When Randall Ryder, a consumer rights lawyer and blogger, decided to spend a day working from home last spring he had a pleasant surprise. Usually, Ryder wrote on his blog, his day would be bookmarked by his blogging which he would do first thing in the morning or last thing before he left the office. His legal work he would do in the middle of the day when, he claimed, he would be most productive and his brain had “warmed up.” This time he started the day by leaping straight into his cases. The result, he says, was a fresh perspective, a jolt of energy and a number of new strategies.

“Arguments that were not fully realized reached their potential. Things that I dreaded because they were scheduled for later in the day, were actually fun to work on.”

Ryder put his improved productivity down to the confines of a rigid schedule that can “lull your brain to sleep” and prompt you to think about the next task on the list rather than the task currently under way. Whatever the reason, Ryder isn’t the only to have found that a change in the routine can be enough to boost productivity. Premed student Ryan Nguyen found that the importance of changing a workout routine to maintain muscle-build efficiency can also be applied to study routines.  Studying in the same way, in the same environment and with the same people, he argues, leads to a steady decline the more you do it.

Nguyen’s tips for routine-breaking apply specifically to students — use flashcards, learn in the park, deliver a faux lecture — but there are also a number of things that freelancers can do to break their routines and increase their productivity:

1. Change Your Tasks

The easiest way to change a routine is to follow Randall Ryder. His break came when he chose to work from home — something that many freelancers do anyway — but swapping around the usual order of the day is both simple and refreshing, and it can even lead to long-term habits of greater efficiency. David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, for example, recommends checking email no more than twice a day: once in the morning and once in the evening. Whatever you think of his system as a whole — and the complex new routines that have to be created to use them — getting into the habit of not being disturbed by non-urgent messages during the day can be helpful.

If you tend to check email regularly and answer immediately, then create a new schedule that sets time to deal with messages and leaves the rest of the day clear for more urgent tasks.

But in the short term, you can also swap the order of the day. A writer accustomed to blogging in the morning and writing sales copy in the afternoon, for example, should do the opposite. A website designer who first creates the icons then plans out the page, could try the reverse. As Randall Ryder discovered, sometimes a change as small as the reversal of a traditional work pattern can have unexpected benefits.

2.     Change Your Location

The change in Randall Ryder’s routine was prompted by a change in his location. That’s something even easier for freelancers to do. While employees with offices or cubicles always have to work between the same four walls, freelancers are free to drag their computer to a different room in the house, a different co-working space, or a different café to break their routines.

It’s worth knowing not just that your nearest coffee bar has free wireless and plenty of electricity outlets but that the library is available too, that there’s an open network accessible from a bench in the park and that co-working spaces have plans based on usage that allow freelancers to visit no more than once a week — and to come on different days.

The challenge with changing your location is to ensure that the increase in productivity outweighs the extra time it takes to reach the site. If you have to travel an extra half-hour to reach the library then you’ll need to improve your output by a whole hour to get the full benefit. Sometimes the best change of location is not to change your location at all: instead of dragging your computer to a café, keep it in the office and stay at home all day.

3.     Take a Different View of Time

Freelancers are free not just choose the order of their day and the places in which they spend it but the times in which they work. Night owls can, if they want, work when the sun goes down while morning people can clock on first thing and finish their shift by lunch. Most don’t however, not just because few people find that way of working comfortable but because it puts them out of sync with friends, family and clients.

If you’re not willing to radically change your work hours, you can radically change the way you think about your work hours. Muji, a design store, sells a scheduler it calls a Chronotebook. Instead of dividing the day into hourly rectangles that start at the top of the page and finish at the bottom (the kind of visualization that might just have you thinking about the next task on the list), it places a clock in the middle of the page with one page for morning and the opposite page for the afternoon. Tasks are then listed in a circular fashion instead of vertically.

The notebook’s design is also minimal; there are no lines dividing one hour or one task from another, unless you draw them yourself. That gives the day a more fluid feel, with one task flowing freely into the next.

It’s a creative idea but it’s not perfect. You’ll still have to complete the tasks, of course. You’ll still have to decide where you’re going to complete them. And you’ll still have to change that routine if you’re going to keep your productivity rising.

The iPad has blown away the opposition. The device’s share of the tablet market is now more than 61 percent. All the Android tablets together barely make up 30 percent while only 4.6 percent of tablet owners are using Windows-based devices (and it’s likely that 100 percent of them live in Richmond.) RIM’s share of the market is a pretty negligible 3.3 percent. It’s hardly surprising then that HP has already pulled the plug and is getting out of the hardware business altogether. According to one theory though, the secret of the iPad’s strength isn’t Jony Ive’s design or Apple’s A5 processor. It’s the App Store. They’re wrong; it’s the iPad.

Sure, developers have already made more than 90,000 of the store’s 475,000 iPhone applications compatible with the iPad’s bigger screen and greater processing power. Of Android’s 300,000 apps, only 300 have been optimized for the tablets’ Honeycomb operating system, a pretty big difference. But there’s more to it than that. The iPad is just a great device. Even out of the box — without downloading any more apps and certainly without jailbreaking it  — the iPad can do some amazing things. In fact, in the rush to download apps and fire up the videos those incredible little tricks and techniques often get overlooked.

That’s why we sat down with our iPads and — using just the apps that came with it — tried to figure out all of the things that Apple’s tablet could do. We were pretty stunned.

Some of the things we discovered were just neat little tricks that we’d heard of but never really explored, like the ability to make the battery last longer or squeeze more content into the device’s meager memory. Some, such as the ability to add ready-made dates to the Calendar have been incredibly useful additions that we wished we’d known about earlier. And others, such as a workaround that lets international users not just access but actually buy content from the US iTunes store, have felt so much like additional features that they’ve opened up whole new areas of usage for the tablet.

We drew up a list of twenty of what we thought were the iPad’s most powerful, useful and little-used functions and put them together in a new book called iPad Advanced Manual that you can now find on Apple’s iBookStore. Each technique includes step-by-step instructions and lots of screenshots to make sure that you get the trick exactly right. There’s also a quick, little summary at the end of each chapter in case you need to go back and start again, and just need some quick prompts.

Some of the techniques (such as the iPad’s keyboard shortcuts) are straightforward and simple, but are little-known and rarely used, even though they make the device much more efficient. Others can be fairly complex but add the kind of new features to your iPad (such as the ability to search on Safari pages) that are so valuable you’ll wonder how you managed to get along without them until now.

If you’ve got an iPad, either a first or a second generation, you will want to know these techniques — and once you know them, you will be using them!

We’ve included below just one small example of a little-known but surprisingly useful technique that your iPad can do. This is one that didn’t make it into the book. The tricks that you’ll find there are even more valuable and even more useful than this technique that connects your iPad’s Notes app to Gmail to create instant cloud-based, document storage.

Keep Up with Your iPad Notes Anywhere

The iPad’s Notes app can be a very convenient way to create lists and jot down spontaneous ideas. But once you’ve made notes, you want to be able to access them on other devices, including your desktop, laptop and mobile phone.

Fortunately, the iPad, as well as third generation and later iPod touches and iPhones from the 3GS model onwards, can automatically sync content placed in Notes with IMAP accounts. They can also sync them with MobileMe Accounts.

How To Do It

1. To sync Notes with your IMAP account.

i. On the iPad, open Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars.

The IMAP account also syncs calendars and notes.

ii. Select your IMAP account. Gmail works well.

iii. Slide the Notes slider to On.

Just slide to sync your notes.

2. To move a note into your IMAP folder.

i. Open Notes and press the Plus button to create a new note.

With note-syncing on, write your note….

ii. When you’ve finished writing, close the Notes application.

iii. Open your IMAP account.

Your list of labels should now include a label marked Notes.

…then open Gmail.

iv. Open the Notes label to find your new note.

While you can see your synced note in Gmail or another IMAP mail client, you won’t be able to make changes to those notes or create new ones in the program itself. You can, however, reply to the note, sending the amended version back to your iPad Mail app so that you can paste it into Notes.

This is just a simple technique that lets you continue working on the content you’ve written in your Notes application even when you’re away from your iPad. But the iPad can do so much more, including:

• Allow GPS usage even on a wifi-only iPad.
• Read image files from a standard USB flash drive.
• And even turn books bought from the iBookStore into audiobooks that are read to you automatically.

Sure, the App Store with its giant amount of content optimized for the iPad’s large screen and powerful processor is a good reason to buy an iPad. But when Apple created the device, the company packed so much into the hardware and the iOS itself that it’s hardly surprising that many of the iPad’s in-built features have been overlooked. That’s a shame. If you already own an iPad you need to pick up the iPad Advanced Manual and understand exactly what your device should — and can — be doing for you. (You can also get the kindle or the nook version.)

When Google released an extension for its Chrome browser that allowed users to block specific sites from showing in search results, it was both an admission of its failure to combat content spam and a giant boost in productivity for people looking for information on the Web.  No longer did Chrome users have to push past poor content sites to find the knowledge they needed. If a result was on the first page, there was a better chance it deserved to be. It was the quickest productivity fix since someone thought of putting erasers at the chewy end of pencils.

Now that the search giant has changed its algorithm to push down companies like Demand Media, that little productivity app has become slightly less useful. But there are still plenty more products in Chrome’s app store that help you to squeeze more out of your time, and more out of your browser.

Google Tasks

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that the 672 most popular productivity apps include plenty that let you make notes and create lists. Fans of Remember the Milk, a tool that’s long been available both on the Web and on smartphones, can stick the cow in their browser too, and a search for an app that will help you to “get things done” produces no fewer than 24 tools that can let you copy David Allen.

Which list-builder/ note-taker best suits you is as much a matter of personal taste as real functionality: a list is a list. But Google Tasks wins points for its simplicity, neatness and the fact that you can open it in a new tab instead of a window so that you don’t have to bring up a new browser every time you want to tick something off or, more likely, type something in. That’s bonus productivity.

The Deadline

Google Tasks is simple. But if you’re looking for an app with a little more functionality, then The Deadline is particularly clever. It doesn’t mess about with dozens of folders or offer ways to mark entries with different colors that look nice but only confuse. Instead, it lets task-makers use Twitter-style hashtags to categorize their entries.  So if you had created an entry reminding you to fix the garage door, for example, you could mark it #garage and #home repairs to find it quickly.

You can choose which types of tasks you want to view, and you can even share tasks with others by using the @ symbol followed by the other person’s email address.  The first person listed is automatically given chief responsibility for the project, ensuring that everyone knows who to blame if the job isn’t done. All of the participants can also send messages to each other and comment on the task.

Most creative though is the idea that each task is assigned not a date but a deadline. While that might, in practice, mean the same thing, it’s a more accurate way of reflecting how tasks need to be completed.

Yast

The Deadline’s main benefit is that it tells you when you have to complete a task by rather than the day you have to do it. But deadlines can be powerful productivity-raisers in themselves. Nothing feels more like a whip across the back than the sight of a looming due date — except perhaps the sight of the hours ticking away on a task that should only have taken minutes to do.

Yast is a time-tracking app that lets you see exactly how long you’re spending on a project. It’s really meant for large organizations that charge by the quarter-hour and have teams of pros writing code or, more likely, poring over contracts.

For companies that need time charts to show to clients, the ability to review work time and to export records could be a crucial asset. For the employees, who are left to feel that they’re being judged every time they stop to sip their coffee, it must be a little like having a boss looking over their shoulder all the time.

But for freelancers who are paid according to the amount of work they’re able to squeeze into a day, it’s a valuable way to see which jobs are taking too long and why they’re slowing down.  One commenter noted that after using it for a day, he was already able to see the problems in his productivity.

Checking the time probably helps to reduce the wastage too.

Chrome’s Yast is really more of a shortcut than an app but it’s still effective enough to add to the browser.

Invoicera

Invoicera includes a time-tracking feature too, but this is an invoicing product rather than a time-management tool.  You can schedule invoices, set auto-billing, track expenses and even ask for money in eleven different languages and using sixteen different payment gateways.  Whether you’ll get the money is another question but no invoicing software can stop a recalcitrant client on his way out of the office.

You’ll also need to pay. You can use it for free with up to three clients but up to 25 clients will cost a monthly subscription of $9.95 — an easy investment to recoup for businesses too small to employ a bookkeeper but large enough to have clients to invoice. An extra ten dollars lets you bill as many people as you want.

It’s possible that the same functions placed in a program rather than locked into an app could be easier to use but if you’re growing accustomed to working in the cloud — and Google wants us to get used to working in the cloud — then Invoicera’s app makes money demands just a little easier.

Coolendar

Like The Deadline, Coolendar uses hashtags for organization and it also takes a new look at productivity, this time at appointments. There are no calendars here and no duration limits (Coolendar calls duration a “poison concept”). Instead, calendar entries are presented as a list that can be organized by priority as well as by “today,” “tomorrow” and by month. It’s remarkably simple — which means you’re not going to waste hours figuring out how to use it or playing with features you’re probably never going to need.

That’s already one productivity win.

Photography: Sarah G…

Productivity is never stable. Some days are more productive — and profitable — than others, and there are always periods when even the most productive of freelancers find that the amount of work they produce each day drops and just won’t seem to rise.

Everything in the day seems to be the same — except for the amount of work they’re completing and the amount of money they’re earning.

When it happens to you, there are a number of possible reasons:

Your Current Workload is Too Heavy

When taking on more work means an opportunity to earn more money — and especially when you can’t be certain what the next few months are going to bring, a constant problem for freelancers — there’s a strong temptation to accept every project on offer now and multitask your way through the overload.

So at the same time that you’re designing a website for one client, you could be researching a logo for another, creating App Store icons for a third, and thinking about the look and feel of a brand redesign for a fourth. It feels like you’re getting a lot done but it might be that you’re actually doing far less than if you were focusing on just one task at a time.

According to William Klemm, a Professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University, multitasking is actually more like “multiplexing.” Instead of doing more than one thing at a time, the brain switches from one thing to another, retaining less information than if it stuck to a single event. One study in 2004 even found that employees spend an average of just eleven minutes on a task before being interrupted — and that it would take them 25 minutes to return to that task.

In taking on too much in too short a time then, you might well be introducing too many distractions into your work day.

The best solution is to arrange your work calendar better so that one task follows another instead of piling on top of each other in the same day (or even the same hour.) When that’s not possible, plan the day so that you’re focusing on one project at a time to minimize distractions, perhaps by working on one job in the morning and another in the afternoon. (And a third at night, and the fourth during the weekend.) Clear distinct time for each project and you should be able remove at least some of the distractions caused by different demands.

The Current Workload is Too Light

But don’t overdo it. Work has a habit of filling the time available so taking on too little work, or giving yourself deadlines that are too loose, may remove pressure that can help you to stay focused.

That’s a factor that’s harder to control. Just as the speed at which you work can change, so the rate at which work flows in can change too. At some point, regular clients who all have a habit of demanding your attention at the same time can suddenly find that they have all they need, leaving you with spare hours in the day. When that happens, those hours tend to fill up with distracted time instead of productive time.

While the best solution is try to control the workflow so that you’re always busy — but not too busy — that’s not always in a freelancer’s power. One option then is to keep in mind a project that you want to do but haven’t had the time to think about, such as blogging for profit or selling your own Photoshop brushes, and use those spare moments to develop it. Even if it doesn’t pay back immediately, it may still be productive and profitable in the long run.

Events Are Distracting

According to a survey carried out at the end of 2009 by ASSOCHAM, the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India, as Indian businesses try to catch up with Western firms, they’re losing as much as 12.5 percent of their work hours to young employees surfing social media sites. In effect, sites like Facebook, Twitter, Orkut and even MySpace are reducing the work day from eight hours to seven.

Social media always has the potential to hit productivity but it shouldn’t lower productivity more than usual. There was little in the survey to suggest than Indian employees were using social media more on some days than on others.

In practice though, that might well be the case, and social media usage is one place to look when you find that your productivity has fallen below its usual levels. Tracking a major news story on Twitter will add another of those distractions that can do all the harm of multitasking, and even adding comments to a friend’s Facebook feed can deliver a steady series of distracting nudges if you’re opted in to receive a notification when a comment you liked is commented on.

Adjusting your Facebook email notifications is always a good idea if you want to stay productive, but when a major story is in the news, whether it’s another uprising in some distant part of the world, or the latest sports news, the best way to beat the distraction is probably to lock yourself away in a place that the Internet just can’t reach. Knowing that you can’t surf until you’re done might even give you a useful false deadline.

You’ve Changed Your Routine

If distractions damage productivity then a steady routine should be a useful way of maintaining a good work rate. But routines have a habit of changing. Children move from pre-school to primary school, changing the times at which you start and finish your day. A new project can force research into the morning when you’re usually doing hands-on development. Even a partner’s new job can alter your work day in subtle ways that stop you doing your best work at the best time.

Only you know at which hours of the day you’re most productive so it’s up to you to make sure that you’re doing the work that requires the most focus during the hours that deliver your closest attention. If your productivity has changed with your routine, you’ll need to adjust your day once again.

Productivity is unpredictable but it’s not uncontrollable. If you can isolate the factors that have hit your work rate, you can improve your results — and your earnings.

Photography: Voxphoto

From Lifehacking to 43 Folders, workers looking for tools to battle distraction, improve focus and increase efficiency aren’t short of choices. Whether they prefer to make use of Gmail hacks, build detailed lists, outsource their tasks or mindmap their concepts, there’s a range of strategies they can pick up that allow them to complete their projects in the shortest time possible. And they may need them. With the next Web page no more than a click away, multitasking a way of life and even schoolchildren said to use up to 30 different programs at once, life has never been more distracting. But is that a bad thing? If the forces driving distraction are so powerful maybe we should stop fighting them and embrace them. Maybe there’s something to be said for taking your time.

Clearly some inefficiency can bring advantages. When economies are inefficient, somebody is benefitting. A monopoly, for example, allows one firm to charge the prices it wants without having to bother about productivity levels or improving quality; “DrRich,” a medical blogger, has argued that healthcare companies deliberately preserve inefficiencies in their claims processes in order to earn interest on delayed payments and deter doctors from claiming for expensive procedures. But those are inefficiencies that bring harm to others; without them goods would be cheaper and claimants would get their money earlier. But what about the benefits that don’t cause harm and that can help individuals? Here are three ways that working slower and allowing distractions could make your life richer:

1. Time to Think

One option is to redefine inefficiency. If we think of one kind of distraction as time invested rather than time wasted, we can actually plan it as part of our day. In a new book, author and management consultant Daniel Forrester argues that organizations should create time for reflective thinking. Reflection and deep thought, he says, “are critical in generating new ideas within challenging contexts.” Citing a study by knowledge economy analysts Basex, Forrester points out that in 2010, knowledge workers were typically able to devote just 5 percent of their time to reflection, a drop of 7 percent since the last survey two years earlier. The largest amount of time — 25 percent of the workday — consisted of “information overload.”

That time for thought, which others have called “slack time,” has been described as an essential element of innovation. Scientists, proponents argue, theorize before they prove and long before their ideas are accepted. President Obama has talked about the importance of having time to think and strategize during the 2008 Presidential campaign, while President Clinton complained that a lack of time to reflect contributed to his party’s mid-term election defeat. Twitter was thought up by Odeo staff during a brainstorming session in a park playground.

It’s a policy that Google has famously used with its Twenty Percent Time, an allocation of free space in the workweek for employees. The policy is responsible for Gmail, Google News, Google Talk and Orkut among others. It’s also produced a lot of failed projects too though and no shortage of unproductive time. Other workers who want to set aside a schedule for their own creative thinking need to do it carefully, warns Daniel Forrester.

“My advice is that it must live within an established architecture that nurtures the ideas through gates that allow money makers to rise quickly and money losers to fade.  Think time with no tangible outputs nor accountability can be a giant cost.”

2. Learning — and Sharing — Through Gameplaying

Usually, the distractions caused by Web links, search results, YouTube streams, screaming children, honking traffic, pretty snowfalls and the million other things that pull attention away from the screen are thought of negatively. They’re things to avoid and eliminate not seek out and enjoy. Even “slack time” only produces results when the slackers focus on their own creativity rather enjoying the results of someone else’s imagination. There is one time though when we deliberately seek out and enjoy inefficiency: when we’re playing.

In a paper for the International Journal of Learning, authors Jeff Kupperman, Jeff Stanzler, Michael Fahy and Susanna Hapgood argue that while gameplaying may be inefficient, it can deliver real benefits for teaching. Using the parable of the grasshopper and the ant to illustrate their ideas (not the most efficient way to make their argument but perhaps the clearest), they note that the ant would have argued that the game of golf is a waste of time. If you want to put a ball in a hole, he would have told the workshy grasshopper, hitting it with a stick is not the best method. It’s an exercise that requires a “lusory” attitude, a willingness to use play to overcome unnecessary obstacles in order to reach a goal. The same is true of school, the authors argue. Schoolwork itself isn’t particularly practical. Geometry exercises are rarely used by most schoolchildren once they leave the classroom. But they are necessary to graduate, get a degree, and build a career. Making games out of lessons then might not be the most efficient way to deliver knowledge but it can be effective at helping children to absorb the information they’re being taught.

It’s an approach that’s difficult to transition into the workplace but Google again, has given it a try with the video games, pool tables and other amenities scattered around the Googleplex. Encouraging your employees to play doesn’t sound particularly efficient (especially if you’ve already given them 20 percent of the workweek just to think and experiment) but the open entertainment areas may provide an opportunity for ideas to flow between departments. For the company, it’s better that employees stay in the office and discuss their concepts with colleagues than head to a bar and share them with competitors.

3. Inefficiency is Fun!

But perhaps the best argument in favor of inefficiency isn’t that it delivers results but that not delivering results can be so enjoyable and lead in all sorts of unexpected directions. Arguing in favor of distraction in New York magazine, writer Sam Anderson points out that Proust’s gigantic masterpiece was prompted by allowing himself to be distracted by the memories created by biting into a cookie:

“That famous cookie is a kind of hyperlink: a little blip that launches an associative cascade of a million other subjects. This sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness.”

Unlike “slack time” or play time, unmindfulness isn’t something you can plan or prepare for. But unless you’re a French novelist, you can be sure it won’t help you get your work done.

Photography: Robert van der Steeg

In a survey conducted in 2008, the cost of production lost in the United States to interruptions — and the time it took to get back to work after those interruptions — was put at more than $650 billion. That’s the fee the world’s largest economy is paying for the unscheduled phone calls, an average 50 email checks each day, and 77 daily uses of an instant messenger made by the typical information worker. When the bill falls on the corporation, that’s someone else’s problem. But when you own the corporation, or when you’re working for yourself, it’s not just your problem, the wasted time becomes a giant productivity challenge that has to be tackled head-on.

The most common advice usually consists of task listing and prioritization. Some experts will recommend the Eisenhower Method, a system said to have been used by the 34^th President in which tasks are accorded space in a table divided into areas marked urgent/not urgent; important/not important. Others will suggest Posec, an acronym that stands for  Prioritize by Organizing, Streamlining, Economizing and Contributing. And for the truly brave, there’s always Getting Things Done, David Allen’s system of folders, lists and sub-lists.

While these kinds of methods may work for some people, they’re often the disciplined types who are most organized anyway. Most timewasters find that the complicated process of listing and prioritizing tasks takes up more time than it saves.

There are easier methods.

How Much is Your Time Worth?

The first is economic. Practitioners of the “dismal science” base their ideas on the assumption that money can be a motivating factor in personal choices: make people pay more for their petrol, for example, and they’ll drive less, reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Know how much money you’re losing each time you re-check an email, take another look at Facebook or get up to pour another coffee, and you should find that you’re doing those things less too. That’s always been the principle in time and motion studies in which companies look for ways to squeeze greater efficiency out of their workforce. Because they can measure the improvements in financial terms, they’re motivated to bring in the consultants and implement their suggestions instead of turning a blind eye to worker inefficiencies.

Freelancers and the self-employed might not be losing $650 billion a year, but they can put a value on their wasted time by calculating their hourly rate and being aware of the amount they lose for each ten minutes they waste flicking to their browser and back.

In practice though, awareness alone may not be enough if only because remaining constantly aware is just about impossible. Forget the cost for ten minutes, and you can easily find yourself forgetting that you should have been working for the last ten minutes.

Combine that awareness with time-blocking though, and you might just be on to something. Gina Trapani, founding editor of Lifehacker, has described one method that she used to beat office distractions while working as a programmer in an open plan office. With designers, coders and engineers sitting elbow-to-elbow, interruptions were constant and distractions a part of the office environment. To meet her deadlines, Trapani would schedule a meeting with herself in the conference room, shut the door and turn it into a private office.

That didn’t just help because it took her away from the designers’ elbows however. It also worked because the time was limited. Trapani would only have had an hour or two in the conference room before her booking ended. Knowing that she only had to focus during a set period of time would have helped her to beat distractions caused by email, messaging and status updates. She could always catch up on the latest lolcat when the appointment was over. One of the easiest strategies that David Allen recommends is to only check your email twice a day (once at the beginning of the day, and once at the end.) It’s a strategy that effectively blocks out one major source of distraction for the entire day.

Cutting yourself off entirely can work for short bursts. Head to a café with no Internet connection and turn your phone off, and you might just find that you’ve got nothing to do but work until the time runs out or the task is complete, but it’s not a strategy that you can use all day. Time blocks must be limited if they’re to be effective. At some point, you’ll need to turn the phone back on, reopen the browser and hit the Internet again.

Know What You’re Doing

A third strategy then is to make your time-wasting more productive. Perhaps the biggest, newest time-suck in the last few years has been the growth of social media. A Nielsen survey conducted at the beginning of 2010 found that Facebook users spend an average of seven hours on the site each month, a loss of almost an entire work day. Much of that will be fun time spent by students and friends chatting to each other, rather than the loss of productive hours and much of it too will represent investments of time by businesses promoting themselves on the site. With little awareness though of how social media can actually benefit a business — beyond the vague idea of “branding” and networking — much of that time really will be wasted. If you’re finding that you’re heading over Twitter or your Facebook page on a regular basis, then you can convert that time into production by making sure you’re posting the kinds of messages that generate business, build relationships with key influencers or distributing coupon codes. You’ll still be spending time, but at least it won’t be entirely wasted.

Perhaps the best way to make better use of your time though is Lee Silber’s suggestion. The talk show host, speaker and graphic designer, ends his book Time Management for the Creative Person: Right-Brain Strategies for Stopping Procrastination, Getting Control of the Clock and Calendar, and Freeing Up Your Time and Your Life, with the suggestion to just say “no” when projects pile in.

That’s certainly the best way to stop wasting time: don’t use it for work.

Deadlines are supposed to motivate us. They have the power to force freelancers to focus on the task at hand, to keep them away from the shiny lights of the Internet and to restrict their attention to the work that needs to be completed. They increase productivity, allowing more work to be done in less time and, ideally, for more money, and they also ensure that the tasks are actually completed. When you have to put your pencil down when the alarm bell rings, the project doesn’t last forever without ever reaching its end.

And sometimes, clients do actually need the work at set times. A delay at your end can create blockages along their production system costing them money in lost income or increasing the cost of the product. That’s bad enough for them, and when it gives you a reputation for causing problems, it’s bad for you too.

And yet, setting a deadline is about as easy as setting a quote. It requires a clear knowledge of the complexities of the task and the work required to complete it, and an understanding of your own levels of productivity.

Know Your Job and Yourself

Both of those should come with experience. The more you’ve worked in an industry, the more you become aware of the actual time it takes to design, code and debug a website, produce a logo or build a simple iPhone app. You’ll know that tasks that sound easy — such as debugging a program or cropping an image accurately — can actually take far longer than they seem. Clients might not recognize those time limits but experienced buyers will have heard the predictions before, and inexperienced ones will soon discover how long their projects actually take. Part of learning a job is understanding the tasks it includes.

And another part is understanding yourself. Different workers and freelancers do have different levels of productivity. Not all copywriters are capable of churning out more than a couple of thousand words a day; others will hit that benchmark by lunch and press on towards 4000 before they tear their fingers away from their smoking keyboards. The more work you can get done, the more income you can earn, and while deadlines can help to ensure that that productivity is at its maximum, there’s always going to be a level beyond which you just can’t produce. It doesn’t matter how much you’d like to believe you can produce an MMORPG in a weekend, it’s not going to happen and setting that kind of deadline is only going to result in disappointment.

The Bigger the Project, the Softer the Deadline

Even when you understand both the job and yourself though, deadlines can sometimes be missed, and that’s particularly true for long projects. Telling a client with a quick job that might be completed within a couple of hours that he’ll have it by the following morning is easy enough. But when a large project stretches for months, and the target is so much further away, a small miscalculation in your productivity prediction can result in a big miss. Start to fall behind and you’ll feel you’ve got plenty of time to catch up — right up until the deadline is upon you, and you realize that you don’t.

And that’s if your calculations about yourself are slightly wrong. It’s also possible that your understanding of the project and yourself are accurate, but your predictions about the rest of the world are off. The longer the project lasts, the greater the chances that something will happen to throw things off-kilter. Even a short cold — something statistically likely over the space of three or four months  — can kick an on-time project a couple of days behind schedule. Forgotten holidays, family strife and technical breakdowns all mean that a project that everyone expects to finish at a certain date ends up taking longer than expected.

The solution is obvious in theory but difficult in practice. Consider how long you believe a project will take then add perhaps ten percent to the time and you should leave room for those unseen mishaps to do their worst. But the Boyle’s Law of the workplace — that work has a tendency to expand to fill the time available — will quickly squeeze out those spare days. All you really end up doing is proving that tight deadlines really do improve productivity.

So if you can’t leave room for mistakes in your own predictions and you can’t add days for unforeseen events, what can you do to increase the chances that you’ll hit the deadline for a long-term project?

Perhaps the best thing is to talk to the client. Explain that the longer the project continues, the softer the deadline needs to be to take into account those bumps on the long road. Your own deadline will remain solid, giving you the productivity you want, but the client should have contingency plans in case things happen to push the presentation beyond the delivery date. The alternative, to tighten the pressure towards the end of the project, is as likely to result in a squeeze on the quality as force the work to be delivered on time.

And understand too, that a missed deadline isn’t rare. Little more than three months before the opening of the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004, 60 percent of the venues were incomplete. It’s already become clear that renovations to parts of the London Underground won’t be ready in time for the 2012 Olympics, and that’s still two years away. No one though is saying that the London Olympics will be a failure because the Northern line won’t be running faster.

Deadlines are a vital part of the freelance business. They’re as much a part of accepting work as estimating quotes and knowing how to do the job. But just as freelancers need to know what they’re doing, so outsourcers too have a responsibility to the project to expect delays and build in contingency plans. Deadlines might be great ways to inspire productivity and ensure that the work is done but they also need to be softer than they look.

Photography: seeveeaar

One of the most notable changes that freelancers feel when they leave start-ups and start working for themselves is the effect that self-employment has on productivity. Long chats around the watercooler don’t disappear because there’s no watercooler or because there’s no one to chat to — your own kitchen, after all, is just down the corridor and a phone is close at hand. They vanish because time spent talking is time not spent producing billable work. The more productive you can be, the more successful you’ll be, a correlation that’s less direct in the corporate world where a half-hour schmooze with a supervisor over coffee can be considered a half-hour invested in career networking. But maximizing productivity as a freelancer means staying focused and avoiding distractions, a strategy that’s always easier agreed than employed.

David Rock, a business coach and author of Your Brain at Work: Strategies for overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long divides distractions into external distractions and internal distractions: bright shiny things that pull us out of work and which demand energy to drag ourselves back to it, and inner thoughts that intrude on our thinking processes.

Of the two, external distractions appear to be the easiest to avoid. Rock recommends blocking them out entirely by switching off all communication devices while you’re working. It sounds ideal and would no doubt be a perfect solution if you were working in a windowless box for a couple of hours. In practice though, you’re going to be working all day in a home office, at a kitchen table or in a café. Your phone will be on because someone might actually need to contact you. The Internet will be connected because you need it. And while you might be able to shut the door at home, in a public area, you can’t stop people from talking to you any more than you can block out the sounds around you.

Blocking Out the Noise

What you can do though is exercise some level of control over those external distractions. You might not be able to turn off the phone but you can set it to vibrate, check to see who’s calling and only answer the most urgent of calls. That’s simple enough. Much harder is the effect of music and ambient noise. Cafes might be useful places to work but it’s the baristas who decide what you listen to and the other patrons who define the nature of the conversations you hear around you. If those conversations turn out to be interesting — and more interesting than your work —  there’s a good chance they’ll have you listening instead of working.

Different sounds though may have different effects. David Rock cites an experiment in which volunteers were asked to type while seeing a pattern of flashing lights. Those who were able to discern the pattern of those lights, and in particular those who were able to articulate the pattern, were found to type up to 30 times faster than people who simply saw the lights as random flashes. That might suggest that listening to music that’s familiar to you, rather than the barista’s choice of his favorite techno hits, would help maintain focus. A playlist of classical music and a pair of sound-negating headphones might not be as essential a work tool as an Office suite and an Internet connection but if stops unfamiliar music and café conversation from pulling you away from your screen then it could be a good investment. (And a big screen might help too: David Rock also cites a Microsoft study which found that larger screens minimized distraction, perhaps by blocking out visual distractions. Presumably, facing the wall instead of the inside of the café would have a similar effect).

Directing Your Thoughts

The internal distractions though are harder to block. You can’t turn your brain off, and any pause to think allows all sorts of thoughts to intrude, from what you’re having for supper to what you’d really like to be doing instead of working on the project in front of you. David Rock’s advice is two-fold. Clearing your mind, he argues, will silence at least some of those voices in your head, and against those that remain, you can apply mental brakes. An instruction from your subconscious to think of an issue or take a particular action might not be possible to stop but there is a small window of time, perhaps as little as a third of a second, in which you can refuse to obey the order.

He may be right, and mental discipline is certainly an important aspect of remaining focused but a better option might be not to block the subconscious entirely but to control it and use it. Sitting in a café, you will feel the urge to look away from the screen and think about something other than your project. But if you can direct those thoughts towards something productive, then you’ll be cutting the time needed for your next task.

The trip to the café, for example, is actually as important as the time you spend there. While the walk or the drive might feel like a pleasant break from the keyboard and the computer screen, it’s actually a useful time to think about the work you’re about to do. When you’re ready to sit and work, the loudest voices in your mind will be those that you’ve just placed there — the ones telling how organize the spreadsheet or which design templates to use for the website. As those voices go quiet and new ones start chirping, you can drown out the less useful ones asking what’s for dinner or wondering what the people at the next table are discussing by focusing the inner distraction on the next thing you need to do. You might not be able to block the inner distraction  but using it could keep you productive.

For freelancers, distractions, focus and discipline are daily battles. The enemy is never completely beaten, is always able to make a comeback, and your ability to tackle it depends on the nature of the project, the tightness of the deadline and your ability to knuckle down and work. But at least it doesn’t include the watercooler.

Photography: Scott Feldstein

Cubicle walls might not have been pretty but they’ve always been good for productivity. Not seeing your neighbor might have freed you up to take a snooze, fire up the solitaire or surf to the sports pages, but it also meant less gossip, fewer temptations to chat, and the fear that your boss might peer over the wall and catch you in the act. So what happens when you give the office a miss and swap the cubicle for a coffee shop? What can you do to ensure that working in a social environment won’t mean all sociability and no work?

It’s a question that’s become increasingly important as cafes recognize the power of wifi to pull in regular customers. A survey in 2006 found that about a fifth of the US workforce spent at least some time working outside a traditional office, and estimated that the rate was growing by about 10 percent a year. With hi-tech firms feeling the squeeze in the recession and even skilled geeks picking up pink slips and  “consultancy” business cards, it’s no surprise that so many café tables are now packed with Macs.

Etiquette between café workers has now become clear but while those rules will keep the atmosphere pleasant, they won’t necessary keep your productivity high. That happens first when you choose the right café. Even chains serving identical drinks in identical décor can vary in atmosphere. A Starbucks on a main street will often be filled with shoppers resting their feet and swapping sales stories. A branch next to a law firm will contain suits discussing briefs and sharing strategies. Each of those cafes will feel very different to freelancers opening their laptops and hoping to hunker down to some focused effort. It’s always harder to work when others around you are having fun. Look up from your keyboard to see others typing away though, and you’ll feel guilty you’re not doing the same.

Work Where Others Are Working

Rule one for productive café workers then, is to work in a café where others are working, meet in a café where others hold meetings — and have fun in a café where others are chatting.

Rule two is to keep your distance. There might not be walls between tables in a café but there should be enough space for workers to get on with work without being tempted to sit and talk. Etiquette demands a nodded greeting between regulars but productivity requires nothing more to be said before it’s time to close up and head back to the home office.

That’s not as easy as it sounds. Asking a fellow coffeeholic to watch your Mac while you make space for another brew can easily spark an opening for a conversation. Sharing a power outlet gives enough in common for two workers to feel like old friends. And talking can make for useful networking. One of the benefits promoted by co-working spaces is that they allow freelancing geeks to talk, chat, problem-solve, and perhaps even build businesses together. The conversation and the company are as much a part of the package as the table space and the Internet connection. When you see the person at the next café table not as a potential disruption but as a possible partner, it’s tempting to spend time deepening those connections instead of building your product.

In practice though, those sorts of benefits rarely materialize. Fellow café workers might make for reasonable neighbors but there’s little reason to believe that they’ll also make good partners. Once you’ve assessed another freelancer’s ability to help your company — and found it wanting — it’s best to stick to nodding terms so that you don’t spend your time talking instead of working.

Add Stress to Your Coffee

Where you sit matters too. Café regulars tend to choose the same seats each day but it’s important to choose the right seat. Obviously access to a power outlet will  be crucial — otherwise you’ll be spending half your time glancing at the battery icon — but choosing a seat that lets you sit with your back to the wall can help with productivity as well. You’ll be able to see everyone else (and see them working) but you won’t be stuck with the feeling that someone is reading over your shoulder. There are few things more disruptive than that. Cafes are public which means that to protect your productivity you’ll also have to do whatever you can to protect your privacy.

But perhaps the biggest threat to productivity when working in a café isn’t the atmosphere, the conversations or the peeping toms trying to spy on your screen. It’s the comfort. Cafes are designed to make people relax but studies show that a little stress can improve productivity, even if a lot of stress has the opposite effect. To be at your most productive then, you’ll want to introduce just a little bit of pressure even in a place as calming as a café. You can do that by setting yourself strict limits on the length of time you’ll sit and drink. Knowing that you’ll only be there for two hours — and that you have that long to complete a specific task — will get you working against the clock. You can also try breaking the routine by visiting the café at a different time of day or trying a different watering hole. The unfamiliar might not be as stressful as a tight deadline but it might just be enough to make you retreat into your laptop and get on with your work.

Cafes have turned out to be great places for digital nomads to use as replacement offices. They’re everywhere, they’re affordable, and they come complete with good refreshments. But using them in a way that lets you work rather than relax, get things done rather than watch waiters get things done, and produce results rather than just a large bill, does take a little care. Get it right though and you should find that your local coffee bar beats the cubicle any day.

Twitter’s hashtags have become an essential tool. Conference organizers use them to expand their reach. Communities use them to track natural disasters. And of course, protesters use them to tell the world what they’re doing and what their governments are doing back. It’s no surprise then that spammers also use them to hit eyeballs and push their dodgy goods, and that the most popular trending topics always seem to be light and breezy: three things to say after sex tends to pop up a lot and everyone always seems keen to announce what they’re listening to right now. But essentially, hashtags are a way for Twitter’s users to organize the information they’re producing on the site. They’re a means of categorization, allowing anyone to find the data they’re looking for without wasting hours sorting through irrelevant posts. In other words, hashtags are efficiency tools. So how else can you use them to improve your productivity and cut back on wasted time?

The easiest way to use hashtags for productivity is to identify the tags that are most relevant to you and create a series of saved searches from your Twitter page. You won’t need to do more than click the tag to bring up a list of the latest results so you’ll even save the time it takes to type the hashtag into the search field. First though, you’d need to know which tags you need to be looking for. Directories like Twubs and wikis like What The Trend can tell you what the different tags mean, and Brizzly, a social media platform, provides a little explanation together with each trending topic. But in practice you’re unlikely to need them. As you follow people you find interesting on Twitter, you’ll naturally come across hashtags that your community is using. Save the most common terms, create a relevant list, and you might just be able to cut down on the time spent checking Twitter for interesting tweets. Those hashtag links will bring up the best tweets on your topic right away.

Categorize Your Tweets

Saving hashtag searches will help you to quickly find tweets that have already been categorized by others. But hashtags can also be a good way to categorize your own tweets. It doesn’t matter whether other people use those hashtags or not –- in fact, you don’t want people to use them. You want to create a system that allows you to pull up a list of the tweets you’ve posted that fit a particular category.

The #quote tag, for example, is used by people who like to toss inspiring quotes into their timelines, an easy way for people who have nothing interesting to say themselves to add new content and win retweets. Create a unique tag for your own quotes and place it in your tweets in addition to the #quote tag, something like #[username]qts, and not only will you turn up when someone searches for quotes, but you’ll also be able to quickly pull up a list of your own tweeted quotes. While it might not make the most exciting reading, it will at least ensure that you don’t tweet the same quote twice and it will help you to figure out what kind of quote you might want to include next.

For other kinds of tweets, categorization by hashtag will let you keep track of your posts in the same way that categories let you group posts on blogs. Replies could have one kind of tag, tweets about your business another, tweets about your blog a third kind, and tweets about your product a fourth tag. Include the occasional tweet listing the tags you’re using and you’ll help your new readers to find old posts they might have missed. And by calling up posts that use those tags you’ll be able to see which kind of tweets you should be tweeting next.

Categorize Other People’s Tweets

That’s particularly important when it comes to Twitter-based conversations. You can’t categorize other people’s tweets, and while you can favorite them, that only gives one overall category for the tweets you’ve found important enough to answer. Fave all the tweets you’ve replied to and, if you’re chatty – as you should be on Twitter — you’ll struggle to find old posts that caught your eye. You’ll have the same fight flicking through your own replies to see the posts you were replying to.

Include a hashtag in your replies though and you’ll create a layer of categorization beneath “favorites” and “replies.” You’ll be categorizing your own replies but more importantly, because you can click through to see the tweet you replied to, you’ll also be able to categorize other people’s tweets that have caught your eye. Using the hashtag #replyblog, for example, will let you find the conversations that you’ve had about blogging.

And there is one more way that hashtags can improve your productivity. They can stop you using Twitter so much. One of the reasons that Twitter is such a time-waster is that you never what kind of post is going to be coming up next. You don’t know if those “2 new tweets” are going to be something important, relevant and unmissable, something fun and entertaining, or something pointless and dull that makes you wonder whether it isn’t time to unfollow. Restrict your tweet-reading to hashtags on a service like TweetGrid or TweetDeck and you’ll only be getting information that you know you want. You’ll also be getting a lot less information overall.

Most productivity systems are centered on categorizations, whether that’s in the form of multiple to-do lists or the 43 folders of Getting Things Done. Twitter’s hashtags make it possible to add multiple category levels to your own tweets, allowing you to keep track of the information you’ve posted in the past, as well as find relevant data that other people have tweeted too. Lists might not have taken off on Twitter but with a little creativity, you should find that smart hashtagging can save you time, keep your reading relevant and improve the way you keep track of track of Twitter’s communications.

Nothing focuses the mind faster than an impending delivery date. You’ve accepted the task, done the research and played with the procrastination. Now, with the deadline in sight, you actually have to finish the job and hand over the goods. The change is massive and sudden. Knowing that your reputation and possibly your job is on the line has an amazing effect. Suddenly, a task that looked impossible becomes achievable. YouTube and viral emails still appear tempting but you can block them out. Your productivity goes through the roof. Instead of staring at the wall or pacing around the room, you’re hacking at the keyboard as though it’s stuck to your fingers. Even if you miss the deadline a little, the period between recognizing the urgency and completing the job is one of unparalleled attention and diligence. If only you could work that way all the time. Sprinting like this over a full working life is just about impossible but you can take some of the lessons learned from the effect of a tight deadline and use them to raise your work rate every day.

First, it’s important to understand that deadlines aren’t uniform. They pack different characteristics and each characteristic has a different effect on motivation. The outcome for the worker himself, for example, is one important influence. A deadline for a design that could win you a promotion or land a larger and more satisfying project is likely to be met. A threat from the wife that she’ll throw out anything in the garage that hasn’t been put away by the end of Sunday can be fairly safely ignored. Deadlines aren’t just dates, they’re also carriers of personal punishment and reward.

Missed Deadlines Are Your Fault

They’re also vehicles for organizational punishment and reward, and that’s important too. When a failure to meet a deadline is going to have a knock-on effect throughout the business, delaying the next stage in a project or causing large-scale changes to the marketing plan, those results also affect motivation. Even if you can shift the blame onto tardy suppliers or poor information, the knowledge that others will suffer will influence your ability to knuckle down and finish on time.

And personal interest in the project helps too. When a task is interesting, exciting and fun to do, you’re more likely to do it on time and less likely to be pulled away by the lure of a new post on an interesting blog or the chance to chat with a friend.

All of these things make up the task’s importance—to you and to the organization. Other factors affecting a deadline’s ability to drive you to get things done include its level of difficulty, and the specificity of both the task and the deadline goal. You’re much more likely to miss a deadline when the job is difficult, when you’re uncertain about the requirements, and when you’re not clear about when the project actually has to be delivered. Does “the end of next week,” for example, mean 5pm on Friday or, if the project is just going to sit ignored on a computer all weekend, can it include a bit of Monday too?

So deadlines are most effective at increasing productivity when they include real consequences, when you know what needs to be done and when it needs to be done by, and when you enjoy the job. Few tasks pack all of those things but the more you can include, the better.

But these factors are difficult to control. You don’t want every job to be life or death. A task that looks clear can become fuzzy as you work your way through it. And while you might start a new task buzzing with excitement, that thrill can quickly fade.

There is one characteristic of a deadline though that’s more powerful than all of the others combined, and it’s also under your control: its proximity. One group of researchers at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington has argued that a close deadline brings rewards closer, increases the challenge and raises motivation. It creates two psychological states, they argue: urgency and “felt accountability.”

Clearly, no one is going to ask for a tighter deadline just so that a task feels more urgent but deadlines can be made to feel closer simply by placing smaller versions—milestones—before the final due date.

Celebrating a Milestone with a Million-Dollar Party

This is something that happens anyway, argue the Foster Business School researchers in the book, Work Motivation: Past, Present, and Future. Using secretaries as an example, they describe how employees faced with a deadline continually assess their progress towards the goal, reallocating their time and effort depending their assessment of whether they’re likely to finish on schedule. In effect, workers are creating mental milestones that tell them whether they’re on the right track.

Those milestones can be built up and made concrete. Dan Carrison, writing in Deadline! How Premier Organizations Win the Race Against Time, describes how Boeing organized a massive party to celebrate the first time all of the components of its new widebody 777 jetliner were put together. The company didn’t just invite all of the engineers and employees who had worked on every part of the plane to mark the event—which would have opened the celebration to 10,000 people—it invited their families too. Altogether, more than 100,000 people were able to tour the plane as proud relatives showed off the screws they had attached and the wing parts they had designed.

But the plane wasn’t finished. It would be another two years before it made its first flight. This wasn’t a celebration of the end of a job. It was an attempt to encourage workers to complete the task on time. Engineers were able to see what their work had achieved so far. They were able to understand what completing the project would create. And by allowing employees to bring their families, Boeing was able to recruit a giant team of cheerleaders: wives, husbands and children who would ask their staff about the big plane over the dinner table.

A party after the project is completed is a reward, Carrison writes. A party held while the project is still under way—when it’s met a milestone—is a motivational strategy.

Of course, you don’t have to throw a million-dollar party to mark your milestones but knowing when they are, celebrating their achievement and letting others know when you expect to be done can all keep you focused and motivated, even when the final deadline is far away.

Photography: smileygeekgirl

Start working for yourself and distractions suddenly become a great deal more destructive. You might been bothered in the past by a colleague talking too loudly in the next cubicle. The constant drip of emails into your inbox might have been pulling you away from your projects. But when the money you received at the end of the month was always the same regardless of how much you produced, it didn’t really matter how often you went back to the watercooler to escape the noise or how much time you spent looking at lolcats. Become your own boss, and those distractions aren’t just mildly irritating (or even lots of fun), they’re expensive timewasters that reduce your monthly income.

It’s when you calculate the amount of money you’re losing when you let distractions pull you away from work that you realize just how much those trivialities are costing you. If you’re charging $50 an hour, for example, and spend twenty minutes a day looking at friends’ feeds on Facebook and ten minutes a day writing jokey emails, then you just spent $25 for that entertainment. That’s about three times the price of a movie ticket.

A workday will always have some distractions but there are things you can do to minimize the power — and the cost — of the biggest timesucks.

Avoid People

People are the most powerful distracters. They’re demanding, they’re everywhere and they get offended when you ignore them. While working from home will mean that you have fewer people milling about the office looking for a conversation, it doesn’t make you completely incommunicado. You have to do that yourself.

So children have to be taken care of. Trying to work with little ones running around your feet rarely works out. They’ll be demanding your attention long before you’ll have completed your project, and they’re the hardest people to ignore. This is one instance when multitasking just doesn’t work, so divide the time, get help and make sure that when you’re at work, you’re working, and when you’re with the kids, you’re far from the computer.

Unless it’s a real emergency. In that case, you can always call on the TV to do its job, at least for a while.

Grown-ups are a little easier. They understand when you shut the door, even if they don’t like it. You can also choose to use voicemail instead of answering the phone to everyone who calls, turn off your chat programs and set specific times to answer email.

While people can be giant moving sources of distraction, they’re not too difficult to avoid.

Surf Smartly

The Web though is unavoidable. With around a quarter of a billion websites and plenty of unseen content that you probably should read and certainly would enjoy reading, it’s not hard to justify taking a few minutes to catch up on the news or check out the latest tweets.

The solution looks simple. You can turn the Internet off. If you don’t have the self-discipline to pull the plug or shut down your wireless connection (and who does?) you can always pack your laptop off to a spot with no connection at all. Or use a program that blocks access to certain sites except for set times of day.

But that’s a mistake. There’s only one greater source of distraction than the Internet, and that’s its absence. Instead of looking for a few minutes at the latest headlines, you’ll be wasting ten-minute blocks wondering if it’s really possible to get a connection when there’s only one bar showing. Or trying to figure out whether it’s possible to beat the blocker.

So don’t try to avoid the Web. Instead, use it smartly. Open sites that you can read in nibble-sized chunks. Twitter is good because you can read the tweets with a look. News sites can also be useful because by the time you’ve hit refresh and waited for the new headlines to load, you’ll be ready to head back to your work.

Shut down your browser completely though and deciding what site to open will take enough mental effort to pull you completely away from what you should be doing. Leave it open and when you find the cursor heading towards the toolbar, you’ll be able to keep the distraction to a minimum, even if you can’t get rid of it completely.

Turn Off the Silence

Noise is also supposed to be a distraction, but that’s not always the case. Much depends on the type of noise you’re hearing and the type of working you’re trying to do. A repetitive banging or a constant dripping will always be more off-putting than a piano concerto. And complete silence is so unusual that its presence can be even more distracting than a little background noise.

But music also brings a structure. Songs and albums are a set length, so you can tell yourself that you’ll keep cracking on until you reach the end — and you always know when that end is coming. Even talk radio like NPR can bring a schedule that can help to retain focus at least until the end of the program.

The key then isn’t to find a space in the library where you can’t hear anyone scream but to find the right kind of noise to match your project. For those whose work requires playing with words, classical music or tunes in foreign languages can work well. When the work is tedious and requires more physical than mental effort — such as data entry or QA — talk radio can keep the curious part of your mind occupied while the rest of you sticks with what you should be doing.

And even the background din of a café can be helpful. It’s not just the call of the baristas or the buzz of conversation that will keep you staring at the screen but the fact that you’re alone with a computer. That’s fine when you’re looking at the keyboard but spend any more than a few seconds gazing around the room with no one to talk to and you start to look a little weird. Reminding yourself of that should be enough to distract you from your distraction.

It’s impossible to work for eight hours (or more) straight without being distracted at all. But when you’re working for yourself, it is worth identifying the biggest slackers — and firing them.

One of the problems of working online is keeping track of your life. It doesn’t matter whether you are researching for an offline job or are a hardcore web worker. In the past, a lot of us have used paper day planners, but if a significant part of your day is spent online, you likely have digital information to track. One of the most powerful and flexible ways to do this and stay productive is with a Personal Dashboard.

A Personal Dashboard doesn’t have to be just for your personal affairs but can include aspects of your life and work on or offline. There are actually a number of web applications that are considered a type of web dashboard, including Pageflakes and Netvibes. Some people even use an RSS reader such as Google Reader, or a calendaring tool such as Google Calendar as a sort of web dashboard.

The drawback is that these sorts of apps are very narrow in their feature set, especially Google Reader. Sure, you can track all the sites you like to read daily, but that’s about it. With portals like Pageflakes and Netvibes, you can do a bit more. Yet you cannot track other types of information, images, links, lists, etc. Most of all, it’s not necessarily in a handy format.

A much more suitable application choice for a proper Personal Dashboard is to use a mind mapping tool. You have your choice of desktop or web-based packages, and even the latter are starting to offer sophisticated feature sets.

What’s a Personal Dashboard For?

A personal dashboard is a sophisticated way to digitally track your offline and online life, both for work and personal. Here are some possible bits of information you might keep in your personal dashboard, in no particular order.

1. Personal goals – career, relationship, etc.
2. Tasks by time period – daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, long-term.
3. Personal tasks – meetings, appointments, reminders.
4. Work tasks.
5. Schedule.
6. Work log – a record of what you did, by day or even by hour.
7. Reading list – online (URLs), or print (list of magazines, books, authors).
8. Passwords.
9. Notes in full text.
10. Links to finished documents, including word processor or spreadsheet files.
11. Design snippets

Why Mind Mapped Dashboards?

Why use a mind mapping tool? A mind mapped personal dashboard allows for high productivity, for all the same reasons to use a mind mapping tool at all: flexibility and diagrammatic representation, stimulation of thinking processes, and more. You can view mind maps in detail or at a high level, use different shapes, colors, line styles, text fonts and so on. Mind maps stimulate both sides of the brain, logical and creative. So you could take your personal dashboard and expand it to link to other mind maps where you’ve worked out solutions to work or life problems.

If you think you’ll miss your RSS reader app or your favorite portal, no problem. Most desktop-based mind mapping tools allow you to link a map node to an application. So a mind map becomes more of a meta-dashboard that can provide hooks into your desktop applications and documents, as well web pages, and store snippets or even large blocks of text.

So it doesn’t replace portals, calendars, to do lists, etc. What you have instead is a central area where you can access what’s important to you each day, arranged in some diagrammatic fashion that is optimum for your use.

Here’s a summary of the value of using a mind map for your personal dashboard in more detail:

1. Radial thinking – the visual structure of many mind maps forms a radial pattern, which supports a more open type of thinking pattern.
2. Hierarchical structure – any information that has hiearchy can be well-represented in a mind map.
3. Flexible structure – easily reorganize information.
4. High or low view – ability to expand/ collapse map nodes so that you can get focused view or a bird’s eye view, respectively.

An advanced mind mapping tool allows:

1. Active linking to documents (web pages or on hard drive) and applications. Clicking a linked map node starts up the application associated with the attached document type.
2. Synchronization with MS Office, including Excel, Word, Outlook, MS Project and other files.
3. Inclusion of native spreadsheet blocks (as an alternate to linking to a spreadsheet file).
4. Creation and linking to sub-maps.
5. Attachment of notes to map nodes. In terms of workflow, this is a productivity boon. This makes it easy to find associated notes.
6. Inclusion of images in map nodes.
7. Floating nodes that represent peripherally related information which should not be part of the main map.
8. A variety of map styles.
9. A type of diagramming, using map node shapes, lines, borders and relationships.
10. Building of complex mind maps, depending on the tool used.

A Sample Personal Dashboard Mind Map

Depending on which mind mapping tool you are using, you can get pretty sophisticated with a personal dashboard. A great example of a personal board is in MindJet’s library. The snapshot above shows an overview of this dashboard, but I recommend you see it in full. To view the mind map, you’ll need a copy of MindJet’s MindManager Pro 7 (free fully functioning trial) or their free MindManager Viewer 7 map viewer. The Windows version of MindManager offers a 30-day fully functioning trial. For Mac, it’s 21 days.

The drawback, at least as far as I found, is that MindManager can get addictive, and if can’t afford the steep price (which is worth it if you are a hardcore mind mapper like myself). What you might want to do instead is start with a copy of the free multi-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) FreeMind. Work with FreeMind, get used to the process, if you haven’t used mind maps before.

If you like the general feel of using a mind map, then consider downloading a trial version of MindJet MindManager (Windows, Mac OS X). This should give you enough time and feature variety to determine if you like mind mapping enough to purchase software or stick with FreeMind. Or a relatively expensive desktop option that I’ve used extensively, amongst several dozen, is MindApp, though it’s nowhere nearly as sophisticated as MindManager.

If you prefer using something web-based, there are several options, including Mindomo, Mindmeister, or Comapping. However, don’t always expect the full sophistication of a desktop, especially the ability to fire up desktop applications.

Photography: elliotcable

It’s a type of holy grail: trying to get more work done in less time than you’re spending now. Entrepreneurs, web workers, freelancers, writers, designers, coders… Doesn’t matter what type of work, you’re probably wondering how to increase your work productivity.

Well there are ways to increase work productivity. These are some tips that have worked for me over the years.

1. Plan. Judicious planning can make the difference in your productivity. While some people can fire off several units of work from scratch, most of us need some time to consider a few ideas, absorb some relevant details/ research, and have time to brew our results – whether it’s an article, logo, web design, code or whatever.

2. Use mind maps to organize. Lists are fine as a starting point, but mind maps are a far more productive tool to organize information.

3. Have lots of ideas. The more ideas you have, the greater the chance that one of them is worth pursuing. Professional photographers, for example, tend to find this out intrinsically. They might take an entire roll of film (well before digital cameras) with the expectation that 1-3 frames might produce a usable picture. Inventors also try many ideas before getting to something that works.

4. Filter your ideas. Use discretion and judgement to filter ideas for feasibility. That is, if you manage to create a large flow of ideas on a regular basis, learn how to pick out the winners. You can be like Thomas Edison and come up with 9,999 ways not to invent a light bulb, but you’d save so much more time if you filter for worthwhile ideas.

5. Sketch/ diagram. Producing visuals for your ideas not only help convey them to others but stimulates a different frame of thinking. It’s also easier to visualize your end results and work towards that. Diagramming always helped to produce code faster.

6. Think peripherally. The answers to your questions might come to you from unexpected sources. Sure, that sounds a bit cryptic, but I’ve always attributed my usually high productivity to immersing my mind in different topics and content formats. This gives me creative flow, and combining unusual ideas (“intersecting”) sometimes produces solutions I wouldn’t otherwise think of. (For more about “idea intersection,” I highly recommend reading The Medici Effect – free PDF copy at main website.)

7. Build on your past successes. Why waste your past efforts? Is there anything you’ve done previously that will help you complete faster what you are doing now? For example, the reason why I could often produce a thousand lines of working, partially-documented computer code in 2-3 days was because of reusing code fragments I’d developed in the past. Each fragment had its own functionality. You’ll have to extend this paradigm to whatever work you do, but here’s another example. When I freelance write, I often work in niches with overlapping topics. This is usually intentional, sometimes fortunate. What it means is that I can leverage a few hours of research for one article by reusing some of it for a later article. By spending a bit of time planning possible future articles, I save a lot of time and get a lot of work done.

8. Batch tasks. Work in such a way now that you can reuse or leverage current efforts later. One way to do this is to batch a group of related tasks. Instead of fragmenting your time doing small tasks one at a time and spread out, consider if you can allot a block of time (time chunking) to do them all at once. This allows you to focus on related efforts. With some tasks, it might require a bit of planning, but the time saved makes it worthwhile.

For example, if you’re a writer and tend to research and write for each article as the need arises, you are not batching tasks nor leveraging your efforts. Assuming that you’ll have a block of articles in a short period of time (say a month at most) which have something in common (topic or niche), you might be able to plan them all at once and even research for them simultaneously. So if you plan and outline your batch of articles now, you leave time for ideas to brew, to allow the articles to grow. I tend to use a mind map to organize and develop my article ideas, simply because mind mapping software allows you to easily switch between “big picture” and “detailed view.”

This batching can be applied to admin tasks or regular work. I no longer check my email every 15 minutes. I’ll spend 5 minutes every hour or two hours to check a few email accounts, one forum, and Twitter or Plurk.

9. Allot less time for your work. If you work at home, it’s quite likely that you’ll mix business and pleasure time if you don’t make a conscious effort not to. That means you’ll just take that much longer to get your work done. However, this principle can apply no matter where you work. Setting artificial deadlines might motivate you to be more efficient with your work.

If you spend any part of your work day online, it’s possible that you get a heavy dose of information overload and excessive sensory input. E-mail here, e-mail there, voice mail, IM/chat, cell phone text messages, Facebook chat, Facebook wall, Facebook messages, Twitter, Plurk, and whatever else you can think of. On top of that, there’s actual productive work tasks you do. If your day is full of distraction, large tasks can feel overwhelming.

If you’re in this situation, there’s a simple piece of advice that bears reviewing, something you’ve probably heard countless times before: take one step at a time. It’s a very simple but powerful approach, since it’s far easier to focus on one small step or change at a time.

How It Works

The key to conquering large tasks is break them down into smaller subtasks, then to only focus on the current subtask. Even better, if you “hide” everything but the current subtask, it becomes easier to focus. You already know what comes after, but you keep distractions to a minimum by focusing. This way, you can enjoy small successes each step of the way, and large tasks become less intimidating.

Managing Tasks

Once you break a large task down into smaller tasks, you have a choice of methods for managing your taskload. Here are a few methods.

To-do List Software

To-do list applications are great for brainstorming a stream of consciousness and writing down thoughts as they come to you. However, they’re not as ideal later when you need to organize your thoughts, cluster ideas together.

It’s often better to scribble down your thoughts in a list, on a piece of paper, then apply another method, such as mind mapping (below). Another flaw with to-do lists is that if you have deadlines attached to each subtask, it’s sometimes difficult to get an overview of related tasks. Calendaring software (below) might be more suitable.

Some sample to-list applications are Ta-da Lists, Todoist, and Remember the Milk (RTM). RTM integrates with Google Calendar. Some of these function well on cell phones, especially those with large screens such as the iPhone.

Calendaring Software

Free Web-based calendar software abounds, and using it is another way to manage tasks, provided you know when you need to complete each task. The real benefit of web-based calendaring apps is that you can access your calendar(s) from anywhere that you have an Internet connection, often including from a mobile phone. Some calendar tools even synchronize seamlessly with to-do list applications. So you could import events recorded on your mobile phone, or from your web-stored lists.

If you don’t know which calendar tool to use, Mashable lists over 65 of them. Some of them, including Google Calendar, have APIs to build custom applications with. Or you could simply combine a to-do list app such as Remember the Milk, mentioned above, with Google Calendar, giving you a more robust way to manage tasks.

Project Management

Project management, aka PM, is a very sophisticated approach for managing a set of related subtasks. Good Project Management software offers a number of tools and methods, such as Gantt charts, critical paths, etc. If tasks are spread out over a team of people, you can track their efforts as well, check their workload, determine which tasks are project bottlenecks, and get a rough idea of how long an entire project is going to take. I say “rough” because subtask durations might change, and any later subtask dependent on a previous task will be affected, as might the entire project.

Project management is a very structured approach that is typically better suited to large, complex projects with many dozens of tasks and one or more team members. Smaller projects might benefit from some PM principles, though often there is too much rigidity or over-management of tasks.

Mind Mapping

Mind maps can take over where to-do lists leave off, are sometimes robust enough for managing projects, and are an ideal tool for  implementing a “one step at a time” approach for several reasons. (In fact, most mind mapping software allows you to put to-do lists aside, and offer equivalent functionality.)

1. Mind mapping software lets you expand or collapse parts of a mind map with ease. This allows you to see the big picture but to also focus on the small picture details when you need to.
2. They are a free-form way to record information, tasks, links, and other bits of data. To this information, you can apply as little or as much structure and hierarchy if and when you want to do so.
3. Mind map nodes can show text, icons, or images, and link to documents or activate applications on your computer desktop or in a web browser.  This means that if you use a suitable mind mapping application, you can integrate any type of to-do list, calendar or PM app from different parts of the map. Using mind maps, you have the benefit of all of the above-listed methods, if you want – giving you a more robust approach to task management. A mind map can then act like your project command center, and can itself be integrated with a master mind map or personal dashboard map.

An added benefit is that an increasing number of mind mapping applications – e.g., MindJet MindManager – are either incorporating PM features or are integrated with separate PM software, including Microsoft Project.

Of the methods listed above, mind mapping gives you the most flexibility and can incorporate the other methods.

By now, you’ve probably seen a number of Geekpreneur posts about mind mapping. Mind maps are a powerful tool that when used properly can multiply your productivity.

Here are some of the general ways that mind mapping can make the average freelancer (and other people) more productive in their work, followed by a list of some specific uses.

1. Offers blank canvas. Mind mapping software (or paper) gives you a blank canvas to work with.
2. Facilitates brainstorming. Allows unstructured brainstorming where ideas can be organized later.
3. Shows multiple detail views. You can switch between high-level and low-level detail, allowing you to see the big picture or focus when necessary.
4. Cues learning. More closely resembles human thought processes, so mind mapping research notes on a topic makes it easier to remember the concepts as a whole. This makes it easier to learn complex topics.
5. Integrates your digital workflow, since all mind mapping software allows map nodes to link to either other maps or document files. Clicking on a linked node fires up the default application for that file type.
6. Controls your workload. Allows you to break down complex problems into more manageable parts. For example, you can take a piecemeal/ step by step approach to writing articles and other documents.
7. Complexity flexibility. Mind maps can be simple or complex. Personal dashboards, for example, can be your daily workflow command center, integrating all your digtal/ web work tasks into one place.
8. Controls admin records. Easy to keep project completion records, with links to invoice files or to web documents.
9. Controls information overload. Freelancers – especially writers – often have to do a fair bit of research. Information overload can be a daily problem, but when using mind maps, it’s easy to build a reference map of articles, group and regroup information as necessary.

Some Daily Uses of Mind Mapping for Freelancers
Here are some more specific uses of mind maps for freelancers.

1. Personal Dashboard. A personal dashboard using a mind map allows you a powerful way to manage your work and personal life. Sections of a personal dashboard can start as a cluster of notes but can later transform into articles, documents, books, websites, business plans.

2. Task Management. Personal and work tasks are only a fragment of what you might put in a personal dashboard, but they’re an important part of your daily life. There are a variety of ways that you can manage tasks using mind maps. You can use them for simple to-do lists, track goal completion, develop ideas and more.

3. Idea Generation/ Idea Bank. Using mind mapping software, it’s fairly easy to simply brainstorm ideas. Once you’re finished brainstorming, you can applying filtering criteria to accept or reject each idea. After filtering your list down, you’re left with an idea bank. You can now easily organize your ideas. Hierarchies for information often “reveal” themselves, so it’s dificult to say in general how you should organize everything.

4. Learning Log. Mind maps aren’t just for brainstorming and recording ideas. If one of your tasks is to learn a subject or niche topic, mind maps allow you to build an organic knowledge base.

Start by recording what you know, in the same way that you might brainstorm. Brainstorm first, then organize your thoughts. Now arrange your notes into whatever natural information hierarchy occurs. You can add notes to your knowledge base as you learn something new, and even turn it into an idea bank.

Need to learn a language so that you can translate your writing (or someone else’s)? Mind mapping is one of the most ideal ways to learn a language. Not only can you link to web pages with podcasts or lessons, you can add images to map nodes to speed the learning process. You can build your own paced lesson plan this way, and with some mind mapping packages, share interactive maps.

5. Problem-Solving. A visual approach to problem solving often stimulates solutions that might not otherwise have occurred to you.

1. It allows you a big-picture view of the problem, although you can zoom in on details as well.
2. Mind mapping also allows you to break a problem down into component parts and dissect it piecemeal.
3. Allows you to explore relevant questions and various options radiantly, without confiining you like a list or spreadsheet would.
4. Stimulates “intersection” (Medici Effect) solutions from unrelated disciplines. These are those types of solutions that are often labelled “inspired.”

6. Scope, Plan, Develop and Write a Book. Regardless of the type of freelancing you do, if you plan to write a book about your skills, mind mapping software is a perfect tool. Some mind mapping tools are even integrated with word processing software, making conversion from map to finished document even simpler. Mind mapping also works for developing novels.

7. Document Version Control. Create a sophisticated version control manager for your documents, whether you write articles or code, do graphic design, or some other form of digital freelancing work.

8. Easy-Access Password Cache. Freelancers often have to maintain multiple website accounts. A password cache mind map allows you to hiearchically organize accounts by category of web service. Add in the site’s logo or favicon and you have a visual cue to find passwords faster. Most mind mapping programs let you link a map node to web page, so you can activate each web service from its corresponding map node.

Consider this undesirable freelancing scenario: you’ve gotten to the level of success in your business that you have so much freelance/ contract client work that you can’t think straight and can’t get the work done. If so, then you need to manage your workload. Even if you’re not overwhelmed with work at the moment, setting good workflow habits now will save you grief later. Having work you can’t complete is probably worse than not having it at all – something I’ve had to deal with earlier this year, when my productivity slipped.

Knowing that you could handle more work if it came to you makes you more receptive to opportunities that do pop up. What’s more, if you have an efficient workflow, that makes it easier for you to outsource to someone reliable and be able to manage them. This sparks the beginning of a transition from freelancer to entrepreneur.

Project Selection
Here are a couple of questions to ask yourself when you’re at the project selection stage.

1. One client or several? It’s rarely a good idea to only work with one client. Sure, there’ll be transition periods, but you want to deveop an active list. The Pareto Principle (aka 80/20 or 70/30 Rule) could be interpreted to suggest that most (e.g., 80%) of your income will come from the fewest (e.g., 20%) clients. However, there’s the matter of the other 20% of your income, and what happens if your big clients drop out for a while or even permanently. What’s bad, too, is having just one client and worrying about that constantly.
2. One project or several? This more difficult to answer and really depends on your work efficiency and ability to handle large projects. If you’re bad at breaking down a project into smaller tasks and systematically completing them, then you might be better off take more small projects. Personally, I prefer a mix.

Ultimately, what you pick (clients, projects) really depends on how you work and what type of work you do. For me, I prefer (or used to) more small coding projects but more large writing projects. (It’s hard to have to come up with lots of fresh writing content week after week. Freelance blogging is not quite as systematic as maybe technical writing.

Setting Project Priorities
Whether you choose lots of small projects, fewer large projects, or a mix, it’s important to set your task priorities. A task might be a complete small project or part of a large project.

1. Prioritize projects by due date first.
2. Then prioritize by size, not fee.
3. Break large projects down into smaller tasks.
4. Give each task an approximate value, whether it’s a whole project or part of one. This is very important for large project tasks, else it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

For example, if I have a $50 project and a $500 project, regardless of deadline, the larger one is going to be more intimidating. But if I break it into logical subtasks and assign a rough value (based on a fraction of the project rate), then its easier to be systematic. This is more important for freelancers, since we tend to have to work on many projects simultaneously. Keeping a clear list of achievable tasks and subtasks is key to managing a large workload.

Setting a Work Schedule
If there’s one luxury most freelancers have, it’s that of being able to choose your work schedule. If you want to work evenings, go ahead. Do what works for yourself and your clients. I prefer to code in the day and write on evenings and weekends. That’s not always the case, but it’s nice if I get to pick based on mood. Creative work is often affected by mood, so schedule freedom helps productivity.

1. Choose your work session durations. Assuming for a moment that you’re going to put in a 40-hour work week, there are many ways you can split it up, depending on other demands in your life. It might also depend on the type of freelance work you do. Some people prefer to put in a 5-day week of 8 hours each. Others prefer a 4-day week of 10 hours each. For coding, I used to prefer 10 hour days. For writing, I like to split the day up into 2-4 three-hour chunks, depending on deadlines.
2. Choose task order.  You do want to factor in time for research, interacting with clients, doing administrative tasks, and so on. My rule of thumb: if I’m feeling productively creative, I write. Otherwise I do non-creative tasks.
3. Go with the flow. If you’re really efficient and come up with a killer workflow model that maximizes your personal productivity, go with it. However, if it starts to change, don’t be afraid to let it. My workflow models often change within a few months, based on the needs of the work i’m doing or my personal productivity level at that time.

Efficiency of work flow is often affected by personal life. If you have a strong personal reason for being efficient, you’ll find it. If you’re having trouble with workflow, maybe there’s an area of knowledge that you need to refresh or update.

Procrastination causes loss of revenue and is the often a manifestation of a problem with either (1) your workflow; (2) your choice of projects or clients; (3) a feeling of lack of knowledge; or (4) health issues or personal problems that need to be sorted out. These are issues that need to be dealt with, if you if you want to build up to an efficient workflow.

Need to learn a niche fast? Learning something new always has, well, a learning curve. But if you want to shrink the time it takes to learn an entire niche, one of the most efficient and productive methods is to use mind mapping.

Workflow Benefits of Mind Mapping
There are literally hundreds of uses of mind maps, and mind mapping, but here are some of the important “work flow” reasons to use this process:

1. Mixed map views. If you’re using mind mapping software, you usually have the luxury of switching between either detailed or high-level views of your maps at a click.
2. Easy info gain. It’s fairly easy to record a variety of information about a niche: links, documents, images, notes, etc.
3. Easy info organization. Because mind mapping software generally offer up a blank slate with loose hierarchy, you can organize information in a mind map in any way that you feel comfortable, within the parameters of the software’s features. If you’re using paper-based mind maps, then there are few restrictions. (Starting with paper maps and then transcribing to a digital mind map is something to consider, depending on whether you are researching online or from printed matter.)
4. Easy info reorganization. It’s easy to shuffle around sections of a digital mind map, rearrange individual nodes, change hierarchies and sub-hierarchies.
5. Easy to explore options. The organic nature of a mind map makes it easy to explore sub-niches or to look at various problems to be solved.

Reasons to Use a Mind Map for Learning
Here are just some of the things you can do with a mind map when it comes to learning a niche:

1. Catalog what you already know about your niche.
2. Catalog what you still have to learn (provided you know what that is).
3. Produce a lesson plan for learning your niche topic.
4. Manage your “learning” task list.
5. Record whatever you learn along the way. (I.e., anything you didn’t know that you didn’t know.)
6. Brainstorm an idea bank.
7. List any niche-related problems that you need to solve.
8. solve problems by exploring various problem solving techniques such as tunneling or color coded visual analysis.

There are other reasons that you’ll discover as you go along.

Suggested Process for Learning a Niche
Here is just one process you could use to learn a niche using mind maps.

1. Find your starting point. If someone asked you what you know about a niche, you might draw a blank. So instead, start recording niche-relevant websites and web applications that you frequent. Add in links for software, books, magazines, etc., that you might recommend. If you don’t know where to start, try a niche search engine.
   1. portals
   2. voting sites
   3. industry sites
   4. “tips” articles
2. Collect additional bookmarks. While you record bookmarks for websites you already know and are surfing, you might come across links to other sites and articles that may be useful. Don’t worry about the info hierarchy just yet. You can take care of organizing information later.
3. Save RSS feed URLs. You can subscribe to RSS feeds in a feed reader such as Google Reader. Alternately, some mind mapping software (e.g., MindJet MindManager Pro 6 and up) even allows for creating sub-maps with RSS feed headlines. (MindJet calls them “smart map parts”.) You could also build your own custom feed aggregators, rivers of news, or news timelines, depending on how sophisticated your niche tracking needs to be.
4. Dissect content. This is where your actual learning takes place. Everything else is just “setup” activity and maintenance. As you browse/ read an article, dissect it. Jot down salient points and concepts in your master mind map, or create a sub-map and link to it. Try to summarize the article’s information in point form, but in the form of a mind map. Because of the “radiant” nature of mind maps, information absorption is far easier than if you use straight lists.
5. Reorganize info. When necessary, move mind map nodes around to suit your learning needs. Change the information hierarchy around until you find something easy to remember and maintain.
6. Enhance your map. Emphasize various portions of your niche map, making sections and concepts and hieararchies distinctive aids in memory retention and learning. Some possible enhancements using mind mapping sofware are:
   1. Use different node shapes. E.g., circles, ovals, rectangles, lozenges, hexagons, etc.
   2. Use node background colors and textures.
   3. Use node border colors.
   4. Use connecting line colors and thicknesses.
   5. Use colored, bolded, and/or italicized text.
   6. Use different font sizes.
   7. Use icons to categorize nodes or sub-maps.
   8. Add images for emphasis.
   9. Use different map modes (layouts), if available.
   10. Use boundaries around clusters of related map nodes.
7. Keep the info mapping process organic. Depending on the duration of your learning, you could be constantly adding new information as you come across it. It does not have to be a one-time, single session effort. So you’d be repeating some of the above steps as necessary.

The above process is merely suggested. Adjust it for your own needs and learning style.

Example Niche: Photography
Some of you Geekpreneur readers know that there’s a sister site, Photopreneur, with its own photography blog. So this is just as good an example niche as any other.

So suppose you’re trying to learn (more) about photography. Your reasons could be one of many, and would actually dictate how you use mind maps to learn this niche. Some possible reasons:

1. To become a photographer (or a better one).
2. To write about photography.
3. To teach photography.
4. To learn to use photography in design.

There are of course other reasons, and each one requires a different starting level of knowledge about photography. So what information you mind map will differ from what someone else maps.

Let’s refine our example and say that you intend to write about photography, but that you do already know something about it. So you’re building on prior knowledge, but you want your mind map to be a master reference for the niche.

Now, what info might you map? The diagram below shows some possibilities.

If your daily work involves a substantial amount of writing or research, you know the frustration that sometimes comes from trying to manage information for multiple projects. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing business plans, company reports, articles for clients, or doing academic research. Coming up with an effective way to manage multiple document files and research notes can make a difference in your work productivity.

One of the most ideal ways to manage research notes and multiple forms of writing is mind mapping. A digital mind map is like a blank canvas that gives you multiple benefits.

Benefits of Using Mind Maps for Research and Writing

1. You can see high- and low-level views of document details.
2. Easily organize and reorganize the information hierarchy in whatever way is optimum for a given document.
3. If you work as part of a remote team, you have the choice between web-based mind mapping applications or new shared workspace features that complement desktop mind mapping tools.
4. Most digital mind maps, regardless of the originating application, integrate well with files on your desktop and the default applications tied to their file types. You can associate each node of a mind map to a document file. Double-clicking your mouse on a linked node activates the desktop application associated with that file type.

To summarize the benefits, a mind map gives you powerful control over multiple document from a single place. E.g., a master map, which will give you a high level view of all your research and writing projects and files. You can then link a map node to either a document file or even to another mind map that contains even more details about that project. If you link nodes to document files, you can then quickly open those files in the associated text editor, word processor or web browser. Ditto for image file links. (Note that some high end mind mapping tools have native editors, word processors, spreadsheets and browsers embedded in the interface.)

How to Use Mind Mapping for Research and Writing

Storing Research Data
When you use a mind map to store information, notes, hyperlinks, images, spreadsheets or whatever else, you have a  lot of leeway in how you store your data. The simplest way is to either type, copy/ paste, or drag and drop your information into a sequence of mind map nodes. When you start to see hierarchies, you can rearrange the map nodes however you want.

Writing
When it comes to writing documents using mind mapping, you have a number of options:

1. Brainstorm. You can brainstorm semi-randomly, recording what you already know, building a list of related topics, and cataloging (research, links) what other people have written about similar topics, as well as relevant images. Then start asking questions. If you’re writing articles, you might ask yourself what others have not said. What can you add to the collective conversation about that topic? Continue to collect notes, links, and whatever information you need to form your article.  On the other hand, if you’re writing business or academic documents, it’s likely that you need to follow some document structure.
2. Structured writing. Start by listing off the sections your document needs, depending on the structure you need to follow. This gives you a basic outline and is actually a powerful way to help you visualize completing complex writing projects. For example, you might have the following sections in your mind map:
   1. purpose
   2. assumptions
   3. tools
   4. processes
   5. notes
   6. intro
   7. body
   8. summary
   9. references

   Now flesh out the sections in layers, adding details as you go, including point form notes, examples, theory, interpretation, or whatever you need for the type of document you’re writing.

Cautions

Don’t overthink. It’s possible to overplan when using a mind map. Take notes in the form of your map, then start writing. Either use your mind map’s native text editor/ word processor, or a third party application.

Don’t obsess about the writing. Do your best to edit, check typos and grammar after you have a rough draft.

Let it flow. When you use a mind map to record research notes or to write an article or document, you give yourself an unstructured canvas that can be intimidating. If you get stuck, try collapsing portions of your mind map to look at the big picture (high-level view), not the details. Maybe the flow of your document or article’s sections is not quite right, but you will not notice if you’re only looking at the details.  Let your mind map nodes flow and develop naturally. You can always alter hierarchy after you’ve noted everything you feel is necessary. Your final document does not need to include everything that you have in your mind map. The map is only a guideline towards your completed writing.

Example
As an example, take a look at the PDF file via the Scribd window below. It’s a PDF of my final mind map for the article you’re reading. You can see the structure I’ve applied, though it looks extremely different than what I started out with.

Mind Mapping for Productive Research and Writing

Final Thoughts
Mind mapping can be used for any type of research and writing, and gives you a greater degree of control over large quantities of information. A master mind map can be the glue that helps you manage a large set of research notes and document files.

In Tunneling Your Way to Complex Problem Solving, the focus was to define an end goal and determine how to get there from “here,” your current state, by exploring possible options, fleshing out the details organically, then filtering out options that were not feasible. This method of problem solving and goal setting can be applied in the reverse direction as well.

For the sake of reference, I’m calling this approach “reverse tunneling,” and it builds on similar ideas as in the previous article, but also upon a goal setting process developed by Brian Azar, a personal and professional coach also known as the Sales Doctor.

Brian Azar’s Goal Setting Process
Brian Azar developed his goal setting technique over the years, using his early experience in social work, then as a personal/ professional coach mostly for salespeople, and also his recent work teaching kids tips on how to have an entrepreneurial mindset.

The basic process is that you define your goals and then step backwards to determine what “X” has to come before “Y”, then what “W” has to come before “X”, and so on until you come to present day.

His approach usually is applied to a five-year period, and the step-back period is one month. So you start with your goal for five years from now, then step backwards one month at a time, determining what needs to be done in the month previous to achieve the next month’s goal. Keep stepping back until you are in the “now.”

For example, if you want to build up, say, $50,000/year in sales in month 60 (five years from now), what do you have to do or achieve in month 59? What do you have to do or achieve in month 58 to get to month 59? Write down what you think you need to do or achieve in each month going backwards, but stay open to the possibility that there may be one or more alternatives to achieve the sub-goal in month X. Make sure you break monthly goals down into weekly and/or daily goals, as appropriate.

Adapted Process
Brian Azar’s process can be applied to personal and professional goals. Many of his clients are salespeople, though his method can be adapted for many uses including typical entrepreneurial goals. In experimenting with his process, I realized that it could be adapted to the tunneling method of problem solving discussed previously.

In adapting the process into “reverse tunneling,” I’ve used a looser time frame. You should not skip the stepping backwards process, but you do not have to bind yourself to a month by month timeframe. You also can just set goals for one or two years from now. Many people get intimidated by having to produce five-year plans, even though that’s fairly standard advice for entrepreneurs starting a business. Still, there’s nothing wrong with easing into the process by setting goals for a shorter period.

So step backwards, to break your goal down into sub-goals. Decide later when certain sub-goals need to be achieved by. Make the process organic, leaving room for some changes in timeline. Determine bottleneck goals.

To summarize:

1. Keep a short time span. Apply the reverse tunneling process to 1-2 years of goals first. After solidifying your action plan, you can think about longer-term goals.
2. Step back at comfortable levels. You do not need to step backwards only one month at a time. If what you need for month X requires something to be achieved 3 months back, that’s okay. But steps of one month backwards tend to be less overwhelming.
3. Apply a final timeline afterwards. This is less intimidating and helps you to gauge what’s realistic. A particular achievement might take more than a month.

The diagram above shows a loose action plan followed by the same plan with a timeline applied to it.

Benefits of the Reverse Tunneling Approach
The benefits of this approach is that you have a visual process for setting your goals, and a loose timeframe in which to achieve them. You can adjust your timeframe as necessary. This breaking down of goals is far less intimidating, and it’s easier to feel that your end result can actually be accomplished.

Examples
Because my life and work are so intertwined at the moment, I tend not to separate work and personal goals. Do whatever works for you. This method applies equally well to both personal or professional goals. My feeling, though, is if you’re going to plan, plan big. Just keep in mind that big plans can be and usually are overwhelming, which is why breaking your big goals down helps. You can have personal work goals or goals to be achieved with a business and or life partner. Just be clear, for your action plan, who is being included.

Example 1
The image below is a bird’s eye view of my approximate plans professionally and personally. The timeline runs across most of the width of the image. The thin blue lines running down from the timeline attach to personal goals, many of which are in turn driven by professional goals.

Don’t be concerned with my actual goals (since you cannot really make them out in the images below). Just get an essence for the process and apply it to your goals to produce an action plan.

Example 2
Here are some slightly larger views of pretty much the same example as above. The focus is on the professional goals. While I have goals for what I’d like to achieve in gross revenues per month for all my efforts, either on my own, with my fiancee and with other partners, I’ve also broken down daily achievements (first image) as well.

Here is the professional goals action plan fleshed out a little bit more, minus the daily breakdown.

It’s old wisdom but it bears repeating: the big problems in life are best solved one step at a time. You don’t even have to have a detailed solution right away, but can build up to it from general options.

That’s the gist of the “tunneling” method of complex problem solving described here. The idea is to start by describing the current problem, writing down the desired resolution, and then exploring your options and building upon them. The entire approach uses what some people call continuous improvement, incremental change, stepwise refinement or even Kaizen. They all amount to doing things one step at a time. [Note: my use of the term tunneling is not the same as Ben Popken's use in The Consumerist, when talking about how to move to NYC and stay sane, but you could use visual tunneling described here to map out the solutions he provides.]

You can use this approach to solve very complex problems, starting with partial solutions. As you accumulate more information or additional options, you can expand your problem solving map accordingly.

Tools

This approach to problem solving is very visual. I’ve used the MindJet MindManager Pro mind mapping software (some alternatives: FreeMind, Mindomo, Mindmeister, Comapping), though you can pretty much use any sort of diagramming application (MS Visio, Smartdraw, Gliffy). Many of these apps either have free trials or free options. FreeMind is entirely free and multi-platform.

Problem Definition Process

1. Define your problem. This is your “start” state.
2. Define your ideal solution state. This is your “end” state.
3. Draw two nodes, “Start” and “End”, and sketch a path between them. (See the top half of the diagram above.)
4. List all the solution options for your problem that you can think of. Do not rule anything out just yet, no matter how absurd. Brainstorm if you have to, talk to people, research. Spend as much time as you need (within the timeframe that you have to solve a problem.) Keep in mind that a “solution option” can simply be a few words suggesting a solution. You do not yet have to come up with a complete plan.
5. Incorporate these solution options into a revised version of your problem map.

Here’s an example of the type of map you’ll end up with:

Tunneling Process

Now comes the “tunneling” part, as shown above. You have a basic solution map at this point, which is the “big picture, ” focusing on the end result. Now focus on the small picture, the details. How can you get to your desired result from where you are now? Which options seem most feasible? Do you know what each option requires?

Use whatever techniques you have in your problem solving arsenal to explore each option: brainstorming, visual thinking and diagramming, critical thinking, idea generation, etc. From this point until you decide on a final solution, you’re going to explore each option, adding in greater details, tunneling your way to a full solution plan.

The gist is that you do not know which option is best yet. That’s what you’re exploring. Add increasingly more specific details to each option in your problem map as you go. If an option is in itself complex, recursively apply the same approach to it as to the entire problem. Break it down into sub-problems and sub-options. Create a separate map for an option if necessary. The overall result is similar to a decision tree, but if you’re “tunneling” your way to a solution.

Here’s a look at the type of map you’ll have now:

Each solution option has a different level of detail, though any of this could change. This is an organic process. As one option very obviously becomes nonfeasible, eliminate it. Add new options if they occur to you. Add option details as you decide upon them. Draw diagrams, add charts or images if they help you. Break all problems and options down to their most “atomic” level.

This iterative, visual approach to problem solving is far less intimidating than mentally trying to solve complex problems. Each step of the refinement process gives you small “wins,” motivating you to keep exploring.

On the other hand, the mental approach to complex problem solving usually becomes overwhelming, making it far easier to give up. Even simply writing down your problem and options is an advantage over a mental approach. The power gained from a visual approach to problem solving should not be overlooked. A visual approach helps stimulate both the logical and creative facets of your mind.

Example

Up until this point, there’s no mention about what type of problem you can solve using this tunneling method. The answer: pretty much any type of complex life and work problem. Though since life problems tend to take longer to solve, at least in my experience, there’s a lot more time to collect and explore options and filter out what will and will not work. An example tunnel diagram is shown below, which for personal reasons have the details blurred out. It is “in progress,” and still has to be fleshed out some more, but the ultimate goal is starting to show a few clear option pathways. It should show you the essence of the tunneling method, visually speaking.

Final Thoughts

The tunneling method can be a valuable tool in your problem solving arsenal. There’s a great deal of room for flexibility to apply the methods you prefer to use, so use it as a basis for solving the more complex problems in life and work.

How long you take for the entire problem solving process really depends on how complex the problem is and how much time you have. I use this approach for very complex problems that might take 9-12 months to completely solve. Shorter-term problems can be solved the same way.

References

A tremendous resource for visual thinking and modeling is at Idiagram. Start at the home page and explore the rich collection of visual models, and try to absorb some of the processes described there. One section to focus on is The Art of Complex Problem Solving, which has some impresive visual aids.