Massive Microsoft Fail

By on April 30, 2013 in News

I was all prepared to write a glowing review of Microsoft Web Apps. I was going to tell you all about how awesome the group collaboration features were, how you could track changes and see comments and preserve formatting.

And then it stopped letting me save. I could literally make a change, hit save and watch it revert. Out of three of us, only one could save their work.

Do me a favor, ok? The next time I depend on a new Microsoft product for anything, please whap me upside the head.

Despite all this, the book still has a semi-decent chance of being released on May 1st as planned. If by released we mean, ‘ePub conversion is flawless and I upload it to Amazon for approval before collapsing into bed in the wee hours of the morning.’ Because we all know, of course, that the day doesn’t change over until I go to bed. :D

Stay tuned…

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Want to influence my new book?

By on April 16, 2013 in News

The folks on the newsletter know all about this project – they’ve been getting a blow by blow account of its development, along with the occasional excerpt. But I’m *finally* reaching the homestretch, and with a bunch of hard work and a bit of luck, The Productivity Ecosystem should be ready for you to dive into by May 1st. (Hear that, universe? Please do not send any more antibiotic resistant sinus infections, emotional sucker punches or pharmaceutical fuck ups until this is done, ok?)

I’m currently finalizing the chapters and exercises, and I wanted to take this opportunity to ask the wider world for some feedback. Today, I’m releasing the introduction and humbly asking for your reactions. Based on the introduction, what do you think? Do you want to read the rest? Am I missing anything you’d like to see? Could the information be presented in a more digestible format?

Please click here to download the introduction to The Productivity Ecosystem!

If you could take a few moments to read and offer me your thoughts, I will love you forever. Everyone who leaves a comment on this page will get recognition in the final manuscript and the opportunity to buy the book at 80% off retail price when it comes out in a few weeks. And if you want to make 100% sure that you’ll know when the book comes out, sign up for my email list!

Thank you!

Kirsten

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Welcome to Rethink Productivity!

By on August 14, 2012 in Uncategorized

Personalized Productivity has now become Rethink Productivity!!

So, what’s the difference between the two?

Personalized Productivity was about building the perfect productivity system using your personality.

Rethink Productivity is about using your personal strengths to make it easy to reach your goals.

Do you have a dream that you want to turn into reality? Have you tried setting out steps and gotten frustrated when the situation changes and they no longer match? Or have your plans withered under the onslaught of day to day life?

Rethink Productivity uses your personality type, your philosophy and your current reality to ensure that you realize your dreams. If you’re having trouble with productivity, I’ll help you sort through the chaos and identify the most important tasks. If you’re having trouble charting a path from here to your dream, I’ll help you discern the way forward. If you’re struggling with limiting beliefs, I’ll help you identify and eliminate them.

Rethink Productivity is all about moving you forward, toward whatever your goal may be.

You’ll still have to put in the work. But my goal is to make the road to your goals as smooth and simple as possible.

Sound like a plan? Leave a comment below and tell us a goal that you’re shooting for in the next 8 weeks, and what, if anything, is standing in your way.

Thanks so much for coming by the new Rethink Productivity! (Oh, and for anyone who’s wondering… I turned in my thesis last week, and I officially have my MPH!!!)

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Almost There!

By on June 28, 2012 in Uncategorized

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Sorry that it’s been a bit quiet around here lately – I’ve been putting most of my time towards the final thesis sprint. The full draft is done, and I’m about halfway through the first round of edits (on sections that have already been edited several times). Soooo close!

When I’m not working on my thesis, I’ve been doing some thinking about Personalized Productivity. I know where I want it to go in the post-MPH era, but my opinion is not the only one at play here. What would you like to see from Personalized Productivity? If I could solve one problem for you, what would it be? If I could create one piece of awesomeness, what would that awesomeness look like?

Please, come save me from edits, erm, talk to me! Leave a comment on this post. Send me an e-mail. Hit me up on Skype at kasimmon or call my shiny new business number – 678-561-3948

Talk soon!

Kirsten

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Three Outsourcing Horror Stories – A Tale of Betrayal and Thievery

By on June 6, 2012 in Outsourcing

Once Upon a Time there was a gentle souled entrepreneur, a sweet lady who trusted all around her and left calm and confidence in her wake. She quickly grew her business, for people loved to be around her, but she soon ran into a snag.

“The financial management aspect just doesn’t fuel me,” she mentioned to a client (as explanation for why her invoice was 3 months late). “It drains me of energy and keeps me from my people, the part of my business that matters to me the most.”

“Why not just hire it out?” the client replied. “I have a friend who does that sort of thing for quite a reasonable rate.”

And so the gentle-souled entrepreneur got the contact info for this friend, reached out, and soon had happily handed over the passwords and control of her finances. All went well for several months, until the gentle-souled entrepreneur decided to purchase a copy of Lemise, the landing page plug-in by BloppyCogger. To her astonishment, the business account that she’d assumed was bursting with revenue was completely empty!

“Where are all my earnings?” she asked the accountant. “I haven’t been working any less, and the expenses haven’t increased!”

“You’ve been running a deficit for months now,” the unscrupulous villain replied, and slammed the phone down in the gentle-souled entrepreneur’s ear.

Now, the gentle-souled entrepreneur knew this wasn’t true, so she decided to unearth her passwords to her financial accounts to check on everything herself. To her astonishment, she found that the passwords had been changed and she had no access!

The gentle-souled entrepreneur found herself ensnared in a police investigation, a felony theft case and a huge hassle to regain her money and her credit rating. Distressed, she asked one of the nice police sergeants how she could keep this from happening again, and learned never to give up full control of her accounts. She has followed his advice, and ever since then she creates separate accounts with limited accessibility for anyone she hires to manage her finances.

Are you interested in outsourcing, but afraid of becoming a horror story? Learn how to outsource safely in Kirsten’s upcoming class, 5 1/2 Tasks You Can Outsource For Under $100 That Will Save You At Least 10 Hours/Month

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The Three Outsourcing Horror Stories – A Tale of Babysitting and Woe

By on June 4, 2012 in Outsourcing

Once Upon A Time there was another young entrepreneur – this one slightly wiser in years and experience than our first, but still with much to learn in the ways of the Outsource.

Said this young entrepreneur, “My inbox has topped 80,000 unread messages! My Facebook page is out of hand! I need help, and quickly, to remain afloat in this wave of work!”

So she paid an agency a pretty penny to screen and interview VAs for her, thus avoiding the trap in which our first young entrepreneur became entangled. And she was quite pleased with the VA they found. “She’s experienced, she’s cheap, and she worked for Dora Toader,” the young entrepreneur thought. “What could possibly go wrong?”

Our intrepid duo charged forward, with the young entrepreneur attempting to explain the intricacies of an inbox receiving everything from client communiques to Mary Jay makeup newsletters. What should be deleted? What needed unsubscribing? What needed immediate attention? The questions were endless, and both the young entrepreneur and the VA soon became frustrated.

There must be a better way, the young entrepreneur thought, and she switched the VA to working on backlinks and article rewrites. But the VA was industrious and soon blew through the work in, and the young VA was at a loss to come up with enough to keep going. Finally, with a heavy heart and a lamentation at the waste of money, she let the VA go and corralled her mother into helping her weedwhack her inbox down to something more manageable.

Now older and wiser for her experience, the young entrepreneur swore to prepare extensively before she hired another VA – and to wait until she had at least 80 hours of outsorceable work per week to do so.

Interested in outsourcing but afraid of becoming a horror story? Learn the path to the land of outsourcing next Friday in Kirsten’s class 5 1/2 Tasks You Can Outsource For Under $100 That Will Save You At Least 10 Hours/Month.

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Three Outsourcing Horror Stories: A Tale of Incompetence All Around

By on June 1, 2012 in Outsourcing

There aren’t many ideas that are universal to all types.  95% of the time I’m advocating for different techniques, systems and methods for the four types.  But outsourcing is different.

I advocate outsourcing for every small business owner, because it has a huge potential for time savings, but it also forces you to take a thorough look at your business, your customers and how you’re moving through the routine tasks in your day.

Most small business owners I work with have heard all the horror stories and are hesitant to outsource. This series, written in fairy tale style, will explore those horror stories and how you can avoid them in your business.

Once Upon A Time there was a young entrepreneur. She was a comely lass with a head full of ideas and a heart full of enthusiasm. Like most young entrepreneurs, she also had a bank account full of nothing, and she was pulled in several directions trying to work out her business and get everything done.

One day, after having had a long talk with her mentor (who was, himself, a bit on the shady side, though the young entrepreneur didn’t know it at the time), the young lass sat down and directed her browser to oDesk.com.

“I must hire someone to move my WordPress Installation!” said she, for this is what her mentor had advised her to do. She looked at her technical knowledge and at her dwindling bank account, and wrote the following ad:

Wanted: Someone who can move the WordPress Database from one domain to another. Payment: $15

Soon, offers were pouring in from all over the world. The young entrepreneur chose the first one who met the price and could write in decent English, sent him her passwords, and woke up the next morning to find her site appeared to have been moved intact.

But alas, such was not the case, for when, several weeks later, she decided to move ahead with her plans to rebuild the old site, she deleted the old WordPress Installation and found, to her horror, that both sites were now gone! She contacted the VA, only to have him give strangely generic and unhelpful responses. She contacted her tech-savvy friends, only to have them tell her, “Umm, sorry, that sucks.” She contacted her hosting company, only to get a more formal version of the same response.

So she was left to try to reconstruct her site, with over 50 posts, from her archives – a process which took much longer than it would have taken to simply screen the fellow more thoroughly in the first place. The young entrepreneur decided that from then on, she would hire out tech work to her tech savvy friends (or at least have them help her to prepare applications and screen candidates in the furure.)

Have horror stories like these kept you from outsourcing? Check out my class on June 8th – 5 1/2 Tasks You Can Outsource for Under $100 That Will Save You At Least 10 Hours/Month.

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Product Review: iAnnotate for iPad

By on May 7, 2012 in Product Reviews

Do you have to read through lots of documents, studies or reports on a regular basis?  If you have an iPad, this app will be the best $10 you spend this year.

If you’ve read any of my other product reviews, you know that is not a thing I say lightly.

What’s so awesome about iAnnotate?

Imagine an electronic library of all the documents you need to read.  Imagine that you can highlight, draw, write or type on them, insert blank pages into them, search them, search your annotations to them and export them with your comments intact.  Imagine that you can surf the web and download directly into the app, and that you have complete freedom over how you organize your library of documents.

That’s iAnnotate.  In less than a week, it became my go-to app for any sort of reading that required notes.  My thesis lit review has been done entirely within iAnnotate.  The same with all of my class reading.  Free business resources too.  I’ve even uploaded the worksheets from Firepole Marketing and filled them out with a stylus in iAnnotate.

Now, I’m not going to try to pretend that there aren’t a couple of downsides.  The app does have a habit of crashing, typically when I have a lot of documents open and I’m trying to move between them.  It only allows 9 open documents, which can be annoying when I’m trying to do cross comparisons.  I’d love it if it had some sort of interface with a citation program like Mendeley.  And the web downloads work great for open source studies, but not so much for items that require an interface with the university library system.

That said, it’s far and away better than anything else I’ve ever worked with, including desktop programs like Endnote.  It’s easy to upload documents from iTunes, so while it would be nice to download everything within the app it’s not like it’s that much of a hassle to transfer when I need to.

So – if you have any need for an iPad app that lets you read, annotate, search and export, look no further than iAnnotate.

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Product Review: iAWriter

By on May 4, 2012 in Product Reviews

Remember a few weeks ago I reviewed Byword and ended up not liking it so much?

I’ve been using another writing app since then, and I’m liking it a bit better.  Not enough to give it five stars, but enough that I’m continuing to use it.  At least until Scrivner takes a shot at an iPad app, or I run across something better.

iAWriter is really very similar to Byword, at least when it comes to the basics.  It’s a lightweight word processor that supports markup.  The overhead menu slides back to give you a distraction free white screen to write on.  It syncs to iCloud, which is nice, and also allows export via e-mail, print or copy/paste.

I actually end up e-mailing most of my writing from the app.  My reasoning is two-fold: one, I don’t have Lion on my desktop so I can only access the cloud from my iPad and two, I’m often sending posts to myself to submit to other blogs or to Steph for posting here on Personalized Productivity.  E-mail is more convenient than the cloud, at least for my purposes.

iAWriter doesn’t have Byword’s issue of difficulty getting back to the menu; a single tap and it appears at the top of the screen.  My only gripe is that I can’t seem to set up any sort of folder organization for the documents I’ve written.  They all appear as a list from most recent to least, and I can see this list getting pretty darn long.  I’m sure there must be a way to organize these posts if I go into the iCloud folder itself, but it would be nice if I could do it from iAWriter.  I’d also like to be able to export from the app into some of the other apps on my iPad, like iAnnotate or iBooks.  But those are relatively minor issues when the iAWriter does what it should to for 99% of what I need it to do.

So… still looking for a writing app that can blow me away, but in the meantime I’ve got a pretty good go to.

Have you used an iPad writing app that’s blown you away?  What was it?

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When Your Routine Can Be Your Worst Enemy

By on April 18, 2012 in Uncategorized

Once upon a time there was an entrepreneur. He was fairly successful, by most measures. He was living comfortably, and made enough to hire an assistant. Part of his assistant’s duties was to screen his incoming e-mail and only send him the most important messages. All others were handled with a canned reply or a quick trip to deletion.

One day, the entrepreneur got a message from Groupon. They wanted to feature his business. His assistant sent on the message, only to have the entrepreneur respond that Groupon was horrible for small businesses and that if any other offers like this came through, to reply with an automated, ‘Thank you, not ingested.’

A few weeks later, the assistant got a call from a journalist at a national news outlet. They were running a series on the intricacies in the entrepreneur’s field and wanted to feature his business. The entrepreneur wasn’t there at the time, so the assistant replied with the closest training to the situation that she had received. ‘Thank you, not interested.’

The entrepreneur never realized what an opportunity he had missed.

Many creative entrepreneurs, especially Fantasticals, view systems and routines as anathema to their creativity. “I can’t be boxed in like that!’ they’ll proclaim.

I agree – to an extent. A poorly formed routine is stifling. But a well thought out routine, now, that can set you free.

So how do you identify good routines from bad?

We all have some routines, regardless of our personality type. We all (hopefully) brush our teeth and bathe on a regular basis, and chances are that you eat fairly regularly as well. These routines are beneficial to your health and well being. And while you do eat regularly, it’s unlikely that you eat at exactly the same time every single day unless you have a medical reason to do so. The routine has flexibility, and that’s what differentiates a bad routine from a good one.

Consider your routines and whether they allow for flexibility. Can you rearrange them on days when you need to? Do they prevent you from experiencing the world first hand and making decisions with critical pieces of information in front of you? A good routine supports your work, whereas a bad routine will get in your way.

Some bad routines are insidious, disguising themselves as good routines until unexpected situations come up. Then, like in the story of the entrepreneur and his assistant, they show their true colors and prevent you from taking full advantage of the opportunities that come your way.

Routines and employees is a whole different post (or series of posts), but for today think about your own routines. Do they support you? If they don’t, what can you change to make sure that they do?

Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

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