See What They Had to Say: Productivity blogs preferred by small and medium business owners
FPO
LifeClever Chanpory Rith
Anne Zelenka Web Worker Dailys
We gave members of our Small & Medium Business Printing Wiki the opportunity to vote on the best business blogs from a selection written by some of the best business bloggers on the web. The top three blogs in the Productivity category have been published in this HP eBook for you to download, print and reference as you need inspiration
Table of Contents
Productivity, 10 Tips for Keeping Your Desk Clean and Tidy Posted by Lifeclever, Chanpory Rith on August 21, 2007 .................................................................................................... 4
Productivity, 15 Ways to Maximize Your Lunch Hour Posted by Lifeclever, Chanpory Rith on June 26, 2007 ....................................................................................................... 9 Productivity, 20 Different Ways to Manage Your To-Dos Posted by Web Worker Daily, Anne Zelenka on January 7, 2007 ......................................................................... 12
Productivity
10 Tips for Keeping Your Desk Clean and Tidy
Posted by Lifeclever, Chanpory Rith on August 21, 2007
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Productivity
A messy desk is a sign of creativity and imagination. This is the excuse I gave myself for the mountain of papers, knickknacks, and San Pellegrino bottles normally piled on my desk at work. Truth is, I’m just lazy. When I started wasting more and more time looking for lost items instead of being a brilliant creative person, I knew I had to do something. I got my desk organized, and have been miraculously keeping it clean for the past three months.
Here’s how:
1. Use a system to manage paper Most of the clutter on my desk is paper. In a recent post, I wrote about a system for organizing files on the computer. The same system can be modified to work with physical files: Setup: A place for everything. First, you’ll need a few items: Inbox This is a standard stackable letter tray. Put documents that don’t yet have a place in here. This may be items like memos, print-outs, and random things placed on your desk by random people. Incubate box On top of your Inbox tray, stack another letter tray to put items that are “on hold” These are items you . aren’t yet ready to do or complete in here. They may be articles you’re thinking of reading, sketches for potential projects, and information about events you might attend. Action & Tickler file For this, Merlin Mann of 43 Folders recommends an A-Z accordion file. Put papers requiring an action that takes more than 2 minutes in here. This may be items such as forms to fill out and documents to proofread. You can also use a tickler file to supplement this. Check out Merlin’s tutorial for more details. Current projects rack For this, use a file rack or small file box to hold folders for active projects. Create one folder per project.
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“If it takes more than two minutes to do, put it in your Action or Tickler file.Or if it’s project-related, put it in your current projects file rack.”
Filing cabinet Put completed projects, general reference items, and anything else you might want to look at again in a filing cabinet. Use simple flat folders organized from A-Z, instead of hanging folders. Dump boxes (trash can, recycling bin, shredder) I avoided throwing away paper because I didn’t have access to a trash can, felt guilty about tossing recyclable paper, or was afraid of throwing away confidential materials. Having a trash can, recycling bin, and shredder for each of these situations eliminates these hesitancies. Usage: Process, Organize, Review—You’re now all set and ready to clean your desk. The steps below are adapted from David Allen’s GTD system:
Process:
Put all papers on your desk in your Inbox tray. If it doesn’t fit, just put it next to it for now. Go through each file one by one. Ask yourself: can I act on this file? If yes: Do it If it takes less than two minutes, just do it. Delegate it If you’re not the right person to do it, then send it to someone who can. Defer it If it takes more than two minutes to do, put it in your Action or Tickler file. Or if it’s project-related, put it in your current projects file rack.
Organize:
If the file has no action for you to do, you can: Trash it, recycle it, or shred it, if you don’t need it. Put it in the Incubate tray if you’re not ready to deal with it. Archive in your filing cabinet for later.
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Review
The most important part of the system is setting up reviews for you to process your Inbox and organize your files: Daily Process your Inbox as often as you like throughout the day, but do it at least twice a day: once around noon and again at day’s end. You must empty it at the end of the day, so that your inbox is nice and fresh in the morning. Weekly At the end of the week, move completed projects into your filing cabinet. Go through your Incubate tray and decide if you’re ready to act on any of the files, following the steps you would to process your Inbox. Take items in your recycling bin to the main recycling bin in the office. Monthly At the end of the month, go through your filing cabinet and prune any files you don’t think you’ll ever need again. 2. Banish Post-it notes Stop using Post-its to remind yourself of important information. They’re just to easy to lose and they’re ugly when plastered all over your monitor. Instead, keep a little notebook on your desk to write down reminder notes. Better yet, use GTD tools such as the hipster PDA and kGTD to keep track of what you need to do. 3. Trash those printouts After printing a file and completing the action associated with it, throw it away. You already have a copy of it on your computer, so you don’t keep it lying around on your desk. 4. Keep blank file folders and a label maker at your desk The reason why you don’t file is because it’s so tedious to find folders and label them. With a stack of blank folders and label maker within reach, you have no excuse.
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“I got my desk organized, and have been miraculously keeping it clean for the past three months.”
5.
Ritualize your reviews Schedule time in iCal or other calendaring program to clean your desk at the end of each day. After two or three weeks, the habit will stick.
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Throw away pens Why do you need so many pens? Throw them all out except for two or three. If it doesn’t have a cap, toss it.
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Say no to schwag Yes, it’s hard to resist the ugly free crap at conferences and internal office events, but avoid taking them just because they’re free. This includes all those cheap pens, stickers, free magazines, brochures, postcards, and anything else that will likely end up littered on your desk. If you need a reminder of a particular vendor, take your PDA or notebook with you and write the company’s name and URL down.
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Take your books home Take home any books you don’t use on a regular basis for work. You’ll have more space to work, and if you have to leave your job for any reason (heaven forbid), you’ll have fewer heavy items to pack.
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Eat away from your desk Eating at your desk encourages trash like paper bags, cups, and utensils to stick around your desk. I’ve been guilty of this and have the crumbs in my keyboard to prove it. To prevent this, eat somewhere else. Preferably, out of the office. Doing this also allows you a mental break from work where you can enjoy your meal without phone or computer interruptions.
10. Limit photo frames on your desk Pictures of loved ones remind us of what’s important in our lives. More than three on your desk, however, is a distraction. Instead, use Flickr to store photos which you can view in a slideshow during a break.
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Productivity
15 Ways to Maximize Your Lunch Hour
Posted by Lifeclever, Chanpory Rith on June 26, 2007
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Productivity
In our obsession with productivity, you might think this article is about how to multi-task and use your lunch hour to work more efficiently. It’s not. In fact, your lunch hour should be the least “productive” moment in your day. Lunch is a micro-vacation from work. It should be relaxed, pleasurable, and enjoyable. If your lunch hour only lasts a mere 20 minutes—or just doesn’t exist anymore—here’s how to turn it around and make it joyful: 1. Put it on your calendar To avoid getting stuck in back-to-back meetings all day, schedule your lunch as if it’s a meeting in itself. On shared calendar systems like MeetingMaker or iCal, make sure the office can see that you’re booked at this time. Your lunch is sacred, so don’t allow anyone to book meetings with you during this time. 2. Eat lunch at the same time everyday. Once it’s on your calendar, eat lunch consistently everyday at the same time. This keeps your body in a rhythm, but it also trains your office to know when you’re unavailable. 3. Go an hour later or earlier. Beat the long lines, by going to lunch during off-peak times, such as 11am-noon or 1–2 pm. You’ll get speedier service and no stress-inducing crowds. Since you’ll be in the office while everyone else is eating, you’ll also get fewer interruptions and more time to work. 4. 5. Automate lunch choices with the Wheel of Food. Stop wasting time deciding where to eat. Spin the Wheel of Food, and let it pick for you. Yelp it Once you land on a restaurant, use review sites such as Yelp to research it. Keep an eye out for reports of stuck-up waitresses, disgusting food, and breeding cockroaches. 6. Map it Avoid spending your lunch time getting lost while trying to find the restaurant. Use Google Maps or Yahoo Maps to get directions before heading out. 7. Ditch your phone. Eliminate interruptions and compulsive text-messaging by leaving your mobile phone at work. I admit, this is my worst habit. It takes away time from truly enjoying a delicious meal. And when other people are with me, it’s just plain rude.
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“Your lunch hour should be the least ‘productive’ moment in your day. Lunch is a micro-vacation from work.”
8. 9.
Don’t bring work to lunch. Laptops, work files, and meeting notes should also remain at the office. Don’t work, eat! Eat away from your desk. To fully separate work from lunch, eat away from your desk. You’ll avoid the temptation to check email, take phone calls, or browse gossip sites. Plus, it keeps your desk clean and free of crumbs.
10. Don’t overeat. You must enjoy the pleasure of eating, but be careful about overstuffing yourself. If you get too full at lunch, you’ll enter a food coma when you return to work. So instead of being alert and more efficient, you’ll just be drowsy and unproductive. 11. Eat slower. It takes about 20 minutes for your brain to register when you’re full. So to avoid overeating, eat slowly for 20 minutes before deciding if you’re still hungry. This helps you avoid unpleasant food comas. And according to scientists in fancy lab coats, it also helps you lose weight. 12. Take the full lunch break. Done eating before your lunch hour is up? Don’t rush back to the office. Take the rest of your break to take a walk, read a book, or twirl under the sun. Do anything, except work. 13. Pack your lunch. To make more time available for relaxation during your lunch hour, pack lunch ahead of time. You’ll avoid the hassle of dealing with restaurants, and it’ll save you money. 14. Get a frequent diner card. If you visit the same restaurant often, ask for a frequent diner’s card. Besides saving you a little bit of money, you’ll get treated better as a regular customer. 15. Make lunch dates. Make your lunch more enjoyable and social by going with friends. Just try not to talk about work.
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Productivity
20 Different Ways to Manage Your To-Dos
Posted by Web Worker Daily, Anne Zelenka on January 7, 2007
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Productivity
How many ways are there to manage your task list? Almost as many as there are people with tasks to do. Here are 20 different ways of tracking your to-dos, with examples of each. You probably use more than one of these options, depending on what you’re trying to manage and what suits your temperament. Or maybe you have some other ideas. If so, share them here. 1. Free web-based to do list managers. Remember the Milk supports sharing lists, email add of tasks, and SMS reminders. Ta-da List is 37Signals’ stripped-down version of their for-pay Backpack information manager. Voo2Do includes project management capabilities like support for software scheduling and tasks organized by project. 2. The Hipster PDA. A pile of index cards held together with a small binder clip plus a Fisher Space Pen as a stylus. Carry it in your pocket. Take notes on the cards. Categorize using rainbow-colored cards. Reorder as necessary. Learn more on the Hipster PDA wiki. 3. Text files. You can put everything in one big text file. You can implement GTD with text files. If you get really excited about your text files, try the Todo.txt scripts that give you powerful editing, searching, sorting, and progress reporting. 4. Task list integrated with your desktop or online calendar. The 30 Boxes online calendar offers taggable to do lists. Yahoo’s calendar incorporates a simple task list. Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Entourage, and the Mac’s iCal software all offer task management capabilities. 5. Word processor or spreadsheet, desktop or online. Of course you can use Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. Create task lists that look just as you want, print them out, and get the tactile pleasure of scribbling off tasks as you complete them. Online versions make it supereasy to share lists with your family members or coworkers, like when you want to add items to the grocery list. Two biggies in this category are Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Zoho Office.
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“How many ways are there to manage your task list? Almost as many as there are people with tasks to do.”
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The Emergent Task Planner. PDF files that you print out. Developed by David Seah, these pages guide your work each day using time boxing. You list what you need to do, estimate how long each will take, and schedule them in blocks of time.
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To do list widget on an Ajax start page. I like Netvibes’ to do list module. When you check off an item, it remains on the list, but crossed out, giving you feel-good feedback as to what you’ve completed. But you don’t have to use an actual task list widget. The start pages offer various sticky notes and text editor widgets that could be used also.
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Paper-based 1980s-era planner. Remember Filofax? The Franklin Planner? No self-respecting Gordon Gekko wannabe of the late eighties would be without a bulging binder of to-dos and calendar items and contacts. Then the Palm Pilot came along and it was named the “Filofax of the nineties. Now paper planners are still used, but they no longer ” qualify as status symbols.
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Desktop note taking app. You might use this as an intermediate spot between your brain and a more structured to do list or project planner. Check out our profile of four of them: Sidenote and mynotes on the Mac, EverNote and OneNote on Windows. Readers also mentioned VoodooPad (Mac), Yojimbo (Mac), and Tomboy (Linux) among possibilities to consider.
10. Build-your-own custom online to do list manager with Dabble DB, Ning, or Coghead. This new breed of do-it-yourself web app platforms make it easier than ever before to create sharable online software. Creating a to do list app would be a good way of checking out how capable these services are. 11. Sticky notes everywhere. Not electronic stickies—real stickies. They’re not ideal as a primary means of managing tasks but come on, admit it, haven’t you put a sticky note on the bezel of your computer monitor to remind yourself to do something? I also put stickies on the front door when I need to remember to take something with me the next time I leave. Plus, sticky notes are great for doing preliminary project planning–write each task on a sticky note, perhaps categorized by color–and shift them around on a big board to see how tasks fit together.
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12. Mind mapping. Feeling stuck in a rut? Not making progress on your goals? Mind mapping can open up new ways of thinking about how you should move forward. You can doodle a mind map on a piece of paper or use mind mapping software. You can choose from open source (e.g., FreeMind), freeware or shareware, or forpurchase (e.g., MindManager). 13. Open-source personal information manager (PIM) on your own web server. Perfect for someone who knows how to hack and wants to customize their information management. Tudu lists is available as source code or in a hosted version. Tracks, built in Ruby, implements GTD and can be installed as desktop software because it comes with a built-in webserver. 14. Fancy notebook with a fancy pen. If you love interacting with beautiful, well-made things, maybe this is the choice for you. Moleskine is the most well-known of the prestige notebooks, but it’s not the only one. Paperblanks offers beautifully designed notebooks that are almost works of art in themselves. What kind of pen is worthy of those notebooks? Perhaps a Montblanc or a Conway Stewart. 15. PDA software with its desktop counterpart. For example, Palm devices like the Treo come with Palm Desktop. Makes sync ultra-easy. But you might give up some features you want in your task manager in exchange for ease of synchronization. 16. Desktop to do list app for your PC or Mac. To Do X for Mac allows you to print in many different ways–great if you like to enter and manage tasks online, but print and carry lists with you. There are, of course, lots of shareware options for Windows and Mac including To-do List 2.2.1 for Windows. 17. Or create your own desktop app. If you’re at all familiar with Microsoft Access or another desktop database management program, it’d be easy to create a table of tasks with whatever attributes you want: due date, category, project, and so forth.
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“Now paper planners are still used, but they no longer qualify as status symbols.”
18. Outliner software, web or desktop-based. Good if you are managing multiple projects but don’t want the overhead or extra complexity of a project management app with Gantt and PERT charts. Buy a Mac, and you’ll get OmniOutliner. If you’re an RSS geek, you might like to use Dave Winer’s OPML Editor. On Windows, you might try NoteMap. Want to combine your outliner with a mobile PDA? Try the Carson method, one geek’s method that uses OmniOutliner with the Hipster PDA. 19. Online wiki. Free wiki services like PBwiki and Wikispaces make it easy to create, edit, and share web pages. Some wiki platforms support interaction beyond simple creation and editing of pages. Have you heard of Monkey GTD, a “GTD inspired task manager” that uses TiddlyWiki plus plugins to implement getting things done? Here’s Monkey GTD in action. 20. A piece of paper with a pen. Easiest and cheapest. I use looseleaf paper, one page per “context” (at computer, at home, errands, to call) and staple them together. It’s completely mobile, just fold and go, and I love scribbling out items when I complete them.
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