Do you need to read more but find you don’t have enough time? Welcome to the club. I’ve been falling way behind in my reading, particularly business books, and have found it difficult to catch up.

There are so many good business books being released that it’s impossible to pick the right ones let alone read all of them. So how do you keep abreast of the latest yet still have time for everything else you have to do? You might want to try a book summary service.

Last week I happened to meet Dan Pfister a principle at The Business Source, a Toronto Canada based service that writes summaries of the latest business books. After digging through their web site I realized what a great idea. I know a few people (not me) who used Cliff Notes in college. It was a good way to get the gist of a book (not a great way to study for a test). The Business Source does something similar yet much more elegantly.

Business Source subscribes receive two 5-page summaries (about 2,500 words)each month. These concise yet detailed summaries take between 10 – 30 minutes to read. You get enough detail to come away with a basic understanding of the book’s key concepts. You will know immediately if you want more detail. If so, just click their link Amazon affiliate link and buy the book. If not, then you haven’t used much time and saved yourself $30+.

I read a few of their summaries and found them to be very well written, insightful, and quite entertaining. In fact I was very impressed with the style. The writer gives you a good insight into the book without editorializing or getting in the way. There is really an art to this and their writers very good at it.

The summaries do an excellent job of getting to the mead of a book yet do it in a way that keeps you reading. For example their web site contains a free sample of their review of Freakanomics. A book I have never read, but wanted to. In 20 minutes I had a good understanding of the essential elements of the book and a plan to buy a copy for my collection. Take a look at it and you’ll see what I mean.

Business Source Subscribers receive two summaries of current business books each month plus 24 sets of business tips and 4 audio tracks from prominent business speakers each quarter. The cost is $130 US per year, about the cost of 4 books.

If your time is valuable, but you understand the value of “sharpening you saw,” then you should check out The Business Source

have you ever tried to explain something verbally or written that would be faster and easier with a screen capture or even a short video?  It’s easy to do  with  Jing, the free screen capture and screen recording software from Techsmith.  Here’s a short video that shows you how it works and how to get it.

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

New membership site development service – WishList Master.

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.

When you begin to think of your time as an asset (like money) you begin to think differently about how you are using it. Try to apply common money terminology to determine if we are making the best use of yours.

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

The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it.
- Alan Saporta
During physical activity, your mind is stimulated and potentially very  creative; yet few people take full advantage of this opportunity.

Use the time you spend doing physical work or exercising to come up with new ideas or resolve problems. When you do come up with solution ideas immediately pause to jot them down.

So don’t just “zone out” when doing something physical, use that increased blood flow to harness the power of your mind.

Have a great week!
- Bob

Photo by jef safi

Just before the holidays I used Survey Monkey to conduct a time management survey among people who work form home. Since then many of the participants asked to see the results, so please accept my apologies for the delay. However it took this long to get enough responses.

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.

Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem, in my opinion, to characterize our age.

- Albert Einstein

When is “good enough”, good enough?

That’s a question that haunts many of us. Perfectionism, while important in brain surgery, can become a roadblock.

One of the best examples of “good enough” is the MP3 audio file format. It delivers less that perfect fidelity, but because of its ability to compress audio files with an acceptable sound quality, an entire industry was born. Witness the growth of iTunes, now the largest distributor of music in the world.

True audiophiles may turn a deaf ear to the quality of an MP3 file, but to the rest of us it’s just fine. If the creators of the MP3 format tried for perfection, we’d still be listening to CDs or even vinyl records.

Where are you striving for perfection where “good enough” is all that’s needed?

Have a great week!

-Bob

Successful people choose to do the things unsuccessful people choose not to.
- Unknown

I learned this quote from a mentor many years ago.  It has stuck with me ever since.
We are blessed to have freedom of choice. But sometimes this works against us. Too often we choose to avoid doing positive things that are uncomfortable like changing habits or delivering bad news.

What are you choosing not to do?

Take a minute to identify some things you are choosing not to do.  Pick one and make a conscious effort to do it routinely over the next month.

Have a great week!

- Bob

Photo by BasileLeConquerant

I must create a system or be enslaved by another Man’s.
- William Blake

Whatever system you use to manage your work must use almost no thought on your part during it’s execution. If you find yourself asking “what do I do with this” or “where do I put that”, then you aren’t performing at your best.

The purpose of your workload management system should be to get everything in its place with little thought on your part. Thus saving your energy for more important matters. Your energy is highly valuable and very limited so don’t spend it on routine matters.

The efficiency of your system can be observed when processing your e-mail. The next time you work through your e-mail inbox pay attention to your own thought process. Do you find yourself having to make a decision about each message or do yo know instinctively what to do with them? And how many times have you made a decision about some of those messages in your inbox?

If the answer is a lot, you’re spending more time an energy on this then you should. It’s time to streamline.