I think the real benefit comes from the long view. I’ve posted below the percentages of my time allotments for the past year. These figures may mean nothing to you, as they are my numbers, but imagine what you could pull from having this insight into your time at the office? Maybe you will see that you are not doing enough of one thing, or maybe way too much of something you should not be doing at all. Either way, you’ll know – and that could be enough to push you into something new in the way you work.

For clarification, “real” work simply means all project work. Teaching is my time teaching at Shepherd and FCC, including travel. AAF/AIGA is my time volunteering for both boards. Yes, I spent more time doing that than new business, but in someways they overlap. (Click here to join now). Administration is simply the act of running the business. Remaining percentage is various other tasks.

UPDATE: Here is a link to the timesheet I use. Timesheet (PDF)

Being organized means having a system that can capture tasks, needs, and items, as well as having some effective way of execution. So many systems and products focus on the first part. You get a great feeling when you see all the work in front of you in nice orderly lists and there are so many choices for list building applications it’s almost overwhelming. But how many applications help with the next step – actually doing the work?

Before we get into doing, lets talk about collection.

I’ve been using GTD as a great framework for much of my organization and task collection. Being someone who tends to have a lot of irons in the fire, GTD helps me clear my mental space to focus on the task at hand. I complete the weekly planning sessions reviewing the items that are active, I keep a note pad by my desk and a dicta-phone in my pocket to capture any new items that arise whether I’m at my  desk or in the car. This system has worked for me and continues to be the impetus behind the collection of tasks and ideas. Task collection is critical to task and time management because you need to be working on what matters. And you will not know what matters until you have it all in perspective.

Now for the bread and butter: task execution.

Executing tasks is where we have to fold in one more dimension that is not present in task collection. This dimension is time, and it has two parts.

1. The time it takes to complete a task
2. The time in which it is due

Many popular applications and methods only focus on the latter. In college, I was guilty of this method and fell victim to Parkinson’s Law on may occasions.  This happens when you only think of the deadline, and tasks end up taking as much time as you have available before that deadline. So you may surf the net, get coffee, or take a few more glances at your inbox, knowing or subconsciously knowing you have more time to complete a task than it generally would take. The issue arises that you are allowing your allotted time to stretch beyond what it actually takes to do a task. Confronted with this stretch, you may not gravitate toward other meaningful tasks on that list since you are still focused on the deadline. So rather than finishing up and moving on, you loose time in limbo.

There is no such thing as “extra time”, time is quantifiable. Everything you do can be measured by the time it takes to complete it. Making coffee, taking the dog outside, driving from your house to the store – all of us can very easily assign approximate durations to these events. Now most of us do not care how long it takes to walk our pet because we are not pressed by any given deadline. But as soon as we have a deadline, those durations become more important. Most of know how long it takes to drive to work, or get to the train from our house in the morning, because we have to be at work at a certain time. So when you look at managing these deadline oriented tasks, the concern of task duration becomes a critical part.

So why are lists not enough?

About six months ago, I started doing something new with my task lists. I started putting them into my calendar. Not just in the nice little task bar you have in Outlook, but as blocks of time designated for an event. In fact, part of my weekly review on Friday, is to plan out in blocks of time my tasks for the next week. I started this because I would put meetings into my calendar as blocks of time, but not much else. So every morning I would fret about the large list in front of me, and the one or two hurdles in my event calendar.

So I started estimating how long tasks would take as “events” and putting them into my calendar.  And after a few weeks I saw some positive results:

• Completed more projects ahead of time or on time at the latest.
• Knew my real availability for immediate needs.
• Could schedule in every aspect of work, including self promotion and long term projects.
• Had complete focus on my task at hand, not “the list”.
• Increased creativity and mental space.
• Became more than 90% accurate at estimating the time to complete tasks.
• Had more time to get things done and spent less time shuffling and editing “the list”

This approach may not work for everyone and the best laid plans will always be faulted by life’s unexpected emergencies. But where would you rather be when it happens? With a list and no plan, or a list and a plan? And you have to be realistic. The chart below shows what I do and do not schedule.

I recommend that you stop thinking of your work as a series of deadlines.

Work is a series of events, prioritized by when they are due. Hopefully you will start to feel the freedom and energy of having your day in front of you and removing the over-arching task of keeping tabs on the list. It’s working for me, and I know it can work for others. Its a work in progress, but working very well so far.

If you have questions, ideas, or additions please feel free to post below in the comments to contact me on twitter @tobinlehman.

• Use both sides of printed paper, recycling when full
• Recycle Everything. (Cans, paper, electronics, ink cartridges)
• Drink tap water instead of bottled
• Buy 100% or more post-consumer content in paper goods and office supplies.
• Use skylights to light the office during the day
• Shut down the computers and printers at night (after back-ups of course)
• Set computers to sleep after a short period of away time
• Go paperless for documentation (PDFs)
• Use soap and water to clean desks, chairs instead of chemical cleaners
• Walk to work and meetings when able.
• Use real utensils and dishes, not plastic and paper
• Offer sustainable hosting options to our clients

All of these are simple steps that I am taking but I’m sure there is more that could be done. If you have ideas or suggestions, please post back and let me know.

I recommend this book to anyone who manages a team or interfaces directly with customers. We need a team of dedicated and thoughtful customer service representatives, not just the one who sits at the front desk. With the holiday season quickly approaching, consider empowering all of your employees with this small book. It just might be the best present your office receives.

As the Internet continues to be a wonderful place to explore, participate, and consume, the technology we use to engage this plane of reality is in a constant state of development by software developers and their communities. As builder of sites that use this technology, we must provide the most progressive and robust experience possible to our clients and their customers, keeping up with these advancements. In this progressive response, we must also leave behind software of the past to continually provide a cost effective solution to our clients. The following list states the current minimum browser standards covered in our development projects.

Microsoft: Internet Explorer 7

Mozilla: Firefox 3.0, Camino 1.5

Apple: Safari 3.0

In addition, as future Web browsers emerge on the market, compatibility for your site and these new browsers may become suspect to new issues. As a proactive approach, you or your marketing department should be conducting an evaluation and review of these new browsers as they emerge. Happy browsing!

http://eternalmoonwalk.com/

You can’t work this fast. Something like this can only come from a community of devout, passionate people who care more about what they are doing than anything else. I don’t think there is a firm on earth that could promise this to a client in less than 3 weeks, then generate enough viral traffic to have such an amazing site flourish so quickly. It seems that passion is stronger than budgets, sleep, and eating.

Step 1:

Close all browser windows but one. Goto Tools > Options

Step 2:

Select Settings in the Private Data Section

Step 3:

Select the Options you want to keep or remove. Make sure “Cache” is remains selected. When complete, hit OK

Step 4:

Hit the Clear Now Button

Shortcut:

Going forward you can simply press Cntl+Shift+Del to clear your Private Data based on the settings you just selected. Similarly, you can hit Cntl+Shift+R to simply empty your cache only.

So much can be learned from a continual review of your Web site statistics. Trends in your user’s habits and patterns start to emerge. From there you are able to leverage new findings to support a new ad strategy or get raw data on how successful the web site is working for you. Statistics can also give you keywords that visitors are using to find your site in search engines. There is just so much to learn from these simple reports that you cannot ignore them!

But more and more, online marketing has become an intensive and time-consuming effort. It’s harder to manage all of the venues and make sense of it all. That is why we have started to offer a new service to our clients, Web Site Monitoring.

With Web Site Monitoring, we take a look at your site every month and generate an easily digestible report that you can review with your morning coffee. This simple report gives you a high-level review of your traffic in and out of your site and detailed keyword report with information on how you site is performing in your keyword market. In addition, we give you a list of possible growth strategies, as well as failures, to help optimize your Web presence. All in all, you finish with a confident understanding of where your Web site stands.

Give us a call 240.575.5887, or email us to learn more about this service and how it can help you reach a new level of confidence with your Web presence.

So to mark the year in which IE6 will finally fall below supportable levels, I have compiled a list of links to remember this fallen giant and the hordes of people who couldn’t wait for it to pass on. The following links are organized by death-scale, starting with “why is should die” to the more active “campaigns trying to kill it.” Whatever may happen this year, IE6 and I will still have those memories of broken mice and expletives that we shared many a night past.

Why it should die:

1. The weird and wonderful world of Internet Explorer
2. IE CSS bugs that’ll get you every time
3. 119 Bugs in Internet Explorer 6 for Windows

Why it won’t die:

1. The Slow Lingering Death of IE6
2. Campaigns to kill the web browser that just won’t die: Internet Explorer 6
3. Why won’t IE6 die already!?

How to deal in the mean time:

1. How I Might Deal with IE6
2. ie7-js
3. Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6

People who are watching, waiting for it to die:

1. Bring down IE6
2. 6 Reasons Why IE6 Must Die

Campaigns trying to kill it:

1. Stop IE6 script
2. Kill IE6
3. IE Death March