The Time-Space Disconnect

If you are working for one client who has offices elsewhere, and your job requires communicating with various people working within that one office, you’ll probably find it easy to work within a set of hours that you know those people will be available. Unless you live in a timezone that is the flip side of theirs (your day is their night and vice-versa), getting in touch when you need to speak with them shouldn’t be too difficult. But what if all the people who need to connect work remotely – in different timezones? Suddenly, the task of getting in touch with someone becomes a crazy tangled mess.

Need to make sure a project goes live in the next hour, but the final details have to be coordinated with several team members? Maybe Joe is around, but Janet lives in a timezone where it’s 2 a.m. right now, and she’s fast asleep. Perhaps Charlie took his kids camping for the evening and left the cell phone at home. This kind of team fragmentation can be difficult to overcome, and extremely frustrating for everyone involved.

As the world moves more and more towards this fragmentation of the workforce, this type of situation is becoming more and more commonplace. What can we do to deal with these types of problems?

Start With A Chart

Make sure everyone involved has some form of current organizational chart that can be easily accessed. This chart should include all team members involved, including temporary workers and independent consultants. Don’t just place the classic information such as name and title on your org chart, either. Include the contact information and best times to contact (with time zone) for each person on the chart. At the bottom of the chart, include some sample times for different cities around the world, along with a link to a world clock. A glance at this organizational chart should make it clear which of your team members might be available, based on the timezone they live in.

Set Business Emergency Procedures

Know the policy for contacting people in a business emergency. If your team is responsible for a client’s site, for example, and that site is down, what happens if the site admin on your team is asleep or on vacation? Who else can handle the emergency? If any part of your team’s responsibilities for a project involve a time-critical step of any sort, make sure everyone knows how to handle any last minute problems, including who can be reached, and who can’t.

Automate Reminders

Don’t rely on your own memory to follow up on a problem with someone that you couldn’t reach. Use an online calendar or other time management tool to automatically remind you to follow up at a later time.

Use Reply All

Make sure all members of the remote group stay in the loop with anything that’s happening by using the Reply All feature of your email program. One tiny change from one member of the group might have a significant impact on the to-do list of another member, so even if you don’t realize that, you can avoid a problem by just using Reply All to keep everyone informed of every change.

Plan For Black Holes Of Silence

Don’t sit around waiting for a response (and don’t start playing Solitaire). Always be ready to jump into another task while you’re waiting for information from someone. There will always be tasks that aren’t time-critical, but need to be done “at some point” that you can work on while you wait for that oh-so-important return email or phone call. You can knock out quite a bit of work during those black holes of silence, so don’t waste them.

These are just a few things I think are useful when working with a remote group of people around the world. I’d love to hear about the problems you’ve faced and the ways you’ve found to solve those problems. Let’s share our experiences to make our jobs even easier.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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Everyone is familiar with their computer’s desktop. It’s what we stare at as we type, or surf the web, or do any work on our computer. It contains our menu, and our windows, and our icons, etc. Before long, windows stack up on top of windows, and icons litter the entire desktop, and it just becomes one great big mess. We’ve all probably learned to deal with it over time, and may not even notice how frustrating it can be since we’re so accustomed to it. But there can be a better way, and everyone has access to this for free.

What if you had more than one desktop? What if you could easily switch between 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 desktops? What if each desktop could hold its own set of icons and windows? Imagine having your browser open on one desktop, the document you’re typing open on another desktop, your Twitter client open on another, and so on. Imagine just jumping from one to another with just a click, or a flick of the mouse.

Linux users are used to having multiple desktops, and that’s where I first stumbled across it. The video below is a screencast I just took of my 6 desktops. (I could use more or less if I wanted, but 6 works great for me right now). Five of the desktops always have one or two main windows open that I use regularly. The sixth is always a clean slate with nothing open, so I can do whatever I want with it. Actually, I can do whatever I want with any of the desktops. I mean, it’s not like I can’t open and close new programs and windows on any of them at any time. But I personally like to keep them mostly the way you’ll see in the video below – nearly all the time. Play the video now, quickly, to see what I’m talking about. It’s less than 30 seconds long. (Sorry about the low quality of the video).

That’s my computer, and a quick glance at all six of my desktops. This ability to segment my work and keep a visually clean desktop at all times, keeps me much more productive – and much less frustrated – than I used to be.

You can have it too. It doesn’t matter if you run Windows or Linux or Mac. They all have free programs you can run to give you multiple desktops. I’m not very familiar with the various ones available for Windows and Mac, but I’ll list a few for you to investigate on your own. I just quickly searched for these, so there may be others that are better out there.

For Windows, you can get Microsoft’s own PowerToys virtual desktop manager that lets you have up to 4 desktops. And yes, it’s free, or you can try Dexpot, which lets you have up to 20 desktops.

As far as I know, Mac, like Linux, comes with multiple desktop capability built-in, but there are programs available to manage them more efficently and/or give extra functionality. One such program for Mac is Desktop Manager, and the one I use for Linux is Compiz, which also does a ton of other things besides handle multiple desktops.

I recommend trying out multiple desktops for a week or two and see if it makes your workday a little saner and a little more productive. I know it’s helped me a lot, and I would hate to have to return to the old days of using just one desktop. Hopefully, this is one little productivity tip I can pass along to you to make your work days a little smoother.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: desktop, Linux, Mac, Microsoft Windows, Virtual desktop, virtual desktop manager
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Determination.

I’ve been determined to focus, focus, focus, and work, work, work at getting things done that needed doing.

That determination is paying off big time. The sites I’ve been focusing on are growing by leaps and bounds, and the content is attracting both search engines and visitors.

I may have put this blog on the backburner the last few weeks, but it doesn’t mean I haven’t been working really hard. It just means I’ve used my determination elsewhere.

What about you? How determined are you to get things done! How determined are you to not get distracted? How determined are you to focus, focus, focus?

The level of your determination will help determine the level of your success down the road.

So ask yourself the question: “How Determined Am I?”

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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Here’s what I do when I’m faced with the monster of all monster task lists. I divide it up into 3′s: Must-Do’s, Should Do’s, and Everything Else. Each item on my to-do list has to be re-routed to one of these three new sublists. Here’s how to determine which items go into which list.

Must-Do’s are tasks that you are obligated to complete, either because you have an agreement or a contract with someone else to do so. If you are a freelancer, for example, you have clients that you’ve contracted with to perform certain tasks. Those will always go into the Must-Do sublist. Likewise, you may have items on your list that absolutely have to get done for yourself (such as paying bills and/or taxes on time) or there will be fairly impactful consequences for inaction. Move all must-do tasks onto this list first.

Should-Do’s are items on your to-do list that are important because accomplishing them would be beneficial to you or your business in a rather large way. Not getting them done won’t necessarily hurt you or your business, but getting them done would make a nice difference in income or sanity or happiness, for example. Move these types of items into this sublist now.

Everything Else is … well … everything that’s not a Must-Do or a Should-Do.

Now that you have your 3 sublists, you are going to divide the Everything Else sublist into 3′s yet again. Because these items are the least important of all the tasks you have on your list, you’ll want to get as many of them off your shoulders as soon as possible. Divide these up into the following sub-sub-lists:

Kick ‘Em Off: These are tasks that really aren’t important enough to waste a moment of time on, but somehow they snuck onto the list for one reason or another. Often we think something might need to be done for a moment, and then later realize it really wasn’t important at all. Dump any of those right now.

Put ‘Em Off: There’s a good chance that a large majority of the Everything Else list will be moved into this sub-sub-list. Most of the items are important enough to get done at some point, but there’s no great urgency to any of them. Throw those here.

Pawn ‘Em Off: If you’re lucky, you’ll find a few items on the list that could be pawned off on someone else. We don’t always have a large number of people that we can rely on to help us with our daily tasks, but hopefully there is a short list of people that are there to help us on occasion (and vice-versa). If you’ve been networking, then you probably have a few virtual friends that would be happy to give you a hand. Maybe that designer friend of yours would edit a photo for you, in return for that time you helped her brainstorm an idea. That’s one of the great things about networking, so don’t forget to make use of it (without abusing it of course).

Now that you’ve divided your list up into smaller chunks, it should make the monster look much less threatening. Tackle the Must-Do’s first, then the Should-Do’s, and eventually the Put ‘Em Off’s. What was once overwhelming will become actionable, and you’ll be back on track in no time.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2008. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: designer, GTD, tackle, task list, Time management, to-do
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My days and nights have become one long string of never-ending distractions. I end up doing so many things in one day, that nothing ever REALLY gets done. Projects started don’t get finished. Excellent ideas get pushed aside to make way for the distraction of the moment. I look around me and see a great plan that isn’t being carried out. That’s my fault. And that’s all going to change, starting today.

First things first. My new assistant brain, Sandy, has been given my new schedule, with instructions to send reminders of each task I must tackle, at the time I need to tackle it. (I spent several hours today creating this schedule, determining what needed to be done, creating a slot of time for each task, and determining how often it needed to be done. Some are daily, some weekly, etc).

Keep in mind that:

Creating a schedule is one part of the solution.

Having someone (Sandy) keep me on schedule is another part of the solution.

But the glue that holds this solution together is going to be the unplugging of the distractions.

During set hours of each day, I will unplug from the world. No IM. No Twitter. No forums. No email. No phones. No distractions of any kind, with the exceptions of true emergencies (i.e. somebody better need me to take them to the emergency room).

For several hours each and every day, I will focus solely on whatever task Sandy has reminded me of. Nothing else. No one else. Just That One Task. Get.It.Done.

Several hours will be devoted to times when I can be distracted. Communication will be turned back on. I’ll visit forums. I’ll participate in social networks. I’ll tweet, message, email, and phone. But when Sandy says it’s time to turn it all off…the switches will be flipped, and the time for uber-focusing will begin.

I’ve got a big master-plan brewing for 2008, and I’ll be darned if I’m going to let distractions get in the way. I decided to share this in case you needed to take a look at your own juggling act.

Are you doing so many things, that you aren’t doing anything?

If so, take some time to reconsider the juggling act you’ve got going on. It might be time to make a change.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2008. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: assistant, social networks, Twitter
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