A MULETEER set forth on a journey, driving before him an Donkey and a Mule, both well laden.  The Donkey, as long as he traveled along the plain, carried his load with ease, but when he began to ascend the steep path of the mountain, felt his load to be more than he could bear.  He entreated his companion to relieve him of a small portion, that he might carry home the rest; but the Mule paid no attention to the request.  The Donkey shortly afterwards fell down dead under his burden.  Not knowing what else to do in so wild a region, the Muleteer placed upon the Mule the load carried by the Donkey in addition to his own, and at the top of all placed the hide of the Donkey, after he had skinned him.  The Mule, groaning beneath his heavy burden, said to himself:  ”I am treated according to my deserts.  If I had only been willing to assist the Donkey a little in his need, I should not now be bearing, together with his burden, himself as well.” ~Aesop

Have you ever had a small problem that you didn’t feel like dealing with? Something that was easy enough to ignore where there didn’t seem to be any harm in just putting it off? Enough about donkeys and mules. Let me tell you how I ruined two perfectly good garden hoses.

Last week we went to Florida. (You know there is something wrong when you head to Florida to beat the heat in Kansas.) Anyway right before we left we got a lot of rain so when we came back the yard was well past the point where it needed to be mowed. We have about 2.5 acres and even with a 54 inch riding mower, it takes a while. I didn’t get started until late and was racing the encroaching darkness. I had a few hoses set up to water some trees and an area of the yard on a timer. I didn’t want to take the time to wrap them all up so I decided to just mow over them. Even with the blade on the highest setting I managed to nick the 100 footer that ran to the trees. It was small enough that I thought I could probably repair it, but I didn’t learn my lesson and 5 minutes later managed to completely mangle a shorter hose cutting it into a bunch of foot long pieces and getting it wrapped tightly around the left blade of the lawn mower.

By the time I got the hose off the blade, picked up my mess, threw the trashed hose away, and then patched the nicked hose I spent way more time than it would have taken to simply move the hoses and that doesn’t even include the time  I’m going to have to spend to go get a replacement for the hose I destroyed.

Shortcuts are often the longest way of doing something. I’d write more, but I need to go to the store to get another hose.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• garden hoses (1)
• mule gift ideas (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• 100 Ways to Enjoy Life
• Home Office – Effective Design
• Inteview: Biggest Productivity Challenge

For example, if instead of writing this post, I start fiddling around on the Internet and spend a mindless hour on social sites or reading jokes, that is probably a bad thing.  This post is more valuable to me than an hour wasted on the Internet.  However, if I decided I don’t really want to write this post and instead decide that it is nice enough outside that I should take my kids to the park for an hour, that really isn’t a negative thing. Maybe I came up with the idea as a form of procrastination to put off writing this post, but my procrastinating activity is something more valuable than the activity I’m putting off.

So there are two ways to procrastinate.  One is by doing something of much lower value than the activity you are putting off and the other is by doing something of higher value than the activity you are delaying. If you are doing a higher value activity then you aren’t really wasting time. Obviously there are limits to this–eventually I have to take the time to pay my bills and I can’t just put them off forever. However, within reason, procrastination can have some positive aspects as long as you are shifting to an activity that you value more than what you are putting off.

Sometimes the feeling of “I don’t really want to do this” is our subconscious trying desperately to point out that the activity we are about to start really isn’t that important to us and we should be doing something different. When this results in a change of plans where we do something valuable it can be a good thing.  Unfortunately we often replace the activity with something that is even less valuable.  These types of activities are the equivalent of junk food–they are chosen because of they are easy to start.  It is much easier to start the task of randomly browsing the web than it is to start the task of preparing your taxes.

The trick to being productive is being able to recognize the feeling of procrastination and then taking appropriate actions.  Once you recognize that you are headed toward a procrastinating activity, steer it toward doing something valuable. Take a few moments to decide whether the task you want to put off really needs done at all. Even if it does need to be done, perhaps now isn’t the best time for it.  Sometimes you’ll need to go ahead and complete the task, but giving yourself the option to do something different can be liberating.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• procrastination is good (87)
• good procrastination (76)
• why procrastination is good (68)
• procrastination good (14)
• procrastination is a good thing (8)
• reasons procrastination can be good (2)
• is procrastination good? (2)
• why is it not good to procrastinate? (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Praise for the Procrastination Prevention Course
• Procrastinating in Sheeps Clothing
• Un-Procrastination Book by Leo Babauta
• Procrastination Course
• Procrastination Prevention Course – Now Live!

A list is a way to break down your life goals into easy manageable steps that you can complete in a specific amount of time. In this sense, your list becomes a guide showing you how to succeed in life.

The way most people start off creating to-do lists, isn’t particularly effective. It is easy to end up with many items that aren’t important, that you don’t want to do, and that don’t contribute to your overall goals.

Developing a talent in creating your lists is very beneficial First, you need to see your list as a sacred place. It is there to help you achieve your life goals. It represents items on which you plan to spend part of your valuable and limited time. This doesn’t mean you can’t put smaller items on the list–like getting groceries. It does mean that you need to make sure you only use your list for things that are actually valuable to you.

photo credit

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• to do list (49)
• things to do list (8)
• todo (4)
• work to do list (2)
• creating a list (1)
• life goals list (1)
• list of thinks ppl are scared (1)
• to do list life goals (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Simple Todo List
• A Better ToDo List – Behance Giveaway
• Binge Productivity
• Behance’s Action Pads
• Two Task Lists

1. Grocery store trip – It may or may not be efficient to send someone to do your detailed shopping, trips to pickup milk, bread and other staples can be handled by someone else.
2. Meal planning – This can be nicely coupled with grocery shopping. You could even set certain targets you want to hit regarding nutrition.
3. Meal preparation - If your assistant can cook, this might be a good time saver for you. Obviously this doesn’t work very well with a virtual assistant.
4. Deposits – With a rubber stamp, you can give someone else the ability to make bank deposits for you. Obviously it needs to be someone you trust.
5. Scanning – If you are trying to implement a paperless office, having someone else do your scanning can save you a lot of time.
6. Filing – If you haven’t gone paperless.
7. Proof reading – A second pair of eyes can often spot issues much faster than you can yourself.
8. Contacts cleanup – If you have a setup that syncs contacts from your computer, phone and other devices, it is likely that you have a bunch of duplicates or incomplete contacts.  Let someone else clean them up and make sure your information is up to date and accurate.
9. Send handwritten letters – Using a font like vLetter, you can give someone else the ability to print and send handwritten letters for you.
10. Pay bills – You may or may not want to give someone else access to your online bill payment service.  If you still use checks, someone can save you time by getting everything ready so you just have to sign the checks.
11. Get your oil changed – The 30 to 60 minutes it takes to get your oil changed can easily be handed off to someone else.
12. Transcribe voicemail – Depending on your workflow, it might be much more efficient to have your voicemails transcribed and sent as email.
13. Shred sensitive documents – This can be particularly important if you are scanning in a lot of documents that can’t be thrown away due to the information they contain.
14. Buy airline tickets – This can be tricky because there is a lot that usually goes into picking out tickets that requires your personal attention.  However, if your needs are simple, this can be a small task that you can delegate.
15. Wait on hold - It is easy to waste a lot of time just waiting for someone else to answer the phone.  While you can’t hand off every phone call to an assistant, the ones that you can will save you time.
16. Tech support – If you deal with a lot of electronics you probably spend at least some time fixing problems, working with tech support and getting parts replaced.  In some cases these are activities that could be delegated.
17. Mailing letters and packages – It isn’t hard to mail a package, but it can be time consuming and that makes it a great canidate to delegate.
18. Send birthday cards - Sending birthday cards is a great networking tool. An assistant can help by getting the cards ready, addressed, stamped and even signing them using a signature font.
19. Birthday shopping – With a little organization an assistant can help you keep up with your birthday gift giving.  If you give them a list of people, birthdays and a list of possible gifts they can make sure you never miss a gift giving opportunity.
20. Finding deals – An assistant can help find the best deal (including shipping and tax charges) on a particular item you need to purchase.  American Express’ concierge generally does a good job of this.
21. Answer phone calls – Using something like Google Voice or Ring Central you can forward your phone calls to an assistant so callers get a real person during the times you would normally send them to voice mail.
22. Library run – It is easy to order books off Amazon simply to avoid the inconvenience of going to the library. Sending an assistant to the library is particularly useful if you have a small library where a lot of specific books will need to come through library loan.
23. Proof reading – A second set of eyes to look over things before you send them out can drastically reduce little errors. This can be a bit challenging if you are trying to use someone  in India where they speak a slightly different version of English.
24. Phone calls – Sometimes you need to get a message to someone and simply leaving a message won’t do.  An assistant can keep calling until the person answers and give the message.
25. Bill collection – If someone owes you money, having an assistant call and inquire about when to expect payment can help keep you out of the bill collector role but still get the payment in the mail.
26. Researching lists – For example, if I want a list of the top 100 peer blogs to Productivity501 along with various stats about them, an assistant can gather that information easily into an document where it can be sorted and analyzed.
27. Interviews – Virtual assistants are great for querying a large number of people and compiling their answers.
28. Organizing personal library – Have you ever wanted to have your home library organized according to the Dewey Decimal system?
29. Book index – If the Dewey Decimal system is to much, you still might like a master index of your library.
30. Listing books on Amazon - If you have a bunch of books you want to get rid of, an assistant can get them listed for you on Amazon.
31. Update phone – If you can’t sync your phone with your computer, consider having an assistant update the contacts.
32. Locate photos and illustrations – A virtual assistant can save you a lot of time by locating pictures to illustrate blog posts and presentations.
33. Transcription – Sometimes you want to have a text copy of an audio file.  It could be the recording of a conference call, meeting or even radio broadcast.  This time consuming process is a great candidate for outsourcing to an assistant. If you have a tremendous amount of audio to transcribe, you may want to look into using services that specialize in audio transcription.
34. Categorize pictures - An assistant can help you categorize, rate and organize your pictures by adding tags or putting them in different folders.
35. Mail merge - A good assistant should be able to take a spreadsheet and a letter and do a mailing with minimal intervention on your part. This could be anything from sending out your Christmas letter to 50 family members or a huge newsletter mailing for your company.
36. Watering plants – This may seem trivial, but it is one other place that an assistant can save you a few minutes.
37. Setting up appointments – If you need to meet with a large number of people an assistant can setup your meetings and update your schedule.
38. Watching for news – An assistant can monitor various news sources and notify you when something comes up that you need to know about.
39. Garage sale shopping - Garage sales are one of those things that you don’t know what you are looking for until you find it. However if you do know what you are looking for, an assistant can scour the garage sales looking for used books or whatever it is you need.
40. Fill the car with gas – It isn’t a hard task, but it takes up your time.  If you can send someone to fill the car up for you it will probably save you 15 to 30 minutes of time.
41. Driving – Letting someone else drive you can free up your time to work on the computer, read, make phone calls safely, etc.
42. Qualify leads - If your business generates leads that then need to be qualified, a virtual assistant can follow up by phone, ask a few questions and schedule a meeting with you.  This helps you keep your time focused on the qualified customers.
43. Twitter – Most of our famous quotes on Twitter were researched and scheduled by my assistant.
44. Printing – It doesn’t always make sense, but sometimes it makes more sense to send your assistant a file and let them handle the printing, getting the right paper, printer options, etc.
45. Summarizing data – This can be a great way to use a virtual assistant.  Let them send you summaries of news or financial information that you would wade through otherwise.
46. Article clipping - Instead of going through magazines and newspapers yourself, an assistant can clip the parts that are relevant to you.
47. Setting up appointments – If you need to meet with a large number of people an assistant can setup your meetings and update your schedule.
48. Watching for news – An assistant can monitor various news sources and notify you when something comes up that you need to know about.
49. Office supply stocking – An assistant can help make sure that you don’t run out of paper, pens or toner.
50. Reconcile accounts - Trying to find the missing transaction that is keeping your accounts from balancing is a great thing to delegate.
51. Preparing expense reports – You give them your receipts with a note on the back and they handle filling out whatever forms you need.
52. Sending out “good to meet you letters” – A great networking tool is to follow up with a physical letter.  An assistant can handle doing this for you.
53. Letter sequence - Similar to the above, but you may want to send people out a sequence of letters.  Once again, a great thing to delegate.
54. Wait for cable repair – Most cable companies give you a window of when they will come that is huge and keeps you sitting at home all day wondering when they will show up.  Let someone else do the waiting.
55. Wait for important packages – If you have a package coming that needs a signature, you don’t have to be stuck waiting for it.
56. Locate and schedule carpet cleaners – You an give criteria such as: locate 3 carpet cleaners, get and follow up with references, choose the one that sounds like they will do the best job at a reasonable price.
57. Answer emails – I’m not crazy about giving someone else direct access to my email, but there are some situations where it may make sense.  In particular it may be good if you are away from email for an extended period of time.
58. Transcribe written notes – Turn your written notes into searchable text.
59. Negotiate – Sometimes having a third party negotiate for you can give you an upper hand. Give them the parameters you are willing to accept and let them try to negotiate for you.
60. Accountability – Asking a virtual assistant to make sure you exercise, or make sure you leave work on time can help give you some accountability to do the things you know are important.
61. Worry – I’ve heard of people delegating their worrying to someone else.  The virtual assistant promised to worry about a big contract so he wouldn’t have to. Sounds silly but this person said it was very effective.
62. Walk the dog - Of course this doesn’t help you get any exercise.
63. Pickup medicine from the vet - Simple time saving errand.
64. Mow the yard – Another timesaver.
65. Write letters to politicians - If you want to let your voice be heard on a topic, let your assistant track down everyone who has any political pull in that area and mail them your opinion.
66. Send out resumes – They can handle the printing and mailing part of things.
67. Writing cover letters – Let them help customize your cover letters for each specific company.
68. Customize resume – They can research each company where you want to apply and help tweak and reorder your resume to best appeal to that company.
69. Mail newspaper clippings - A great way to network with people in your town is to clip out anything about them from the local paper and send it to them with a handwritten note of congratulations.  An assistant can help identify and clip these for you. (It is best to only do this with positive news.  You don’t need to send someone a note saying that you read about their DUI.)
70. Confirm reservations - Let your assistant confirm you car rental, hotel reservation, etc.
71. Send holiday cards – You can get cards for pretty much any time of year.  Let your assistant help keep your name in front of clients by sending St. Patrick’s day, Easter, and Groundhogs day cards for you.
72. Sell stuff on eBay – You will probably make a lot more selling old items on eBay than with a garage sale.  Your assistant can handle the listing and shipping for you so it doesn’t eat up all of your time.
73. Search craigslist.org – If you need something, have your assistant look for any new listings for that item on craigslist each day.
74. Gather menus - Want to have better information in choosing a restaurant.  Ask your assistant to get a copy of the menu from several different places ahead of time for you.
75. Parking and getting the car – This is particularly useful if you live in a place where you can’t park near your house or office.
76. Wait in line for tickets – If you want to get tickets to an event that will require a wait, send your assistant.
77. Wait in other lines – Your assistant probably can’t get a drivers license for you or register your car, but they can wait in line and call you to come when your turn is approaching.
78. Get quotes - Lets say you need to put a new roof on your house.  Your assistant can locate a number of roofer and get quotes for you to look over.
79. Transfer your phone - If you need to switch cell phones it can be a time consuming process.  Pass it off your your assistant, they can deal with the cellular company and make the changes.
80. Meeting minutes – This may be useful for things other than formal meetings.  It might be beneficial to have written minutes of a conference call or other informal meeting.
81. Wakeup call - I’ve heard of some people having a virtual assistant give them a wake up call along with the weather report and reminders of any important things coming up for that day.
82. Keeping home items in stock – This could be your batteries, printer supplies, envelopes, trash bags, flour, light bulbs etc.  Delegating responsibility to make sure you don’t run out of these things means you don’t have to think about it anymore.
83. Place Ads to Sell Stuff on Craigslist – They can also filter through the large amount of spam you are likely to get and help qualify people whoa re likely to actually buy.
84. Look for stuff to buy on Craigslist – Lets say you need a lawn mower.  Once you determine the model, age and price you are looking for, an assistant can check for one that meets your criteria daily and do the initial contact to make sure that the ad isn’t a scam. (Hint: If they are trying to ship you a riding lawn mower from another country, it is a scam.)
85. Play devils advocate – An assistant can offer valuable feedback by letting you test ideas and taking a contrary point of view.  This will help prepare you for likely objections to your ideas and proposals.
86. Get you off of mailing lists - Giving your assistant a stack of mail that you don’t want to get anymore, can save you a lot of time and reduce the amount of paper being used in the world.
87. Creating a Powerpoint presentation – If you can provide the general outline, an assistant can look up relevant statistics and add graphics.
88. Track loyalty program points – They can help you keep track of where you have existing points and how to make best use of them.
89. Identify potential jobs – People without a job probably aren’t the most likely to hire an assistant, but if you are looking for a job and wanting to play the numbers in your favor, getting some help might be useful.
90. Sending out resumes - An assistant can help you tweak your cover letter, mail out resumes and help you track where you’ve sent your information.
91. House sitting – If you are going to be gone for a few days, it may make sense to have someone stay in your house just to keep it occupied.
92. Online presence – Some people have an assistant do their updates to Facebook and Twitter.  This might be useful for someone wanting to maintain a particular online image.
93. Personal metrics – An assistant can help you compile and graph personal metrics.  This could be anything to how many miles you’ve walked each week, to your weight over time or the number of calories you’ve consumed.
94. Business metrics - Similar to above, they can keep track of how many sales calls you’ve made, how many deals you’ve closed, how many contacts you’ve followed up with, etc.
95. Plan your vacation – It might seem silly to have an assistant plan your vacation, but if they know you and your family well, they may be able to come up with a better schedule and locate more interesting things to do than you could for yourself.
96. Blog posts – If you need to maintain a certain style of online presence, an assistant can help you do that by writing about what you are doing in your voice. Not for everyone, but there are some people who might use this.
97. Conversions – I had an assistant move a bunch of my sites from Drupal to WordPress.  It wasn’t particularly difficult, but it was very time consuming and I had been putting it off.
98. Suggest cultural events - An assistant can keep track of the events in your city and suggest things you might want to attend.  If you say, yes, he/she can make the necessary arrangements for you.
99. Comment filtering – An assistant can help you manage comments on your blog and make sure you keep spam out while letting legitimate comments through quickly.
100. Fact checking – If you plan to use a piece of data for a publication or in a presentation and need to verify it, an assistant can do this for you.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• personal outsourcing (118)
• outsourcing (15)
• Personal (11)
• new outsourcing ideas (2)
• 100 things you can outsource (1)
• personal outsourcing ideas (1)
• outsource personal needs (1)
• outsource home meal preparation (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Links On Remote Assistants
• Outsourcing Efficiently
• Personal Outsourcing Caveats
• Outsourcing Ideas
• Lifesourcing

Logging into and navigating voice mail.

Of course, you have to check your voice mail; but there are some things you can do to keep it from interrupting your day. Personally, I find that navigating voicemail menus is a huge waste of time. I have set my voice mail system to send me an email with the message attached as a .wav file whenever someone leaves me a message. This centralizes all my messages to the same place (my email box) and doesn’t require that I navigate using the phone keypad.

Reading emails.

Here are several tips for streamlining your email reading:

• Make all your emails come to one place. If you have to log into several different accounts to read email you are wasting time. Most mail programs can check multiple accounts and show them all in the same or adjacent mailboxes.
• Don’t check your email every few minutes. It is easy to let email be a form of procrastination. (Whenever you don’t feel like doing something you immediately check your email looking for an excuse to do something else.) How often you check it will depend on your particular job, but if you are checking it more than once every 30 minutes you’re probably not being as effective as you could be.
• Turn off email notifications. Unless you get very few emails, having your computer beep, play music, talk like Homer Simpson or whatever, isn’t going to help make you more productive. If your email interrupts you just like the phone, you are going to have a much harder time concentrating on other work.

Writing checks

For regular bills, it just doesn’t make sense to sit down and write a check each month. Regardless of how fast you write, this is time that you can spend doing something else. Most banks offer some form of online bill payment where you can make both one-time and recurring payments. Once your payees are setup, it is a simple matter of typing in the amount and when you want the bill to be paid. Online bill payments also reduce the amount of paperwork involved in record keeping and balancing your checkbook each month.

Watching Television.

I’m not going to try to talk you out of watching TV, but with normal broadcast channels, one-third of your time will be spent watching commercials. DVR’s like Tivo allow you to fast forward through commercials and give you the ability to watch the programs you want on your own time table instead of being forced to fit your schedule around the television. If you don’t have a DVR, consider investing 15 minutes in learning how to program your VCR to record shows that you want to watch.

Personally, I’ve found that I prefer watching movies to watching television. Blockbuster and NetFlix offer subscription-based services where they mail you DVDs. Their selection is much more than what you’d find at a typical video rental and you keep the videos until you are through watching them.

Browsing the internet.

It is easy to waste a great deal of time aimlessly browsing the internet. Here are a few ways to make your browsing more productive:

• Use a feed reader. This is a tool that subscribes to any site you find interesting as long as it has an RSS feed. This means you can go to one place and see anything new that has been posted on any of the sites you subscribe to. You don’t have to visit each site individually and you are less likely to miss something important.
• Use bookmarks for frequently visited sites. Even if you type fast, a single click to bring up a site is faster.
• Use tabbed browsing to load sites. Most browsers (other than IE) will allow you to open several sites all at once in tabs. If have a list of sites you need to use each day consider opening them in this way. Since they come up all at once, you don’t have to wait for each site to load individually.
• Use tabbed browsing to view related pages. When using the web, it is easy to follow a link and lose track of what you were reading on the original page. If you come across a link that you want to follow, but you also want to finish reading the current text, just open the link in a tab. That way, it will be there when you finish what you are currently reading without requiring you to hunt down the link.

This post was originally published October 5th, 2005.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• internet email (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Top 5 Time Savers
• Cutting Out Distractions
• Choosing a PDA
• Dealing with Gadgets
• Changes at Productivity501

One hour of work on an airplane is equal to three hours of work in the office.

Wow! Sounds incredible, doesn’t it? If that is true, then basically, you’d get just as much done if you spent three hours every day on a plane and take the rest of the time off. Offices of highly paid workers would be better off if they would stop leasing expensive floorspace and just get everyone airline tickets every day.

Okay, so maybe it doesn’t scale to something you can do every day of the week, but if you’ve ever worked on a long plane ride, this statistic doesn’t sound completely unreasonable. Planes offer the following:

1. A bunch of people you probably don’t want to try to chit chat with.
2. You are physically tied down to your seat.
3. It is usually so uncomfortable that you couldn’t go to sleep even if you wanted to.
4. Your work surface is 16.5 inches wide by 9.5 inches deep, so you can only focus on a single task.
5. No phone calls.
6. No internet access. (Well, that is changing for some planes, now.)
7. The roar of engines cover up other conversations.
8. If you can watch television, you probably only have a single channel and chances are it is something you don’t want to watch anyway.

Now, if we could only recreate this same environment in your regular office,you’d be in productivity heaven. So should we all take out our desks and replace them with airline seats?

Probably not. But it is worth trying to create more distraction-free blocks of time. Here are some ways to do it without getting on a plane.

1. Turn off your Internet connection for a while to focus on work without the distractions of email and the web.
2. Forward your phone to voicemail for an hour.
3. Come in early to do some of your intense mental work when there isn’t anyone around to distract you.
4. Clear your desk of everything but the project you are working on.
5. Bring in a very large fan that makes as much noise as a jet engine, and no one will try to talk to you in your office.

Okay, so the fan idea might be a bit much, but you get the idea. (Maybe we need a jet engine ambient sound.)

The point is that you are probably losing a great deal of work time in the office. It sounds like you might lose as much as 66% of your time due to distractions, etc. Just think how much more productive you could be if you had even a fraction of that 66% back.

Office interactions are an important part of what makes organizations function. However, they can turn into huge time sinks if you aren’t careful. Be purposeful with your interactions. Don’t neglect to build the relationships you need to do your job effectively, but don’t over invest in relationships that are of no benefit.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• airplane ride (1)
• productivity plane (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Productive Blogging Posts
• Productive Blogger
• Tuesday’s Tip: Pennies
• Internet–Friend or Foe for Productivity?
• TIP: Create Productive Time

For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time. — Richard Stallman

Basically, if he wants a page, he sends an email to a special address asking for it and the page is emailed back to him. That is definitely one way to keep from wasting time on the internet.

A lot of times the internet doesn’t help productivity because it wastes just as much time as it saves. Here are some tips for keeping focused.

• Block Ads - Ads are there to distract you and get you to do something different. If you can block them out, there is less to keep you from focusing on the task at hand.
• Two Browsers - Sometimes using one browser for work and one for personal use can be a good idea. It forces you to think about whether you are saving or wasting time.
• Disconnect – I know some of my most productive times have been in areas where I have limited internet connectivity. Some routers will let you schedule times to block access. For example, you could block internet access every day from 8am to 10am to help force you to do non-internet related work.
• Slow Connection - Sometimes having a slow connection can bring good balance. If you can get to what you need, but it is too painfully slow to jump around unnecessarily, you will naturally limit your web use to just the minimum necessary.
• Time Audit – Knowing where your time is going can be a good way to keep your browsing in check. Check out our post on how to do a time audit.
• Auto logging – There are applications that will keep track of what apps you are using on your computer and what sites you are visiting. Check out SLife for some software with which to do this. You can download their older, free client here (which is the version I’ve used).

What techniques do you use to help keep from wasting time on the internet?

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• What does TheYNC stand for? (331)
• What does TheYNC stand for? (HINT: You can read it on the main page ) (260)
• WASTING TIME (17)
• What does TheYNC stand for? (HINT: You can read it on the main page (16)
• keep from (16)
• theync (12)
• que es theync what does theync stand for (2)
• productivity apps block internet (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Keep People from wasting your time
• Paperless Update
• Tuesday’s Tip: Stop Communication You Don’t Need
• Father’s Day and Productivity
• Productivity501 Store

Minimize soap scum

It seems that soap gets everything clean except shower walls. In your bathroom, soap becomes the dirt you are trying to remove. However, some soaps stick more than others. I recently tried an experiment with different types of soap and noticed a very big difference in the amount of soap scum left by various brands of soap. Dove soap seems to be about the best brand for keeping your shower clean. Also, if your bars of soap seem to disappear from having water run over them, move them somewhere else in the shower or switch to a liquid soap in a bottle.

Welcome mats that work

Years ago I worked as a waiter. I noticed that thick industrial mats in the entry seemed to get dirt off shoes much better than anything we used at the farm where I grew up. So, I bought my mom several of these thick rubber mats. The difference was very noticeable. A lot less dirt and mud made it past the entryway and into the house. While the mats were very expensive, they are still in nearly new condition 15 years later, whereas the previous mats needed to be replaced every few years or so.

Take your shoes off

Michigan has a very high concentration of people from Dutch descent. One of their customs is not to wear shoes in the house. I’m not sure how that started. Maybe it’s because wooden shoes are so uncomfortable. However, it has a marked effect on the life of carpet. Given the snow and mud that accumulates during the winter, the “no shoes” custom means a lot less time spent cleaning the floors.

Get off mailing lists

Every piece of mail you have to handle costs you time. If you can stop mail at its source, it saves you time and reduces the amount of waste you produce. If you have no intention of ever buying from a catalog, do yourself and the business a favor and ask them to take you off their list.

Throw stuff out (or give it away or recycle it)

Less stuff means less clutter and less clutter means less to pick up. Reducing the amount of stuff you have can make a big difference in how long it takes you to clean up. When you have less stuff and better storage for the stuff you still have, your house won’t get as disorganized because it is easier to keep everything put up and away.

I’m not suggesting that you throw out all of your furniture and sit on the floor, but do you really need 5 balls for your cat or dog? How many ink pens do you need to keep in your house? How much time would you need to spend ironing if your closet wasn’t stuffed full of clothes that you never wear?

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• use dove soap to keep snow from accumulating? (2)
• squandering time (1)
• stop at home (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Stop Reading on the Internet
• Working From Home
• Reader Question – Working from Home
• Tuesday’s Tip: Stop Communication You Don’t Need
• Setting up a Home Office

A common trait I see in successful people is that what they do for entertainment often gives them benefits that go well beyond the simple entertainment value. According to Nielsen, the average person watches 4 hours and 35 minutes of television each day. A small percentage of those are watching educational programing and another percentage are probably watching television while they exercise, but most of them are probably just killing time with a passive activity that adds no value to their life. Interestingly enough, the lower your income, the more time you will spend in front of the television. One could argue that rich people go to the movies instead of watching the TV at home or perhaps lower income earners can’t afford the expensive entertainment of the higher classes, but I would guess there is more of a causation factor here. People who are successful and have higher incomes often spend their time doing activities that are more rewarding than watching TV.

I’m not trying to just pick on television here. It illustrates the point very well, but in truth, there are a number of activities that can easily crowd out more valuable activities. There are many activities that aren’t necessarily bad in and of themselves. Their detriment comes from what they prevent you from doing–particularly when done in excess. Playing a video game isn’t necessarily bad, but spending more time gaming than you spend with your kids is definitely not a good thing. By organizing your life around activities that have lasting value, you can reduce the amount of time drained by non-valuable activities. I’m not saying you should never watch TV or play a video game, but you will be far better off if your primary entertainment activities aren’t centered around those two things.

Let’s look at some different types of valuable activities.

Reading

Reading is one of the primary ways we learn about things that are beyond our normal day-to-day experiences. Yes, you can learn by talking with others, watching a video and going to experience something for yourself, but reading is still the activity that gives you access to the greatest amount of knowledge.

In particular, reading books is a valuable activity. The Internet is a valuable resource and there are types of information that lend themselves very well to the web format, but for in-depth, extended study of a topic, books are still the best way to learn.

I’ve seen some statistics saying that 42% of college graduates don’t read another book before they die. The average conversation uses significantly fewer words of vocabulary than even children’s books. You are unlikely to increase your vocabulary through talking with people, and most media isn’t much better. Other studies suggest a strong correlation between above average vocabularies and above average salaries. If you want to increase your vocabulary, books are going to be your best bet.

Beyond just increasing your vocabulary, books contain the knowledge you need to get a raise, start your own business, be more efficient, better parent your children, invest your money, etc. Your ability and discipline to obtain that knowledge is what will determine whether you fall to the left or right of average in many areas of life.

Exercise

Exercise keeps you in shape, makes you look better, makes you think better and extends your life. It is funny that one of the biggest excuses for not exercising is “I don’t have time.” In a broader context, you don’t really have time not to exercise. A brisk walk for 30 minutes five days per week can add 3 years to your life. That is nearly another 9,000 hours to live with only a 130 hour per year investment.

Even if exercising didn’t extend your life, it will help save you time. Exercise helps make it easier to learn and keeps your mind in good shape. Even small amounts of consistent exercise have been shown to reduce your chances of Alzheimer’s and dementia by 33%. Exercise has also been shown to make it easier to handle stress and to make you more productive.

Exercise is an investment in the way you look. The way you look does influence how people treat you. Even more importantly, it influences how you feel about yourself. Both of these factors can play a big part in your ability to succeed in life and in the opportunities made available to you.

Business Hobbies

If you can do something for fun that brings in an income, it makes your time go further. Here are some ideas of hobbies that can also be a business:

• Blogging – Like this site. It started out as a hobby, but now makes a non-trivial amount of money each month.
• Travel – Some people leverage their travel to write books, travel guides, etc.
• Watching Movies – Sound crazy? The guy who started www.imdb.org had quite a business and eventually sold it to Amazon.
• Gardening – There are people who have turned their small gardening hobby into a profitable way to raise and sell herbs.

I’m not saying you should never do anything just for fun, but there may be a way to monetize something you love and turn it into a business. In the end, that gives you more time to do the things you enjoy because you are getting paid for it.

Educational Pursuits

Doing things that make you smarter pays great dividends. Not only does it teach you new skills and new knowledge, but it helps keep your mind working sharp and helps you avoid certain types of mental problems as you age. And it isn’t just a matter of studying something really hard. There are lots of things to learn that can be entertaining as well as educational. Here are some ideas.

1. Educational cruise -There are cruises that are designed to teach you everything from how to use your computer to understanding the culture of the places you visit. Semester at Sea is a company that partners with universities to offer credit for these trips.
2. Cooking classes – If you and your spouse enjoy cooking, a class or two can be a great way to do something fun while learning a skill you can use for the rest of your life.
3. College classes – Taking a class or two can be a great way to enrich your life in a fun, beneficial way. With night classes and internet-based programs, there are a lot of options available.

Family Activities

Doing things with your family is one of the best uses of your time. It is easy to get caught up in work and social activities and overlook spending time with the people you value the most. When you are 80, there are probably very few things you will wish you had done other than spending more time with your family.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• Provide two examples of media sources you think are entertaining as well as valuable media (47)
• Do you think media receives the credit it is due? (25)
• Do you think media receives the credit it is due? Explain why or why not Provide two examples of media sources you think are entertaining as well as valuable media (17)
• valuable hobbies (5)
• most valuable hobbies (3)
• shows that are entertaining and valuable media? (3)
• valuable activities (1)
• valuable activity (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Doing Less
• Laptop Unfriendly Library
• Take the Time to Play
• Doing Less
• Little by Little

Here is a simple method for doing a time audit that will help show how your time is actually spent. Get some type of timer that can be set for a specific interval of time. You want to use 60, 30 or 15 minutes. Normally an hour is what you want to use. Set the timer to go off, but make sure you start at some odd time, like 8:11. You don’t want to start at the top or bottom of the hour because that tends to go off right when you are switching contexts (going to lunch, headed to a meeting, etc.)

Each time the alarm goes off, write down what you are doing at that moment, reset the alarm, and go back to work. The process should take about 20 seconds. It will interrupt you, but the data should be well worth the inconvenience. Ideally, you should collect time audit data from several different days. It might make sense to do the time audit Monday on one week, Wednesday of the following week, and Thursday of the next. Spreading it out helps keep it from becoming a habit and lessens the distraction impact of any given week.

Once you have all the data from your time audit, go through and analyze it. You can use any method that suits your needs, but in general you want to categorize what you were doing at each interruption point by how important that task was. At the very least, you should use three levels:

1. Very important - the type of task that you should be doing all the time.
2. Not particularly important – something that may need done, but doesn’t add significant value and should be minimized as much as possible.
3. Worthless – Activities that you shouldn’t be doing at all.

If 75% of your time audit shows you working on Very Important tasks, you are doing extremely well. Many people will find that they are spending a lot of time on levels 2 and 3. Don’t be too discouraged by this. It is typical and partly a by-product of the fact that work days aren’t designed around being productive.

Once your time audit shows how you are spending your time, you need to ask yourself important questions:

1. Can you modify the order of tasks or your schedule to make better use of your time? For example, if you found you were on hold for a good percentage of the time, can you place those phone calls earlier or later or on a different day when you are less likely to be put on hold?
2. Are there distractions you can avoid? If you have a TV in your office and your time audit shows you are often watching the news, maybe you should turn it off or move it out of your office. Some people will save a lot of time by uninstalling solitaire.
3. Can you stop low-value activities? Ask yourself, “What happens if I just don’t do this at all?” Sometimes the consequences are trivial once we actually look at what will happen.
4. Can you shift to more high-value activities? This may mean delegating or automating. If you spend a lot of time running papers back and forth for signatures or faxing secure documents, perhaps getting your team to switch to Digital Signatures & Encryption would help let you focus more on your job and less on the tasks that add little value. You might be able to make use of a virtual assistant to help you focus on the more important things.

If you are a manager, you might be thinking “I should have my staff do this!” Maybe, but keep in mind the time audit is only useful if people are honest. You will probably get better results if you have them do a time audit and then discuss ways you can be more efficient as a team instead of trying to get each person to share their individual results.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• time audit (316)
• time audit template (87)
• time audit form (39)
• time management audit (28)
• time audit sheet (17)
• how to do audit (16)
• how to do an audit (16)
• audit time (6)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• How to keep from Wasting Time on the Web
• Understanding Taxes
• Money Thoughts
• Lifehacker Password Hacked

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.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• the power of knowing (33)
• decide ahead (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Tuesday’s Tip: Label Your Warts
• Portable Scan Snap S300
• Your Not to Do list
• Worry vs. Problem-solving
• Power of Routines

In this post, I want to talk about optimal parking strategies, because people seem to waste so much time on the activity. But first a story:

I knew someone who would occasionally go to the mall around Christmas. He would walk toward a car in the prime parking spot and invariably be followed by a crazy-eyed parking spot hunter. He’d go stand next to the car for a few moments. The hunter began to drool at the prospect of capturing such a marvelous prize. The cars would start backing up behind the first car–everyone envious of the spot they were about to get, then he would simply walk off to his car parked on the far side of the lot.

Ok, so on to parking strategies:

It isn’t that far of a walk

First of all, in most situations, the time it takes to walk from the empty spots to the spots next to the store is minimal–only a few minutes. If you want a spot that is close to the store, try a reasonable strategy and then just take a spot. You don’t “win” by driving around again and again looking for an even better spot.

Sometimes the most productive thing to do is to pick a spot a reasonable distance from the store and walk. It is good for your health, keeps your car away from where it is likely to get hit and scratched, and often saves time.

Shopping cart returns matter

If you get a close spot, but it requires that you return the cart clear across the lot, you haven’t really gained anything. People don’t think about this because they don’t have a cart when coming to the store, only when leaving. A spot that doesn’t seem as close, but is right next to a cart return, can save you quite a bit of time over a close spot where you have to actually go back into the store with the empty cart and then back to your car.

Start at the store and work out

If you are looking for a spot headed toward the store, it can be hard to see if an empty one is the best available or if there is another one just ahead.  I’m sure everyone has driven just a bit further to discover that the “empty” spot actually had a Geo Metro in it, and the one three spaces back (which was just taken by an SUV) was actually the closest available.

If you start your search at the store side and work out, you can just take the first available slot. And don’t be tempted by a closer slot you see in another lane headed back to the store. If space is at a premium, it will be gone by the time you get there.

Think about the speed of leaving

Not every slot is equal when it comes to exiting the parking lot. Some will dump you out into a flow of pedestrian traffic and can waste considerable time.  This is one of the advantages of picking a side lane and taking the first space you find while moving away from the store. Also, watch out for things like pharmacy pick-up spots that are likely to have a high rate of vehicle changes and thus can make it difficult for you to get out of the parking lot if others are pulling in and out when you need to leave.

And there you have it. Some great strategies for getting in and out of parking lots. As I said, I feel a bit silly even writing about this, but little things matter, and from what I saw going on at the grocery store today, there are a lot of people spending a significant portion of their lives looking for a parking spot.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• car parking techniques (80)
• reverse parking technique (79)
• parking techniques (71)
• parking strategies (54)
• bay parking technique (28)
• side parking technique video (27)
• reverse parking canada (24)
• how to back into a parking space (11)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Power of Routines
• Tips for Airport Travel
• Tips for Exercise
• Subscription Contest
• The Right Things

Even if it doesn’t translate into more time away from work, these tips can help you use your time more effectively so you can get more done and out-perform your peers as you advance your career.

1. If you have some leeway in your arrival and departure time, use it to minimize your commute. In a lot of big cities, shifting your workday by 30 or even 15 minutes can cut your commute time in half.
2. Know which is faster–stairs or elevator. If you have less than 5 floors to climb, the stairs may be significantly faster than the elevator.  You may need to do some experimenting, but saving an extra minute or two each day (on average) can really add up over the course of a year.
3. Don’t skip lunch. It might seem counter-intuitive, but skipping lunch is unlikely to save you any time. You need the break to get away from things for a little while.  You aren’t designed to simply plow through 8 hours of straight work–at least not in a way that is productive.  Even just thirty minutes away from your work can help you refocus and make the rest of the day much more productive.
4. Don’t wait on things. If your computer takes four minutes to boot, find something else that regularly needs done and do it every time you boot your computer.  For example, four minutes may be just about the amount of time it takes to check your mailbox. You could also use that time to straighten your desk, review your plan, etc.  The point is that you shouldn’t just sit there waiting for something. Use that time for something you are going to have to do anyway.
5. Prepare for tomorrow. When you leave for the day, spend just a few minutes getting ready for the next day. Basically you want to ask yourself, “What is on my mind right now, that will save me time tomorrow?” It may be a matter of writing yourself a few short notes, leaving a file where you can quickly find it or sending an email requesting information from a colleague.
6. Turn off email notifications. If you are like most people, you get emails throughout the day. You don’t want your computer beeping or putting up a sign every time a new email comes in. If your job requires you to check email every 15 minutes, you can do that, but make sure you do it between other tasks instead of being interrupted every time a new message comes in. Getting interrupted takes a lot longer to recover from than you realize.  You are far better off spending 15 minutes to complete a task than 30 minutes because your concentration is being broken by email notifications going off. If something can’t wait 15 minutes, the sender should be using the phone–not email.
7. Don’t stay sitting down. Simply sitting at your desk all day isn’t the best thing for your productivity.  Getting up and walking around–even just a little–will make it much easier for you to get stuff done and think clearly.  If you have tasks that require getting up from your desk every day, use them strategically to help give you a break from sitting down.  Even just standing up at your desk for a few minutes while you read some email or look over a spreadsheet will help.
8. Batch tasks. Put tasks together that require the same resources or level of concentration.  For example, if you have 4 tasks that require a great deal of concentration, do them when you are least likely to be interrupted.  If forwarding your phone will help, go ahead and do it while you knock them all out together. If you need to ask your boss a question that isn’t urgent, wait until you have several questions to ask.
9. Identify and eliminate bottlenecks. Try to remove obstacles that slow you down.  For example, if you find that typing is slowing you down, get a copy of Mavis Beacon and practice at home for 10 or 15 minutes per day.  You will probably be typing for the rest of your life, so a month of improving your skill is going to be well worth the investment.  If you find you are constantly needing to stop and ask your boss how to handle situations, make a chart that shows how he or she has told you to handle them in the past and ask if you can use that chart for the routine issues. If your computer seems to be running very very slowly, you might be able to ask IT to re-image it so it goes back to the settings and speed it had when you first got it.
10. Understand your tools. Most of the applications you use on a daily basis have many more features than you’ll ever completely learn.  However, it is well worth your time to try to understand what they are capable of so you can learn how to use new features when they are appropriate. Tools like Microsoft Office come with significant collaboration functionality built in, but many people simply don’t know about it.  For example, Word will let you send a document to multiple people, allow them to add comments and make changes, then merge everything back into one document and let you select the changes you want to keep. For some people, this can be a huge time saver and it is just one of many similar features that can save significant time.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• office workers (61)
• office worker (52)
• tips for office workers (4)
• time management for office worker (3)
• office worker tips (3)
• 10 time savers for office workers (2)
• top pc time savers (2)
• techniques necessary for an office worker (2)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Productive Airplane Rides
• Paperless Signing and Faxing
• Evernote Book
• Work vs. Time
• Office Timesavers

The Order of Tasks

There is a survival simulation where you are trapped in a cave.  There is a single ladder going to the surface that can only hold one person at a time.  There are two other individuals with you.  One is younger than you and can climb faster.  The other is older than you and can climb slower.  Your job is to  decide the order that people should leave the cave–oh I forgot to mention there is water rising and if you don’t do it in the correct order, someone will drown.

The trick is to send the older person last because they can  still be on the ladder climbing as the water covers the area where you are currently standing.  If you try to send the older (slower) person first or second, someone is going to drown.  With the first two people, it doesn’t matter what order you use.

The point is that certain things work better when done in a particular order or at a particular time of day.  If I sit and watch television for 4 hours in the morning, and then try to write late in the evening, I am not being my most productive.  It is far better for me to write in the morning and then (if I have time), watch some television before going to bed.

Some of this comes down to understanding how your body mind works.  For me, I’m better off doing any writing before noon or a few hours after lunch.  I do better programming, when I know I will have no interruptions so I often am at my best when everyone else has gone to bed for the day.  If I’m meeting with a client to discuss their business processes, I am at my peak mid morning around 10 am. It is personal and can be different for each person, but you have to make a conscious effort to understand yourself and put tasks where the work the best.

A task out of place (like trying to read a dense report when you are exhausted) can easily take twice as long as a task placed optimally in your day. By giving a little thought to the order in which you do your tasks, you can easily get more done with less effort.

Originally published March 1, 2007.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• ordering tasks (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Reader Question – Organization & Saving
• The Most for your Minute Posts
• Tuesday’s Tip: Movie List
• Productive Sonic Environment
• Webinars? Input Please

It is very easy to become enamored with high-tech devices that promise to save hours of time when we are in the purchasing stage, but fail to execute when it comes to really implementing them. This isn’t just a problem for individuals.  I routinely see businesses spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on software designed to make them more efficient, only to lose most of the advantages because they don’t have the discipline to follow through in the implementation stage.

When you are looking at buying a new device or new piece of software, be sure to consider the expense of really learning how it works and using it. Here are a couple things I do to lower the amount of time I need to spend learning new technology:

• Upgrade my primary computer every 3 to 4 years. I tend to buy at the very top end, but keep it a long time. Switching computers can be a big time drain.
• Skip versions of software. On one hand, I need to stay up-to-date in order to get support, but on the other, if everything is working, I don’t want to take the risk of running into a bug by trying to follow the manufacturer’s update cycle.
• Don’t be the first.  I usually try to wait a while before upgrading software or hardware.  There are plenty of people who simply must have the latest and greatest and I’d rather learn from their experiences than join them.
• Standardize.  When my family was switching cell phone providers, I got everyone to go with the same Blackberry that I use.  One reason is so I don’t have to spend a lot of time figuring out a new phone if they need help.  The other reason is so they can help each other.
• Learn from other people’s experiences. Amazon reviews are a great way to find out what people don’t like about something.  Also, a search for “product name review” will find a lot of other reviews that are helpful.

Regardless of where you fall on the technology adopter spectrum, keeping a focus on the true productivity benefit of every new device will help you save time and money.

Business minded? Subscribe to Mark Shead’s business consulting blog.

This article was useful when looking for:

• EasIR-4 price (22)
• easir 4 price (2)
• easir™-4 price (1)

---
Related Articles at Productivity501:

• Credit Cards as a Productivity Tool
• Tuesdays Tip: Start Something
• Cleaning Supplies
• Simple Tip
• Odds of Success