Category: Musings

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Avoid Information Overload The 4-Hour-Workweek Way

Posted on August 20, 2012 in Front Page and Musings. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour-Workweek approach to productivity is one of my favorites because it’s based on radically simplifying your life. One of the ways to do this is to stop the information overload. But for professionals who largely live on the web, this can be tough. The never-ending news alerts, emails, phone calls, voicemails, and text messages can all make for a pretty overwhelming day. Within an hour of waking up, our heads are usually filled with a ton of unnecessary information from the latest industry trends to your daily Groupon deals to the latest news on Robert Pattinson’s relationship problems.

If we have any hope of being at our best, it needs to stop.

How Tim Ferriss Stops Information Overload

In The 4-Hour-Workweek, Ferriss mentions that he never watches the news, never reads the paper, and never browses CNN. Instead, once a week, he will ask a friend or even a stranger at a bar or cafe, if there was any big news that week. If there was anything important, he will definitely hear about it and save himself a ton of time.

When it comes to work-related information overload, Ferriss reminds everyone to re-take control of their lives. You don’t need to respond to every email or phone call immediately: the world won’t end. Instead, you should set aside specific times when you go through your emails and voicemails – and let your boss or co-workers know that they will not get an immediate response.

How To Stop Your Own Information Overload

Most of us have a workweek much longer than four hours and don’t have the same circumstances as Tim Ferriss but we can all benefit from stopping the information overload we all deal with. Here are some easy steps to get you on your way to a less overwhelming day:

Use RSS Feeds: Most websites allow you to subscribe to new content via an RSS reader and Google sends you news summaries on whatever topic you wish. Get the information you want right in your reader without overwhelming yourself with news you couldn’t care less about.

Create Limits: Stop using your peak times to go on Facebook, Twitter, or surf the web. Set times for yourself to take a Facebook break but avoid becoming distracted by your friend’s never-ending puppy photos.

Relax on The Weekends: Taking time off from consuming information altogether can be a great way to clear your head. Try to avoid wasting your free time on the weekend consuming information and relax your brain instead.

Let Everyone Know Your System: It can be difficult to disconnect from the constant stream of emails and text messages but it’s easier if you let people know what to expect. Ferriss recommends adding an email signature that lets people know that you check and reply to your email at such-and-such specific time but if they need an urgent response they should call you instead.

5 Tools To Get The Most From Your Social Media Efforts

Posted on August 20, 2012 in Front Page and Musings. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are quickly becoming a big part of nearly every business’ marketing strategy. While they make a great addition to every company’s toolbox, it can be difficult to manage multiple accounts across multiple platforms and quantify the results into something more meaningful than the number of retweets or likes that a post received. Here are 5 tools to make your social media efforts more productive, efficient, and trackable.

HootSuite: HootSuite is one of the most popular and powerful social media tools out there because it allows you to manage your Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and FourSquare accounts all in one place. The app also provides in-depth customizable analytics reports on all your profiles, allows your entire team to access the accounts, and lets you schedule updates for more optimal times. If you are going to only use one social media tool, this is the one to try.

SproutSocial: SproutSocial is the main competitor of HootSuite and offers a more powerful management dashboard that is especially helpful for marketers managing many different profiles. The app allows you to publish posts to multiple profiles, gives you in-depth analytics on your efforts, helps you find highly targeted customers, gives you full control over your team’s permissions, track keywords and trends, and measures your “customer engagement.”

Wildfire: Wildfire is a quickly growing social media suite that recently became part of Google. It allows you to manage and design all your social media pages, publish and schedule messages, create and manage social media ads, and monitor their comprehensive analytics. What really makes Wildfire stand out, however, is their Promotions platform. Wildfire allows you to easily launch a sweepstakes, coupon, contest, quiz, trivia, or group deals to generate word-of-mouth, capture new leads, and ultimately sell more products. The app gives you a ton of control over the promotion and branding but is very easy to set up and monitor.

Social Mention: Social Mention is a very simple tool that allows you to see who is talking about you and your company. Simply type in the name and Social Mention will bring up a full dashboard of stats. See how strong your social media message is, see the ratio of positive to negative mentions, see who is talking about your brand repeatedly, the range of your influence, top keywords your name is associated with, and see all of the pages and profiles on which you are being mentioned.

Klout: Klout is a very popular tool that allows you to measure your “influence.” Klout assigns your brand a Klout Score based on an algorithm that involves more than 400 different signals from seven different networks. Among them are your Facebook mentions, likes, comments, subscribers, wall posts, and friends, your Twitter mentions, re-tweets, list memberships, and replies, your Google+ comments, +1s, and reshares, your LinkedIn title, connections, recommendations, and comments, and foursquare, Klout, and Wikipedia power. When using social media, it can be hard to quantify how much success you are having but the Klout Score might be a great way to quantify how much reach and influence you have.

Track Your Goals With The Seinfeld Method

Posted on August 20, 2012 in Front Page and Musings. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Jerry Seinfeld has been one of the biggest comedians in the country for nearly 30 years, but you don’t write that many airline food jokes without a strong productivity system in place to give you that extra kick in the butt. Although his job mostly involves coming up with clever quips about things like tipping etiquette, his ability to get to work every single day is something anyone in any industry can take a page from.

How does he do it? With the productivity system known as Don’t Break The Chain. Simply put, pick the daily tasks you need to accomplish and start building a chain by marking off the days you succeeded in your daily goals on a calendar. Sounds too simple? It’s actually one of the most effective approaches to accomplishing your goals over a realistic period of time rather than try to sprint for the finish and burn out.

What makes the Seinfeld method great is that it combines concepts like step-by-step progress, pressure to keep moving, gamification, and a personal reward system into one incredibly simple Seinfeldian approach to getting things done.

The Goal

Seinfeld realized very early that the only way to become a better joke writer was by doing it each day. Sure, some comedians can sit down and write 1,000 jokes in one day, but if Jerry writes just 10 jokes each day, by the end of a year he will have 3,650 jokes. After 10 years, 36,500 jokes. After 20 years, well, you get the point…

The principle here is that we all have tasks that we need to do each day to become better at what we do, even if we just make small daily strides. An engineer may need to do a certain amount of coding each day, a freelance writer may need to write a certain number of words each day, a realtor may need to make a certain number of sales calls each day, etc.

Pick your goal(s) and set the rules. When in the day will I do this task? How much time will I devote to this each day? Don’t worry if it’s a small amount of time, the point is that your progress builds up greatly as you consistently do it over time – allowing you to accomplish more by doing less.

Step-by-Step

For me, the hallmark of a great productivity system is simplicity. Once you have settled on a goal, you need nothing else but a calendar and a marker. After you have completed your daily task, mark the day off with a big X. If you have multiple tasks, you might want to use different colors and just create a continuous line for each task each week.

After a few days, you will have a small chain. If you are anything like me, you will want to keep that chain going more than anything. It sounds simple, but the pressure of trying to keep the chain going, visualizing my progress right on the calendar, and rewarding myself with a big red X on the calendar after every successful day makes this a killer productivity strategy everyone should try.

If you stick to the system, you will quickly see the progress you have made build into substantial results – but if you don’t, there’s always the Kramer method.

Get the Most from the New Outlook 2013

Posted on August 10, 2012 in Front Page and Musings. 4 Comments Tags: , .

Outlook has been around for what seems like forever, and Microsoft doesn’t spend too much time creating big new features. Instead, the new Outlook 2013 is essentially the same powerhouse application as before but has been upgraded to help you streamline basic tasks, put your documents in the cloud, and work better on mobile and touchscreen devices. In other words, Microsoft has done a great job in helping you do things more efficiently and skip unnecessary steps, which makes it a fantastic email application platform when it comes to productivity. Here are just a few ways you can save time with Outlook 2013.

Take a Quick Peek: Rather than open up your calendar, contacts, or other Outlook items, you can now hover over the icon with your mouse to take a quick peek at the info you need. It’s a small but very helpful feature that can save you a few minutes every day, and those minutes add up.

Touch Your Emails: Rather than open each email or check off which ones you want to delete, you can take a quick look at the contents of an email and decide whether you want to delete, tag, or move it without having to open it up. The Quick Delete function is very helpful and I like to schedule two or three specific times of day to go through and clean out my email this way. It helps avoid being distracted by incoming email throughout the day and I make sure I decide what to do with each message right then and there.

Skip a Step, Reply Inline: Another welcome new feature is the Inline Reply function. Rather than hit reply, I can just start typing and Outlook automatically creates a new message. If I go do something else and then come back, Outlook saves the inline reply as it would any other draft.

Use Copy2Contact to Capture Contacts: Just like the quick delete and inline reply functions that help you skip a step, Copy2Contact is a must-have for every Outlook user. It captures contact information right out of email signatures, and appointment dates/times from messages. One keypress and BOOM! They’re saved in Outlook. The more steps you skip, the more time you save. Copy2Contact for Outlook 2013 will be ready before the final release date in October.

Use the Availability Function To Save Time: Email is great, but sometimes you need something as soon as humanly possible. The Outlook 2013 contacts view allows you to see who is available and who can’t respond to your email right now, similar to Gmail. If you need something done fast, Outlook will let you know that you’re better off getting in touch a different way.

If you’ve checked out the new Outlook 2013 Preview and want to share some of your own productivity tips, we’d love to hear from you! We may even feature your tips for the entire Copy2Contact community to see. Please leave a comment.