Productivity

Personal Automation, with “If This Then That” – ifttt.com

February 3, 2012 By Tom Catalini 5 Comments

With so many handy sites and utilities on the social web, it’s easier than ever to keep organized. But it’s also harder than ever because there is so much information and so many ways to organize it.

A little automation can go a long way. And that’s where ifttt.com comes in.

This handy site is very straight-forward and easy to use, yet extremely powerful. It’s can glue together many of the most popular utilties on the web to help you do all sorts of helpful things.

The basic construct, as the name implies, is to have the site process certain tasks based on certain triggers. Some examples might explain this better.

Examples

Here’s an example: If I favorite a tweet, email it to me. This helps when checking twitter on the run. Maybe I’m on the train or in line for a sandwich and see a tweet that links to an article I’d like to read. If I “favorite” that tweet, ifttt sees that and emails me a copy. I could also have it posted to delicious or diigo and tagged “read later” – there are many options.

Another example: I read a lot of stuff on Google Reader. It’s great for reading bunches of RSS feeds, and many times I’ll come across something that I want to share on Twitter. Unfortunately, that’s not easy to do from Google Reader. Enter ifttt. I setup a simple rule to tweet anything that I mark with a star in Google Reader. Problem solved.

The possibilities are endless

The possibilities are endless, it seems. There are dozens of services that ifttt integrates with and many tasks you can create. Also, the ifttt community shares many “recipes” that you can browse to get ideas. Recipes are tasks others have created for one purpose or another and shared with the community.

Check out ifttt.com and explore the possibilities. You’ll likely find some simple automation ideas and capabilities that can go a long way in helping you to automate tasks to save time and keep organized.

Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: automation, ifttt

Solitude and Collaboration

January 17, 2012 By Tom Catalini Leave a Comment

This recent New York Times article is worth a read: The Rise of the New Groupthink. There’s a lot packed into it, and a few good takeaways:

Creative work is best done in solitude
Committees are not creative (beware ‘brainstorming’ sessions)
The way you layout your office matters
Interruptions are not harmless (more on that here)
Be strategic and deliberate about collaboration
Neither (collaboration or solitude) is good in extreme

Photo credit: Andy Roberts

Filed Under: Productivity

Sharpening (and broadening) your skills

January 11, 2012 By Tom Catalini Leave a Comment

Ignorance is not likely to lead to bliss much in the field of social media, marketing, or technology. The days of compartmentalizing functions and expertise are quickly slipping into a new era where really smart people need to know a little (or a lot) about a lot of different things.

An obvious example

The classic example is the need for technology workers to improve their communication skills. Your job is not just about technology. You run a technology function within a business, and everyone in that business uses technology to get their job done. You need to be able to communicate – effectively – with them, and you need to understand the business context for everything you do.

Get comfortable engaging people in conversation, speaking up in meetings, writing out your thoughts and plans. Ask questions, learn. And figure out ways to convey your thoughts in a straight-forward, jargon-free manner. Sometimes things don’t seem as logical as we’d like in IT – until we take the time to understand the context and motives. Sometimes we feel like order takers, until we make the effort to consult with others and influence decisions.

While this is a classic example, it’s now not a nice-to-have, but a requirement.

Marketing

The same thing is happening in marketing. You can’t be good at marketing and ignore the technology. You need to understand all the major components and how they fit together. And in some (many) areas, you need to have sharp skills. You need to know how to work the tools, coordinate and integrate them.

Getting more technical is no longer an option. If you’re going to run social media, a blog, manage the email newsletter or any other digital function, you need to have some savvy about how the tools work. Getting comfortable with a little HTML, manipulating graphics, converting audio and video file formats and similar techie skills is necessary. You don’t need to be an expert in everything, but it’s far less effective (and worse – slower!) if you can’t get some basic tasks done yourself.

Specialization

Work is becoming more integrated in areas like marketing and technology, both due to the times we live in (a doing-more-with-less economy) and due to the evolution of technology. So, while you don’t need to necessarily be a jack of all trades, you do need to know a little about a lot of things, things that surround your core area of expertise, in order to be successful now. We don’t need more generalists, but we do need specialists with a broader skill set and more direct capability to simply get things done (done well, and done right the first time).

Photo credit: D’Arcy Norman

Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: expertise, learning

How often do you update your toolbox?

December 29, 2011 By Tom Catalini Leave a Comment

Like a good plumber, electrician, or carpenter, we all have our tools of the trade. For knowledge workers the tools are the set of approaches, techniques, strategies, and tactics we use to meet common challenges. These are shaped by our experiences and knowledge, and by our past successes and failures.

Certain approaches work very well for certain circumstances. We learn this and leverage this knowledge again and again to save time, energy, and focus. These tools are invaluable. The work every time.

Until they don’t.

But sometimes, we grow attached to our tools. We have so much faith in them, based on so many years of experience of success, that we might become blinded to their shortcomings. We may not notices as they slowly (or quickly) become ineffective.

It’s good to check once in a while, and to remain open minded to the fact that our tools need to be changed more frequently than in other trades.

Photo credit: ktow

Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: knowledge work, strategies, tactics, techniques, tools

Mundane Teamwork

December 12, 2011 By Tom Catalini Leave a Comment

Sometimes the work just needs to be done.

It’s not grueling, but it’s not interesting either.

That sort of mundane work can be maddening sometimes. There’s not much strategy to consider. There’s not a novel approach to try. There’s simply work and an incredibly straight-forward, repetitive way to do it.

That’s an opportunity for teamwork.

The strategy remains the same. The work remains mundane. But now you have company. Moral support.

And that can go a long way toward boosting motivation, building relationships, and just plain getting the work done faster.

Photo credit: woodleywonderworks

Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: moral support, teamwork

Most good ideas are simple and obvious (after you’ve seen them)

December 2, 2011 By Tom Catalini Leave a Comment

Our water heater failed recently. Fortunately, we caught it when there was less than a gallon of water on the floor.

But the situation could have been far worse – 50 gallons or more flooding the basement.

I gained a little knowledge from the experience. These things tend to fail shortly after their predicted lifespan (warranty period), and you’re very lucky if the failure isn’t catastrophic.

Two key pieces of information, then, come in handy in order to stay ahead of this going forward – the date the unit is installed and the length of the warranty. Information I did not have handy from the previous homeowner.

Our plumber, though, had the brilliant and simple solution, which he implemented upon installation of the new water heater – write these two critical data points right on the unit in a big, obvious way.

Of all the warnings, instructions, and technical info plastered all over this thing, these two pieces of information may be the most useful.

Very clever. Now I’m just trying to figure out where else I should be implementing this strategy.

Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: clever, simple

Getting Intense

November 23, 2011 By Tom Catalini Leave a Comment

Intense work requires that you ratchet up the level of time, attention, and focus to a task or project.

There’s no time for distractions. Your use of time becomes more efficient. Your attention to detail is magnified – you see more details and you see each one more clearly.

Immersing yourself in the problem totally provides a new, more comprehensive viewpoint and a deeper understanding. And you get more done. Much more. More than you thought.

Then, you ratchet back down to work on something else. And this other thing that seemed like a lot of hard work not so long ago, suddenly seems much easier.

Not only does getting intense once in a while help to get something done (and probably at a higher quality level), it can make regular work seem easy.

Getting intense is worth doing. Regularly.

Photo credit: gustaffo89

Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: concentration, Intensity, productivity

Orientation

November 3, 2011 By Tom Catalini Leave a Comment

It’s easy to put off learning categorically.

“I’ll never be a programmer.”

“I could never design a tee shirt.”

“I’m not a good cook.”

Refusing to go down the path of learning a new discipline is severely limiting. The thing is, it’s not an “all or nothing” proposition. You don’t need to become a programmer in order to learn some programming skills. You don’t need to become a designer in order to design a tee shirt. You don’t need to become a chef in order to upgrade your cooking skills.

And learning some basics will go a long way. Taking the time to explore and think about the fundamentals of a new discipline will open up opportunities – to de-mystify things a little bit, to gain even more respect for the pros, to take in ideas than can be applied back in your area of expertise.

It’s well worth it to take an hour to learn something new every now and again. If you’re interest is piqued, a few hours scattered here and there over time will gain you a lot of ground. You may not get your 10,000 hours in to become an expert this way, but you will learn a lot. More than you might think.

Photo credit: Steven S.

Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: learning, new, studying

There is always more to do

October 31, 2011 By Tom Catalini Leave a Comment

You’re never going to finish everything, there will always be more to do. Every time you cross something off of your todo list, something new will be added (or maybe a few things).

And that’s ok.

But once you realize that getting everything done is impossible, you need to focus more intently on deciding what’s most important.

The top of the list

Decide what should be on top of that todo list, what’s most important. Decide what you will actually finish (soon, like today, not over the more ambiguous “long term”).

Ignoring the rest of the items right now is ok. In fact, taking away the distraction of the bottomless list is key to committing to the top of the list items.

Focus on the top items, get them done.

The bottom will rise, decide again

The bottom items will rise up as soon as you are finished. And when they do, don’t just slide them into place. Re-evaluate the order. Decide what is most important, because even the important stuff is going to have to wait until the most important stuff is done.

Photo credit: Manu Contreras

Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: get things done, prioritize, todo list