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Valuable Activities

2010 by 7 Comments
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When it comes to what you spend, your money on you should focus on things that appreciate instead of things that depreciate. For example, if you buy a house for a fair price, it will generally be worth more in 15 years than what you paid for it. If you purchase a sports car, it will generally be worth less. When it comes to how you spend your time, you have to think in the same way. Some activities are inherently more valuable than others. Activities that make you more valuable or create something that will produce an income for later make for a better use of your time than activities that produce no lasting benefit. A common trait I see in successful people is that what they do for … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Time

Passwords – Different For Each Account

2010 by 3 Comments
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The founder of Facebook has been accused of using information from Facebook to break into email accounts at Harvard Crimson (Harvard's newspaper). While I don't know if it is true or not, the technique is plausible and is an excellent demonstration of why you shouldn't use the same password for every website and how important it is to create secure passwords. The story says that the Facebook founder was concerned about a story the Crimson planned on running. He located people on Facebook who said they worked at the Crimson. Since it sounds like Facebook stores passwords in a secure manner, he couldn't simply look them up from the database. Instead, he went through the server's logs to try … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: , ,

Reducing Email Overload

2010 by 11 Comments
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Email is one of those things that can be both a great time-saver and a huge waste of time. The idea of being able to send a message to someone across the country and get a reply back in hours or even minutes is amazing, even though we take it for granted. Unfortunately, email has become a victim of its own success, and it's easy to drown in the huge volume of electronic messages that come in each day. In this article, we are going to look at some ways to help reduce email overload by looking at strategies and methods for getting the most out of email without letting it run your life. Multiple Mailboxes Not all email is created equal. Some email you never want to see. Other emails … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: , , ,

How to do a Time Audit

2010 by 5 Comments
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There is often a great discrepancy between the way you spend your time and the way you think you spend your time. A time audit helps you look at exactly how your time is being used so you can better understand where your time is going. One form of a time audit is to simply keep a log of your time. This works to a certain extent, but it tends to better show how you want to spend your time instead of how your time is actually spent. For a time audit to be effective, it needs to reflect your actual work history. 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 … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Time Tagged With: , ,

DocuSign Review

2010 by 4 Comments
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As environmental and financial pressures increase on today's businesses, managers and other administrative workers are constantly on the look-out for cost-cutting methods and ideas. One way to save both money and impact on the environment that has become popular in the last several years is paperless technology. Eliminating paper trails has other benefits, as well, besides those to the environment and finances. Organization is much more structured and convenient when it is done on a searchable hard drive rather than in a file cabinet. These reasons, among others, are some of the factors that have convinced some companies to rely less on physical paper and more on online tools and … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: , ,

Productivity – What is it?

2010 by 6 Comments
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What is productivity? Productivity is simply the amount of output you get per unit of input. It is a way to compare the cost of something to its benefit.  So if you have an input of 5 and output of 5, your productivity is lower than something with an input of 5 and an output of 10. Productivity is kind of like the miles per gallon on your car. It tells you how far you can go on a given amount of input (gasoline for your car). In this article, we are going to look at productivity from your boss' perspective and then talk about personal productivity. Employee Productivity In mathematical terms, productivity is output divided by effort.  So if  O = output, I = input then P = … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: ,

Yojimbo Review

2010 by 6 Comments
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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 … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: , ,

Reputable Language

2010 by 10 Comments
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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 … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Development Tagged With: , ,

5 Questions To Help Organize Your Desk

2010 by 14 Comments
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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 … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Organize Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Power of Knowing

2010 by 3 Comments
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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 … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Time Tagged With: , ,

It’s Hard to Learn From Your Own Mistakes

2010 by 4 Comments
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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. … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Development Tagged With: , , ,

Privacy and Technology

2010 by 6 Comments
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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 … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Community Links

2010 by 5 Comments
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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 … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Misc Tagged With: ,

On the Job MBA

2010 by 3 Comments
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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 paid, formal MBA program can be gleaned from on-the-job experience if you are paying close analytical attention resulting in a free MBA level education. 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 free MBA 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 … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Development Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Income Diversification

2010 by 5 Comments
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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 … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Money Tagged With: , ,

Who’s Got Your Back Review

2010 by 2 Comments
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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 … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Development Tagged With: , , ,

Parking Strategies

2010 by 20 Comments
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I'm amazed at how much time people are willing to spend driving around a parking lot looking for a space to park. I'm not talking about places where it is snowing and there are only limited slots in covered parking. I'm talking about the people who will drive around the lot for 15 minutes trying to avoid a 2 minute walk from the empty spaces just beyond the spots everyone is fighting for. 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 … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Time Tagged With: , ,

Powerful Presentations

2010 by 6 Comments
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I recently gave a presentation at a business. After the presentation, I was waiting for my plane at the airport when I ran into the president of the company and his teenage daughter. We talked briefly about what their company was wanting to do. Then he said, "You have a very engaging presentation style." He then turned to his daughter and said, "You would have really enjoyed hearing Mark talk." Now that is a pretty significant compliment, in my opinion. It is often hard enough to get businesspeople to sit through a presentation. If the president actually thought a high school student would have enjoyed it, I must be doing something right. Here are some of the principles I try to … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: ,