eSoup

When Is It Time To Get An Outside-The-House Office?

A couple weeks ago a friend of mine;told me he was looking at office space at this cool "collaborative co-working facility" (this is a more space age way of saying "office") called The Hive.

Undoubtedly it's much more cool than the office in my house (you should see the photos of the "chillout room" at their website, and they have a Wii!), but I wondered,

• Exactly what type of internet worker would really need to rent office space?
• Haven't we all been trying to get away from fluorescent lights and cubicles?
• Why not just work at home or at the cafe?

I had a few ideas at the as to the answer to these questions in respect to an entrepreneur with my friend's needs, but a new facet to this "virtual worker having space outside the home" idea popped up today when I found out one of my clients was actually doing something similar!

His reasons for getting outside space were different from my friend's, but I thought "Aha, I see a pattern here!"

Some very successful online entrepreneurs are yearning for a more structured workspace where they can get more work done, meet with in-person clients, and possibly socialize and collaborate with colleagues and potential clients.

Let's take a close look at these questions and discover when it's time to get an outside-the-house office.

How A Tiny Change Can Make A Huge Impact: Eating To Maximize Your Productivity

  smiling kids lunch box 
  Originally uploaded by Keiki

One problem that I have with working from home is that sometimes I get so focused on the work I'm doing that hours go past, and before I know it it's 3pm, and I haven't had breakfast or lunch, and I'm absolutely starving and feeling in desperate need of a nap!

Another occasional side effect of this meal skipping is what Andy Wibbels calls "the hungry bitchies" ;-). Nobody wants to be around someone who has the "hungry bitchies", believe me. You'll get your head bitten off!

Not that the "hungry bitchies" happen that often with me, but I can't deny that proper nutrition and eating at regular time intervals can can have a huge impact on a person's productivity, moods, and energy level.

HowTo Take A Spontaneous Day Off & Still Keep Your Business Running Smoothly

Entrepreneurs have to be the hardest working folks on the planet.

We usually carry much or all of the work load for our businesses, and that makes it difficult to take days off. We are human, however, and there will be days when for one reason or another we're just not feeling up to par.

While it may be tempting to "gut it out" and just work through the pain, I think a healthier and more productive strategy is to take the day off, rest and pamper ourselves so that we can recuperate our strength and bounce back fast.

Taking a spontaneous day off is sooo much easier if, during healthier times, you've put a safety net system in place for those pesky unforeseen sick, mental health, or family emergency days.

BlogMusik: Audio Anti-Depressants for Your Workday

I really think that music has the ability to heal and inspire, and it's amazing the impact that hearing our favorite tunes can have on our energy, mood, productivity, and general happiness on any given day.

Usually I work in silence, but first thing this morning I came across this site called BlogMuzik, and I quickly got absorbed in making my own mixes.

It's free (just register with an email address), and you can create playlists of your favorite songs, then post them on your blog.

For me, the usefulness of this (besides being able to share the mixes with friends) is that when I start my workday I can just pull up my blog page that has the mix on it, and press play.

Presto--instant audio ambiance!

As I said, I usually work in silence, but today I've been listening to the music mix I created, and I've noticed a big difference in my energy. I've totally had my A-game all day (you know, just really pumped up and focused on the task at hand), and I credit this being "in the zone" to hearing my favorite tunes all day.

Top 11 Ways to Kick a Procrastination Stupor

  procrastination 
  Originally uploaded by aelyn

I don't know one person, no matter how evolved, organized or productive they may be, who does not suffer from the occassional bout of procrastination.

Mere mortals that we are, it seems like we're contastantly in danger of falling into a downward spiral of avoiding things that we know we should be doing.

Accompanying this avoidance is often stress, shame and guilt, not to mention that the thing we're avoiding stays firmly planted where it is still needing to get done and perhaps getting worse because we've neglected it for so long.

Oy--what's to be done to overcome this dreaded foe?

Sometimes it helps to get past a roadblock if we understand the reason why it's there. JohnPlaceOnline lists the top 11 causes and cures of procrastination (via) as being:

• Complicated-task anxiety: Break big, complicated tasks into smaller pieces. Complete a starter task, no matter how small.
• Fear of imperfection: Accept that perfection is rarely attainable and seldom necessary. You’re a person, not a robot. Use the 80/20 rule whenever appropriate.
• Indecision: Determine your decision-making criteria, then set a deadline for your decision. Ask a friend to hold you accountable.
• Priority confusion: Distinguish obligations from options. What are you really responsible for? List and prioritize tasks.
• Boredom from minutiae: Automate simple repetitive tasks whenever possible.
• Lack of focus: Minimize distractions. Check e-mail and voicemail only twice per day instead of every 5 minutes. Find a quiet room where you can concentrate. Resist the urge to keep taking breaks.
• Poor organizational skills: Clean your work area. Put tools and utensils in their proper place so you can find them when you need them.
• Laziness: Remind yourself of the consequences of procrastination. Resist the urge to be a couch potato. Try to complete several small tasks to provide a feeling of accomplishment. Reward yourself.
• Lack of energy: Maintain a regular sleep routine. Eat healthy. Exercise regularly. Do not skip breakfast.
• Early morning lag: Before you stop working each day, make a list of the tasks you want to begin first thing the following morning so you can hit the ground running the next day.
• Post-lunch fatigue: Before leaving for lunch, make a list of the things you plan to do when you get back so you can pick up where you left off. Avoid eating a heavy lunch.

I totally agree with everything on John's list. Procrastination is something that we can try to control (kinda hard to cure!  ), but there will be times when we succumb to it. Here's a tip for when that happens:

If you are going to procrastinate, a good thing to do is to procrastinate using activities that are actually somewhat useful.

Let's say you're avoiding a report you're supposed to be doing--well, you might as well procrastinate by doing the dishes, or cleaning your house, or sorting through your mail. That way, even though you're technically procrastinating you're at least using your procrastination time wisely by getting something else necessary done.

Question for ya--What are the things that cause YOU to procrastinate and what do you think the cure is?

HowTo Make a DIY Blog Organizer

I am so old school when it comes to organizational tools--I vastly prefer paper to electronic organizers, and that's why I got all giddy when I read this post by Julie Bonner about this "Blog Binder" idea that she came up with.

When I just had the 2 blogs that I was writing for (eSoup and 901am) I used to keep a list of story ideas for each blog in my notebook, but now that I'm blogging on multiple blogs and am in the process of building a new niche blog called Chocolate Chipped (more on this later), I realized that I needed to turbo-charge my organizational efforts in respect to blogging.

I've followed Julie's outline of how her binder is organized, and have adapted it to suit my needs. I've made it more GTD-esque, and am also using it to keep track of writing projects, such as some ghostwriting I'm doing and this mammoth e-book I'm about to start working on.

Here's how my blog binder is organized:

5 Ways to Create Second Chances for Underperforming Posts

  a second chance 
  Originally uploaded by heavin inc..

Have you ever written a post that you really loved, then published it only to see it flop with no comments or feedback?

Ouch--It's always kind of sad to see one of your favorite posts fall off the front page of your blog and languish in obscurity.

When you spend a good amount of time trying to craft a creative and helpful post, it's hard not to take the deafening silence personally, but the truth is it happens to even the most popular bloggers, including Darren Rowse at Problogger who writes about what he does to give underperforming posts a second chance.

In case you're like me and wondering "What gives? This is one of my best posts--why does no one like it?", Darren has some advice that is kind of consoling.

Reasons he cites that can account for a post that flops (his tips, my phrasing):

• More high profile stories breaking at the same time hog all the attention
• Your traffic fairy godmother was MIA (more about "traffic fairy godmothers here)
• Posting on the wrong day of the week (I am not sure what the "wrong day of the week" is, although my guess is that the most popular days seem to be Tuesday and Thursday, and the least popular are Saturday, Sunday and Monday)
  
• You wrote the post when you were still a newbie and didn't have any readers yet
• Or perhaps your post just wasn't as great as you thought!

I also want to add one to Darren's list:

• Posting too frequently--I'm starting to think that putting up too many posts has the inevitable effect of causing some of the posts to get lost in the fray. It could be that the post flopped simply because your readers didn't see it.
  

It does make me feel somewhat better to see that even Darren has these issues. He has some great tips giving your best underperforming posts a second chance which you can find here, but I wanted to share some of the things that I do to save my fave posts from dying a lonely death  .

Here are ways I give posts a second chance:

1) Blogging on a more popular blog. Sometimes I blog on bigger blogs than mine that get much higher traffic, and on a couple of occasions I have taken ideas from my favorite posts on my own blog, and have re-worked them to address the audience of the bigger blog. It's really rewarding to publish on a blog with much higher readership and see the comments and trackbacks start pouring in, especially if the post that I originally wrote for my own blog fell flat. Also, there is indirect traffic that comes to my own blog from my author link on the bigger blog.

2) Have a "Best Of.." section to draw attention to old posts. I put links to my favorite posts in my side bar.

3) Re-work posts and turn them into articles for online article submissions. Not all blog posts are suitable for online article submissions (the articles need to be more formally written and kind of timeless with minimal links), but when I write a post that is "article-worthy" I'll take some extra time and re-write it so that it's appropriate for article submissions. The article is reaching a completely different audience than my blog post, and it has the potential to get picked up for publication in an ezine.  I think I've had pretty good success with this, since at least one of my articles was picked up by an ezine with a big subscriber list, which resulted in a jump in RSS subscribers to my blog. Also a couple weeks ago someone contacted me asking if he could include one of my articles in a book he was writing (a book about archery, of all things!).

BTW--I always hear folks fretting about duplicate content with the online article submissions, but the submission service I use (www.SubmitYOURArticle.com) allows me to create unlimited variations of certain elements of my article (title, intro paragraph, resource box, and various sentences within the article) so that potentially each publisher will each receive a unique, well-written version of my article.

4)  Fewer posts, more fun. Another thing I've started doing on the front end to give posts more of a chance to take off and comments to develop is to post less frequently. I have decided that I would rather put up 1 to 3 posts a week and give conversation a chance to develop around the post than to inundate you guys with multiple posts a day every day of the week.

Now, this kind of goes against the problogging/SEO approach where you try to produce as much content as you can, but let's face it--I am not a problogger and I don't have the Hurculean writing stamina that those problogger guys have. It means more to me to produce quality posts and not kill myself with writing, writing, writing (after all, I have a life and a business besides this blog! ;-))

5)  Turn comments into blog posts. This is sort of a side topic, but another thing I do is re-work some of my more detailed comments that I leave on folks' blogs to be entire posts on my blog. In fact, the first version of this post you're reading here was actually a rather elaborate comment I placed on Problogger in response to Darren's post. I had written up such a detailed comment, I was like "This comment is "blog post worthy". I might as well find a way to use it on my own blog." I've also done this with a few other comments I've left of folks' blogs where my comment sparked the inspiration for a post.

These are some of the ways I give my fave posts second chances--I'm wondering if anyone else does this type of thing.

Do you recycle posts, and if so, how do you go about it and what success have you had?

I'd love to hear some other ideas! 

Update: I'm now realizing that I almost passed up a perfect opportunity to give some of my fave underperforming posts a second chance by posting links to them in this post. Here are my faves that are in danger of dying a lonely death:

• The Juggler's Rivalry--maybe it's just not a catchy title?

• Einstein: Creativity Trumps Brains--I've changed the title on this one a couple times trying to spark some interest, but no luck. I find the excerpt from the Daily Show to be interesting and hilarious. I've watched it numerous times, and was just waiting for someone to chime in and say they liked it too, but not one single bite so far!

One thing that these two posts have in common is that they are both based on videos, and I don't know if that has anything to do with the lack of interest. Or....maybe they just aren't as good as I think they are, and I'm more attracted to the idea behind the post rather than the post itself.

• And from over on 901am.com, I really thought the post Nomadic Web Workers Follow In Hemingway's Footsteps would go over bigger than it did. Remarkably, the same day I posted the Hemingway post over there, I also published a HowTo called "5 Ways to Work Less & Get More Done Online", and that one took off! Out of the two of these, I really liked the Hemingway one more and thought it was better writing, but the HowTo got far more comments and trackbacks. Oh well, what do I know?!!! 

Email Ninja Moves: Challenging Email Expectations

This is Part 3 of the eSoup series about establishing healthy email habits and taming your rambunctious inbox.

  Let's see a show of hands:

*Do you feel like you need to respond to emails within minutes of their arrival in your inbox?

*Do you find yourself compulsively hitting the "check mail" button every few minutes, expectantly waiting for the adrenaline rush of getting new mail?

*Do you feel like you're always checking, checking, checking, but not actually getting anything done?

If so, then you're not alone.

I don't know what the deal is, but I think whoever invented email may have unwittingly unleashed everyone on earth’s latent obsessive/compulsive tendencies.

It's like email is specially constructed as the perfect interruption machine, and it takes some serious strategy on our part to overcome its hypnotic powers.

So, how often should we check it?

It really depends on your job--for example, I check email twice a day most work days, once in the morning and once towards the end of the day.

This works for me, but if you're an agent for your government's counter terrorism unit, and you're awaiting important info about how to save the world and such, you're going to want to check it more frequently.

(Little known fact-- Jack Bauer checks his email at least every couple of minutes, 24/7, and to my knowledge this is the most exciting photo ever taken of anyone checking email.)

For folks like Jack, it’s a necessity to always be on call with emails, but I think most of us don’t have to be that radical about things. The idea is to check email as often as you need to and as infrequently as you can get away with.

Challenging Email Expectations

The first thing to do is decide how often you need to check email, then schedule email check times in your day.

That's right--do not leave your email open all day long and check continuously throughout the day and night.

Remember--You are not Jack Bauer.

I feel pretty safe in saying that the security of your country will not be in jeopardy just because you aren't on call with email all the livelong day. (This is just a guess though--I'm not entirely sure of the occupations of everyone who reads this blog!)

At all other times outside your designated email checking times, you might want to consider completely closing your email program so that you're not tempted to fiddle around with it and take a quick look-see. At the very least, you could disable your auto-check (this is what I've done with mine) so that you're in complete control of when your email grabs your attention.

The Newest Info Is Not Necessarily The Most Important

Here's something to meditate on--When we stake ourselves out in our inbox, we’re being seduced by the immediacy of email, and we’re giving many tasks an elevated priority simply because they’re new.

Let’s all say this out loud: “The newest information we receive is not necessarily the most important (unless you're a counter terrorism agent)."

Whew--that feels good!

Believe me, the sooner you get out of hypnotic trance of your email and put an end to the check, check, checking, the weight of the world will be lifted off your shoulders, and you'll actually be able to concentrate on getting your work done. (Photo of Jack's Palm via)

This is Part 3 of the eSoup series about establishing healthy email habits and taming your rambunctious inbox.

You can find Part 1, Zeroing Out Your Inbox here and Part 2, Filters To The Rescue! here.

 

Email Ninja Moves: Filters to the rescue!

  Splattering Bubbly Cauldron of Yummy 
  Originally uploaded by mrjoro.

This is Part 2 of the eSoup series about establishing healthy email habits and taming your rambunctious inbox. You can find Part 1, Zeroing Out Your Inbox here.

By this time, hopefully your inbox is either zeroed out or very close to zero, and you're no longer drowning in a sea of emails.

This the perfect opportunity for a fresh start and to put some systems in place to make it so that zeroing out your inbox on a daily basis is as easy as possible.

Filtering: Automatic Email Triage

Remember when we did the "triage" sorting when we were getting the inbox zeroed out?

We searched/sorted for spam and junk mail, for newsletters, blog comments, for emails from family and friends, and for each of these types of messages we put them in an appropriate folder or the trash.

One of the main time saving tricks for being able to zero out your email every day is to automate as much of this sorting process as you can so that you don't have to touch or look at the emails in order to get them in the appropriate folders.

We do this by taking a few minutes on the front end to set up message filters, which are a basic feature of most email clients. With filters you can have incoming mail automatically sorted into different folders, with certain messages labelled, marked as "Junk", or even deleted. This is a huge timesaver!

  Sabrina (Elizabethan) 
  Originally uploaded by laceygj.

Since it's likely that many of us use different email clients I'm not going to go into the technicalities of how to set up a filter, but will rather focus on what we're filtering. (FYI--here are the "Create a filter" tutorials for Thunderbird, Eudora, Outlook.)

Stuff to filter for

Blog comments--I tell mine to automatically go into a "Pending" folder; however, if you get tons and tons of comments like some people we know ;-), you might want to set up a folder that's just for blog comments.

Ezines--I personally don't subscribe to a lot of ezines, but one of my clients loves, loves, loves him some ezines and gets 15+ a day. I've set up his email so that his ezine emails go straight into a folder marked "Ezines".

Personal emails--If you get regular emails from certain folks in your personal life, you could filter for the names/email addresses of your friends/family and have their emails shoot straight into a "Friends/Family" folder. When I'm doing this for a client, I try to separate out the business-y stuff from the more personal items, but of course this is just a matter of personal choice, and you might want to have your personal emails go straight into "Pending" or "Archive".

Priority client emails--I have the emails from clients go directly into a special folder so that in the morning when I hit the "get mail" button and 200 emails come flooding in, I can immediately see if one of my clients has written me, so that I can read his email before tackling anything else.

  Coffee filter "rose". 
  Originally uploaded by Erin Or Die..

Task related emails--I get tons of email, but lots of it is predictable with the same action being done for certain types of messages. For example, one of my clients has an article submission site, and folks will write in wanting to know if their article would be appropriate for our service. The subject line of these emails is always "Is this article suitable?", so I filter for that subject line and have all those emails go into a folder called "Is this article suitable?" (how original, I know!). I do the same for other types of task related email so that I can tackle all of these tasks in a bunch, rather than always having to switch modes back and forth. I think if you are doing one action over and over, that if you can get your momentum going by tackling all those emails in a bunch, you work faster.

Spam/Junk--There are junk mail controls that you can use in most email clients. I use the one in Thunderbird, and basically you "train" the control to filter out certain types of email that you consider junk. Somehow spam still gets through though, so I do filter for certain recurring spam messages I get and have them sorted directly into the trash.

Stuff I don't need to see or save--I don't know if this is true of anyone else, but I get bunches of emails from sites that I don't need to actually read or save. These are auto-response emails, and I can't elect not to get them, but I don't need to read them, so I filter them to go directly into the trash.

For those of us who don't like to think first thing in the morning...

The huge trick with processing email is to be able to quickly determine:

• What the heck is this?
• Is it actionable (is there some sort of action I need to take in response to this email)?
• If it is NOT actionable, then does it go in the trash or in the archive folder?
• If it IS actionable, then what is the "next action" I need to take?

  Coffee Filter Dress. 
  Originally uploaded by sonyakarate.

For a big chunk of my daily email, these questions are automatically answered for me by the filters I've set up. I hit the "get mail" button, and the premilimary sorting begins automatically.

The junk items automatically go in the trash without me having to even look at them. The priority items are plainly visible to me in the folders I've set up. I can glance at my folders and immediately see I have 3 emails from a client, 5 articles that need to be reviewed, and 13 ezines that are neatly corralled in one area.

For the most part, I don't really have to think about what my "next action" is for the emails--the nature of the sorting/filtering has determined the action for me.

My exact filtering strategy may not work for you--you'll probably need to customize your filters to fit your own needs, since each of us gets different types of emails. The big thing to watch out for is the recurring emails and emails you can predict.

Truly, any amount of filtering that you can get going will decrease the time you're spending in your inbox. Plus, it helps with our morale to not be overwhelmed with an onslaught of 200+ random emails rushing into our inbox first thing in the morning! :)

Next week we're going to be talking about email exectations, aka the question for the ages: "How often should I check it?"

Other parts of this series:

Part 1: Email Ninja Moves: Zeroing Out Your Inbox

Growing a Right Hand

  Where the !*$%^!* is SIlver? 
  Originally uploaded by purpleslog.

For a lot of folks, even if they're overwhelmed, there's still this part of them that wants to say "I can do it myself!"

When you're first starting your biz, it's a matter of survival to be able to wear all the hats and get everything done yourself. Another part is that if you're used to working on your own, it's sort of scary to give up some of the balls you're juggling.

I was getting ready to start with a new client last month, and as he and I were gabbing each day and getting to know each other better, he would talk about things that were weighing him down and clogging up his day, and I would say, "You know this is something that I can take off your plate. This is something that you don't even need to be messing with any more."

At first, each time I would say it he was a little surprised, like "Really? I don't have to do this anymore?"

At one point, early on, this over-busy guy even said, "My only concern is that I won't have enough stuff to keep you busy." And knowing what his schedule was like, I replied, "Are you kidding me?"

It took a few weeks of me chiming in and reminding him of what I could do to help before he adjusted his thinking from a "I'm a Lone Ranger" mindset  to a "We're a team now; we share the load" mentality.

For most biz owners thinking of taking on an assistant or someone to help them manage their business, I think the biggest hurdle is wrapping their mind around the concept of exactly how can someone help make their daily life easier. It's actually hard to imagine at first.

Along these lines, KG had asked me to write a guest post for Write Now Is Good  addressing a question that her readers had brought up:

What types of things can a writer delegate to save time?

I think that's an excellent question, and although you might not be a writer, if you're a biz owner who is thinking about teaming up with an assistant or a virtual business manager, you might be interested in the list of things I came up with. Here it is: Delegate tasks to save time

If you're wondering anything about this type of stuff, don't be shy. I'm happy to answer your questions :-).