Posts Filed Under ‘Workflow’
The second season of my Work Smart video series at FastCompany.com premiered yesterday, with a question from Suhasini Kotcherlakota about how to take better meeting notes, and some answers from me and Brad Isaac, who wrote a great piece on mind-mapping meetings at Lifehacker a few years back.
Despite the fact that I still can't watch and listen to myself on film without cringing, I am so pleased with the results. Adam Barenblat at FastCompany did an amazing job on the art and design, which is based on a fun new webapp: Popplet.
Check out the finished clip.
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Hilary Mason: How to Replace Yourself with a Very Small Shell Script ·
Just stumbled upon a YouTube clip of one of the best Ignite presentations I've seen, by Hilary Mason, a computer scientist at Bit.ly. Mason wrote a series of scripts that auto-respond to email with particular content, and auto-nag folks she's emailed but hasn't gotten a response from yet. Hit the play button to hear more. She says once the code's fit for sharing she'll put it up on GitHub. Cannot wait. · May 25th, 2010, 6 comments
The best part about my Work Smart video series at Fast Company is that I get to cover my favorite, classic digital productivity problems with the latest and greatest solutions I know in a whole new medium.
In the past five installments I addressed some old and new issues any tech savvy digital worker encounters: keeping track of passwords, wasting time leaving and listening to voicemail, being a productive freelancer (or just work-at-homer), syncing files across all your computers, and, for fun, a few things you didn't know your cameraphone can do. Hit play on any of the 2-3 minute segments inside.
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My two latest videos over at Fast Company deal with how to get things done even when your lizard brain is completely against you. First, a bit on how to procrastinate productively; second, how to get your most important work done first thing, before you start procrastinating.
The topics are very much related. Once you've let yourself dread something long enough, you get stuck in a cycle of procrastination that makes you feel like crap. But my big secret is this: some of my best work got done while I was putting off doing something else. When you're procrastinating, you're highly motivated to avoid something for as long as possible. Which means you've got both the will and the time to knock out something OTHER than the dreaded task you're putting off.
On the other hand, if you see that dreaded task looming on the horizon, you can set yourself up to tackle it first thing in the morning, before anything else happens. I jacked the title of a book I love, Eat That Frog, to describe that one. Here are the two clips.
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My latest two videos are up at Fast Company: one's on firewalling your attention with time blocking, and the second is on three ways to use Google Wave in your business.
The time blocking piece is actually a personal confession about my hermit tendencies. Sometimes I just shut everything off, fall off the face of the planet, and have some uninterrupted me-time. I've had co-workers say to me, "Um, where did you go today?" and the answer is usually "To my happy place, a distraction-free zone." As you'll hear in the video, at my last office job, I actually used to schedule a meeting with myself complete with a conference room to get away and focus on something for awhile. Here's the 2 minute, 37 second clip.
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37signals' new book Rework is a fast, inspiring read for anyone who's thought about starting a business but froze at the idea of quitting their job, getting investing, and working 24-hour days.
As they do every day at their blog, in Rework the Signals break down their minimalist philosophy into a series of essays written in uncompromising language. Expect a table of contents full of sections entitled things like "Learning from mistakes is overrated," "Planning is guessing," "Outside money is plan Z," "Throw less at the problem," "Skip the rock stars," and "Meetings are toxic." While it's billed as a business book, at its core Rework is a get-up-off-your-ass, stop-talking-and-start-doing book--a productivity book that uses 37signals as its main case study.
People who follow 37signals online know that they are opinionated and contrarian--sometimes to the point of abrasive. At least one person thinks their small business philosophy is downright dangerous. Personally I give 37signals credit for having a strong point of view, a well-executed shtick, and for having shipped some fantastic software products. (At Lifehacker we lived in Campfire.) My advice? Take the book with a grain of salt. After reading it you don't have to cancel every meeting you have at your company. But, if you shorten a few, you've gotten something out of it.
To get a taste of how the book reads, download this PDF excerpt with essays on why workaholism, business plans, and meetings don't work. The book is available today in bookstores and on Amazon.
Rework
Panic is a software company that makes useful tools like my personal favorite, Transmit for the Mac. They've also made a beautiful project status display that helps their team keep on top of what they're working on, and what important dates are coming up. Click on the thumbnail to see the full version. The board is actually an internal web page that auto-updates support email queue numbers, how far along each company project is, day over day revenue comparisons, the company calendar, and Twitter messages. Here's the effect it's had on the team:
Les, one of our support guys, said it best after a week: “That board is like magic.” Our support turnaround time is faster than it’s ever been. Just the simple act of “publicizing” those numbers — not in a cruel way, but a “where are we at as a group?” way — has kept the support process on-task and, I think, made it a bit more like a video game. (It helps that when all the boxes are at “zero”, a virtual bottle of champagne appears on-screen, and a physical one is likely removed from the fridge.)
Brilliant! I am dying for one of these for my own personal use. Panic, will you add that to your project list? For the nitty gritty on how this board was built and what kind of display it's on, check out the full post at the Panic blog.
The Panic Status Board [The Panic Blog]
Closing the Feedback Loop · Matt Haughey says Google Buzz doesn't offer an easy way for publishers to see what people are saying about their stuff. He's right; as in Google Reader and Facebook, much of the liking and commenting and sharing that goes on in Buzz happens out of earshot of the creator. I think Buzz is a fine product--a pretty predictable FriendFeed clone, really--but it does suffer from this same broken loop problem that Google Reader creates. Also of interest to other publishers, Matt's related piece on what feedback loops he pays attention to in order to learn how to make better stuff online. · February 10th, 2010, 10 comments
A week ago I asked readers to tell me how they're using Google Wave in their daily lives, and despite a bit of "ha! no one's using Wave!" snarking on the Twitter, I got lots of interesting responses. Unsurprisingly, most Wavers use it as a real-time wiki, but some take advantage of features unique to Wave, like inline and private replies, public tags, and gadgets. I featured the most unique use cases I got in a brand new chapter just added to The Complete Guide to Google Wave. The following is the text of the just-published Chapter 10, which describes ways in which a few people who don't work for Google are using Wave to get things done--with screenshots.
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I'm thrilled to announce a new series of weekly videos and blog posts that I'll be publishing at FastCompany.com called "Work Smart," which will cover personal productivity in a digital world. Long-time Lifehacker readers will recognize much of the material, but some fantastic editing and animation make each 2-4 minute video segment a whole new, fun format. The debut Work Smart video segment takes on the age old digital productivity problem: email overload.
In this 2 minute, 45 second segment, I describe my three-folder system for emptying your email inbox on a day-to-day basis, and keeping on top of everything you have to do, are waiting for, or want to keep on hand for reference.
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Getting up on stage, taking a microphone, and facing an expectant audience scares the crap out of most mere mortals. But rock star public speakers from Al Gore to Tony Robbins inspire and inform thousands of people with their talks--and charge $30,000 an hour to do so. Scott Berkun's new book, Confessions of a Public Speaker, explains why, how, and what goes on before and after a great speech.
"Good public speaking is based on good private thinking," Berkun writes in Confessions, where he recalls years of his own successes and failures traveling the country giving presentations. Preparation is the key to reducing your anxiety about public speaking, Berkun says, as is the awareness that humans are literally wired to fear the situation.
Our brains, for all their wonders, identify the following four things as being very bad for survival:
- Standing alone
- In open territory with no place to hide
- Without a weapon
- In front of a large crowd of creatures staring at you
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Just like the rest of us, Outlook user Scott Hanselman gets too much email, and he's come up with some rules that auto-prioritize incoming email into folders before he even looks at it. Scott uses Outlook at work, and messages from his co-workers inside his company are higher priority; also, he gets invited to a lot of meetings via Outlook. If this is similar to your situation, check out Scott's strategy. He set up three rules which separate incoming email into 1.) messages that were sent directly to him (he's in the To: field), 2.) messages he was CC:'ed on, 3.) messages from outside his company, and 4.) meeting invitations. Hit up Scott's full post for step-by-step directions on how to set up these rules.
As always, your preferred email processing system depends on your situation. As a freelancer who doesn't use Outlook, rarely gets meeting invitations, and almost always gets messages from outside my non-company, this strategy doesn't work as well for me, but for a nine-to-fiver inside a corporate firewall, it makes a whole lot of sense. Thanks, Scott!
The Three Most Important Outlook Rules for Processing Mail [Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen]
Alerts Help You Stop Obsessively Checking Web Site Stats · One of the conditions I set for myself when I started this blog was that I would not, under any circumstances, spend too much time navel-gazing at web site traffic graphs. For a year now, I've been pretty successful--but I still want to know if some big spike or dip happens, and I don't want to have to check by hand to see that. So, I'm pretty stoked about Google Analytics' alerts feature. You set it to shoot you an email when something happens--like your traffic goes up more than 10% from where it was the day before--and you're done. I like software that comes to me when something I care about happens. (That all said, Google Analytics is still a little too complicated and hairy for me at times; I've been meaning to try out Mint for awhile now, which looks simpler, but doesn't appear to have alerts.) How do you track your site activity without staring at graphs every day? · December 10th, 2009, 4 comments
Note to Self: Don’t Forget to Use the Phone · My friends who know what a telephone phobe I am will surely guffaw at the sheer hypocrisy of my latest post at Harvard Business Online, an exercise in self-talk wherein I declare that a phone call beats out email in a lot of situations. In my defense, for the last month or so I've been working on a project that involved several super-productive calls per week, so I have been practicing what I preach (a little bit, anyway). Here's the whole piece: Don't Forget To Use the Phone. · October 30th, 2009, 1 comment
In their new-to-me "Lifehacking"* section, Slate asks a few celebrities what kind of tricks they use to get things done. Here are my favorite responses.
Patty Stonesifer, chairwoman of the Smithsonian Institution Board of Regents:
I do a short exercise with every request that comes through—I ask myself "If I had to do this today, would I be glad?"
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The second season of my Work Smart video series at FastCompany.com premiered yesterday, with a question from Suhasini Kotcherlakota about how to take better meeting notes, and some answers from me and Brad Isaac, who wrote a great piece on mind-mapping meetings at Lifehacker a few years back. 
I'm 
