Life loves to throw things at us from all directions. The key to staying on top of everything is having an effective schedule to keep you on track.

So how the hell do you create a system for managing your tasks, events, notes, and calendar no matter where you are?

You need to create a bullet journal.

“A full 93% [of educators] state that using their Bullet Journal… makes their lives easier or significantly easier.

As one educator noted, ‘I find it difficult to track all of my classes and schedule in any other system’.” – Todd Foutz, Educators on Bullet Journaling

We here at Process Street know how difficult it is to keep track of everything, so that’s why this post will take you through everything you need to know to create your perfect bullet journal.

You’ll learn:

• What a bullet journal is
• What you’ll need to make one
• How to create a bullet journal
• How to get the most out of it

Let’s go!

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The most useful Checklist Manifesto quotes

After publishing the Checklist Manifesto Review and following up with the Checklist Manifesto Summary, I thought it’d be fun to share the most memorable The Checklist Manifesto quotes by surgeon Atul Gawande. The book is packed full of useful knowledge, and not just from the author himself.

He interviews professionals from the man responsible for foolproof checklists given to pilots flying incredibly complex Boeing airplanes to a group of high-powered venture capitalists. All the people in the book have something in common – they want to reduce risk. And Gawande himself, like every human being with a will to survive, is no stranger to risk reduction. For him, however, it’s vitally important.

The Checklist Manifesto is the story of how this simple checklist was made.

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The following is a guest post from graphic designer and copywriter Erik Fessler.

What do you think is worse: sitting for 100 days because you didn’t know what direction to travel in, or going for 100 days down the wrong path?

Here’s the good news:

This question doesn’t matter if you have a reliable and logical process to find the right direction.

Brainstorming is the key to finding that direction, and it’s something you can implement for your team in a logical, structured way. With that in place, you can use that process as a reliable way to generate ideas, iterate upon them, and harness the power of your team’s combined creative energy to make real business change. That is, if you can build and optimize your brainstorming process…

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Screencasts are true powerhouses in team communication; they allow us here at Process Street to convey everything in a concise manner with both visual and audial cues, whilst giving the viewer a resource that they can run through as many times as they want.

Unfortunately, many teams put off using screencasts because you have to:

• Spend time recording it
• Wait for the file to export
• Wait for the video to convert
• Wait for the video to upload
• Remember you recorded a video that has now finished uploading
• Manually send it to the right team member

Whilst conversations are more likely to be forgotten or lost, their ease makes them the go-to method for communication (or, at best, a Skype call). This is a huge mistake.

Using just a couple of free screencasting apps you can record your video, spend three seconds saving it and then have it automatically sent to to the right person. Rather than waiting for your time zones to match up or the other person to reply, you can record, save, then get on with the rest of your day.
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“I’d give anything to work from home. It must be so relaxing!”

I’ve heard this kind of thing from my entire family, and with the increasing trend of remote workers it’s not surprising that people want to get in on the action.

The last 3 years of working remotely have taught me otherwise.

Yes, you get to work from anywhere, have more flexibility with your hours, and even wear whatever you want. However, remote work can be isolating, demotivating, stressful as all hell, and even physically damaging.

So, I’ve brought together all of the lessons I wish I’d been told when getting into the game, including:

• How to maintain a work/life balance without a traditional office
• Creating and sticking to your own schedule
• How to stay motivated without seeing your teammates
• Staying healthy and avoiding injuries common to remote work

Also, if you’re looking for remote work, we here at Process Street are hiring!

Check out our jobs page for more information.

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Generating and sending invoices can be a time-consuming process. A properly designed invoice helps a business get paid and provides legal protection for both parties.

Think about it, all the hours and energy you put into completing a project will have an invoice at the end of it. Invoices are the tool that provides freelancers with the ability to receive income. That’s why we over at Process Street sat down and thought up a way to make getting paid even easier; a template which serves as a custom invoice generator.

Never again worry about charging your clients the wrong amount, or even sending them an invoice with an outdated logo or set of information. All you need to do is plug your information into this template and away you go!

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Pinch analysis is a difficult topic to talk about, as it both has widely applicable techniques which can reduce the need for external resources, but it’s traditionally very complicated and used in a limited business sector.

That’s why today I’ll be breaking down the topic and showing how the principles behind it can be used across any and all disciplines.

You don’t have to be a thermodynamics buff to understand this; it all comes down to analyzing what you have, what by-products your processes create, and whether you can use those by-products to your advantage.

By doing this, traditional pinch analysis is able to typically result in energy savings of 10-35% – that’s a third less energy you need to generate or import to carry out your processes.

Lets’ get stuck in.
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[ Download our Free Ebook ] – Click here to download our free 111 page ebook on “How to automate the tasks you hate at work using Zapier“.

Business vs Casual, Zapier vs IFTTT

Whether it’s Coke vs Pepsi, Ariel vs Persil or Hawaiian pizza vs everything good in the world, rivalries are everywhere. They make for fantastic spectator sports and can help improve our lives by showing the flaws in each side.

In our efforts to help you guys automate as much of the laborious shovel work in your lives as possible, we came across two main competitors; the great battle that is Zapier vs IFTTT.

Okay, so maybe “battle” is over-dramatizing things a little; it’s not as if they’re running massive smear campaigns. Still, the competition is real, as both Zapier and IFTTT have earned their spots on the map for being darned good pieces of kit. This got us thinking; which is better?

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Tracking your work and what you do may sound a little simple (however, we’ve proven before that it’s not necessarily the case). But just imagine having lots of people working on the same project at the same time. That’s when it actually becomes not so easy to track what’s going on.

Online collaboration tools are on the rise with businesses who want to track their employee’s workflow – especially remotely. You might have already seen our previous article comparing Asana and Trello, but instead of comparing the user experience we will look at the features and usability of each app.

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In a study of 400 businesses in the UK and US, global analyst firm IDC established that 23% of employees don’t understand a core part of their job. Combined with the potential damage that human error can cause, it’s easy to see why it’s important to make sure that your processes are being followed to the letter.

Still, nobody enjoys hearing the term “ensure compliance” when it comes to their team. It’s cold, impersonal, and conjures up images of school students being sent to detention or prisoners under strict watch, and if your team feels the same then their morale will quickly plummet.

Here at Process Street, we’re well versed in the problems with documenting, managing, and deploying your processes. That’s why this post will take care of those compliance problems by giving you some killer tips to make sure your team sticks to their methods without alienating them with harsh policies.

Let’s dive right in!

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