james burdine

I’ve loved music even longer than I’ve loved productivity (No, really). I realize that while I’ve written posts on Johnny Cash and taking early action on problems and musicians recording covers as a framework to rethink product development, I hadn’t until now written about music as a productivity tool.   As I began writing, I realized I was in the trap of writing a post about using different kinds of music to drive distinct activities: like listening to live bop and post-bop jazz for deep strategy docs and writing long emails or early REM, Radiohead, or Midnight Marauders to get the creative juices flowing.   That would be a fun post to write (hell, I might even sound cool), but it’s not helpful from the perspective of productivity.   Instead, I’d like to focus on three smart and subtle uses of a deliberate soundscape as a productivity tool that work for me. (These ideas all work just fine whether I’m using earbuds, big old headphones, or streaming through a bluetooth speaker).  

No Clocks. Create three or four 20 and 45 minute playlists of your favorite songs. When I have a 30 or 60 minute block of time to knock out a series of tasks, I play one of these playlists on shuffle. Shuffle ensures that I’m not actively aware of how many songs remain to be played or how much more time I have. When the music stops, my time is up. By avoiding looking at the clock, I find that I free my mind up to dive deeper (and more quickly) into the task.

Slack integration. For blended remote/co-located teams (or purely remote teams) using Slack, establish a Slack channel for sharing music suggestions. Call it SlackTunes and as a camaraderie builder, on say a Weary Wednesday, I might do a call out to @channel and ask each team member paste the Spotify link to the song they’re listening to at the moment. Then the whole group spends the next hour working and listening to each other’s picks. It sounds silly, but it really is a nice way to share in virtual office life for people based in different locales. Pro-tip: if Weary Wednesday is too downtempo for you, make your callout Getting to the finish line or Getting ready to ship to hype up ship dates. Do you work in an office or studio alongside your colleagues? You can use the same tip.

Frequent Traveler? Soundscape is important when you travel too. I’ve found I can get to work more quickly in a hotel room, borrowed office, or airport lounge if I’m listening to a playlist that I regularly use in my office. It’s as though my mind recognizes the soundscape as a trigger to get to work. (More on travel hacks and the role of a good white noise app here).

There was a time where I had a team of 80 and only two members of my team were based in the same NYC office that I considered my home base. The other 78 team members were spread across disciplines and the globe, and while a portion worked from home, others worked from long-standing satellite offices. Skype kept us connected and proved a miracle-worker in reducing our communication expense and empowering us to use early video calls. Later, I led a team based in the Pacific Northwest with sales reps based across the US. Technology improved dramatically within those few years, and we suddenly had iPhones with FaceTime and group text chats, plus video conferencing software and screen sharing on our laptops.   I’ve said time and again, that in my corporate roles, working remotely was a critical component to success. It gave me the space to get big, strategic thinking done without being interrupted. Over time, I think my preferred situation was a blend of time in the office and time spent working remotely, but that depended a lot on the duties and responsibilities of the role I was in.   Managing remote teams, coordinating remote efforts, and working remotely are increasingly common and hugely beneficial to collaborative work. I’ve had the opportunity to both manage remote teams and be a remote worker. I’ve had good experiences and challenging scenarios that came up short under both scenarios, and I thought it was worth a post to explore my observations on managing, leading, or experiencing a successful remote work engagement.   There’s no perfect model for co-located teams vs remote workers due to variables like the type of work, the industry, the company culture, the quality of the company processes and procedures, and the ability of all involved to trust and communicate candidly. There is a lot of good writing available on all aspects of best practices for remote workers. Instead of rewriting what’s already available, I’ve included a list of remote worker philosophies and best practices at the end of this post.   What’s so hard about communication, anyway? In my experience, one of the great challenges to working remotely or managing a team that isn’t co-located, is an overlooked aspect of communication. The problem to take on is how to foster informal communication among yourself, your remote workers, and your co-located team. It’s pretty easy to set-up formal meetings, check-ins, status updates, etc: be aware of time zones, send cal invite, fire-up Skype, FaceTime, appear.in, Google Hangouts, or GoToMeeting and you’re on your way. What’s much harder though is to create a culture that spurs your remote workers to contact each other in those instances where, if the team were all located in the same building, someone would have popped into her colleague’s office with an idea or an insight. Capturing those ideas and insights is critical to productivity as missing acting on them could prove to have a high opportunity cost. What you want to avoid is developing a culture of I’ll add this point to a list and mention it during our next 1:1 - this is the equivalent of pouring molasses on the gears of your business. Encourage ongoing group chat or leave windows open with private chats with your remote team members. Slack is a fantastic solution for asynchronous communication and will help build a culture of not waiting to act. If you manage a team of remote workers, I’d suggest stealing a best practice from every college professor I’ve ever known and keep an hour open for digital drop-in office hours every other day. Look your company culture dead in the eye. I’ve found company cultures where being a successful remote worker is near impossible. If that’s the case, you should think long and hard before accepting a remote assignment, approving that one of your team members transitions to a remote role, or creating a new role that can be remote. You don’t want to set yourself or your team up for grief and failure.   If you’re uncertain whether your company culture might not be right for remote work, ask yourself: is this organization hierarchical or flat, how is power wielded, is the company results-focused or time-focused, are people gossipy, is the organization closed-minded when facing new organization design, does the organization devote time to developing and documenting processes and procedures, and lastly, has the organization historically had a bad experience with field sales reps? Most of these points are pretty straightforward, and a combination of any two or three of them probably indicate that the organization isn’t ready to transition to any specie of remote workforce. That said, I’d like to pick at the last two points in a bit more detail.   It may seem contrarian, but process and procedure are actually more important to a remote worker than you might realize. For co-located teams, new processes and procedures are codified and oftentimes the practical understanding of these new rules and regs are disseminated in hallway chatter and socialized among teams over coffee or in quick informal chats in a hallway or an office. For the remote worker, process and procedure represent the substructure of their work experience. Process and procedures are sort of the walls of their experience in the organization. In my experience, remote workers tend to have a higher adherence rate to process and to make that possible, require greater documentation of the same. They want to read the new protocol. Weirdly, it’s like their office getting a new coat of paint.   It’s nothing new to have field sales reps based in territory, meaning that for many companies, a field sales team is the organization’s sole experience in having an employee based offsite. For many reasons, it can happen over years or decades that a sales rep becomes less effective than he was in the past. Eventually, the rep and the company part ways and in my experience the false lesson-learned in the unsavvy organizations can be that remote workers fail. Really what happens is that sales is hard, and sometimes sales reps need to move on to selling something else for someone else. But if the organization isn’t careful, an attitude that all employees must be on-site to be successful can take root, making it much harder culturally to move non-sales roles to remote opportunities.   Selected Resources on Remote Work Best Practices

Remote Teams: Best Practices and Culture Lessons

How to Manage Remote Direct Reports

The Fundamentals of Running a Successful Remote Team

6 Remote Work Culture Lessons from Successful Startups

How to Effectively Manage a Remote Team

The 5 Best Ways to Make Remote Employees Feel Like They're Part of the Team

10 Essential Tips to Managing Remote Employees

5 Ways to Effectively Lead Remote Teams

7 Best Practice Tips For Successfully Working Remotely

In my experience, there’s an often overlooked critical tool for increasing productivity across teams and businesses and it’s found outside of notebooks (no, really), automation, and keeping meetings short. Candor is the interpersonal linchpin of productivity.   How does a lack of candor show-up?   When I prepare a SOW for a client, The first section is titled What I heard you say, because I’ve found that at times clients don't fully articulate the extent of the problem faced by their company. In having the client read back what they told me, it often strikes up a deeper conversation wherein the client provides more background, detail, or other critical facts.   How often have you been a part of a meeting or, god help you, a task force and as project milestones are being reviewed, you learn that a member of the team hasn’t hit his respective deadline. In that moment, it’s easy to begrudge your colleague’s miss, but it’s also a good moment to think about the culture of the meeting (or even the company) and ask yourself if the design of the project was realistic? Was there a moment where your colleague should have asked for more help but didn’t? If so, I lean toward asking myself if I’m encouraging my cohort to mention when they are short on time or resources. Am I supportive in those moments? There’s a part of my upbringing that frowns on the idea of admitting weakness or need - I’m sure some of you identify with this admission. The downside to not raising a resource issue early in the execution of a project is that it will inevitably cause a productivity hit later in the process. How so? Other work within the project plan will need to be sped up or decelerated to make up for the resourcing miss.   Why is a culture of candor important?   Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone, shares an insightful view on how to improve candor and positive feedback within organizations, meetings, and work groups. This is a great read, and hits home. I only wish I’d been apart of teams that followed his suggestion to have a Yoda in the room representing candor.   Five ways candor improves productivity 

A team that can speak freely and confidently is fearless and is free to constructively (and blamelessly) problem-solve.

Candor enables clear discussion around resource and time allocation as a project is scoped - regardless of rank or seniority.

Candor during the discovery phase of a problem-solving exercise or a consulting engagement enables faster, more deliberate work. In its inverse, a lack of candor when describing a problem-area inevitably leads to scope creep, as inevitably the undisclosed rot spills out and upends the project timeline.

High performers benefit greatly from frank 360 feedback and the only way to get it is to encourage (and never stifle) candor in group settings and one-on-one meetings.

Candor produces a culture of learning and openness to new ways of solving problems, building new businesses, or framing new creative explorations. In that way, candor enables a team or an ad-hoc cohort to short-circuit how they’ve traditionally done things to embrace a new disruptive way of working that may leapfrog them forward.

There was a period in the mid-2000s when I was a new dad with a demanding expat job that was eating me from the insides outward and for which I needed to maintain stoic composure and lead a team through a difficult year. To say the least, I was irritable and impatient.   Luckily, around that same period, I happened to read an article on mindfulness (here's a more recent article) - it was 2006 and early days for mindfulness to appear in business writing. I began to hear myself admonishing myself (and later my team) saying things like: “are you doing what you’re doing while you’re doing it?” and “we don’t have time to do things right but always find time to do them twice.” I was a charmer. The mindfulness was helpful, but my impatience diluted the positive impact it could have. It took time, but I improved.   In the intervening years, I’ve expanded my mindfulness focus to another area of increasing annoyance and opportunity: the importance of waiting. In the last two years, I found that being present with the concept of waiting while having to wait at unpredictable times during the day helps develop a kind of patience that is a critical skill in business, the arts, and in intellectual life generally.   What is the benefit to having to wait? Waiting in line for coffee or a sandwich, while Photoshop renders an image, or Excel chews on a dataset is a perfect opportunity to observe yourself waiting and then explore what that feels like and become comfortable with that annoyance or discomfort.   Why is this important? Think about the last time you were in a meeting and an attendee arrived unprepared. If you find your anxiety level rising and your annoyance increasing as he scrambles for the materials that were to be shared, my experience is that I’m that much more likely to miss the point of those same materials when presented because I’m distracted by my own annoyance at having to wait. 

I remember my first-ever business trip - I traveled to Mexico City with my brand new passport and brought every piece of paper, two 3” white binders, every piece of marketing collateral that I thought I just might maybe kinda need. I carried a Toshiba Tecra laptop (roughly the size of a record player) in my messenger bag and little else. My roller-bag was so full that I had to check it, and luckily my travel-seasoned colleague was patient and kind and only teased me a little bit. I learned my lesson.   I’ve had the good luck to travel regularly in the years since that trip and I thought I’d share my favorite travel hacks. Productivity thinking manifests in the ability to develop systems that operate in the background and are there to support you when you need them. There are few better cases for needing supporting systems than when traveling. Here’s a list of what works for me:

I pack a small powerstrip in my messenger bag. More on this hack here

I keep a dark-colored down vest in my carry-on. A down vest can be used as pillow and as a way to stay warm on chilly flights without feeling super-bulky; plus most are thin enough to be worn under a jacket if you’re traveling between different climates on the same trip. The vest itself crushes down and takes up very little space in my bag.

Large Binder Clips are the best $3.79 I’ve ever spent. I like sleeping in a dark room so I use the binder clips in hotel rooms where the curtains don’t close enough to block out the light. So helpful when time zone jumping.

On the topic of getting good sleep while traveling, I make it a point to use a white noise app to help set a sonic trigger to fall asleep and stay asleep. The useful hack that I rely on is to set the white noise app to turn off ten minutes before my alarm sounds, that way if I wake-up in the middle of the night, I know that if I can hear the white noise app, I’m ok to fall back to sleep. (I do this at home too). The added benefit here is that I don’t look at the screen of my phone and then calculate how long until it’s time to get up. As white noise apps on iOS go, aSleep is my favorite. Start using the app well before you take a trip so that your mind/body associate the white noise with sleep - especially if you’re time-zone jumping. Lastly, I have a hard time sleeping on long flights and I’ve found it helpful to turn on the white noise app and listen to it through my earbuds to help doze off.

I pack my clothes and gear in a backpack vs. a roller bag and the Osprey Porter 46 is my absolute favorite. It fits in every overhead bin I’ve ever seen (I’m looking at you McDonnell Douglas MD-80). I’m not sure when I started to really dislike traveling with roller bags, but in the past ten years or so, I’ve pretty well avoided them. Running through an airport to make a connection is a lot easier with a backpack. On a short trip, I can frequently travel with my messenger bag inside the Osprey - a productivity thinkers dream. The bag loads through a panel vs more traditional top-loading, meaning I can pack my clothes and not have to remove everything from the bag to get to what I need. Newer versions have all sorts of extra handy pockets and a shoulder strap too. It is soft-sided and has compression straps and as a bonus, it folds down and takes up very little space in my closet.

There are those trips where I spend hunks of time working in my hotel room and I can only spend so much time at a desk staring at a wall. I’ve found that a good alternative to a bad desk is to use the ironing board in the hotel room as a standing desk. Placing the ironing board in front of the window makes for a pretty great standing desk workstation too - especially if I’m visiting a place with interesting topography or a beautiful cityscape.

I keep a small Stojo collapsible cup in the easy-access pocket of my carry-on. It’s perfect for grabbing a quick cup of water or a hot drink in the airport without buying a bottle of water or using a paper cup at the airport coffee joint. Not for nothing, it’s probably saved me a few hundred dollars over the past couple years for all the occasions where I didn’t buy a bottle of water.

I learned a to keep a hooded rain shell in my messenger bag from colleagues in the Pacific Northwest. Buy one that’s a size larger than what you normally wear and it will fit over whatever you’re wearing in case of downpour. A rain shell also packs much smaller than most umbrellas. I keep one in my bag all the time. 

There are many days when I’m in constant motion and interruptions come at me in threes and fours. Those interruptions can prove to be awfully important - a heads up regarding a potential client fire, a new business opportunity, a text to bring home ice cream and beer. There’s no productivity hack that’s going to block out 100% of the noise in your day. In fact, some of that noise is actually useful to orient me to what’s happening around me and keep me out of a well-constructed bubble. More importantly, there are moments in the day when you have a stray thought about a different project or team member that you need to act on afterward. To my mind, the key question is how best to capture the important information inside all of those interrupters?   The solution that’s worked for me is to commit to a solo-capture device where I enter all of the random information that presents itself each day.   What is a solo-capture device? Put simply, you commit to writing down every worthy interruption, important but out-of-context question or thought in the same place, every day. That way, you always know where to gather and organize that information when you review your day. It’s critical to point out the importance of capturing the out-of-context inputs. What does that mean: imagine I’m in a meeting reviewing May Digital Marketing stats and the conversation sparks an idea for a new Instagram contest to drive lead gen. I don’t want to lose that item in my running meeting notes, but I can’t act on it right that moment either, so I add it to my interrupters list.   In my experience, the critical benefit to using a single capture tool for capturing important interrupters is you never again have to wonder where you scribbled that phone number or what was that question about conversion that you need to ask the marketing team? That peace of mind is priceless.   How to put using a solo-capture device into practice? I’ve successfully used both methodologies and both work really well. I tend to prefer using a notebook  

Analog! Use a notebook. I fold over roughly one third of the right-hand page of my notebook to make a column. Starting at the top of the page, I note interrupters sequentially as they come up over the course of the day. Later in the day, I review my list and act on each interrupter. Once I’ve taken the appropriate action, I cross the item off the list.

Go digital! Try Evernote, GoogleDocs, iA Writer, or any other text editor. Cloud-based text editors are great for this kind of capture. My favorite system is to create a running doc that I leave open all day long. At the start of the day, I enter the date and then create a bulleted list below. As interrupters come up, I add them to the list. At the end of the day, or during a break in the afternoon, I act on each one and either add a check box to the entry or just type an X at the beginning of the entry. The benefit to using a cloud based system is that I can add to the list from my laptop, tablet, or phone throughout the day knowing that there is only one list to manage.

In thinking about productivity hacks, I aim to share tools that I depend on to get my higher order work done. Sometimes these tools are apps created by amazing developers like Flexbits, creators of Fantastical, or they’ll be tips for workflow, idea capture, or travel. In today’s post, I want to share a tool I created in Excel for organizing an ambitious idea quickly, so that I can start allocating resources, creating urgency, and finding the right collaborators to partner with on the right items at just the right time.

I've worked on small teams where there weren't any project managers or resources for project management software. At other moments, I've needed a tool to get organized before I hand-off an idea to a real project manager.

Before developing this project management tool, I struggled at times with having a good idea for an ambitious project (a go-to-market plan, a new sales campaign, a new product launch, etc) yet lacked a tool that let me quickly organize what the resource and time needs were to get the project underway. Before I had a tool to help me see a high level overview of the whole project in one place, I would find the idea would take much longer to gain traction in my own thinking and with my team and peers. Worse, there are times when I've been tasked with operating responsibility for a large project of someone else’s creation and that's when I've really needed a tool that lets me organize resources, concurrent steps, and milestones to move a project forward.

I've worked on small teams where there weren't any project managers or resources for project management software. At other moments, I've needed a tool to get organized before I hand-off an idea to a real project manager.

A couple notes on the Project Management Organizer/Operating Calendar.

Download the tool I use for quickly organizing large projects and smaller, complex efforts and follow the guide below to get the best use out of it. (I filled this sample worksheet with generic pm information)

Starting at Column A, Row 4

A - Item: a task or large topic area that needs to be assigned to a team, a team member, or me

B - Lead: the lead individual responsible for the item

C - Start Date

D - Days - Fill in the number of days you anticipate this item requiring

E - Due Date - Calculated Cell

F - Days Remaining - Calculated Cell (calculates TODAY formula in Cell AA1 minus the due date

Conditional formatting: if the item is due in fewer than 5 days, the cell turns yellow

Conditional formatting: if the item is overdue, the text turns bright red

G - Complete: if the value in the cell is Y, the days remaining calculation stops running

H thru V

Conditional formatting: if an item is in STAGING, type zz and the cell will be shaded Blue

Conditional formatting: if an item is UNDERWAY, type xx and the cell will be shaded Green

Conditional formatting: type yy and the cell will be shaded Red for the month an item is DUE

Conditional formatting: type vv for items that are COMPLETE (I use this once the entire item is complete, not just the stages)

The First 6 Weeks Check-in Tab works the same way, and includes a daily breakdown for a six week period. This is useful to me for more granular team assignments. It is handy for assigning tasks and setting milestones for a larger working group. It can be used and reused at any point in the project process.

It’s summer and I’m wishing excellent vacations for each of you. I’ve found that spending time setting up systems to manage my inbox before I leave is a great way to ensure a restful vacation and a return to the office isn’t marked by a dumptruck full of disorganized and unfocused email plopped in my inbox.

Be Proactive.

First and foremost, be clear with colleagues, clients, and vendors about your upcoming vacation ten days before you depart. Make it a point to specify that you’re going to be out of the office frequently. In my experience, this upfront notice acts to help stem the onslaught of email to hit your inbox while you’re out of the office.

Be sure to set-up an out-of-office auto-responder that advises people who email you that you’re away, the date you’ll return, and who to contact in your absence (if the request is urgent or needs to be dealt with). A proactive out-of-office has the added benefit of ensuring that at least some of the email in your inbox has already been managed by your surrogate while you’re away from the office.

In the cases where your team is bombarded by that one VIP who won’t accept the “he’s-away-on-vacation” message, I’ve known business leaders to create an email address with a variant of the username “JamesIsOnVacation@ domain . com” to give out to really insistent or rude clients/VIPs. (If you work in a big org that can’t quickly make up email address, just create a gmail address with the same kind of username). After all, you can’t let your team take grief all week. With a little luck, typing that address will chagrin that one VIP. Be sure to have your colleagues refer to the address as the top secret email address and mention that you only check it once a day. It will also make the VIP feel special.

Lastly, be sure to set up rules in your favorite email program/platform to give you a shot at finding the most critical email quickly. I use these hacks, and while they take a few minutes to set-up, in my experience they’ll save you hours of time and opportunity cost as you can focus in on the important and not get lost in fires that have already been put out or a build-up of news items. I have these rules running 365 days/year.

If you don’t already have one, set-up a rule to collect all News items, newsletters, and other subscription-based emails to automatically move all of these type items to their own folder. Feeling extra creative, I usually call this folder News… This hack also gives you power over this type of content as you can read it when you’re ready and not feel the inbox pressure or distraction to dive into it as your favorite SaaS Newsletter lands in your inbox.

Visual Cues. Create rules to change the color of emails in your inbox list from your direct reports and other areas with whom you collaborate so that you can easily and visually batch information. This is easy to do in Outlook and OSX Mail. Here’s what I do:

Direct Reports - change to blue

Boss, Clients, Senior Leadership - change to red

Sales - green (yep)

Marketing, Creative, or Product - purple

Finance - orange

Operations - brown

Automated/Weekly Reports. If you work in an organization that pushes out automated and/or weekly reports, set a rule to gather these and move them to their own folder. Mine is called Weekly Reports. Like news items, it’s helpful to get these out of your inbox until you’re ready to read them, and you have the added benefit of storing all automated reports in the same place.

Above all, being proactive is the best thing you can do for yourself and your colleagues - you planned a vacation and deserve to enjoy it!

Shocker: like you, I get a lot of email. On average, I find that I write half as much email as I send (thanks for those monthly reports, Google). I’m going to imagine that you too deal with a bursting inbox. Today, instead of giving you a strategy for reducing your inbox, I’m thinking about a productivity hack that will reduce the inbox stress load of your team and all the other people on your correspondence list.

I’ve started using these three abbreviations with my emailing that give the gift of reduced inbox-induced-stress to the recipients. Important to note here, that this hack initially benefits everyone you email before it will improve your productivity. These three abbreviations

NRN means No Reply Necessary. What’s the context for this hack? I think about every time I receive a forwarded article or blog post from a colleague, and then feel unspoken pressure to respond with some insight about the article. NRN in the subject line means, I’m sending you this great Fast Company article about Slack, and I’m not expecting a reply. This abbreviation also signals to your recipient that you know she is as busy as you are, and you’re not fishing for a quick Thanks! email in return. Additionally, NRN can act to elevate the value of what you have to say in the mind of your recipient (think: up the food chain) as you’re communicating that you’ve given thought to the content and audience before hitting Send.

EOM indicates End of Message. Perfect example of the utility of this abbreviation: Birthday cake for Mary at 4pm in the Conference Room EOM, or 15 Minute Standing Status Meeting at 3:30 in Joe’s Office EOM. You’ve just spared the recipient time - she just needs to glance at the Subject line and delete the unread email - she knows exactly what she needs to do and when.

NFA tells the recipient that she needs to take No Further Action. Consider NFA a more robust FYI that can ride along with those informative emails you have to send and establish that you have the situation under control, i.e. someone on your team is out, or when sending a status report, or when sending a quick update on a long-term project - Warehouse Pick/Pack Report June 2016 NFA. Over time, I find the absence of NFA in a subject line is powerful too, because when used correctly, its absence indicates to the recipient that you really do need something from him this time.

If you’re in a traditional leadership role (i.e. you manage a team) or you exert soft leadership through influence, start using these abbreviations with your email and, if your experience mirrors my own, you will begin to receive email with these same abbreviations in the subject lines. That’s the real beauty of this hack - first you help your team by sharing these abbreviations in your own messages, then you accrue the benefit of that knowledge sharing as NRN, EOM, and NFA make their way into the subject lines of the messages that land in your inbox.

If you want to start with just one of these as an experiment, I’d suggest you try NRN. In my estimation, it’s the most transformative of the group. Oh, if you want to use real subject line judo - imagine the power of the NRN NFA combo.

For me, the daunting challenge created by so much great content and digital ephemera on the internet is being able to find it in my files, bookmarks, and screenshots at the instant it’s optimally useful to me. Evernote does the best job of solving that need for me.

When considering my client work, Evernote is the digital tool that I’ve recommended more than all of the other options out there to the broadest possible audience of experts. Academics to architects, creatives to executives have all incorporated Evernote into their workflow and have continued to use the system over the years. According to Evernote, I’ve used the system since 2009!

In October 2014, I wrote the blog post 4 Digital Tools I Depend On and this use case for Evernote is still 100% accurate for me:

Evernote: the other half of my brain, I use it for everything from drafting blog posts and documents to keeping running notes. I’ve had an interest in unstructured data and non-filing-cabinet-based filing systems for years and Evernote allows just that. The multiple notebook and tagging system fit my needs: clients get their own tag, but since I can add multiple tags to each entry, I can quickly find a proposal I’d written in the past or a research on a sales team development quickly by adding additional tags like #marketing automation, #e-commerce or #team building. Speed is king and Evernote hasn’t failed me. I brainstorm and take notes in a notebook and Evernote makes it easy to snap pics of the pages and drop them into a note. Free or Premium for $5/month

In my opinion, here are the three most compelling reasons to start using Evernote today.

Evernote is the most complete note-taking, thought-capturing, document drafting software package available - especially at the $5/month price point. The seamless transition from MacBook to mobile to iPad, picking up in a document where I left off - especially if an idea occurs to me while away from my desk - is critical.

I talk a lot about unstructured file systems, and here too Evernote excels. I’ll write more about this point in a dedicated post, but the key here is that I can write notes tagged with #topic_name or #boilerplate and file these into notebooks dedicated to clients or projects. From there I can search by tags across notebooks, meaning that items filed with the tag #proposal filed in multiple notebooks are all easily located across notebooks. Oh, and a premium account gives you the option of searching text inside of pdfs and scanned documents.

Curation. Oh boy. Evernote assigns users a unique email address that allows me to forward email to my Evernote account for filing away. This is really helpful for reports, pdfs, presentation materials, travel documents, anything you can imagine that hits your inbox that you’d love to be able to put your hands on later in the context of other related information.

Here’s how that piece works. Take another peek at the red rectangle in the image above: then, open an email you’d like to file into Evernote

In the Subject line, after the subject line text of the email, add @Name_of_target_Notebook and then add #tag1 #tag2 etc. (For the tags to work, they have to already exist in your Evernote account, so don’t create new tags in the subject line.)

Hit send in your favorite email program and wait a few seconds for your forwarded message to be automatically filed away in Evernote.

On the curation front, Evernote also does a great job of incorporating web clipping utilities into your favorite browser which enable you to grab full web pages and drop them into Evernote notes - this is really helpful to brainstorm, research competitors or prospective clients, make vacation plans, and any other collection/curation need you envision. I know creatives that use this curation capability to create inspiration notebooks filled with ideas and images that get their minds flowing, I’ve worked with architects that use the curation aspect to collect images and product info on rare home furnishings and antiques that they think would be great for their clients, and strategists that keep running notes on competitor moves in the marketplace.

In honor of the 50th anniversary of The Beatles hit Paperback Writer, I wanted to circle in on a powerful hack that added a printed book to my productivity tools.

First, what is context jumping fatigue? I remember experiencing those moments where five minutes into a midweek meeting, I’d feel more disengaged with the topic than when the meeting began. Where the crush of a series of unrelated meetings over the course of a day takes its toll as some mid-afternoon marketing plan review meeting begins and you feel your brain barely grasping the content and a sense that you’re unable to think expansively about the topic. And sadly, more coffee doesn’t help. This isn’t a problem with being sleepy or disinterested. I call this sensation context jumping fatigue.

Context jumping is part of my life as a consultant and was a reality when I worked on the corporate-side. I'm certain it’s a challenge you face as well. Context jumping is the constant shuffle your brain makes as you move from deep theme to minor task to hairy challenge to new theme. It is unlike multitasking as that concept implies interruption of a flow or a desire to do five things at once. To fully understand context jumping, look at three consecutive days of meetings in your calendar. See what I mean? Strategic planning to sales comp review to the 20 minute June Birthday Cake get-together to the three client calls to the digital marketing stats review and on the list goes. Like any skill, I find my ability to successfully context jump over the course of a busy week diminishes as I move from project to project and theme to theme. It's worse if I'm timezone hopping.

After running different experiments, the most effective hack I've found is to block 30 minutes in my calendar during the middle of the day on Wednesday and/or Thursday to read a printed book. Why a printed book? Because it can't alert you or notify you of incoming anything. Moreover, I find that the act of reading in print helps my mind unhook and release from the first half of the day and then grasp tightly and effectively on what comes next. I find books work better than magazines due to the sense of awareness or breaking the spell that occurs as I finish one article and begin the next. Books provide an ongoing narrative that I can ride for those 20 minutes of resetting time. Ben Ratliff’s work on John Coltrane The Story of a Sound is my current read and rides along with me in my messenger bag. To get past context jumping fatigue, I'll read just about anything that isn't a business book - even a great business book won't help me refocus on the day.

An added benefit: I've found a midday break to read a printed book is a powerful reset when a project feels overwhelming or I feel a creative block. You might be thinking that the 20 or 30 minutes spent reading sounds luxurious or even seems a waste of time, but I'd argue that 20 minutes spent reading midday has spared me hours of procrastination and frustration in the face of an oncoming deadline or dreaded writer's’ block.

I realized this hack was working for me because I felt greater focus and clarity in the latter half of the day - say the 3pm to 7pm period - after having blocked thirty minutes to read a book earlier in the afternoon.

What are your favorite context jumping hacks? Let me know if you try using a book to break up your creative blocks or sense of feeling overwhelmed. (And support your local library while you’re at it).