Ever hear me talk about “work sprints”? I mention it a LOT. It’s great for work nerds.

Blogging is the new
Poetry of Our time!
Ever hear me talk about “work sprints”? I mention it a LOT. It’s great for work nerds.
Finding new ways to increase productivity for you and your team is a constant but worthwhile challenge. Who wouldn’t want to do more with less time?
There are many ways you can optimise your site for search engines and many of them are what we call “the bare minimum – we do them anyway!”.
This blog is written by the highly successful Charles McLachlan, who is Chairman of Academy Group 27 & Academy Group 11 and co-founder of the Transformation Development Partnership. He has very kindly shared with us his wisdom when it comes to running a successful business.
As an August baby, I have constantly needed to hustle my way through running a business and celebrating my birthday during a time when many people leave town.
I generally will not let simple things like “it’s a quiet month” and “we’re going to decide in September” or “let’s wait till after the summer” stop me from making things happen. In fact, August is the perfect month to get those procrastination projects picked up and done, ready for September. And a time to try out new habits.
I did it!
This week while I have been on a sort of working holiday in Singapore (working meaning I am still working but not doing any events or speaking or meetings so much) I managed to reduce my inbox count to a total of 0! YAY!
As a true fan of Social Media and of the powers of Twitter, I have been observing new users for a while now, and have had the privilege of training those who have an interest in using Twitter more effectively.
Twitter has a lot of strange things unique to it – punctuation marks and abbreviations which may look like alien-speak to anyone who hasn’t learned it. Although there are many guides online (I particularly like the Mashable Twitter Guidebook) I can see why a lot of people might look at the stream of tweets and wonder what is going on!
There are 5 basic things you really need to know– once you understand them you will be well on your way. – hashtags, RTs, @replies, mentions, and url shortening.
As designers who also deal directly with clients we have a combination of work that requires us to concentrate (like design and coding work) for a couple of hours or a few hours at a time) and work that needs to be done regularly, like responding to emails and managing our colleagues on projects where we are working together as a team.
A client wrote to us and asked “How do I post the same update on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, automatically, every time I put a new blog post up? I really want to save time!”
Here is a trick I play a lot when I need to get things done. I choose a number – I like 8 because to me it’s lucky.
In my Moleskine diary, I make a list of a few tasks and use these goals to batch my activities. Then I power through them like a demon and only take a break when I have done that batch. It feels great and then I can brag to friends and Twitter folk about how I just completed 8 whatever-it-was.
I then use a highlighter pen to highlight the tasks I have done. Using the higlighter just feels more positive than crossing it out. It’s a little celebration!
To help you lovely readers out I made a list of examples of some of the things I do – all using the number 8 (except for the big time consuming which use the number 3).