From the BlogSubscribe Now

Can improving productivity save you money?

As part of my ongoing productivity plan, I thought it would be a good idea to take stock and look at how we are doing at the end of year two in the process:

Ditching the landline for Google Voice, throwing out the fax machine and losing the extra line in favour of MyFax, adjusting my mobile telephone plan and canceling cable tv after the old telly died brought some surprising numbers:

Per month savings:

    • Landline $20
    • Fax $10
    • Mobile $30
    • TV $70

Total: $130/month doesn’t sound much, but that’s $1,560 pa.

Additional annual savings continue since going paperless:

Office supplies over a year in a paper world were easily around $3,300+ but now only $300 are spent with the advent of cheap external disk drives and the iPad, plus no need to order those huge boxes of paper, ink cartridges etc giving a massive saving of $3,000.

In one year, that’s $1,560 + $3,000 = $4,560

Kicking the Starbucks habit!

It gets better though. We also dug the Italian Espresso machine out of storage and looked at coffee consumption:

  • In the office, approximately 6 double espressos are made a day.
  • At $2 a pop in the local Starbucks, that’s equivalent to $12/day, $74/week or $378/month.

Even buying fresh roasted and ground coffee from the local importers at $9 a pound and 5 bags are needed a month, subtracting $45 from the above total still gives $333 savings a month or ~$4,000 a year. Wow, that’s an expensive habit.

Running total: $4,560 + $4,000 = $8,560 per annum saved.

Overall, in 3 years that starts to add up cumulatively in terms of improved margins right off the bottom line.

What’s next?

  1. Business cards – hardly use them anymore, and most clients prefer an emailed vcf card they can simply add to their address book.
  2. Moleskines and notebooks – am now getting through one a year rather than the 4 or 5 I used to scribble through thanks to the iPad and simple text files. Savings of around $80 annually.
  3. eBooks on the Kindle and iBooks are generally cheaper than hardback or paperback books. Lately, the ones I’ve purchased have easily been $5 less a pop. At one book a month, that’s at least another $60 saved.

What other value engineering techniques do you recommend for small businesses?

Sally

10 Top Tips For Improving Your Email Productivity

EmailEmail overwhelm can be rather stressful, unproductive and frustrating for the small business owner. I therefore thought it would be a nice idea to share some of the tricks and short cuts I have found useful and see whether we can crowdsource other ideas too.

Without further ado, here are some suggestions based on personal experience…

10 Top Tips For Improving Email Productivity

 

  • Use TextExpander to quickly insert signatures, footers, boilerplate, or personalised text using macro commands and key strokes. This can be done even on mobile devices with the master snippet file synced via Dropbox.

 

  • Clear out the inbox daily – use rules, scripts or filters (Outlook, Mac Mail and Google all do this very well) to tag, organise, star and sort incoming mail efficiently. The time spent automating this is well worth it. Once done, it means you can see and respond to important mail more efficiently and read all the blog and newsletter subscriptions later in blocks. Prioritisation is key here.

 

  • Use IMAP to sync across multiple devices. I can’t stress this one enough – POP will not automatically mark as read if you read it on one device, then check another later. There’s nothing worse than 100+ unread emails you have already actioned!

 

  • Use Email “Search” to find messages you need quickly and easily.

 

  • Need simply, snazzy looking HTML emails without too much hassle? Type the text in Markdown, convert to HTML and paste to the email body. I love Marked for this conversion process – you just drag your text file to the icon and magic occurs.  It’s quick, easy and very efficient.

 

  • Reduce distractions by only checking mail 2–3 times a day at set times and not 2–3 times an hour. Turn off mail notifications, minimise or close the mail window and focus more clearly on things that need to be done. Distractions and procrastination are your enemy, not your friend.

 

  • A very under-rated skill is the fast, almost ruthless, unsubscribing of newsletters and email blog lists, especially those you did not sign up for. I love a nifty tool called Unsubscribe to do this for me and mark rogue senders as Spam. They also have a new cool social media feature to help you with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Well worth checking out – they have free and paid versions so you can try the service out first.

 

  • Tired or frustrated with delayed mails from your email client and need a completely different email hub while looking like a Ninja at the same time?  Then Xobni for Outlook or Gmail might suit your style. Learning the Gmail shortcuts will also save you a ton of time. Desire a simple, no fuss, distraction free mail app? Check out SparrowMail.

 

  • Please think twice before hitting the Reply All button in a fit of pique, especially if the email list for the mail is a long. This will avoid the 50 emails you don’t need by limiting chain reactions and flame wars. Think about it – the more you respond to email messages, the more replies you will get back in your inbox. Exercising some modicum restraint will significantly reduce the workload for yourself.
  •  Lastly, if you absolutely need to declare email bankruptcy, as a last resort, Select All and Archive. You will still be able to find things easily using Search and anything vitally important will get re-sent by the sender as a reminder anyway.

What are your favourite tricks and tips for managing email?

How to take Text Editing to the next level in your small business

Have any of you ever written content for a website or blog and found that the output or RSS feed was corrupted by rogue HTML or even worse, junk from a copy/paste via Word?  And then spent hours trying to fix it?

Me too.

Sadly, judging by the comments in the last post on TextEditors, I’m not the only one!  Imagine how frustrating is it to find, edit and prune out the junk. Ugh, like many I have spent too many hours wasting time editing instead of concentrating on writing content.

Over the last few years, I moved more of my writing into text files and away from Word Processors such as Word, as we discussed in the last post on Text Editors.

The funny thing?

More and more people are doing writing in plain text too, partly for the elegance and simplicity and partly out of necessity. Just because the Corporate and Enterprise world is still hung up on bloatware, doesn’t mean that we have to be lemmings too.

We covered quite a few plain text tools previously, including Simplenote and Notational Velocity, to mention two that work with the desktop and iPad/iPhone sync well, but there are plenty of others including TextEdit, PlainText, WriteRoom, Notesy, BBEdit, TextWrangler to name a few. I’m not going to cover the apps per se, but rather focus on a revelation that happened to me recently.

I was wondering how I could make more use of the >1000 plain text notes I make and came across a brilliant solution.

Markdown

Here’s what happens… in the words of the development guru, John Gruber:

“Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).”

Source Daring Fireball

Essentially, you take your plain text and add simple formatting syntax and then a tool converts the formatted plain text into html.  Thus, I typed plain text for this post into Notational Velocity, add the header syntax etc and cut n pasted it into the Markdown convertor tool.  It will look like this (the bottom box previews how it will look in a web post):

Markdown

Using the html converter (clicking Source in the Results drop down menu then hit Convert) you then get the HTML code, which looks like this for cutting/pasting into WordPress:

Markdown to HTML convertor tool

Pretty cool and nifty, eh?

Sometimes, copying and pasting a useful quote into WordPress or your website editor from Word can end up with extra gibberish you really don’t need. This may be hidden and cause slowing of the website or worse, wonky copy in your newsletters. Yes, it’s happened to me too :(

The beauty of combining plain text with Markdown is the simple syntax such as ## or > can be added as you go or at the end using shortcut keystrokes in TextExpander, making the whole experience very fast and easy.

You can also get TextExpander Touch for the iPhone and iPad from the iTunes App Store. With Dropbox syncing, this allows you to use the same custom shortcuts across all your computers, including the smart phone/tablet. The advantage of this is really fast, efficient typing. More on TextExpander and how you can use it in your every day business life in the next productivity post, so do check back for the next How-To in the series.

Another advantage I also love that Scrivener can import and export Markdown files, which makes it useful managing (and printing) for large documents and reports. Yes, Markdown can be used for writing reports, even copy for your marketing brochures.  No more fighting with Word over cranky formatting!

In Summary…

What I like about this approach with Markdown syntax is that it allows me to focus on the Zen of writing and getting stuff out of my head, with less time getting frustrated by formatting quirks and irritations.

Over a day, that can add up significantly.  To a small business person or a consultant, time is money.

Sally

15 things you can use Text Writers for to improve your Productivity

I write a lot as a pharma strategy consultant, in the office, at conferences, in meetings, during interviews with people. Actually, I write so much it is sometimes hard to draw the line where the day job begins and the night job as a blogger on cancer biology ends :)

With this in mind, I’m always on the look for more efficient and effective ways to gather up that writing so that all the snippets can be gathered, analysed and insights developed.

We’ve talked here on BOTB previously about some of my favourite writing tools in the past such as Scrivener for long form written reports and Simplenote on my iPad or iPhone while out and about for short snippets I want to record and keep track of.

While in the office, I mostly use an open source text app called Notational Velocity ALT or nvALT for short. It’s a desktop text (.txt) based writing tool that is simple and elegant to use.  You don’t have to be connected to the internet for it to work on a Mac computer.  This is really handy on the odd occasions when the internet service goes down!

How does it work?

I’m using it to write this very blog post. You just write a title for your note, hit return and then keep on writing until you get to to then end. It looks very bare bones, plain and minimalist, which I really like:

nvALT

This clean approach allows me to focus more simply on the writing and jotting down my thoughts, rather than faffing or procrastinating with formatting and such like, which is the bane of most bloated commercial word processors.

Hitting the cross in the right title bar takes you back to all of your other notes. It then looks like this:

nvALT

The beauty of this simple system is that I can keep it open on my desktop and add notes, snippets, urls or simply little notes to self or brain dumps whenever I need to do so.

What I really like about this app:

  • It’s very simple and very easy to use.
  • Need to find an old note? Just type in a couple of keywords and hit tab to the one that is needed.
  • It syncs with Simplenote on my iPad and iPhone, as well as Dropbox. Flawlessly.
  • It works with TextExpander (more on this in another blog post).
  • Cutting and pasting text between apps does not give you formatting hell to sort out (a pet peeve).

The other day my new Mac arrived along with a new over-sensitive mouse I nicknamed Mickey that flits all over the place in Powerpoint, driving me potty! Then I remembered I tamed Minnie with a command line instruction. Hopeful, I typed “command line” in nvALT and there was my command line snippet to cut and paste into Terminal. Beautiful.

What sort of things do I collect in nvALT and Simplenote?

Well, here are some ideas and suggestions based on a quick scan of a few hundred items in the database:

1. Notes about companies and their drugs that I am researching
2. Quotes and links to key scientific papers I read
3. Essential data on key cancer pathways I’m interested in
4. Snippets from Twitter and other relevant social media
5. Quotes from expert oncologists I meet at conferences
6. Notes from conference sessions I attend
7. Mac terminal commands
8. Ideas for blog posts
9. Draft/half written blog posts (needed for emergencies in case Sarah gets the machete out!)
10. WP Plugins/themes I need to look for
11. Markdown shortcuts (more in another post)
12. Notes to self – to be added later to OmniFocus
13. Business development activities
14. Moving house tasks
15. Phone numbers for key tradesmen such as the plumber, locksmith etc and local emergency services (become a clickable link in Simplenote on the iPhone)

And so on…. you could collect all sorts things for business, home, personal, hobbies etc.

The real time syncing allows real time updates across my Mac, iPhone and iPad, which is really very useful in so many ways. It also becomes a powerful, searchable database – no more hunting for lost Post-It notes and scribbled bits of paper!

Write -> Capture -> Search -> Execution!

Meanwhile, for those of you using an Android phone, all is not lost.  Notational Acceleration for Android is a great way to use .txt files on a mobile device and sync them with Simplenote.

Who else out there is a fan of Text files and Text Editors for collating their writing and notes?

 

The Power of Boundaries: Setting Boundaries That Make Sense

Setting boundaries

At first glance setting boundaries seems like a pretty straightforward task.

You determine what needs to change, create a rule or boundary to protect the new change from the outsiders who’ll try their best to break through your fortress.

Simple, right?

For me it’s very simple but not for everyone.  I usually hear things like, “it must be nice to be in that position” or “I’m not to that point yet”.

The thing is I’m not in any special position or to some special point.  I just decided to do it.

Just Do It

There’s no mystery.  There are no special credentials required.  It is simply a choice.

There’s a little bit of fear with setting boundaries where there were none before.  You might start to think, “What if….”.  And yes, things you imagine happening could actually happen but I’ve found that to be a rare occurrence.  If it does happen there’s no reason you can’t re-adjust the boundary.

Your quality of life rises in direct relation to the boundaries you create for your co-workers, customers, family and friends.  Why put it off any longer?

Setting Boundaries that Work

The first step in the process of setting workable and effective boundaries is to start with the end result.  What are you hoping to achieve by creating the boundary?

Perhaps you have kids and they are old enough to understand when Mom is working and needs quiet, uninterrupted time.  And yet, as soon as you sit down to start writing or creating or producing they show up with requests for snacks and questions, “What are you doin’?” and “Jenny took my frisbee” stuff.

With all this going on it might be that you simply want some quiet and productive time to get work done.  That’s your end result.

Knowing what you are trying to achieve with your boundary will help you see that it’s not a prison sentence for your kids, it’s just a way for you to get work done.

If you can’t find solace in a Starbucks you’ll need to set a boundary.

Boundaries are not static.  Once you’ve set up your new rule you may need to adjust.  Be flexible

My Boundary

I was interrupted constantly while trying to write and it was making it difficult to stay on track.  I decided action was necessary.  I determined that when at my desk in front of my keyboard I needed focus.  I set up the boundary: when you see me at my desk in front of the keyboard working, no interruptions.  I couldn’t close the door because the dogs would just sit and cry and scratch at it so the only way to enforce the rule was to set up a boundary… me at the keyboard.

There are times when I’m researching, reading, writing and at those times I’m not in front of the keyboard.  Those are open times, I don’t love being interrupted but the consequence isn’t so great.

Advertise It

Step two is to let everyone know what’s up.  This can be a general household announcement if you have a home boundary.  But boundaries aren’t just for your home.  Perhaps you have car rules, co-worker rules, and friend and family rules.

For work time rules I stop answering the phone at 5:00 pm.  Whether I’m working late or not I stop answering the phone at 5:00 pm.  I mute the ringer and get back to work.  Outgoing customer communication shows hours that go until 5:00 pm and yet, inevitably people call until 8:00 pm hoping to catch me.

You might need to have a meeting or send a memo but you need to make everyone aware of your rules.  If folks don’t know the boundary they will unknowingly cross it.  Most people understand and respect your desire to get things done.

The Enforcer

Step three is enforcement. Boundaries don’t work without enforcement.

When someone crosses the line, let them know.  Remind them of your established rules and then ask if there is another time that would work for them.

If you let someone cross the line it becomes an invitation.  Let’s face it adults are like children, they will test the boundaries to see what they can get away with.  Their intention isn’t to “test” you, but rather to get their needs met.  Understanding that will make it easier to enforce your boundaries and get your needs met.

Time

The final step is patience.

It might take some time to get everyone comfortable and “trained”.  If you’ve had a lackadaisical way of dealing with your time in the past you’ll need to get used to new habits and so will everyone else.

The worst thing you can do is give up.  Keep at it, be consistent, be nice about it and as time passes you’ll see changes in your productivity and in the attitude of those around you.

Let’s face it when we are productive we are happy.  Everyone likes being around a happy person.

3 Simple Ways to Tackle the Overwhelm

So I’m out for a run yesterday and I’m pacing myself listening to Basia and she’s singing Love is a Gift.

Annnnnnnnnd I’m thinking, “Yeah I’ll tell you what a gift really is. Time. Time, that’s a gift, right? I can buy love if I have to, but I can’t buy any more time and I’d pay, like, triple for it if you could get it, but you can’t. Love is a gift? What the hell…”

I ranted for awhile on that and some other things too including why after years of supporting my undying love of cool whip, my mother proclaims that it tastes like chemicals and now I can’t enjoy it ‘cause like I think I’m going to get some kind of cool whip tumor if I keep eating it.

But my thoughts kept returning to the gift…the gift of time.

Here’s how I see it. I figure lots of work-from-home peeps  feel overwhelmed.  So, let’s ease your suffering and give you my top three tackle-the-overwhelm tactics.

ONE:  Make a List!!!!

This is a big one.  It can make or break how well your home office runs. I’m not going to guru you to death about how to make lists.  I don’t care how or where you make a list.  Put it on paper, white board, index cards, your calendar, computer…wherever. Just do it. And make the list the night before, that’s even better because your brain will mull it over while you sleep.

Here’s why lists work. And this is important so listen up!

It’s all about the brain.  The human brain, for all of its amazingness, is kind of dumb.  It doesn’t have a post-it note feature.  So every time you think, “I can’t forget to get the milk” it puts that little thought in with all the other little immediate random thoughts. It creates a kind of soup of thoughts all floating around. Your brain is juggling these thoughts, keeping them all the time in ready mode because it doesn’t know when you’re going to need one of these thoughts.

If your brain sticks one of these post-it note type thoughts into the long-term filing cabinet it’s going to mix in with everything else and it’ll take you a ton of calories to retrieve it. So the brain figures that it uses less energy to hold onto that little thought if it goes into the soup bowl until you need it.

The problem is, this isn’t very efficient. It takes a ton of calories to juggle all that thought stuff in the soup.  And I know what you are thinking…calories, burning calories, I love burning calories…but this is different. Burning off fat cells? Good burn. Burning off thought cells? Not so good burn.

Here’s an example. Imagine all the grocery items you don’t want to forget to pick up and phone calls you need to return and e-mails you need to write—all those random thoughts. Take those out of the soup bowl. What’s left? Only items for the task at hand! That is a much easier soup for your brain to manage.

Here’s a recap in case you missed it…

Brain Calories = Brain Energy/Power

Juggle lot o’ things = burn lots o’ Brain Calories

Burn lots o’ Brain Calories = no Brain Power left for task at hand

Make a list. Your brain will remove stuff on the list from the soup and you’ll have more brain power left for the task at hand. Simple. Make a list and use it.

TWO:  Pick A Task and Evaluate

So this is another easy one.  Pick a task, any task and evaluate it to make sure your process is the most time efficient.

Sounds complicated, I know, but it’s not.  Not nearly as complicated as trying to run backwards while chewing gum, working a yo-yo and worrying about cool whip disease…promise.

Classic example: The phone.

Say you get a call from a guy who wants a price for 20 Chinese ball bearings and he wants to know when he can get them. He gives you his reasons for wanting Chinese ball bearings and not Tahiti Ball Bearings and he goes into detail about why he needs exactly 20 ball bearings and not 15 or 25 and he wants to make sure you know he might be going out of town and he needs those ball bearings, let’s see… maybe before… no, no, no it can wait until after…la la la.

25 minutes later you begin to work on the estimate which then requires a return phone call to give the customer the estimate. Another 25 minutes on the phone to deliver a simple here’s the deal estimate. You’ve eaten an hour out of your day for one lousy estimate.

My way? Let the damn phone go to voice mail!

Customer calls and leaves a message asking for the estimate and time frame.  3 minutes. You work out the details of the estimate and time frame and call him with your info and tell him you only have a few minutes and that he can email you with any changes.  15 minutes.

Now THAT is a time savings. More importantly, it is also a simple solution to overwhelm that you can apply to any task.

Pick a task, like the example I gave but from your work day. Evaluate how you do it now and how you can change your process to save time. Pick another task and do the same. You will find lots of places to save time and ease the overwhelm.

THREE:  Stop and Do Something Physical

Now, I’m not going into an involved conversation about what you all think is physical. I am talking about walking, jogging, playing with the kids outside, or the dogs; simple stuff and part of your immediate daily life. If you can’t get outside right now, then treadmill or wash dishes or fold laundry or do yoga.

This is NOT about speed walking or tempo runs. I don’t want you to turn the heater up to 95 and do birkram yoga. This is just about activity. Simple get-out-of-your-chair now physical activity.

The activity is to recharge. According to brain smarty pants people, a great way to recharge your brain for cerebral tasks is to do some physical activity.

When you go for a walk (or whatever), the key is to not worry about what isn’t getting done or what you were working on or anything like that. Hey, plug in the iPod, put on some music and listen to it.

You need to give your brain a break or it can’t do its best work for you.

During the day when you start to feel overwhelmed, take a break. Do something physical. Five to ten minutes will give your brain the recharge it needs.

My favorite recharge?

Furpile of course!  The girls (pups) and I get on the bed or floor and roll around and wrestle and giggle.  They try to lick me, I try to hide my face.  It is an absolute riot and I cannot possibly think of anything else while I’m doing it!

So, we are at the end of the list. I promised you three simple tasks. Go on, tell me these aren’t simple tasks, I dare you! These three tasks you can do without spending money, without taking up additional time, with no learning curve…and with no excuses.

What are you waiting for? Go. Start your list. Pick a task to evaluate. And take an action break. Get on with it alright already.

Do you have additional suggestions for our overwhelmed readers? Please share them.  Not every idea works for everyone so your suggestion could really help someone else out!

 

Using SpringPad for small businesses and consulting

SpringPad is a really useful new free tool I’ve recently been playing with and it has quickly become a way to sort and organise information easily.   In the past, I’ve been a big Evernote fan, but while it is useful for collecting abstracts, photos, papers etc, SpringPad has a whole different set of utilities and dimensions that I find myself using on a daily basis, both in the office, and while mobile at conferences.

One of the challenges in my work is sifting through vast amounts of data and generating useful insights, either for posts here on this blog or as a consultant.   I’ve tried a lot of different web 2.0 tools over the last 7 years, but occasionally one comes along that sticks in my workflow.  SpringPad is one of them.

The first thing I did after signing up, was download the iPhone app and the web clipper for Chrome, my preferred browser.   This makes life a lot easier when you come across anything interesting:

SpringPad web clipper

SpringPad web clipper

You can also email items such as webpages, links and PDF files to SpringPad using your own personalised SpringPad email address (in the settings).

Once in the SpringPad web app (similar layouts for the iPad, iPhone or Android phone are available in an app too), your top level notebooks appear something like this:

SpringPad Notebook Dashboard

SpringPad Notebook Dashboard

You can colour code them for easy visual appeal and finding things.  Of course, I’ve also hidden the mission critical client projects, but you can see the general gist of what my recent science topics look like.

The nice thing about this approach is that you can create Notebooks by topics and then once you’ve clipped or emailed relevant information to SpringPad, it can be organised efficiently.

For example, the JP Morgan Healthcare conference is ongoing this week in San Francisco with lots of news emerging by biotech company, drug and pathway.   I can clip, then tag the information and also assign it to several Notebooks.  Information emerging from the meeting on Keryx’s perifosine might get added to the Keryx, colorectal cancer and myeloma Notebooks, for example.  This makes it easier to find information later when you search for it, or later look at all the information you have collected to date on say, lung cancer or a particular pathway, to look at the big picture trends.   I also diligently tag items across a broad range of topics so they will appear later in the database searches.

Another useful feature of SpringPad is that you can collate information around an event.

Once inside a notebook, for example, the recent one I created for the ISGC meeting at MD Anderson to keep me organised with a one stop shop for all the preconference information, to-dos and post conference notes looked like this:

Inside a SpringPad Notebook

Inside a SpringPad Notebook

While travelling to this meeting, I had everything I needed for the event in the iPhone app and could add new notes, to dos, places, contacts, pictures, photos, url links etc while on the road for other projects.   This worked really well, even on the plane, since SpringPad will sync the notes once internet access is available later.

The iPhone is small, so it is not good for rapid note taking at meetings and wifi was gippy at best, so I made most of the notes on my Mac laptop in Twitter using a hashtag and also in an offline text app, Notational Velocity, which syncs with Simplenote.  I’m now looking to see if I can email my notes on each presentation to SpringPad or worst case scenario, cut/paste them into the notes created.  Another way to do this efficiently would be to use an iPad, but that’s still on my geek wish list in the Gear Notebook :)

Assigning dates to To-Dos and items is a really useful feature – you can check your Alert box and see what’s immediately due.  I added in contacts from Google Contacts and was pleased to see it created a map on my iPhone when I needed to check an address while going to a new place for the first time.

Another feature I really like is the ability to import Delicious bookmarks (I have 3,000 of them!) as well as the associated tags, so these are now searchable in the context of any other information I might have collated in SpringPad.   When a client rings up or sends an email asking about something, this makes the answer much easier to find than Googling and getting lots of spammy results, which seems de rigeur in public searches of late.

SpringPad is not only useful for business things – you can plan meals and recipes, renovation or kitchen projects, create a wine library, the kids school activities, craft projects, writing ideas – the list is endless.  There are plenty of popular examples on the SpringPad blog to help you get started.

There’s a lot more functionality in SpringPad not covered in this review, but I will add more updates as it becomes more familiar and a bigger database is built up.  Has anyone else tried SpringPad yet?  If so, what were your experiences or do you have any cool tips to share?

Sally