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Make sure your passion for work is productive

Dawn Foster — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 12:04:48 +0000

Last week, I talked about thinking differently to improve productivity. A big part of that post is about loving your work and taking the time to live, instead of working all of the time. In short, having a healthy passion for work and life in balance can be a big productivity booster. But too often, that passion for work can veer too far into workaholic tendencies, especially for web workers.

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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Think differently to improve productivity

Dawn Foster — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 12:04:45 +0000

Increasing productivity is something that many of us struggle with, and finding the time to balance all of the things that we want or need to do can be tricky. I’ve shared a lot of tips for improving productivity over the years, but I think that many of us need to spend time thinking differently about our work if we really want to be productive over the long term. Here are a few things to think about if you want to be able to get more done by enjoying what you do.

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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How to minimize the impact of 5 common distractions

Dawn Foster — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:04:57 +0000

We all want to get our work done, but sometimes it seems that there are so many distractions that it is almost impossible to be productive. Those times where you reflect at the end of the day and remember that you were busy, but feel like you haven’t really accomplished anything are the days that were probably full of distractions.

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.

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?
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.
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.
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.
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.

What are your favorite tips for minimizing distractions and other time wasters?

Photo used courtesy of West McGowan.

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How to be prepared for death in a digital age

Dawn Foster — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 12:02:05 +0000

Death isn’t something most of us want to spend time thinking about, but it is inevitable for all of us, and we need to think about passing on our digital assets as well as our physical and financial ones. Most of us know that we should have a will and beneficiaries designated on investment accounts so that our assets are distributed to the right people, but many people don’t even take this first step. However, those of us who live and work online really need to go further, and think about how our loved ones should have access to our digital assets, accounts and information.

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: Who owns your identity?

Dawn Foster — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:02:19 +0000

Our online presence defines much of our identity both personally and professionally, especially for web workers. Now, I challenge you to think about how much of this personal identity you actually own and control. Do you have your own domain, or do you use something like Blogger or Tumblr? Do you manage your own software in a hosting account where you control all of the files? Do you use social networking tools, like Facebook and Twitter, as a key piece of your online identity? What would you do if any of these sites went down or your account was deleted for some reason, and how would that impact your identity? How much of your online identity is controlled by someone else? I spent most of the last weekend in June discussing these and other issues with a group of geeks in Portland, Oregon at IndieWebCamp organized by Tantek Çelik, Aaron Parecki and Amber Case.

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.

A few things to know:

The Indie Web is an emerging concept and a process that is taking time to evolve as we debate the right solutions.
There are varying degrees of how “indie” you want to be. For example, do you host your own servers in your garage or do you rely on a hosting provider?
There are many trade-offs to be made between how much time you want to spend on your identity and how much control you want to maintain over the long term. Your technical skills also play a role in how much you are willing or able to do.

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

People are working now on tools that can take this a few steps further:

Keep copies. When you post to social networking sites, keep copies of those posts on your website or archive them in some way to reference later. You can get some of this functionality using APIs or tools like ThinkUp. This may act as a bridge while we finish implementing the tools to needed to fully realize the IndieWeb vision.
Syndicate to social networking sites. Ultimately, we want to be able to post everything to our website to have ownership of the original content while syndicating it out to other websites. The tools to do this are starting to emerge, but most are still work in progress and not ready for regular users to implement. Examples include the custom platform that Çelik has built to run his website and syndicate content to other services, and Will Norris’ Snowflake plugin that syndicates his short posts to Twitter. Both are good examples of the “post then syndicate” model, but neither are quite ready for regular users to deploy.

These are just a few of the many projects that aim to illustrate the Indie Web idea to get people thinking more about ownership and control of identity. It’s up to us to build the tools required to fully implement this vision.

Photo used courtesy of Aaron Parecki.

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Tips for being a happy and satisfied web worker

Dawn Foster — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 21:04:38 +0000

We all have different strengths and weaknesses, and while it’s important for everyone to know what they are, it is especially critical for people who work mostly online. As Jessica noted, many employee evaluation techniques have limitations, and web workers are less likely than more traditional employees to get career help. So it’s important to be proactive and figure out for yourself how your strengths and weaknesses drive your web working preferences. You can improve your job satisfaction and make you happier in your work by finding projects and jobs that play to your strengths and preferences.

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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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5 reasons why side projects are good business

Dawn Foster — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:05:01 +0000

Side projects can be businesses or just-for-fun efforts that we do in our nonworking hours, usually out of some passion for the work. There are some risks associated with taking up side projects. For example, I have at least one friend who was fired partly because he spent too much time working on a side project, while I have at times previously picked up way too many side projects and ended up burned out as a result. However, despite the risks, I strongly believe that most of the time, side projects benefit both the individual and the employer.

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

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.
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.
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.
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.
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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5 ways to pay it forward and get ahead

Dawn Foster — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 12:05:53 +0000

We all know those people who you can go to with a question and know that whenever possible you’ll get a helpful response. They may not know the answer themselves, but they can usually get you a step closer to the person who can get you an answer.

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?

Photo by Dawn Foster, used with permission.

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Take Control of Your Inbox: 9 Ways to Sort Email

Dawn Foster — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 12:03:37 +0000

I make extensive use of smart folders (in Apple Mail) and tags (in Gmail) to sort my email into logical groups that I can easily process all at once; it’s an important part of my strategy for processing my inbox faster and dealing with email overload. The key is to use rules and filters that automatically sort my email without any additional intervention from me.

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

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

I also like to automatically color-code my email using rules, which allows me to see at a glance email that is likely to be important in some way:

Important people. I use a rule to color-code emails from my boss, my boss’s boss, employees and people in other critical roles as orange. Whenever I see something orange pop into my inbox, I know that I need to at least take a quick look at it, because it is more likely to be important than most other types of email.
Critical notices. Things like spam reports that I know need to be dealt with immediately get set to red. Anytime I see something red in my inbox, it requires some kind of immediate action on my part.
Projects and topics. I have other colors that I use to keep track of important projects and topics. For example, as a community manager, I subscribe to all the mailing lists for my project. I need to pay a little more attention to the community mailing list, though, so I set those emails to blue to make sure they stand out.

Image used courtesy of Flickr user RambugMediaImages

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6 Task List Hacks to Get More Done

Dawn Foster — Fri, 20 May 2011 12:05:45 +0000

I’ve been on a productivity kick lately, and have shared my tips for getting more done in less time, finding extra time in your schedule and dealing with information overload. The task list is another area where most of us can improve our productivity: Better task management allows us to get more accomplished, while spending less time managing the process.

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

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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Photo courtesy of Rob and Stephanie Levy

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