I saw this quote at my health club and thought you would enjoy it to begin the year.  I like it so much that I plan to use it in an upcoming productivity pointer. 

If you’re not on the distribution list use the form in the sidebar on the right.  I promise not to spam you.

If you like to collect quotes below is the text so that you can copy it:

“Every man is enthusiastic at times. Sometimes for 30 minutes, sometimes for 30 days. but its the man who has it for 30 years who makes a success of life!”
– Edward Butler

If it’s important to your business and/or career to network with others then using LinkedIn (the professional social networking site) correctly can streamline the process.

Earlier this year LinkedIn expert and consultant, Crystal Thies, wrote a guest post on this site about the Three Top LinkedIn Tips. That one post has generated so much interest that I asked Crystal to do an interview to discuss her system in more detail. When she was in town for a speaking engagement recently she was nice enough to carve out some time form her busy schedule to sit down with me.

She is an excellent resource so it will be well worth your time to listen. Just click the link below.

Click Here to listen

For more information about Crystal Thies and how to leverage LinkedIn to grow your business (and career) visit her website Crystal Clear Buzz

Link to Crystal’s LinkedIn Profile

Crystal’s Twitter address is crystalcleabuz (note it’s only one “z”)

Crystal’s interview can also be found on the On Target Podcast but I included a link here for your convenience. Please feel free to listen here or download it for later. If you’re an iTunes subscriber you can add the podcast to your feed by clicking here.

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Photo by Mark Jen

A few weeks ago I embarked on a new journey by switching all of my e-mail management to the Gmail client.  This was a big change for me since Outlook is such a big part of my personal management system.  At first I was a little nervous, but as I became more comfortable with the user interface and additional tools, I was hooked.

I used Gmail for years for a personal e-mail address but didn’t give it much thought as a business tool.  In a span of a few weeks several clients had told me that they switched everything to the platform.  I was skeptical at first, but the more I looked into it the more sense it made for me.

Best for small businesses and soloists

I have to add that this approach makes more sense for small businesses and solo operators than it does for individuals on corporate networks.  But it also gives the little guy the same functionality and ease-of-use enterprise Blackberry users have had for years.

Many people have asked me why I made the switch since I spend a great deal of time teaching time management with Outlook.  Like all technology it’s a matter of personal choice, not unlike choosing a pair of shoes. The fit is individual.

Here are my main reasons:

• I switched to Outlook (Office) 2010 to become familiar enough with it to create a new version of our Master Your Workload with Outlook.  Unfortunately 2010’s  contacts no longer sync with Gmail contacts without jumping through a number of hoops. I looked at moving my contacts to Gmail and it made sense.  Besides I’m a big fan of cloud applications. When I update a contact on my mobile device (right now I’m using the Android), desktop or laptop everything is changed at the source.  No more synchronizing.
• Same thing with e-mail.  I set forwarded all of my company e-mail boxes to my Gmail account and now I can manage everything live at the source no matter which device I use.  And I’m able to take advantage of Google’s IMAP.  As a longtime Blackberry user I had found the POP e-mail clunky on the Android, often not receiving messages.  Now that everything is in one place I haven’t missed anything.
• Using Gmail’s labels and filters gives you the ability to identify messages coming from multiple e-mail addresses. And I find them to be easier to use and versatile than Outlook’s Rules.
• If you use the right tools you can make your inbox do double duty as a mail receiving dock and as an adjunct to your task list.  I don’t advocate letting everything sit in your inbox so that you can use it as a task list.  But by using labels and filters correctly you can quickly archive e-mails (get them out of your inbox) and view them later as tasks.  This saves converting them to separate tasks.  If you are a fan of the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach you can make it mimic your lists.

In fact there’s a cool Gmail application called Action Inbox that allows you to manage your e-mail using GTD lists.  I hope to have the creator as a guest on our podcast soon.

What’s the catch?

On the downside, the task tool in Gmail is weak…very weak. But if most of your activity is driven by e-mail then it may not be a problem.  Also, you are at the mercy of the gods at Google.
Last week a friend told me that she had a Gmail virus that spammed everyone on her list in a matter of minutes.  Google immediately shut her down and it took hours to resolve the problem. In the meantime she had no access to her contacts and messages.

Be sure to back up everything on a regular basis.  Don’t trust your cloud provider, no matter who it is, to make sure your data is safe.  You may recall the incident a couple years ago when T-Mobile lost the e-mail of millions of customers.  Stuff happens.

Tips and new premium content here

As I use Gmail for my daily work I see how it can easily be integrated into our own WorkloadMaster time management system.  I’ll be sharing some tips and tricks here on the blog and will create a series of how-to training videos for our premium members.

This is a change in the text but not a big change in the path we’ve been on for the past several years. Personally I’m a geek and love technology.  Although I am well aware if its limitations and its tendency to get in our way.

Our personal technology can do a lot to help us do things faster and more efficiently with greater ease so that we can accomplish more or better yet spend more time enjoying life.  The downside it, technology can have a big learning curve, be very distracting, fragment your thoughts and interrupt your concentration.  We need our tech to be our servants not our masters (think Skynet Terminator fans).

The purpose of this site will be to help you make use of personal technology (personal computers, Internet, apps, mobile devices, software and assorted gadgets) to improve your personal productivity.  When it makes sense to do something without tech, I will be the first to point it out (“ the right tool for the right job”).  When something gets in the way, I will gladly point it out.

Our weekly productivity pointers will continue to focus on the human side of personal effectiveness.  If you don’t already receive them feel free to sign up in the box on the right.  I promise not to spam you or share your name with others.

Photo by: Tommi Koulainen

If you’ve listened to even a little of my training you know I harp about the evils perils of attempting to multitask. You can’t actually do two things at once you can only switch quickly between them, "switchtasking" it’s been called.

I won’t repeat myself here, but I will refer you to an excellent discussion about the subject that took place on the Marketing Online Live podcast a few weeks ago.  This episode has nothing to do with online marketing so if you have no interest in this subject fear not.  This one is all about the most effective use of your time.  It’s only about 12 minutes long so take a few minutes and give a listen.

The program is hosted by Internet marketing guru Paul Colligan and Alex Mandossian who is a leader in the tele-seminar field.  Mandossian is also a productivity expert in his own right with a web site called beproductive.com.  As a deep thinker in the subject he is a big proponent of focusing your limited time and attention on the truly important things, one at a time.

Photo by:lutykuh

Since we began to offer our online Outlook program I’ve received a number of inquires about how we made it happen.  It seems many of our readers have produced content like  training, articles, coaching or consulting services that  lend themselves to online deliver Here’s a quick explanation how our system is put together.

Workload Master is a very special kind of blog called a membership site. This simply means that someone must be a registered member (or subscriber) to access the premium material.  Our site is powered by WordPress, the most popular content management system on the planet.  Our member’s area (master Your Workload with Outlook) is managed by a very special WordPress plugin called WishList Member.

I’ve had so many people ask  how to develop a site like ours that last year I formed a brand new company called Wishlist Master (how original is that).  WishList Master provides consulting and development of membership sites for trainers, consultants, publishers and other content providers.  The sites we create are based upon the WordPress platform using WishList Member.

If you have any interest in exploring this exploding Internet niche, please don’t hesitate to contact me.  I love to talk about this stuff.

I also receive a lot of questions about our videos.  Almost all of them were recorded with a piece of software called Camtasia.  It is the most popular and versatile screen recording application for the PC.

I thought it was going to take about two weeks to create the online training program.  After all, I had been teaching the program for years.  Well it took over 6 months of working day and night to launch the site.  Since then I’ve learned a lot, which is why we formed WishList Master.  Our objective is to help clients avoid the learning curve so that they can bring their membership sites to market in a fraction of the time that it took me.  It’s working.

First a major distinction. You can always get more money (or any other resource for that matter). But you can never get any more time. You get what you get and that’s it.

Invest…Spend….Waste

We tend to use the term “spend” when we think about how we use our time. But that’s not quite true.

For example, you can “invest” your time by finding ways to do things faster or eliminating unnecessary steps. The result isn’t more time, but you do have more available for other things.

Here’s a quote from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged that sums it up nicely: “…every hour I save is an hour added to my life. It used to take me five hours to fill that tank. It now takes three. The two I saved are mine-as pricelessly mine as if I moved my grave two further hours away for every five I’ve got.”

You can also invest time to create income. For example using your time to learn a new skill can result in an increase in your income.

And most important, you invest time when you use it to strengthen relationships.  Forget the phrase “I’m spending time with my family”  and look at it as an investment instead.

Next time we’ll look at spending and wasting time.

Top photo by thinkpanama

My objective going into this was to determine the market potential for a home-based specific time management course. For that reason can’t share the results of those questions at this time. However the most interesting results came from questions I’m happy to share.

Total responses: 92 (It took me a lot of tweets, e-mails, LinkedIn posts and everything else I could think of to get this many).

Here are the questions:

What are the two major sources of frustration and stress that keep you from being as productive as you would like to be?

Distractions and Interruptions 56%
Loneliness 17%
Telephone calls 15%
Waiting for others 9%
Everything else 3%

This is the last time I ask an open question like this. It took a while and some judgment calls to boil it down to this.

Frankly I was surprised by this. You’d think that someone who works alone would be less distracted, but the numbers speak for themselves. I must point out that many respondents indicated that children and other family members and pets are major sources of interruptions.

On average how many hours do you work in your home office per week?

0-10 5.6%
11-20 22.2%
21-30 33.3%
31-40 11.1%
41-50 22.2%
51-60 5.6%
60+ 0

Again I was a bit surprised. I expected a much higher percent in the 31-40 and 41-50 range. But that’s why we do surveys. Had I phrased the question differently, like “how many hours do work each week (taking into account time with customers and travel)”, the numbers could (and probably would) have been very different.

What tools do you currently use to manage your time? Choose all that apply?

Software (Outlook, Lotus Notes etc.) 82%
Paper-based planner 35%
Smartphone 65%
Web based service 29%
PDA 18%
None 0% (this was encouraging)

It probably would have been best to limit this question to one choice, like “what is your most used tool?” But I asked it this way to learn the to help craft a curriculum. And for that purpose it was quite helpful.

The high percentage using software and smartphones was probably skewed because the survey requests were delivered online; hence targeting an audience predisposed to using technology.

Which best describes you?

Business Owner with Staff 1%
Self Employed – Solo 82%
Employee 7%

Which best describes your business/profession?

Consulting 47%
Sales 23%
Service Business 24%
Online Business 6%

(The question also included options for legal and financial but each received zero responses)

So these are the totally unscientific results. I hope your find them useful. There were quite valuable to me.

If you have any thoughts or ideas about how to create better surveys I am all ears.

Between the holidays I had an opportunity to interview Chuck Frey, publisher of InnovationTools.com.

Visit The On Target Podcast web site for the interview and show notes.

Not long ago I posted a short video about using a mind map to help visualize project outcomes. It was one of the most popular posts on the blog that month.

I found the software and lots of good information on The Mind Mapping Software Blog, published by Chuck Frey. Because I received so many questions about mind mapping I decided to to ask Chuck to do an interview in On Target. I was thrilled that he was available.

Chuck’s main web site is InnovationTools.com which focuses on innovation, creativity and brainstorming. He’s been at it for about eight years and has created a wealth of information about these subjects. If you have an interest in this area, you can easily spend a few hours here. If you don’t read anything else on the site, be sure to read Chuck’s post about river people vs. goal people. It demonstrates his writing chops (he’s a journalist by training) and is something to think about for the new year.

Chuck’s are first rate which shows from the volume of traffic he receives and inclusion on the prestigious directory Alltop.  Most impressive is that he created and managed both sites while working a full-time job. Now that’s a busy guy. So I took time during the interview to ask him about what tools and techniques he uses to manage his time. To learn more, listen to the interview or at least read the show notes a The On Target Podcast.

Photo by Sarah Grice

I promised to take this week off, but I just found this article from Scientific American about multitasking and had to share it. Plus I needed an excuse to try out this new app that gives me the ability to post from my Blackberry.

Here’s the link: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=multitasking-mind.

See you after the holiday.

- Bob