Yojimbo Review

With computers becoming even more central than ever in the information age, many people are looking for ways to “unclutter” their hard drives. Sometimes the default structure just isn’t quite enough to organize things quickly and efficiently. For those that favor web applications, there have been quite a few pieces of organizational software written for both Mac and PC. However, Yojimbo is written specifically for Mac users (there is no PC version).

Yojimbo offers a neat feature that lets the user store information quickly, without interrupting work flow. Once the software is installed, a tab appears on the left-hand side of the screen on the desktop. Some users may like this feature because of the convenience of having a dropbox right on the desktop.

For those that would like a program similar to Yojimbo, but for PC, Evernote is certainly worth a look. Yojimbo is the simpler of the two programs as far as logistics go. However, Evernote does offer more features, including OCR. Both programs can store PDFs, however, Evernote allows the user to search those PDFs.

Yojimbo has several different default categories for storing your information. Users can create bookmarks, store images and type notes inside the program. If you want to see an overview of all the information you’ve put into Yojimbo, the Library category shows all of the documents that are stored in the program.

Tags

Because the simple categories aren’t always sufficient for organization, users can tag different documents in order to further classify them. If you plan to use this program extensively for keeping track of a project, this feature really does come in handy.

Notes

There really isn’t a whole lot to explain about the “Notes” feature. The user simply has to click the green “+” icon in the upper left hand corner of the program window and select “Note.” In fact, the whole program is simple to use, which is nice for new users.

Flags

For those that intend to use Yojimbo to help them organize tasks, the Flag feature is a convenient way to remind yourself of things that need to be accomplished. To flag an item, the user selects the item to be marked, then clicks the “flag” button at the top of the window. Again, the commands and interface are very easy to use.

Access

As far as I can tell, there are only two ways to access Yojimbo from a remote location. The product site says that Yojimbo can be accessed on other Macs through MobileMe. However, there is a product called “Webjimbo” that allows the user to access Yojimbo from the web or from an iPhone. The product does cost $30 to download, however.

Conclusion

Overall, Yojimbo seems to be very good at what it is intended to do. It helps the user organize information in an efficient and timely manner, and the user interface is very good. However, the product does cost a little bit ($39 for an individual version, $29 for educational), and Evernote is free. The main difference between the two programs is that (1) Yojimbo is made to be simple and user friendly, and so that it does not interrupt workflow. Evernote is more capable. It actually syncs to it’s own cloud-based web version and allows iPhone access without payment. (2) Yojimbo does cost a bit to use. Evernote is free, for the time being.

Reputable Language

When you put yourself into a new social context, one of the things you learn is a new vocabulary. This is natural and normal. However, you must give care to develop vocabulary habits that will benefit and not hinder you in the future.

I started college in 1994. After a few weeks on campus, I realized there were quite a few words and phrases that were in common usage that I was going to start using simply by being around them. While most of them were benign, there were several that I was a bit unsure whether I wanted to adopt or not. I’m not talking about obscenities. I’m talking about things like:

• Crap – Often used as an expletive, adjective or adverb.
• Sucks – Used to describe an undesirable state or occurrence, often in the phrase “that sucks”.
• Hey – Used instead of “hello” or “hi”.
• Legit – Used to express a desirable state or approval, often in the phrase “That’s legit” or as an adjective and sometimes and adverb.

When I caught myself using these words as described above, I had to stop and decide if that was the vocabulary I wanted to use. (I never used “legit” in that manner–it always sounded stupid to me.) I came to the conclusion that “crap” and “sucks” expressed concepts that I could probably better express using other words. Furthermore, there were some situations where those terms would be highly offensive, and I didn’t want to run the risk of having something ingrained into my vocabulary that might get me into trouble.

I did succumb to saying “hey” instead of “hello” or “hi”. I didn’t really like it, but it felt much too formal to say “hello” when someone said “hey” and waved.  After a while, I was saying “hey” with the best of them.

I have cousins who grew up in Chile speaking both Spanish and English. Even as a child, I was always impressed with how precise their language was. In particular, I noticed how they said “yes” instead of “yeah” or “uh huh.” Now that I have kids, my wife and I have been trying to teach them to say “yes” and “yes sir”/”yes ma’am.” The difficult part is trying to retrain ourselves to stop saying “yeah.”

At a recent doctor visit, the nurse asked our two year old a question. She replied “yes.” The nurse stood up, looked at us, and said “I just love it when kids say ‘yes’ instead of ‘yeah’.”

People do notice how you speak. Other than your physical appearance, your vocabulary is the next biggest component of the first impression you make. People form all kinds of initial opinions about your intelligence and education from the first few sentences you speak. As important as first impressions are, it is worth spending a little bit of time examining your own vocabulary to see what type of impression you may be making with the words you do and don’t use.

5 Questions To Help Organize Your Desk

Look at your desk right now. Is it messy? If so, don’t feel too bad. It isn’t uncommon. This post is a series of questions to ask about the stuff that is currently on your desk. Asking these questions will  help you find the cause of a messy desk and give you some ideas for stopping the disorganization at its root. This is vastly more beneficial than simply taking the time to clean your desk right now, because if you don’t change your process and organization, you’ll be back in the same position in a week or so.

1. Do you have reading materials on your desk?

One common source of desktop disorganization is reading materials. Magazines, newspapers, etc. that come to you that you feel like you should read can consume a bunch of desk real-estate. For many people, this reading material isn’t ever going to be read. It just causes clutter and slows you down in other areas. Here are some tips for dealing with reading material.

• Stop it at the source. Be honest with yourself and if you are unlikely to read something in the future, get off the mailing list or cancel the subscription. There is no sense keeping it coming into your life to clutter things up.
• Opt for more expensive, higher-quality publications. Subscribing to a few high-quality succinct newsletters that provide an overview of your fields of interest may be much more efficient than trying to deal with 10 publications that you have to sort through. I subscribe to the Kiplinger Letter, Kiplinger Tax Letter and Trends Audio Magazine and find that those three subscriptions cover a great deal of content I had previously tried to acquire from multiple other sources. They are short–only a few pages long–so they don’t take much of my time, but they still keep me up-to-date on areas I need to know about.
• Keep what you need. Glance through a magazine and identify the articles you want to read. Tear them out and put them somewhere you are likely to read them. For example, putting them in your computer bag to read while waiting at the airport or even in your bathroom can help you get the value out of them when you have time to read them.
• Use RSS. Subscribing to publications through an RSS reader will let you skim a large quantity of sources and pick the ones that are of interest to you without filling up your physical or virtual inbox.
• Get it in audio form. If you have time during your commute, you may be able to get audio versions of the publications you are interested in. This can improve the value of your commute while freeing up your desk from papers you want to read but will never get around to reading.
• Get a bookshelf - If you have more books than places to put them, get some bookshelves. I do not recommend the the pressed-wood shelves you’ll find at office supply stores. If you really load them up with books, they will bend and break. We purchased some folding, real-wood bookshelves from World Market several years ago and have been very pleased with their quality. Also, don’t overlook having a carpenter build some permanent shelves for you. Sometimes the cost per foot of shelf is significantly lower and you can get them designed exactly the way you want. If money is a big issue, a few cinder blocks and 1 by 12 inch 5 foot long boards are very functional, durable and very low cost.

2. Does your desk contain items that need to be filed?

If there are items on your desk that need to be filed, but haven’t yet been organized, ask yourself, “why”? Why are they still sitting on your desk? Is your filing cabinet too far away? Is the filing process a pain, so you set things on your desk rather than put them away? Right now on my desk I have several pieces of paper related to taxes that I haven’t filed. I really don’t have an excuse. There is a stack on a nearby desk that my assistant will scan into my paperless filing system, but I just put the paper on my desk instead of where it belongs.

Why would I do this? Over the past week, I’ve been very busy and I’ve set some items on my desk that don’t really belong there. If my desk were clean other than just those two or three pieces of tax-related papers, I would probably have put them away. So keep in mind that clutter causes clutter. Keeping an organized desk will help you stay organized. Keeping a cluttered desk will encourage you to put more on it because “one more piece of paper doesn’t really matter.”

3. Are there papers on your desk that require action?

This is a big area of desk clutter–things that require your action that you haven’t gotten to yet. Take a look at these types of papers and write a number in the corner (or on a sticky tab) indicating the number of minutes you feel it would take to deal with them, or at least take the first action that would be required.  If you have a bunch of 2 to 5 minute items, you would probably be better off doing them as they come in. Is there a reason you didn’t just pay that bill when you opened it? Is there a reason you didn’t sign and send back that form when you got it? Understanding why you put off the action will help you understand how to keep those papers off your desk in the first place.

Papers that require longer action may be a bit more problematic. However, is your desk the best place to keep papers like this? At the very least, they should go into some sort of inbox so they will all be together. If you have a lot of papers that require action in the future, use some sort of tickler system to remind you when they need your attention.  Of course, if you have papers that require attention, but not necessarily your attention, they can be delegated and put on your assistant’s desk or inbox.

4. Are there things on your desk that don’t belong there?

Right now on my desk I have a plush stuffed dog and a conestoga wagon bank. These belong to my two-year-old daughter and she has brought them to me over the past few days. While they represent clutter, I have absolutely no desire to stop her from sharing her treasures with me. That is one of the big reasons I enjoy working at home. I want to be present as she grows up, and the clutter she adds to my desk is part of that. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. (That said, I probably should take these items back to the play room where they belong.)

Other things that are on my desk that shouldn’t be there:

• Utility knife – I was using it to open some packages and failed to put it away when I was finished.
• Video camera – I use it for video conferencing, but it has somehow made its way off the tripod and onto my desk.
• Spindle of blank CDs – These belong on the storage shelf, but I failed to put them away last time I used them.

As you can see, I have a number of items on my desk that simply need to be put away. This is where a messy desk breeds a messy desk. If my desk were clean, I probably wouldn’t have left out the video camera; I would have put it away. However, with everything else on my desk, there is no mental anguish in adding yet another item.

5. Do you have enough storage space?

One of the best things I’ve done to help keep things organized is that I brought in an eight drawer dresser. Multiple small drawers make it easy to sort items and these drawers provide a great deal of storage space. Of course, the downside of storage is that you’ll end up keeping things that you should really get rid of, but not having enough storage for the things you need virtually guarantees that you’ll have stuff on your desk that has no home.

Conclusion

Keeping your desk organized will probably always require effort. Some people keep an organized desk naturally. Others don’t. However, there are significant benefits for everyone who works toward keeping their workspace organized–whether it comes easily, or not.  The five questions above will help you better identify the sources of your disorganization and will lessen the amount of effort it takes to keep the benefits of an organized desk.

The Power of Knowing

A lot of time-management techniques suggest creating some sort of prioritized to-do list. Why? What is so special about having a pre-determined order assigned to the things you need to do? Obviously, picking your kids up from school is a bigger priority than washing your car, but for the things that are nearly equal, what does it matter?

It turns out that there is a very good reason that so many people recommend this. Good time management has an arch enemy. It isn’t interruptions or even procrastination. The big foe to good time management is indecision.

Knowing exactly what you need to do next wards off indecision. Even if the order is somewhat arbitrary, there is value in having a plan so you don’t have to sit around and try to decide what to do next. The ordered list lets you focus on performing action, not deciding which action to do next.

Deciding what to do is work. It requires effort on your part. Most people underestimate how much work this actually involves. Even if it doesn’t take a lot of time, your brain still counts it as doing work. Not having a plan means you double the amount of work you have to perform. You have to choose a task and perform the task itself.

There are a lot of areas where you can be much more efficient by making decisions ahead of time. Here are a few:

1. Investment decisions – The amount you invest and the way it is allocated isn’t something you should have to decide on every paycheck.
2. Movies you want to rent – Chances are that making a decision from scratch when you are ready to see a movie will result in you watching something you weren’t as interested in and skipping over one that you wanted to see, but couldn’t think of at the time. At the least you should be picking your movie from a list of ones that you know you already want to see.
3. Buying gifts – Trying to make a decision on Christmas gifts while you are at the store can be very time consuming. While you can’t completely eliminate the decision process at the store, going in with a list of a few options is a whole lot better than just thinking “I’ll know it when I see it. “Also, it is far more likely that you’ll think of the perfect gift for Aunt Bertha sometime between January and November than in the first part of December.  Capturing that information will determine whether thinking of that perfect gift is actually beneficial to you or if you’ll end up sending her a fruitcake again.

You can’t make every decision in advance, and even your ordered to-do list is going to see modifications throughout the day. The point is to try to minimize how much time you spend making decisions. If you catch yourself being indecisive, just go ahead and make a decision. In many cases, indecision is more of a threat than picking the wrong task to work on next or choosing the less optimal of two good choices.

It’s Hard to Learn From Your Own Mistakes

Failure gives you a chance to learn. When you make a mistake you can learn from that mistake and not make it again. Right? Well, yes, in theory. The problem with this approach is that failure triggers strong emotions and makes it very difficult to focus on the cause of the failure.

For example, let’s say that you were fired from a job. (Feel free to substitute your own big failure for this scenario.) When you think about being fired, your mind will focus on the emotional part of it–the being fired part, cleaning out your desk, walking out of the building, looking for a new job, etc. These are the things that are strongly branded in your brain because they contained the most emotion. Unfortunately, they don’t tell you anything about the events leading up to getting fired, and in the context of learning from mistakes, those are the events you should be looking at.

Even if you look at the cause for getting fired, you are unlikely to see the whole picture. If your boss said you were being fired for X, you’ll probably focus a lot of mental effort on that reason–even though it may be minor compared to everything else that was involved. Let’s say you were let go because of the economy. That doesn’t give you a whole lot to go on, but it is likely to become your focus instead of really digging deep and understanding the other reasons–reasons that you may have had some control over.

While you might have been let go because of the economy, if other people were retained, there were probably other reasons involved. Here are some potential reasons:

1. Your boss sees you as a threat.
2. Your performance isn’t as good as others’.
3. Based on some of your comments, your boss thinks you are likely to leave anyway.
4. You are a higher maintenance employee than others.
5. Your boss has a romantic interest at work and you are standing in the way of that.
6. You never built a relationship with your boss, so you were the easiest person to fire with the least amount of emotional pain.

The list could go on and on. Some things may be your fault, others may not be. Regardless, you can learn from the experience and do a better job of managing your relationships in your next position. However, your natural response is not to notice these things because it isn’t where your memory is fixated because it isn’t where the emotion occurred.

Here are some strategies for learning from mistakes and failures. Not everything will apply in every situation, but they all have their place and can be very useful.

1. Think about failures well in the past

Things that occurred a long time ago probably have lessened in their emotional sting and you may be able to better analyze things now It is going to be easier to see your faults in a high school relationship than in a breakup that occurred last week.

2. Ask others for help in understanding

Don’t do this unless you really want their input. For example, if you have a good friend at a job you were fired from who is familiar with the situation, ask if there are things you did or didn’t do that they can see that contributed to your failure. It may be hard to get this information from them, because they will probably assume you don’t really want to hear it.

Once they tell you, don’t argue. If you disagree, keep it to yourself. They are doing you a huge favor by breaking social norms and being honest with you. If you don’t think their perspective is valid, just set it aside. What may seem irrelevant today might be very useful a year from now.

This is a good strategy for smaller failures as well. If you got passed up for a promotion, sitting down with your boss and asking what you could have done differently might not be a bad idea. If you fail to sign a client for a deal, a call asking if there is anything you could have done better might yield some useful information.

3. Fail on your own terms

If you know something is going to fail and are certain you can’t prevent it, get out on your own so you don’t have to deal with the emotions of someone else telling you that you have failed. This will put you in a better mindset to analyze what went wrong.

I had a job where I was clashing a lot with the people above me. I tried to make some improvements, but eventually quit. While I doubt if I would have been fired, looking back now, I see some specific areas where I wasn’t recognizing the political game as well as I should have. Whether I decided to play along or not would have been my decision, but not recognizing what was going on was a huge failure on my part, and something I’m much more aware of now.

4. Look at the numbers

Where possible, look at actual data and numbers. It is easy to weight the causes for a failure based on where we felt the most emotional instead of on what really caused the failure. If you have numbers and statistics that you can analyze, it will help you see things in terms of objective truth rather than just how you feel about it.

No one likes to fail, but good can come from a failure where you learn something. Going through all the pain of a failure while learning nothing is the ultimate tragedy.

Privacy and Technology

There is a current court case that involves a school that provides laptops for its students. The students are allowed to take the laptops home. These laptops had video cameras, and the school would occasionally activate the webcam of a laptop to try to figure out where it was. They activated the camera of high school student Blake Robbins and took a picture. It seems that he had some candy visible in the picture and the school system decided it looked like drugs that he was taking or selling.

After Robbins was disciplined for drug use/sales, he sued the school system basically saying that not only was he falsely accused, but that they should have never turned the camera on in the first place. You can read some of the details of the case at Wikipedia. I think there are at least a few people working for the school that are committing career suicide here. Even if they thought the student had drugs in the picture, I can’t imagine why they would have acted on that information since taking a picture inside a student’s house is obviously a huge invasion of privacy. Even just admitting that you take pictures of students in their bedrooms seems like it would be enough to get your servers confiscated on child porn laws.

It is possible that more details will emerge that will make the school’s actions seem merely stupid instead of egregiously stupid, which is the way things stand right now. Regardless, this case is a good example of how important it is to understand privacy, particularly as it relates to technology you use.

Company Computer

Most companies have a policy that basically says “we own everything on your computer and can look at it whenever we feel like it.” I know that some people think this means they can ask for your computer to look at it. That isn’t the case. Many computers have software installed that will let someone in IT pull up your screen and watch “over your shoulder” without your knowledge.

I haven’t heard of any companies activating a laptop’s camera to check in on their employees, but I’m pretty sure it happens. It is just that companies probably aren’t dumb enough to tell someone they were being fired for something that was discovered on their webcam, as the school administrators had done.

Internet Access

If you are using your employer’s Internet access, anything you send or receive is fair game for them to look at. I know some people think that using HTTPS to connect to web-mail will keep their private emails private. This isn’t the case. If your employer can see your screen, it doesn’t matter if your email is viewed over an encrypted connection. Also, some employers use keyloggers that will keep track of everything you type on the keyboard. In addition, web pages are cached locally and someone that knows what they are doing can pull them out of the cache.

Even if you aren’t using your company’s Internet connection, you still need to be aware of how people can see what you are doing. I was in college when my  university wired all the rooms for Internet. With a bit of fiddling in my room, we discovered we could watch all the traffic for our entire dorm room. This meant that, every five minutes, we’d see everyone’s username and password go across the wire when their email program checked their email. You could also see who was in what chat room and what they were saying. And we weren’t doing anything shady like breaking into a server–we were simply watching all the bits of information that the system was transmitting into our dorm room over the network cable. (This was in 1995 and most schools now have a policy that specifically prohibit what we were doing.) This is worth thinking about when you fire up a connection at Starbucks. The signals you are sending to and from their wireless router are free game for anyone in the general vicinity.

Social Media

It is becoming easier and easier to post information to social media sites. My Blackberry can quickly send a photo to Facebook where I can share it with all my friends. However, just because you can share something doesn’t mean that you should. Many people have lost out on potential jobs because of something they posted on Facebook or elsewhere on the web. What might seem like a funny party picture may end up being the main Google hit for your name found by a potential employer. At least Michael Phelps knew what people were giving him grief about. You may end up suffering from a photo or rant without ever having the luxury of knowing what people are thinking about you.

I try to be careful about posting travel information until I’m back. I don’t really want it to be public that my house is going to be empty for the next two days while I go on a trip. This is surprisingly difficult. If a friend is having a wedding, I can’t say anything like “can’t wait to see you” without exposing the fact that I’m going to the wedding. Fortunately, my obscure travel plans aren’t the only thing that we use to protect our house. Neighbors, house sitters, dogs, etc. all come into play as well.  Still, it is good to be just a bit paranoid and ask yourself “what could someone do with this information” before posting something online. (There is even a site called Please Rob Me that compiles all the posts of people saying that they are away from home.)

Metadata

Pictures and files have hidden fields called Metadata. When you take a picture, it will usually include things like the make and model of your camera, exposure information, and (if supported) your GPS coordinates. Cell phone cameras typically have the GPS coordinate capabilities if it is turned on, so think about this. You post a photo of your new big-screen TV, and suddenly the entire world knows the exact coordinates of that television. Pretty useful information for a thief if you tell everyone you are going out of town for the weekend.

Some pictures even carry information that show what the original photograph looked like. This isn’t a big deal if you simply cropped the picture to make it better. However, a TechTV host learned about metadata the hard way when she posted some photos cropped to a headshot, but the meta data showed the full photo in which she was less than fully clothed.

It isn’t just pictures that carry this information. Word documents often contain your company name, your name and sometimes various revisions.  Dennis Rader, the serial murderer from Kansas, was caught when police tracked the document he sent on a disk back to the computer at his church where he created it. (I think he wanted to get caught. He asked the police if they could trace his floppy, and when they said “no,” he sent it in instead of using paper.)

GPS

Most GPS units in your car have a HOME setting. You hit HOME, and the unit will figure out how to get to your house. Some theives have started breaking into cars at sporting events and stealing the GPS units and any garage door openers they can find. The GPS takes them to the individual’s home, and the opener gets them in quickly and easily.

A lot of phones have applications that will let you track your friends and family using the phone’s GPS.  If it is completely private and you know everyone with access, that might be fine, but some do things like post your location to Twitter or your blog. This isn’t necessarily the information that you want to have out there.

Cell Phones

If someone gets your cell phone, what good would that do them? More than you might think. Here is a story that is floating around that I haven’t been able to confirm, but gives you an idea of what someone could do with your phone address book.

A woman lost her purse and cell phone. By the time she realized it and called her husband, the thieves had already texted the contact named “Hubby” with a message saying “I can’t remember our debit card pin. What did we change it to?”, and cleared out their checking account. So beware if your spouse is suddenly texting you for information that could give access to all your finances.

Of course, the address book works for good as well. I was in line with my two-year-old waiting for a butterfly ride at an amusement park when the two youngsters in front of me found a cell phone on the ground. They asked me what to do with it, so I took it and called the most recently called number. A lady answered saying “Greg?”. I said, “Is Greg missing his cell phone?” I told her where I was and she got the phone back for her husband.

Conclusion

I’m not trying to scare you away from using technology. There are a lot of good things that technology can do for you. If you live in complete fear, you’ll never leave your house in the first place. Of course, staying at home can be dangerous, too. You might get hit by a meteor. It is worth understanding that some of the things you make public can provide people with ill intent very detailed information about where and who you are. You can’t live under a rock, but understanding what information you are making available is important.

Community Links

Many Productivity501 readers also have their own blogs. In this post we wanted to feature some of the top content from you—people who leave comments on this website.  So read on to discover some great posts from the Productivity501 community.

30 Days Habit Change: Waking up at 5 AM-Freestyle Mind
In this post, Oscar from Freestyle Mind writes about his plan to see if getting up at 5 AM will increase his productivity.

DIY Common Sense Search Optimization-Monday Morning VA
Search engine optimization can seem like a daunting task, but this article gives 4 rules for optimization that can prime your web page for optimal placement page rank.

Are You a Human Decision Making Machine?-Mining Man
Whether followers notice the effort or not, leadership is a skill that requires input to generate successful output (good decisions). The author of this article discusses the book, “The Magic of Thinking Big” by David J. Schwartz and how the book compares things such as effective listening to raw materials used to build the foundation for good decisions.

Don’t Do Work Just for the Sake of Doing Work-From Bottom Up
It is easy to get discouraged when work doesn’t go as smoothly as we would wish. In this article, the author gives tips on how to create a better working environment that encourages productivity.

Sweet Backstabbers-Leadership Freak
If you’ve ever encountered someone in the workplace that seems kind face-to-face, but undermines you behind your back, you’re most likely at a loss concerning what to do. In this article, Dan Rockwell gives some tips on how to skillfully and diplomatically restore your reputation.

Nine Ways the iPad Will Change Time Management-Time Management Ninja
With the controversy over whether or not the iPad will be a truly useful tool, it is interesting to see how people will actually be able to incorporate the device into their daily routines. This article lists nine benefits of using the iPad to aid time management.

How to Abandon a Sinking Ship-30 Days at a Time
Failure is something that we all must face at one time or another. The author of this article gives several observations on how to deal with failure.

How to Profit from Your Passion-Potential2Success
Entrepreneurship has long been a way for businesspeople with great ideas and work ethics to make a living at doing what they love. However, there are a few myths about starting your own business. Ralph Jean-Paul discusses a few of these common misconceptions.

9 Powerful Time Management Tips for Students-Taming Time
Today, most students fill multiple shoes. Many work or raise families as they attend college. This article gives a helpful list of suggestions on how to get the most out of your day.

Demotivation: the curse of success? The choice is yours-6 Aliens
Being unmotivated to complete a certain, necessary task is something all of us face at one time or another. In this article, Ben Lumley discusses how motivation is a choice and that a change in focus could bring about a more positive outlook.

On the Job MBA

A Master of Business Administration degree is designed to give a broad set of skills needed in running a business. A good deal of what you would learn from an MBA program can be gleaned from on-the-job experience if you are paying close analytical attention. This article is going to explore some of the ways you can leverage your job experience to develop many of the skills you’d get going through an MBA program. In fact, if you apply yourself to this type of education, your skill set would put you well ahead of some state school MBA’s I’ve had to work with.

Business is not rocket science. A lot of what you need to know is just a matter of learning to pay attention, and learning how to apply others’ mistakes and successes to help you make better decisions.

Learn from good leaders and managers

Many MBA programs use case studies that describe a situation, the actions taken, and then discuss the outcome and other possible alternatives. As far as case studies go, it is hard to beat real experience. Your job can be one big case study if you are willing to invest the time in systematically analyzing events.

When you encounter a situation where you feel a manager did a good job, take the time to write down what happened and why that manager’s actions were good. Consider what you would have done in their situation and (given the benefit of hindsight) what the results of your actions would have been.

Writing it down is important because it helps you clarify exactly what happened and gives you a way to come back and examine it later. Repercussions from certain actions may not be apparent for some time. Your written record gives you a way to go back and examine causes and effects in much greater detail than just relying on your memory.

Analyze mistakes

When you see a manager do something bad, take the time to examine what happened. Think about why the manager made that decision and how things looked from his/her point of view. Give special thought to how his/her actions were perceived by others and how those perceptions influenced their behavior. Put yourself in the manager’s place and think about how you would have acted. It isn’t enough to just notice that they did something wrong. You might do the same thing in their situation. Spend time trying to understand at what point the failure occurred. Did the manager’s ego get in the way of making a better decision? Did they forget to consult with key people? Did they miscalculate staff buy-in for a particular change? Describe a course of action that would have had a better result and how you, given your style and strengths, would have behaved to achieve an ideal outcome.

Your goal is to teach yourself to avoid making the same mistake. This doesn’t happen on its own. Learning from others’ mistakes requires a significant amount of effort on your part. Writing is one of the best ways to go through this effort and put yourself in the best position to learn. It may not be wise to keep your records at work. A documented list of your manager’s failures isn’t exactly the type of thing you want to have someone find.

Hone your intuition

When a business decision is made by management, take the time to record the decision along with your prediction of what will happen and why. For example, if your company is going to open a new office on the other side of town, explain why you think it will or will not be successful.

This exercise will help you gauge your intuition without risking anything. Be very detailed in your predictions and the come back and see if you were right or wrong. Analyze the results of your predictions and make sure you understand where you were wrong. Write it all down. You should end up with a lot of statements like, “I thought X would happen, but it turned out Y occurred. It appears that I underestimated the value of Z in this situation.”

Accounting experience

Getting a good grasp on the basics of accounting is a very important part of your on-the-job MBA, but if you don’t work in the accounting department, it can be a bit more difficult to get hands-on experience. Obviously you should take any opportunity to work on projects that involve accounting, but you may need to go outside to get a better range of experience.

There are few things that will help you better understand accounting than keeping track of the finances for a small business or non-profit using a double entry accounting system. You might be able to volunteer to help keep track of finances at your church or another organization. Most of the time, you’ll be using a piece of software to help you. However, you can do the necessary accounting using a pencil, calculator and ledger paper.

Look up “double entry accounting” and you will find lots of examples and tutorials to help give you a foundation. Taking an accounting class from your community college is another way to gain skills in this area. Often your company will pay for it as a business course.

Taxes and corporate structures

You need to be at least familiar with how corporations work. This can be tricky to get on the job, because your company probably has only one corporate structure. You’d be amazed at how much you can learn on this topic by spending several hours doing searches on Google. Picking up a book on “how to incorporate your business” can also be a good place to start.

Take what you learn in your research and use it to better understand how your company operates. What type of corporate structure does it use? Is it a C Corporation, an LLC or a partnership? Who are the shareholders or owners? Who are the directors? What types of taxes does the company pay? If your company is a publicly traded entity you may be able to find a lot of information in its public financial statements.

Business language

In any degree program, a very large portion of what you learn is a specialized vocabulary. If you have been at your job for a while, you’ve probably already picked up on the vocabulary necessary to describe your line of business. However, we want to develop a generic business vocabulary that isn’t tied to one particular company or market.

For this, I would recommend subscribing to the Wall Street Journal and setting aside significant time to read it each day. Make sure you don’t only read the articles you understand. You want exposure to topics that you might not just pick up to read on your own. In addition to developing your business vocabulary, the Wall Street Journal will help reinforce the other learning areas.

Other publications that can be good to read include: Harvard Business Review, the business section of your local paper, Forbes, Economist, etc.

Human Resources

Your guide to your company’s human resource policies is usually going to be in the employee handbook. One danger here is to assume that your company is doing everything the right way. Still, you can get a lot of good information about how human resources are managed by reading through an employee handbook. Look for ways that human resource policies follow from the other things you’ve learned. For example, different corporate structures have different types of deductions for employee benefits, and you can often see how those deductions come into play in how the benefits are worded in the employee manual. It is ideal if you have the employee handbooks from several different organizations to compare and contrast.

Get in front of people

I used to write presentations for my boss. After a while she decided I could probably give sections of the talk better than she could, so I started getting pulled into board meetings. There are few things as valuable to your career as the ability to talk in front of people gracefully. You are only going to get good at public speaking by doing it. Take advantage of any opportunity to stand up and talk in front of people.

Final thoughts

The purpose of this article isn’t to put down an MBA education. There are very fine schools that offer MBA’s, and many teach skills that are very useful.  However, many people overlook the training that is available to them in their current job. I hope this article has given you some ideas on how to get the most out of where you are right now and prepare for where you want to be in the future.

Income Diversification

Most people make money from their job working for someone else, and that is it. This is an extremely precarious situation, because if the job goes away, it takes away 100% of their income. The ideal situation is a number of different income sources that can all be ramped up, if necessary.

In this post, we are going to look at several different sources of income.

Job

This is where most people make their money. They work for an employer that pays them for their time. An advantage of this type of income is that the employee doesn’t have to know much about running other parts of the business. They can concentrate on their portion of their job. A janitor at Google doesn’t have to understand how search engines work, how to sell their Apps solution to large business, or how to run payroll.

Of course, the downside of this arrangement is that businesses will only pay you a portion of the total value you bring. So a highly motivated person can make a lot more money per hour working for themselves–if other people are willing to pay them directly for their skills.

Side Business

I know some people who start a side business to bring in some extra cash and give them something different to do when they are off work. I knew a materials management worker who had a side business washing windows. He could make a few hundred dollars with a couple hours worth of work and enjoyed the chance to do some work outside during the summers.

The problem with a side business is that there is a certain amount of overhead effort that is going to go into the business regardless of the size of the business. If your business requires a lot of effort just to be at the point that you can perform your business function it might scale down very well.

Side Jobs

Similar to a side business, a side job is something you can do without requiring a lot of business setup. The person who occasionally sets up computers for others is a good example of this. Other example is someone who does calligraphy or occasional proof-reading.

Side jobs can become full-fledged side businesses if you want to invest the time and resources in them, and many can become full-time jobs if they are successful.

Consulting

Consulting is an occupation in which you go into other companies and offer your expertise–usually for a limited period of time or to solve a particular issue.  The company that is hiring you gets the advantage of very specific expertise without having to hire a high-level employee with that skill set.

The problem with trying to do consulting on the side is that your day job will likely interfere with the schedule on which potential clients would like to hire you. Still, consulting can be a great way to bring in additional cash when you start your own business. I have seen a lot of start-ups that pay the bills with consulting while they build a product that they want to use as their main income.

Services

Services can cover a wide range of things–many that would also fall under side businesses and side jobs. Here are some ideas of services that can bring in additional income:

1. Proofreading
2. Ghost writing
3. Creating resumes
4. Hosting websites
5. Dog walking
6. Lawn service
7. House cleaning
8. Website and Graphic Design
9. Virtual Assistant Service

A portion of my business focuses on hosting email for small- to medium-sized companies where reliable email access and high delivery rates are very important.

Online Sales

The Internet has opened up the market place so an individual can easily sell items all over the country or world. Ebay is probably one of the easiest examples of this. It provides value by connecting buyers and sellers. A big advantage of selling items online is that you can often do it on the side in the evenings and weekends without it interfering with your day job. There are sites that have grown up around selling specific types of items. Etsy focuses on a lot of handmade-type items. Amazon makes it easy to sell used books. E-Junkie offers a service that makes it easy to sell digital content (which is what we use for some of our products). Some companies like Amazon will even warehouse your product for you and take care of shipping it to your customers.

Investments

Making money from your money is the ultimate income diversification. Many people don’t learn much about investing because they don’t feel they have enough money to invest. This is unfortunate because you can make money with even modest amounts, and the effort required once you understand what you are doing can be minimal. Many employees have some type of retirement account through their job, and often employers will match a percentage of what you invest. Knowing how to best put that money to work will benefit you over your entire lifetime.

Conclusion

You don’t need to rush out and try to create a source of income from everything mentioned in this article. However, there is great value in being aware of different opportunities and looking for one or two ways you can protect yourself against the loss of your primary job. In particular, if you can find something you enjoy and turn it into a secondary source of income, you can give yourself a lot of flexibility in the future, regardless of what happens in the job market.

Who’s Got Your Back Review

I really enjoyed Never Eat Alone, so I was excited to get a review copy of Ferrazzi’s new book, Who’s Got Your Back. It is a good book and I’d recommend it.  If you can only read one of Ferrazzi’s books, I’d go for Never Eat Alone.  However, I listened to an audio recording of Never Eat Alone and read a physical book of Who’s Got Your Back, so I may have missed out on some of Who’s Got Your Back by not hearing it read by Keith Ferrazzi, himself.

Never Eat Alone talks about building a network of people that you can help and who can help you.  One of the constant criticisms of anyone who is seriously working on networking with people is that these types of relationships seem superficial and don’t always go very deep.  You can’t build incredibly strong relationships with 500 people–there just isn’t enough time.

Who’s Got Your Back looks at building those deeper relationships with people who are going to look out for you and your interests.  These relationships go well beyond the acquaintance level that the previous book focuses on.  These are the types of relationships where people can tell you hard truths that you probably couldn’t take from someone at the acquaintance level.

Who’s Got Your Back

In this section, Ferrazzi lays out a lot of definition of the type of relationships he is going to be discussing.  He gives several examples from his personal experience of people who helped steer him away from bad habits or mistakes by giving “tough love” type advice.

This type of deep relationship is a very good complement to the types of relationships mentioned in Never Eat Alone. Together, the two approaches offer a very balanced approach of maximizing your ability to network while still retaining a circle of very close friends/advisers.

The Four Mindsets

This section looks at the mindsets that need to be there to build a deep relationship.  They are:

1. Generosity
2. Vulnerability
3. Candor
4. Accountability

Building Your Dream Team

This section of the book covers some of the practical matters on how to build a team of advisers whom you can trust and will feel comfortable giving you candid feedback and advice.  It also looks at how to approach people about being on your team and lots of examples of how others have implemented these types of groups.

Make It Your Life

This section looks at some of the ways to integrate these types of relationships into your life.  It also talks about the “Greenlight Method” using a meeting methodology from Ferrazzi’s consulting company.

Overall, it was a decent book, but I’d still recommend reading it along with Never Eat Alone. Together, the two books give very balanced approach to maintaining good relationships. Who’s Got Your Back,by itself, isn’t quite as strong of a book as Never Eat Alone, but still well worth reading.

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