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

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

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Learn Keyboard Shortcuts

You can blast through your feeds with a few simple keyboard shortcuts that allow you to quickly move around without slowing down to reach for the mouse or the touchpad. It also seems that some features don’t really have a click-able counterpart, so the only way to access them is through the keyboard shortcuts. You can get a list of the available keyboard shortcuts from the Google Reader help page, but here are a few of my personal favorites that I use most frequently:

• ? – get a list of keyboard shortcuts
• j – move to the next item in the feed
• k – move to the previous item in the feed
• <space> – page down
• <enter> – open or close an item
• v – view original post
• r – refresh feed

Go Full screen

For really serious reading, you’ll want to go into full screen mode and use all of your available screen real estate for reading feeds. In full screen mode, you get a simple window showing the current feed with no additional clutter. You can navigate using the navigation shortcuts above, in addition to some shortcuts that are specific to using full screen mode:

• f – enter or exit full screen mode
• <shift>+u – show pop-up navigation menu to change feeds

Ditch the Home Page

While the home page has some interesting things like tip of the day and recently read items, if your goal is to maximize your productivity and efficiency, you should set your landing page to something else. I have all of my most important feeds in a single folder named “Critical” and I start there. You can change your start page by going to Settings -> Reader settings -> Preferences -> Start page, and select from any folder that you have created, or from a selection of other pages (All items, Starred items, etc.)

Group and Prioritize

I make extensive use of folders as a way to group and prioritize my feeds. They have become even easier to use after the recent addition of the rename folder functionality. The feeds that are most important located at the top of my navigation window. The order of the folders denotes their importance to me, but this shifts around a bit depending on my current projects. I simply drag the folders around within the subscriptions navigation pane to reorder them.

I also group things into folders based on projects or context. For example, I usually put my work-related feeds into a couple of folders grouped by topic that I can easily get through without being distracted by personal items. Keep in mind that you can also click on a folder and navigate through all of the posts within that folder across all of the feeds, so you can get through the folder more quickly than if you are navigating the individual feeds. As a result, I sometimes put critical feeds in multiple folders (critical folder and project folder) so that I can glance at it when I land on my start page of critical feeds or when I’m browsing through the project folder. Reading an item in one folder also marks it as read in any other folder, so you don’t have to worry about duplication.

Use Trends

The trends page is surprisingly interesting and useful. You can find it in the left-hand navigation pane, or with this shortcut combination: g then <shift>+t. While you can get some interesting insights into which feeds you really read, when you read them and what you clicked, the real value is in pruning your feeds. Take a look at the frequently-updated feeds section of the subscription trends; these are the high volume feeds in your reader. Now, which ones do you really still read and which ones have the zero percent read rating? You can unsubscribe from the dead weight by clicking the conveniently-located trash can, and it won’t take you long at all to reduce the clutter.

What are your favorite tips for using Google Reader?

Now, I should admit to a dirty little secret: I’m a bit of a productivity junkie. I get an enormous amount of pleasure out of finding faster and more efficient ways to accomplish everyday tasks; I love to find better ways to gather and process information more quickly. I actively look for ways that I can streamline activities to accomplish more in less time, and I wanted to share a few of my tips.

Less Multitasking

I know, I know, you are all expert multitaskers who can accomplish more when you do multiple things at the same time. Maybe, maybe not. There have been some recent studies showing that we are more efficient when we do one thing at a time. I’ve talked before about organizing my work into chunks where I focus on specific tasks; I believe that it’s a more efficient way to work.

This tip becomes critical for corporate web workers because if you are constantly multitasking, then you seem distracted and less productive, especially when you are multitasking on conference calls. After a few times of asking people to repeat the question that you missed because you were doing something else, your boss and coworkers are likely to become suspicious about whether or not you can pay attention when working outside of the office. They don’t know if you were distracted because of email and other work or if you were distracted by the television, your kids or other home activities. We need to stay sharp and pay attention on those conference calls, so reduce the multitasking and focus on the task at hand.

News Feeds

Remote employees can’t always rely on the hallway conversations to stay caught up on industry or company news, so if we want to stay informed, we need to do some of our own legwork. Monitoring information can take a lot of your time if you aren’t efficient, but with a few tricks, you can pare it down to something more manageable. You can start by setting up a little monitoring dashboard that you can use to keep an eye on important information at a glance. Add your company blog and some news feeds that look for keywords mentioning your company or area of expertise to get started and prioritize your feeds to put the most critical ones near the top of your dashboard and searches for less important keywords near the bottom. If you want to get really efficient, you can use a tool like Yahoo Pipes to filter your information down to only the most important items. While a dashboard or feeds of keyword searches can take a little while to set up, this work will pay off over the long term. Ultimately, you want to be able to stay on top of all of the important information about your company and industry while spending very little of your precious time.

Hack Your Email

No, not that kind of hacking. I’m talking about the good hacking where you tweak your tools to better suit your needs. Let’s face it; almost everyone working in a company spends way too much time in email. The key is to be able to process your email quickly and efficiently to make sure that you are responsive without spending too much time. We all have a different way of approaching our email and different needs based on our role and the tools we are using. Here are a few of my favorite email tips that I’ve used:

• Use color to quickly pick out important email. I currently have a specific color for the people that are the most important (bosses, employees, etc.) I’ve also used colors to designate client emails when I was doing client work. You can use colors in many different ways to help you catch anything important at a glance.
• Filters are your friend. For low priority items, you can process the email immediately by moving it to a folder without spending any extra time on it. I also use tags or smart mailboxes to allow me to efficiently process groups of email while still seeing it appear in my inbox. I use this extensively for mailing lists and other lower priority email that I can scan and process quickly in batches.
• Make canned or template responses for those common questions or regular emails that you need to send. Having a template ready to go for status reports or other regular communication can save more time than you might expect over the long term. Celine wrote some handy tips on how to use canned responses in Gmail that could also be applied to other email clients.

Of course, these tips apply to everyone, and there are many more productivity tips that I could have covered (great task lists, organizational tools, etc.), but I thought they would be especially helpful for the corporate web workers.

What are your favorite productivity tips to get more done in less time?

Photo by Flickr user Ryan Ritchie used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

Maybe it starts with the long-awaited end of a project, a move, or even the reorganizing of a closet or the rearranging of a room.

For me, it started with the re-installation of my laptop’s operating system. Simple, right? But fifteen minutes into the process, I felt relief, “Thank goodness this thing will finally work as it should.” I immediately wanted to re-install the operating system on my desktop computer as well, just to have a completely blank canvas to work on; how nice it would be to have both my computers functioning like they were new again.

I started thinking about clean slates. Imagine if you could make every part of your life feel new again.

Maybe you get back to exercising and eating better every day. Maybe you eliminate your debt and cut all the fat from your spending. Maybe you move to a place you’ve been thinking about or paint your office that bold color that always catches your eye.

Sometimes we need to hit the reset button on our lives, not to forget or undo where we’ve been or what we’ve done, but to get a new lease on life, a new perspective, or a breath of fresh air that’s just enough to motivate us to live our lives and run our businesses in a better way.

Spring is just around the corner, and what better time to make a little room to clean a few slates?

Start in the Most Obvious Places

For me, that was my laptop. I had been aggravated with its performance for several months and had gotten to where I rarely used it, because it was too slow. That meant I was bound to a desktop, which seems crazy to me as a web worker.

There are other obvious areas that need my attention, too. My desktop computer is probably next, as well as my archaic filing cabinet that’s filled with junk I don’t need or even use. In fact, I could almost take the entire thing to the curb to go out with next week’s garbage, yet I keep it, and it’s just another reminder of the various canvases and slates that need to be cleaned in my life and business.

Be Inspired to Keep Going

As you clean out one area, a junk drawer or your desk, you’ll most assuredly think of other areas that need your attention. Don’t feel like you have to tackle it all in one day or weekend. Maybe set aside two or three hours every Saturday or Sunday for as long as it takes to get to the bottom of it all. How motivating could that be to think, “What will I tackle next? What will be the next clean slate in my life?”

And, you know, it doesn’t have to stop with junk drawers and computers. You might need to clean up some relationships in your life. Maybe you don’t call your mom or siblings or best friend as much as you’d like and could make some time to make those relationships stronger. Then again, you might need to tackle your health, spirituality, or areas within your business.

So often, we become hoarders, hanging on to all kinds of clutter and excess baggage that crowds our lives and our thinking. Clean slates are very liberating and make you start thinking of all the possibilities that are available to you, if you only make room for them.

Sometimes I get on what I call my “crazy cleaning sprees” and get rid of all kinds of excess clutter and junk. What’s the most outrageous cleaning spree you’ve gone on? Were the results good or bad, liberating or costly?

Photo by Flickr user John Loo, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

1. Plan your exit. Productivity for tomorrow starts today. Set a time to leave the office and stick with it. An hour before that time, have a wrap-up alarm remind you to start wrapping things up for the day, a great tip from organizational and productivity guru Julie Morgenstern in her book, “Never Check E-Mail in the Morning”.
2. Plan tomorrow. Set your intentions and priorities for tomorrow during the last hour of your day so that you hit the ground running.
3. Set your boundaries. At quitting time, turn off the computer (completely off so that you’re not tempted to “quickly” check your email), turn off the light, and shut the door. Don’t return until it’s time to work tomorrow.
4. Honor a bedtime routine. Two or three hours before you want to be asleep, begin a routine of winding down. This will be different for every person, but it might include: no more phone calls or connectivity with the outside world (unless it’s an emergency, of course), no more talk about work, a bath or shower, a cup of hot tea, light reading, journal writing, no television, and lights out at a set time.
5. Start the day off right. Wake up at a set time. Exercise or do yoga for fifteen or twenty minutes, unless you have another workout routine that you prefer. Eat a healthy breakfast (don’t skip this, as it affects your energy levels for the rest of the day). Set out with the right intention for your day by taking care of yourself first.
6. Maintain your boundaries. Don’t immediately go to your office and start checking emails or news feeds. You’ll be at your computer all day. Take some time for yourself and other priorities in your life, or they’re less likely to get done later in the day, especially after work.  Have some coffee, write in your journal, read, or go for a walk. Just take some time for yourself before jumping into your work day.
7. Avoid or limit email time. Avoid checking your email right when you go to the office, or if you prefer seeing if anything important is waiting, at least limit your time to fifteen minutes so that it doesn’t distract you from more important tasks. Email is a huge time suck; if you don’t control it, it will control you.
8. Avoid or limit news feeds and social networks. This is another time-suck that easily distracts from other priorities. Set specific times for keeping up with the latest news and updates, and then be diligent about staying away from the distractions.
9. Start with your list. Jump right to your list of intentions and priorities that you jotted down the previous day. You were probably much more focused and honest about what needed your attention when you were planning it out with a clear head. First thing in the morning, it’s easy to want to procrastinate or give too much importance to trivial tasks and to-dos.
10. Check in often. Set yourself an alarm for every hour or two. Don’t let yourself get too far off base from your intention/priority list. If you do get derailed, at least you’ll not lose much time this way.
11. Work in blocks. In a business, it’s easy to have a wide variety of different types of tasks. There might be client work, writing and publishing, and marketing-related tasks to be done. Groups these tasks and complete them in scheduled blocks of time, say two- or three-hour sittings.
12. Stay disciplined. When you finish with a particular type of task, like work for a specific client, don’t pick up that client’s work again until his/her designated time comes back around again. It’s easy to be tempted to do “just one more thing” for a project, especially when clients are emailing feedback and updates throughout the day, but avoid the temptation. Treat all time blocks with equal importance, whether you’re working on client projects or doing lead generation tasks. It’s all important, and if you don’t maintain a balance between current work and future prospects, you’ll experience peaks and valleys with your revenue as well.

It’s not always easy to stay on track. Time flies, distractions can beg for your attention, and deadlines loom, making you feel pulled in one hundred directions and unable to keep up with the demands, but by approaching your work with purpose and discipline, it’s a lot easier to get things done and feel great about what you’ve accomplished.

What steps do you follow each day to stay on track and productive?

Photo by Flickr user SC Fiasco, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Inbox Zero

I usually manage to get my inbox under control right before I take a week off during the holidays, but by the time I return to work, it has usually filled right back up with new email. This time, I’m making a real effort to keep it at inbox zero for more than a few hours. I went to inbox zero about a week ago, and I’ve managed to keep it at zero all week by spending a little time each day responding to what I can and moving everything else into areas for response or further reading while creating tasks for to-do items. By keeping up with this process during the holidays while the volume is more manageable, I hope that I’m building up habits that will help me continue to manage my email in 2010. Even if you don’t aspire to implement inbox zero over the long-term, there is something very refreshing about starting the new year with a clean inbox.

Paperwork, Planning and Finances

This is also a great time to get all your paperwork, planning and finances in order. I plan to tackle that pile of paperwork accumulating on my desk that really should be filed, and it’s a great time to get everything ready for your taxes. You should also take some time to set your goals for 2010 and come up with a plan that will help you achieve them.

Relax

Nothing helps me get a fresh start like taking a few days off to relax and recharge. It’s hard to get a great start on the year if you are overworked and exhausted. I took most of last week off to visit family, but the holidays come with their own stresses. I plan to work like mad on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to get the rest of my work done along with some paperwork and other business; however, I’m going to take a nice, long four-day weekend off at home to relax, read and hit the gym to start the new year feeling great.

What are your favorite tips for getting the new year off to a great start?

Photo by Flickr User Daniel Voyager used under Creative Commons.

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I don’t read every post or update on all of my social web sites. The secret to participating without losing your sanity is that you don’t need to read everything. Think about it like a river of information. When you have a few minutes, you can dip your toes into the water for a little break, but you don’t need to spend the entire day swimming in it. Participating in social web sites is like a huge chat room. You participate when you can, but you don’t need to catch up on the conversations that you missed during the times when you weren’t in the chat.

Each of us have slightly different ways to keep up with social web sites. For the rest of this post, I’ll focus on Twitter, since it seems to be one that can be the most difficult to keep up with for many people.

My strategy for improving Twitter efficiency has three components: smarter use of applications, ignoring Twitter and following fewer people. I use TweetDeck to manage the flow of information by filtering my stream to focus on the updates that I care about the most, and I ignore a lot of what happens on Twitter. I keep up with what I can while letting the rest stream past me.

Chris Brogan talks about how to use Twitter at high volume (he follows almost 90,000 people). He also thinks of it like a river of information. Chris uses applications to pick out what he can and lets the rest stream past. He also uses search extensively, and considers it to be the most important part of the Twitter experience.

Augie Ray has a twenty minutes per day strategy for managing Twitter. The idea is that you dip into Twitter five times per day, spending three minutes each time to read a few posts, check @replies and direct messages, and post your update or respond to someone else. This leaves you with five minutes per day to search for interesting information and find other people that you might want to follow.

How do you manage your flow of information on social websites?

Photo by Flickr user keepitsurreal, used under Creative Commons licencse.

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I regularly speak on topics related to participation in online communities and social media. This question almost always comes up, and people always seem surprised by my answer. As someone who spends almost all of her time online and joins every new social network, people seem to expect me to encourage other people to do the same. However, I am a pragmatist at heart, and I want people to do what feels right for their situation. My way of life and my choices work well for me, but they aren’t for everyone. It was refreshing to see a similar viewpoint from Alexandra Samuel, CEO of Social Signal, in a post about not keeping up with social technology on the Harvard Business Blog in which she emphasizes this point: “But most crucial of all, the choice to stop keeping up with all the shoulds and must-haves, and to start choosing technologies that support the goals and priorities that matter to you.”

I also see too many people make the same mistake when they do decide to join social networks: They try to do too much at once. If you have not been participating regularly on social web sites, don’t join everything at once. Pick the one network that you think will work best for you, and try it for a while. If you enjoy it and want to spend some extra time on social sites, join another one. If you didn’t enjoy it, consider dropping it and trying a different one before you give up entirely.

It is important to find a balance that works for you, whether that means not joining anything, focusing on one or two social sites or, like me, joining everything you can find.

Where do you draw the line when joining social web sites?

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Utilities. In response to my first post on using two monitors, some readers wrote in with tips on free software utilities that can really add to your efficiency when running more than one monitor. Multi-Monitor Mouse got good marks from readers. It allows you to speed up your mouse interaction on multiple monitors, and use shortcut keys. Katmouse also drew praise for offering “universal scrolling,” where you can scroll the contents of windows that are under other windows. (If you use multiple monitors, you tend to have more windows running concurrently than you otherwise would.)

Are Two Displays Enough? The chief efficiency benefit I’ve gotten from using two displays concurrently is that I can run multiple applications in logical ways, constantly keeping the tools that I use all day available and easy to get to. However, several people who commented on the original post, noted that they use four and even more displays concurrently.Check out the six-LCD setup seen here, and shown above. In response to this post on the OStatic blog, another reader wrote in supplying a photo collection of his four-screen setup, dubbed “MEGADESK.” It has large individual displays, and allows him to look at one huge image across tons of screen real estate, or run many applications on several displays concurrently. Very nice.

Bill Gates Hits for a Triple. I noticed with interest this Lifehacker post, which discusses this post about how Bill Gates makes use of three displays concurrently. Gates reports that he gets over 100 emails per day from Microsoft employees alone, with many more coming from outside the company. He says:

“The large display area enables me to work very efficiently. I keep my Outlook 2007 Inbox open on the screen to the left so I can see new messages as they come in. I usually have the message or document that I’m currently reading or writing in the center screen. The screen on the right is where I have room to open up a browser or look at a document that someone has sent me in email.”

That’s exactly the benefit I see in multiple displays, and I’m seriously considering moving beyond just two displays. The separate displays make it easy to isolate applications and tasks, in a more organized and logical way than you can with just one. If you haven’t tried multiple displays, try it.

Do you use more than two displays? Has it noticeably boosted your productivity?

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While a fire hose of notifications and feeds can be too distracting when I’m working on things for client, if I’m looking for inspiration for a new blog post or new venture of some sort, I want to see as much information as possible in the hope that something will catch my eye and provide the inspiration that I need.

Here are a few of my favorite tools for embracing information overload. Please beware that these tools are known to sap productivity and suck up precious hours that can never be regained! Use these techniques at your own risk.

FriendFeed Notifier will send you pop-up messages every time one of your friends posts something to FriendFeed or comments on a post. For maximum information overload, make sure that you select the following options: show updates when someone comments on my posts, show updates from my home feed, and show posts and all comments. For the wimpier among us, you can choose to show updates only from a small list of friends or show posts only.

Tweetdeck or other Twitter clients with notifications turned on at full blast. I’ve talked about using reduced notifications with Tweetdeck to get targeted notifications for groups and searches, but for the full effect, you can also get notifications for the “all friends” feed (in other words, notifications for every single tweet). If you set this up right, you can get duplicate notifications for all of the tweets posted on FriendFeed and the tweets coming in through your Twitter client. I’m joking! I suggest only using one of the two options presented so far at a time, unless you really are a glutton for punishment.

Snackr gives you a scrolling RSS ticker with news from your feeds. You can even import everything from your RSS reader and have huge quantities of information scrolling across the bottom of your screen all day. I admit that would probably be a bit much. I took a subset of my feeds with my favorite tech news blogs along with a few interesting people, and I imported that subset into Snackr.

What are your tips for embracing information overload?

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The longer I continue this practice, the more I’m coming to appreciate it. Here’s why it pays to track.

#1: It helps with finding the “time sucks.”

You might realize after tracking your time for a while that certain types of projects are less profitable than others. For instance, if you’re a ghostwriter, you might make considerably more writing blog entries than in-depth white papers. If so, you can adjust your pricing or service offerings to compensate.

You might also find that a particular client is more demanding of your time than others, and as a result, you might decide to drop him, charge him more going forward, or change your work habits in order to be more efficient.

#2: It helps with staying on track.

I currently have a very specific goal to keep me on track — work four paid hours per day. I can quickly glance at my time sheet for a given day and see if I’m anywhere near that goal. If I’m not, I know I need to concentrate on acquiring new projects. The more consistent you can be about hitting your own daily goal, the more consistent your income and work load will be.

#3: It helps with being more realistic.

As I mentioned, my goal is four paid hours of work per day. I realized recently that reaching my much lofty income goal would take much more time. In reality, lead generation, administrative tasks, and communications make it impossible to focus exclusively on paid work, so I had to adjust my income goal to match my available time.

Also, you might estimate that you’re working much more or less than you really are. Having a detailed time log shows just how much you’re actually devoting to your business. If you left the corporate world in order to have more flexibility and free time, but you’re still putting in 70-hour weeks, then your reality is well out of line with your intentions, and you might want to rethink your workload.

#4: It helps with improving profitability.

The more you can arm yourself with information, the more accurate you can be when making projections, like giving clients quotes and estimating expenses, which in turn leads to increased profitability.

You can also learn a lot about what tasks are taking more than their fair share of your attention. You might have a “busy” month (one filled with things to do, communications, etc.) and not really have a “profitable” month, since much of your time was unpaid. Hopefully, you can then identify low-value unpaid tasks going forward, and weed them out of your to-do list.

So, although time tracking might seem like yet another demand on your already overtaxed schedule, give it a try for a few months and see if it doesn’t improve your business, and your bottom line.

How do you streamline the time-tracking process? Share your tips, as well as the ways time-tracking is helping your business.

Image by flickr user RBerteig

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New applications or enhancements to existing ones can provide big efficiency benefits, but there are also many simple tweaks, unsung tips, and new ways to think about the tools that you already use that can help you work better. In this post, I’ll share five ways that can help you accomplish more and experience less hassle. You can take advantage of many of these tips in minutes.

Double Up On Monitors. We’ve covered the efficiency benefits of using dual monitors before. While some users like sitting in front of one giant monitor these days, for the same cost you can buy two (or more) reasonably priced monitors, put them side-by-side on your desktop, and use the displays as one fluid desktop. I recently switched to this kind of setup, and I’ll never go back. The time I save simply loading web pages and applications is substantial, and it’s also just easier to work this way. Windows XP and Vista both offer dual-monitor support out of the box, as does Mac OS X. Give it a go if you haven’t tried it.

Flex Your Mouse Muscle. Some of the most surprised comments I’ve ever gotten for any post on this blog came in response to a post called, “Nine Ways to Make Your Mouse Roar.” I made the point there that you may well spend more time with your mouse each day than you do with any person, and yet, a lot of people install a mouse without ever consulting the documentation and finding out what it’s capable of. Do you have a mouse with a scroll wheel? If so, in any tabbed browser, just click your scroll wheel while hovering over a link on the web to open it in a new tab. Or try this: In the middle of a web page you’re looking at, click once on your scroll wheel. Your cursor should change shape. Moving up and down with the mouse will let you scroll the page, and do speed scrolling. If your eyes are tired, hold your Ctrl key down and lightly push your scroll wheel up a few notches. The size of the text on the page you’re looking at will increase, and you can  hold Ctrl and scroll back down to return it to normal size. There are many more of these tips in the original post.

Become a Word Power User. There are plenty of nifty ways to squeeze more productivity from Microsoft Word and make it easier to use. For example, if you need to leave a document but want to have your cursor sitting right where you left it in the middle of an editing session when you return, you don’t have to leave your document open. Go ahead and close it. When you reopen it to resume editing, hit Shift+F5 to take your cursor back to precisely where you left it. Do you have multiple Word documents open and need to take a break? To rapidly save all open documents, hold down the Shift key and go to Word’s “File” menu. The usual “Save” menu choice will show up as “Save All.” There are many more of these tips in the posts above. Check out this post and this one for more essential efficiency tips.

Get More Out of Outlook. While it’s almost nobody’s favorite email application, many of us must use Microsoft Outlook for work. If you do, you’ll find eight good efficiency tips for it in this post. For example:  Do you often forget to respond to important Outlook messages? To set a reminder — visible in your Inbox — to act on or reply to any message, right-click on the message you want to set the reminder for, select Follow Up, and choose your Due By time and date. When you click OK, the message will be flagged for you to remember to respond to it.

Reboot Your Wi-Fi. In this recent post, I described how important it is to do a regular, cycled reboot on your home Wi-Fi setup. I also described how the combination of the cycled reboot and changing Wi-Fi channels can eliminate dropped signals and other common problems. Several readers provided comments with Wi-Fi efficiency tips of their own, including free, open-source firmware applications that can give you much more control over your Wi-Fi router, and better performance through boosted signals. Many of us are very dependent on Wi-Fi all day, so look into how a few simple tips can help you be more wirelessly efficient.

Share your tips for boosting efficiency in the comments.

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Yes, I know, you could just do a search using your favorite search engine and get tons of responses to your query. While this is a great first step, it can help to have some more targeted methods of finding information.

I usually start by reaching out to my social networks. A quick question posted to Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed or any other social network where you have a group of peers can help you get started on the right foot. I used this technique on Saturday when I was looking for a good software solution for letting people register for a class that I’m planning to teach. My Google search resulted in a bunch of what looked like questionable solutions, but my Twitter inquiry gave me several great options to choose from.

I also use Google Custom Search Engines for targeted searches where I can control the sites that are searched. While a narrow list of sites to search will not work for every purpose, it can be very useful in certain situations. I have one custom search engine that searches only a defined list of online community thought leaders for when I am looking for previous coverage and quotes on a topic from reliable sources. I also have a custom search engine that only searches the industry analysts that cover online communities and social media for when I am looking for data points to quote in blog posts or in materials for a client. There is even a Google Marker bookmarklet available that makes it very easy to add new sites to any of your custom search engines.

These are my two favorite research tools and techniques to help me quickly and efficiently do research.

What are your favorite research tools and techniques?

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I try to keep updates out of email, so I push as much as possible into my RSS reader for those items that I want to keep track of. As a web worker, so much of what I do relies on being able to keep on top of new information and find the conversations that people are having about the many activities where I have some type of involvement (blog posts, organizations, my consulting services, etc.) I’ll illustrate this with a few examples.

I get many of my blog post comments as RSS feeds instead of email, especially for the high volume blogs, like WebWorkerDaily. While this is straightforward for single author blogs, it took a little work to get a feed of just the comments from my own WebWorkerDaily blog posts. I ended up writing a custom Yahoo Pipe to come up with a feed that worked for me.

I also use many vanity feeds to track mentions of the various activities that I’m involved with across multiple organizations. Most of these are complex Yahoo Pipes that track mentions across blog posts, Twitter, Flickr, video sites and more with filtering to clean up some of the noise. I even posted a two-minute video demo for how to create a quick and very simple vanity feed using Yahoo Pipes. However, vanity feeds don’t have to be complex. You can track the feed from a Twitter search and a blog search in your feed reader to find the most important mentions, without getting into more complex methods.

Alerts for job postings are another good use for RSS. There are a few job boards that have postings from companies looking for consultants in my field. I monitor a few of those sites exclusively via RSS, rather than getting periodic email alerts.

I keep track of output from various online applications that give you the ability to get content as RSS.  FriendFeed, Delicious, Twitter and many other applications have RSS feeds built into the service. I’m more likely to glance at the content if I don’t have to remember to wade through email or go to the site to find it.

Finally, don’t forget to add a little humor to your daily RSS routine to break up the serious reading. Noise to Signal, xkcd, and UserFriendly.org are a few of my favorite online cartoons.

What are your favorite creative uses for RSS?

(image from Social Signal, Creative Commons-licensed)

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Let’s start with Twitter. I get so much value out of Twitter: links to news and other information, updates on friends, notification of events and much more. However, it could easily consume too many hours out of my day if I didn’t keep it under control. I needed to make my use of Twitter more efficient: spend less time using it, while still getting the information I need.

Smarter Use of Applications

In my case, TweetDeck has been a giant help. I’ve tried quite a few of the Twitter applications, but this one is my favorite for two reasons: grouping and smarter notifications.

You can group your followers in a way that makes it easier to consume the information. In my case, I have a group of people that I follow closely. These are people who don’t tweet too frequently and who post updates that I never want to miss. While I follow almost 400 people, this smaller group has just over 100 people. I read this group first, and if I have time, I read the other groups.

TweetDeck also has pop-up smart notifications (assuming that you have configured it to notify you) for @replies, direct messages and dynamic, persistent searches. I configure searches for events I am organizing, companies I’m involved with, and more. This week, I’m closely tracking mentions of this Thursday’s Ignite Portland, since I am helping to organize it.

While Tweetdeck is great for consuming information, I use twhirl to manage posts to multiple Twitter accounts. I manage Twitter accounts for events, organizations, and other informal groups. Managing posts to those accounts can get very time-consuming if you have to keep logging in and out. The big benefit of twhirl is that I can be logged into several accounts simultaneously to post updates, which saves me time in the long run.

Ignore Twitter

As much as I love Twitter, I do need to shut it off when concentration is required. While the notifications keep me constantly informed, I don’t need those distractions when I’m doing client work that requires focus. As a result, I’ve started spending more time ignoring Twitter as part of my time management improvements. I can always catch up later if I missed something.

Follow Fewer People

I’m a bit brutal about my following policy. I can’t follow all of the people that I find interesting and keep my sanity. I only follow people who provide real value for me; whether that value is humor, information, or some other intangible. This threshold is going to be different for each person. Some people spend more time on Twitter and can follow more people. I’ve also found that I can follow more people now that I use groups in TweetDeck to manage how I read tweets. I usually follow people until it starts getting overwhelming, and then I pare back and unfollow the people who are providing the least value for me.

None of these are hard and fast rules for how you should use Twitter to get the most out of the time you spend on it. These are simply the ways that I am managing my Twitter use to be more effective on my journey to improved time management.

How do you get the most value out of Twitter without spending too much time on it?

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Photo by Josh Bancroft

People tease me that my hobby is starting user groups. I also organize big events for geeks in my spare time just for fun. I’m one of those people who notices the gaps and jumps in to fill them. When I wish Portland had an event, user group, or other gathering that doesn’t currently exist, I feel compelled to start it. I also enjoy meeting with other people to talk about common interests, learn new things, or help others who need a little guidance (the way others have helped me over the years). All of these activities are amazing and fun, but they are side projects that take up valuable time.

While I enjoy all of these activities, I’m starting to experience serious side project bloat resulting in personal overload. I’ve let my side projects take over to the point that I’m having a hard time making room for my paying client work. Part of my reason for starting my own consulting business was to give me more personal flexibility to manage my work and my side projects rather than having my hours managed by an 8 to 5 work day schedule. I have many other web worker friends who have made similar choices, and most of us seem to struggle with balancing our time between paying work and the side projects that are our passions.

There are a few ways to create a better balance between work and side projects.

A friend of mine recently implemented a “one thing” policy to better manage his time. He only does one non-paying “thing” a day during normal work hours. For example, if he already had coffee with me, he won’t have tacos for lunch with Todd.

I have started combining activities and asking people to join me at events like Beer and Blog if they want to talk to me or chat about side projects. It helps me combine those informal meetings with other events that I am already attending.

I also have started finding co-leads for anything that I decide to start, which helps spread the organizing load a bit. I am also going to start cutting a few things and doing a better job of resisting the urge to start new things along with saying no to more activities.

What are your tips and tricks for managing the balance between side projects, fun activities, and paying gigs?

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