As we wind down 2010, I’ve begun assessing what I’ve accomplished and what new challenges I’m going to take on in 2011. The end of a year and the beginning of a new one is always a good time to do some cleaning whether it be reorganizing my office, cleaning out file folders, changing up how I stay organized or anything else to introduce a little shock into the system and prepare for the year ahead.

In addition to keeping our physical and virtual systems and spaces organized, updated and refreshed, every once in a while we need to do some pruning and make tweaks to our sources of information.

I have been seeking out fresh voices in two main ways:

Google Reader – A few days ago I went through all of my feeds, analyzed the stats and unsubscribed from blogs that weren’t providing value to me any more. I then reviewed what blogs my community were often sharing content from and did some searches around specific topics that I want to dive deeper into over the next few months.

Twitter Lists – It’s easy to build your own echo-chamber if you rely on the same Twitter Lists and searches without ever switching things up a bit. To help find new people to connect with I headed over to Listorious and found a few new lists to follow. I then created searches for 3 sets of keywords that I want to monitor in the coming months. Besides the new lists and searches, I went through the lists that I’ve created for myself and did some shuffling around, as well.

I’ve been excited at the new content and people I’m being introduced to over the past week since I did some house cleaning of my RSS feeds, Twitter Lists, and searches. The voices are fresh, new and a welcomed addition to my addiction to the consumption of information.

Are you regularly seeking out fresh voices? If not, use the end of the year as a good excuse to start doing it.

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In most companies meetings are broken. You and I both know it. We organize and attend meetings that take too long, are unstructured, involve too much rambling and not enough follow-up. We meet for the sake of meeting, not out of necessity. We allow individuals to hijack the meeting so it takes twice as long as it is supposed to. For the few minutes per day that we’re not in meetings, we’re being consistently interrupted. Yet, we’re still expected to complete all of our work on time even if we spend the majority of our life in meetings.

Does this sound like a conversation you might have had recently with a co-worker?

I know this has happened to me. I know that I’ve been both the culprit and victim of broken meetings. But, lately, I have become increasingly restrictive of how easy I’ll agree to a meeting without questioning the need to meet and the length of time required. Too often, as I’m sure you’ve experience, hour long meetings are scheduled because it sounds like a nice, round number.

Meetings don’t have to be the source of this much frustration. Meetings don’t have to zap your team’s productivity. Meetings don’t have to suck!

Now, this isn’t to say that meetings aren’t necessary. They are very much needed, when they’re structured, are respectful of your time, involve follow-up, and aren’t just a meeting to meet about the last meeting you had.

If you’re stuck in an organization that enjoys meeting just to meet, how can you fix it? How can you regain back your precious time?

Merlin Mann has come to the rescue once again. A few years ago he began preaching from tall mountains on how each of us could regain control on our inboxes with his, now famous, Inbox Zero speech. Now Merlin wants to help you fix broken meetings so that they return to be useful allocations of your time.

Merlin recently publicly rolled out this new presentation during a session at Twitter HQ. The entire presentation is a little more than an hour long but is worth every minute of your time.

In case you missed it during the presentation, Merlin shares 10 patterns for improving meetings.

10 Patterns to Improve Meetings

1. Purpose
2. Agenda
3. Grazing
4. Edges
5. Guests
6. Timekeeper
7. No Ratholes
8. Focus
9. Follow-Up
10. Consistency

What are your thoughts about broken meetings? Did you find a nugget or two of actionable information that you can take back to your organization and implement?

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Photo Credit: Kevin Lawyer

When I was at my old company I had a large outsourced team based in the Philippines.  Since I was only able to make it out there once every 10 weeks or so, we had to rely on tools that would allow us to transfer reports and communicate with one another from close to 18,000 miles away.  At the time this was primarily done via email, IM and FTP.  That feels so long ago because now, just a few years ago, we have seen a sharp increase in cloud-based tools for individuals and businesses.  At the heart of these tools is the goal to keep people connected by allowing for access to data and the ability to easily communicate through a variety of channels.

I utilize cloud-based apps all throughout my day and didn’t realize just how much I rely on them until I sat down and began thinking about how I store and retrieve personal data and how I communicate with a number of team members, clients, and partners on a daily basis.

Here are the top 12 cloud-based tools that I use to stay productive.  I use many other tools as well but these are the tools I wouldn’t know what to do without.

12 Cloud-Based Tools to Stay Productive

1. Google Apps/Docs: I use Google Apps at both New Marketing Labs and my steakhouse. I also heavily use Gmail and Google Docs in my personal life.
2. Google Bookmarks: Google Bookmarks ensures that I have access to my most frequently used bookmarks from any computer, anywhere I’m at.  I also use Delicious but I use that more for storage and curating together lists such as corporate social media policies or food recipes.
3. Google Reader: Google Reader is the primary way I’m able to consume so much information on a daily basis.  There are a variety of tools available for the iPhone and iPad plus I can access from any computer with a browser.
4. Mozy: Mozy allows me to sleep at night knowing that all of my data is being backed up.  I have other backup processes in place including external hard-drives and heavy use of Dropbox but Mozy remains at the center of all of these processes.
5. Backupify: Just as Mozy allows me not to worry about the data that’s stored on my computer(s), Backupify ensures that my social media data is backed up and available for future reference.  Backupify can secure your data from a variety of services including: Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, Zoho, Google Apps/Docs, WordPress, Basecamp, Gmail, Facebook, Google Calendar, and many more.
6. Dropbox: Dropbox keeps my most used files available to me wherever I am.  Not only does this serve as a backup of those files, it also allows me to access from my iPhone, iPad, or any other computer.  This comes in handy all the time and helps me to stay responsive to business requests for copies of files.
7. Evernote: I have been a fan of Evernote since it was first launched. I have multiple notebooks that I use for all sorts of things including my task management, goal setting, lists of all kinds, and random notes.
8. Hootsuite: While technically I could’ve listed all of the different social platforms, I would like to think that would be sort of obvious. However, Hootsuite is important because it allows me to stay connected on too many Twitter accounts and Facebook Pages to count.
9. Yammer: We’re just deploying Yammer at New Marketing Labs but it is being used to keep our team connected so that we’re not constantly interrupting each other and so that we can stay in contact when we’re traveling.  We had used other internal networks such as Socialcast and they worked great but a few of our partners were already using Yammer so we decided to give it a try. So far, it’s pretty awesome!
10. ScrewTurn: ScrewTurn is what we use for our corporate wiki where we keep information on just about everything we do including our policies, timelines, meeting notes, discussions and lots of other great uses we’re finding for it.
11. Zoho: When we first launched New Marketing Labs we bounced around between a few CRMs and finally settled on Zoho.  I wanted a full-featured platform because I had spent 3 years as the administrator of NetSuite at my old company but we didn’t have the needs of, for example, a software company that has hundreds or thousands of leads coming in each day.
12. GoToMeeting: Even though Citrix Online is a client of mine, I have been using GoToMeeting for years.  I already travel a lot.  If it wasn’t for GoToMeeting, I would have to rent a closet at an airport because I would never be home.

What are some of your favorite cloud-based tools to stay productive and keep connected?

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Photo Credit: bestrated1

a personal assistant to a politician or political candidate. A body man accompanies the politician or candidate virtually everywhere, often arranging lodging, transportation or meals, and providing companionship, snacks, a cellphone, and any other necessary assistance.

After learning about Reggie after watching a MSNBC special on an inside look at the working White House, I did some more research.  Reggie has become one of the most well-known body men in political history, due in part to his role as a basketball player with the championship Duke University team and his try-outs with two NFL teams.  There have been some very interesting articles on Reggie and surrounding him considering himself the “Chief of Stuff”.

When President Obama was on the campaign trail, ESPN caught up with, then, Senator Obama and Reggie to profile the Chief of Stuff.  It’s a fun video to watch, in my opinion, since it’s another look behind-the-scenes.

If you can’t view this video in your browser, you can also find it here…

Not only do I find motivation watching people like Reggie Love do whatever it takes, working 18-20 hours or more per day, when I first heard Reggie describe himself as the “Chief of Stuff” it resonated with me.  As General Manager at both New Marketing Labs and at my steakhouse, I tend to focus on operations, processes, and doing my best to ensure everything runs smoothly.  Along the way there are tons of “stuff” that needs to be dealt with on a daily basis.

Also, there a lot of things that I help Chris Brogan with throughout the course of the week.  Now, Chris never asked me to take on a role as his personal aide, though I am his right-hand man with a lot of things.  He does after all have a personal assistant in Kathryn Jennex.  However, I’m always concerned with ensuring that Chris is taken care of and that his other obligations outside of NML are taken care of.

So, why do I do this?  Because first, foremost and most importantly, Chris is a close friend of mine who I want to see continue to succeed.  He doesn’t like doing paperwork, organizing or worry about the detail stuff.  That’s not what he’s best at.  I, on the other hand, enjoy doing that and actually need to be organized to function properly.  So, as much as I can, I work with Chris to make sure he doesn’t have to worry about all that “stuff” that would slow him down.  I also work with our internal team to ensure that we’re aligned on processes, staying organized and always moving things like side projects along.  With how busy everything gets, it is very easy to let certain things go astray.  I try my best to ensure that doesn’t happen.

That role doesn’t stop with NML or Chris though.  I function in this role at the steakhouse and at home too.  Joe, my best friend and business partner at Caminito, is just like Chris in how he feels about “stuff”.  Joe is best at being our Executive Chef, not at organizing, planning, logistics (except as it relates directly to the functioning of service).  At home, I naturally fall into this role because of how much I do it by day.  I handle the bills, the scheduling of maintenance, logistics, and anything else that will help Laura and I out.  That’s not to say that Laura doesn’t do a ton of “stuff” that keeps us functioning.  Things like laundry, dirty dishes and tons more seem to always escape me.  She keeps me in line with that stuff.

I guess that makes me a “Chief of Stuff” kinda too, huh?  I’m okay with that and actually enjoy it.  So, my official title may be “General Manager” but I thing “Chief of Stuff” is a little more fun

What are you the Chief of?  How do you handle all of the “stuff” that needs to be taken care of on a daily, weekly or monthly basis?

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