Getting things Done

Are you stressed out? Do you have a lot of things on your mind at the moment? You might want to take just a couple of minutes to read this - it might help you out.

I'm a big fan of David Allen's Getting Things Done book, and have adopted many of his techniques to increase my personal organisation, efficiency and productivity. If you're stressed out at the moment from all the 'stuff' you need to deal with, I can really recommend taking a little bit of time out to read it.

A key concept in his Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology is coralling your 'stuff' into one big pile before sitting down to process your way through it all. This includes all the 'stuff' in your head - every little 'to-do' in your head, even if it's just remembering to buy milk on the way home tonight. If you've never tried it, I can't recommend it enough. It's an amazingly relaxing experience to have all of that stuff out of your head.

David Allen recommends that you write down each of these thoughts on a piece of paper and put it into your giant intray. This is a great idea, but has two flaws. One is that it is environmentally pretty unfriendly, and the second is that it's not exactly portable. The only time you'll be able to process your way through it is at your desk. Then I very recently discovered ThinkingRock which addresses both of these problems beautifully. ThinkingRock is a small Java based application created by Jeremy Moore and Claire Lemarechal that you can run on your desktop, laptop, or from a USB stick, and take a virtual intray with you. It's an excellent way to implement GTD, and best of all it's free.

Even if you think you don't have any time management issues, I'd really give this a go, both the book and the free software.

How to have the latest news about your clients delivered to you for free.

It's important to keep up with news about, or relevant to your clients, but who has time? Life is difficult enough without searching for this sort of thing on a regular basis. But what if you could get a newspaper that just contained news about your clients? And what if was free? Would that help you?

Here's a way that you can put together your own, free, personalised 'news aggregation' service, tailored just for you. You can set the whole thing up in less than half an hour, and it's Google we can thank for providing all the tools that we need.

1. Set yourself up with a Google Reader account. If you're familiar with using RSS feeds, then you can use whatever tool you want, but if you're not, this is a great place to start.

2. Browse your way over to Google News, and search for news about your clients or your market sector. On the 'results' page you'll see the words "RSS | Atom" feeds. Click on one of them (doesn't really matter which), and you'll be taken to a new page. Provided that you're logged in with your Google Reader account already, you'll see a button at the top of the page - "subscribe to this page". Go ahead and do it, then do another news search for a different client and repeat the process. Your Google Reader account will now contain all the feeds that you've set up so that you can catch up on all the latest news in one place.

You can also 'share' items that you find interesting on a public page. So you could even have someone in your company read through all the news everyday and flag up the interesting items to go onto the public page for everyone else to read.

Enjoy!

In a post coming soon, for the more technically advanced of you, I'll show you a way to filter these feeds and join them together using Yahoo Pipes so that you can be even more efficient.

By the way, you can subscribe to this blog as an RSS feed as well - just click on this link: http://www.bullfrey.com/blog/atom.xml

Do you still use handwritten notes?

Typing while talking to someone is socially awkward - and certainly not something I would consider doing during a client meeting. It's also not the greatest way to capture a mixture of notes, diagrams, arrows joining up thoughts and so on.

So what do most of us still end up doing? Use handwritten notes in a notebook. Are there any alternatives? Well there's always a tablet PC, but I don't see this as being that much better than typing on a laptop. It's still a little bit of a performance to pull it out and start notetaking.

I stumbled across this the other day, the Logitech io2 Digital Pen.

For those of you who like to keep things simple. It's basically just a pen. It works, well... just like a pen. But it captures your writing and doodles (up to forty pages worth), and you can synchronise it with your computer later, so that you can add the notes to client records etc. Much better than having to spend time searching back through your notebook for an important bit of information. Add to that handwriting recognition software and you're seriously in business.

For round about £90 quid on Amazon, you might consider it to be a very expensive pen, or perhaps a very reasonably priced way to keep yourself that little bit better organised in 2007...

As with everthing in life, there is a catch however - the pen only works with special paper. But the paper is fortunately reasonably priced and comes in a variety of familiar formats, including "Black 'n Red" notebooks.

Managing Email

If your business has less than fifty employees, or if it's just you on your own, what's the best way to manage your email?

Well, I very recently reviewed all the possibilities as I was working out how to deal with the email for Bullfrey.com, and I thought you might find some of that research useful.

I wanted a system that would meet the following requirements:

Be available offline so that I could review old email and write new ones when I wasn't able to access the Internet.

Be available online through a web browser so that I could access it from any computer anywhere - and not just current unread email, all of my old email as well.

Be accessible via a mobile device.

Be very good at filtering out spam.

Not cost the earth.

The options that I considered were:

Download all my email from a POP3 server that also has web mail capability. This is what I used initially, but of course as soon as you download an email, it's no longer available online. Workable, but not too great.

Host your own email server with MS Exchange. Well, first of all you have to buy a copy of MS exchange (££), and more importantly, you need a computer that is always switched on, has a very reliable Internet connection, and have a backup strategy. A whole lot of money, and a whole lot of work. Not very appealing.

Host your own email server with Open Source technologies. As above, but no software license costs. Still a huge pain in the butt though.

Use a hosted MS Exchange Service. All the advantage of an Exchange server for a reasonable monthly fee. I was seriously considering this, until my friend Camille told me about:

Google Apps for domains.

You can set it up to receive all the email to your domain, and you can have anything up to 50 user accounts with different addresses. Each account has 2 GB of storage, and you can download it with POP3 for offline access. Anything that you send from Outlook is also stored online.

It took a little while to adjust to the user interface online, but once I did - wow. I love it. I rarely use my desktop email client anymore. I don't get any spam. It just works and I don't have to think about it. I still download all of my email, so that I have a copy of it should anything go wrong with the service, and I can switch back to my old system using POP3 within minutes if I really need to in case their system collapses (which is unlikely - something tells me that their infrastructure is probably more robust that mine!).

I also love the online calendar, which allows me to bring in other people's calenders and show them on mine, and also publish selected calendars (e.g. course dates) publicly if I want to.

How much does it cost? Well at the moment it costs nothing, which is pretty good value.