Archive for the ‘Productivity Methods’ Category

Using more than one browser at once is not just the practice of web designers, everyone can reap the benefit of having multiple browser open, instead of multiple tabs or windows of the same browser. You can separate different types of pages more easily, you can keep your workflow in a different space than your personal like, and you can better use the different advantages of different browser.

If you work on the web and/or live an active social life here, you surely have a lot of “accounting” type pages open, or pages you want to monitor regularly. I call my email accounts and adsense account “accoutning” pages, since these are in no way part of my workflow, separating them is a big productivity booster. Firstly, if I take all of these pages and open them in Chrome instead of Firefox, I will be left with a clean environment to work with in Firefox, and quite possibly, less memory usage. Once you have these separated, the less clutter will help you focus, and you can also put one browser on a side monitor, and your main one right in front of you, if you have a dual monitor setup.

You can also reap the benefits of different features if you use more than one browser. I wouldn’t really use Flock for working, but its a great browser for living your social life, so using Twitter, Facebook and such is much easier and faster. If you are more productive in your personal space, it will leave you more time to work, or simply more time to relax.

I don’t know if I’m alone out there or not, but I don’t like to give an hourly rate for my work to clients. I do have a good idea of what I want to be getting each hour (millions of Dollars), but I feel safer when communicating the price of a project as a fixed fee, or a fee between X and Y. As a consequence, I do tend to either overwork myself (more common), or underwork myself, and checking up on my pricing policy is becoming a habit.

This is easily done by taking your fixed fee, and dividing it by the hourly fee you’d like to see from similar projects. As a result, you will get the time you should spend overall on the project to get exactly the fee you wanted. To track how I’m doing, I use a great little Adobe Air application called Klok. The application is a great time tracker, I shall have to do a long review soon, but to showcase just this feature, I’ll use the Project Summary page.

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I’ve talked about how to put your effectiveness into numbers a short while ago which is definitely good advice in any field of work, because you get real feedback on your performance, but the stats you generate can also boost you psychologically.

My favorite example of this is blogging. I’ve been on and off for ages now, for various reasons, but there were many instances in my blogging life where I either came back, or stayed on, due to statistics. After not writing for 3 months, I went to my Adsense account and saw ad revenue! I thought “wow, I need to get in on this”, so I came back (this was a while ago). The same happened about 15 months back, when I realized I was getting more and more comments. Little stats like this can help boost your determination, even if those stats are negative.

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If you read a few productivity blogs, you’ll come across some posts which help you to focus, or get lists out of your head, by asking you to limit yourself. In some cases you might have to spend no more than 10 words per list item, or describe a project in 100 words, and so on. So is this method a blessing for productivity or a curse? As usual, it depends, but in my case, definitely a curse.

I think the biggest problem people have, especially the entrepreneurial sort, is that they have a load of ideas floating around in their heads. While this is great, it clogs you up, and all the productivity methods out there urge you to get everything out of your head. Limiting yourself to few words can help a lot, you will jot down the stuff in less time, you’ll have a shorter, more concise list, but chances are you won’t get everything down.

Taking ages to describe everything in my case is a part of my modus operandi. I get ideas while I’m thinking/typing, I have very specific thoughts I do not want to forget. Therefore, I can describe something in 10 words, but I’ll be missing out on aspects, most of which I don’t want to forget. Also, the reason for getting things out of your head is to free you up to think about other things, so you don’t have to worry about forgetting important details. If I have to limit myself in any way in this process, I will still have things sloshing around in my brain because I couldn’t write them down.

I would recommend limiting yourself in the main task list, but attaching notes to every single task you need to, and instead of limiting yourself, spend as much time and as much space as you need, filling out notes. This way you will still enjoy the benefits of a clean task list, but you will also reap the rewards of a clean slate in your head.Here are some good tips for adding data to task lists without cluttering them.

Whenever trying to accomplish a task, finish a project and so on, if you want to know how you performed, you will need some sort of method to calculate your effectiveness. You can do this by simply deciding weather your goal was reached or not, but if you want to be a bit more sophisticated about it, read on.

I don’t want to go into a lot of math here, especially because you can come up with your own calculations for your own specific tasks. One of the easiest ways to calculate how effective you were is to estimate the number of hours a task will take, and compare it to the amount of time it actually took. This is especially useful if you’re working on something repetitive.

What I really want to take a look at is the factors to take into account if you want a totally unbiased report on yourself. I was motivated by a comment left on a Lifehacker post by a reader, take a look.

I bet Warren Buffett uses a computer that’s sh*ttier than yours. What are you trying to accomplish with your computer? What is he trying to accomplish with his? Who is more successful at harnessing his computer for the tasks that he needs it to do? You or Warren Buffett? Who has a better price/performance ratio? A better ROI?

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I’m not sure that this tip works, and even if it does, only a few people can do it, but I guess its worth sharing nonetheless. I had 5-6 days when I knew I was going to be at home without actually going anywhere. I wanted to get a lot of work done, although it was not absolutely essential that I do. Since right at the start I was pretty tired, I decided I’d try a new way of working, going to bed whenever I wanted to, and felt tired.

The problem with this is, that after lunch I always feel sleepy, and if I go to bed, I rarely wake up after an hour, I usually sleep 3-5 if left alone. Also, if I go to bed after 11pm, I am well capable of sleeping until noon, although this may be because I never sleep more than 7 hours, while I think my natural need is around 8-9. In any case, I decided to give this a go to see what happens.

I tried it for about 5 days, so this is by no means a definitive study no the effects, but the results where surprisingly positive. In a nutshell, I spent much more time in bed, I even played some games, which I haven’t done in ages, but I still managed to get a lot of work done. I’m not saying I actually got more done than if I would’ve concentrated only on work, but it wasn’t much less.

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