The last time I was there, she just stopped, looked me dead in the eye and said, “There’s something wrong with this picture. Other people can do this. Why can’t I?”

Her pain was heartbreaking. Unfortunately, a clear desk, a ToDo list, and some time management do not equal peace of mind. Simplifying is about so much more than this.

It’s emotional. It challenges strongly engrained habits and responses. It digs up old baggage. It brings us face to face with our unrealistic expectations. It tests our relationships and communication skills. Let’s just say, it’s not all that easy for a lot of people.

I put this mind map together for her. It represents a combination of factors that she’ll be working on, for ex. Time Management, Systems, etc.

We then listed one easy habit for each of these factors.

My intent was to give her

1. a visual understanding of how complex the situation is. She’s incredibly hard on herself and will benefit from lightening up and having patience.
2. something she can refer to on a daily basis that reminds her of very simple actions she can make.

The fascinating phenomenon is that the smaller the steps are, the more powerful the mind map will be. In fact, the bigger a step is, the less likely you are to do it, which makes it about as helpful as an unused gym membership.

Success comes from repetition, not the size of step.

Each step, action or thought by itself seems almost meaningless, like a crumb, but aggregated over time, they result in an entire chocolate cake. Well, that’s more like reverse engineering, but you get the idea.
My suggestion for you is this:

1. Make your own simple mind map reflecting your challenge areas.
2. Write down a single, easy-peasy thing you can do to support yourself in each area. Let it be easy!!
3. Pick one easy-peasy thing to work on for the week.
4. Do it. A lot.

TIP: If possible, tie it to something that happens irregardless. For ex. if the goal is to relax and breathe deeply throughout the day, then every time you’re about to reach for the phone, pause first (whether to answer or make a call). Sit still, relax your shoulders, draw a breath all the way down to your feet, and smile. Then pick up the phone.

My client desires a lifestyle in which she is joyful and present with her family, on top of her projects, and happy with the level of organization in her home and office. What’s your goal?

If you have ATT or Verizon, wireless here’s how you can tell your callers how to skip that!

• View Options
• Naming Your Notes (important!!)
• Searching not turning up something you know is there?
• How do you rename a tag or Notebook?
• Adding tags to multiple Notes.
• Annotate a note
• Shortcuts, oh how I love thee
• Sharing a Notebook with someone else

View options.
You have three options for viewing your Notes: List, Snippet, & Thumbnail. Hands down, I prefer the snippet (middle) view. You get both text and a visual image. Within the view, you have several options for sorting but I prefer sorting by Title.

Naming Your Notes (important!!)
Whether you sort by title or not, you’ll want to pay attention to what you name your Notes. It’s just like naming file folders! Even, nay, especially when you click that little elephant icon to save a webpage and it autofills the name of the Note. Make sure the title begins with the letter that makes the most sense.

Look at how this one was automatically saved (a product I’m going to check out called Document Guard):

It automatically titled the note:
Partner Programs, Affiliate Program, Specialist Program | Document Guard (yikes!)

I changed it to:
Document Guard — Affiliate Program (rock it with some cut and paste so that it shows up under “D”)

It’s worth the 5 seconds to change the title!!

Searching not turning up something you know is there?
You can search for a Note via search field (upper right of screen) or by clicking on a tag (under Notebooks in left sidebar). If nothing turns up and you know there’s a note with that name exists, then check at the top of left column and make sure that “All Notebooks” is selected.

How do you rename a tag or Notebook?

To rename a Tag or Notebook, (Mac) Ctrl + click, or (Windows) Right click on the name.

Adding tags to a multiple Notes.

With a bunch o’ Notes selected, click on a tag and drag it over to one of the Notes. That tag will be applied to all of them.

Annotate a note

To add a comment or note on a screenshot that you’ve saved, you can:

1. type inline if the website page saved is text based. (Tip: Use a different color so it stands out.)
   OR
2. if the page is image based, you can add a table with 1 Row and 1 Column that spans 100 % of page. Then you can type your notes in that. (see example)

Shortcuts, oh how I love thee

Evernote’s keyboard short cuts for:

• Mac OSX
• Windows

Sharing a Notebook with someone else

Say I want to give my assistant editing privileges to a Notebook called “for Shawn to comment”. The idea being that as assistant is surfing the www, she finds and saves websites that are relevant to my business in this Notebook.

Share a view-only Notebook by (Mac) Ctrl + click, or (Windows) Right clicking on the name and selecting Share Notebook.

Minor glitch.

Up to this point in our discussion, Evernote has generously been a free, no-cost program. The share feature in the free version, however, is limited to granting View Only status.

Premium service

If you upgrade to Premium, $5.00 per month or $45.00 per year, you can grant editing privileges. **This is the only feature that floats my boat in the Premium service.**

Back to sharing Notebooks with another special someone

My work-around to this limitation was to just give my assistant access to my entire Evernote account.

That’s just about it, folks.

There are, of course, all kinds of other things you can do with the program that I haven’t explored. I’m not a super gadgety type of person, I like the basic functionality of an easy-to-use program.

There’s a fine line between

1. learning new stuff just because you can and someone had a cool idea AND
2. making sure your tools stay in the position of working for you with minimal maintenance.

On that note, go get Evernote working for you and let us know what additional organizing functionalities help you!

You can add simple lists, images, photos, audio files and screenshots.

• Its platform is uber-flexible: Mac, PC, online-based, Android, Blackberry, iGadgets (iPhone, iPad).
• You can use it online or offline and it syncs between the two automatically.
• You can send clips to it from anywhere on your computer.
• It has both list and image based view options for the visually oriented.
• It’s free!

(Discliamer: I’m not an affiliate for Evernote or connected with them in any way besides being a user of their program.)

Is it for you?
If you glean a lot of resources from the internet, I’d say it’s a must. Bookmarking and folders in bookmarking only go so far. My experience has shown that these get big and unwieldy and then you never want to look at them again. Not helpful. The difference with Evernote is that you have multiple sorting options which make finding and accessing info much easier.

If you are brand new to Evernote, check out this quick tutorial for setting up your desktop program and your online account (you do both for syncing). The tutorial also shows you the basics of creating new notes.

Once you have it set up, let’s look at your options for organizing and viewing info in the program. The goal is for you to have meaningful lists with minimal maintenance. I’ll also point out tips that have made my list life easier.

The method I use the most for creating new notes is in Safari, my web browser. Click the little elephant icon to the left of your address bar to save a page.

There are 2 main tools for sorting info in Evernote:

1. Notebooks. These are collections of notes on a particular subject. Each Note can belong to one Notebook.

   Here’s a partial list of the Notebooks I have set up. You’ll customize yours based on your business and projects:

   • Biz models
   • Blog post ideas
   • Book related
   • How To’s
   • Inspirationals
   • Marketing
   • Resources for biz dev.
   • SoMe ideas (i.e. Social Media)
   • Studies and research

2. Tags. These are keywords or descriptors that you can assign to Notes. You can assign multiple Tags to a Note. (A list of tags you’ve used shows up under the list of Notebooks in the left column.)

Here’s an example of using both Notebooks and Tags: In Safari, I clicked the elephant icon to save a link to a webpage with Mac keyboard shortcuts for Evernote, then

filed it in the Notebook called How To’s, and
tagged it: Mac, HowTo, ShortCuts, Evernote

TIPS

In the interest of not having a post that’s a mile long, the tips are in the post called Specific ways to maximize use of Evernote to organize lists for your small business. Subjects include:

• View Options
• Naming Your Notes (important!!)
• Searching not turning up something you know is there?
• How do you rename a tag or Notebook?
• Adding tags to multiple Notes.
• Annotate a note
• Shortcuts, oh how I love thee
• Sharing a Notebook with someone else

Go to Specific Ways post.

It’s about as simple and brilliant a tool as you’ll ever invest in. Here are tips to make the most of your journals for novice through advanced journal users.

Novice Don’t have a journal? Time to 1. get one, 2. commit to having it with you always and 3. use it.

Tips:

• Medium size blank book for easy portability, for ex. 6 in. x 8 in.
• Spiral bound or a bind that allows the book to lay flat.
• Light or no lines. I find the dark lined journal pages to be distracting and confining.

Intermediate You are ready to get more use out of your journal by developing your own set of symbols and notation.

Tips:

• At the top of each page, write the date, for ex. in the upper outside corner (see image at right)
• Give each page a title indicating what the contents are (see image at right) (the circled “1″ is below in Advanced)
• Use a circle (or a box or whatever works for you) to indicate a piece of info that needs to be transferred, completed, or otherwise acted upon. I use a circle no matter what type of info it is. Andrew Watt, provides fun ideas for symbols based on the type of info collected (see image below for examples or go to his Flickr page to see all of his symbols).

Advanced You rely on your journal to document brilliant and developing ideas that you may have future use for.

• Reserve the first page of your book for the dates that it spans + a theme or affirmation—something that you’ll read every time you go to use the book, for example, “Rock on, Super CEO!”
• Number the page by the date (see above image) The circled (1) represents the first page for 3/8.
• Reserve two pages at the beginning for “Table of Contents”. Rather than log every page, just log the pages that contain info that you may want to reference in the future.  I write: date | page number(s) | title of page.

The icing on the cake

• Make or decorate your own journals for a fun crafty project, to get into another head space, and to express your own creativity. I use a coptic stitch when I make mine so that the book lays flat and no spiral gets in the way of my hand.

I’d be willing to bet that the sheer quantity of brilliant ideas that have passed through journals the world over could solve the remainder of the problems plaguing the planet. The next one might come from you. The humble journal—don’t leave home without it.

: : : : : : : : : :

Image credits: Shawn

For 4 callers, for 84 minutes, he was charged over $500. Seriously. That’s highway robbery if I ever saw it.

I told him I’d send him the URL for the service I use, which is InstantConference.com. Less than $500? Uh, how about FREE?

Even if he did the $9.95/month plan in order to offer his callers toll free number access, that would’ve been
4 callers x 84 minutes x .039/minute = $13.10 + $9.95 for the monthly access = $23.05

As it is, he was charged over $1.49/minute per person.

I don’t do a ton of conference/training calls, but when I have, InstantConference.com has been great. One of the features that I like (as a workshop leader) is the mp3 recording of each call that I can download.

Obviously if it’s a business call you want to make sure everyone on the call knows it’s being recorded and probably not even activate the function.

For a list of features and to compare plans goto this page.

Go forth, prosper, and call!

: : : : : : : : : :

Photo credits:
Phone, Venice by sanberdoo

Even if you aren’t contemplating a paperless office, you might enjoy her mucho fun brand. For ex. “she helps Type-A personalities leave for Paris on 56 minutes’ notice”. I wonder if she could get me sent to Paris in the other 4 minutes of the hour?

She does a great job of outlining all the different aspects to consider from:
- Is it the right decision for my office?
- Back up considerations.
- Working with other members of your team who will be affected.
- File organizing ideas.
- What kind of scanner should I get?
- and my fave, naming conventions. Seriously, this is sooo important.

It’s an easy to read tutorial that would be good for anyone thinking about putting their scanner to work!

Writing out a list for the day and crossing things off, that’s not so bad.

The question that follows though, must be answered truthfully:
- Does that list reflect your priorities?
- OR is it reflective of the critical issues going on in your life right now?

If you take the time to do a list, my guess is that it’s some of both.

Now, then.

IF you have a lot on your plate,
AND you don’t want important tasks falling through the cracks,
then relying on your head to manage all your tasks is just plain crazy making (which is essentially what daily list making does).

A task manager of some sort is a must. As Gina Trapani (of LifeHacker.com) points out in her book, 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day, your system must offer three categorical trackers:

• projects
• contexts
• priorities

Reality check: choosing a system is just the beginning of the story.

Almost a year ago, I recommended OmniFocus (it’s a Task manager for Mac) to a client. She bought it.

I helped her get it set up based on what I knew about her work, projects, and contexts. Since it was a new concept for her, she mostly deferred to what I suggested.

Even though I knew quite a bit about her work, asked questions that came to mind, and finished with the strong encouragement to change it around as she saw fit, they way it was set up did not engage her.

Months went by and she used it half-heartedly. After a while, I was beginning to think that it was a lost cause.

Until a couple of weeks ago.

All of a sudden, she took ownership of the thing. “This project list isn’t useful for me. What would work is if it was organized like this XXX and then with sub-projects like this.”

It was as if she finally realized that no matter how much she wanted to see me as the all-knowing expert, her thought process must be reflected in the system and that she was the best person to guide that part of it.

I jumped in the program right then and there and began rearranging and renaming based on her thoughts.

Then we went through every ToDo already in there and moved them to their newly appropriate places.

It was as if a brand new program had been installed. With her active participation at this level, we were able to customize it in such a way that she was finally willing to engage with it 100%.

It isn’t enough to:

• pick a system,
• install it, and
• learn how to use it.

Make it YOURS.

• How can it reflect the way that you think?
• How can it fill in to support you in your areas of weakness?
• How can it be used to fit in with your patterns?

Go get ‘em Tiger!

Skimming, aka Morning Pages

In a co-coaching call with good friend Kalia, I reported on the somewhat unexpected and excellent results arising from being recently hard-core-dedicated to my daily skimming practice.

Her immediate response was, “I want that! …um, what is it?” (Apparently she hadn’t made it down to the Lifestyles section of the last newsletter =). I was glad she asked, though, because the practice deserves it’s own section.)

In a nutshell, skimming is one of Julia Cameron‘s two “Basic Tools” that she describes in The Artist’s Way. She calls them “morning pages”.

Rules of the road

• 3 handwritten pages every morning (yes, every morning)
• don’t show them to anyone (also suggested to not read them yourself)
• write about a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g (the good, the bad, the ugly, the geeky)
• allow a stream of consciousness (let your lefty-logic brain step aside)

From my experience

• The initial benefits from this practice are a clearing of the gunk and junk that distracts and bogs me down.
• Sometimes it leads me to the doorstep of a current project or solution to some thorny issue.
• The benefits after longer, regular practice are a surprisingly reliable path Home-ward (whatever you want to call it: to your core, essence, best self). Consider the ramifications here: this simple practice brings me Home, and since I do it each morning, this means that each day I start out calm and centered, not to mention with a light and gunk-free mind. This is H-U-G-E, people. Huge. How often do you start your interactions with world feeling like a million bucks?

Why “skimming” (and not “morning pages”)?

The term “morning pages” harkens to the frequency of the activity. For me, the practice so evidently clears the scum from my chatter-brain that I prefer to refer to that benefit. Also, when my mind starts spinning, whatever time of day, I pull out the pen and paper and skim away the confusion.

For additional reading

• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The section in “The Basic Tools” (pp. 9-18) provides a detailed introduction to morning pages.
• Skimming has been popping up on my blog since January 2009. A search on “skimming” brings up these posts.