Author: Carol Williams

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Get Organized More time in my day prioritize procrastination Productivity

Dreaming to Doing: The How

For those of you who may have missed my article in the January Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce newsletter, here’s a timely reminder in MARCH for what we may have intended in January!

 

WHAT is the issue?

 

New Year’s resolutions don’t work. You know that.  Some statistics:

Resolution maintained through first week 75%
Past two weeks 71%
Past one month 64%
Past six months 46%

Source: http://www.statisticbrain.com/new-years-resolution-statistics/

 

But, why? We are intelligent and successful leaders. Why do we have a DISCONNECT between Intention and Action?

 

Answer: It’s our brains. It’s how we are wired. But, here’s the good news. We can outsmart our brains.

 

SO WHAT?

 

With everything to gain, and much to lose, it’s worth another look at the “right way” to not only plan, but to design a system that enables you and your team to (really) follow though this time. Without consistent and reliable methods for follow-through, your team will lose momentum, become disengaged, and possibly disgruntled. A disengaged team barely scratches the surface of productivity, whereas a highly engaged and motivated team knows no limits.

 

What if, after many tries of fording an impossible stream, someone built a bridge? Would you ford the stream again? It’s doubtful. What do you have to lose? To gain?

Screen Shot 2016-02-22 at 9.22.09 AM

Want this bridge? Read on.

 

NOW WHAT?

 

How do we outsmart our brains, then, to go from “Dreaming” to “Doing”? It’s simple, but it’s not easy. If it were easy, we’d find different statistics.

 

Simply Successful Steps:

 

  1. Be certain. Envision your end result, with the caveat that you truly believe you can achieve your goal(s). Half-hearted beliefs are doomed to failure.

 

  1. Keep it super simple. A big mistake is to plan for more than three goals. One to three is ideal. “Less is more” after all.

 

  1. Believe through the bumps. There will be bumps, but reminding yourself of successes will breed more successes. Honor and celebrate, and expect the bumps. A deep and meaningful “why” is paramount.

 

  1. Really remember the reminders. What reminds you of “what you were going to do”? Some use a vision board. Some visualize daily. Create small “if/then” habits (hint: this is a “brain trick.” For example, “IF I open a new browser window THEN I will ask myself what my highest priority of the day is.”)

 

  1. Consistently. You must commit to a small step, at least every other day. This creates habit and momentum. It’s also known as Deliberate Practice, which is another way to re-train your brain.

 

  1. Get support. No “man is an island.” Humans are gregarious by nature, and in general, find greater success in personal accountability. Try https://www.stickk.com/, a mastermind group, or a coach. Even announcing your goal (personal or professional) on Facebook can help!

 

Above all, take heart:

 

According to a 2015 study by the Miriam Hospital in Rhode Island, we can “rebuild our willpower muscle.” Like any muscle however, it must be trained.

Categories
Get Organized

Make Your Bed, Make Your Day!

There are times when finding order and organization in our lives seems nigh impossible. I’ve built an entire career and life’s work guiding my clients through that very search. And in a world of “quick tips” and “life hacks,” where the solution to productivity is a “few easy steps!” away, it may be surprising, and perhaps discouraging, that true satisfaction and productivity is so hard to achieve for many people.

This blog isn’t here to make it seem easy. It’s here because I recognize that it’s actually very difficult – but there are tools I can give you to make it easier. Some may not be the final fix you’re looking for, but may in fact be a way to empower you to keep striving for more fulfilling days.

A simple start: make your bed in the morning. It solves nothing and everything at the same time.

What I mean is that essentially, making your bed is a solution to exactly one problem. The problem of having an unmade bed. Now when you think about your hectic days (the looming meetings, the unanswered emails, the schedule that seems to tangle as it unravels) the fact that your bed is unmade may not be your #1 problem. It may not even be problem #99.

So why does making the bed actually help many people, if the habit seems so useless in achieving anything? Psychology Today reports that “71 percent of bed makers consider themselves happy; while 62 percent of non-bed-makers admit to being unhappy.” They also observe that bed-makers are more likely to “like their jobs, own a home, exercise regularly, and feel well rested.” You’ll notice that these are the building blocks of productivity I so often espouse on this blog! Could it really be that easy to attain all these – with a few folds of the sheets?

The answer is a strong “no.” I’m not here to sell you snake oil. But what making your bed can do is start you on the path towards more meaningful tools – it’s what author Charles Duhigg called a “keystone habit” in his book “The Power of Habit.” Making your bed enables you to have other effective behaviors. It starts your day in a mode of productivity, giving you a sense of control over the clutter in your personal sphere. This clutter will rear its head throughout the day, in your email inbox and your hopeless file cabinet. But if you start your day knowing you can overcome disorganization, these problems are going to seem a lot more manageable later on.

Try it tomorrow. It’s an activity you can even make fun too – I won’t stop you from jumping on your newly made bed. You may find that this simple activity may propel you through the rest of your day – even when your day doesn’t seem so simple.

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Evernote

The Why and How of Social Media and Evernote

On July 23, I gave my first live Evernote Webinar, “The Power of Evernote.”  It went wonderfully, and I was so glad to have the opportunity to educate others about what Evernote can do. I know there were at least a couple of social media marketers in attendance. Though I did not go into Evernote and social media in detail via the webinar, I think it is important to dive a bit deeper into that topic. The connection between the two is actually very strong! So here goes. As always, please provide feedback via comment, email, or on social media!

As a reminder, Evernote makes it easy to:

Collect information. With Evernote, you can take snapshots, clip web articles, and store data relevant to one project in one notebook.

Present your work. With a single click all your notes are transformed into a presentation layout without the hassle of having to create slides; and

Discuss work with your co-workers. By sharing notes, you can collaborate on your projects so that the whole team is on the same page. Use the “workchat” feature to eliminate back-and-forth emails. Emails with attachments can get confusing and clutter your inbox – Evernote’s workchat streamlines all that.

Here’s a look at some of the most useful tools, and how to use them:

1. Make to-do lists. Evernote has the ability, in its text editor, to add check boxes (they are like a bullet list in your word processor). For social media marketers, you can use these to:

  • Keep track of an e-newsletter you’re preparing,
  • Organize your upcoming Facebook posts
  • Or store your drafted tweets!

You can create a template, timeline, and themes with your team. Let’s say that on Monday Sally knows she needs to promote X Y and Z. She can check them off and you can see she has done it. She can even create a “notelink” in the checklist to the note where the data/release lives.

Evernote also allows you to utilize IFTTT to auto post tweets and Facebook posts to an Established Evernote Notebook. We’ll cover that later in the article!

2. Snapshots: Not sure whether you should post a picture of that really cool thing you saw today on your way home? Take a picture on Evernote and share it with your team to get their thumbs-up before you post it. We all know, what’s once online, stays online. Here’s a easier way to make sure that what’s online is what you really want to be there.

3. Sound clips: As with pictures, you can save relevant sound clips on an Evernote notebook and use it later for that blog post or report file.

4. Connect to LinkedIn: Eliminate all that business card clutter and simultaneously expand your network.

5. Send an LI invitation as you are snapping the picture of the card. As I demonstrated at the webinar, you can snap a picture of a business card on Evernote and use it to send an invitation to that connection on LinkedIn. Place all your business cards in a notebook and you have a basic Contact Management System started. The beauty of this is the automated nature of it – you can build a bigger network, a lot faster.

6. The WebClipper. This handy Evernote tool eliminates the need for bookmarks! Here’s the scenario: You are searching the web. You find good info for an article. You bookmark it in your browser. How do you remember this later? Here’s how Evernote can help:

a. Download the web clipper add-on for your browser.

b. While in the article, click the elephant icon (web clipper). Then hit save.

c. Now the article is in the notebook you want it in, with any tags (A.K.A. keywords) you want! You can even add them upon saving or add them later, at your convenience.

d. Forget where you put it? Once you have everything saved up neatly in your Evernote workspace, you can easily and quickly search through your content later – Evernote searches tags, texts, and even text within images!

The power of this is that you simply and easily save links from websites, social media sites – in a way that’s a lot easier to manage than endless and obscure lists of unsearchable bookmarks.

7. IFTTT: If This Then That: Last and not least, this is the POWERHOUSE of building processes – and will make your social media life forever better. Here’s the long and short of it: When a process is automated, it saves time and effort, resulting in higher personal productivity. Read on to learn how IFTTT.com can help you with Facebook and Twitter updates.

Let’s say you forgot if you posted that update about a meeting, or you want to keep a running log of what posts have been made about a product release. There is an IFTT “recipe” for this, linked here: This recipe sends all of your Facebook updates directly to an Evernote notebook. This is perfect for when you cannot launch your Facebook app, but need to see what you have posted. So you will save your status updates on Facebook to an Evernote notebook. This keeps a running diary of your Facebook status changes by automatically saving all updates to an Evernote notebook.

You can use Evernote as an IFTTT action or trigger in many different ways, but here we’ll focus on one: Backing up all of your tweets to your Evernote notebooks. You can then search through and share them whenever you like, without having to trawl back through your Twitter feed in and endless scroll, searching desperately for something that would take five seconds to find in Evernote.

How does this work? IFTTT uses “recipes” and is dead simple to use. Go to ifttt.com and search for what you need. They walk you through it. It looks like this:

FOR TWITTER: Create a recipe from within IFTTT and choose new tweets as the trigger from the Twitter channel—you’ll be given the option to include or exclude retweets and replies along the way. The app then prompts you for an action within Evernote, so choose to append new tweets to an existing note, which you can tag as you like to make it easier to find in future. Once a note reaches 2MB in size, IFTTT will automatically start a new one for you.

Here’s the link to send all of your tweets to your Evernote notebook. This makes it quick and easy to share with teammates and clients who may not use Twitter, or stay up to date with your latest posts.

FOR FACEBOOK: It works the same way with a different “recipe,” linked here: This recipe sends all of your Facebook updates directly to an Evernote notebook. It’s perfect for when you cannot launch your Facebok app, but need to see what you have posted.

Save your status updates on Facebook to an Evernote notebook. Keep a running diary of your Facebook status changes by automatically saving all updates to an Evernote notebook.

So to wrap up: Evernote helps you remember everything. The more you use it, the better it gets, and this is doubly true for the complicated work of social media marketers. Try it for one client starting today! See what you think, and start small. Perhaps just start creating notebooks for your campaigns and posts, then let me know what questions or comments you may have. I look forward to helping you be even more productive with this tool!

Categories
Productivity

Take a Vacation – It’s Very Productive!

This may be a surprise to all of you who know me as a busy bee – but I am on vacation! Yes, even the most productive among us have to find time to sit back and relax. For the next few weeks I’m doing a lot of hiking (and recovering from hiking with a cool drink and a book afterwards…), as well as posting a blog for you all, of course!

Since I’ve got relaxation on the mind, I thought I would try and impart some wisdom on just HOW to relax – and make it count. It’s easy to take a few days off and fritter them away thinking about to-do lists, returning to work, or even packing your vacation time with as much excitement as possible, filling what should be a period of tranquility with unneeded stress. You deserve better! Not only will more effective rest make you happier during your vacation, but it will allow you to feel so much more recharged for work when you “get going” again.

Here are three strategies for getting the most out of your time off:

  1. Know that your vacation is a good thing! There’s no need to feel guilty or restless about giving yourself a break, simply because you aren’t working. The fact is that, while you aren’t being productive per se, you are contributing to your ability to be productive later. The Atlantic, after looking at the science behind restfulness, found that “breaks are better for our brains than overtime.” Vacations radically increase worker productivity by improving mental health and motivation. So trust your relaxing self; you’ll be able to do far more after a few more dips in the pool than a few extra hours grinding away at your desk.

  2. Sleep well! I cannot stress this enough – sleep is critical in recharging every part of your well-being, and you can’t be at your best if your health isn’t at its best. But even when you’re on vacation, it can be hard to squeeze every ounce of restfulness out of a night’s worth of sleep. There are some ways to “hack” your sleep patterns for the most rest possible. Try avoiding “blue light” – the kind often emitted by TV, computer and cell phone screens – for an hour before bed. Scheduling out your sleep pattern can help you take advantage of your full sleep cycle too; use this tool to find your perfect bedtime.

  3. Get away from emails! The advent of email is a great yet tricky thing – it makes communicating easier, but ever-present. When you’re always an email away, it can turn the 40-hour work-week into a 24/7 work-week, leaving little time for actual restfulness. As discussed, that restfulness is precious, and there are ways to keep email from stealing it away. Vacation auto-response is a feature on many email platforms, allowing you to notify those who email you that you’re on vacation. If the person’s message is critical, you can include other contact information in the customized response. It’s OK to be out of touch for a while, and this is a great way to tell others that in a respectful way.

It’s my goal that these tips will allow you to relax and replenish your energy for a great summer ahead. I’m trying them out in preparation for my webinar on July 23rd about “The Power of Evernote” (which you can still sign up for here!). Here’s hoping that you’ll see me more relaxed, recharged, and ready to be productive than ever!

Categories
More time in my day prioritize procrastination

Summer Fun or Summer Work? Both!

It’s summertime, and as Ella Fitzgerald sang, “the livin’ is easy.” But what about the working, the staying on task, the getting-things-done? For those, your newfound appreciation of swimming pools and ice cream may be leading you astray. So how, in a season of fun in the sun, do you actually achieve anything?

I’m here to tell you that enjoyment and accomplishment aren’t mutually exclusive. We’ve talked about the relationship between happiness and productivity before on this blog, and never does that hold more true than in the summer. It’s the time when the excitement of life and energy for work can go hand-in-hand. Where some make summertime work the enemy of summertime fun, you can capitalize on the power of both. Here are some tips for making fun work and work fun:

  1. Let yourself take breaks. Variety is the spice of life, and it’s the spice of work as well. No one is at their best in the midst of an hours-long slog, and you want the quality of your work to represent you at your best. So teach yourself to (temporarily) walk away from a task instead of trying to push through it. A break will help you refocus, re-engage, and re-inspire yourself for even better work when you return. Scientists agree; according to a productivity study cited by The Atlantic, the ideal balance is 52 minutes for working, followed by a 17 minute break.

  2. Surround yourself with fun AND productive people. We all have friends who look like they’re having fun 24/7. One look at their Facebook wall – or a slideshow from their trip to the Bahamas – and you can get a major case of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). But nobody can have fun all of the time. It’s important to be reminded of this, so that you can allow yourself periods of productivity along with your time to let loose. The more you emulate people who have a healthy balance between work and play, the more you’ll find satisfaction in both.

  3. Build in active time during your daily schedule. Productivity relies on so much more than your sheer force of will. Being healthy, in both body and mind, can boost your motivation and ability – as well as allow you to have more fun. Studies show that exercise that improves both mental and physical health also has a profound impact on productivity. So take that morning run, that afternoon bike ride, or that noontime dip in the pool – your workday will be more fruitful because of it.

  4. Listen to music (really!) This one is controversial – take it from any student who has argued with a teacher about using earbuds during a test! But studies show that music can increase productivity by relaxing and refocusing the brain away from other aural distractions. Now before you jam out to Beyoncé at your desk, know that there are limits to music’s benefits. Music without lyrics, and for short durations of time, usually works best in creating a relaxed focus.

  5. Expose yourself to nature. No, this doesn’t mean “go out for a hike every day” – hardly anybody has the time, let alone the energy! But research shows that even just a little green in your day – from having an office window facing trees to a 20-minute walk in the park – can drastically improve your output. Make sure you aren’t cooped up, and you’ll be feeling and working better in no time.

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Evernote More time in my day productivity in the workplace

Less Mess, Goodbye Stress

How many hours per day, or per week, do you or your employees spend looking for documents (electronic or hard copy)? Studies vary, but the average is 1.8 to 2.5 hours PER DAY. Wow.

Often, the documents being sought are “locked in silos” such as your email, a file folder that keeps co-workers guessing, or…on your desktop (electronic or on that “piece of furniture”).

What if there was a simple way for your team to:

• Collaborate without email?
• Find what each other is seeking, quickly?
• Access this information anytime, anywhere, from any device?

Evernote Business answers those three wishes. And more.

If you or your company seek a relatively low-cost solution to your informational collaboration/location needs, it’s time to consider Evernote. If you are a team of two people or more, you’ll want to consider Evernote Business. If you are losing paper, losing notes, and losing what you should have remembered, you are losing productivity. That’s where Evernote Business can help. It’s not the ONLY such tool out there…but Evernote works very well with many other apps you are likely already using.

So, what is Evernote Business?

 

• Evernote is an online (or offline) notebook.
• Evernote does NOT data-mine, for example, like Google does. Evernote makes their money through paid subscriptions. Your information is yours alone. If you choose to share it, you may… or you may not.
• If you wish to collaborate effectively (and almost effortlessly) you should consider Evernote Business.

How do I get set up?

 

To start using Evernote, you must set up an account via Evernote.com. At its base level, it’s free. The Premium level is $5 per month, per user. The Business level is $10 per month, per user.

With Evernote Business, you must select a person who will act as administrator for your company. This person will be your “batphone link” to Evernote support, to your Evernote Business Certified Consultant, and will be the person to whom you ask coordination questions. He or she will hold any standards you (should) develop for naming notes, etc.

Do not do a complete overhaul all at once. Rather, start slowly. Select one workflow where you begin using Evernote Business. See where the kinks are. Use this workflow as a way to “beta test” Evernote and as a “real life launch pad” to train your staff.

An example beta test could be creating a series of Evernote Notes in a Notebook for just one particular client or project. Add all project photos, emails, budget, whiteboard notes and ideas, meeting minutes, etc. into Evernote for that client only. You can then share the notebook with the whole team. You have the power to give each team member the permission to modify and view, or just view the notes.

What results can I expect?

 

Less email. Once people begin using Evernote as a way to collaborate, there is no need for back and forth email with different versions of documents.

Less to remember. Evernote has been referred to as a “brain.” Simply open it, type in a keyword, and it will show that keyword in tags, in images, in text (written OR typed–and yes, you read that correctly).

Your information can be accessed anytime, anywhere… even when you do not have an internet connection. Your synched notes are on the app residing on your device. They are also automatically saved back to the Evernote server, unless you specifically set the note up as NOT synced. On the road, on the plane, bumping into a client or prospect you did not expect– all is made easier through the power of Evernote.

Better team collaboration. When you are working on something, Evernote automatically shows “related notes” on the subject from your account, or from the shared notes within your team.

In summary, for best results, use it. Use it more. Use it for everything. Start collecting recipes with it. Use it for travel plans. Use it for business ideas and “somedays.” Photograph cards and watch them automatically prompt you to “LinkIN” with the contact. The more you use it, the better it is.

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