent, and some of it is urgent, but most of it is not important. I could easily spend all day on email, but I’d rather accomplish something real and tangible. In a year, will it really matter than you responded to all of your email immediately or would you rather be known for doing something really amazing and interesting?
• Love your work. I think a lot of people misunderstand this idea. Unless you are in a really unique position, most of us have a love/hate relationship with our work. There are things that we love doing, but we also have those tedious or unpleasant tasks that come with every job. The big question is: Where do you focus? Do you focus or dwell on the unpleasant parts of your work or do you get those unpleasant tasks out of the way so that you can focus on what you enjoy? If you spend all of your energy thinking about the things that you hate about your job, you’ll never be happy in your work. Find the things that you love about your job and focus your energy on thinking about the good, rather than dwelling on the unpleasant. Loving your job is all about having the right attitude about your work.
• Live. While loving your work is important, most of us work as way to support the rest of our lives. Workaholic tendencies are common among web workers, so we need to take the time to remind ourselves to take some time away from work to really live our lives. This one is hard for me, but I’m making a big effort this year to take advantage of business travel to see more of the world by combining vacation with trips to visit places I’ve never been. I’m also making more time to meet new people and spend time with family and friends away from our computers to have good food, great conversation and human interactions. Doing something new and learning from it can give you a whole new perspective on a work problem when you least expect it. Even a short vacation or an evening with new friends can help improve your mood and help you feel refreshed and ready to tackle your work with a new outlook.
• Fitness. So many of my friends ignore their health, leaving them drained of energy and lethargic. Getting outside or to the gym to get your blood pumping can make a huge difference in your energy levels and mood. The more social among us can find group activities that can be done in pairs or groups, or you can use your fitness time as a way to spend some time alone. I tend to run in the summer and lift weights in the winter, but I have friends who walk, bike, go hiking, play sports, do martial arts or yoga and so much more. The key is to find something you enjoy doing to improve your fitness. Those endorphins can make a big difference in your productivity.

While tips and tricks to improve productivity are great, the real key to better long-term productivity is in your attitude and how you think about your work.

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The key to remaining productive is to not let distractions sidetrack you from your primary job. Here are a few tips for taking charge of your day and kicking a few of the most common distractions to the curb.

1. Social media. Turn it off when you need to focus. Seriously. Shut down your Twitter client and log out of Facebook and other services for at least part of the day when you really need to focus on your work. If you can’t turn them off, you can still disable notifications so that you aren’t having them pop into view constantly. This doesn’t mean that you can’t check social media while you work, but you can minimize the impact by only checking in periodically. Maybe you look at Twitter and Facebook once per hour, or when you finish one task and are moving to the next. But really, if you are checking Twitter every few minutes, are you really going to get as much work done as you would if you weren’t checking it?
2. Visitors. Whether you work in an office or at home, people will drop in and distract you. I’ll admit it, I often listen to music or put my headphones in just to signal to people that I am not available. If people see that you have headphones in, they will at least think twice about bothering you. Leaving your phone headset on can also work. You might try “do not disturb” signs or shutting your office door, if you are lucky enough to have one. I’ve even had pretty good luck with hiding and working in a super secret location until I finished a piece of work that needed focused concentration.
3. Unnecessary or unproductive meetings. I’m a big fan of not attending meetings that aren’t valuable in some way. Now, this probably doesn’t mean that you can blow off your manager’s staff meeting or important meetings with clients, but you can probably skip a few meetings. I’ll often look at the agenda for a meeting, and if there isn’t anything particularly relevant for me, I’ll send the organizer an email to let them know that I won’t be attending. On the flip side, you should be considerate when scheduling your own meetings. Cancel them if you don’t have anything important for the meeting, and always send an agenda in advance to let people know whether or not they need to attend.
4. Email. Most of us get more email than what we can possibly read anyway, and it just keeps coming in! You could probably spend all day just responding to email, but then you would never get any work done. The first thing to do is turn off any pop-up notifications that you get every time someone sends you an email. Next, set up some filters and color code email from important people to help you notice the ones you care about while ignoring the rest. Now, the hard part. You have to actually ignore your email and focus on other work without that distraction. You can occasionally glance at your email on a regular schedule or between tasks and look for anything critical. If it’s not critical, ignore it for a bit until you are ready to spend a little chunk of time focused on doing email.
5. Instant messages. For really serious work, you might think about logging completely out of your instant messaging client. For most of us, we can use custom status messages to signal to people how urgent their request should be before they interrupt you. I recently set my status to “cranky, interrupt at your own risk”, and I don’t think I had a single IM during that time. I also use the generic, “busy – priority interrupts only” status, and you can get pretty creative with these to let people know that they really should think twice about interrupting. It is also perfectly acceptable to not respond immediately to an IM. If a friend or co-worker sends you a message on a topic that isn’t going to be critical, ignore it until you get to a good stopping point or when you are ready to take a break and respond when it makes sense for you.

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This is a very personal post for me, since I am dealing with the sudden death of my father, a fellow geek and web worker. He died without a will and without any way for us to access his password-protected computers. He did freelance work for clients as well as in-home computer repair for individuals. We have a stack of computers that we are pretty sure belong to other people, but they aren’t labeled and without access to his computer records, we can’t find the owners. We also know that he administered a bunch of systems for a big client, but we don’t know exactly who the contract was with, or who to contact to notify them. The computers in the house also control key household components, like the lights, and run the web servers for his personal and professional websites, so we’re trying to wait a bit before trying to hack into them to get access for fear of taking out critical household functionality. Would your family members would have similar difficulties if you died or became incapacitated in some way?

Here are a few things that you should consider:

• Password management. Come up with some way for your family to access certain critical accounts or computers. I know one person who has an encrypted database with all of his passwords and the access information is in a sealed envelope in a safe. Other people use a password management system, like 1Password or LastPass, and make sure that a trusted family member has a way to access it. How you choose to do this depends on how you manage your passwords and how often you change them. I think most of us could find some creative way to make it easy for our family to get access to at least a few key accounts.
• Technical documentation. Make sure that you have some kind of documentation about your technology in a place that people can access it without having access to one of your systems. This is especially important if you have systems tied together in a complicated manner. If you don’t have another tech-savvy family member, make sure that this documentation includes the names and phone numbers of a couple of trusted friends who can help out.
• Client or work contacts. Keep a file or some kind of documentation about your clients in a place where other people can access it. At a minimum, you might want to include the name, email address and phone number of each current client, or your manager if you are a corporate worker, so that they can be contacted. I know that when I was running my solo consulting business, I kept everything on my password-protected computer, and it would have been very difficult for my family to contact my clients if anything happened to me.
• Digital assets. Most of us have family photographs and other digital assets that our family will want to access later. Make sure that someone knows how to find those important photographs and other documents, and don’t rely on online photo storage services, which might be deleted at some point. If you keep most of your data on your own server (hosted or onsite), leave instructions for how to access and download anything that someone might want to save.

What else can we do to make this easier for our families? How prepared are you?

Photo used courtesy of Ken Mayer

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The Indie Web movement is primarily about ownership and control over your identity. The difficulty is that many of the tools that we need to achieve the complete vision of data ownership just don’t exist yet, or they exist, but not in a way that is accessible to most people. During IndieWebCamp, we focused on discussing these current issues and starting to build some of the tools necessary to make the Indie Web a reality for regular people.

Start now

Here are a few things that you can do now to gain better control over your own data:

• Own your domain. The first step is to purchase and own your own domain name where you will build your online identity. If you aren’t ready to take the next step of hosting your own website software, you can start by redirecting your domain name to where you currently have your website.
• Use your domain for email. While some take the extra step of hosting their own email server, I’m OK with having my email managed by Google , but using my domain. If Google decided to shut my email down for some reason, I can always spin it right back up with a different email provider because I control the domain name.
• Host your own blog or website on that domain. Get some space on a server where you can install your own software and have control over your environment and ownership of your data. This has become much easier recently with one-click installs at many hosting providers where they can help install and upgrade your software if needed, so this doesn’t take as many technical skills to manage as it did a few years ago.

The future of the Indie Web

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Think about the following questions in relation to past jobs that you loved or hated. They will help you figure out what kind of projects you really want to work on now.

1. Teamwork. Do you prefer to work as part of a team where you can collaborate closely with other people on regular basis? Or are you happiest when people leave you alone and you can just get things done with minimal interaction? If you prefer to work alone and you end up in a job where you have to work very closely with other people, the chances of being happy are slim. Likewise, if you want to work as part of a team, you will likely feel alone, isolated and unhappy on solo projects. Finding a project or job that matches your team style can make a big difference in your job satisfaction.
2. Leadership. Are you happiest when leading a team of people on a project, where you can be in the driver’s seat? Or would you rather stay out of the limelight and work in the background? Just because you want to be in a leadership position doesn’t mean you can jump right into one right away, but you can look for opportunities to lead smaller portions of a project, to prove your leadership capabilities and set yourself up to move into leadership. On the other hand, if you aren’t happy leading, don’t get suckered into taking a lead job, even if it comes with a little more money. If you hate your job, a few extra dollars a month probably won’t make up for it.
3. Innovation. Do you like to come up with ideas that are revolutionary and new? Or do you prefer to take an evolutionary approach to make existing ideas and projects better? If you enjoy the latter, then you should be careful not to get into positions where you are responsible for coming up with groundbreaking ideas. It can also be a good idea to pair up with team members of the other type so that people are coming up with new ideas and others are working to make them better over time.
4. Employment. Do you crave stability and the benefits that come with being a full-time employee? Or are you happiest when you are working as an independent consultant with flexibility and the ability to control your work? There are many advantages and disadvantages of both, so it helps to know what you prefer.
5. Technology. Do you have specific technologies that you can’t live without? Or do you use whatever your employer or client prefers? If you are a diehard Apple  fan, the chances of being happy in a job where you have to use a Windows  laptop and BlackBerry  phone are slim. Some companies run on email while others use more collaborative technologies, so make sure you ask about technology usage if you have any strong preferences.

A few other things that are important to keep in mind:

• Is the project interesting to you?
• Do you get to work with people whom you want to spend time with?
• Do you like working for your manager or client?

Finding a project or job that plays into your preferences can mean the difference between a miserable experience and a happy one. Think about how you really want to work, then work toward a position that matches your preferences and makes you enjoy your work.

How do you stay happy on the job?

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Lars Plougmann.

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Here are a few reasons why side projects make good business sense.

1. New skills. I love to use side projects as a way to stretch myself and learn new things that I wouldn’t normally do as a result of my regular work. In the past, I’ve had side projects where I co-founded a nonprofit to organize community technology events, co-founded a location-based startup, wrote a book about community, wrote a cookbook, started blogs and much more. Out of each of these efforts, I’ve learned many new skills that I’ve applied in my day job. I’ve personally benefited from each of these efforts, but the companies I’ve worked for have also benefited from the skills learned in my off-hours.
2. Connections and networking. Most of my side projects have given me an excuse to meet new people. I’ve made friends and valuable industry connections that I can talk to about new ideas or trends. Especially for those of us working in technology, many of these connections bleed over from one project or company to the next. Having additional contacts in your industry gives you a broader base of people to talk to about new side projects or interesting things that you are working on in your day job.
3. Sense of accomplishment. While many of us are lucky enough to have great jobs where we get a sense of accomplishment from our regular work, it isn’t always the case. There is nothing quite like launching a fun project to boost your overall mood and give you a sense of excitement. For me, the accomplishments from my side projects tend to have a positive impact on my regular job, too, since my improved mood makes me even more productive when it comes to other work. Employees with improved self-confidence from a big accomplishment can often become better workers in other areas.
4. Safety net. In today’s economy, we need to be prepared for a potential job loss. The people who have wrapped their entire identity and life around their job at a company can be devastated when they lose a job. Those of us with healthy side projects can throw ourselves into these existing projects and maybe even generate a little income while we look for a new gig. Having some projects to fall back on and keep your skills current can help to maintain your sanity and prevent you from becoming despondent over your loss.
5. Fun. Most importantly, side projects should be fun! In many cases, side projects can be hobbies that you enjoy spending your free time on. If your side projects start to suck the energy out of you, then it’s time to find a new side project that leaves you energized and with a sense of enjoyment. This is part of why I organized tech events in my spare time for so many years. They were hard work, but it was great to get all kinds of different people together and create an amazing and fun experience. After a while, I had done so many of these that it ceased to be much fun, which is when I dropped them from my side projects and moved on to other projects.

What types of side projects do you most enjoy?

Photo courtesy of Selena Deckelmann

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Most of these helpful folks are well-connected to a large network of people, but they don’t build this network by being selfish and difficult to work with. The people I know who fit this mold are usually generous and “pay it forward” in return for the help they’ve received from other people. Paying it forward is something I’ve tried to achieve in my professional life, and here are a few ways that I do it:

• Career mentoring. While formal mentoring programs work well for other people, they always seem a little forced to me. However, I’m often happy to sit down with people just starting their career or moving into a new one to provide suggestions and ideas for ways to improve. If nothing else, I can share what’s worked for me over the years and hope that they find something useful in it.
• Sounding board. I like to spend time talking to people who are working on interesting, innovative projects. In most cases, I learn something from them while also providing them with some feedback. Providing a fresh perspective and looking at something for the first time can often uncover things you miss when you’re very close to a subject.
• Spontaneous connections. Not everyone asks for help or even knows that they could use some assistance. When I see someone struggling with a project or activity, I’ll try to make a spontaneous connection to someone I think might be able to help. However, this only works if it’s unobtrusive and not too pushy. In these cases, I’ll usually point out that I know someone who has been through something similar, then offer to make an introduction. This leaves it up to them to decide if they want the introduction or want to continue on their own. I know that I’ve been grateful for similar connections in the past.
• Organize events. Organizing in-person events and meetups where people can connect and collaborate is another way to pay it forward. We’ve all attended events organized by other people and a good way to contribute back to the community is by organizing our own events, or helping someone else organize one. This gives other people a place to connect with like-minded people while giving you some additional visibility at the same time.
• Community participation. There are many existing online communities where you can contribute some expertise or be helpful as time permits. Answering questions or providing some other help as part of an online community is a great way for busy people to pay it forward and help others while making fewer commitments that they might not be able to fulfill when time is tight.

How do you pay it forward?

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Here are a few of the rules, filters and email groupings that I use to sort my email and process my inbox more efficiently:

1. Status reports. I use a rule that automatically places anything that contains “monthly status report” or “MSR” anywhere in the subject line into a “status reports” smart folder, without removing it from my inbox. At the end of the month, when the status reports are flooding in, I can click on my folder and pick out the few that I need to read while filing the rest away in my archive to quickly get them out of my inbox.
2. High volume subjects. For any topic that is generating a lot of email, such as a project that’s about to be completed, I’ll often create a temporary smart mailbox that uses keywords to find those high volume subjects. I can then easily scan through all the emails on that particular topic and better see the threads that are being discussed all together in one place. Turning threaded discussions on for those folders is a good way to see entire conversations in order to decide whether or not I need to add anything to the discussion.
3. Twitter messages. To reduce distraction, Twitter messages automatically get dumped into a separate folder without ever hitting my inbox. I can just take a quick look at this folder occasionally to see if there is anything interesting or anyone that I want to follow back.
4. Services. I also create folders to group mail from bug trackers, mailing lists, etc. These go to individual folders without skipping my inbox, which helps me to get through the first wave of email in the morning, because I can process all the email from each service that came in overnight. During the day, I can see the new emails popping into the inbox and decide whether they need to be dealt with immediately or processed later.
5. People. I keep a list of the people who work for me and make sure that their emails appear both in my inbox and in a smart folder. This is really important when I am pressed for time and can’t get through my email, because it allows me to at least glance at the email from my employees to see if anyone urgently needs something from me.
6. Unimportant. I also have a bunch of filters that take things like press releases from random PR people and dump them immediately to reduce the clutter in my inbox.

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Here are a few suggestions to help you focus on completing tasks rather than managing your to-do list:

1. Pick a tool and methodology. I’m not going to dictate a specific tool, because the tool you use has to fit your needs, work well with the type of job you do and make it easy for you to get things done. The important thing is to pick a tool that works for you. For years, I used the task list in Microsoft Outlook because it was convenient, and when I switched to a Mac, I tried a bunch of different tools before eventually settling on Hiveminder. When I was consulting, I found a task list wasn’t suitable, so I used shorter lists of the next three things I needed to do. Experiment until you find a tool a and methodology that you like, and then stick with it!
2. Keep it visible. The advantage of having a task list that is integrated with your email, like Gmail Tasks or Outlook’s task list, is that every time you look at your inbox, you have your tasks right where you can see them. With my web-based task list, I keep it open on a tab all the time, and I can quickly glance at what I need to get done. If you use a standalone task manager or a simple text document, you can keep it open on your desktop and easily accessible. By keeping your tasks visible and easy to access, you’re much more likely to see them and complete your tasks.
3. Create tasks from email. One of my favorite email productivity tips is to get task items out of your email and onto your task list; having an efficient process to create tasks from email content is important. In Hiveminder, I can forward email to a special Hiveminder address with a subject line that includes commands for things like due date and priority, and the email appears as a new task in Hiveminder right away. Other task list software lets you drag and drop email onto your to-do list, or is integrated into email clients. The important thing is to have some kind of process that allows you to quickly create new tasks from email using a method that works for you.
4. Prioritize. You’ll want to use prioritization to distinguish the tasks that are critically important. I tend to use three categories — high, medium and low — which lets me quickly scan down my list for the highest priority items. While some people argue task priority should be based on the importance of the task alone, with a due date to signify urgency, I take a more pragmatic approach and set priorities based on a combination of importance and urgency.
5. Due dates. I give every task a due date. Even when I need to arbitrarily pick a date, it helps me make sure I don’t lose track of anything. I sort my task list by date and then priority, so all of my tasks for the day are at the top of my list, in a rough order of importance. This helps me stay focused on what I need to accomplish today, and it helps me get more done. For those tasks that have arbitrary due dates, I can at least look at the task on the day that I’ve marked it as due, then decide whether I should do it right away or look at it again in a few days or a few weeks.
6. Daily reality check. While you should look over your task list throughout the day, spend a minute or two every day doing a quick “reality check” on the tasks you have scheduled. First thing in the morning or at the end of the day are good times for this. What you want to focus on during the reality check phase is how much time you really have to work on your tasks and which ones are the most important. For any tasks that you know you won’t be able to do, you can bump the due date for that task out into the future or just move it way down the prioritization. Some tasks will have increased or decreased in priority relative to other tasks, so you’ll want to adjust those priorities, too. The important thing is to get rid of the clutter so that you can more easily see which tasks you need to focus on now.

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1. Decline meetings. I don’t accept every meeting. If I don’t see real benefit resulting from my attendance, either for me or someone else, I decline the meeting. By only going to meetings you need to attend, you free up some time to do something productive.
2. Have effective meetings. Strive to have shorter, more effective meetings by being organized and always having a definitive end time. Spending a few minutes preparing for a meeting and send out an agenda and other materials in advance; it will mean that you get through the meeting faster, with less floundering around figuring out what you need to accomplish. I also try to keep people on track during the meeting and attempt to end on time or early when possible.
3. Schedule work. We all have certain tasks that require uninterrupted time where we can focus. For those activities, I try to free up big blocks of time on my calendar, and I schedule those tasks the same way that I would schedule a meeting, which allows me the time to work uninterrupted.
4. Schedule recreation. I also schedule my workouts just like any other meeting on my calendar. This has a couple of advantages. First, I get a reminder when it’s time to work out, and second, it discourages other people from scheduling over my workout and makes it more likely that I will be able to find the time for staying fit.
5. Take advantage of off-peak times. Try to schedule activities at times when you can do them in less time. When I need to drive to work (a 45- to 60-minute commute), I get up early to beat some of the traffic and schedule my workout after work, so that by the time I’m done exercising and ready to drive home, the traffic isn’t as heavy. I also try to avoid grocery shopping right after work or going to the bank at lunch.
6. Group and combine. Where possible, I take advantage of logical groupings to minimize travel time, such as scheduling afternoon meetings downtown when I know I need to be there for an evening event. I also try to combine meetings where possible, and I often meet with people for informal discussions at local tech events or prior to meetings. By combining meetings with meetups, I can get more done.
7. Be flexible. I try to be flexible with my schedule to maximize productivity. On days that I work from home, I start work at six or seven in the morning and then take a slightly longer lunch with a workout, which helps me start the afternoon refreshed. I also tend to move things around on my schedule and be flexible to take advantage of unexpected, but productive conversations with coworkers or to stay “in the zone” when I’m really being productive on a chunk of work.
8. Take breaks. When we get really busy, we tend to turn into workaholics and attempt to power through the work even when we aren’t being productive. While taking a break sounds like you will lose time, in many cases, it can help you get a new perspective on a difficult problem. A short walk can help, as can taking a break to accomplish something else, like running an errand or getting in a workout. After a little break, your brain will be refreshed and ready to be productive again.
9. Turn off the television. I used to watch a lot of television in the evenings until I realized I was spending too much time watching other people and not enough time experiencing my own life. I was surprised at how much time I had for hobbies, reading, fitness or even just getting a little work done in the evening when television wasn’t sucking hours out of my day.
10. Block out time for you. I block out my calendar from 4:30 to 5:00 every afternoon to give me a few minutes to reflect on the day, double-check my task list and wrap up any last-minute projects. In a past job where I often had back-to-back meetings all day, I used to block out my lunch hour just to give me time to eat! I know others who block off some time in the morning or afternoon to have time to take their kids to and from school. Think about what is important for you and make sure you find time in your schedule for what you want to do.

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Here are my tips for getting more done in less time:

1. Stay focused on the important work. Keep your eye on the work that will have the biggest impact, and make sure you finish the most important work first. Don’t get caught up in tasks, even those that seem urgent, if they aren’t really important.
2. Learn keyboard shortcuts. The more you can do without taking your fingers off of the keyboard, the faster you’ll finish your work, so take the time to learn available keyboard shortcuts for commonly-used tasks. Email, RSS readers, browsers and any other frequently-used apps are good places to start. Keyboard shortcuts aren’t only available in desktop apps; many web apps, such as Google Reader and Gmail, also have keyboard shortcuts.
3. Know whom to ask for help. If you can spend less time trying to figure things out for yourself, you can get more done. Make connections with people in your company and your industry you can ask for help. However, you’ll need to be prepared to help others, too.
4. Filter anything you can. If you get really good at automatically filtering out the noise, you can focus only on what you really need to see. Set up filters wherever possible: in your email, RSS reader and more.
5. Learn to skim. If you get good at skimming over content without reading every word, you can quickly determine which items require your attention and which ones can be ignored. This works for reading social network posts, news and email.
6. Touch once. This one is hard for me to stick with, but when I do it, it really makes a difference. For email or other communications, look over it and decide what to do with it right away: archive, respond, create a task item, flag for followup, etc. Regardless of how you process communications, just make sure you deal with them once rather than looking at them multiple times.
7. Take control of your calendar. I’m really proactive about my calendar, and I only attend meetings where there is some benefit from my attendance. If you want to have time to get any real work done, you’ll probably need to occasionally decline meetings.
8. Become the master of your email. Don’t let email control you. Finding ways to reduce email overload and proactively deal with email will allow you to spend less time on email and more time on actual work.
9. Work in chunks and focus. Despite what some might think, humans are not great at multitasking. We work better when we focus on one thing at a time. I do this by breaking my work up into logical chunks where I can focus on specific tasks.
10. Get really good at using search engines. Learn little tricks for your favorite search engine. For example, with Google, you could search for “productivity site:gigaom.com/collaboration” to find all of the productivity tips posted on this blog. Spending less time looking for information means that you can get more done.
11. Automate routine tasks. For any mundane tasks that you perform manually over and over, you should find a way to automate them if at all possible. I write scripts, automatically process email with rules and filter RSS feeds to automate tasks and spend less time on things I can have the computer do for me.
12. Prune. Have less data to process. Dump those irrelevant newsletter subscriptions, drop the social network contacts who don’t have anything interesting to say and prune feeds out of your RSS reader. Focus on the important information and get rid of the rest.
13. Keep it simple. When faced with any task, look for ways to keep things simple and avoid spending time on complexity that doesn’t add much value. Simple document formatting is a good example. Focus on the content that matters without getting too caught up in having elaborate formatting that could create more maintenance problems later.
14. Get news from podcasts. I pick and choose the news sources important to me with a combination of mainstream news and news on niche technology topics, and I listen to that news when I’m doing household chores, driving, grocery shopping, working out and more. I get only the news I want, and I listen to it at times I wouldn’t otherwise be productive, which allows me to keep up with industry news while spending little time on it.
15. Take time to recharge. If you work constantly, you’ll look like you are busy, but you’ll burn yourself out. If you really want to be productive, you need to take time to workout, do something fun, take a vacation, read or do something else relaxing. You’ll find that you come back to work with new ideas and focused energy to make a real impact.

Share your productivity tips below.

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Here are a few ways to ensure you can demonstrate your value to the company, whether you’re a freelancer being evaluated or a full-time, web-working employee preparing for an annual performance review.

1. Keep good records. I spend a few minutes at the end of every day to document in a work diary the top few things that I accomplished or worked on that day. I’ve been doing this for most of my career, and it’s a great excuse to reflect on my productivity for the day, in addition to providing me with a reminder of what I worked on in any given month or year. You could also do monthly status reports, internal blog posts or use some other form of documentation. The format isn’t as important as making sure you have some kind of ongoing record of your performance.
2. Demonstrate your expertise. Everyone is an expert in something, and demonstrating your expertise is one good way to stay top of mind, especially when you work remotely some or all of the time. In my current position, I’m focused on open-source online communities, and people I work with come to me with all kinds of questions on this topic. I try to document best practices to help people find the information they need to be successful, but I also make time to sit down with people to answer questions and provide suggestions for how they can work within the open source community. People come to me for help, not just because of my job title, but because I’m willing to explain and help them work through their difficulties in a way that makes all of us more productive.
3. Learn new skills. For most of us working online, technologies change every day, and while we don’t need to jump on every hot new thing, we do need to take the time to learn new skills and techniques. If we don’t learn about new technologies, we’ll find ourselves becoming obsolete and irrelevant. You can’t perform well if you don’t have the right skills. Whether you learn these new technologies by going to classes or just jumping in and learning on the job isn’t important, but you need to set aside some time for development.
4. Brag to your manager. Yes, I know your parents probably told you not to toot your own horn and that you shouldn’t brag about your accomplishments. But you spend at least 40 hours a week (probably more) working very hard on your job, and your manager probably sees only a couple of things you do every week, especially if you work remotely. It’s your job to make sure your manager knows about all the important things you do, and the only way to make sure she knows is by telling her. Make the time to meet with her or send her a quick email when you finish something that you are proud of accomplishing.
5. Emphasize the benefits of working remotely. When working remotely, it’s also important to talk about how working remotely impacts your performance and use it to your advantage. In my case, I drive to the office two or three days a week on the days that I have a lot of meetings, and I make sure that I use that time to track people down who aren’t responding to email, and I make the most of my time in the office for in-person collaboration. On the other hand, for my days working from home, I focus on activities that require quiet and concentration, like strategic thinking, data analysis or writing projects. I’m careful to schedule my time and structure my to-do list to take advantage of each location, but I also talk about why this works with my manager, employees and coworkers to give them some insight into why I work the way I do and why it works so well for me.

The bottom line is that you manage your own performance, and you need to make sure that you are getting credit for your hard work, especially if you are working remotely.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Roman Pinzon-Soto

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Here are a few of tips to help you overcome those issues and make your international meetings more successful:

1. Find a suitable time. If you only need to accommodate a couple of major locations, this can be relatively easy, but it can get ridiculously complicated if you are trying to co-ordinate attendance with people around the world. However, there are some great tools that can help you visualize working hours in various time zones. The World Clock Meeting Planner is one of my favorites: you can input up to four cities, and it produces a chart showing how the times vary in the various locations, helpfully color-coding the times shown with green for working hours, yellow for non-working hours, and red for times when people usually sleep. When you’ve determined the time for the meeting, it can be useful to include a link to a tool like the Event Time Announcer in the meeting invitation to ensure that attendees don’t make any time zone conversion mistakes.
2. Rotate meeting times. If you regularly have a meeting involving participants from spread of time zones where it is impossible to find a time that suits everyone, try rotating the meeting time (also known as “sharing the pain”). You rotate the meeting around, so that everyone gets convenient times sometimes, and also gets the terrible times sometimes. For example, my company recently moved a meeting that had been at noon my time for about a year to 11 p.m. to better accommodate Asian participation, and we’ll probably keep this new time for a while before moving it again six months to a year from now.
3. Send materials in advance. You should still send materials in advance even if you are using a meeting tool that allows people to access them during the meeting. I’ve been that lonely participant in a remote hotel room with a terrible Wi-Fi connection unable to keep me online and logged into the meeting tool. If you want everyone to participate, make sure you’ve sent the materials in advance so they aren’t relying on an Internet connection.
4. Allow plenty of preparation time. Whenever possible, you should send out an agenda and materials 24 to 48 hours in advance of your meeting, especially for international meetings where not everyone is a native speaker. This helps to ensure everyone receives the materials with enough time to review them. With non-native speakers of the language, having some time to review the materials and come prepared with questions can make the difference between a successful meeting and one that doesn’t really accomplish much.
5. Speak slowly. This is hard for me, so I appreciate it when someone asks me to speak more slowly. For participants who aren’t native speakers, speaking slowly helps give them time to process what you are saying, but it can also help people with poor audio quality over cell phones, or on international phone lines with delays.
6. Pause for questions. Leave plenty of time for questions, and provide lengthy pauses to give people time to think about their questions. Too many people rush through presentations without giving people time to respond with questions. This is especially true in international meetings, as in some cultures, interrupting is considered rude, and also some participants may need a little extra time to think about how to translate their question into your language before asking it. If your pause for questions doesn’t feel uncomfortably long, it probably wasn’t long enough.
7. Send minutes. Don’t forget to follow up after the meeting with detailed minutes, materials and any action items people are responsible for accomplishing. This means you should assign someone to take notes during the meeting, so the same person isn’t trying to present and take notes at the same time. Having detailed minutes is a great way to make sure you can follow up with people and gives people who had a hard time following along a little more information to review.

Photo courtesy Flickr user leoplus.

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1. Instant messaging. This is the obvious alternative to email; it’s a great way to get a quick answer or ping a colleague with some important information. The downside to instant messaging is that it interrupts the person you want to speak with, and it’s only useful if your colleague is online and logged in at the same time as you.
2. Text messaging (SMS). For those times when you need to urgently communicate with someone who isn’t currently online, text messaging is a good alternative to instant messaging. It’s immediate and tends to get people’s attention, but it can be really annoying if overused.
3. Group chats. A group chat or IRC channel is a great place to find answers to questions, especially for those topics where you’re not sure who’s best-placed to provide you with an answer. Group chats can also be a nice way to replace the water cooler as a way for remote team members to have informal conversations and keep up with the latest news in the office.
4. Collaboration tools. If you work at a big company, you may have access to a collaboration suite like SharePoint, where you can work together on documents or hold online discussions. If you don’t have a full collaboration suite, you can always pull something together with a wiki, Dropbox or other tools that accomplish similar goals. Getting documents and discussions out of email can really help you better manage your time. For those critical bits of information, you can always IM someone a link if you need a response right away.
5. Internal blogs. Company blogs are a great way to communicate information with a wide audience without clogging up everyone’s inbox. It also avoids those long email threads where a couple of people with strong opinions reply to the original email, start a heated debate and end up annoying the rest of the people who just wanted the initial information. Moving this type of discussion to blog comments gives people the option of continuing the conversation or moving on to the next blog post.
6. Social networks. I don’t think social networking tools, like Yammer and Chatter , will replace business email, but they do provide a great way to reduce the amount of social conversations in email. For example, you can share your latest photos of that event or the conference you attended on a social network instead of sending them around in email.
7. Talking. This really is going old school, but you can still walk over to someone’s office or pick up the phone and have a (gasp!) real conversation using vocal cord technology. For those tricky issues where you’re not quite getting the point across, taking the time to talk to someone can make a huge difference. Last week, I exchanged almost a dozen emails in a long argument with someone before finally tracking her down in person to find out that we were arguing the same point and were actually in agreement.
8. Video conferencing. Many people claim they are planning on using more video. Call me a skeptic or an old fogey, but I think people like the idea of using video to collaborate more than people like the reality of using video. Do you always want someone to see you (which means you have to change out of your pajamas for that call), and does video really make the conversation that much better?

Despite my frequent hatred of email in general, I often use it to send information or get feedback from people in different time zones. While I like to replace email where it makes sense and reduce my email load, there really are times when email is the best tool for the job.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user watchsmart.

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You don’t need to be a software developer or hardcore techie to use APIs. In fact, some web APIs, like the Twitter API, are relatively easy to use, and you can use them get access to useful and otherwise hidden data. When you start looking into APIs, you’ll also see how simple some of those web applications really are when you discover the underlying API calls used to build them.

Before you can start to play with Twitter’s API, you’ll need to know a few API basics. You can find information about constructing URLs, rate limiting, keys and more in my previous post about using APIs. Now, let’s look at a few fun things you can do with Twitter’s API.

Show User Data

The various web applications that do simple things like showing when a user joined Twitter are probably using data from the users/show API call. While most of this data can be found by looking at a user’s profile page, there are a few interesting tidbits that are only in the API, like account creation date (created_at), number of favorites (favourites_count), time zone (time_zone), ID number (id) and more.

http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.xml?screen_name=geekygirldawn

In this example, you should replace geekygirldawn with the username that you want to learn more about.

Friend Data

The statuses/friends API call is a fun way to get the data we got using at in the users/show call, but for all of the people a particular user is following. The data is displayed for 100 users at a time with the most recently followed users at the top.

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/friends.xml?screen_name=geekygirldawn&cursor=-1

Again, replace geekygirldawn with the username that you want to learn more about.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have a way to sort by oldest friends first (or at least no documented way in the API) without some additional programming required. However, adding the cursor=-1 option, shown above, does let you page through the results. To get the next page of results, scroll to the bottom of the results to find the next_cursor attribute value, and replace the -1 in the above call with the value found in next_cursor. It should look something like this:

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/friends.xml?screen_name=geekygirldawn&cursor=1320699204947613644

Follower Data

The statuses/followers API call is very similar to the statuses/friends API call, but it returns data about the people who have followed a certain account. It’s an interesting way to get all kinds of relevant data on one page about the people who have recently followed you. Like the statuses/friends call above, the data is displayed for 100 users at a time with the most recently followed users at the top.

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/followers.xml?screen_name=geekygirldawn&cursor=-1

Like the other examples, you should replace geekygirldawn with the username that you want to learn about. You can also page through the results using the next_cursor attribute described in the above example.

Important Information You Should Know

• Rate Limiting. Using this technique to get data from the Twitter API results in a limit of 150 calls per IP address per hour, which is fine for most users. However, those of us who work at large corporations where most of the company’s Internet traffic goes out under a single or small number of IP addresses will find ourselves almost immediately rate limited, so doing this from home is probably a better option. Developers get around this by authenticating with the Twitter API, but that’s a little more complicated.
• Viewing XML. Some browsers do a better job than others in displaying XML from the Twitter API in a format easily read by humans. While I use Chrome for most of my web browsing, I like to view XML / RSS using Firefox, since it displays a nicely formatted structure for the data. You can also save the XML as a file and view it in your favorite text / code editor.

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