I think resolutions are probably a good idea for the most part (lose weight, exercise more, smoke less/no more crack) but, psychologically, they just don’t work. Still, it’s never a bad thing to think about how you want to change your life. Since I’m neck-deep in technology and since my personal life is immaculate (chuckle), I figured this might be a good time to think about how I’d like to change how I use technology in my own life.

I’m done selling tangible objects on Craigslist, I’m done using eBay, and I’m through with PayPal

Between PayPal’s ridiculous user agreement and business practices and all the unscrupulous people out there, I’ve been ripped off 3 times in the last year. In the end, the money lost has not been crippling by any means (probably about $300) but it has been frustrating and makes me think less of the human race in general.

Selling things on-line is tricky. My advice to anyone using eBay or Craigslist is to cover your butt completely. If you use PayPal (I wouldn’t recommend it), make sure you completely understand the user agreement and you don’t leave your money in there for longer than a few days if you can help it. If you ship anything, get a tracking number always (that should be obvious but I guess I needed to learn my lesson the hard way). All my advice comes down to not leaving yourself open to anything. I hate to say it but assume that everyone you’re dealing with is trying to rip you off. That way, when you think “I’m sure this guy will send my stuff back, I’ll just reverse the payment” you’ll immediately laugh and ignore phone calls and emails until you get your stuff back *cough*.

My first step towards avoiding any future screwings is to cancel my PayPal account for good. These guys make so much money for doing next to nothing and involve themselves in transactions when they aren’t needed. In an attempt to appear to protect buyers and sellers, they move money around, take money away, and will sick collection agencies on you before you know it. PayPal sucks and I won’t use them ever again:

eBay too:

I’m going to finish targeting/optimizing my website, clean up all the static content, and style all pages

It’s a bit sad that me, a person who helps other people build their on-line presence, has an un-optimized, incomplete, unsatisfying website. I still haven’t picked and optimized for keywords that I use, there are a few pages (like the search results and my 404 page) that aren’t styled, and I change my mind about the page content on a weekly basis.

Just like the lawyer who gets a DUI or the personal organizer with the messy car, I just don’t make time for my own projects because, well, no one is paying me for them. The problem comes when I miss out on work because someone doesn’t want to hire a web designer with an unfinished web presence. As such, here is my to-do list:

• The Portfolio page is going to be changed into more of a client presentation than a list of things I’ve done. It makes more sense to concentrate on the client, their needs, and how I helped them than on the individual projects I’ve completed. I see myself as much more of a consultant and an on-going resource than just a guy who builds sites and emails and then moves on.
• The Resume page needs to be updated and new testimonials need to be added. I’m putting together a list of questions that I will be sending to current and past clients about their experience with me and how they liked the outcome.
• The Hire Me page is going to be more of a list of products/services that I offer rather than a meandering list of stuff I can do. I want to offer 5-8 different products, each with its own base price (website from scratch, SEO analysis, page content re-tooling, full web presence package). I think this will go a long way towards showing people what I can do and what they might be missing.
• I need to pick out keywords and write for them, period. I made a few small changes and watched my traffic from search engines grow by about a third. Each post should be optimized and targeted or I’m just wasting my time.

I’m going to use Adobe Illustrator for design and layout more often than Photoshop

Unless you’ve used both programs, you might not understand the benefit of one or the other. I’ve been using them for almost a year now and, while I understand, for the most part, the benefits of one over the other in various realms, it just never occurred to me to use Illustrator for web design and layout.

The main and most obvious difference between these two programs is that one works in vector artwork (infinitely scalable and very flexible) – Illustrator – and one works in pixel artwork (only one true size but displayable anywhere) – Photoshop. When possible, you always want your artwork or logo or layout in a vector format and exported to pixel format (like a JPEG) for use on the web.

I’ve always assumed that since the web is displayed in pixels that you should probably design in a pixel program. What didn’t occur to me is that creating everything in Photoshop really limits you in terms of future changes and expansions. Since you can’t really “finalize” anything in Illustrator (make into pixels which can’t, for all intents and purposes, be changed), your designs are much easier to change and adapt later on when minds are changed or goals are modified.

On top of the many benefits of using AI to do layout, it’s also going to force me to use it more and get better at it. I like using Illustrator but I’m not very good at it and I want to get better. Practice makes perfect!

Who cares?

Search engines are complicated, proprietary, heartless machines that chew up poor, unsuspecting websites and spit out a category based on what it tastes like. These categories are used to literally rank a site’s individual pages based on their relevancy for particular word or phrase. The rank, as it is referred to, is the key to getting more people coming to your website (called traffic) which can lead to more sales/appointments/contacts (called conversions).

Unless you don’t actually care if anyone goes to your website, you should be concerned with how findable you are on-line. Studies show that unless you’re on the first or second page (mostly just the first), you won’t get clicked on very often, your page will get minimal exposure, and your time and effort creating the site in the first place will be for naught.

Your rank in a particular search engine for a particular word or phrase is, simply, a combination of the following (more or less in this order):

1. How many other sites point to you as a reference, particularly for that word (known as incoming links)
2. How regularly that word is used on your page and where it appears (page titles, meta information, content)
3. How “good” your site is (lots of focused content, continual updates, age of site)

If you want people to see the information you have, if you want to turn web browsers into customers, and if you want to take advantage of the biggest marketplace of potential customers, you’ll give more than a second thought to how you are seen by a search engine.

Why is SEO important?

Consider what it would be like if no one could easily find your place of business, or even your telephone number. Most businesses could not continue for long in such a situation. The same thing can happen with your web site if people cannot easily locate it. Traffic volume, if it existed at all, slows to a crawl. Potentially valuable customers never even know you are there.

Key word strategy & generation

I’ll start off by saying that this is the single most important thing that needs to be done for a site… and, of course, it’s the hardest thing to do, the easiest to get wrong, and the most lengthy process. There is a lot of information available online about keyword strategy so this description will be brief.

Keywords are the words for which people are searching. Keywords for your own website are the words that people are searching to reach your website. Picking the right keywords is partially an exercise in putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and partially in avoiding words that are too common. Putting yourself in your customers’ shoes means that you’re thinking about words that your customers would use to find you. Avoiding common words means that you’re not competing directly in search results with sites that have a very strong presence and might be in a totally different industry.

Here are three simple steps towards picking keywords that can work for you.

1. Choose words that you think people might be using to find your site. Come up with about 20. These are probably not the words you’re going to use.
2. Go to google.com/keywords, type in your words, allow synonyms, and search. You should have a list of potentially hundreds of different words.
3. Pick about 5-8 words that have low-ish advertiser competition (under half), a good amount of searches but not too many (different for every situation but I usually pick words that are under 10K monthly searches), and a flat or upward trend (current month is higher or the same as the average).

These keywords should be used as-is throughout the site, it’s structure, image descriptions, and the text content.

Each step comes with it’s own set of complexities but, if you’ve walked through these steps, even if you’re confused by the end of it, you’re a step ahead of many, many people on the web.

Building a functional keyword strategy is not something you just do once. Seach engine optimization is something you need to do on a regular basis. I see it as a scientific process. You start with an idea, a hypothesis (”my clients will find me by searching ‘eye care’ and ‘cataract correction’”). Then you design an experiment to test your original hypothesis (”We’re going to write a few pages of content, each one concentrating on a different part of the keywords we chose”). Data is gathered and analyzed and a new path is chosen (”Our traffic went up 30% with these keywords… are we getting all the benefit that we can?”). Time and culture will change search patterns so what used to be a golden word for you, may become stale and unpopular. Keep checking those analytics reports!

Need help?

If you’re looking to increase traffic on your business website and need some help with all of this, give me a call (contact info on the top left of this site), I’d be glad to help. SEO techniques are important and confusing and it helps to have someone there to guide your efforts.

Yeah, seriously.

What brought this up

I’ve been doing, inadvertently, a lot of thinking and reading about search engine optimization (SEO) lately. For the company I’m contracted with, we’re trying to come up with a solid strategy to rank better in our industry, get more online attention, and attract sales leads. For a couple of my clients, I’m trying to implement some simple changes and add information to get them as visible as possible. For my blog, I’m always looking for ways to help my ranking.

Working for other people and helping them build an online presence is a whole hell of a lot easier than doing one for myself. I can help someone easily summarize what they do, help them pick keywords, and put them all in the right places. For myself, however, when trying to pick a niche, I find myself in these very existential moods. I’m picking 8 words or phrases too some up everything I can do for people. Wait, I have to sum up my professional interests in 8 words?! How?

Keywords… those effing keywords

The problem isn’t finding things to write, thinking of relevant tweets, titling my blog posts, filtering what I want to write about versus what I should write about, the problem is picking keywords.

To rank well in a search engine, you have to write content targeted at a certain audience of people. Think about who you want to sell to and get to work, right? Wrong.

First, you have to summarize the things that people are going to search to find you. In other words, what headings do you want to be found under? This isn’t too hard, I did it and came up with 50 things. We already have a problem.

Now, put those things in a keyword generator like Google’s and see what else comes up. Not only will you add 50 more words that never occurred to you in the first place, you’ll find that the words that were the most interesting to you are the hardest words to rank for. Not only that, once you start picking words that you have a chance in hell of ranking with, you find yourself limited and a bit off-center from what you actually do or want to do.

I want to do it all and I want to do it from right here

So what do you do? No really.

I do a lot of different things... some of them don't even involve a computer

Searching for keywords for something as important and, dare I say, intimate as your freelance work (or writing or anything) puts you in this terrible position between passion and pragmatism. I want to write about art and science and the internet and web design and email and writing. I also, however, want my writing to help me reach people that need what I have to offer.

Part of my problem, in a business sense, is that I don’t have a well-formed “elevator pitch” for what I do. The value proposition (I hate that phrase but it’s relevant), the text at the top of this pitch, is about as close as I get. I help people build a web presence for their business or their own personal endeavors. That’s cool, sums it all up, right?

But I also help people with writing projects, advertisement design, document layout, and self publishing. I alter photos, help people write resumes, layout print ads, teach HTML and CSS, customize email templates. I teach people about social media (what little I know), explain technology concepts to friends and family, and fix computers. I set up printers, cure slow-running computers, and answer questions. I do it all, Josh Can Help, dammit.

Good for you. Now prioritize

That’s the key, prioritization.

First, I’m going to need to think about the work that I want. The most important reason I have a website/blog is to build a reputation, display my work, and get more clients. If I was guaranteed not to get any clients or feedback from my website, it would look worse, be updated far less often, include a lot more boring personal junk, and have less people who read it. Already, I’m making a pragmatic choice by centering it around my professional life.

I want to work with people to build or repair their website. I want to help them make it as visible as possible to all the major search engines. I want to show them what else is out there that can build a more robust presence (social networks and media, blogs to read, online resources that are valuable). I want to explore advanced web development stuff like PHP development and Javascript coding on my own time, implementing interesting functionality for people who never thought they could have one of “those websites.”

The people I want to help are small businesses and individuals. I love helping people in the art world because it keeps the right half of my brain active. I also, however, really want to get into the industry that I’m going to school for, chemistry. I want to help small technology companies do great things with the web and reach more people. I would love to work for a green technology company, either as an employee or a consultant.

Endgame

Off into the sunset...

In the end, I want all of this to lead to something amazing, something massively fulfilling, something that I can be proud of. I want to look back at a long list of people and companies and know that I did something great for them. I want to write a book, I want to help people do what they want to do, I want to make things easier for people, I want to work on a broad spectrum of things for a broad spectrum of people.

I want to bring people together, help them work better on things they are passionate about. I want to help people concentrate on what they’re doing because they want so bad for it to work. I want my name on something. I want to be accountable for something.

I want to work with a team of people that can’t be stopped. I want to work long, long hours, not because I’m forced to do so but because I can’t help myself. I want to collapse into bed with a smile on my face, mind racing, a million more things to do tomorrow.

I want to help you because I can help and I want to help. What’s the keyword for that?

The folks over at Young Entrepreneur’s blog (YEB)have been kind enough to review the structure of my blog in exchange for a review and link to their blog. Happy to oblige!This is a blog I subscribe to and read on a regular basis because of their solid content.

Why I read this blog

I started reading YEB because I am young (ish?) and an entrepreneur, for the  most part. I figured, hey, this thing must be written for me.

From what I’m read, I’m guessing that the staff don’t have a long history of starting and raising successful companies. I don’t say this because the advice is bad, I say it because it had more of a “hey, let’s get together and figure this out” feeling rather than a “I’ve done this and this is what works for me” feeling. Nothing wrong with that at all, it’s a great way to build community.

After a while, I really wanted to read about people who had really made it and how it all came together for them. Coincidentally enough, YEB started interviewing experts more and posting words from famous business starters from all different industries. Perfect!

I read the blog for the interviews and the Entrepreneur University section, for the most part. They include write-ups about other things but the unique content they provide me are the sound bytes.

Thanks YEB! Keep it going!

Tools and resources for entrepreneurs and business minded individuals who are growing their business at the Young Entrepreneur’s Blog!

why, it’s my Amazon Affiliates widget!

Introduction

There are two companies online that I like a lot (love?) and will always patronize (as long as they stick to their formula); Amazon.com and Newegg.com. Put simply, the prices are great, I’ve never had an issue, what I order shows up fast, and, when I need it, the customer service is great (Newegg’s service is off-the-charts great). As such, I also give them respect on here and by word-of-mouth.

Someone clued me into the whole Amazon Affiliates program where you advertise books you like from Amazon on your site. Since I wanted SOME kind of monetization and I like to show my support for things I really like, it seemed like the perfect combination. I think, however, it requires a bit of explanation so you don’t think that those are just random books. I actually picked them out and read them myself and now I think you should do the same.

I’m a newbie so what’s in it for me?

So, let’s say you’re a bit web savvy and let’s say you’ve got a lot to say so let’s say you start yourself a little blog. You start off slowly, write a few posts, get some momentum and now you want to see what you can do about raking in the dough.You get to researching blog advertisements and, BAM, too much information.

I don’t think you can go wrong with the Amazon widget, to be honest. Pick books that match your content, pick books you support and why wouldn’t people click on the links? I think it’s honest, it’s up-front, you can support something you agree with, and their widgets look great.

I’ll report back when I’ve retired off of the revenue and tell you how to do the same.

So what’s so great about those books?

In the spirit of being honest, I thought I might put a little review on here of each to prove that I ACTUALLY own these books and ACTUALLY read them (well, you don’t so much read a CSS guide or an Illustrator book.. I did read the XHTML one though). Here’s why I like them (I’m posting these on Amazon as well)…

The Elements of Style (Illustrated) by Strunk, White, and Kalman

I wish I could remember who originally recommended the original Strunk & White Elements of Style to me. If I could remember, I would find them and hug them unabashedly.

If you’re writing ANYTHING and care AT ALL about how it turns out then do yourself a favor and pick this one up. The organization is very strange (there isn’t any to speak of) and the writing style is very direct. The result is a no-nonsense book that teaches you to cut the crap out of your writing.

There are many, many valuable lessons contained in Strunk’s short and useful guide but the best ones, for me, are the ones regarding comma usage and his favorite command, “Omit needless words.” During everything I’ve ever written since reading this book I’ve heard a disembodied voice telling me to remove words. I’ve noticed while editing other people’s work that the piece can be improved dramatically by deleting all the words that say nothing.

It’s a quick read but a necessary one for anyone doing any kind of writing.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

As with “Elements…,” I’m not sure how I heard about this book. It was one of those odd series of events that ends with something in your mailbox. I read a few quick things about it online and suddenly decided that I must read the book. I’m glad I did because this was one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time.

Anne has a casual but polished writing style that you can’t help but to get lost in. She writes like a close friend speaks to you, eschewing ego and pretentiousness to deliver her simple, personal message. It started out a  bit slow but the stories she told were very entertaining. By the time I reached the middle of the book, I was totally hooked and found the last half hilarious and very informative.

This book is, in the end, a guide on how to be a writer, not a guide on how to write. What I mean by that is you won’t really develop your style or improve your sentence structure by reading this book. What you will do, however, is come to terms with a lot of the obstacles facing writers at every stage of their careers. Her humor and her honesty makes you feel really good about contributing, failing, hating yourself, and moving on.

Though I would definitely recommend this book to anyone writing their own book, I would recommend it even more to anyone living in this world and doing the best that they can. She talks a lot about failing and self-hatred and giving up and charging through. I found myself particularly centered after reading about her embarrassing reactions and consequent success over jealousy and writer’s block. I learned more about my life and myself than I did about writing. I don’t necessarily consider myself a writer but I explore my creativity in different ways and this book really speaks to all of them.

Pick this book up, read it, and feel better about just being yourself.

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout.

Finally, a book with a history I can share.

This book was given to me by my dad, the king of business books and the fastest, most prolific reader I know. This guy blows through almost 1,000 pages a month on top of all the magazines, newspapers, and online sources he devours. Though our reading tastes aren’t completely aligned, when he recommends a book, I typically read it (or at least add it to The List in earnest).

This is the kind of book I don’t read. Though I find the advertising industry slightly interesting, I mostly hate it and wish it would go away (despite having a hand in it). This book, however, really cuts through the crap and explains positioning and branding in a way I’ve never heard before. In terms of marketing and branding, I pretty much live by the concepts in this book. Oh, and it’s about 30 years old. That’s how good this book is.

The  book shows you what successful companies have done to become that way and what other successful companies have done to screw it all up. With tons of examples and a very straight-forward writing style, this book will explain why certain products win and why others fail.

I read this book quickly and moved onto others by the same authors. They really know their stuff.

The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon

This is the best book I’ve ever read and likely will ever read. Period.

I have suffered off and on from depression throughout my life and this book, the first and only book I’ve ever read on the subject, did so much for my understanding about the condition. I’ve really never read a book that explained what I think and feel better than this.

First off, Andrew Solomon is an excellent writer. He gets a bit verbose at times but I found each sentence, regardless of it’s complexity, an adventure in and of itself. He paints such an incredible picture of the feelings and thoughts that accompany depression. Like anyone able to describe depression, Andrew has been through it and reading what he’s suffered from made me realize how lucky I have been with my own depression. Andrew has seen hell, been through hell, and came out enlightened.

Strangely, I always find this book difficult to describe adequately. His words were just so well chosen and the research so personal and interesting, I feel like it’s a book that needs to be experienced to be understood fully.

If you suffer from depression, clinical or occasional or undiagnosed or anything, I completely recommend reading this book from cover to cover. If you know someone who suffers from this condition and are struggling to understand what they’re going through, this book will go a long way towards helping you see what they see. I’ve really never had a book that explained something as well as this.

The Non-Designers Design & Type Books by Robin Williams

I wanted to write a quick blurb about this little book that has gone a long way towards teaching me proper design.

I’ve been dabbling seriously in graphic design for about a year now and find it one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever done and also one of the most satisfying. It’s very subjective, hard to describe, very time consuming, very sensitive, and totally maddening. When it works, it really works but when it doesn’t work, it shows you the highest level of frustration possible.

Robin explains all the basics very well which puts you in a position to begin to experiment. If you just stick yourself in front of Photoshop and try to bang out a business card or a menu or a technical document (which you really wouldn’t do in Photoshop), it’s probably not going to work out well unless you’ve had some experience. If, however, you read this little guide and try it, you’re going to have a few more ideas and at least understand the contrainst you’re working with in terms of color, alignment, etc.

This book is great for people without any experience in design who want to improve the way their documents, webpages, application screens, and printed material looks. You’re not going to win any contests with this knowledge (and neither are her examples) but what you produce will immediately look better. The writing style is a bit goofy but I use what I learned every day in everything I produce from graffiti to webpages to technical documents to resumes.

CSS: The Definitive Guide by Eric Meyer

A solid plot, well-formed characters, and an intriguing writing style make this… wait, what?

This is a boring, very useful book. I’ve read a lot about CSS on the web and nothing came close to the  explanation in this book. Instead of saying things like “we won’t bother you with the complex way this is calculated,” Meyer bothers you with the complexity. Each property I read made me really understand how it works and how it should be used.

I’ve been reading this bad-boy from cover to cover and I think I’m doing myself a bit of a disservice. I think I’m going to skip to the positioning section (everyone could use a better understanding of this mysterious and magical world), read that, maybe read a few other things I’m interested in mastering and then leave it as a reference. It makes a lot more sense to read the properties you don’t understand than trying to get through it all.

Learn (x)HTML and CSS online, then buy this book is you’re serious about getting into web page design.

Visual Quickstart Guide to HTML, XHTML, & CSS by Elizabeth Castro

I think I bought this book a bit late in my web design learning process but I still find a lot of use out of it. I use it as my general reference book and I’m constantly in the appendix and the chapter about forms.

Though I would recommend this book to people because I found it useful, I think there might be better books on the subject. I say this because it does not go into the level of detail you really need to master HTML. It does a great job explaining what it does but there are quite a few things left out or breezed over to keep the book and appropriate size. Also, combining HTML and CSS in the same book is probably a bad idea. The CSS book I reviewed above is bigger than this book and, ostensibly, covers 1/3 of the material.

If you want to learn enough about HTML to get by creating simple web pages or fixing your own, this is a great book for you. If, however, you want to really understand HTML and get into web development, I would suggest finding a book with a bit more content (probably something from O’Reilly [publishers of the CSS book above]).

Introduction

I was listening to a BBC program the other day that was talking about whether grandparents raising their grandkids was a good thing or a bad thing. Some people called in to say, yes, it was good but also bad. Other people called in to say it was bad, but also good. In the end, it seemed like the show’s host, whether on directive or personally motivated, was looking for “the truth,” in the sense that she wanted an answer - the answer. This is the format of most discourse in modern-day media, it seems, because it simplifies the issue down to the proverbial black and white. Instead of looking for some perspective on things, the conversation, apparently, always needs to come to a conclusion.

Self Help by hagner_james on flickr

I see this mentality a lot when I read the prolific “self-help” & “personal-growth” genre of blogs. There are “keys to success,” “paths to financial freedom” and, my favorite, “rock-solid ways to improve productivity.” If you’re familiar with blogs, then you’ll know the format of a catchy title, a hooky intro, and subsequent headers that are action-packed and full of information (cough). Knowing this, it’s hard to be TOO critical of the content because, hey, people are reading it and subscribing to it and linking to it and people are getting paid and everything is great. Still, there is something a bit funny about someone who discovered their path to productivity on their own but then shares it as the gospel of getting things done.

So, I’m going to share with you how I work. This method would/will drive certain people nuts. This method is not foolproof but none of them are. It also doesn’t work for absolutely everything, but none of the other ones do either. I read a lot of the productivity posts out there, internalize the message, and typically end up rejecting a lot of it. My system is probably a hybrid of all the things I’ve read about “making work happen.” Still, I modified it to be my own and, while I’m always changing and improving, it’s working well for me (ask the friends and family I don’t talk to enough).

I’m new to all of this… how can this help?

It’s so easy to get caught up on the “self-help” cycle of reading other people’s insights constantly and going nowhere in your own life. It’s also easy to get down on yourself if you just CAN’T meditate for an hour in the morning with a warm cup of white tea and visualize your day coming together. Some people work one way, some work another, and many don’t work at all. I want to tell you what I do to manage the chaos, live in the chaos, and use the chaos to my advantage. Maybe you’ll learn something, maybe you won’t but hopefully, by the end of this, you’ll at least feel OK about having your OWN system (or no system).

1. I work on what I want to work on

I’m simply incapable of being motivated and productive when I work on projects that don’t have my full interest. I’m still trying to figure out if this is just a human thing or a particular limitation of mine. Regardless if the origin is DNA- or species-related, it is something that affects my professional life profoundly.

Part of having a job of any kind is taking the good with the bad. This is, thankfully, true for rockstars, artists, programmers, teachers, and everyone else. We all have those moments, some more than others. So what to do when you get tired of something?

Move right along. Do the next thing. Stop what you’re doing before you ruin it.

If I can’t write, I don’t write and I try something different like web coding or maybe a bit of design or just run-of-the-mill organization. If I’m not feeling mentally capable, I do something repetitive. If I’m feeling competent and smart, I try to tackle something high level. Unless it’s due, people are waiting, or something’s on fire, if I don’t want to contribute, I don’t.

2. I jump from project to project, sometimes mid-sentence

This might be the most destructive of my tendencies but so far so good.

Unfinished and forgotten by Zach_ManchesterUK on flickr

I’ve been writing an email to someone, lost the motivation to type and switched to something else immediately. I wasn’t interrupted, the connection wasn’t broken, I didn’t change my mind, I just decided not to continue emailing. I often save drafts with unfinished sentences, let alone paragraphs.

Sometimes your inspiration to complete a certain task only lasts so long. Maybe the first couple paragraphs are gold and the rest are, say, crap. Instead of just pushing through for the sake of doing so, I stop and move on to come back when the motivation re-arises.

Now, there are times when it pays to sit down, drill in, and concentrate on what you’re doing. There are many things that require a strong train of thought and benefit from moving from idea to idea within a framework. There are more things, however, that simply don’t need that kind of attention. Emails in any form, documents, web pages… many things just need you to complete mental modules and then you can move on.

Never underestimate solid concentration with no interruptions for long periods of time. Don’t be afraid, however, to take microbreaks and split your project into chunks. The drip drip drip can, in many cases, lead to a better output.

3. I keep close track of (almost) everything

I’m on top of my shit, that’s all there is to it.

I stay in close contact with people and I do what I say I’m going to do. I’m frequently used by other people as their system of organization because I keep things moving and can remember where things left off. I’m not great with uber-minutia and I can’t possibly admit to always being on time, remembering anything, and making no mistakes. What I don’t do, however, is drop the ball.

I keep my inbox empty or as close as possible. I don’t move anything to a long-term to do list unless it’s a personal project. Anything client-related is up-front and center because I put it there. Things shift in priority, no doubt, but I don’t stop doing things because I forgot about them/. They either lost everyone’s interest or died off.

This helps me keep very current with everything I’m doing and helps me to consciously lose track of things that don’t matter.

4. I stay very organized

I wouldn’t say that I’m anal about everything but everything definitely has it’s place.

Emails get saved if they’re important and should stay as emails. Otherwise, their content gets stripped quickly and moved into an appropriate secondary system (like my contacts or my calendar). My USB drive is full and it’s easy to find everything that I need. My pictures are listed and sorted in a way that makes sense to my brain.

I don’t spend all day scheming up systems and sorting things around; that would defeat the purpose of having a system like mine. I take care of things immediately lest they fall off my radar. Documents are saved and sorted, bookmarks are sorted and printed to PDF if they’re THAT good, and personal information gets saved into Outlook (on my phone, synced at work, and exported into Excel to make sure I don’t lose track.

Again, I’m not the picture of organizational perfection but it’s hard for things to slip through the cracks. I make it that way so I can work the way I want to.

5. I’m quick to abandon a system that isn’t working

If my organization is the glue then this is the engineer to check to make sure my glue is holding.

I don’t “swear by” my system and I certainly would not go out of my way to recommend it (I would recommend SOME kind of system, though). I’m always on the lookout for better ways to do what I do because I always  like to save time and change is a good thing.

I try out new systems, software, methods, tools, etc but, more often than not, my day-to-day functioning doesn’t change much. This is because I re-iterate, check, and evaluate what I’m doing on a constant basis. This isn’t quite a conscious process, it’s more like something that’s in the back of my head. If a certain piece of software is pissing me off or I keep forgetting to do something or something is irritating me, a red flag appears and I’m ready to replace it.

Case in point, my email situation. I have too many damn email accounts to keep track of for no good. I have a business one that I access with my phone and Gmail. I also have a separate Gmail, separate Hotmail, separate Yahoo, and an office account. In the end, I feel no more connected because I have a million email accounts. I’m in the process of overhauling this system to make it work for me (expect a post about it).

That’s all

Yeah, just that.

Though the way I work is a bit unorthodox, I’ve shown many people how to make their lives easier using free/cheap software and a system to use it. I absolutely would not be as successful as I am without the technology that I use every day. If you’re interested in learning about getting your professional life together in a way that makes sense and isn’t a burden, get a hold of me.