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

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

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This week, I’ve been playing with the RunKeeper iPhone app to track my workouts. I wanted to play with something different to track my runs, and some friends have been using RunKeeper, so I thought that I would give it a try. RunKeeper has been around for a while, so it is only new to me, but I like it way better than I thought I would.

I really like the RunKeeper approach. You hit a single button to start your workout and another to stop the workout, and when you press stop, you have the option to save or discard. Saved workouts are automatically sent to your RunKeeper account, where you can log in to view all of the details from your workout in a web interface with maps and a variety of statistics about your workout.

RunKeeper tracks all of the important aspects of my running workouts:

• Start time, end time and duration to keep track of how long I’ve been working out, to help me identify any differences in my performance based on the time of the day that I did my run.
• Distance, pace and speed help me make sure that I’m going a little further every day to build my running endurance (one of my personal workout goals).
• Climbed (altitude) is particularly important for me, since most of my workouts include a fair amount of elevation gain, and the altitude gain of my workout is going to impact speed.
• Calories burned is calculated based on your body weight and distance; however, it also seems to factor in speed, since I did two nearly identical distance workouts, but one was 10 minutes shorter with more calories burned. It shows that they are doing something more sophisticated with their calorie calculations than a simple distance and body weight computation, which I thought was a nice touch.

I also like being able to edit my route for those times when you lose your GPS connection, or when you are making turns more quickly than the GPS sampling can accurately record. I edited my route for one of my workouts when it looked like I was short cutting through people’s yards, instead of staying on the sidewalk. It was fairly easy to drag the route back into place, which triggered a recalculation of distance.

The privacy features are fairly robust with several options for how you can choose to share your workouts or keep them private. You can choose to automatically make your routes and runs public and share them over Twitter and Facebook. You can also decide not to automatically share everything, and just share individual activities on an ad hoc basis. The option that I’ve selected is to keep everything private.

My one big complaint with RunKeeper is that when I registered, it emailed my password to me in clear text. This is a rookie web application mistake that should be fixed as soon as possible by moving to commonly accepted password best practices, like encrypting passwords for starters.

Despite this one major faux pas, I’m a huge fan of RunKeeper. I’m also using it in conjunction with DailyBurn, which helps me keep track of all of my workouts (weights, gym cardio, outdoor running, etc.) I plan to keep using RunKeeper, at least until I get distracted by the next shiny iPhone fitness application.

RunKeeper is available in two flavors. RunKeeper Free is ad-supported, while RunKeeper Pro costs $9.99 and has audio cues (you can hear your stats via your headphones) and training workouts (hear time-based or distance-based interval workouts through your headphones).

How do you keep track of your workouts and stay motivated to keep fit?

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MotionX-GPS for the iPhone comes in two flavors: a free Lite version with somewhat limited functionality and a full version currently available for $2.99. I used the Lite version for my evaluation, but I’m already thinking about upgrading to the paid version. I gave it a pretty good test with a 1.5-hour, 5.3-mile workout over a combination of city streets and a hike up a local mountain, but there are so many features packed into this app that I wasn’t able to test absolutely everything.

To get started, all you need to do is start the stopwatch, and it starts tracking all of your statistics automatically using the iPhone functionality. The stopwatch screen keeps track of your elapsed time, current speed, average speed, maximum speed and distance. The average speed looks about right for me, but I’m a little suspicious of my maximum recorded speed of 10.1 mph and suspect that it was caused by a temporary glitch (I’m just not that fast!).

You can also take pictures from the stopwatch view and the pictures are tagged with additional data: time taken, distance from starting point, altitude, and latitude/longitude. The picture also shows up on the map so that you can see exactly where you were when you took the photo. I’ve had some difficulty getting it to display multiple photos from the workout, but I’m not sure if it’s a limitation of the Lite version, a user error or a bug in the software.

After you finish your workout, you can share it with other people via the MotionX community, Twitter, Facebook or email. I’m not a big fan of sending automated messages to Twitter and Facebook, so I opted for email sharing to test this feature. The email contains data about date, time, distance, speeds, altitude, latitude, longitude and more. It comes with a link to Google Maps to see your route on a bigger screen than the one on your iPhone. The email also has attachments that included my photo, and the data in .gpx and .kmz formats, which can be used to export your workout maps and other information to various mapping services.

The app even includes a compass, which is based on GPS data to determine the direction that you’re traveling. Obviously, it only works when you are moving and the iPhone can determine your direction based on your direction of movement, since the iPhone has no built-in magnetic compass. While I wouldn’t rely on it for navigation, it was an interesting use of the technology.

You can also set up waypoints for your starting points, ending points or key milestones along the way. This allows you to see your movement throughout your workout on the map to keep track of your progress toward a location goal.

The biggest downside to this app is the drain on battery life. I started with almost a full charge on my iPhone, and by the end of my 1.5-hour workout, I had used almost half of the charge. They do give you several tools and suggestions to reduce the battery drain, but I wanted to test the experience using mostly the default settings. I suspect that their tips will help with battery life, but you should probably plan to recharge the battery after your workout.

I love being able to see all of this data about my workouts, so I’m going to keep using MotionX-GPS for my outdoor workouts. I still enter the final time and distance results into DailyBurn to keep all of my gym workouts and outdoor workouts results tracked in one place. Ideally, I would like to see the two services integrate together with a “share to DailyBurn” feature.

MotionX-GPS is available from the App Store. The free Lite version includes full tracking functionality but can’t store as many waypoints or tracks as the full version, and is missing some of the customization features of the full version.

What tools do you use for real-time workout tracking?

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Instead of feeling guilty, I do other tasks that matter to my business but aren’t my main job, tasks that don’t require the same energy or “mood” as writing does. Whenever the writing muse decides to take a break without my permission, I can work on editing or reviewing tasks instead.

But even if I don’t have any reviewing or editing lined up, there are some tasks that almost everyone can do, guilt-free, regardless of your career. Try one of these next time you hit the wall.

Do social networking: Hey, it is a marketing tool! Social networking is fun and maybe you’ll dig up some new work opportunities or the motivation you need to return to your core duties. Twitter and LinkedIn count!

Reconcile bank accounts: It’s administrative and dull, but most of us have to ensure our bank accounts balance.

Manage invoices: You do want to be paid, don’t you? Make sure your invoices are up-to-date and paid.

Follow up with clients: It’s OK to call or email clients just to see how they’re doing. Contacting them without any motive can make your relationship stronger. Why not surprise them with a handwritten “thank you” note?

Read content related to your work: Here’s one time where you don’t have to feel guilty about Internet surfing. Hopefully, reading WebWorkerDaily helps you to learn something new and become a better web worker. Don’t forget about books, newspapers and magazines. They all count. Well, maybe not People magazine, unless you’re in the entertainment business.

Clean up email: A less cluttered email box equals a more organized mind.

Write a blog post: Even if you don’t have a blog (why not set one up?), consider contributing a guest blog post to another blog that your prospective customers read.

Find a better way to do something: This could mean time and money savings. Are you not happy with your invoicing process? Research other options. Change is hard, but can pay dividends. I just got a new computer and don’t look forward to switching over to it, but should mean a faster and more efficient system.

Exercise: While this doesn’t directly contribute to your business, staying healthier ensures you have fewer sick days and doctor’s visits.

What business-related activities do you do when you don’t feel like doing core business tasks?

Photo credit: Gaston Thauvin

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Last week, I wrote about staying fit as a web worker. While I know that fitness is important from both a physical and mental standpoint, I sometimes resent the time away from work. Yes, I can listen to podcasts and even sometimes do some email or feed reading while I get fit, but I wish I could do more. Enter wish list idea #1: workout workstation. I want to be able to work out while I work. I like to think about how I could walk for miles while doing client work, making calls, or writing blog posts. They even make some contraptions that let you strap your laptop onto the treadmill console, but they look pretty flimsy and are often at an uncomfortable angle for typing. I’m thinking of something more like a treadmill but with a standard desk adjusted to an appropriate height for someone standing and typing. The one that Susan Heid built looks a little rough, but it is pretty close to what I was thinking. Now, I just need to build it, find a place for it in my tiny house, and not kill myself in a freak treadmill accident while juggling my tea, laptop, and cell phone.

I also like to take vacations in locations with beaches, hot weather, and sunny skies. I refuse to work on these vacations in favor of spending most of my time lounging on the beach with a good book. However, on the way home, I always start thinking of ways to spend more time at the beach, which brings us to wish list item #2: exotic beachfront office. Some people manage to pull this off; Tim Ferris wrote a whole book related to this idea. This idea usually starts popping up around this time every year when the rainy season in Portland seems to have lasted for years, instead of months. Maybe I could re-arrange my life and work schedule to spend a couple of winter months in a cottage on the beach in some exotic locale, but with solid wireless and other web worker amenities of home.

I even managed to implement one of my wish list items last summer when I put together a pretty decent setup for a deck office with a long, outdoor extension cord, chairs, table, and umbrella for shade. It isn’t a fancy office, but I can get some fresh air while also getting work done.

What items are on your web worker wish list? What are your tips for implementing these ideas?

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Last July, Mike Gunderloy wrote a post covering three fitness resources for the deskbound. His post discussed reducing tension and pain with stretching, trying isometrics instead of the gym, and getting more active. These are all great suggestions, but I wanted to add a few more that work for me. Since we, as web workers, spend our days in front of the computer, I’ll focus on a few online techniques to help you get (and stay) motivated to get off your butt.

In early October, I decided to make myself accountable to my friends on Twitter for working out by using a new Twitter hashtag, #getoffbutt. My intention was to track my workouts while, at the same time, increasing my accountability for actually working out. What I didn’t expect was to start seeing a bunch of other people using #getoffbutt for the same reason! People seem to have found some value in using a Twitter hashtag to track workouts.

I recently started using Gyminee to track my workouts with more detail: workout type, calories, time, etc. However, my favorite thing about Gyminee is that you can invite your friends and all keep track of each other’s workouts. It also has plenty of special interest groups to join, pre-defined workouts, fitness challenges, and more. It even works great with the iPhone. I wrote a more comprehensive review of Gyminee in January if you want to know more about it.

I also schedule my workouts on my calendar. I have a daily recurring meeting on my calendar for 3 p.m. for my workout. While meetings tend to get in the way of any recurring appointment, I can easily see that something is scheduled over my workout and can move it another time. Realistically, I will probably never work out seven days a week, but I can make sure that I don’t cancel too many of my workouts.

The point isn’t about which tool you use to track your workouts or how you make sure that you find time for your workout. In the words of the famous shoe company from Oregon, Just Do It!

What are your tips for making sure that you stay fit? How do you balance working out with web working?

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Note – If it has been years since you’ve last worked out, and years since you’ve had a medical checkup, I’d strongly suggest you bookmark this post, get a physical, and then come back.

WalkerTracker – Let’s take the first step – and then the next, and the next. Walking is one of simplest, best forms of exercise that can be done anywhere. But the way of taking walking from “that’s nice” category to “Hey, I’m losing weight!” is by measuring how much you walk with a pedometer ($10 – $30), and then social networking with others who also have the walking bug. Enter WalkerTracker with is clean Web 2.0 interface, groups of walkers to join physically or virtually, automated encouragement (it still counts). Free with ads or ad free for $18/year $33/lifetime. Bring your digital camera.

Is walking a little to sedimentary for you? How about rock climbing? You can hook up with other climbers worldwide at Bouldr, a social network/Google map mashup for the seriously vertically inclined. This new free Web 2.0 site has two goals: be able to get concise information about climbing anywhere in the world and make it easy to find climbing partners. Bring your digital camera – and good luck!

Maybe what you need is a way for you and your buddies at work or online to commit as a group. In that case, definitely have a look at PEERtrainer, a site for finding and creating online groups of people ready to start acting and stop procrastinating about their health. At this site, it’s all about peer pressure and peer support – strong accelerants when you want to get the fitness fires burning.

Peer motivation is all well and good, but maybe what you need a good online app to track and plan what you eat and how you exercise in addition to external motivation. Have a look at traineo – one of the leading get healthy sites on the net today. Traineo combines creating a circle of motivating friends to keep you on that treadmill with simple online tools to track you food intake and workouts. Traineo is one of the leaders in this approach, although it’s online tools may be too simplistic for some.

If your last visit to a gym was last century, RunFatBoy will generate an easy to use workout plan for you – and no one needs to know you got it here. The brainchild of not-supermodel-thin Nebraskan Jim Jones, this may be what you need to confront your reality.

If you have concerns about a specific condition or disease, and you’re looking for solid information, an online community and real ways to deal with it, a visit to Steve Case’s RevolutionHealth is definitely in order.

“After leaving AOL, I thought long and hard about what I should do next. I felt that health care was in dire need of transformative change, and decided to build another company that could be a change agent, with the goal of shifting power into the hands of people themselves.

I see this as a business opportunity, to be sure, and we’re aiming to build Revolution Health into a major company. But I also see this as an opportunity to do some good, by tackling a health care system that is a mess, in the way I know best: by building a company that can change the world.”

RevolutionHealth’s Web 2.0 Health Goal Setter – and the experts who moderate each goal is very slick and a great way to focus on what ails you.

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