If you take the internet out of context and forget about all the obvious productivity advantages it has given us, like email, skype and so on, it’s still not anywhere near to being as much of a time saver in productivity as it could be. Let me explain.

Take a look at the average internet user for example. He loads up gmail, sends and email, browses for an attachment, sends it. Then he logs in to his blog, writes an article, fires up GIMP and makes an image for the post. He simultaneously logs on to Twitter, to let the world know he’s writing a blog post, and so on and so forth. Much of our time is wasted on switching between apps, and overall, using too many application to accomplish our goals.

Services and technologies spreading like wildfire on the net are constantly changing this, and making us more productive. For once I’m not talking about Remember the Milk, or even Gmail, but the applications that serve to bring these all together.

Prism, Adobe Air, Google Desktop and a whole host of other applications are working together to serve us a dish which we can eat all at once, not bit by bit. Using Adobe Air you can use the much quicker interface of your desktop to control applications like Twitter, Chat clients, and almost any other web service. Using Prism you can integrate services into your desktop better, and Google desktop search brings together various web services with the power of Google Search on the web and on your desktop.

In my opinion this is all just the beginning. Prism in reality doesn’t give us a huge productivity boost, it’s just more convenient and browser independent. Adobe air is a better example, since this way we can customize better to our tastes and use our desktops speedier environment. The future lies in these technologies though, imagine an Adobe Air like software for bloggers, joining Wordpress, Splashup, Flickr, Twitter and News sites. It would be an online suite of the tools I use for blogging saving content online and on my hard drive as well. It could automatically create databases for me with post contents, titles, categories, pics used and so on. It could also automatically post to Twitter, notify me of comments and so on.

As you can see there is a great deal more that can be done, but I think what I described above is technologically very possible. What remains perhaps is an easy way to connect all these services, so users with minimal amount of programming knowledge can custom-tie apps together, to serve their own productivity.

I have been doing the blog for so long I couldn’t remember If I’ve ever done a post on RocketDock. I had a feeling that I didn’t, but I haven’t even mentioned it, oh the horror of it all! If you haven’t heard of it, RocketDock puts a little Mac-like dock on your Windows desktop and enables you to extensively customize everything from visuals to icons, to size and hover behavior and so on.

I actually had quite a problem naming this post, since it could easily have been “put folder contents on the desktop productively and stylishly” because I’m going to show you a way to use OS-X style stacks with RocketDock that makes navigating some folder’s files very easy.

I have a drafts folder for example where my drafts reside, but the contents change daily, and any single file will be gone in a maximum of 2-3 days. I needed to put the folder contents on the dock, not just the files, so I had a look at the addons page and found the Stacks Docklet, which I will be using to show you a great way to get to your files.

Once you download the zip file, extract it, and put the whole extracted folder in the “Docklets” directory in the RocketDock folder. Right click on the actual dock and go to add item and stack docklet. You will see a downward pointing arrow appear and all you need to do is right click and choose icon settings. You can specify which folder to use, and even which icon. You can also choose between the normal stack mode, like in OS X, and also a grid mode, which uses a box to show your item.

Let me give you one more productivity tip for RocketDock. Here is a screenshot of my desktop, and you will see that in my actual configuration, the icons are very small. The reason is that I keep them on top all the time, and even with a window running they are not in the way. Take a look at this Firefox screenshot and you’ll see what I mean. I am also using MyColors with one of the free themes, and IconPackager for my cursor scheme. This lets you access all the icons and files in your dock all the time, without having to minimize stuff, saving you a lot of navigation time.

“If you want to help out Hack Your Day and you’re looking for a hosting solution please choose Bluehost and sign up using this affiliate link. I can personally vouch for this company, apart from offering the best services - unlimited bandwidth for example - they have the best customer care ever. If you need a management solution please also consider Nozbe a great GTD based application.”

I’m an avid believer in the saying that “too much of anything can be bad”. I probably just made that up, but it’s true nevertheless. I have found though in my own experience that over-organizing may be a suitable action plan for some people.

The organizational curve

I think the against arguments are fairly obvious. Organization works like economies of scale. Up to a point the more you do, the exponentially more you benefit. After a while you benefit more, but the gradient is not as steep as it was (economically speaking, the marginal worth of your extra organizational input is declining). After a critical point, more organization brings you less benefit. So the moral of the story is, that by organizing yourself a whole lot takes away precious time you could spend actually doing something.

External factors

What the above model doesn’t, and can’t generally take into account is the fact that there are loads of other inputs in the equation. Your mood, your feelings, the weather, the music you’re listening to, everything. Generally I found that over organization helps people who tend to be disorganized not because they don’t know how to be organized, its just that they loose interest and/or, don’t like to keep to-do lists refreshed and ready for action.

I’m typically one of these people. While I have awesome thoughts about management and organization, I rarely take my own advice because I find that I hate doing regular stuff. Well, I found my answer in doing something even more regular strangely enough. I am now doing gross over organization of my work.

For example, I do a lot of blog writing, both for myself and others. I also do articles, ebooks, the occasional rewrite and so on. From the beginning of May every single piece I release is filed away. It is formatted in word to a specific format, same scheme, same everything. They all contain links to the published version if any, and all files are categorized, titled, tagged with Vista’s interface. In addition I am also entering all the details into a database, which contains a load of info about each item.

Why this works

On the surface it may seem like I am a tardy person because of this, and on the surface, I have to say this is true. The driving force behind this though is that I feel I am organized only if every single detail of everything is organized, not just my to-do list. What I have created is the total and complete organization of my blog life, which takes up about 80% of my time, so at least this part is now under control. This “sitting on top of the mound” feeling helps me continue organizing and working happily.

In addition, I have a very up-to-date database of everything I have done, and it fills me with joy to see that I’ve written 20 published blog entries in 5 days. I can also see how much this will pay off in terms of hard currency, which is of course another impetus.

In the end I am organizing way too much. This extra effort tones down my short term productivity, but in the mid to long run, I am definitely doing better. I hesitate to suggest this to everyone, but if you’re struggling to stay on top, why not give it a try?

Apart from blogging I actually used to do (and am starting again) to do a fair bit of freelance writing. There a lot of things you can do for yourself that enables you to work better, get better work and to organize yourself better. Let me share some tips I’ve accumulated to make your job easier.

Find work

I used to rely solely on one site to get work and that is Elance. Since then I am doing a lot of guest blogging, which I attained through relations with other bloggers, but even if you’re new to blogging you could apply, many blogs are searching for good writers. If you do want to become a guest writer I really suggest not pushing the envelope. If you’re an all round nice guy and offer to write a guest post or two for them (without mentioning employment or money) they will probably take you on anyway if they need the writers and you do a good job. I suggest being polite friendly and sincerely helpful.

Elance is a great site for finding many types of work, not just writing. There are web design projects, administrative projects, legal work and a whole lot more. Application is simple, although you will have to pay for a subscription later on. The basic one for writing is around $9 and I can vouch for this site, they are not ripping you off. In addition to the $9 you will have to pay a fee which is based on your earnings, so that’s “just” a deduction. Anyways, it’s a great site, if you’re thinking of signing up and giving it a try, I would be grateful if you could send me your email address and I could refer you, it would mean $50 for me after each $1000 you earn (or spend on someone else’s services).

Organization will be a key feature for finding good work on elance, since with a solid and well managed portfolio you are much more likely to find work than someone who has a messed up one, or none at all.

Organization and productivity

I have about 4-5 projects running simultaneously and I could manage it without organization, but I have a few good reasons to spend the extra time. I use a database to follow my projects right down to the actual stuff I write. My database goes along with folders which contain all the articles, blog posts, e-books I have ever written. This allows me to quickly find anything for a past client, or to construct the best possible portfolio for prospective clients to view.

The work database contains tables for projects, clients and so on, but I also have a table named “items”, which contains all the detail for each project. A typical entry (say a blog post I wrote for someone) )will contain the ID of the item, the project it belongs to, the date it was written, the date it was published, an attachment that leads to an Office document of the text in question and a hyperlink which leads to the post itself. If you’re just using an Excel sheet that’s fine too, in this case you might want to add the client name and email too, in my database this is in a separate table.

My folder structure contains folders named after projects (not clients). I have many repeating projects (like guest blogging), in this case I advise sub folders with month names. In my database the project entry for my gHacks guest blogging is “gHacks blog posts May” for example and the folder structure is “gHacks” -> “May”. I then create doc files for all the separate posts. Nothing fancy, they just contain the title, the body of the post and the URL. This is helpful for me because I can search through the whole body of my life’s work very easily, but I can also send any one of them to clients, and they can also navigate to the post itself.

I manage these files using Vista because it gives me the advantage of tagging and categorizing doc files. I usually use the following categories: “Project name”, “Type of text”, “Project type”. For gHacks posts this would translate into: “gHacks”, “blog post”, “work”. I distinguish between blog posts for my own sites, which are not work, they are categorized as “blog”. This ads a level of complexity to it, but I want to be able to separate work which other people pay me for, since an error there means a dent in my reputation.

I use tags to describe the contents of individual posts, but I need to explain my method a bit further. I use two levels of depth here. For posts which are similar to the content found on Hack Your Day my level of tagging is much deeper. I would tag with “Remember the Milk” and “Tomboy” for example. I am writing a few posts on auto parts right now, but that is outside my normal writing field, so I just label all of them as “automotive”. My reason for this is that I want to use tags mainly to build custom portfolios. So if I see a job that pays $10.000 for auto articles I just zip those up and send. For productivity and geek oriented posts I do want to sort sometimes to find stuff by tag, so I need the extra level of detail.

Creating an image

A good tip for freelancers is to create an image. Create a color scheme, a specific design that becomes your staple, something that can be found anywhere in your work. It doesn’t matter if you can’t design a logo, or have no Photoshop skills at all, this can be as simple as using the same font regularly, always using green as the title and always underlining the last paragraph so it can be followed by a resource box. The point here is to create something by which you and your work can easily e recognized.

This comes in handy because it both looks good, and once people will get to know you, they will associate you with your style. People might not remember your name, but they might remember the awesome writer they once worked with with the green color scheme.

Here are a few things you can work on that could all be customized to the same look:

• Email design (headers, footers)
• Returned article/assignment formating
• A creative tagline
• Company logo
• Website for yourself
• Profiles on other sites
• Business card (vCard too)

Remember to customize many things which are not assignment or task specific. The reason is that many clients prefer a specific format which will most likely not allow for your customizations.

Manners and work moral

Always, always, always be nice. This is a universal rule, and I don’t just mean this when you start earning $100 a month and you rely on people to give you work. Being nice will pay off hugely in the long run, and you will get a lot of unexpected job offers or job prospects in the future.

I have had countless cases where I did a good job and the same client offered me other stuff too. If my quality is good but I’m a horrible person, this wouldn’t really happen. Also, try not to assume the worst, if a person doesn’t send an email response to you for a week, he may be sick, or have other things on his mind, just be patient.

Productivity as a freelancer

Overall, the moral of the story is that in my opinion there are four factors that go into being a good and successful freelancer. Number one is quality, which rules all. I also mean punctuality and other traits which add to the quality of specific jobs. Number two is manners, and disposition, which can get you more work than you think, and can get you out of pretty bad situations too. Number three is organization and management which will make your life much easier and help you create your portfolio and stay on top of things. Number four is image which is not a requirement for people who want to earn a few bucks on the side, but if you want to boost your income, it’s an easy and smart thing to try. Good luck freelancing!

I am not a huge fan of clipping tools, there do seem to be a lot these days, but I found ClipClip worth the mention since it is so simple and for scrapping purposes it is effective.

The idea behind clipping tools is pretty simple, you can highlight a section on the web, pics and all, click the ClipClip bookmarklet and your clipping will be saved in your online ClipClip scrapbook.

You can use this tool quite productively if you are researching for a present, or for something else because you can clip pics, text and then later mix them up to form ideas. This is not the way I perform best, but scrapbookers will love the idea and using really is as simple as a few clicks.

When people start out with GTD I think they get overwhelmed because they’re expected to go from no, or unproductive organization to writing  everything down, categorizing and dealing with stuff. A method I read about on Stuff for Getting Things Done is very much like what I first did when GTD hit me.

The point of doing a mind sweep is to let everything transfer itself from your head, down onto paper, or on to the screen. On one hand, this will let you organize the most data you have, so you can create your GTD system fully, but on the other hand it also gives you clarity of thought and a warm fuzzy feeling that you’re not going to forget anything, since it’s down on paper.

I would actually recommend doing a mind sweep every now and again, say monthly, it would be the equivalent of reaching into the corners of the room when cleaning. You do take down your thoughts regularly, just as you also clean, but now and again it may prove effective to reach into the corners of your mind to get at those hidden thoughts.