Category Archives: Tools and Tips

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How to “Freee” Up Your Time and Make More Money

Those who know me, know that I always look for ways to optimize everything! I want to find the most effective and efficient way to get things done while saving time and making money. From automating tasks and eliminating unnecessary activities to outsourcing work that I don’t need to be doing.

This was kicked up to a whole new level when Timothy Ferriss published The 4 Hour Workweek in 2007. I found his way of thinking outside the box to be quite inspiring. The timing of his book was also impeccable as it coincided with the massive economic downturn and recession, creating urgency for businesses to become more cost effective.

My First VA Experience

In 2008, I took over as the business leader of a large engineering company in Calgary. We were in the depth of the “great recession” and the business had been losing a lot of money. In fact, they had just laid off over a third of their staff – the first lay-offs in their 35 year history!

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How to Improve Your Projects with 25 Simple Questions

As I wrote in a post a few years ago, project management is not for the faint of heart! Projects can be very complex and stressful.

Besides managing scope, schedule, and budget, project managers need to manage relationships with staff, customers, contractors, vendors, community leaders, and many others. Much of this project management is now done virtually as the project team, contractors and customers can be spread in multiple locations over multiple time zones, cultures and languages.

This is a daunting task!

Even more daunting is the task of a person responsible for the oversight of multiple projects. How can one person possibly stay on top of all the details from multiple large projects?

The answer is that they cannot and they should not even try!

So, what can a leader who is responsible for oversight of multiple large projects do to ensure the projects are on track and delivered successfully?

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How to Make Your Business Stand Out

I recently attended a keynote from Claire Diaz-Ortiz. Diaz-Ortiz is an author, speaker, founder of the non-profit “Hope Runs”, ex-executive at Twitter, voted one of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business” and is known as “The Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter!”

Besides being articulate, intelligent, and successful in the business world, she has a very compelling personal story that she is able to effectively weave in with the business side of her life.

So, when she defines a system to make you and your business stand out, we should listen!

Her keynote outlined the framework for this system that she uses to help her and her organizations standout in the marketplace.

She calls the system “SHARE.”

S.H.A.R.E.

Diaz-Ortiz’s framework for how stand out is built around the acronym SHARE. I have briefly summarized the components below.

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Random Thought Missiles!

How many times have you been distracted from your work on important activities and tasks by random ideas and thoughts?

These can be super-valuable ideas that you don’t want to lose but you also don’t want to be distracted from the task at hand! Robert Rodriguez (in Tribe of Mentors) calls these disruptive, yet potentially valuable ideas, Random Thought Missiles!

A Random Thought Missile can complete vaporize your focus on important tasks at hand. It can be disheartening when you block time in your calendar, shut off your phone, block out all electronic distractions, only to be interrupted and taken off track by these random thoughts.

Even as I sit down to write this post, my “deep work” thought process is constantly under attack by ideas for future posts, potential customer contacts, project delivery enhancements, and 100 other ideas. I cannot possibly investigate all these things and write the blog post at the same time!

So, what is the solution? How can you productively intercept and capture a Random Thought Missile without vaporizing your “deep work” focus  and without losing the value that the random thought may contain?

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How to Stop the Email Madness and Save a Boatload of Money!

There are literally billions of emails sent each day and many of them are simply not needed and result in “make work” projects. This is a huge productivity drain on your business!

According to a Washington Post article the average worker spends 4.1 hours per day doing email while this Forbes article suggests 2.5 hours a day per person for email!

If you have 50 staff working for you at an average cost of $50/hr and they are each wasting 2.5 hours a day on email, you are losing $6,250 dollars a day. This is $31,250 a week or $1,625,000 a year just because you don’t have better systems in place for business email!

So, what can you do about it?

Here are 12 tips that you can implement in your business to stop the email madness and reduce the flow of money down the drain!