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I am a small business Conversation Consultant and public speaker that uses the power of the internet to leverage your success. Productivity in Context is a web magazine focused on Productivity and tools for organizing. Make this your headquarters for improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

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Please contact me via e-mail: stephen @ hdbizblog dot com

Dave Crenshaw has a post on a subject that is near and dear to my heart:

Over a year ago I was working with a business owner who was in severe time debt. He was working in the ballpark of 90 to 100 hours per week, and both his business and family were suffering. We started by calculating his per-hour worth. When doing his most profitable activities, he was worth $500 an hour or more. Yet we found that he was spending approximately half of his time, 45 hours or more per week, performing $25/hour, $10/hr, and even minimum wage type work! Why? A huge factor was that he was surrounded by Time Liabilities.

At one point during our training he needed to punch holes in some paper for a three ring binder. Yet when he went to punch the paper, his paper puncher clearly wasn’t up for the job. He had bought a cheap model that had was basically broken after a month of use. I watched as this business owner kept turning his stack of papers around twice to punch. Most often he kept misaligning the punch and ruining the stack.

This poor fellow was spending lot of time on everything but that “vital 20%” of effort that brings in the 80% of the results (your mileage may vary, I just like the simplicity of the 80/20 “rule”). Do you ever catch yourself doing things like that, at home or at work?

Are your own practices holding you back?

Take a few minutes today to think about your workflow, what your nominal schedule will be when you start working on Monday morning. If you get to the office and you are not looking at a streamlined and productivity-optimized workspace, then get ready to make a change.

Monday’s post will give a step-by-step description of how to get your “stuff” organized, with pictures! Don’t miss it - Subscribe to the feed, get the next post in an e-mail.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/4nd4cd. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

I was recently contacted by the the OnePlace Chaos Management System, created by former High Jump Software CTO, and current Riverock Technologies CEO, Steve Kickert. They have a 30-day free trial going for using the OnePlace system, so I thought I would give it a shot and perhaps review it for you all.

Recently reviewed by web consultant Steve Borsch in MinnPost, this ground-breaking online project management software combines team collaboration, information sharing and management features in its goal to eliminate the chaos felt in all aspects of a team’s business life.

Here is a snippet from Borsch’s post:

What did I like about OnePlace?

It’s easy to use, and within 15 minutes, I’d used most of the key features that enabled project/task management; time tracking; reporting; calendar; discussions; file sharing; notes; lists and more.

I loved the iPhone interface. Connecting what we do on our desktop computers or laptops to Internet/web server functionality “in the cloud,” isn’t enough when we carry around devices like an iPhone (or the rumored touch tablet) and other small devices growing in penetration.

Let me remind you, OnePlace is not a sponsor, nor do I receive any compensation for posting this. I signed up on Saturday and decided to share this with you. If any of you would like to give it a try as well, please click on info.oneplacehome.com/projectmanagement.

On the other hand, (in the interest of full disclosure) Wrike.com is a sponsor, and I have also signed up for the new Enterprise version, which I will be reviewing in the next week or so. I do like the Wrike system very much, and wrote a review of the original platform here [link].

Highlights

The unlimited users feature is definitely one of Wrike’s strongest. As a person who does not have a lot of group-interactive work to manage (UPDATE: Hoo boy, I do now!), I tend to have more of the one-off projects that require a short period of collaboration between users in different parts of the world. You can create a Project (Group) and a task by email.

I also like the automatic updates and the feature of uploading and attaching a document as part of a task. Each time this document is downloaded and changed, the user can upload the new version and a record is created that retains each successive version. Each Group can have all of the data needed for the project’s completion right at hand, whether it is a text file, a spreadsheet, or even images.

Feel free to come back and share your thoughts and comments!

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/3q3qfx. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Darren Hardy has an excellent article at successmagazine.com (SUCCESS — What Achievers Read.) that brings together many of the tips that you may have seen scattered all over the interwebs.

Of all the resources in the world, what are the most crucial for gaining efficiency, productivity and achievement? Now there are a lot of intangible answers—pertaining to attitude, philosophy, character, belief, faith, expectation, strategies, techniques, ideas, skills, behaviors—and we will reveal these over the many issues of SUCCESS. The objective of this article, however, is to identify the essential tools, technologies and resources to support your greater success.

1. List of Goals. The first step toward achieving your dreams and ambitions is to identify them. Hopes and dreams remain fantasies until you write them down and create a plan for achieving them.

2. Nutrition and Well-Being Plan. YOU are the most important person in your life, and your good health is your most important priority. People often list other priorities such as spouses, children, employees, customers, etc., above themselves and their health. If you are sick, or worse, dead, how good are you going to be to your spouse, children or customers? Take care of yourself first, so you can properly take care of everyone and everything that is most important to you.

Read the whole thing!

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6k8ufr. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Michael and Jason from Black Belt Productivity have asked a few productivity writers to weigh in on a comment that was posted at BBP a short while back. The commenter was looking for advice on how to measure the effectiveness of a productivity program:

Hi! My name is Mayra. I work as a Black Belt in a Mexican company. I want to know the best way to measure the performance of a BB. I mean, Which metrics are the most appropriate way to prove that a BB is reaching his/her objectives in the company (# of projects, savings, etc)? Thanks for your help!

The short answer is “all of them”.

The long answer is, measure everything. Then select those tasks and activities that promote your objectives and track them for improvement. The next question is how to do this in the framework of your Getting Things Done practice, since GTD does not have a specific process for measuring productivity improvement.

The good news is that GTD does include a mechanism for creating your own measurement tools.

Adaptive Productivity Management

The beauty of the GTD system, for me and many others, is that it is remarkably flexible in its application. Digital or analog, PDA or Moleskine, there are nearly as many methods of executing the GTD practice as there are practitioners!

The core principles that make the GTD method so effective are the Workflow Process and the Weekly Review. With these two tools you can get a grip on your inputs and outflow, and track your progress from beginning to end. The specific methods of implementing these tools are up to you, from a master to-do list all the way up to the design of your workspace.

Lets do a quick review of these fundamental principles and see how they can be used as a device for measuring one’s productivity.

Collect

Process

Organize

Review

Do

These 5 steps in the GTD workflow, when iterated regularly, are enough to improve your personal productivity and help you accomplish the things that need to get done.

In order to measure the results of your program and the success of its implementation, you will need to create your own, personal process map.

My workflow diagram looks something like this:

Select Something to Measure

Thus, when it comes to measuring any part of your workflow, there is a built-in template for picking a component and recording your progress. Select any one of your activities, e-mail management for example, and record how much time you spend on that activity. Alternatively, you can create a time log and record how you spend your workday on all of your activities.

The important thing is to keep this measurement in context. Without a starting point, you cannot measure anything. And if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. [*note*] This initial piece of information will be your baseline with which you will compare to measurements you make in the future. The time to compare these two sets of measurements is the Weekly Review.

Before and After

The differences, if any, in the two measurements is a quantitative expression of how productivity has improved. For example, say that our sample employee spends one hour every morning responding to e-mail before starting with their other tasks (measured before implementing the GTD process). At the end of the first week, they can measure again and record any improvement. This process can happen every week for a month, at which point a trend should have appeared. For the sake of our example let’s say that learning to deal with e-mail in a productive manner has reduced this initial e-mail processing time to 30 minutes daily.

This quantitative measure of time saved can be expressed in units of time, wages, or even increased billable hours spent on other work.

There is also a qualitative measure of productivity improvement, which I consider to be even more important. The ability to get your work done and go live your life should be the driving force behind all of your productivity practices.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5e94x4. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen