In this episode of Work Smart, idea guy Bryan Serven asks the question every entrepreneur has wrestled with; I offer a way to reframe the question and weigh your options, and author of Do More Great Work Michael Bungay Stanier weighs in with a great tip. Press the play button below, and then check out part 2, which covers how you know when to kill a project you're already working on.

Part 2: The toughest thing an entrepreneur has to do is admit a company or a product is a failure and move on. But the longer you work on something that's not working, the more time you lose that could be spent working on a success. This episode covers part 2 of inventor Bryan Serven's question: what are the early signs it's time to end a project?

Once more author of Do More Great Work Michael Bungay Stanier weighs in with his advice for diversifying your portfolio of projects.

I'm on the hunt for one more question to wrap up the Work Smart series. Send it to me at worksmart@fastcompany.com.

In this week's episode of Work Smart 2, I got to give my best answer to that question. Bill Clark asks how you can actually work smarter when you spend a lot of time learning new productivity tricks. I share my favorite tool for keeping yourself honest, and then asked author of productivity bible Getting Things Done David Allen for his thoughts. (In short: there are worse ways to waste time.)

Press play on the 2-minute, 30-second video clip below.

During my research for this video, I went back to using RescueTime in earnest. The charts it generated, which show what programs you spend the most working in, are really insightful for anyone who wants to do more self-monitoring. If you're having a particularly rabbit-holey day, RescueTime's Growl notifications which say things like "You've spent 45 minutes on distracting activities" can help you get back on track, too. Even if they tempt you to just quit the program and keep reading Lady Gaga's Wikipedia entry anyway.

I was lucky enough to get none other than David Allen to agree to be my expert in this segment. I was pretty nervous talking to David, as his material has been an inspiration for me for years now. Hopefully I didn't come off as too much of a dork on Skype with him.

Here's the final, 2-minute video clip.

In short, the key to staying productive while travelling is to create a to-go system that's as effective as your home system. A big part of that for me, which got cut from the final segment, is having a good portable inbox. I use a $2 plastic envelope with a Velcro closure, which I slip in next to my laptop in my bag. Expense receipts, business cards, and random pieces of paper that you tend to collect as you travel all go in that plastic envelope, which I dump out as soon as I get home.

We've just wrapped the first four video segments, and starting in on the next batch of four, so I need questions! If you want to appear in a future episode, email me your question to worksmart@fastcompany.com.

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.

Some production notes: I outlined the script using Popplet, which Adam used to design the video, and that Popplet is available at FastCompany.com for you to click and zoom around yourself. We got all the interview footage using Skype and eCamm's CallRecorder software, which is cheap and fantastically easy to use. We wanted an informal webcam look, but we wanted "the hostess" to have a plain background and professional lighting, which I set up in my home office relatively inexpensively, thanks to the TWiG headset I already have. It was really fun getting to "meet" and talk with people who sent in their questions from all over the country. Unlike the first season of Work Smart, which was just me talking to the camera, these episodes involve 3 separate shoots--one with the person asking the question, one with the expert, and one with me. Breaking it up that way adds a nice variety, and it also means I don't have to fly to New York to shoot with a director and a production crew. I get to stay home and simply use Skype with my iSight. Fun stuff, plus time and money savings.

If you want to be featured in an upcoming episode, email your question about tech and/or productivity to worksmart@fastcompany.com.

Then Google Buzz launched.

So, here's my social media productivity two-punch: first the video, then a walk through Google Buzz's more advanced features.

Work Smart: Mastering Your Social Media Life is two minutes and nine seconds on how to keep up with social networking updates without spending your whole day managing it all.

After thinking about Google Buzz in the context of funneling updates into a single place, it seems clear that Buzz doesn't just take on Twitter and Facebook, it takes on any kind of "universal inbox" product, like my beloved TweetDeck. It makes Gmail your universal inbox by putting social media updates right under your email inbox. A LOT of people have said that Buzz's inbox integration is immediately overwhelming and too noisy, and I have to agree. I've already created a filter to make Buzz items skip the inbox immediately. Find out how to do that--and turn off Buzz completely--in today's piece, How to Do Everything in Google Buzz (Including Turn It Off) .

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.

I first wrote about this three-folder system on Lifehacker back in 2006 as a riff on Merlin Mann's five-folder system, which he published in Macworld in 2005. Of course, Merlin went on to be the king of Inbox Zero (book forthcoming!). For a much longer--and much funnier and in-depth--video on using email well, check out Merlin's hour-long Google talk about it.

I've been using this system to organize my email since I wrote the original article back in 2006, and I've found it's an absolute sanity-saver. At this point it's so ingrained in my workflow I barely think about it. Though I must admit: some weeks I'm better about it than others. This week I'm on book deadline, and I do have about 40 messages that need to be processed sitting in my inbox right now.

This video segment is the first thing I've ever shot in a studio with a backdrop, lighting, a director, sound guy, two cameras, makeup artist, and an actual script. Besides that weird thing my hair is doing, I'm so pleased to see what came out of what felt like 600 takes. Our editor and animation artist, Adam Barenblat, did an incredible job of turning a dry, boring, "create this folder and name it this" subject into something really fun to watch. Thanks a whole lot to FastCompany.com for having me, and for the crew at Magic Bullet Media for turning out something so cool. There will be a new video every week for the next few months at FastCompany.com, and I'll post about each new one as it gets released here as well.

If video's not your thing, here's the transcript of the segment.