Going from May to June my project count jumped from about 3 to about 9, in addition to all the ideas and future developments I have in mind. If you’ve ever had your mind totally full and couldn’t write up a list for fear of forgetting something, here’s a 5 step list to make sure you get everything down in detail.

Now I never use mindmaps to organize myself continuously, I think it’s a tremendous tool to quickly draw up all the projects and related groups of tasks you have in mind, and then derive everything you need to do from there. I found myself in front of an empty Remember The Milk inbox, I wanted to reorganize all my project and their tasks, and I was at a complete loss. There’s Blogtastique which drains my resources a lot nowadays, there’s Hack Your Day, which I want to return my attention to, there’s all the guest blogging I do, some article writing I do freelance, translation work my musical life I want to revive, and a load of ideas I want to develop. I am fully capable of completing all these, but when faced with writing up a task list my mind was bubbling with things I didn’t want to leave out. I got a single piece of paper, a pen, and started the ten minute work that led me to be completely organized, here’s how:

1. Follow your thoughts

This may seem like a stupid point, but I think people try to cling to some sort of order in everything, and I believe this is the stage to let go, Don’t think in terms of categories, projects, time frame, just start writing. Draw a circle in the center, label it “Projects” and follow your train of thought. You can write up all your projects on different branches, or start writing, then spend time on project two developing it with sub branches and so on.

The point of this is to just let everything come out naturally. This will clear your mind somewhat and then let you concentrate on adding details here and there. The reason you should not follow any type of order is that you will loose focus, and start thinking about the order, not the actual items. This point is the most important one, let go of everything, just start writing anything that comes to mind.

2. Add details

Once you have initially jotted down everything you should actually have an almost complete list. Remember, we are not really adding tasks, but projects and sub-projects. This can get a bit tricky though, my philosophy is to add projects and continuous tasks. So for Hack Your Day I would have “Management”, “Marketing” and “Posting” for example as sub-projects. Indeed, posting is a task, but since it needs to be done indefinitely, it can be considered a project at this point.

When I talk about adding details I mean really thinking about stuff. This is the time that you may actually get some new ideas, since everything put down on paper is now out of your head, giving way to some new neuron activity in there. Actively try to think of new things to add, or new connections between items. By the way, you should also add connections in this stage. For example, my Blogtastique projects feed into the maintaining of the Blogtastique main page, since I want to let everyone know if Blogtastique is managing Gawker Media or CNN blogs right? I might also post about some of my awesome customers and so on. Essentially these are data flow connections and may be left out, but I like to see them in there for information’s sake.

3. Translate your mindmap into lists

By this stage you should be organized and I got here in about 10 minutes with a huge load of projects on my paper. The next steps can be altered or combined, altogether they will be about another 30 minutes, but well worth it in the long run.

I know lists may be a bit old fashioned nowadays due to things like Remember the Milk, Todoist and so on, but we’ll get there, don’t worry. Create a three column list for each big project and label them “to do”, “ongoing” and “plans”. The to do column should contain all your short term tasks related to that project, with the exception of ongoing stuff. The ongoing column should contain items you need to do repeatedly. For me this is posting and management, but in some cases you may not need this column at all. The plans section should contain any items you wish to complete in the future, say in between 2 weeks and 2 months. If you have long term goals, I recommend a fourth column named “future” for 1 - 2 year goals.

The purpose of this is now to get right down to the nuts and bolts of your life. From “clean my room” to “implement new cms system”, you should get everything down and out. In many cases this could take some time, so if you want to be very thorough you can devote 10 minutes to each project, and you don’t have to do it all on the same day.

4. Highlight your project backbone

This is something I came up when doing my mindmap to determine three things. The most important tasks I need to do right now and the most important project to develop. Take your pen and trace the whole route from the beginning of your mindmap (the projects circle) to the sub-projects containing your 3 most urgent items. Take a different colored pen and trace the path to the three tasks you have the most important “plans” items for.

This may lead to some pretty complicated stuff, and you will need to make sense of it yourself. If many lines run into the same project you then have a pretty important project. If all lines go to different sub-projects, but have a common project, you then prioritize that project. The point here is to give you an overview of your most urgent, and most important tasks.

5. Transfer all the data to the app of your choice

If you like you can keep all this on paper, but if you’re the web 2.0 type of guy I am, you’ll want to look for some fancy online solutions. I vouch for Remember the Milk and Todoist for free options, or Nozbe and Vitalist for not so free options (although both have basic free accounts). Using these tools is an art form all in itself, so I won’t go there, but you can use all the tagging, categorizing, contexting, time-tracking tools at your disposal.

6. Revisit mindmapping once in a while

This is an awesome, extra productivity step, wow! The idea here is to create a mindmap without actually consulting your lists every 2 -3 months. Of course you should be getting roughly the same results as you can see in the lists, but it never hurts to check for 2 reasons.

Primarily, many people are tardy in their list servicing. They forget to add here, forget to delete there, and lists get jumbled up. Revisiting these steps help clear up any messes in there, and clarify goals. Secondly, it serves as a great feedback tool to see if your priorities have changes. Not thinking of a task at all these days? Having way to much to do in other tasks, no problem, your mindmap and task lists will tell you!

I have been working quite hard in the last few days to complete and put a new site online called Blogtastique. The aim of the site is to help beginner bloggers churn out a truly quality site in a day, and to help pro bloggers manage their blogs.

With the free Basic Package we’ll install your Wordpress blog for example, recommend themes based on your content, recommend some cool plugins and generally give you some good tips about this and that. the Pro Package means we’ll make some theme customization for you, install plugins, third party applications like embedded Twitter, widgets and so on and we’ll try our best to synchronize the look of your blog with what you write about.

The Managment Package is for those of you who don’t like doing the “paperwork” that your blog generates. We’ll pre-configure your categories or optimize them for you, going through each post, we’ll create a custom theme just for you, we can check each new post for errors, we’ll moderate your comments, manage users, and generally do any task you bestow upon us.

Please take a look at this new service, I’m very excited to get started with it, if you have any questions, suggestions or want to sign up, please write to the Blogtastique team, you can find contacts in the contacts section of the Blogtastique.

Highrise, by 37signals, is a very powerful contact management system that lets you keep track of anything contact related. You can use it for customer care, networking, team management, even task management if you want to.

Basics

At its core, Highrise is a place to store contact information and interaction. You can create contacts, enter various contact information and you will see a list of these contacts. Nothing really special there. Once you’ve created someone, you can add a an entry to his history, anything you did together, or agreed upon for example. This entry will be saved and once you’ve been using the app for a while you will have a neat log of events that took place with different people. All searchable, with different views as expected from a quality application.

This alone gives you a lot of power and flexibility in your organization, but what really boosts your productivity is the ability to add tasks, follow-ups and dates to remember. You assign tasks contact specifically, but you can also see them aggregated and you will also get email notifications if you so choose. The reason this is so awesome is that it allows you to separate the log from the to do list. This way you can keep a tab on what is actually happening and separate it from what you want to happen and once a task is complete, it will be placed into the log as an entry about a completed task.

Features

You can find millions of ways to use Highrise, and little details to love, here are some of my favorites. When you view all your contacts, separate groups get created for companies, showing the amount of contacts inside. This is great, since there is no need to create folders for this.

Titles and companies are also shown below each contact and they are all clickable, so under my name if you see “owner of Hack Your Day”, you can click owner to see all your contacts with that job position and Hack Your Day to see everyone working at Hack Your Day.

Searching works extremely well because it seems to be an AJAX based type-as-you-search box, which means that results get filtered as you type along. Apart from speed, this also helps you refine your search and while doing that, it also looks really smooth.

You can import and export contacts into and from the most common formats. Importing can be done from vCard, Basecamp, Outlook, ACT! and export is available to vCard and Excel files. This is a great backup option, or a starting out option for those who want to switch to Highrise.

Free vs Paid

The free option for Highrise gives you 250 contacts, 1 case, 2 users but lacks SSL and file uploads. Cases are basically folders to group people in. They are great because they allow you to cross-connect people in different ways. Two of my contacts primarily work elsewhere, but we also share a project, so creating a case will let me see both of them in the same context. Overall the free plan is fine for light users, but if you need some serious space for contacts you should consider the other options.

The paid plans are quite well though out, the best option if you aren’t working in a team is the Solo plan. For just $29 a month, you get 20,000 contacts, SSL, unlimited cases, 1 GB of file storage but only one user. This is the option I will be switching to soon.

Other plans are geared toward teams, with 15, 40 and unlimited users, 3, 10 and 50GB storage (that last one’s pretty impressive), and 20, 30 and 50 thousand contacts respectively. The top of the line will put you back $149 a month, although if you have these needs, I don’t think this is a huge price to pay, I would dish it out happily for this app.

Overview

I am using Highrise regularly now to keep track of everyone and it is working really well, and I’m still in the free version. I love the ease of use (just type an entry), the searchability and the way it sneaks some productivity into my contact management, something I’ve been looking for for a while now. In the end though, you need to use it regularly for it to work. If you do though, you will become a happy camper indeed.

Reaction time is very important nowadays, especially if you work as a blogger or as someone else who feeds on info. I need to fix some problems at my day job again so I didn’t write new posts, but had a few draft titles written up. I had a Prism review on my agenda three days ago, Lifehacker covered it yesterday; I had a Doomi review on my list since Monday, gHacks covered that this week too. As you can see a lot hangs in the balance and staying on top of all this info is an important task.

The way I found I can get there before anyone else (or at least at the same time), is to carefully plan my information scraping technique. Getting your news regularly as a habit will increase your productivity much more than if you would actually be sitting in front of your RSS feed for 24 hours a day. The reason is that you have to write and publish these stories as well, not just read them. Therefore I suggest two different approaches, you can decide which works best.

As I have said, I separate about 30 - 60 minutes of each morning to read news. This includes feeds, websites, even newspapers if I am so inclined. I transfer everything I want to write about into separate drafts and during the next 2 hours I write up the stories. I publish either the most interesting ones or the most relevant ones (like a Firefox update) and the rest of the day I can spend covering the less important stuff.

Another method, which is to read all about the news before you go to bed, transfer everything to drafts and then write about it first thing in the morning. This way you can probably get rid of those not-so-good ideas quickly and you are starting to write with a fresh mind, which is always very important in productivity.

Whichever you choose, I recommend separating the actual reading of news and writing as much as possible, to avoid distractions. I also advise writing when you are at your freshest, regardless of when you read news. A story which is perfect, but a few hours late will be fine, but covering something first with really appalling quality will kick you in the behind after a while.

During my dayjob my boss recommended an awesome application called RescueTime. Basically it is a simple app residing in the system tray that monitors what you do all the time. It periodically sends this data to the RescueTime server, and by logging on to your account you can view how productive or unproductive you were. I think this is one of the best productivity measurement apps I’ve ever seen, warranting it a bit more in-depth look on my part.

Setting up RescueTime

Setup is really easy, all you need to do is go to the RescueTime homepage and register for a free account. Once done, download the desktop application and install it (currently available for Windows and Mac). When you run the application it will reside in the system tray, right-click it and open the preferences. On the basic tab you can enter your registration details so the app knows where to send the data, and you can also set it to go to your dashboard with a double-click, I have this enabled.

On the advanced tab you can set the scanning interval of the application. I recommend you set this to a very low level, around 1-5 seconds. If you change windows very few times you can set it to a higher value, but it may lower the effectiveness of the logging. You can also set the time intervals between updates sent to the web. If you want to review your tasks every night I suggest setting it to around 15 hours, but you can also update manually using the button. I have it set to 5 minutes right now because I like my stats all nice and fresh, and I am also still in the process of setting things up.

In the privacy tab you can restrict your browser logging activity a bit, since RescueTime not only records that you are using your browser, but also the site you are looking at. You can create a whitelist by adding some entries, this will result in the app logging only those sites by name, others will be logged as “Other Websites”. You can also record only partial URL’s like “google.com” instead of “google.com/reader”, but both these options lower the effectiveness of the logging process, the fuller you record what you do the larger boost in productivity you could get with the app.

Using RescueTime

Now that we’ve got everything up and running its time to actually start using RescueTime. All you really need is to start working normally, the app will record what you do, and for how long. After you finish a few hours of work though, I suggest going to the dashboard and taking a look at some stats. Since you don’t have any tags yet, let’s make some, this will give you a lot of flexibility in monitoring your productivity.

Click on the Apps/Site List on the right and you will see a list of all the apps you have used. You will see that apart from Windows or Mac programs, you will also be presented with specific web pages you visited. You can click on Tag it! to add tags to each application. Once you add some, you will be able to view graphs on time spent on each tag and so on, which is very powerful on its own, but add tag rating to this and you really do have a productivity monitoring powerhouse.

If you click on all tags you will be able to rate each tag from -2 to +2 and based on this, RescueTime will calculate some valuable info for you. Once you are done, go to the dashboard and you will see some more stats now. You will see your efficiency level (time spent on productive activity vs distracting activity) and your productivity (compared to the RescueTime user base) level. I would mainly concentrate on the efficiency level, but trying to increase productivity could be a fun activity, and of course it forces you to be highly productive. You can also see various informative graphs about your top tags, top applications (time-wise) and total time spent.

Setting Goals and using RescueTime productively

Setting goals is a great help if you want to spend more time on a specific activity. Click on Goals and Alerts in the right sidebar and you will be able to add some specific goals in the form of “I want to spend 3 hours a day on blogging” for example. This info will be shown on the dashboard and you will see how you are doing. As all visual representations of data, it will be immensely helpful in bettering your performance.

The way to use RescueTime productively is to let it monitor you all the time. I found myself switching it off for 5 minutes, since setting up Netvibes for my girlfriend isn’t a normal activity in my day. I realized though that it is still an activity and should be logged, since in the long run, after thousands of hours it won’t make a difference too much and if it does, I won’t notice it if I always switch logging off.

Another way to use the app to maximize your productivity is to use the time views available. By analyzing your day to day performance, weekly performance, monthly performance and eventually yearly performance, you will be able to identify “trends” in your working method, and hopefully you will be able to extend high points in the graph and eliminate low points.

My RescueTime verdict

This application is the one I am most excited about and I will be covering it more in the future. The reason I love it so much is that after 20 minutes of setting up it will monitor your performance automatically, no need to constantly update, add tasks and so on. The beauty of it is that if you spend some extra time on it you will get 500 times the invested time back, but if you spend no extra time at all, you still benefit a lot.

If you blog a lot, especially if you do it professionally, a lot of your day will be spent writing and reading stories. An RSS feed is an integral part of this, both for finding stuff to write about and also to keep yourself up to date on news. I think Google Reader is an excellent tool to manage 90% of your workflow in terms of writing and reading, it ads a great deal to my productivity at least.

I used to send myself the stories I wanted to read or work on through Google Reader (take a look at the post here), but since I’ve switched to a tag and folder based approach. Here’s how I manage my blog workflow in 5 steps to maximize my productivity.

1. Organize your feeds by importance

Instead of organizing my feeds by category it is more effective from an organization point of view to doing this by importance. This is helpful because I may have 1000+ unread items from some news feeds, which is not a big deal, but just one post missed from a site like the official Google blog will make me quite unhappy indeed. Therefore to stop interesting, albeit less important news items clogging me up, I create three folders, “Important”, “To Watch”, “Other”. My important folder contains product blogs, like the Remember the Milk blog, or the Official Gmail Blog so I can get the latest development news quickly. It also contains some top blogs like Lifehacker. The “To Watch” folder contains other blogs which also have cool stories, but if I miss out on one, or read it a day later the world doesn’t collapse. “Other” contains general news blogs I read or fun stuff, like the Beaver and Steve RSS feed.

2. Create categories for your workflow

One feature that Google Reader introduced not long ago helped a lot in my productivity and is party the reason for making the change from email to a wholly Reader based solution. Apart from folders, you can now tag posts, and even view them later on as part of that tag. I have three types of tags, I call them resource tags, info tags and archive tags.

Info tags are tags which I add to regularly, but I also remove items every day. They could be compared to to-do lists because all items represent something to do. A tag like this would be my “To Read” tag. All posts go in here which I will not write about, but I want to read because it contains some info, usually regarding my blog, or blogging. Once I have read the item I will delete it from this tag and either remove it completely from Google Reader, or move it to an archive tag.

Resource tags contain items which have resource lists in them. A post about the top 10 to do lists on the net would be put in here for example. I will not cover this post as is, but it provides a list of services which I might want to cover. Resource articles don’t stay around forever either. I usually review items in this tag once a week and if I find services I like I record which ones they are somewhere and I delete the item.

Archive tags just serve to contain material which I delete from other tags. Posts which provided me with valuable info might be put here just in case I need to reference them again, you never know. I rarely delete something from an archive tag, but it may be a good idea to go through it every 3-4 months and clear it up a bit.

In reality I actually use three tags “Resource List”, “To Read” and “Archive”, these correspond to my three categories, but the reason I always talked about categories is that you can have more than one info tag, depending on the field you work in and the type of blog you write.

3. Record your ideas

Recording your ideas is very important, especially for me because I just have so many. About 50% of these turn out to be not so great, but since I take them all down, I’m left with the other 50% that is good. I use drafts to record everything, and by draft a simple title will do to quickly jot down a thought. I use Windows Live Writer to manage all the ideas and posts because I can write as many drafts as I want, going through them one by one, and once done publish them from right there.

I transfer all story ideas that come from my RSS feed to Live Writer as well as stuff that just pops up during the day. About 90% of the time I just come up with a quick title and put the source of the story (if any) in the body, and perhaps a few notes and pointers so I don’t forget. This way Writer works sort of like an ideas repository for me.

4. Create daily routines

I say routines because I don’t like it if my whole day is governed by one task list our one routine. I have 4-5 things I do each day and the reason I separated them is that if I skip one the system doesn’t fall apart. One of my favorite routines is the RSS scanning every morning. Basically I get up at around 6am and go through all my RSS items.

On my first go I star all items of interest, regardless of what category they will fall into. I then fire up Live Writer and transfer all stories I will write by creating a new post, coming up with the title and opening the link to the site of the item, copying the link into the body of the draft. I take down any additional notes I have, but I do not spend more than 30 seconds on one single post. I un-star all items that I have transferred, so I am left with only 3-4 starred ones which I will now review again.

On the second pass I decide what to do with the remaining items. I either send them to an info tag, for reading later, or send them to the resource list for future reference. More often than not, I also immediately delete some items because I realize I will not really need them anymore, you’d be surprised at the difference 5 minutes of settling in makes to your views on one piece of info.

While making two passes is a bit redundant, I find that it increases my productivity overall. I may read an item twice, but the organization and clarity of mind I gain makes the extra spent time quite worth it.

5. Set up fix review times

As I have already mentioned, it is important to set up some review times, just like you would in GTD. I review info tags daily (and weekly) and my resource tags weekly. I review info tags daily from the perspective of reading some, and every Friday I review them to purge the list, delete items I won’t really read. My resource tags get reviewed weekly for the same reason. I either take down some items from a resource list or I just delete it.

You also need to review your drafts often, since you may find that a story has been sitting on your “desk” unwritten for ages. I review my draft list just like my info tags, once a day to get a glimpse of what I need to write or what I missed out on, and weekly to purge the list and delete drafts that don’t seem like great ideas anymore.

About once a month I review my whole system as is. I take a look at the tags I’m using, my feed reading activity and so on. I remove feeds I don’t really read, or that I don’t find too interesting, I add tags and delete them if necessary (I advise as little change here as possible) and make tweaks and changes where needed.

The idea is to keep your system as static as possible, while making it flexible enough to make changes if needed. Ideally you should find things to tweak all the time, find new tools and so on, but your core system should stay in tact.