Getting Things Done, Enhanced Personal Productivity, and Better Time Management

Author: vin
Topics: Podcast on Oct 19th, 2009 | View Comments

Would you like to Increase your productivity? Streamline and optimize your workflow for better time management? Well, this weeks AutomateMySmallBusiness.com podcast discusses some of the best ways to enhance your productivity using various tools and techniques.
Matt & Brandon talk about getting things done (GTD) and how this approach works great at every level of the automated business model, the best way to capture Ideas on the fly and on the go and how to use google to make the most of your mail.

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Transcript:

Welcome to Automate My Small Business where we show you how to set up and run your own automated business on the cheap. So get ready to take back your life and add a little spice. It’s time to build something automated.

MATT: Hello and welcome to Automate My Small Business episode number 6. I’m Matt.

BRANDON: And this is Brandon.

MATT: And today we’re going to talk about personal productivity tools and things that you can do to form better habits to get things done faster. So Brandon, do you want to tell us a little bit about how you prioritize things and you know what systems you might use to streamline your time?

BRANDON: Yeah. I’m pretty excited about this topic. It’s something I think we all face. We got a lot of good things to kind of talk about. We got some ideas and some stories to share with you guys. But just before we do, Matt, I’ve been hearing you’ve been making some big progress on this new site you’re doing. Tell us about it.

MATT: Oh yeah, so this week I started out a new business. I think on the last episode we talked about outsourcing and that we use people from all around the world. And a lot of the people I use are from the Philippines. And so recently there was a lot of flooding due to typhoon Ondoy. And you know I felt really bad for everyone over there so I was trying to look for a way that I could help. And so I was trying to get my VAs to take the week off and I would pay them and they would go help but they’re all in the wrong places. So I started this new charity called NanoAid that will give small donations to people to do relief work. And I was trying to find people to basically outsource this work to and so I went onto Odesk and I found you know a bunch of people and got them hired and then when I ran out of money to do that, I started setting up a site so that they could get more donations. So we’ve raised a lot of money and we’ve fed over like 500 people and provided toys for kids and bottles for babies. It’s been really amazing and it’s…

BRANDON: So let me get this straight. You started this what about a week ago?

MATT: About a week ago and …

BRANDON: And you’ve already raised money to feed over 500 people?

MATT: Yeah, I mean…

BRANDON: And clothed and feed babies?

MATT: Exactly.

BRANDON: So the website is nanoaid.org, is that right?

MATT: Right. So basically I set this up and a couple of hours using the techniques that we’ve talked about, a WordPress site. This one actually is WordPress MU so all the you know relief projects can have their own blog and the MU part is the multi user. It’s the same thing that wordpress.com and some big sites like that use.

BRANDON: So somebody who’s let’s say in the Philippines while it’s being flooded right now and they’re having this big typhoon, somebody in the Philippines would post some sort of project where they would want to help their family members or the community, let’s say you know, fill sand bags and keep the store front from getting flooded or something like that.

MATT: Exactly. Say they need like 30 bucks for some sandbags and whatever they need for that, right?

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: So they’d post this project, they say, “Hey I need these things. This is what I want to do. This is how many people it’s going to help or affect,” and then we post that up on the site and then we try to find donors for them.

BRANDON: And so the donors can do as little as a dollar or a thousand dollars? They could do $5 here and $10 to another project and that’s why it’s called NanoAid, is that right?

MATT: Right. We believe that small donations and a lot of effort can make a big difference so it’s really about getting people involved and getting people motivated to do stuff.

BRANDON: That’s pretty cool.

MATT: It doesn’t take a lot of money to make a significant improvement especially when you put a limit on it, people get creative in the way that they use the money you know kind of the Twitter effect over the 140 characters.

BRANDON: Exactly. It’s very ground level, grassroots. You know people who know where the most impact can be made on the ground you know with their neighbors and their family members and their community, they’re the ones who are actually getting out and doing the work and they just need a couple of bucks to get the supplies or something like that. I think that’s fantastic. That’s a great idea.

MATT: Exactly. I mean they’re on the ground. They know the things that they need the most and people like the Red Cross can do big giant things but those big broad sweeps sometimes they miss some stuff and the people that are affected by the crisis they know exactly what they need.

BRANDON: Cool. So you basically put a WordPress site together in a couple of days, right? You got a donate button put on using the Paypal payment system, right?

MATT: Right. I mean we got the website up in about two hours after we have the idea of moving in onto its own area. Within 24 hours we already had donations and like 10 posted projects and we got to set up really fast. It’s really the non digital stuff that’s taking awhile so creating the real business and you know filing for the tax exemption. We’ve already got everything set up and running from our operational perspective and now we’re like trying to backtrack and get the business set up.

BRANDON: So basically you’re using the techniques that we’re talking about on Automate My Small Business to build the charity. So you know even though we call this business automation, it could be for anything. It could be for non-profit or for profit.

MATT: Yeah and you know one of things that we’re going to work on soon is getting a email newsletter set up and we’ll get in to talking about that with autoresponders and stuff.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: Probably a little bit in this episode and more at a later episode.

BRANDON: Well I haven’t fed 500 people in the last week but I do have a SkyMall ad coming out which I thought was a pretty big achievement. I’m never been featured in SkyMall before. SkyMall is that magazine that you see on the back of a seat pouch while you’re on the airline.

MATT: That’s the thing I read when they tell me to turn off my iPod, right?

BRANDON: Exactly. Can you believe it they get 1.8 million readers a day reading that catalog? Because it’s in every plane in North America.

MATT: You know they’d get like ten if they didn’t make me turn off the iPhone.

BRANDON: Yeah, I know. So I’ve been kind of busy with that. That’s kind of my news for the moment and then I plan on doing an infomercial with the product. And you gave me a great idea to try to use Google Video Adwords, you know. During the 80s and 90s, infomercials really had their boom and so did I think a lot advertising companies but now with Google and the internet and making it extremely targeted and easy to make advertising available to everybody even with five bucks in your pocket. You don’t have to have $5,000,000 to do an ad campaign like you use to.

MATT: Yeah I don’t think a lot of people know that Google Video Adwords actually goes on TV and its real TV commercials.

BRANDON: I’m kind of excited to kind of dive into that more. I’m still on the learning process but I think it’s going to be a great option instead of having to go to a large infomercial company, I could just probably test the idea for a very small amount using certain spots that Google has pretty much tied up. Even during in the middle of the night you know they have like a 30-second spot or 2 minutes spot you commonly see early in the morning if you ever wake up as I do with my one-year old son. I got to be up pretty early so I’m watching TV at 6 am, in the morning sometimes and I noticed there’s all sorts of infomercials running so.

MATT: That’s why you have all these ad rollers.

BRANDON: Exactly. I never use them unfortunately but… So anyways, alright, so getting into our featured presentation here, we’re going to be talking about productivity. You know productivity is a component of your automated business plan here. We talk a lot about business tools but when it comes down to it, the whole reason why you’re trying to automate is to free yourself and give yourself more time.

MATT: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So you know we started this often you know I kind of jump the gun but you have a system that you use and you know I’m starting to use it. Tell us about it.

BRANDON: Well, it’s been around for awhile, Getting Things Done by David Allen. He’s actually been number one author and I think he got started maybe about 10 years ago. But I haven’t even been to one of his seminars probably around that time 10 years ago. And he’s got this method called the GTD method, Getting Things Done method, which I think really wasn’t intentional but it came out being GTD. But it caught on so quickly that everybody just started calling it GTD. And his main method is this, there’s a few main processes that you go through. First is the capture phase where capturing ideas wherever you are or whenever they come to you.

MATT: I think that was the most prolific thing for me was you know I’m always trying to manage so many things in my head off you know I need to do this, I need to do this and you know 50 things at least in there that I’m trying to manage you know all at once. And because of that I never get anything done. So as I’m starting to do this the capture of just doing a brain dump of just everything and having it in a place that I could trust and could find, that in itself was a huge boom for me.

BRANDON: And his point to that is that by having everything in the system that you trust, you can finally kind of relax and your stress levels come down a bit and you can really focus on what you need to get done and therefore you become more productive just through the process of being more organized you know with your task list and things of that sort. So the first part was you know just get everything out of your head and that is to capture those ideas when they come up. Usually if you have an iPhone, we’ll talk about some tools we use and if you got even a pad of paper or even an index card in your pocket.

MATT: Yeah I think he invented the system when there were no little hand held devices and it can be implemented with paper but you know with all the technology we have, why?

BRANDON: Yeah, why. I have to admit I recently got myself an iPhone. I was a big Black Berry advocate.

MATT: I won the battle.

BRANDON: You won the battle, Matt. You were the first to do it in and now everybody’s got one but I was always a big Black Berry guy. But there’s just so many apps out there, I had to make the switch. Now one of those apps is Nozbe. And actually Matt, you were the first one to find that. Nozbe is a GTD method application that basically takes your tasks and puts them into projects and categorize them using context.

MATT: Yeah and I really like the way that it does it because a lot of the list management systems which is kind of what this is you know you move that task into different folders and then you can’t get organize exactly the way you want because you really want to be in three different folders all at once. Nozbe is this kind of similar to tags so you can tag one task with a certain context and tag it with another project and tag it with a date and then you can view it from all these different profiles. So you can view you know what’s due today or you can view it as you know I’m having lunch with Brandon, what I need to talk him about or what are the things that need to be done for this particular project. So I can look at it from all these different angles without having to move that task anywhere. It’s just all these tags which I love.

BRANDON: Yeah, it’s a pretty sweet way of just kind of keeping your ideas and tasks organized. But the method goes so much deeper than this. We’re really not giving it full credit here.

MATT: We haven’t even gotten off the first step yet, right?

BRANDON: Yeah, I mean just to back up a little bit I mean I think his whole method of capturing ideas and processing them and his big deals is having a weekly review of all your tasks and all the projects you have and then getting to it and separating your creative time and your creative thoughts. We all go through certain moods and phases where one day is you know you just crank out a bunch of work and you’re real productive. And then the next day maybe you’re just aloof, you’re creative. You want to have a vision meeting with your workers or co-workers or you know it’s all about you know the high level vision and you’re a dreamer at that stage of the day or whatever.

MATT: One thing I really got out of you know his system was don’t put artificial due dates on things. So before I use to say, ‘Oh, these are all the things I need to be done today,’ even though there is no reason that they need to be done today. And his system is about you know only put a date on something if it absolutely has to be done today. Otherwise, just put in a list of priorities and you know go through it as you get to it.

BRANDON: Right. It’s kind of managing the chaos of everyday life you know. It’s a good system so without really getting real deep into it, because we could spend hours on it, the one tool I guess we’ll throw on our tool box here is the Nozbe tool for iPhone.

MATT: The other part of that I want to mention was integrating Nozbe with Jott, j-o-t-t. And for anyone that doesn’t know what Jott is, it’s basically voice recognition that would input whatever you say as text into some other tool or Jott itself. So I actually use Jott while I’m driving. You know if I think of something while I’m driving, I just hit the button for Jott and then I say, ‘Hey, I need to go buy a new screw driver at Home Depot or something,’ and then it will be on that captured phase in the inbox for GTD and then I’ll deal with that later. I’ll process it and organize it some other time but at least I can capture it anytime quickly on this is what I’m doing pretty much.

BRANDON: Yeah that’s a pretty neat way to capture ideas I mean here in California it’s illegal to type or text or even use the phone unless it’s a Bluetooth headset but…

MATT: Yes, I use my headset while I Jott so I am legal.

BRANDON: So that’s a good way of kind of managing some ideas that come off the top of your head. Now a big deal that we should probably talk about is email. I think email management probably takes up a lot of our time throughout the day and if you don’t manage it, you’re going to get over burdened with too much of it and I think we’ve all have had that problem.

MATT: That’s only if you actually look at your email like you do.

BRANDON: Matt, I remember you telling me you respond to what maybe only 90% of your emails.

MATT: I respond to only 10% of my emails.

BRANDON: Oh I meant you don’t respond to 90% of your emails.

MATT: Yeah so one thing I did is that I don’t have email open all the time so I don’t get the little pop up choices that says hey you have mail, you have mail. My phone doesn’t have any little beep when they get an email. When I have time to look for email I go and look at email and I’ll respond to that. But I do it on more of a pool basis than a email is being pushed at me. So it’s on my own terms.

BRANDON: Right. There’s certain habits you’ve developed over time that probably gives you more productivity than most anything.

MATT: And then especially at work if you know someone sends an email to 20 people, I figure there’s 19 other people that can respond to that thing so I’ll wait for them to respond unless I have something really pressing to say about it.

BRANDON: What do you use, Gmail right, for your email?

MATT: Yeah, I use Gmail. Again I like the tagging basis which is similar to what we’re talking about Nozbe that you know I find a lot of people especially with Outlook and Exchange and kind of the corporate email, they tend to create all these folders where they move stuff around and it’s hard to find stuff. I like the tagging aspect of Gmail and I like the search aspect of it you know. Everything is on my inbox in Gmail. I just put different tags on it and then I have different views and you know if I need to find something, I’ll search for it.

BRANDON: So you don’t use that archive feature in Gmail as much as they probably expected, is that right?

MATT: I don’t even know what the archive feature in Gmail is so no, apparently I don’t use it.

BRANDON: Well the idea I would think when Gmail was written was to archive everything into a folder and your inbox ends up empty so that you won’t have this huge inbox. But I think it’s a matter of taste really. Do you like to have everything in your inbox that’s all searchable and that’s all obtainable? So moving it out of your inbox really doesn’t give you anything.

MATT: Yeah I mean I don’t look as my inbox as you know what I need to process. You know maybe I look at the unread mail filter for what’s new as oppose to going to the inbox.

BRANDON: One thing that I think you and I both agree on is having a folder structure that a lot of people have gotten into the habit of in say Outlook is just a huge waste of time. It may seem like, ‘Oh, it’s simple to you know it’s just a second for me to move it to this folder and then that folder.’

MATT: I have all these automated rules that do it for me.

BRANDON: And not only that but I think you’d be surprised if you actually look at the mental brain power you used to have to decide well, does it go in this folder or I guess it would go on that folder too.

MATT: You see my problem is I can never find those things when I had the folder structure. Even if I had like the rule that would say if it’s from this person put it in this folder whatever. I’d be looking through all these different folders trying to find the freaking email that I was trying to forward to someone and never could. So…

BRANDON: I know and I’ve had huge debates with certain people that love their folder structure and they just hold onto it so tightly and…

MATT: I worked with the guy that had probably over 200 folders. I have no clue how he did that.

BRANDON: And he thinks he’s so organized, right? But he’s so unorganized because if you ask him, ‘Well, can you find that email that I sent you a week ago?’ And he’d spend you know—this is like my dad, my dad does the same thing. He spend 15 minutes trying to find an email that I sent him a week ago or he just doesn’t feel like he ever got it and it’s just because he lost it in his folder structure. Because he can’t search, well you can I mean you could set it up so you could search all the folders but he usually sorts it by date or sorts it by you know it goes into that folder. It’s just a big waste of time.

MATT: I think one of the other things is to unsubscribe from office newsletters you get and all that crap you get that goes into your junk mail or whatever. That also close up your inbox and it makes you feel like there’s more things you need to read and it takes your time so spend the day and unsubscribe or like you were thinking just give your VA access to your email and say, ‘Hey go unsubscribe me from everything.’

BRANDON: I haven’t done that yet but I’m tempted to. There was a little bit of concern for giving my email access to a VA but you know I’m kind of over it. There’s nothing real private in my email. It’s all crap. So yeah, that’s one thing you guys could probably consider is utilizing your VA if you’re looking for something for a VA to do to get your feet wet using VAs. I know a lot of people that I’ve heard use VAs for email management. So yeah, that’s another way to do it. What else?

MATT: So I know we both have some ways that we set up our emails so that we really only have maybe one account per company and we have different aliases that we use. You want to talk about how we set that up?

BRANDON: Yeah, this works real well in Gmail because Gmail is one of the few systems that you can forward your multiple email addresses to and still yet be able to respond with those email addresses on the fly. I’ve done this with all the businesses and all the websites that I have. I have them all forwarded to one single Gmail account and I’m probably pushing 15 email addresses now and they all come to one single Gmail account. Yet anytime somebody wants to say email me from one of those accounts without me even knowing it I’ll respond to them and Gmail will then respond to them using that account. So to the outside world, it looks like I’m only using one email address but to me I’m using all 15 of them and I really don’t even know I’m doing it because it’s not something I have to decide while I’m doing it. So it’s a good system. I like it.

MATT: And then one of things I do you know when you’re using Google Apps email versus like so and so @gmail.com, so with the Google Apps you can actually have your own domain name and you get a little more control over the email. I set up basically a wild card that says any email that’s sent to this domain forward it to a certain address. So I can make up addresses on the fly. So if I’m responding someone in support or website admin or I’m signing up for some site where I need to register, I might put in spam@mydomain.com, right? Because I have that wild card I can just make up whatever names I want for the purpose.

BRANDON: Yeah. Every business is going to have a sales address and a customer support address and you know you just make this up really just to one, to look like you have a bunch of departments that all those stuff goes to but everybody knows better, and two, it does help separate the email. So for example, I might have a sales address that will go to my customer service company that I’ve hired and if I decided that I wanted to have customer service separate from sales, for example, before the customer makes a decision on purchasing, they just want to have questions answered, I might have a 24 hours 7 days a week service set up to answer those question because I want that sale to go through. But I’m not necessarily going to have a 24/7 support system where you know if they have questions about where their order is or what I do about returning my order if I don’t like it, I don’t need to be putting 24/7 support on that. So I’ll have that email address go to a different even company if I wanted to do that. So it is good to have those all separated out at the very beginning and I do that even with my phone number too. I’ll have a you know press 1 for sales, press 2 for support, and those separate out even separate companies. So…

MATT: One thing you’re telling me that you use that I thought was pretty interesting was the canned responses in Gmail which I haven’t heard of before.

BRANDON: Yeah that’s built into Gmail Labs. You have to go into the labs setting and enable it. It’s not by default so you set that up. It’s real simple. You enable it and you’ll notice a little link right above the input box that says canned response. You basically type out a response ahead of time and then you can save that response in there and you can use that response anytime you want. So I get certain questions come into me maybe certain business questions you know, how do I get set up with reselling your product and I have a pretty standard answer for that. So instead of me retype that every time, I just click on the canned response and I have a response that sends them exactly what they need to know. Even has maybe built in links into and walks them through it. It’s real simple so I set that up and it takes me a second to respond to those. So I can crank through some of those emails pretty quick. I also use an autoresponder which is a good way to manage at least your newsletter emails anytime you’re doing any marketing. I think Matt, you and I both use AWeber, is that right?

MATT: Yeah and you know before I kind of started getting into these things I didn’t realize what an asset a good email list is of customers.

BRANDON: Oh yeah, there’s certain companies that their entire net worth is based on their email list that they have, that they built up over the years, right?

MATT: Yeah and you can really automate all the messages that you send to that. One thing is they have kind of canned responses to things you know, ‘Hey, you know we got your email. We’ll respond to you in a couple of days,’ but they also have the series of emails so like you can set it up so every week after they sign up to send them a certain message and so you can have automatic email management for months or whatever of you know the series of steps you want to lead them through.

BRANDON: Yeah, if somebody signs up with your newsletter let’s say you might want them to get an immediate letter welcoming them to the service and then maybe a week later you have them go check out a new video or an old video that may seem like it’s new to them but you’ve may have had stored on your website for months maybe even years. But you wanted that one to be the first video they watch.

MATT: Right.

BRANDON: And so you can actually set it up to trigger at certain times.

MATT: Or even like you know if a customer places an order, maybe you want to have a follow up email automatically sent to them like a week after they ordered and say, ‘Hey, did you get it? Is everything okay?’ you know, ‘If you like it, go to our website and you know write a review.’

BRANDON: Yeah. It’s great for marketing purposes. I think everybody is real familiar with autoresponders because we all deal with them on a daily basis but one thing that I don’t think a lot of people realize is that it’s available and how easy it is to set up for the average Joe blow you know. It’s not something that huge companies have just because they have the manpower, the resources to go build this kind of automated software that email you.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: It’s just a simple service that you can go and sign up for a dollar for the first month and I think what is AWeber, about…

MATT: I think it’s like 20 bucks a month but its well worth it once you get enough people. Another thing that I use to automate my time is that I mentioned before I have a couple of content websites. Well, those content websites have RSS feeds and I can have a monthly newsletter that just sends out all the articles that were written this month. AWeber will tie into that RSS feed and just pull the latest articles and send out an automatic newsletter. I don’t even have to write it which is awesome for engaging people. I get great click through on those.

BRANDON: Yeah, that’s a great way to use it. And AWeber seems to be integrated with a lot of other web services out there. There’s another one called Constant Contact.

MATT: Yeah they advertise and then PR all the time. I hear them a lot. And then another one I saw that look like a little a bit more inexpensive was iContact which I think was only 10 bucks a month.

BRANDON: You spell that e-y-e or … ?

MATT: No the letter I.

BRANDON: The letter I?

MATT: Yeah and one thing I like about them was they also had surveys built in so that you can send out surveys and collect responses. That’s something that you use SurveyMonkey for or FluidSurveys but I kind of like the idea having it integrated with my autoresponder so I might look into those as well.

BRANDON: So in general, you know, we’re looking at ways to eliminate and automate everything that we have to do on a daily basis. Tim Ferris, his famous, D.E.A.L. acronym. The E was for eliminate. He talks about all the different ways you can eliminate information coming into you. A lot of us know a lot of these and probably use them I mean there’s so much time wasted at commercials, I mean, Teebo is a great example of finding ways to take time back audio books in your car, podcast.

MATT: Podcast. You listen to our podcast so you already figuring this out so go do something else while you listen to podcast. Go to the gym and I’m sure we’ll really motivate you on the treadmill.

BRANDON: Yeah I mean I can’t get into a car anymore without having something plugged into my iPhone or iPod.

MATT: Yeah. Another service I use is something called getAbstract and it’s basically clipnotes for all the business books that are out there, 5-page executive summaries. You know I don’t have to read all the latest business books. I can just kind of get the summary and say, ‘Yeah, I get the main points and it sounds good’ you know 1 out of 15 of them sound good so maybe I’ll go get the audio book for that and listen to it while I drive around.

BRANDON: Yeah and getAbstract is not audio though, it’s paper. Is that right?

MATT: It is paper and I think they have a podcast for some of the stuff but they write a lot more of the paper ones. But the podcast for that is really good.

BRANDON: You know RSS readers, it’s a good tool if you’re not…

MATT: Yeah if you’re still going to 20 websites to get all your information, go to Google reader and subscribe to the RSS feeds for all those things so you have one place to go and read all your stuff.

BRANDON: And more importantly you’re not reading stuff that you’re not interested in like let’s say you open up the morning paper, half the stuff you probably aren’t going to be reading. You have to skim through it just to find out that it’s not interesting to you.

MATT: They still make morning papers?

BRANDON: I know. They’re dying. They’re dying quickly. But you know I’d say get rid of the paper. It’s not worth it anymore. Get something that you’re interested in only the topics come up only for you that’s personalized.

MATT: I mean with Google news you can do a search for something within Google news and then you can create the RSS feeds after that so it’s really filtered to exactly what you want.

BRANDON: So in general, you know, we’re talking about productivity and getting in productive mode. In order to get in productive mode, you kind of have to get into the zone. Certain people listen to music but by far eliminating distractions is a good one and closing your email application for you know a couple of hours during the day. Matt, you’re probably better at that than I am but …

MATT: Yeah I try to you know turn off all those notifications so ….

BRANDON: Yeah turn off all those notifications and if you can get in the zone—the biggest time wasters turns out to be switching between tasks and people brag a lot about being able to multi-task and really psychologists through the decades have told us that there is no such thing as multi-tasking. I mean yeah you can chew gum while you walk I guess if you want to consider that multi-tasking. But to focus your attention on one topic and then another at the same time, your brain just can’t do it so if you realize that limitation, it’s important to achieve focus on one thing at a time.

MATT: Yeah and one thing that I do around that is I really figure out what kind of mode I’m in so if I’m in a getting work done mode or cranking out a bunch of task, but sometimes I’m just like equivalent of writer’s block, right? Whatever I do I just can’t get done and I learn just to go with that and you know whatever feels natural and is flowing and working that day, that’s what I work on. And you know having that list of all those things from GTD of that capture process allows me to more easily flow to what’s natural that day.

BRANDON: Yeah, one thing that you could try doing is take your list and take three things off of that list and say, alright these three things are the most impactful items I could have that would accomplish the most or get me to where I need to be faster than any of the other items on my list. And then literally put the rest of the list in the drawer. Get them out of your sight.

MATT: Yeah I think further too many of our to-do lists are way too long and they just feel overwhelming that you can never get pass it. And so taking just a couple of items, three is really the max that I’ll take now.

BRANDON: Yeah if you get down with three of them, you’re done. You’re done for the day. I mean if you’re able to say that you did three things that were the most productive or had the most impact on your business or your life every day, you’d be a pretty productive person. So…

MATT: But even if I do three and then I go like I can do more you know I go get a fourth then you know I feel ‘Hey I had four things done’ but if my list had 12 things on it and I only got four things done, I’m going to feel like a failure for the day. So it keeps the morale up too.

BRANDON: That’s true. That’s a good thing. So yeah just eliminating, getting in the zone, trying to reduce your task list at least for the day to just three or less. I guess there’s one other tool I wanted to talk about that I used to use quite a bit and now that I’m at Gmail I’m trying to find a new way of doing it. It was an Outlook plug in that was called email follow up. It’s basically like a read receipt except it’s in reverse. So I would click on this button that would send the email and if the person who I was emailing let’s say email the task to one of my VAs. If the VA hadn’t responded with the yes I got it or maybe an answer I was looking for within—I usually set it for two days, an alert would come up and say you know so and so hasn’t responded to you in two days, what would you like to do. And there is one button that I could click that says send a reminder and it resend the email saying you know the email was sent from Brandon and hasn’t been responded to, you know, would you like to respond now? And it gave them an opportunity to respond to me without me being real, ‘hey why aren’t you responding’ or me saying, ‘what’s the deal?’ You know it’s just so easy way to follow up.

MATT: I think being a reverse read receipt is really nice because really you don’t care that they read the email, you care that they didn’t read the email. So that’s a good tool.

BRANDON: Exactly. A lot of people use this read receipts and it just seems to me that why would I want to know that they read the email. I’m assuming they read the email.

MATT: Unless you sent it to me.

BRANDON: Right, unless I sent it to you. So that was one quick tool I wanted to throw in there. That was a good one.

MATT: So what are the limitations of email? What do you think can email be in the future that would really help our productivity?

BRANDON: I’m pretty impressed with this new Google wave concept. Google has announced and not necessarily launched it yet but it’s called Google wave.

MATT: I think they have their alpha out there or something.

BRANDON: Yeah and it’s pretty impressive. I just watched the video a couple of days ago on how I think they’re relaunching it. So let me a see if I get this right, Matt, I think you watch the video too. They basically integrated email with IM and blogging kind of all in one application. Is that right?

MATT: Yeah I mean they really step back and took a look at email, IM, Twitter all these things are really communication. So if we have to redesign this stuff from scratch, how would we communicate? And so they came up with this Google wave system which is kind of a centralized communication management system I guess. And so you have all these threaded conversations and so you know with email you’re sending an email and then the way your email client figures out if it’s the same message is if same text is in there somewhere. So if you respond in the middle of that text that might screw up the threaded conversation. Like if you have Gmail how do you see the threaded conversation, it’s hard to read those things sometimes.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: So seeing it kind of like a threaded forum or threaded discussion comment that’s real time and you can see as people type you know I think it’s just going to change the way that we communicate. I think it’s going to be the email killer, the killer app for the original killer app.

BRANDON: I hope it does. I think it’s time for email to break out of its shell and into a new life form. I think the email that we know as of today is kind of reached its limit and I could see a lot more interactivity with our email.

MATT: Yeah and I really want something that’s a unified interface to my instant messaging and in my email and in all my forms of communication. I don’t like that I have to go to different clients to do these different things.

BRANDON: Yeah I think another tool that pretty similar to that is P2, the same guys who made WordPress, have this tool called P2. And it’s basically a blog that’s real time but for a team of people and you could make it public if you want but a lot of people keep it private. And you pretty much having a conversation with the whole team almost as if you’re in a room with everybody and anybody can just jump in and jump out anytime they want. They don’t have to be online at any particular time like you would with instant messenger.

MATT: Yeah, I love the immediacy of instant messenger but what I don’t like is you know I have a conversation with you know one VA and then I need to involve another VA and they can’t see the previous conversation or I’m telling VA something and then weeks later someone else calls on the stuff and I said, ‘Oh, we talked about this.’ I want to share with them but you know there’s not really a good way to give it to them. So I want that conversation to be searchable and findable.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: And so that’s something that good with both P2 and Google wave.

BRANDON: Right. So it’s kind of combining the best of both worlds. You have instant messenger which is great and still is searchable. So you have that searchability at least in Gtalk and things of that sort but it’s not available to everybody. You’re the only one that can search it so that stops pretty much there. And if you wanted somebody else to jump in and catch up with you by reading the past blogs or the past communications, they can’t do that unless you know you had to export them or send them the whole thread. So I think this P2 is a good intermediate step before Google wave finally launches so…

MATT: Yeah, by having that style of communication is kind of where it’s going and that’s going to be the way we communicate in the future.

BRANDON: Yeah, I’m excited. I’m looking forward to kind of seeing how this goes. So it’s a good wrap up of some productivity tools, I think some good habits to form and some interesting methods to go check out. If you’re interested to learn more, there’s lots of these stuff all over the place. So…

MATT: Yeah I mean we’ll have all the links in the show notes but definitely go watch the video in Google wave, check out Jott and Nozbe, and pick up a copy of GTD.

BRANDON: Yeah. I think he’s got a new book out.

MATT: He does but you really need to read it first. I made a mistake. I bought the new one first. I got you know part of the way through he’s like, ‘This is just like it is in GTD’ and I’m like, ‘Okay, well, I didn’t read that yet.’

BRANDON: Yeah, start from the beginning. That’s impressive and it’s been around for awhile but that it definitely has the following so it’s got a lot of good nuggets in it.

MATT: Yeah, I’ve been happy with it so far. I’m only you know been using it a couple of weeks now but I really like it so far and I’m a lot less stressed so I like that.

BRANDON: So I mean in summary I think here we are talking about building these businesses that are automated and all that really does is leverage your time and what that does is it makes your time more valuable. So every minute you’re working on something, if you have all the repetitive tasks or the task that you could outsource or delegate to somebody else, it’s almost like you’re reducing, I’m saying that in the culinary sense like you would a sauce. You’re reducing the sauce down to its most flavorful parts, that’s basically your time, right? Your time is more and more valuable as you become better and better at outsourcing this and automating your business. And therefore you as a productive person need to be productive too because your time is more valuable more and more as you do this. So this is a good stuff.

MATT: As you’re able to reproduce these in across multiple businesses, these things will start to pile up more and more so being able to manage this stuff makes a big difference.

BRANDON: And you know the stuff even kind of starts to fold into your personal life you know let’s say around the house, you have to sometimes ask yourself, what’s my time worth? Should I get a maid once a month or once week or not at all? Is my time not worth that much yet?

MATT: Yeah we have a blogpost on the site about you know valuing your time and figuring out if it’s worth it to outsource and stuff like that. But basically it comes down to your time is valuable and you can be building businesses and building profit with that time then almost any price is going to be worth it to outsource it to somebody else.

BRANDON: Yeah, so a lot of good tools, a lot of good techniques. You can find them all. We’re going to put links on all of these tools and techniques on our website. You can check it out at automatemysmallbusiness.com.

MATT: And we want to hear back from you so Twitter us with the #amsb and send us an email and Brandon will …

BRANDON: I want to hear some of your ideas. If you guys have any techniques or tools that you use to do any of these methods, let us know. We always want to hear more from our listeners.

MATT: And our email address is podcast@automatemysmallbusiness.com.

BRANDON: Alright guys thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.

You’ve been listening to Automate My Small Business. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To get a list of the links we’ve just talked about or download more episodes and How To videos, go to automatemysmallbusiness.com. Thanks for being with us and catch us next time on Automate My Small Business Podcast.

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