©2015 PearceOnEarth.com

Brandon’s Top Productivity Tips and ResourcesOr How to Stay Sane as a Busy Entrepreneur

After creating my first successful online business in 2004, my family of five has traveled the world together for the last six years.

Since then we've visited over 30 countries while I've grown my first business, started a second, and began offering one-on-one business consulting.

Needless to say, it's important for me to stay organized and on top of my to-do list. Over the years, I've discovered the best tips, hacks, and apps to help me manage both my time and business.

Know Where Your Time Goes

Like most entrepreneurs, I juggle several different tasks and multiple projects each week. To stay productive and accountable, it’s invaluable to me to keep track of what I’m working on throughout the day.

The more frequently I track my activity, the more my work aligns with my values and goals.

I’ve experimented with time tracking over the years and I’m regularly trying new methods. Test out the methods below and feel free to send me an email to let me know which works best for you.

Daily Summary

The simplest and quickest method of time tracking is to dedicate five minutes at the end of each day to write down what I did. This list can include any tasks that were started, in progress, or completed.

Diaro is one of my favorite apps for this. Diaro is a journal app that lets you keep track of anything and everything right on your phone.

Within Diaro, I’ve created a category called “Daily Summary” where I keep track of my highlights from the day. And with categorization and tagging options, I’ve also enjoyed using this tool to keep track of food I eat, exercise, emotions, sex, and more. Gnotes and Evernote are good alternatives.

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More Detailed Tracking If you thrive on the details, you may want to keep track of your time throughout the day. As you go through your day, try pausing for a minute or two every hour or every time you switch tasks to summarize what you’ve accomplished. This has been helpful, especially when going through large inboxes of unread emails. It’s easy to forget how an hour or two passed wading through emails and wonder if anything was even accomplished. Tracking my time in this way has helped provide a regular reminder that I am doing things that are important to me. You can use Diaro for this, but lately I’ve been using Google Docs as it’s easy to switch tabs and briefly take notes. I’ve found that it’s easiest to create a doc that I add to each day. At the start of the day, I create a new heading with the date, followed by a bulleted list of what I did.

Down to the Minute The most revealing tracking exercise for me has been tracking every minute of every day, using a tool like SlimTimer or Toggl. With both of these tools, you enter a task that you’re working on, start a time, and hit stop when you’re finished. Before you begin your next task, start the timer again. This is especially helpful if you’re billing a client by the hour for your time. The longest I’ve done this for is one week - tracking each moment spent working, sleeping, spending time with my family, and relaxing. While a bit intense, this exercise revealed how my time was really spent and made me question if my time was lining up with my values. If doing this for one week sounds intimidating, trying it for even a day can be illuminating.

©2015 PearceOnEarth.com

Manage Your Personal Workload Managing my time is one thing, but managing my to-do list is a whole other battle. Finding a system to keep each project organized is crucial.

Although it’s liberating to now have a team of 25+ people helping me with my businesses, I still need a to make sure everyone’s on the same page with each task so deadlines are met.

I’ve tried various systems over the years, and have found pros and cons with each. Here are some of the tools I’ve found to be the most useful.

Toodledo Toodledo supports the Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity method. Users can group tasks by context, location, priority, time required, status, due date, and more. I’ve used this primarily for personal tasks, having found that it is difficult to use as a team.

Asana

Asana is a task management app specifically designed for teams. I use Asana for managing my personal projects, travel plans, and other tasks that I’d like an extra hand with. Asana is great for tracking your to-do list and due dates. Within the app you can organize tasks by priorities and include any supporting documents. Asana doesn’t have as much flexibility as Toodledo in terms of how fields can be organized, and I’d really love a “Start Date” feature for future tasks. But, it’s helping keep me and my team organized.

Trello

Another project management app, Trello, is a very flexible tool that’s pretty easy to learn. I used Trello while in Bali to keep track of all of the things that needed to be finished on the house we remodeled. In Trello, each task has a card which can be organized into columns. Columns could represent anything you want - a status, the person responsible, a room in a house, etc. Although I’m not currently using Trello for any active projects, it’s definitely a tool I’d come back to in the future.

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Manage Your Team With a team of 25+ located all around the world, I need a reliable and effective way to keep in touch with everyone. For my businesses, I use the following tools to stay organized and communicate with my team (besides Gmail and Google Docs, which I use constantly):

Uservoice

Uservoice has been great at handling incoming email for my business. All of our support representatives share an inbox, which seamlessly tracks tickets, response history, and statistics on who is answering what and when. Uservoice also has an area where customers can submit feature requests and vote on them, which has been great for helping us determine what is most important to our customers. Another tool I’ve considered trying is HelpScout. Although I’m not yet a paying customer, I’ve often referenced their fantastic Customer Support articles.

Jira / Bitbucket

Jira/Bitbucket is most useful to those in software development, but having a tool that tracks all bug reports, features requests, code changes, and team roles is invaluable on a development team, and these tools do it beautifully. Admittedly, these can be a little hard to figure out and my project manager is the one who spends the most time in it. When I was working solo or with small teams, I liked using Unfuddle, which is a little less complicated.

Bitrix24

I spent quite a bit of time researching different team intranet, task management, wiki, and other collaboration tools. None were perfect, but I eventually settled on Bitrix24. Bitrix24 includes most of what I’m looking for, including: task management tools with gantt charts; a Facebook-like social intranet for team communication; team organizational charts with HR data; document collaboration; and more, all at a reasonable price. Other tools worth mentioning are Slack, Confluence, Wrike, Glip, Asana, and BambooHR. All are good at what they do, but not as comprehensive as Bitrix24.

©2015 PearceOnEarth.com

Conclusion In the last 10 years, I’ve discovered that I’m most productive when I know how my time is spent, my task list is organized, and my team is communicating effectively with each other. Each of these tools has given me more free time to develop new ideas and spend more time with my family all over the world.

I hope these tips, hints, and resources will help you as you grow as an entrepreneur and further develop your business.

I’m always looking for new tools to try out. If you have any recommendations, let me know!