Tasks to do in preparation

The first few tasks below aren’t things you are going to do in the first ten minutes of your day. Rather, they are things that you can do to make the first ten minutes more productive. Think about how you currently spend the first ten minutes of your day.

Like many people, you might tidy your desk, get your coffee, turn on your computer, open the programs you need for the day, check your voicemail, check your email, check Facebook, check Twitter, (and the list goes on and on). Suddenly, you might find yourself half an hour into your work day with nothing to show for it. So the first group of tasks deal with reducing some of those things you normally do in the morning.

Tip #1: The Day Before
I used to work in an office where the habit was to just walk out at 5:30 pm and ignore everything on your desk. When you got into work in the morning, you clean your desk and move over unfinished tasks to the next day and review your calendar. I couldn’t figure out why my mornings felt so unproductive until I stopped that habit and started finishing my day with a little clean-up and prep. Then I could start my next day fresh. So, before you finish your day each day…

• Make sure your tasks and calendar is set for the next day, moving over any unfinished tasks before you leave.
• Clean your desk of the clutter that tends to accumulate through the day.
• If you keep a paper list or paper-based calendar of your to-dos, have it front-and-center on your desk and make sure the tasks are prioritized.

Tip #2: Computer set-up.

When your computer starts up in the morning, you likely spend a few minutes opening the programs that you need throughout the day. In fact, depending on how many programs there are and how fast they take to start-up, it could take up the first five minutes of your day!

1.    So, if you’re running Windows, go to your Start Menu > All Programs > Start Up and right-click Start Up.

2.    Then choose “Explore” and copy a shortcut to the programs you open into the Start Up menu. (For example, you might copy in your web browser, Skype, your IM client, TweetDeck, and other programs you keep open during the day.)

Tip #3: Browser set-up.
In addition to the programs that you open, you should also set your browser to open the pages you use most often. I’m shocked at how often people have a home page set on their browser that they navigate away from and never return to. Make it useful to you! Make your homepage the site you use most.

And, if you use Firefox, take advantage of the fact that you can have more than one page open at start-up: Let’s say that you have 3 pages you want open; Google.com, Gmail.com, and Wikipedia.org. (Of course, you can use anything; I’m just using these three as an example).

1.    In Firefox, go to Tools > Options
2.    When the Options window opens, go to the General tab.
3.    See where it says “Home page” and has a URL in there? Change that URL to one of three sites you want to open. Then type “|” (which is the vertical line you get when you press Shift + the “”" button). Then type the second URL. Type “|” again and the third URL. So the line looks like this: http://google.com|http://mail.google.com|http://Wikipedia.org

Now, when you open Firefox, three tabs will open, each with one of those sites. Some suggestions you might consider:

• The page you visit most often during the day
• Your project management website
• Your online email access
• Your online telephone management console
• Your blog sign-in page

There are other Firefox add-ons that might be appropriate for you, either to recapture and optimize those first 10 minutes of your day or to make Firefox better throughout your day.

Tip #4: Organize your bookmarks
When I sit down to do my work, there are usually several sites I need to hit throughout the day. Now, maybe I don’t want to open them all when I first sit down to my desk but I eventually need to get through all them. For those sites, I’ve organized them into a single folder in the order that I will access them. (Since I use Delicious, which sorts alphanumerically, I’ve labeled them “01 – [the name of the first site I need to visit]“, “02 – [the name of the second site I need to visit]“, “03 – [the name of the third site I need to visit]“, etc. So all I need to do each day is click the next one in the list.

Why bother with doing all of this stuff? For the simple reason that a day which starts productively tends to be more productive. And if you start your day by opening programs and doing “busy work” (work that feels productive but doesn’t directly contribute to your business) then you miss an early window of opportunity to make a strong start.

Tasks to do in the first ten minutes of your day

The next tasks are the three things I recommend you do in the first ten minutes of your day. I’ve found that doing these three things can make a huge difference in how the rest of your day works out.

Tip #5: Review your goals and projects for the day (Duration: 1 – 2 minutes)
You should get to the point in your business where you know what specific goals you must achieve each day in order to attain the level of success you want. For example, you might need to write 1 proposal, make 2 follow-up phone calls, and do 6 hours of billable work in order to generate enough customers and revenue. Whatever your daily effort is, make those your goals and review them each day as soon as you sit down to work.

To get daily goals, use your annual goals and divide them by your workdays: You (hopefully) have annual goals for your business. Take those goals (perhaps a revenue goal, profit goal, number-of-customers goal, or some other kind of numeric goal) and divide it by the number of weeks you work in the year (probably 48 to 52) and then divide that number by the number of days in the week that you work (probably 5 or 6). So let’s say you want to earn $125,000 in income in a year: Divide it by 50 (and take a 2 week vacation) to get $2,500; then divide that number by 5 (for working 5 days a week) to get $500, which is your daily income goal.

Once you’ve reviewed your goals, quickly look over your projects, just to refresh your memory.

Tip #6: Get started! (Duration: 5 minutes)
Before you check your email or Twitter or Facebook or RSS feeds or (fill in other potential first-thing-in-the-morning distractions), open your first project and work on it for five minutes. Try to get in as much work as you can in just five minutes, just to get some critical mass building on the project. Doing this kind of work this early in your day can help set the tone for the day. You’ll come back to this important project later in the day and you’ll have already done some good work on it!

Tip #7: Anticipate (Duration: 2 minutes)
One of the best ways that small business owners can outpace their competition is by anticipating what is going to happen in the day and proactively dealing with it before it happens. Get into the habit of anticipating what is going to happen to you. Are you expecting a difficult phone call? Is there an email that will probably contain bad news? I’m not talking about being a fortune-teller and trying to predict what could happen; rather, I’m talking about being aware of your business and making it a habit to see the trends that will influence your day. One way to do this is by taking two minutes early in your day to list the two or three challenging things you expect to face in the day. For example, it could be an irate customer or a vendor who is wondering when they will get paid or a frustrated employee. Think about what you are going to expect in the day based on what you know is happening in your business. At first, this list will feel like you’re writing down the things you dread. But soon it will become almost another to-do list that is uniquely focused on issues that could bog you down (but which you can start dealing with right away).

Your first ten minutes of the day will race by. Once you’ve done those three tasks, move on to what you would normally do after you opened the programs on your computer. It probably includes checking your email or opening Twitter. But by optimizing your morning for a faster start, and by focusing your first ten minutes on goal review, head-start efficiency, and anticipation, you’ll set the tone for the rest of the day to be far more productive.

Related posts:

1. Mastering Google AdWords in 10 Minutes – Part 1
2. Mastering Google AdWords in 10 Minutes – Part 2
3. Master Your Day in Just 10 Minutes – Part 2

In the interest of full disclosure, this article of Tips In Ten has less to do with specific ten minute activities that you can do. The activities I’m going to talk about will help to support your other ten minute activities (like scheduling, which you read about in the last issue, but in fact all of the various ten minute activities I’ve shown you in these Tips In Ten articles).

A couple of activities that take more than ten minutes

The first thing I’d recommend – and this definitely isn’t a ten minute activity – is to make sure that you are taking care of yourself physically: Are you getting a good night’s sleep? Are you eating properly? Are you exercising? I’m not your mother so I’m not going to talk about this too much but I will say this: You are way more productive when you live a balanced and moderate life and you get rest, nutrition, and exercise. Since productivity can help you make more money, I see this as an investment. So take the time to take care of yourself.

Understand yourself

It is vitally important that you understand yourself in order to maximize your productivity and be more successful. For example, you need to know when you need to eat, if you might need to nap, and when your mental peaks and valleys are. I don’t like doing anything first thing in the morning, but I’m usually at one of my peaks within 30 to 60 minutes of first thing in the morning. I get less work done in the afternoons. I peak creatively between 11pm and 1am.

As you can imagine, when I know that about myself, I can schedule appropriately. I schedule those important/urgent tasks for my very first peak (but not before because I’m probably not going to start them at that point anyway).

To this end you should be mapping out how you feel each day and watch for patterns. Are there times in the day when you are doing great? Are there times when all you can do is stare at your screen? It happens to all of us and if you know in advance how you are, you can allow for it.

Mapping your ability to work at various times in the day won’t take a single ten minute session but it shouldn’t take you more than a few moments throughout the day to jot a note to yourself. (Set an alarm to ring every hour. When it rings, take note of how you feel: Creative? Eager? Totally unmotivated?).

Another important thing to know about yourself is to know what your limitations are. Maybe you’re a great visionary but you have a hard time knowing how to start something. Maybe you’re a great starter but you don’t finish so well. Maybe you have a hard time starting things but once the ball is rolling you can complete it with excellence.

Great! That is so important to know about yourself! Again, it’s not a task that you can “do” in ten minutes but spending some time thinking about it is well worth the investment. Once you know these things about yourself, you can schedule appropriately.

Adjusting your schedule for who you are

If you are a morning person, fill your mornings with really important stuff. If you are a night person, put it all at night. If you have peaks and valleys through the day, fill your day with the really important stuff during those peaks.

And, in terms of starting or finishing well… If you start really well, figure out ways to help you finish. And vice versa. Let me give you an example:

• How good starters can become good finishers: A client of mine is a great starter but he struggles with finishing. He knows that about himself after he and I spent time analyzing his work style. He has great ideas for projects and he can really get the ball rolling but then he loses steam after a while and lots of projects falter. So we’ve addressed it in a few ways. For example, by making big projects into a series of smaller projects, he can “start” each project (and because it’s small, he can maintain his enthusiasm through the mini-project). Thus, the finishing happens naturally because he’s starting more often.

• How good finishers can become good starters: I’ve worked with people who were great finishers but not great starters. In their case, they found that delegating the start work to an assistant was enough to get the ball rolling. It turns out that they just needed “something” to get them going, even if they had to change it all once they were into the project. That “something” was done by someone else – a virtual assistant in the one case I’m thinking of – who started it and passed it back to them. When that happened, their productivity went way, way up.

Create milestones and rewards

I believe that one reason people aren’t always productive is because they just see a long day of hard work ahead of them and the finish line at the end of the day seems so far away. Keeping your momentum through the day is so important, and it gets challenging as you get into what is commonly known as “the afternoon slump”.

To combat this, I recommend a series of milestones and rewards that you use throughout the day as mini finish lines. Maybe you like playing with your dog; why not use your dog as a reward for a period of hard work. Maybe you like to chat on Facebook; why not set that as a reward after a specific number of tasks. One colleague, a writer, has a set number of words he wants to write per hour. When he does that for 2 hours at a stretch, he takes a half hour break and works on a creative project. (In fact, he keeps a list of creative “reward” projects for just such a purpose).

At the same time, I’d also recommend that you track some important, ongoing numbers – whatever is appropriate for your situation. Maybe it’s revenue generated or words written or minutes spent coaching. In this way, you can watch your day’s success grow and each success helps to propel you to the next one.

Observation and encouragement

Creating a schedule and sticking to it is not easy! Start by spending ten minutes the day before to put together your schedule. That should only take ten minutes. But implementing your schedule is another story and it takes something else: Understanding and mitigation. You need to figure out yourself and how you work best and what pitfalls you succumb to that keep you from work. Then you need to address those by maximizing the things you do best and minimizing or eliminating the pitfalls. And, success takes diligence. You need to create best practices and stick to them.

You can do it! But it will only be successful if you know yourself first.

Related posts:

1. Master Your Day in Just 10 Minutes – Part 1
2. Plan, Break Down and MASTER Your Day in 10 Minutes
3. Get Way More Done in Just 10 Minutes a Day

Google isn’t the only search engine around but it is the biggest and most popular and that means it’s the search engine that 99.999999% of us tend to use in our searches and when we’re considering keywords for marketing. So when I say “search engines” I’m generally talking about Google (so if you use another search engine, be aware that there might be differences). Also, when I say “keywords” I could mean a single word or I could mean a phrase (which is sometimes called a “key phrase”).

When someone goes to Google to search for something, the words they type into the text box are the keywords that they are looking for. So you need to know what keywords you want to be searchable for and then you need to build your website and your external marketing to target those keywords. (Most of my readers know most of this already, of course, but I need to start somewhere).

Step 1: Imagine the possibilities (Duration: 10 minutes)

The first thing to do is to pull out a piece of paper or open a Word document and write down what you do in a couple of sentences. Write it the way you normally would, which is usually from your own perspective. (For example, I might write: “I am a coach who helps small business owners with productivity and social media and project management” or something along those lines).

Once you have that, try rewriting it a couple of times using different words. Bust out the thesaurus if you need to. If you can’t think of anything, imagine what your mom would write if she were to try to describe what you do to her friends. And, imagine what your top 5 customers would each write about you to a peer who they think might benefit from your services. You should end up with 3 or 4 total summaries (yours plus a couple of others). And it’s here that you can start to put together the keywords that are important for you.

Look over the list you’ve created and think about what an internet searcher would type in if they wanted to find your services online. It’s usually (but not always) a derivative of the words you used in the paragraphs you just wrote. For example, from the one sentence I wrote about myself earlier, I imagine that someone is going to search online for the keywords “productivity coach” or “social media coach” or “project manager”, so those might be keywords, as well as their synonyms (like “social networking consultant”).

Don’t worry if these don’t exactly describe your services perfectly. That’s not the point. The point is that you first need to find the possibilities; you can always narrow the list down later. Now that you have a list (hopefully a longer list than the few I’ve just listed as examples), you can move on to the next step.

Step 2: See what Google has to say about it (Duration: 10 minutes)

Go to Google’s keyword tool at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This tool lets you type in a keyword and see a bunch of information about it. Now, you can type in all of your keywords at once and do a single search, and that might work fine if you do one thing. However, many of us (myself included) might want to target keywords for slightly different audiences (i.e. project management, social media, and productivity) so I prefer to separate the keywords out into individual categories (i.e. I’d put “project manager” in one and “social media coach” and “social networking consultant” into a second one and “productivity coach” into a third one) because they can be downloaded to your hard drive and I like to keep them in different files based on what I’m working on.

So, type in one (or all) of your keywords, then type in the “I’m-a-human-being” security word and click “get keyword ideas”.

You’ll end up with a big list of keywords and key phrases that people use when searching for services that are similar to yours. Some will be relevant to you, others won’t be, and some will be somewhere in between.

In this list you’ll also see the number of local searches for the phrase in the past month and the average global per-month searches for that phrase. At this point, I like to choose a “top 10″ keyword list for each of the original keywords I had found. There were 3 original “categories” of keywords – “productivity coach”, “social media coach”, and “project manager” so I have a list of about 30 (give or take) keywords – a top 10 preferred list for each one.

There isn’t a formula that will identify which keywords you might prefer. You don’t have to base it on search popularity: A keyword with hundreds of thousands of hits is obviously more popular and therefore might be more difficult to appear high on the rankings, but a small piece of a big pie can still be good. Likewise, a keyword with only a few dozen searches might not be as popular and will therefore probably be easier to get higher rankings, and a big piece of a small pie isn’t that bad, either.

Step 3: See it in context (Duration: 10 minutes per day over a couple of days)

Once you’ve found your top 10 keywords, start looking around the web at each one. (This might be a good project to outsource, by the way). Find out what the top 10 results on Google are for each of the 10 keywords. Yes, you’ll end up with 100 websites but you’ll also have a clear idea about where you fit. It’s not uncommon to find that a couple of the keywords just aren’t quite what you want to be searchable for. Or maybe the competition is so fierce somewhere that you don’t think you have a chance and therefore don’t want to bother trying to be searchable for that keyword. Or perhaps you see an area where the competition is fierce but you add real value.

This can take some time so break it up over a few days if you need to.

Step 4: Narrow (Duration: 10 minutes)

Now you need to narrow your list a bit. 10 keywords might be a bit much to be able to market effectively. Aim to narrow it down to a core list of 3-4 primary keywords that you want to be searchable for. This doesn’t mean that you’re going to ignore the other keywords, but it just means that you’re going to focus your energy on a few places where you can make the most difference rather than spreading yourself too thin and being ineffective at all of them.

Narrowing your list is pretty easy because of the information you collected in step 2 and step 3 but you may still need to do a bit more work to narrow further. Deepen your search to see what other search results there are beyond the first page of the Google search and expand your search to http://search.twitter.com to see how people are talking about your keywords there.

By the end of this effort, you should have a list of 3-4 (no more than 5, seriously!) keywords that you can then use.

• Embed them in your website and blog content
• Write articles about them and post them at an article distribution site
• Write guest blogs and articles for online magazines
• If possible, incorporate them into your URL
• Make sure they are in your bios
• Create a Google Profile with the information
• … and the list goes on and on.

There! You’ve done keyword research in just 10 minutes a day that you can use to set the course for an aggressive and effective marketing campaign.

Related posts:

1. Competitor Research in Just 10 Minutes per Day
2. Success with Informational Sites – Part 2
3. Mastering Google AdWords in 10 Minutes – Part 1

Business owners face two blocks to great productivity each day. The first block is of their own choosing – they may or may not choose to procrastinate. The second block is a series of external barriers that keeps them from getting more done in the day. While the first blocks is completely in their control, the second block is seemingly outside of their control yet influences how much work gets done. I think these outside-of-your-control blocks are manageable, so in this blog post I’m going to talk about what you can do to eliminate them.

The first thing you need to do is figure out what your external blocks are. Typically, there are common ones and you might have others that are specific to your industry. I’ve listed the ones I see most frequently and I’ve suggested ways to deal with each.

Problem: Big piles of email
Solution: Start by unsubscribing to email newsletters you don’t read any more. There always seem to be some. Then use filters to get rid of persistent and annoying emails that aren’t spam but aren’t what you ever read. Then create folders for various kinds of emails that you need but don’t need to deal with right away (such as ezines or updates from teams, which you can read later) and use filters to auto-sort those emails based on the sender or the subject line to put them in the right folder.

Problem: Writer’s block
Solution: If you create content (perhaps for your blog, for online marketing, or for clients), you can’t afford to be delayed with writer’s block. Brainstorm subjects ahead of time (I like to brainstorm a month’s worth of content in advance). Then, a day or two before you write, open the document and write the topic as a title and put in a couple of bullet points or subheadings. These will percolate while you do other things and you’ll find it a lot easier to write when it comes time to get started.

Problem: Incoming phone calls
Solution: This can be a challenge because you want to be available for your clients but getting pulled off of projects can be costly. This might go against what you feel is good customer service but it’s good to set up some boundaries. Let them go to voicemail or have an assistant answer the phone. You should include in your voicemail message that you are returning calls at a specific time in the day.

Problem: Waiting for customers to review something
Solution: For someone who likes to cross stuff off a list, this might be frustrating for you if your clients end up reviewing things longer than you’d like. Manage these times up-front by setting project deadlines for you AND for the customer. Don’t be afraid to ping them if they are pushing their time limits. Realize that sometimes reviewing work can be overwhelming for customers so offer to help them. Or, if the customer tends to be slow in reviewing, send them smaller pieces of the project at one time.

Problem: Meetings that take longer than they need to
Solution: Presumably we’re talking about meetings that you are not in control of! This is easily solved by (politely) stating up-front how long you have to give to the meeting. For example, you might say, “Unfortunately I only have 30 minutes”. Also, ask for the agenda up-front to make sure that the meeting will be relevant to you and gracefully back out if it’s not.

There are plenty of barriers outside of our control that can keep us from being productive. But using a few people- and information-management techniques like those listed above, more productive work can be accomplished!

Let’s get productive!

Related posts:

1. Getting More Done With “Oh Sh*t” Productivity
2. 10 Minutes a Day For Better Staff Productivity
3. Enhancing productivity and profitability by outsourcing

Recently, my family moved. Anyone who has relocated knows what a pain it can be. As someone who loves organization and productivity, moving isn’t a pleasant experience. The move reminded me of a few lessons that are always good to recall while running a business:

1. Keep it in perspective. A move is a pain in the butt. And it’s sometimes hard to know where the spoons are or where the towels are. But the chaos will eventually pass. Boxes will be unpacked. The spoons will be found. Before you know it, all will be back to normal. Sometimes that thought alone gets you through in business, too, when you face down a tough customer or things become unglued. It’s not forever.

2. Be prepared. Create a good system that everybody knows, use lots of labels and Sharpie markers, and give people a big picture view of what goes where. In business, this kind of big picture view with lots of situational instruction works just as well. It’s all about creating a system and helping people succeed inside of that system.

3. Don’t procrastinate. Start early. Do what you can. If you procrastinate, you’ll end up way more stressed and your system will be shot. Schedule time to do work each day. Get the unpleasant work out of the way as soon as possible. Keep chipping away at the seemingly insurmountable project and it will be accomplished.

4. Expect the worst. Maybe it will rain. Maybe half of your workforce won’t show up. Maybe your truck and all your possessions will slide down an icy hill, across a busy road and nearly end up in a lake (which is an experience that happened to a friend of mine when he was moving a couple of years ago). When you expect the worst, you can plan for it (well, some of it) and deal with it as it arises. In business, we can’t possibly see what’s around every turn but some good planning and a positive, flexible attitude can help when disaster strikes.

5. Maintain continuity. Continuity is difficult in moving. You want to eat but the spoons are at the other place. You want to use your laptop but the wireless router is in a box. This can be avoided with some planning. What are the last things you will need in the old house? What are the first things you will need in the new house? What essentials need to be at the top of the pile? In business, maintaining continuity in all of your process can keep the wheels turning. Carefully inspect your processes (especially in a multi-staff environment) to make sure that you aren’t dropping prospects or customers or best practices as you move them from one step to another or hand them off from one employee to another.

6. Make fast decisions. This isn’t always easy to do, especially if the decisions seem complex or are filled with unknowns. But in moving and in business, you will face decisions that need to be made and you won’t always know the answer but you have to act anyway. Get into a mental state where this can happen.

The good news is, by the time you are reading this, we’ll have completely moved. Boxes are still being unpacked but we know where the spoons and the towels are and I have the beginnings of an office again. And everything else will sort itself out.

Happy Blogging!

Related posts:

1. Top 5 Project Management Lessons from Moving
2. How to Take Your Business to the Next Level
3. These People Will Destroy Your Business

One of my favorite scenes in the movie Apollo 13 is when a NASA engineer walks into a room full of engineers and scientists and points out that the air filters on Apollo 13 are circular in one module and square in the other module. He says something along the lines of: “We have to make these [square] filters fit onto these [circular] filters using only these…” and then he dumps out a box of stuff that could be found in the spaceship. As I recall, they eventually used part of the filter, a sock, and some tape as part of the solution.

I call this “Oh Sh*t” Productivity. It’s where you realize that the situation is SO critical that you need to do whatever you can to solve it. Right now.

In some cases, these situations are of our own doing. We made the decision to put off writing that paper in college until the last possible moment. In other cases (as suggested by the Apollo 13 movie), circumstances beyond our immediate control put us into that “Oh Sh*t” situation.

There’s something advantageous about this kind of productivity. You can instantly enter a zone where you are hardworking, creative, and intensely focused. So, is there a way that we can harness that “Oh Sh*t” Productivity and use it to our advantage? I think there is:

• Tighten up your deadlines. Rather than giving yourself lots of time to procrastinate and then doing the work the night before, why not just hack off half the time you allot yourself BEFORE you even commit? Instead of giving yourself a 1 week deadline, give yourself a 3 day deadline. On client projects you’ll increase your cash flow (and between you and me, would you have started the project any sooner anyway? Maybe not).

• Make an investment. Personal projects can sometimes become eclipsed by client work. While client work is absolutely critical, we can sometimes push our own business off and that can hurt us. But sometimes making a financial investment in something can prompt us to get moving. A good financial commitment to make is to hire someone to help you. They’ll show up for work and you’ll HAVE to have something to give them!

• Make a commitment. I love it when clients say, “there’s no rush on that, Heather.” I also hate it because other things that seem more pressing can get in the way. So make a commitment. And make it hurt YOU if you can’t deliver. For example, some people offer a discount or guarantee if they can’t deliver by a certain time. Or here’s what I prefer to do: I make an appointment with a friend or I set a date with my spouse, and I set these for around the time when I want to have the project done. Then I’m motivated to finish my project before I go out (and I know that I’ll have an annoyed friend or husband if I don’t get the project done on time and have to delay spending time with them).

• Break up the project. If you know you’re prone to procrastinating, break up your project into smaller chunks that are due in a spread-out set of deliverables. That way, you may procrastinate, but you’ll at least procrastinate on smaller sections.

• Fake the “Oh Sh*t” moment. Create a situation in which you feel compelled to act. Perhaps you start advertising your website that you haven’t had time to build. Or maybe you’re sick of the wall in your office and you just pick up a hammer and punch a hole in the wall.

In each of these situations, we are prompting ourselves to act – to make the time to deal with the situation. I call this “Oh Sh*t” Productivity. Although it’s not the way you want to run your business 24/7, you can be sure that you’ll get a lot more done when you practice this kind of productivity from time to time.

Good luck!

Related posts:

1. 5 Common Productivity Barriers and How to Eliminate Them
2. 10 Tips to Boost Productivity
3. Productivity Starts with the Right Pieces in Place

For busy professionals, multitasking is a must-have skill that allows you to shoehorn more productivity into an already packed schedule.

It’s an often-maligned skill, too, because of the frequently quoted problem that multitasking results in poorer quality work. But I disagree. Like other skills, I believe that multitasking is something you can develop and improve and use strategically. Here are some tips to help you do that:

• Start small. Don’t multitask your rocket science work AND your brain surgery work right out of the gate. Instead, multitask a few different less-essential things until you get good at multitasking.

• Triage your work. Not everything should be multitasked. Driving, for example, should remain separate from reading, talking on the phone, putting on make-up, etc. But a lot of things – things that aren’t life-and-death situations – are able to be multitasked. Multitasking on billable work is debatable. I’m personally of the opinion that if you charge by the hour, you shouldn’t be multitasking billable hours. But people who bill by the project and can take as long as they want on something might be okay with multitasking. Especially if they…

• Know the bandwidth limit. Even awesome multitaskers have a limit. It’s like bandwidth. You only have so much mental capacity to use at once. Most tasks don’t take up all of your bandwidth. Some tasks (like driving your car) should probably take more bandwidth than you think they should. But talking on the phone to a coworker doesn’t need to take up as much bandwidth as it does.

• Group like projects together. The most effective kind of multitasking is when you group similar projects together. For example, if you manage half a dozen Twitter accounts, and you want to spend a focused amount of time on Twitter, you can multitask this easily.

• Prep for multitasking. Before you multitask, make sure you have everything ready to go. The purpose of multitasking is quickly lost if you have to get up from your desk or if you spend your time searching for a folder or opening programs. (That’s another reason why grouping like projects together is a good multitasking idea).

• Keep a list. A list of “multitaskable” tasks should be handy. This should be stuff that you can do whenever you have some extra bandwidth. Email sorting, quick email responses, filing, Twitter-follower-list-adding, reviewing your schedule for the day. These are low bandwidth activities that you always need to do. Keep that list nearby. When you discover some extra bandwidth, pull out the list.

• Set time limits on your work and focus on improving your multitasking skill. The purpose of multitasking is to get more work done in less time. So if you have two projects that each take an hour, and it takes you two hours to do them both, then it doesn’t matter if you do them at the same time or if you do them consecutively; there’s no time saved. Instead, focus on doing both of them well in 1 to 1.5 hours in total. This will take some time because multitasking is a skill.

• Have a goal. This is a good time management tip for anyone, whether or not you want to multitask. But if you do multitask, it will make your multitasking easier. That’s because consciously knowing the goal can help you unconsciously work toward it. And, you won’t be half-heartedly working around the project without a clear purpose; you’ll be actively working toward the goal.

• Get into the zone. Multitasking isn’t something you do to avoid real effort. It’s something you do when you are focused and operating at your peak. If you find that you’re trying to multitask but you’re only doing one thing at a time, put something aside until you can focus. I don’t juggle but it seems kind of like juggling: You see jugglers starting with 3 items and then once they have a rhythm, they seem to be able to effortlessly add more in later. Compare that to someone who tries to just START juggling 17 items at once. Seems harder to do. (Back me up here, jugglers!)

Multitasking is a muscle that needs to be worked. When you schedule your day, sit down and quickly identify two or three projects you can multitask at the same time. Work at it. Evaluate how you did. Try again another day. Build your multitasking muscle strategically.

Start juggling!

Related posts:

1. Making Work Easier: Tactical Tips for Better Productivity
2. 7 Time Management Tips To Enhance Your Business
3. Effective Lead Generation in 10 Minutes

You can see that the map creator has divided the category of “content sharing” into sub-categories based on the type of content sharing that you can do: Text/Slideshows, Audio sites, Image sharing, Music sharing. It’s an interesting mix of opportunities and some readers might be wondering where they’ll find the time to do all of it.

Here’s what I would suggest:

First, don’t bother trying to do all of it. You won’t be able to. Or, if you are able to, you won’t have time for stuff like revenue generation. So forget trying to reach out to everyone. Instead, pick a few places where you can make a splash.

• Start by figuring out where your customers like to hang out. Pick 3-5 of the places and see if your target market is spending time there. (Is there content for them? Are they linking to those sites from their sites? Are they talking about it on Twitter?

• See what the competition is like there. Are your competitors already dominating the discussion? If they are, have they left any room for you to shoehorn your way in or are you going to be just another voice in the crowd?

• If there is room on a site where your customers are hanging out but your competitors haven’t tapped out, then get in there!

Second, once you’ve found a couple places, decide what you are going to do there. I would recommend that you don’t post the same content everywhere. Don’t repost your Squidoo content on HubPages, for example. Make sure you’re taking the time to produce unique content at each place according to the types of things that your market is looking for in those places. For example, perhaps I find that my readers on Squidoo typically look for productivity content that has a business-building aspect to it, while my readers on HubPages might be looking for business-building content with a productivity twist. It’s a subtle distinction but the important thing is that you figure out what your readers want and give it to them (while staying true to your brand, of course).

Third, avoid taking on new channels until you have built up good habits and a reputation in these channels. As I coach clients, I’ve found that many of them can be tempted to add the latest, shiniest opportunity to their marketing arsenal without first excelling at the ones they are already using.

Troubleshooting: If you look at each of the content sharing sites and you think that they are so jam-packed with competitors that your voice will never be heard, then consider a different approach. Perhaps, on that channel only (and not as a broad marketing plan for your business), consider doing something totally different. Write some news on your industry and post it on Squidoo instead of yet another tips page like all of your competitors are doing. Take photos about your industry and post them on Flickr. Do reviews of the products in your industry and post them on Triond. In other words, find something that meshes with your brand but takes a fresh approach to the ideas that your readers are looking for.

Content sharing isn’t just about you finding another place to share your insight. Of course that’s important, but I believe content sharing is about a targeted approach to finding places where your insight will be valued and then understanding what you can do to provide content that meets the needs of your audience.

Related posts:

1. “What Should I Do?” – Location Sharing
2. “What Should I Do?” – Social bookmarking
3. Squidoo Success in Ten Minutes a Day

There are a lot of opportunities to do a project really productively. If it’s a complex project, you can break it down into smaller parts. You can apply various project management techniques to get the project done. You can outsource or multitask or automate and get even more done in the same space of time. But so much productivity hinges on one key element: Everything starting in the right place.

Last night I opened the drawer of my filing cabinet and saw a few papers on top. I normally try to file stuff away as it comes in but a recent period of extreme busyness meant that these papers didn’t get filed away with the same determination that I normally have when filing. Instead of just filing them away last night, I asked myself why I didn’t file them away earlier. I had been very good about filing but I had apparently slacked a bit in the past couple of weeks. If things got as busy again as they were recently, how could I ensure that I would file these papers immediately instead of letting them build up?

The answer is in the set-up of the files themselves. They were set up to reflect the way I ran my business a few years ago when I set up my filing system. It’s no longer the way I do business today. We’re not talking about huge changes, but there have been some changes; enough to make filing slightly more time consuming than it needed to be.

That got me thinking about other things around my office that weren’t optimized for my business today. Were they set up for the way I do business now or were they set up for the way I did business when I first set everything up? I have the good fortune of having recently renovated my office, which was a natural way to “update” the placement of my “stuff” (and, subsequently, it helped to improve productivity).

How is your office laid out? Is your stuff – your files, your computer, your resources, even your pens and pencils – as efficiently placed as they could be? They may have been convenient for you when you first set up your office but if they haven’t moved in the years you have been operating your business, it’s possible that it needs to change. And, it’s possible that you might not even realize you need to change because you have unconsciously become accustomed to the inconvenience, as I did with my filing system. Are you reaching too far for your pens, for example?

Yes, even something as simple as moving your jar of pens to somewhere else on your desk can have a huge impact on you. It might sound silly but it could mean the difference between keeping your focus on your computer and reaching for a pen without looking, or, stopping what you are doing to reach across the table for a pen because that’s what you’ve been unconsciously doing for years (when you put those pens there back when you needed them there).

While moving a jar of pens might not seem like a lot, it adds up. A few seconds saved here, your attention remains focused there, and before you know it, you’re more productive and focused and you are saving tons of time.

Your workspace is your mission control and you need it to be the most efficient, focused, and comfortable place it can be. Think about how you run your business and consider how things have changed since you first set up your office.

BONUS: While thinking about this blog post, I came across this relevant article at Harvard Business Review, Organize Your Workspace for Maximum Productivity. Take a look and get productive!

Related posts:

1. Getting More Done With “Oh Sh*t” Productivity
2. Enhancing productivity and profitability by outsourcing
3. Making Work Easier: Tactical Tips for Better Productivity

Paul Lemberg and I share a similar goal in the work that we each do. Ultimately, both of us strive to help business owners use productivity to increase business success.

Paul has developed something called the Formula 5 system in which he lists 5 aspects of a business that can be altered to grow the business. The first 3 parts of his Formula 5 are:

1) Increase your conversion rate.
2) Increase your value per customer.
3) Increase the number of leads.

You can read more about them here: Formula Five – Learn the Secrets to Growth.

Okay, all of that is just my introduction to this video — Time Management Secrets: Getting More Done — which is the first of a 4-part video series (each one is about 15 minutes long). In the first video, about 2 – 3 minutes into the video, Paul says that his research has found people only spend 2 1/2 productive hours of time each day. Yikes! It’s scary but probably true. When you add up the phone calls and the email and the coffee breaks, he’s probably not far off.

Now, here’s what makes Paul’s system so compelling to me and I think you’ll like it too. Paul says that asking us to make adjustments so that we double our conversion rate or triple our value to our customer or get 6 hours of productive time each day is really unrealistic. It’s difficult to make such a profound change all at once. It’s disruptive to the business. (Yes, we WANT to make big improvements but they’re not likely to be healthy and long lasting).

So Paul says what we really need to do to make actual, valuable change in our businesses is to just increase something by 15%.

That’s it!

So if you acquire 20 leads in one month, try to get 23 leads the next month. Although we may dream about getting 40 leads next month, it’s not likely going to happen. But 3 more leads is very possible. And if you earn $1,000 per customer per month, try to get $1,150 per customer the next month. 15% isn’t that hard to get, is it!?!

And the same goes for your time. Since we only get 2 1/2 productive hours of time each day, a 15% increase is 22.5 minutes. So, although it might be difficult to bump up an average productive time each day to 5 hours (doubling it from 2 1/2), it’s easy to get an extra 22.5 minutes with just a few small changes.

The strength of this system is not one 15% change and then a subsequent retirement on the beach because of the increased wealth. Rather, I find the strength of this system is that these 15% incremental improvements can take place again and again over a period of time and they are painless to implement and, when you add them up, they can really be quite profound.

Here’s my advice: As we approach April, choose 5 measurable aspects of your business and aim to improve just one aspect by 15% each week.

Related posts:

1. Business Growth in Ten Minutes a Day… IS Possible
2. Understanding Membership Programs in Ten Minutes – Part 1
3. Mastering Sales and Selling More -Part 1