Recently I subscribed to the video podcast for Workfast.tv. These videos are great resources for productivity with a business and tech slant.
Today I watched “Managing Your Mind With the CEO of ActiveWords” and “The 10 Secrets of Highly Productive People”. Below are the videos as well as the notes I took while I was watching:
Managing Your Mind With the CEO of ActiveWords
My notes:
Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of ActivewordsPrograms:
ActiveWords (mind mapping)
Xobni (e-mail plugin, helps you follow e-mail conversations and also has analytics)
Anagram (e-mail plugin, create contacts from text fast)
SpinVox (voice to text)
Jott (voice notes to text and tasks)
CallWave (now has voice to text)
EverNote (more mind mapping?)
Rescuetime (track where you’re spending time)
eyejot (video e-mails – make communication more personal even from a distance)Learn more about mind mapping. Figure out if Activewords will work with my mac/pc parallels setup or not.So far I use a lot of the programs listed above, I downloaded a few more that look excellent and a couple of others look like they may take an hour or two to learn so I’ve bookmarked them to come back to.
The 10 Secrets of Highly Productive People
My notes:
Matt Rissell, CEO of TSheets.com, a web based time tracking tool that also has the added service of call-in time tracking (so people out in the field without a computer but who have access to a phone can track their time.)Top ten things the people he’s been interviewing have in common:
- Passion
- Surround yourself with excellent people
- Create an environment where great people can succeed
- Simplicity
- Know your motivation
- Secret Sauce (what gives you that competitive edge)
- Make your decisions be great
- Balance
- Be able to Execute
- Build your own system
These aren’t exact quotes … some are more like summaries of my POv of what was said some are partial quotes with a little added to them:
– Choose the things that make you productive.
– Success is growth in every area of your life – not just success at work.
– Don’t get distracted from your real goals.
– Don’t get paralyzed by indecision. Failures are lessons to learn from.
– Your business can be bigger than yourself – hire people that are smarter than you are.
WorkFast.tv aftershow with archives: http://www.kyte.tv/scobleizer
Hi Hilary,
Thank you for the mention. What did you think of the results from the interviews?
I thought the interview was good and informative.
I did find the full list you talked about but with more detail on your blog: http://blog.tsheets.com/2008/business-help/productivity-secrets-of-the-most-successful-people.html
Tsheets.com looks pretty good but there are two reasons I personally wouldn’t buy:
1) Monthly subscription fee – I don’t like being tied to anything that requires me to to keep paying monthly. I got rid of cable and watch tv on hulu or the station’s websites (or not at all … I miss “Good Eats”.) Obviously there are certain things I can’t get rid of an function as a business.
Monthly subscription alone won’t keep me from a purchase if the increase in productivity and income would more than make up for the expense though.
2) I have yet to find anything other than an excel spreadsheet that can handle a certain level of customization. I don’t mean job numbers. I mean instead of needing to track my overall time I need to track billable time and sometimes that gets discounted when a computer acts strange for 10 minutes in the middle of the times you clocked. If I were tracking employee hours this looks great. Tracking billable hours it doesn’t look like I can add a “no bill” to a time or a “wifi router crashed, deduct 10 minutes.)
And I don’t travel enough to need the really nice added features (like jott to timesheet) that would make this well worth the money for some people.
Some of the reasons I don’t think tsheets.com will work well for me might be more about me needing to change in the way I work though … putting my notes of the time tracking and remembering to remove them before the client gets the invoice. I can see in the long haul it’s limiting. However with employees I’ll need to track their on-the-clock time as well as the billable time. Haven’t looked at tsheets.com closely enough for that (but I don’t have in-house employees yet either.)