By Guest Blogger Trevor Ginn
Being short of time is a job hazard of running a business. Every day there will be ten equally important tasks demanding attention and in many cases, there will be no opportunity to delegate the work. It is therefore important to think about how to use time effectively and consider strategies for cutting down on time consuming, but unnecessary activities. Here are some tips.
Avoid unnecessary meetings. Meetings are hugely time consuming and often not that productive. Try and get things agreed via email or phone if at all possible and only have a face to face …read more

PimpYourWork.com

In an effort to boost productivity by minimizing time lost due to aimless web surfing, the Invisibility Cloak script for Firefox was born. Taking advantage of Greasemonkey’s ability to run scripts to enhance your Firefox experience, Invisibility Cloak allows you to block sites that doesn’t have anything to do with your work and would normally consume your working time.Invisibility Cloak comes pre-configured with several sites already blocked and cannot be accessed till 3 in the afternoon. You can easily add more sites to the blocked list and even include excluded sites as well. When you try to access the …read more

Found this video on YouTube today, which mentions some tips on how you can customize the Windows XP taskbar to become more productive. I actually used 2 of those techniques when I was still dependent on the taskbar, namely the use of Taskbar Shuffle and toolbars. However, since then I’ve moved on to a different way of organizing my desktop, taskbar-free. But if you can’t live without the taskbar, this video is worth a look.

Dammit. I’m actually behind schedule on two client requests. Yes, yes, I should have known that was going to happen because I was moving around my Google Calendar items and postponing them a day or two late. And I did spend an entire day celebrating my first anniversary with my partner. If I could, I would send this post to Celine Of Two Weeks Ago to avoid the meltdown I’m currently having.
It may be too late for me, but as a result, I’ve come up with these serious rules that will help me stick to my …read more

Over at Property Crossroads, Dan Rafter made an interesting post about how more people want access to public transportation. People want communities that are planned in such a way that they can easily commute. Now, I live in a 3rd world country where commuting is akin to riding a bus to hell because of the traffic and the possibility of being mugged. Plus, once, a rooster flew into my face. But I digress.
So, for the street savvy commuter, instead of just sitting on your behind during the commute isn’t exactly productive is it? Well, here are …read more

If you’re a blog addict, odds are you subscribe to hundreds of sites.  These sites often have multiple updates, so you thought you’d go through all of them more quickly if you used an RSS reader.  Now that you have the reader, you’re still viewing hundreds of site updates a day.  How do you go through all that without watching your life pass you by?
You don’t have to read everything.  That’s right – you really don’t.  Simply scan for headlines that contain keywords which interest you.  Read those and ignore the rest.  I use GreatNews as a feedreader, and like …read more

My friend Ben Yoskovitz laments a common problem we all have faced dealing with folks via e-mail…not getting a critical question answered:
And that’s frustrating. You can’t keep asking the same question over and over, and presumably you’re asking the question because you really want an answer.

Tip: The last question you ask in an email is the one that will get answered.

People will skim your email, get to the bottom and see a call to action. If you’ve peppered your email with other questions, it’s very likely people will miss them, or won’t bother responding. They will key in on the …read more

No I don’t mean drawing goofy things on a piece of paper. I mean using the site/service Doodle to help you plan a meeting:

So, lately, I’ve found myself informally assuming this role, driving a surprising number of gone-fallow projects just by using Doodle to propose a simple check-in. The bottom line is that this process of getting a stupid 15-minute call on the calendar of several busy people will tell you so more than you can imagine about where you and your project stand. But where’s Doodle enter in to it?
As I’ve mentioned before, Michael Näf’s web application is …read more