If you’re into printing out and filling in your checklists, here’s a 1-page Microsoft Word checklist template. It’s easily customizable, and shouldn’t be much trouble to edit inside Word if you want to include more or fewer boxes / pages.

Continue Reading

If you want to invest, but you’re too lazy to do the research and come up with a bullet-proof strategy, then Tim Ferriss has a dire warning for you: “You’re going to get your fucking face ripped off.”

Ferriss rose to prominence when he wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, the bestselling guide to drastically increasing your productivity output and getting more done in less time. Since then, he’s applied many of those same strategies to become a hugely successful angel investor with positions in disruptive startups like Uber, Facebook, Evernote, and several others.

What’s his secret? Continue Reading

We’ve all had conversations like this:

You: Hey, so I’m going to be writing 3 posts a week now, so I’m handing off newsletter writing to you.

Them: Ok, what do I do?

You: I dunno, go into MailChimp, make the newsletter, check it’s ok and send it to everyone.

Them: Right, I’ll let you know if I have any questions

[Later that week]

Them: [1,000,000 questions, a terrible newsletter and hundreds of complaints from subscribers about broken links]

The informality and laziness of shooting off a few instructions over Slack and ‘let me know if you have any questions’ can kill productivity faster than reddit.

Continue Reading

When was the last time you forced your eyes onto a glaring screen at 4am, furiously typing after just waking up with the best idea ever?

Last night? Never? Well, neither answer is surprising. As I suspected (yet can now say with complete certainty) content writers are an odd mix between two types of people:

• Charles Bukowski hammering at his typewriter with classical music blaring through the radio
• A strait-laced data nerd, carefully analyzing keywords and writing content that has been proven to engage before it even hits Twitter.

While readers think of content in terms of ‘video’, ‘infographic’ and ‘blog post’, we writers think of it as that damn thing which keeps us up at night. So much so that Ed Fry, general manager at Inbound.org, has started writing short-form posts to get the idea out of his head and allow for a proper night’s sleep.

A recent thread at Inbound.org revealed excellent tips which both shared new ideas with me and reassured me that I’m not wrong in the head.

In the discussion, members of the Inbound community like Mention’s Brittany Berger and SplashOPM’s Derric Haynie share their blogging process – both step-by-step (for the more ‘together’ writers) and free-form rambling-style.

In this post, I’ve collated and curated the information to give you an overview of how successful and prolific content writers go from idea, to draft to finished piece.

I’ll also be taking careful note of the way I write this post, and give you a bullet-pointed rundown at the end.

Which text editors do bloggers use, exactly? Should you write to educate or provoke discussion? How far in advance should you plan your content? Let’s find out.

Continue Reading

The Problem Small Businesses Don’t Want to Admit

Every small business owner is an entrepreneur and a technician, but not everyone’s a manager.

Most people start a small business after working a job that involves ‘making’. Programming, graphic design, SEO, you name it – small business owners usually get their idea when they realize that they could be doing the same thing as they’re doing now and getting rid of their boss.

Motivated by the mythical entrepreneurial drive and true technical experts in their field, founders don’t realize that they can’t just get rid of the boss — they have to be the boss.

Being the boss involves management of time, people and money. While this can be possible if it’s your only responsibility, on top of everything else it will be overwhelming.

Unfortunately, in starting a small business, suddenly you have a boss again – your customers, the amount of hours in the day and your revenue.

This idea, from Michael E. Gerber‘s The E-Myth is key to understanding why small businesses face the problems they do, especially when growing fast.

Don’t worry: that’s where productivity tools come in.

Continue Reading

What is The Checklist Manifesto?

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right is a 2009 non-fiction book by Atul Gawande. The book was released on Dec 2009 and was a New York Times Best Seller.

In the book, Atul (who is a surgeon by trade) talks about how many industries across the world use checklists to “get things done right”. He also breaks down his journey as the one of the key champions that brought checklists into hospitals around the world. This endeavor had incredible results. Below is a quote from a post in the New Yorker that talks about the rollout of checklists in just one state, Michigan.

In December, 2006, the Keystone Initiative published its findings in a landmark article in The New England Journal of Medicine. Within the first three months of the project, the infection rate in Michigan’s I.C.U.s decreased by sixty-six per cent. The typical I.C.U.—including the ones at Sinai-Grace Hospital—cut its quarterly infection rate to zero. Michigan’s infection rates fell so low that its average I.C.U. outperformed ninety per cent of I.C.U.s nationwide. In the Keystone Initiative’s first eighteen months, the hospitals saved an estimated $175,000,000 in costs and more than 1,500 lives. The successes have been sustained for almost four years—all because of a stupid little checklist.

The short of the matter is, checklists work. I have written about the power of checklists before when I told the story of how a checklist won World War II. But in today’s day and age, it seems silly to be relying on paper checklists, it only makes sense that as technology evolves we evolve with it.

Continue Reading