This post is actually an attempt to organize myself more than anybody else, but let me share what I propose to introduce into my own life, perhaps you will like it too. My problem is that I want to do too much, and I have too little time. This is an age old problem and I think I’ve found a quasi solution to it. The problem with large multiple projects is not so much that you don’t have enough time, but you need to divide your focus between them, and this division of labor if you will is the cause of much time wasiting.

The way I am trying to solve this is not to split up days into working on all of them, but to split my week up into days dedicated to one project. This creates some problems, but also solves a lot and problems created can be remedied, at least in my case.

Currently I can split my life into about 5 different large projects. These are Hack Your Day, Guest blogging, Code a Day (an upcomming css blog), my upcoming music project and Blogtastique. Ideally I would create a separate day for each of these projects, except for Blogtastique, which requires at least two. Since I can blog about things in advance it’s ok to separate only one day, even put two blogging projects on the same day, I can just schedule posts for a later date. This means I can spend the optimum amount of time on the most time consuming tasks, Blogtastique and my mystery musical project.

You can do the same thing I have done in your life. Identify your key projects and set up different days to work on them. If you have a day job you can still apply the same method to other tasks or hobbies you have. Separating projects like this helps you focus on one at a time, keeping a clear mind and you will be able to work much more productively overall.

The negative side is of course quite prominent with Blogtastique. Since I provide services, I can hardly keep a new client in the dark for 3 days. Even if my Blogtastique days are Tuesday and Thursday, this would still be an unacceptable time lag. So the question is, how much do I keep “out of touch” with a project on unspecified days?

This can be remedied quite easily actually. I have determined that the best course of action (for me) is to make emailing a global task, since that doesn’t take much time, and leave the actual work for scheduled days. So if a new client contacts me I talk through his order with him, and I notify him on which days I will be wrking on his order.

If you have multiple projects, but you can’t separate them like this, I still suggest some kind of barrier between them. Drink a cup of team between working on separate things, go for a walk, clear your mind and start each new project with a clear mind and you will be much more productive and effective!

Productivity is something that escapes many people in the morning, and I would be the first to admit to that myself. I’m far from being the easy waker, although I tend to “fall into shape” fast once I get up. For most of us the problem lies in our sleeping schedule, which we are unable to alter, due to family, friends, our jobs and so on. Let me share some tips to enable you to wake up better and start the day quicker, with more energy and positive thoughts.

Measure how much sleep you actually need

This is a tough one and requires some time. From various sources I’ve heard that if you miss some sleep you should not sleep more the next day, but this is totally stupid. If you sleep less than usuall on one day, you’re body will try to get it back later. This means that if you want to determine how much sleep you really need, you need to spend at least a few days sleeping right, but this should be more like a week or so.

The idea is to always go to sleep and wake up at the same time for at least three days. It’s best to go to bed around 21:30 - 22:00, and don’t use an alarm clock to wake up. Repeat this two more times, and on the fourth night, determine the amount you slept, this should be the amount of sleep you need. This method is far from fool-proof, sleep is probably the most varied thing ever and a lot of factors can mix up your results, so if you feel this is not the right amount for you, repeat this for more days if necessary.

Once you have determined your needs, you will have two advantages. Once is you know exactly how much sleep you should be getting, so you can schedule yourself accordingly. Even if this amount is more than you expect, at least you can now be predictible in your sleep. The other advantage presents itself if you have a low sleep need. If you find that you only need 5-6 hours, you won’t be psychologically pressured if you know you’re only getting 5 hours this night. I find that a lot of people slep badly because they know they are only going to get a few hours, which makes them tense, which makes them stay up even more, sleep even less, and the vicious cycle continues.

Wake up at once

I’m not saying this is something I follow to the letter, but the most helpful thing you can do in the mornings is jump out of bed once your alarm goes off. Don’t set your alarm 5 minutes before the actual time you need so you can get an extra few minutes of shuteye. I mean how much do you think 5 minutes really helps? Sure, it feels good, but you’re just running away from the problem. Wake up, start doing stuff, you’ll feel better in notime and you will save some time in the mornings for yourself.

Start an activity instantly

My Mom is one of the worst wakers ever. When she wakes up she’s like a drunk, she can barely speak and so on. When I was small though and I woke her because I had a tummy ache, she woke instantly and was alert in about 2 seconds. There’s a good deal of Motherly instinct there, but you can use the same basic principle for youself.

First of all, you need a child. No, just kidding, but you need to get yourself an activity in the morning. I frequently sit down and start working right out of bed. This doesn’t mean I don’t brush my teeth and eat my breakfest, the activity just helps me to wake up at least 5 times faster.

How many times have you sat down with your coffee, just staring into nothing? This takes away a lot of time, time which most people don’t enjoy, because they’re still quasi-sleeping. Get up and do something, anything to take your mind off the fact that you’re tired.

Get yourself into the shower as fast as possible

A shower is something that will wake everyone who has had a half-proper night’s sleep, so getting in there asap may be your number one priority. I realize this takes some will power when you’re tired, but it will wake you up, you probably need a shower at some point anyway and makes you feel good and fresh.

If you alternate between hot and cold water the effect will be doubled and this will also help your skin to breath a bit, since it exercises your pores. You can also use a refreshing shower gel, or anything like that you have at home, whichever you feel most comfortable with will be the best.

Did you know that you can use google for much more than surfing? Apart from being able to just search websites you can get the local time anywhere, get stock quotes, use it as a simple calculator, and so much more. Here are a few tricks to make you a more productive Google user.

Caluclator

This is a feature I use a whole lot and it’s extremely simple. Just type in a simple expression and Google will solve it for you. I think the calculator goes as far as square roots, so if you need your quadratic equations solved look elsewhere. However for simple multiplication tasks or additions, just write in what you need like so:

“126+3235″
“76*12″

Currency converter

This is something I tried a few months back because I was converting currencies a lot and I thought, hey, maybe Google has this. So I wrote “420 USD in HUF” which neatly converted my $420 into Hungraian Forints. To use this you need to know the three letter abbreviation of the currency you need, but looking that up is just a few seconds. Be sure to always caps all the characters in the currency’s name though or else it won’t work. Here’s the syntax again:

“125 USD in GBP”
“300 EUR in USD”

Time finder

Finding the time anywhere is really easy with Google, all you need to do is prefix any city with “time”. The cool thing about this is that Google lists all found cities, since there are four “Plymouth’s” for example, and seeing them all listed, and their location makes finding any time a cinch, just use:

“time Plymouth”
“time Budapest”

Weather

Finding the weather in any city is exactly the same as finding the time, just prefix the city with “weather” and you’ll get forecasts for anywhere. Sadly this doesn’t work as flexibly as the time option, you won’t get all the cities listed if you just type Plymouth, but it’s still a quick and easy way to get a forecast, just type:

“weather Budapest”
“weather Los Angeles”

Unit conversion

I used to live in the US, but since I have been using meters and kilograms for 20 years, so I’m a bit out of touch with pounds and inches. In these cases unit conversion is really handy, but you usually have to visit a site for that which takes way to long. Just type it into Google! You can convert a lot of types here, just use the following syntax:

“16mi in km”
“75kg in lbs”

Spell checking

I don’t know if this is a real feature or not, but if you don’t know how to spell a word, just type it into Google, if you misspell it, Google will ask you if you meant something else. If you type recieve instead of receive, Google will say: “Did you mean receive?”. The functions here a pretty limited and in some extremely rare words may not work, but for the simple spell checking of one word it’s perfect.

Remember the Milk is one of my favorite task managers, but there are so many options that you may get overwhelmed, or not use them because they just take too much time to implement into your work flow. There are a handfull of handy shortcuts you can use to ease all these tasks and navigate the RTM interface swiftly.

Multiple editing

Multiple editing is the one mode which can save you a boatload of time. You can enter tags, places, URL’s completion information for any tasks you like at once, or you can mark them complete en masse. Just press “m” to enable multiple mode and from then on, when you select more than one task you will be editing them all at once. Handy lines to the right will enable you to visualize this better, and also to help you notice that you’re in multiple mode when you want to be in single edit mode. If you want to switch back, just press “m” again.

Editing task specifics

When creating a task you need to click on tags, then click on tag, enter it, click on location, enter it, click on time spent and so on, and while these are small additions to the time of task creation, they still amount to a considerable waste of time. There is a letter shortcut however for each task property, so when adding a task all you need to do is press “u” for url, enter it, then press enter, press “s” to change tags, enter them and press enter. While this sounds longer written down it’s actually about 30% faster initially and when you learn the shortucts it shaves at least 50% off your task creation time. Here are the shortcuts to all the properties in the order they are found in RTM, and also the shortcuts for assigning a priority on the fly.

• r - Rename
• d -Due
• f - Repeat
• g - Time estimate
• s - Tags
• l - Location
• u - URL
• p - Postpone
• y - Add a note
• 1 through 3 - Priorities

Navigation and Misc

Apart from just changing and adding tasks you can navigate easily around the interface with just letters. “a” selects all the tasks visible while “n” deselects all tasks, both logical choices and highly productive, especially the select none option. You can easily move up, down and select an item with “k”, “j” and “i” respectively. Another way to easily navigate and input details is the tab key which will save your input and move to the next field. The last keyboard shortcut I use a lot is the delete key which of course deletes the selected task(s).

If you use these shortcuts a bit you will get very used to them and your productivity will soar, shaving precious time off what you spend adding and modifying tasks which in itself is not an effective task.

When they rolled out some new features in Gmail a while back, they changed their link structure a bit. This enabled a lot of productivity short cuts, my favorite of which is the bookmarking of searches.

This week I have been working on Blogtastique orders and I have been searching for emails sent to my address, with some specifics inside. I won’t really use this all the time, so creating a label is not necessary, but this week I have performed this search about 50 times. If you have similar need, here’s a handy tip to help you save some time.

Perform the search you need, and bookmark the result page like you would any other page. Press CTR+D (for IE and Firefox) and type a description and place the bookmark. Now when you navigate to that bookmark you will automatically go to the results of that search.

What I love about it is that if you do this in the same tab as you normal Gmail interface Gmail won’t be loaded again, so the results pop up in about 2 seconds. This trick can save your minutes each day, it has saved me at least an hour this week!

Google Notebook was a nice service to begin with, but it lacked many features. Now that it has matured a bit, a lot of options and ways to organize and be more productive were added, making this not just a thought jotter, but a full fledged organizer. Here are a few tips helping you to turn Google Notebook into something more like OneNote or EverNote than textpad and notepad.

Create a note title

Whenever I write in my Google notebook I always create titles. There are two reasons you should start this good practice. One is obvious, when the note is (or notes are) expanded you can easily see what’s what without having to read into notes. The second reason is that when the notes are collapsed, you can also identify notes very quickly. So that your titles are identifiable in collapsed mode it is best if you add a special symbol after them.

I usually create titles in the format “text - text |”. If you create lists for separate days of the week you could create a title on the first line saying: “tuesday - shopping list”. This will be collapsed and all formatting will be removed, but due to the hyphen and the pipe after, your title will be identifiable when the note is collapsed.

Use labels for future reference

Labels were originally not part of Google Notebook, but they are very welcome now. Labels allow you to group notes that are otherwise totally unrelated. I could have a shopping list in there somewhere and I could also have a post on Hack Your Day about how to productively shop with a shopping list.

While in this particular example I may not benefit from seeing the link between these two, who knows? Perhaps while shopping I find a totally cool method which I only remember to share because I saw the link between the two.

Nevertheless, labeling can help you organize and conserve space by enabling you to reduce your notebook count. Not that you have space limitations, but the simpler your system the better. You can then go to the sort menu and sort by label, or just click on a label to list all notes that belong there.

Combine Google Bookmarks and Google Notebook

Google’s bookmark service has been fully integrated into Google Notebooks, giving you a unified way of organizing notes and bookmarks. Visiting the two services separately is still an option, but pretty pointless, since Notebook offers a much better experience. You can add bookmarks like usual, jot down your notes and so on, they will be updated in both places.

What changed though is that you now have all of Notebook’s tools to help you manage them. You (or a collaborator) can add a comment, assign a label, and this all adds to your organization and productivity, since it is integrated into your system.

Use the Firefox Browser extension

The Notebook Firefox extension is actually one of the best extensions I’ve seen, you can use it for all sorts of stuff. The main reason I suggest using it is that this is the tool that allows you to gather data like you can with Outlook and Evernote.

The extension opens a small window in your browser and allows you to paste data, or actually create and manipulate notes like you do in the full screen browser version. The windows is small, about 300×200px, but still provides a rich experience, very similar to the normal editing mode, how they managed to make this work is a mystery to me.

The browser extension also comes with a handy context menu entry enabling you to save snippets of data as you highlight it. You can right click anywhere on a page and click “note this with Google Notebook” and the small editor will autmatically open, creating a new note with the URL as the title. If you highlight any text on the page, this will automatically added to the note as well.

This will shave hours of your working time in the long run, and will probably save you some frustration as well, this is one extension I rely on heavily because often I save the stuff I want to write about like this. No need to find relevant entries in my RSS feed or bookmarks, I just open Google Notebook.

Use the drag and drop feature

If you hover your mouse over the left hand side of a note, you will see that you can drag it. You can simply take a note and drag it into a different notebook. This is a great feature if you want to keep a record of things to do and things done. Just drag the note to the relevant Notebook.

You could also use this for task management. Just create a task list and Notebooks for phases of a project. When a task enters a new phase just drag and drop it. There are many other ways you can use this feature, it will keep you productive by taking clicks and checkboxes away from the equation and letting you simple rearrange your thoughts.

Make full use of the comments option

Remember that you can use comments for youself, this isn’t just for other users to share their thoughts on your notes. I use a comment box like the “add a note” feature when creating bookmarks. For example when creating a task I would try to be as brief as possible and then add things to do with it in comments.

You can also add notes like “waiting for input” in the comments, or you could add ingredients to a recipe you still need to buy. The uses are again endless, and can contribute a lot to your productivity.

Since the comments section gets condensed as you collapse the notes, it is also good practice to keep your comments short and well organized too, this will enable you to make the most info out without needing to open anything.