GigaOM » productivity

3 Goal-setting Tips That Don’t Work (And 3 That Do)

Celine Roque — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 17:00:53 +0000

“What are your New Year’s resolutions?” As 2011 approached, I heard this question frequently. I usually responded with a cryptic answer about how I always have a list of goals, but don’t necessarily call them resolutions. The word itself usually makes people either hopeful or cynical. I tend to belong to the latter group. With the low success rates of New Year’s resolutions, who can blame us?

Last year, the New York Times published an article (login required) citing research finding that about 80 percent of people who make New Year’s resolutions break them by Valentine’s Day. A study from 2007 supports this, saying only twelve percent of people achieve their New Year’s goals.

Perhaps this means that before we list our goals for 2011, we should take a closer look at our own attitudes towards goal-setting. What misconceptions do we have, and what can we do to remedy them?

Myth #1: Tell everyone your goals so that you’re publicly accountable.

In theory, publicizing your goals with friends, or on your blog or Facebook profile, might force you to achieve them, so as not to be seen as someone who’s all talk and no action. But according to a 2009 study by goal-setting researcher Peter Gollwitzer (PDF), this isn’t always true. Most people state their behavioral goals in very general terms (“My goal is to eat healthier”) that gives the premature impression we’ve already done them.

Here’s what works instead: implementation intentions. Gollwitzer defines them (PDF) as a plan spelling out when, where, and how you intend to accomplish a goal. In fact, another study (PDF) shows that implementation intentions work so well that they can help you accomplish your goals despite the presence of distracting thoughts and emotions.

This doesn’t mean it’s easy after you establish a plan. You’ll need to check and update your plan often. It’s also important to start working on your goal as soon as possible. The more time your goal remains inactive after you’ve stated your intentions, the less likely you are to accomplish it.

Myth #2: Reward yourself for your progress.

Some people suggest that to keep yourself focused and motivated in your pursuit of a goal, you need to have rewards for accomplishments. For example, if you successfully stick to your schedule for a week, you’ll give yourself the license to go out with friends during the weekend. While there’s nothing wrong with rewards per se, you need to be careful about how you think of them.

Research shows that for large goals (e.g.. becoming healthier) that have many supporting subgoals (e.g.. sticking to a diet, exercising regularly), whenever you successfully achieve a subgoal, you should reward your personal commitment to the larger goal rather than to your progress. Rewarding yourself for achieving one subgoal may lead you to ignore the other subgoals, because you’ll view them as substitutes. If you reward your commitment to the larger goal, the subgoals will seem interrelated, and you’ll be more driven to pursue each of them.

Myth #3: Focus on yearly goals.

By definition, New Year’s resolutions are goals that must be achieved within a year. While this tradition can work for some goals, it may not be effective to use such a long time-frame. First, even if we think we know ourselves well, we tend to be poor predictors of what we’ll need or feel in the future. Our perspectives, situations, and desires may differ greatly within a year. Second, most research (PDF) backs up the idea that setting short-term goals is more effective than looking at the big picture. This means that even if you have a list of yearly goals, it’s better to break them down into smaller monthly or weekly subgoals.

Given these goal-setting myths, we should be more attentive to how we set our goals, what works in practice, and what only seems effective in theory. By looking at our goal-setting behavior together with the goals themselves, we’ll be more likely to accomplish more this year.

Do you set goals during the New Year? Which tactics improve your success rate?

Photo by sxc.hu user lazydog

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How Will the Move to the Cloud Impact Remote Productivity?

Darrell Etherington — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:00:32 +0000

Many remote workers make fairly extensive use of the cloud. But to say that one makes use of cloud services is not at all the same as saying that one primarily uses cloud-based computing to do their job. Unless you use a Google Cr-48 running Chrome OS, or work exclusively in your browser, you’re probably utilizing the cloud a lot less than you might think during the course of an average workday.

Working entirely in the cloud is not by any means the norm, and it probably won’t be for quite a few years, but Chrome OS has some very attractive features for enterprise customers, as Google was quick to point out when it unveiled the Cr-48 beta units it would be sending out for pre-release testing. Most importantly, the technology will be cheap, which will really come in handy when businesses have to outfit an increasingly large staff of telecommuters.

More and more of our daily computing activities are making their way to the cloud, but what kind of effect will that have on productivity? To anticipate the impact of a cloud-based remote workforce, look at the last time there was a revolution in the way workers connected: the advent and rise of the Internet.

Productivity among U.S. non-farm businesses grew at a rate of 2.5 percent per year during the period between 1995 and 2000. From 1973 to 1995, productivity had grown only 1.3 percent per year. Yes, it’s true that the web brought YouTube, Facebook and email as well as many other potential distractions, but there’s no denying that it significantly improved worker productivity on the whole.

The groundwork that allowed for that spike in productivity was laid around a decade before, as businesses started to really invest in IT and in the early 80s, an investment which began to pay off in the mid-90s as workers really learned how to take advantage of the new tools available to them.

Similarly, business has been investing in the cloud for some time now. Google anticipated the curve, housing its productivity suite Google Docs completely on the web, beyond local storage. Gmail, too, has become more than just email, and now operates almost as a cloud-based CRM, calendar and task management product. Many similar offerings are available from other vendors, but users haven’t yet left behind local files and started working exclusively in the cloud.

Just as Internet search, email and instant communications reduced the need for letters, faxes, reference material and time-consuming phone calls, soon cloud-based production and collaboration will reduce the need for digital transmission of documents, uploading and downloading files, redundant rework by multiple teammates and more. You won’t have to worry about whether a client has the files, or the right version, or anything like that, because you’ll just authorize them for the cloud-based content of your choosing, and they’ll have instant access. It won’t be something that happens with a few clients here and there, but as natural as using Windows Explorer or Finder in OS X. But it can only happen once enterprise and worker uptake of and comfort with the tools catches up to the IT investment.

It might not take ten years, as Gary Kim of TMCnet suggests, but we won’t see the real productivity gains ushered in by cloud computing until it achieves the same kind of widespread adoption achieved by the original Internet technologies. Once we do, however, and remote workers see it as the foundation upon which all of their work is based, cloud computing’s effect on overall business productivity could rival that of even the wide adoption of the Internet.

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Moving to Mac: Window Management Tips

Scott Blitstein — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 23:06:57 +0000

In my six-month check-in documenting my move to Mac, I mentioned some of the general usability issues that I was still experiencing. While, overall, I was quite thrilled with my new setup, a few nagging issues were really keeping me from feeling really settled in. In addition to some Finder issues and some questions about dual displays, I was having trouble adjusting to how windows are managed in OS X compared to Windows, particularly in restoring items that had been minimized.

My post garnered a lot of comments in response with some great tips and tricks from readers that I thought I would share with you.

The “Black Hole” of Minimized Windows

One of my issues was getting used to the Cmd-Tab functionality of Mac, compared to the Alt-Tab of Windows. While similar, the Mac Cmd-Tab doesn’t restore minimized windows; I’ve been struggling with the “black hole” that minimized windows seem to disappear into. You all came to the rescue though with these handy tips and tricks.

By far the most popular suggestion, and the one that I ultimately ended up using, is to use the “Hide” command or the Cmd-H shortcut to hide windows rather than minimize them. Not only does this remove the window from view but it also shifts the focus to the next application in the stack. This actually helped solve another issue, too, because I was still occasionally bitten by seeing what I believed to be the active window on my screen but having the Application Bar really focused on something else. Hiding the application works to resolve both issues for me.

There is one caveat, though (and I guess this could actually be seen as desirable): if you’re using an application like TweetDeck that is hidden and something happens that prompts a notification, it will bring that application to the forefront. I find this to be pretty distracting so have learned to continue to minimize those windows rather than hiding them.

Another very popular suggestion was to use the add-on utility Witch, which promises to make window switching fun. I tried an evaluation of this utility and found it really useful, but found its plethora of options bit overwhelming, so I’ve settled on the more conventional shortcut hiding method. With Witch it is possible to completely customize how items appear, enable pop up previews and change the appearance of the app switching windows. I have a feeling that as I continue to become more comfortable and my needs increase this is something that I will be revisiting.

Other folks in the comments discussed using a combination of Exposé and Spaces. While I do like Exposé, Spaces just doesn’t seem to click with me. If I could segregate apps, or instances of apps, into different Spaces for different tasks, then I think it would be more useful to me.

Where Am I? How Did I Get Here?

I mentioned that I missed being able to see the full path for the current directory in Finder. Commenter Ted provided the solution: In Finder, open a folder, go to the “View” Menu, then click “Show Path Bar.” This was exactly what I was looking for and really makes the structure of my data make more sense to me.

Where Did I Put that Menu?

With the separation of the Application menu and the program window, I got particularly perplexed when working with a second monitor attached. Having to look to another screen to the see the menu of the application I’m currently using just never seemed right to me. Many of you suggested MenuEverywhere, which adds a staggering number of ways to add menus to just about anything, while another suggestion was Secondbar is more of a single tasker by adding a very useful duplicate of the menubar on the second screen.

Much like with a PC, I am finding that there are a staggering number of utilities designed to fill gaps and provide extra functionality to the OS, and a staggering number of ways to work with and around your process. I am thankful for all of your suggestions and hope you find them useful as well.

Share your Mac window management tips below.

Photo by Flickr user neys, licensed under CC 2.0

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Can Remote Workers Excel On-Site?

Georgina Laidlaw — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 17:00:27 +0000

At the request of a client, I’ve been working on site one day a week, and in that time I’ve noticed something that differentiates the way I, as a remote web worker, operate when compared to my “in-office” colleagues: I see my time very differently than they do. And, to be honest, I think it makes me more productive than they are.

Like many offices, people in this place often strike up conversations that last for twenty minutes or more about topics that aren’t work related. Between commuting, lunch breaks, and a requirement to be on-site all day, every day, the lines between work and down-time blur for the in-office worker.

Whereas I see the seven or so hours I spend at my desk as work time. Someone’s paying me for that time. And the moment it’s done, I’m free: I don’t have to sacrifice my time to commuting, so I can turn around and start to do whatever I like. So when some of my colleagues started a half-hour conversation about television shows the other day, my thought was, “guys, I’ve only got seven hours here!”

A half-hour out of my day spent chatting has a big impact on my productivity, especially as I’m only in the office for a limited time, and need to get all my face-to-face work done in that space. This conscious approach to the way I spend every half-hour of my time is, I think, the reason why my in-office colleagues have been surprised that I turn their requests around “so quickly.”

By keeping an eye on the small units of time, I’m able to focus on outcomes: every time I receive a request, I think, “How long will that take?” Often, it’s about fifteen or twenty minutes, so I do it on the spot. For the in-office worker, this kind of request might simply get tacked on to a to-do list and done when it gets done.

Owning Your Own Productivity

When you work remotely, you really come to own your own productivity — you can’t blame an unproductive day on the people around you talking, someone’s farewell lunch taking two hours, or anything but yourself. If your IM contacts are too conversational, you change your status to “Busy” and get to work.

Working remotely lets you own your own productivity by putting you in a position to set your own boundaries. In an office, the boundaries are blurred: people can interrupt us about work or other topics. You might feel you have no time to take a lunch break, perhaps because of the interruptions, or because your office culture may not encourage it. It may be easy to justify starting — or staying — later at work to miss the peak-hour traffic.

Increased flexibility of employment conditions, designed to make employees more responsible by giving them more control and freedom, may go some way to increase in-office productivity. But I think the workplace itself superimposes certain inescapable conditions onto the work arrangement — conditions that preclude the kind of productivity that remote workers can achieve.

For example, an office is like a community. If the people in it don’t interact, you wind up with ghettos, factions and mistrust, rather than openness and harmony. Every boss wants his or her staff to be friends; as long as we get the work done, they (broadly speaking) may not care exactly how we spend our time in the office. The inescapable social machinations of a healthy workplace take time. Many would argue that they contribute to the quality of the work output: a harmonious office does better work than one in dischord; a close-knit team works more effectively than one whose members can’t be themselves with one another.

Striking the Balance: Remote Workers On-Site

For those who alternate between working on site and working from home, these differences can be hard to balance. It takes some intuition and practice to “read” a workplace and understand how it operates. But it’s important to be able to do this — and quickly — if you’re to work there effectively for a limited time, like a day or two per week.

You’ll also need to be flexible about the way you work: while you might own your productivity when you work remotely, you must give up some of that control when you’re working on site.

You’ll probably enjoy the experience more — and achieve better results — if you open yourself up to a sensible level of conversation with colleagues while you’re working on-site. Perhaps leave the headphones in your bag and allow yourself to be engaged by the personalities around you every once in a while. There will be times with deadlines approaching when you can’t talk, but be prepared to relax and chat for a few minutes when you can.

Adjusting to working in an office every now and again can challenge the hard-line remote worker, but that’s probably not a bad thing. How do you adjust to working on-site, or in different workplaces, when the need arises?

Image by stock.xchng user chriki7274.

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Start Now to Reduce Holiday Stress

Dawn Foster — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 17:00:28 +0000

We’re right in the middle of the holiday season, when the stress starts to accumulate until it reaches a breaking point. Start taking steps today to make some positive changes that will help you manage our stress over the next two or three weeks.

Get it done. Yes, I know you have a million things to do and you are trying very hard to get them done, but now is the time to power through that task list. Having a big pile of unfinished tasks looming over me is a big contributor to my increased stress around the holidays. In addition to all of the regular work, holiday tasks like shopping and cooking can make an already overwhelming workload seem even more daunting. I could either procrastinate, which only increases my stress, or suck it up and devote some extra time to completing my task list. I suggesting spending some extra time this weekend to make a big dent in that task list with a focus on those things that you dread doing, but that must be done before the holidays. Getting the most unpleasant tasks out of the way now helps reduce stress in the long run by making the remaining tasks seem easy by comparison.
Put it off. Now is a good time to focus on the work that really matters and the urgent tasks that must be completed during the holidays. Everything else can wait until after the first of the year. Take a really hard look at that task list and find the “nice to have” tasks that aren’t urgent and likely won’t be completed before 2011 anyway. Make a conscious effort to just move those items out of your active task list and defer them until after the holidays. Having better focus and putting off a few of the less urgent tasks can make the existing task list more manageable and less stressful for the holidays.
Stay fit. During times of increased stress and less free time, it can be too easy to neglect our health and let our regular fitness activities slide, but this is when you really need those workouts. Hitting the gym or the running trail is a great way to reduce stress and improve your mood, especially during a time when most of us tend to overindulge a bit on all of those delicious holiday treats. If you are really pressed for time, try to combine activities with a little extra walking during that shopping trip, or turn a family gathering into a healthy after dinner stroll around the neighborhood. You can reduce your stress and burn off some of those extra cookies at the same time.
Have fun. When we are at our busiest, it can be hard to take time out to have some fun and relax. Find a few non-holiday hobbies and make sure that you leave at least a few minutes a day to do something you enjoy that helps reduce your stress. Have lunch or coffee with a good friend or take an evening off to go to the movies. Even just spending 30 minutes with a great book to relax before bed can help you unwind and reduce your stress, which will help you sleep better and make you even more productive and less stressed the following day.
Escape.If all else fails, have an escape plan. Maybe this is taking the easy way out, but I love to go on relaxing vacations over the holidays. I escaped the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday with a trip to Hawaii where I spent 6 days sitting in a beach chair, having fruity drinks and reading science fiction. I came back relaxed and ready to take on the rest of the holiday season. Don’t feel obligated to always have a traditional or expected holiday. If you want to do something different, interesting and less stressful, go for it!

What are your favorite tips for reducing holiday stress?

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The New World of Enterprise Collaboration

J.P. Finnell — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 23:30:45 +0000

A whole new world of collaboration tools now exists, from workspaces like Box.net, Huddle and Central Desktop to customer-powered support communities like Get Satisfaction. In the enterprise, the convergence of cloud computing, more empowered employees and on-demand infrastructure is driving adoption of these technologies. Let’s look at how each is shaping the future of high-impact collaboration in the enterprise, and with it, new innovations.

The Human Cloud

As Mathew recently said, the human cloud is the capability of a company to get the best talent available regardless of location. With the advent of mobile technology, “flashmobs” and bee “swarms” to accomplish a problem will be more commonplace. An example of this would be responding to a PR crisis: Instead of taking the time to convert a conference room to a “physical war room,” a marketing executive can connect with the resources inside and outside the company (executive team, bloggers, call center, media consultants) to create a “swarm” to extinguish a PR spark before it becomes a media firestorm.

The human cloud is also a catalyst for companies to generate maximum value from existing resources. The Deloitte Center for the Edge recently published the 2010 Shift Index, which rigorously documents a long-term performance deterioration of 75 percent in return-on-assets (ROA) across 15 industries in the U.S. since 1970, despite productivity gains. According to the Shift Index, “the solution lies in empowering passionate employees, those who feel truly engaged with their work and constantly push the performance envelope, by accelerating institutional innovation and driving corporate growth.”

Empowered Employees

Collaborative cultures are now embracing the passion of the whole employee, creating work environments for them to use their devices, home office and professional networks to support the context for creating competitive advantage for the company.

Empowering workers in the human cloud, giving them a choice of devices and leveraging social networks for collaboration is necessary, but not sufficient enough to create truly high-impact collaboration. Different levels of “generational trust” between seniors, boomers, Gen Y and the Millennial Generation create a “digital divide” that can pose a significant barrier to collaboration. Research conducted by David Coleman, Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies, finds the biggest barriers to collaboration are not technology problems but are related to people and process. He has created a framework that illustrates different levels of competence, trust, age and web:

Source: Collaborative Strategies

Companies can act on these findings and create initiatives and social metrics designed to accelerate the progression of digital exiles, digital immigrants and digital natives to digital workers.

On-Demand Infrastructure and Applications

Businesses can now leverage on-demand infrastructure and applications to support nearly every aspect of their operations. Service providers can securely host multiple tenants of one application on one server, which boosts their server utilization rates, cuts administrative costs and lowers server cost per tenant. The resulting efficiencies and cost savings can be passed through to customers using a mesh business model.

At the same time, corporate IT departments are freed from the hassles of traditional deployments, software maintenance and upgrades, and concerns about scalability and reliability. IT can help business units source innovative applications when they need them and avoid getting bogged down with day-to-day maintenance and support. This frees IT up to focus on more value-added activities while being more responsive to changing business needs.

In many cases, these on-demand solutions can be integrated with existing enterprise IT investments. For example, social-media oriented, on-demand collaboration tools can be integrated with Microsoft SharePoint (which offers less-than-optimal collaboration functionality) for an improved user experience that makes employees and external partners more productive, effective and inspired to innovate to establish competitive advantage.

One example of a company turning these ideas into applicable business solutions is Intuit, who developed an innovation management tool called Brainstorm. To read a case study of this process, check out the full report.

Image source: flickr user ChrisL_AK

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Corkboard: A Visual Clipboard Manager

Simon Mackie — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 22:59:07 +0000

Clipboard history management tools are really handy, especially if you often end up copying and pasting many different snippets of information. My favorite Mac clipboard management app is Jumpcut, an open-source app that makes it easy to rapidly select previously copied items via the keyboard, but if you prefer a more visual, drag ‘n’ drop approach, you should check out Corkboard.

The app provides a virtual corkboard that you can use to store clippings from your clipbboard history. Corkboard understands a variety of different types of data (images, URLs, snippets of text, and so on) and displays them appropriately; clippings can be arranged on the Corkboard interface by dragging and dropping them. As well as providing a handy space to store clippings, Corkboard has a search facility that can search inside of your snippets.

Corkboard costs $9.99. A free evaluation version can be downloaded from the website; it’s limited to only storing four items on the corkboard at any one time, and clipboard history is not available.

Let us know what you think of Corkboard in the comments.

(via One Thing Well)

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Is Smartphone Productivity a Myth?

Darrell Etherington — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 16:00:37 +0000

I’ve been using a smartphone for around four years now, and I have a confession to make: I’m fairly sure that during that time, my cellphone usage has, if anything, become far less productive than it had been when I had only a regular old dumbphone. But with apps, email and Internet access, how could that possibly be?

Even though having a phone is an important part of my job as a remote worker, the value of an always-on, constant tether to the office isn’t really as great as one might expect, especially when that device connects me not only to work, but also to almost limitless possibilities for procrastination, diversion and play.

It seems that play is by far the most popular thing people use smartphone apps for. A recent Nielsen survey found that 60 percent of apps downloaded are games. Productivity apps? Way down the list, at around 26 percent. And while a quarter of all apps downloaded seems like a fairly big chunk, I have to question what types of apps fall under the blanket category of “Productivity” (Emoji Plus and Better Christmas List are close to the top in the iOS App Store bestseller list for that type of app, for example) and how often those apps actually get used once downloaded (I’ve downloaded at least six to-do list apps in the past three months, and opened them maybe a dozen times combined).

So if charting project timelines isn’t what most people are doing with their devices, then what is? Taking pictures. The most common activity by far for cellphone owners in general is snapping photos, with 76 percent of respondents in a recent Pew poll sharing that task in common. Just 29 percent ever use an app at all, let alone a productivity one.

Even as an email device, a smartphone is quite limited. If I receive an email that requires instant response, I’ll send one out, but usually it’ll be a quick message to let the sender know I’ve seen what they have to show me, and I’ll wait till I get to a computer to either respond at length or act on the content of the message. Sometimes having received the email will make me seek out a computer faster, but a vast majority of the time it won’t.

I pay more attention to Twitter because I have a smartphone. Is that a productive pursuit? In a strict sense, no, but in a broad sense, it does help further my work. But again, most of the time real engagement waits for the desktop, when I can track down links and access real resources with ease. If I’m checking out Twitter on my iPhone, I’m mostly just killing time or uploading a picture I just took.

James Kwak argues that all a BlackBerry really does is act as a totem of mythical efficiency. After four years of lived experience, I’m inclined to agree. But that doesn’t mean I’ll be getting rid of my iPhone anytime soon. Didn’t you hear? A new version of Angry Birds just came out.

Is smartphone productivity a myth?

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Working On What Counts

Amber Singleton Riviere — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 20:00:01 +0000

As things get busier and busier, it’s important to work on what counts within your business. If we’re smart, we do this early on, even before things get busy, but if you’re like me, you prefer learning things the hard way.

When You Can’t See the Forest

It’s probably only natural to get caught up in details: the how and the what over the why. Big-picture or big-vision thinking is abstract, requires risk and assumption, course-correction and resolve, and it requires faith that something that can (for now) only be seen in your mind will manifest itself someday, if only you stay the course and do those things that will help you make progress for the long run.

Details are much easier. The payoff and turnaround are generally faster, and things are much more obvious. You know what you need to do. There are websites to build, team members to hire, tools and services to research and test, and so on. The list is endless, but with each of these tasks, we have a tendency to slip into perfectionism, procrastination, and avoidance of more important roles and responsibilities within the company. That’s the misstep many small business owners make, which makes it much more likely we’ll flounder or even fail.

Working On What Counts

I’ve been making myself do this exercise fairly often in recent weeks. Businesses are cyclical in some ways, and now is one of those times in my business where things are expanding and growing, so there’s a lot of temptation to forget the forest and concentrate on the trees. Stepping back every once in a while forces me to see if I’ve gotten off track.

I ask myself one simple question, “What counts?” I have a stack of to-dos and ideas I’d like to implement within the company, but when I ask this question, all of a sudden things come into focus and I know where my priorities lie.

Sure, there are still “odds and ends” tasks that need to be done, things like hiring more help and delegating responsibilities that still need to be done by someone; just maybe not by me or the other members on my team who have their own “What Counts” lists.

By doing this exercise, I see that I really have only a handful of responsibilities that count. These are things that have to be done every day, consistently, to move the big vision forward; these are the things I know will have the biggest impact on the success of the company.

Finding Your Own “What Counts” List

If you’re a small business owner, especially, your business is your baby, and it’s hard to let go of the feeling that you have to be the person to tend to it, that things have to be perfect, and that if you don’t obsess about every little detail, something terrible will happen.

Not only is this a good way to run yourself in the ground, it’s also a good way to run your business in the ground, because that kind of intensity will burn you out. You have to be willing to step back and allow some things to be less than perfect and to trust that someone other than yourself can do just as good a job (maybe even a better one) at taking care of certain responsibilities within your business.

As you sit down to make your own “What Counts” list, be willing to let go and be willing to call on outside help, if you need it. Be honest when asking yourself, “What counts?” Really, what counts?

Chances are, your responsibilities will fall into just a few categories: promoting your business; developing products and services; and creating and building relationships with others. Even with those, however, some things will still be handed off to other members of your team, so for instance, you may handle certain aspects of your promotion (writing guest posts, for example), while an assistant handles related aspects of those same tasks (pitching guest posts to bloggers). You have to find those few core activities where you add the greatest value to your business and then fill in the gaps with support staff.

At the end of the day, by ensuring that both you and your team members spend at least 80 percent of your time working only on what counts, you stand a much greater chance of seeing your business to success and building something sustainable for the long term.

What do you think counts most for a small business owner trying to build a successful business?

Photo by Flickr user .curt., licensed under CC 2.0

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Where to Invest for the Biggest Productivity Gains

Darrell Etherington — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 17:00:12 +0000

Looking to plan your budget for next year? Deciding where to spend and where not to is a tricky decision. If you’re a remote worker, or managing and supplying a remote team, then it could be even harder. What kind of investment will pay back the most in terms of productivity? Here are some suggestions to get you off to a good start.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Remote workers can’t escape talking on the phone, or its modern day equivalents. I personally have a fairly expensive handset hooked up to my landline, which I use when it’s important to have great call quality and a connection I can depend upon. You might not consider a landline a wise investment, but if everything else goes to pot, you can at least always get on the phone and call someone. Especially if you have a phone that will work even in a power outage.

You should also invest in a good VoIP solution, be it Skype or any other service you trust. That also means getting the equipment to support it. A high quality headset, or a mic and headphones combo, will make it much easier to communicate with your coworkers, employers and other work-related contacts.

The Desk Does It

If you’ve ever tried working from a different location, or even from the couch instead of your desk, you know that having everything close at hand can make a huge difference in how well effective you can be. That’s why it’s a good idea to reevaluate your desk space yearly and update according to how your demands may have changed.

For example, this year I’m switching to a corner desk, since I’ve been using two separate surfaces in a corner anyway. Changing to a desk made for use in the corner will maximize my usable space, providing more desk surface where before I had a huge gap. Since I’ve also added a new, much larger printer/scanner because my work now requires more paperwork, I’ll also be adding a printer cart to my setup to make that easily accessible. It’s just sitting on the floor at the moment.

Having more space for additional gadgets, and bringing everything up to the same level will actually save me a lot of hassle in terms of day-to-day tasks. The bottom line? If you find yourself saying “I wish this was up here” over and over, whether it be accessory placement, monitor location, etc. you should spend the money to make that move a reality.

Hardware Upgrades

Most remote workers who depend on a computer will know exactly what I’m talking about when I mention machine slowdown. You’ve got a thousand apps open, with multiple windows and tabs and whatever else going on, and your machine just starts to drag its heels in accomplishing every little thing. Not only is it infuriating, it’s a huge, huge time waster.

If you find yourself running up against a wall with your current equipment, look to fix what you can cheaply first. That means upgrading your existing hardware. RAM is an obvious and inexpensive upgrade, plus it’s usually the easiest part for a user to upgrade themselves. Making sure your computer has the most memory it can support should be your first step.

SSD drives are coming down to a point where they’re now relatively affordable, especially if you’re considering them as a business investment. Plus, backup external drives are also affordable, so you can spend a little to have an SSD as your computer’s internal drive and store files on USB HDs, which will give you speed and storage for less than the cost of high-capacity SSDs.

Conclusion

The old adage “you have to spend money to make money” remains just as true today, but that doesn’t mean you can just spend willy nilly and expect positive results. Targeted spending is how you boost your productivity as a remote worker, and the areas mentioned above are easy to hit.

Photo by stock.xchng user PocketAces

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Jason Fried: Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work

Imran Ali — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 10:52:47 +0000

37signals is the team behind popular collaboration apps Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack and Campfire. The company’s co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson recently published REWORK, a collection of essays on topics as diverse as progress, productivity, culture, evolution and hiring in modern business — topics highly relevant to web workers everywhere. Last month, Fried spoke at TEDxMidwest in Chicago, exploring some of the themes of REWORK in an intriguing fifteen minute talk:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

Fried talks about the how absurd it that many people are most productive in trains, cafes, dens, but not in the office. One of the more salient remarks in Fried’s talk is that “people go to work and they’re basically trading in their work day for work moments“. In essence, Fried is suggesting that creative work that requires long uninterrupted stretches of focus is inherently disrupted by the distractions of modern office life.

Curiously, Fried draws parallels between sleep and work as activities that are “phase-based,” requiring prior phases to complete before being truly rested or productive; you may sleep for many hours, but interruptions will lead to more tiredness.

Fried goes on to suggest that the perceived distractions of Facebook and web surfing at work are false, with “M&Ms” (managers & meetings) making up greater, involuntary, more disruptive and expensive distractions.

The talk concludes with three recommendations from Fried:

“No-talk Thursdays.” A period of “quiet time” prohibiting coworkers from talking to each other and limiting distraction.
Replacing active communication, like conversation, with passive forms such as email, IM and collaboration tools.
Cancel your meetings. Things will still get done!

Though I agree with Fried’s thesis that disruption is at the heart of low productivity, I’m not so sure about the general value of the closing recommendations. Email and IM can be just as disruptive as office conversations and meetings, for example, but Fried didn’t offer any insights into best practices in using those communication methods.

Nevertheless, I’m finding the essays in Fried’s book to carry some very useful insights. You can watch Fried’s TEDxMidwest talk at TED.com and learn more about Fried’s book, REWORK, at 37signals. (And if you want to find out more about enabling a remote workforce to to be more productive, you should also come to our Net:Work conference in San Francisco on Dec. 9 — Ed.).

How do you manage distractions in your workplace?

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Use “Action Days” to Get Things Done

Amber Singleton Riviere — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 20:00:39 +0000

Stever Robbins, the Get-It-Done Guy, has a great new book out entitled 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More. One of the concepts I love from the book is the idea of “action days,” which he says originally came from Thomas Leonard of the life coaching community.

He explains action days like this. “You and a few friends get a conference line. You agree to check in at a certain time each hour. For example, right on the hour. At each check-in, someone (you?) reads the attendance list. Each person briefly reports what they’ve done in the last hour. Then they promise what they’ll do in the next hour. Once everyone has reported, you get off the phone and go for it!”

The “action days” concept could work even without using a conference line; all the participants could simply post their updates via Twitter, Facebook or email, or you could even host a regular action day on your website and have corresponding blog posts where participants add their updates within the comments.

Overall, it’s just a great, all-around way of getting and staying on track, and here are just a few ideas for ways you might use action days in your business.

Action Days to Overcome Procrastination

Action days are especially helpful for overcoming procrastination, so if you’ve been avoiding certain projects, this might be a good solution for making progress on things like updating your website, organizing your office, or hiring a new assistant.

Some jobs we tend to avoid more than others, but that doesn’t mean they are any less important, and using a “shot-in-the-arm” approach like this might be the perfect cure for procrastination.

Action Days for Accountability

I’m a big advocate for accountability partnerships, but one thing I know for sure is that finding a good and consistent accountability partner might not always be the easiest task. Schedules, working styles, differences in priorities, and even time zones can interfere with even the best of intentions when it comes to forming a reliable partnership, making it hard to stay on track and defeating the purpose of having an accountability partner.

Action days could make for a perfect substitute to a longer term accountability partnership or could at least be a great way to shake things up and add occasional insight and interest to your current accountability system.

Send out Twitter or Facebook posts, or even email a group of colleagues or friends to arrange an action day for the group, and again, this would be the perfect way to encourage everyone to get a jump-start on projects they’ve been avoiding. Set up a specific day and hourly check-in time, and you could even have everyone commit to the projects they plan to tackle. Then, when the day comes around, get to work on your individual commitments to see how much progress you could make on your projects.

Action Days for Weekly Progress

Certainly, having even an occasional (say, monthly) action day could be quite helpful, but imagine if you had one per week! I’ve found in past experiments with my own productivity and schedule that even the shortest and most concentrated blocks of time can have a huge impact on what I’m able to get done. I’ve even seen that I can get way more done working one concentrated day per week on a project than five where I jump from project to project, so action days could actually result in the bulk of the work you get done in a given week.

If you’d like to test the waters with weekly action days, find a few others who might be interested and set a specific day and check-in times (for example, Wednesdays are weekly action days with on-the-hour check-ins). Then send out email, Twitter, or Facebook reminders the day before the action day each week.

However you set them up, whether you work in regular or one-off groups, action days can be a great strategy for getting started on large or less appealing projects, and they can be a good addition to your current system for getting things done and warding off procrastination.

As an added note, Stever Robbins organizes occasional action days through his website if you’d like to experiment with the concept, and you can check also out a podcast episode where he explains how he uses action days.

What other strategies do you use to get started on big projects and avoid procrastination?

Photo by Flickr user wwarby, licensed under CC 2.0

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Pass It On: Some Infectious Productivity Tips

Darrell Etherington — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:00:57 +0000

Cold and flu season is here, but web workers have an advantage: if you’re not meeting with people face-to-face, you’re a lot less likely to catch any nasty viruses. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be infectious; passing along useful productivity practices is a great way to spread around greater efficiency.

Communication

Email is still the primary means of communication for most remote workers, despite the rise of Twitter and other social networking platforms. It’s also the easiest place to start when it comes to sharing productivity best practices with others.

Start with the subject line. I’m terrible at these, but assuming that people will give your email the attention it’s due automatically is a mistake. The subject line often helps those who receive a ton of email to priortize, so make sure you’re doing your best to help.

Michael Cloutier, CEO of the Canadian Diabetes Association, recommends categorizing your email clearly according to priority right in the subject line. It might not work all of the time, but if people appreciate it, they may return the favor.

If you’re using instant messaging with a distributed team, getting to the point becomes even more important. Too often people become chatty using these services, so establish IM protocol with your team beforehand. Make sure messages are informative, and agree to forgive abruptness for the sake of efficiency.

Reporting

If you’re going to have a long-term relationship with a client with a regular reporting period, try to establish a legend of commonly-used terms to avoid having to retype them over and over again. You’d be surprised at how much easier it is to type a simple two-character letter/symbol combination versus a complete word or phrase, and how much time you’ll save. If the system works well, clients might use it with other contractors, who’ll then use it with other clients, etc.

Make the reporting process easier by keeping a shared access drive in the cloud between you and the client specifically for reporting files and forms. Once you establish that reports will regularly appear in that shared drive at the same date every reporting period, you’ll save lots of time in terms of preparing email and attaching files.

Business Cards

There are few things we pass around as professionals more than our business cards. And there are few things more annoying than having to manually enter contact data from a stack of cards collected at a trade show or industry conference. But since they see such high circulation, they’re also a great way to pass along some helpful tips.

QR codes are making their way into the daily lives of Americans in a big way after a long successful career in Asia. There are ample reader applications available for all mobile platforms (iOS being my choice). There are also many websites where you can create your own QR codes in very little time and share them with others or print them out for inclusion on your cards and other promotional materials.

QR codes make using business cards to exchange information so much easier, you’ll wonder why you ever did it the other way. But that’s not the only thing that you can spreading around with regard to those little paper rectangles of information.

Doing something more useful with all that white space may not be the best idea from a graphic design perspective, but it could go over great with contacts who don’t have time to read over your full resumé. A mini-resumé business card is a great way to do the most with very little, and to save your contacts time and effort hunting down your key skills and experience.

Good Ideas Travel

Every time you interact with someone, you have the opportunity to impress them. These tips will help you work faster, easier and better, and could help knock the socks off of the people you network with, too. And, if you’re really lucky, other people will also start using these ideas, which will save you even more time and money in the end.

What productivity tips would you like to pass around? Share them below!

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Add Interactive Features to Presentations With SlideRocket

Charles Hamilton — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:00:00 +0000

The web-based presentation application SlideRocket has enhanced its tools for interactivity and collaboration. Users can now incorporate interactive elements into their presentations, in addition to traditional graphics. For example, a presentation might include a plugin showing a real-time Twitter stream. In addition, one can include polls directly into presentations, as well as a commenting system, so that viewers can post questions directly on slides. One can also include audio narration.

Users within an organization can have access to shared folders and libraries that they can use to put together presentations that are customized to a specific audience while retaining the organization’s graphic look and content. So, for example, if a salesperson uses a particular slide containing statistics and that data changes, it can be updated in one place; all presentations using that slide will be updated accordingly. Similarly, if a company changes its logo or graphic design, presentations can be automatically changed to reflect the new look.

SlideRocket was one of the first services to be integrated with Google Apps; users can incorporate documents and spreadsheets directly into presentations. Existing presentations can be imported from PowerPoint and Google Presentation.

The interface for putting together presentations is surprisingly simple and intuitive. Without leaving SlideRocket, one can search for images through Flickr, or through its own library of stock images.

Presentations can be made public, embedded into web pages, or can be shared with specific colleagues or clients. SlideRocket offers detailed analytics that allow tracking of who looked at what. And yes, presentations can also be printed or turned into PDFs; of course, interactivity will be lost.

At present, SlideRocket presentations continue to be Flash-based. However, the developer is preparing an HTML5 version that will be available on platforms, like the iPad, that don’t support Flash.

You can see a sample presentation or a video. Pricing plans include a free “lite” version with limited features, a “pro” version for $24 per user per month, and an “enterprise” version that is priced per user. A 14-day trial is available. Google Apps admins can make the trial or full version available to their users through the Google Apps Marketplace.

Do you use SlideRocket? What do you think?

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ClearContext Personal Makes Outlook More Productive

Simon Mackie — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 17:00:19 +0000

ClearContext Personal, an add-in for Outlook, wants to help make your inbox time more productive. It automatically files unimportant emails, like social network notifications, newsletters, e-commerce emails, and other automated “bacn”, into categorized groups, taking it out of your inbox. It’s all done completely automatically, with no need to set up complex inbox rules.

Auto-filed emails can be accessed via a sidebar in Outlook; you can scan through a category, and mark all the emails as read or delete them with a single click. You can also teach ClearContext to file other types of email by dragging them from your inbox to the appropriate category; future emails will then be filed automatically.

To make sure that you don’t miss anything important, once per day you’ll be sent a daily digest email that lists all of the emails auto-filed that day, together with some statistics about your email usage.

ClearContext Personal will also help you pick out the more important emails in your inbox; emails from known senders are highlighted in green, while emails from important senders are highlighted in red. This is a bit like Gmail’s Priority Inbox; ClearContext automatically tries to figure out who your most important contacts are during its setup, and you can also mark senders as important manually using a button on the toolbar.

ClearContext Personal is available as a free download (.exe) for Windows 7, Vista or XP, and Outlook 2003, 2007 or 2010.

Note: Although I had early access to ClearContext Personal, I haven’t been able to test out how effective it is. That’s because it doesn’t support IMAP, only POP and Exchange Mail. When I asked ClearContext about this, the company said that the number of Outlook users using IMAP was very small — in the single digit percentages — and it had to focus its priorities where the users are. While I’d agree that most corporate Outlook users probably connect using Exchange Mail, many tech-savvy users (the kind of people who would probably appreciate this kind of add-on) will use IMAP to connect to their mail servers; they’re not supported by this release, which is disappointing.

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Focus: Do More and Better Work By Being Present

Darrell Etherington — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:00:10 +0000

A new study by Harvard researchers reveals what you probably already at least suspected: a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The trouble is, our minds are very likely to stray from the task at hand unless we’re doing things that tend to require our undivided attention, like working out, holding a conversation, and, apparently most of all, making love.

The reason we manage to stay focused during those tasks is that they require us to remain present in order to guarantee success. That ability to stay in the moment also produces the side effect of satisfaction. Our happiness is never higher than when we have our mind on what we’re doing. That’s a good lesson for web workers.

Job satisfaction, looked at from the perspective of this study, has a lot to do with focus. And for people who work from home, that’s probably not great news. If you’re a remote employee, you generally have unfettered access to the Internet, which means you also have about a million things vying for your attention. You’re probably adept at multitasking, but that same ability to split your focus could lead to unhappiness, which would also lead to burnout.

Maintaining focus is easier said then done, however. So how best to keep your mind on one task? Break that task down to make it easier to identify what’s required to do a truly great job. The difference between really exceeding in the task, and just doing a “good enough” job, is all about attention. If every time you set out to do a task, you set higher standards for yourself than you did last time, you’ll have an easier time maintaining focus and avoiding a wandering mind.

You should also avoid compulsively checking your email, and turn off those audio notifications for new mail. It might be hard to do, depending on what kind of work you do, but even if you can manage to avoid the email crush for a few hours a day, that period of unbroken focus should help improve the quality of your day by quite a bit. Having email “quiet time,” or, even better, keeping specific times during which you open your email app, should make for better email communication, too, since you’ll be more focused on those conversations.

Focus isn’t easy to achieve, especially with so much potential for distraction at hand, but as a remote web worker you have certain advantages over traditional workers. You won’t be as distracted by coworkers, for instance. Also, you have more freedom to set your own schedule, so you can plan attention-heavy tasks for times when you’re less likely to be tired and more prone to distraction.

Even if your task is undesirable, focusing on it to the exclusion of all else will provide a greater sense of satisfaction, and should help you feel happier in your job. It won’t be easy, and work is one of the places your mind is most likely to wander, but if you’re aware and take an active hand in keeping present and in the moment, you’ll have a much better chance of getting things done.

What methods do you use to help you maintain your focus?

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