As we move forward, Kathryn will help me figure out what else an assistant might do to help better my experiences. I have some ideas on what else she could take on, and so does she, but let me just say that the experiment so far has been really great.

What’s awesome about Kathryn is that she’s very personable. She’s very interested in being engaging, and she is quick to act as an advocate for people I haven’t yet replied to who deserve responses. So far, so good, I say.

I asked Kathryn a few questions about the experience, too. I thought those might prove useful.

So, you’ve been with me for a handful of weeks. What’s your impression of my life, if judged from my inbox?

Your life is FAST PACED and at times, intense. It’s full of information. Also the people connecting are amazing – I am very fortunate to be working with someone who is so highly respected and well liked.

You’re really into the independent filmmaking world. Has anything about helping me influenced your work there yet?

The business side of independent filmmaking almost always gets over looked. Working with you is teaching me to be clearer, look for value, establish the relationship and work with the intent of being genuine. Filmmaking is all about telling stories, infact, very similiar to marketing, PR, filmmaking – Social Media.

What is the most common thing you see in my inbox?

REQUESTS: to comment .share, speak, read, look, ponder, blog, meet, tweet :), help, listen, advise, join, foster, introduce and many more! And compliments :).

What is it like trying to tackle some of the workload for me? Like with the airline stuff, for instance?

Sometimes things just rumble busily along and other times things are really hectic, “projects” like the airilne stuff take the forefront and other things fall behind. I think we have been finding our way and are seeming to settle down into a nice little system now. I’m feeling more confident and YOU are more than open to changes and approachable and extremely appreciative. That makes it easy :) Plus it’s FUN and I’m learning TONS!

What do you normally like to talk about on Twitter?

I talk about what comes to mind! I talk about value, engaging, commenting, music, causes I support, RT when i spot something interesting, i like to share information, and I’m hungry to LEARN – follow me and see what I’m saying!

And there you have it. It’s been an interesting experience and I’m looking forward to more. I wrote this up to keep you posted on what it’s like working with an assistant like Kathryn Jennex, and also to give you a sense of who she is when working with me.

Any questions for Kathryn or me?

Founder and all around super nice guy, Jared Goralnick has such a personable level of service to the product that any early bumps in the road I felt during the beta phase were cleaned and treated nicely, with lots and lots of personal follow-up. (Disclaimer: the mistake ended up being ME not the software.)

Want to see a bit more?

Be sure to check out AwayFind and then also follow @TechnoTheory on Twitter.

How to Do More With Less Time

I’m finding that there are two keys: have a simple system, and automate everything you can. In both cases, this allows for more time to do the work that matters to you. Remember, a good chunk of our day is spent doing things that don’t really pay us back (in any sense of the word). Part of this comes with a philosophical perspective to consider, and the other is pure business reasoning. Let’s talk about the mindset stuff behind a simple system first.

Have a Simple System

I’m a lifelong fan of Dr. Stephen R. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and also his later book, the 8th Habit. To the end, I work hard to begin with an end in mind. That helps me center on what I should be doing. For those of you who haven’t read it, essentially think like this:

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

Sounds simple, but it’s not. If you have big things to do and little things to do, focus on the bigger ones. If you fill your day with answering email, your inbox will be empty but your important work won’t be done.

If I were to sum up WHAT I think about to keep my day flowing well, it’s this:

What’s going to move me closer towards my goals? (where “my goals” equals company goals, personal goals, family goals).

Now, let’s move into the tools.

Tools to Automate And Free Up More Time

Once you’ve got a sense of what you want to do with your time, you have to start guarding it. There are many opportunities in a given day when people will ask for some of your time, or distractions will snatch a bit away, or idle time will shift from being a refreshing pause into being a wallowing gap in what you’re doing. Time is the one variable you can work with more than any of the others. Here are some ways to give yourself a bit more time.

AwayFind is Jared Goralnick’s tool to help you keep your less urgent emails at bay. I’ve been using it ever since going through Stever Robbins You Are Not Your Inbox program. Essentially, AwayFind lets you set up a small gate on your inbox. People receive an auto-responder message (you customize it) saying that you’ve received their mail and that you’ll respond when you can. BUT, if this is urgent, just click this link to fill out this quick form.

What it does for me is gives me a way to tell people that I saw their email come in, that I’ll get right to them when I’ve a moment, and it gives the person the ability to tell me something is urgent. (By the way, so far four people have submitted via the “urgent” form simply to say, ‘I just sent you email. Did you get it?’ Not exactly urgent, so I tweaked my message to hopefully clean that matter up.) AwayFind is in Beta, but if you beg, Jared might give you a free-level account.

Jott lets you call a number, record a brief voice message, and that message comes out in text format. You can import your contact book in there, and thus, you can both send messages to yourself for reminders and later information retrieval, but you can also send quick voice messages to others as text emails. It’s a great way to get back some time while driving in the car.

SpinVox (which I talked about briefly here) is a voicemail service that translates speech to text for up to 3 minutes of voice. I’ve only been using it for a few days on my cell phone, and I’m LOVING what it does for me. I’m often in an area where I can’t pick up my phone (meetings, webinars, etc), but I can usually scan a text reproduction of someone’s voice message very quickly. I get back LOTS of time using SpinVox to cover my voicemail messages.

Google Reader is my RSS reader of choice. I use it for both reading blogs and news sources, but also for tracking social media information from other places. For example, Twitter Search has an RSS subscription button for the searches you cook up, so if you need to dashboard some social media activity, throwing it into a capable, fast-paced reader is important. I get lots of time back reading blogs and scanning information rapidly through Google Reader.

Firefox is a fast, flexible, customizable web browser. I use it more than any other application on my computer. To that end, I use it smartly, as well. I use the tabs feature to keep up a few pages that I need throughout a day (like my RSS reader, like some search information, etc). I also use all the keyboard shortcuts so that I can move even faster.

Evernote is a great tool for capturing snippets of information. It’s a lot more powerful than that, including letting you snap photos, and having a built in optical character recognition system. It also has a mobile client for iPhone and Windows Mobile, a standalone client for Mac and Windows, and a web sync. This saves me time in lots of ways, including making sure I have important notes at the ready wherever I am.

Also use some kind of text replacement application. I use TextExpander for the MAC all the time when typing. I have complete emails stored and at the ready in there, as well as all kinds of nifty html replacement information to help me with repetitive tasks.

If you can afford it, get a wireless cellular modem for your computer. I got one from work and now I have no idea how I wasn’t doing this all along.

What I Do With All This

Giving you a list of applications and saying this will make your life better is like sending you a box of paint and wishing you well on your new portrait career. Let’s go through a few ideas on how to do more with less time, and how I use my philosophy, methods, and tools to do that. Let’s just run through that now:

• Guard your time. If you have work to do, ask yourself repeatedly if this work moves forward your main goals. Learn how to minimize the work that doesn’t.
• Work towards checking email less frequently in a day, and also not being a slave to your phone. We forget all the time that these tools are supposed to be helpful, not constant distractions.
• One trick there: kill notifier lights, buttons, sounds, and other indicators, and instead, schedule a task on your calendar or however you keep your appointments, where that task is to check your mail. (I haven’t gotten that far yet, but I’m working at it).
• Find pockets of idle time and use them for something productive. When I’m grocery shopping, I Jott little audio reminders to myself to follow up on later. When I’m sitting in a waiting room, I read books on subject matter that nourishes my career. I use drive time for LOTS of things to go along with driving.
• Build your projects to be modular, so that you can work on them when time comes up. Blog posts are a great example. I keep a text file where I can jot ideas for future posts. Then, I go back and flesh those in from time to time, or delete them, if I can’t remember what my notes meant.
• Learn polite ways to decline things. We say YES to wayyyyyyyy to many things. Learn very warm and polite ways to say no. (Here’s a great audio podcast by Stever Robbins about saying “no” that I need to listen to often.)
• Decide how much of your down time is really recharging you, and whether some of it is just idle for idle’s sake.

I know that some folks are going to retort and say that rest is important, that overworking one’s self is a bad thing, things like that. You’re absolutely right. All those things are true. I love relaxation and rest. I love finding time to rest and recharge, play with my kids, that kind of thing. My point is, if you need to find more time, there are ways to go about doing it.

Your Additions

How are you finding more time? What have you found out about the way you work that might be helpful to others? What tools are you using that maybe we should consider for this list? Let’s talk about that in the comments.

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.

Photo credit, Jarosław Pocztarski

]]> http://www.chrisbrogan.com/how-to-do-more-with-less-time/feed/ 89 http://www.chrisbrogan.com/ten-tech-solutions-to-improve-your-productivity/ http://www.chrisbrogan.com/ten-tech-solutions-to-improve-your-productivity/#comments Thu, 14 Aug 2008 02:57:58 +0000 ceb http://www.chrisbrogan.com/?p=2715 Social media takes up a good deal of time. Between reading blogs, visiting Twitter to check in with people, trips to Facebook and other social networks, the old tasks like keeping up with email and the like can be daunting. I’ve compiled a list of technology solutions that I thought might help you out. We can certainly add more ideas to the comments section.

Ten Tech Solutions To Improve Your Productivity

1. Get a system. I’m listening to Stever Robbins, who just put together You Are Not Your Inbox, an audio program that will help you manage your email.
2. Get a proxy. Try out Jared Goralnick’s Away Find. It helps you with a sort of virtual message manager.
3. Practice keeping your inbox at zero. (I’ve explained how I tamed my inbox before.)
4. Learn shortcuts. Here are keyboard shortcuts for Firefox, Safari, IE7, Gmail, Google Reader, and I’m sure you can find more.
5. Cut down on your browsing. Lifehacker (and Julien Smith) pointed out Freedom, a Mac application. I’m sure there’s a PC version. See also Rescue Time
6. Use computer shortcuts and launches. For Macs, it’s Quicksilver . For Windows, I found 10 Quicksilver alternatives listed here. (Disclaimer: I’m not good with Quicksilver. I use Spotlight still).
7. Don’t read blogs directly from the website. At least not first. Start in a good feed reader. I prefer Google Reader. It’s fast, has keyboard shortcuts, and is flexible in letting me bookmark, share, and email posts that I find useful.
8. Find extra time and use it. One way is to use Jott on your phone to send brief messages, to leave yourself reminders, and to take notes for future use.
9. Set up text replacement. This lets you type a few letters and get back several words easily. For Macs, use TextExpander. For Windows, try Texter.
10. Keep good notes. I’m enamored with EverNote. I’ve used it to outline documents, plan conference content, store small lists of email addresses, and even tried the optical recognition feature for photos. It’s worth checking out.

You probably have several other productivity applications to suggest. We can put together quite a list in the comments, if that works for you. What are you doing to stay more productive?

Photo credit, Freshwater2006

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You’ll Need

• An archive folder (in Gmail, this is a button. On other systems, you need somewhere to store stuff, in case you need to search for details later).
• A calendaring software. I use Google Calendar.
• A project tracking software. I use Things for Mac. You could use anything lets you group projects into contexts.
• A file folder structure (online at least, and maybe mirrored in the real world – hat tip to my hero,Get it Done Guy, for this).
• Two processes: sorting when mail comes in, and reviewing your projects regularly.

Quick Overview

Next, I’ll explain how this all works together. I’ll talk about:

• Processing incoming mail.
• Using the Calendar.
• Project Structure.
• Consistent Review.

Processing Incoming Mail

Mail comes in- Check mail X times a day tops. (I’m trying for 4, but not there yet). When it comes in, see if you can just reply right away. Try to close all informational loops in one go. Points off for “ping pong” emails.

Process step 1- If it’s not a “right away” answer, sort it into a project area. I’m calling “project areas” out by context. In Getting Things Done, David Allen uses physical context, like @computer, @phone, @mall. In my case, I’ve used the following project contexts:

• Family/Home – my first priority, of course.
• Commitments – these are things where someone’s awaiting a response or action for me that takes more than a few minutes.
• Projects – These are more regimented things, like when the boss asks you to build out a new experience at a conference.
• Speaking – I do lots of speaking, and I want to keep my commitments straight, and my details sorted.
• Blogging – This has become where I stuff my “Hey, Chris. I have a social network about porcupines. Will you blog about it?” requests, so I can give them serious thought. (And yes, please feel free to contact me about your special amazing new whatever, if you think it fits the stuff I talk about here).
• Personal – This deals with things like “file your taxes” and “upgrade cell phone plan” which matter only to me.
• Research – I have lots of projects that are more for “rainy day” or “someday/maybe” so that’s where those go.

These are MY context areas. You could have completely different ones. More on projects in a bit.

Using the Calendar

If any of my projects are time specific, I put that information into Google Calendar. I then set up the reminders along the way. Further, if the project is large or lengthy, I set up little milestone time frames such that I will remember to work periodically on projects all the way up to their due date.

This part, the setting milestone reminders in the calendar, has changed my effectiveness, but I only JUST started doing this, so I’ll let you know if it makes the difference I hope it does.

Project Structure

UNDER my above-mentioned context areas are specific projects. For all my projects, I have tasks and milestones, notes, tags, and due dates for each part of the project. For example, I have notes and details on a new conference I’m launching for marketers for September in the Boston area.

Like I said earlier, I use Things for the Mac. You could use 37 Signals Basecamp, or MS Project, or whatever. The tool isn’t the point.

Consistent Review

This will all break down fast if I don’t focus on Things as my “go to place” to see what needs doing. And if I don’t make THAT the focus of my day while working on projects, and slip back into hounding my inbox, the whole thing will fail. You’ve heard that someone with two watches can’t tell time? I believe that someone with multiple systems of managing their tasks and projects will probably fall on their face.

I’ve scheduled reviews into Google Calendar recurring over the next few months. If it works, I’ll extend the schedule of little pings to check my responsibilities.

We’ll Check Back On This Later

This is a work in progress. I’ll let you know how it works out for me. In the mean time, tell me about you. How are YOU getting it all done? Does this make sense? Am I missing something obvious? How are you taming the savage project load?

By the way, Things doesn’t sync in any way with my BlackBerry and that’s a huge hole in this process. Hello? Could you fix that for me, Things? Anything?

Okay, what do YOU think?

For another completely different (and most likely better) method, check out the famed and touted Inbox Zero series by Merlin Mann.

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.

My screenshots are all done with Plasq’s Skitch application.

Three Types of Meetings

First, realize that for most businesses, there are essentially three types of meetings:

• Announcement meeting
• Status meeting
• Brainstorm meeting

These are in order of how fast they should run, and/or how interactive they should be.

Announcement Meeting

An ANNOUNCEMENT meeting should be super fast, and is reserved for announcements that you want to make in person to the team. You might use this to announce funding, to announce the addition of a new key employee (and at a startup, EVERY employee is key), or to announce a major shift in direction. It should have one speaker (two max), and doesn’t require much in the way of social media, except that you might consider videotaping the announcement (either for future use in documenting the company’s experiences, or as potential YouTube press release material).

Status Meeting

A STATUS meeting should be reasonably quick, and it’s a chance for all teams to be heard from. However, it’s not for discussion. Instead, the project manager calling the meeting (and at a startup, lots of people get to play project manager) should have gone around ahead of the meeting to get the status. Get all the conversation out of people by hearing them fully OUTSIDE the meeting.

Then, at the meeting, the person who gathered status merely announces that she’ll be running down the current status. Mention the department or person, give their very brief status message, and move on to the next person. It’s not a time for discussion. If someone wants to open up a discussion, interrupt as politely but as quickly as possible, and state that we can talk after the meeting, but the first and foremost part of the meeting is to run down a status.

Social media and Internet tools that are useful in meetings include a wiki for simple note taking, or perhaps an internal blog might be the better tool for that job. (What do YOU think?) You might use a tool like Utterz to record the status meeting, and team members can listen to the status directly after the fact.

Brainingstorming Meeting

A BRAINSTORMING meeting is probably the most open-ended and least simple to run. In these meetings, you’re asking people together to discuss open-ended futures. This should be clearly announced at the beginning of the meeting (as well as in the invite), so that people know it’s going to be a conversation and not a quick in-and-out.

Some things to make a meeting like this run better: lay out the goals and end-points so that people know what they’re aiming towards. When discussions get too tangential, help people back towards the goals and endpoints. Another tip would be to have one person outside the brainstorming flow with an eye on the time, and also a notion of the goals, so that he or she can guide people back onto the targets at hand.

Social media tools that are useful at brainstorming sessions are a mindmapping tool like Mindmeister, which captures free form ideas in a visual way, and can be later shared in a variety of methods. Other tools for brainstorming could be a shared tumbleblog on Tumblr, where people can clip in various bits of information to share what their vision of a project can be. Need visuals? Don’t forget Flickr for finding photos to use internally for the discussion (be mindful of their Creative Commons status).

Tips for ALL Meetings

The purpose of meetings is to get more than one person into informational alignment. In some cases, that’s asking for information. In lots of cases, that’s doling out status. Here are some tips for every type of meeting you hold:

• Brevity is your friend. Meetings over 1/2 hour are evil.
• Start on time. Finish on time. Meetings that wait for late people get later each time.
• The boss isn’t the boss of the meeting. If it’s your meeting, be firm, polite, and firm.
• Copious notes aren’t a virtue. Understanding next actions are a virtue.
• Every idea needs an owner. If you come up with what has to come next, the NEXT thing you do is find out who owns it, and when, roughly, they will accomplish their task.
• Some meetings are just well-worded email messages and an updated project plan, meaning NO meeting necessary. Trim where you can. People loathe meetings, and the people who love them usually have something wrong with them.

Brief Note for Participants

If you are a PARTICIPANT in meetings, most of what I’ve told you can’t help. However, pointing the person who runs meetings to a post like this one, or several posts over at Lifehack.org is certainly one way to get people thinking about how they run their meetings.

Your Ideas

What are some of your ways for coping in meetings? How have you used social media combined with meetings? Have you ever shown a podcast or a videoblog as part of your presentation materials at a business meeting?

Give us your status!

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog.

Photo credit, flgr