Archive for the ‘task’ tag
Use the First 30 Minutes of Your Workday to Maximize Productivity [Time Management]
No one likes 9 AM. It’s early, we’re tired and we still have hours of work ahead of us. But we’re not the only ones who get off to a slow start. Everyone in the office—bosses included—is in their own world for the first 30 minutes of the workday. Rarely does anyone disturb us or give us a huge task that early in the morning. No, those precious 30 minutes are all ours. And if we use them properly, the rest of the day can be more productive. More »
Doit.im Brings Powerful Yet Intuitive GTD Management to The Web and Mobile Devices [To-do Lists]
Web/iOS/Android/Mac: There’s no shortage of task managers for you to choose from, including many that sync across multiple platforms. Doit.im stands out as being one of the easiest to use, while offering just about every feature a GTD-lover would want. More »
I’m Gina Trapani, and This Is How I Work [How I Work]
Seven years ago, Gina Trapani founded Lifehacker—so it goes without saying that this week’s edition of How I Work is near and dear to us. While leading the site, Gina wrote Lifehacker’s best-selling book, and launched multiple open-source projects. She’s the creator of ThinkUp, a social media insights engine (used by the White House!), Todo.txt apps, a text-based task manager, and Narrow the Gapp, a data-driven web site about the gender pay gap. Gina also hosts In Beta, a podcast about open source, web-based, mobile, and social apps, and This Week in Google, a web show which covers the latest news about the cloud and Google. Gina’s work truly makes the world a better place, and we were thrilled to chat with her about how she does it—from the gear that keeps her going to the advice that inspires her most. Even better? Gina is answering your questions live for the next hour, so ask away! More »
Robot chauffeurs: Google self-driving cars log 300K miles
Google announced today that its self-driving cars have logged over 300,000 miles without a single accident — a step closer to being able to say, “Look Mom, no hands!” without running over your mom.
The company announced the milestone on its blog, saying employees will be able to start taking these cars to and from work without a second researcher in the passenger seat. Up until now, testing has been done in pairs, but those on the self-driving team will start using the cars for short solo tasks such as commuting.
Before we get crazy and start expecting our own robot , Google says it has a couple of things to work on. First off, the cars need to be able to to detect one-off construction signals, a task Google calls “tricky.” The cars will also need to get experience driving on snowy terrain.
Recently Google received a license from the state of Nevada to “drive” its autonomous cars on Nevada roads. The state approved regulations for self-driving vehicles in February, which included getting the green light (so to speak) from insurance companies, car manufacturers, law enforcement, and other involved parties. In order to drive in Nevada, self-driving cars will have special license plates to alert surrounding drivers to their presence. Autonomous cars being tested with have a red infinity logo and those owned by civilians will have a green infinity logo. This green logo, of course, will only come into existence when self-driving cars are being manufactured for the public.
Self-driving car photo via Zack Sheppard/Flickr
Filed under: VentureBeat 
Archive or Delete Emails That Don’t Immediately Feel Important [Email Overload]
Managing email is a tough task for anyone. If you’re really overwhelmed, it might be time to take a more ruthless approach. Developer Matt Gemmell’s solution is especially brutal, but effective: if an email doesn’t seem important to you, delete or archive it immediately. More »
Create An Online Marketing Bucket List – What Would You Do If Your Marketing Plan Options Were Limitless?
When it comes to your marketing, the options are limitless.
Have you ever caught yourself saying, “If only we’d had more time/money/resources we could have knocked that project out of the park!”?
Some marketers are great at brainstorming great ideas and have trouble implementing, while others are more task oriented and have a hard time seeing the big picture. Whether you relate to one of the two types mentioned above or fall somewhere in the middle there is always an opportunity for growth and discovery.
Often we can find ourselves getting caught up in the day-to-day minutiae of completing tasks related to our structured marketing programs. While creating an executable and realistic content plan is an essential part of implementing a successful marketing strategy, I think there is another very important and often overlooked option as well.
A few months ago I started putting together what I call my “Internet Marketing Bucket List”. This list is constantly growing and is a compilation of marketing tactics and ideas that I want to execute but may not be realistic right now. I’ve found that this exercise accomplishes a few objectives:
- Central place to store ideas & concepts
- A great creative outlet
- Helps me think outside the box
In this post I have included tips for drafting your own list, as well as some questions to get you started. Time to begin thinking about what you would include on your very own Marketing Bucket List!
Start Brainstorming & Documenting Your Ideas
One of the toughest parts about creating this list is getting something down. If you’re like me, sometimes you have to be in the right creative frame of mind to work on this type of project. Don’t worry about creating the whole list at once. I continue to add marketing items to my list whenever I think of them. A few additional tips would include:
- Write everything down, even if you think it might be a bad idea
- Include ideas you think are realistic and those that may seem like a long shot
- “Borrow” ideas from other companies
Don’t Limit Yourself
Depending on your role, you may be responsible for a segment of marketing, or marketing as a whole. Say you’re responsible for social media but also have some ideas that would lend themselves to a content marketing plan, get it down. What are the benefits of thinking outside your job function?
- You can become a resource for other team members
- A unique or perspective can often solve a difficult problem
- Your value as an employee can dramatically increase if you think outside the box
Collaborate & Share Your Ideas
Some people like to organize all of their thoughts and have a structured plan before sharing ideas with anyone else. I on the other hand prefer to bounce ideas off of my team as I’m jotting down ideas. Who knows that small conversation may spark additional ideas.
The Marketing Bucket List is not a project that has to be completed on your own. Perhaps you have a weekly or monthly team meeting and could use a portion of the time allocated to brainstorm with your fellow employees.
15 Questions to Jumpstart Your Marketing Bucket List
Below I have listed some questions you can ask yourself to jumpstart the creative juices and begin your very own bucket list.
- How are you going to store the information? (I use Google Docs)
- What are some small tactics you could implement today but simply don’t have the time?
- What are some bigger ideas that may not be possible to implement with current budget and resources?
- If money were no object what sort of campaigns or events would you like to have?
- Can you find examples of marketing that you appreciate from other companies, even if they are competitors?
- What tactics have you always wanted to try but have been too timid to move forward with?
- What sort of marketing inspires you as a consumer or purchaser?
- Who do you think would be the best target market for your marketing ideas?
- What is something you’ve implemented before that didn’t work as well as you had anticipated?
- What would you have done differently?
- Who would be a good person within your organization to discuss your marketing ideas with?
- Are there areas within your field that you need additional education on? (social media, email marketing, blog writing, press releases, etc.)
- Is there a skill or area of marketing that you’ve mastered and want to share with the rest of your team?
- What is your end goal with implementing these new tactics?
- Can you estimate what the ROI would be for your company?
The best advice I can give is not to over-think what you’re writing down. Keep your Marketing Bucket List in a location that is easy to access at your desk or on the go. You never know when a good idea might pop up. As you work through your list cross of those you’ve been able to complete, and add additional ideas as needed.
If you’re looking for some input or want to take this conversation further please feel free to comment on this post or connect with our team via Twitter: @TopRank, @AZeckman.
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Create An Online Marketing Bucket List – What Would You Do If Your Marketing Plan Options Were Limitless? | http://www.toprankblog.com
Handy: A Social Media Image Size Guide for LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and More [Infographic]
As our social media profiles represent our digital avatar, we’re now forced to dress them up just as we would our selves. We need stylish profile photos, cool banner images and appropriate color schemes. The last thing any of us wants to see is a stretched, pixelated image – it’s as bad as ripped stockings for a lady or an too tight t-shirt for a man. Fortunately, the Original Ginger has put together an infographic helping us out with the task of image sizing.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Twitter Political Index
Yesterday, Twitter launched its Twitter Political Index to track enthusiasm for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the run-up to the November US Presidential election.
The Twitter Political Index is a daily measurement that evaluates the sentiment of Twitter users feelings about the candidates based on an estimated two million Twitter mentions of the candidates in a given week relative to more than 400 million tweets sent about other topics each day.
This is a great example of Crowdsourcing, which involves taking a task usually performed by one or a few people (in this case doing political research) and distributing among a crowd of people—outsourcing it to a crowd—via online social networks.
Tapping the crowd to learn about buyers (and voters)
I'll be particularly interested to see how the Twitter Political Index changes when one or the other candidate has a success (a great speech for example) or a public gaffe. And it will be fascinating to learn on election day if global Twitter users are a good proxy for the American electorate.
The techniques used by the Twitter Political Index are available to companies using products like those from Radian6 to gauge the sentiment around products and companies. It is a fascinating way for marketers and PR pros to mine a huge amount of data.
For more information on the Twitter Political Index, USA Today has a good analysis Twitter index tracks sentiment on Obama, Romney.
Birst’s CEO says data warehouses are not dead
Birst, the Sequoia-backed business intelligence startup, rolled out a new feature today that targets data warehouses, and makes potentially juicy data accessible to business users.
The new product, known as Distributed Business Analytics, combines structured data from data warehouses and any potentially useful departmental data (spreadsheets, lists and files) and stores it in one central place. As it stands, there is one data warehouse and dozens of departmental databases, that remain independent of each other. The product, available in 30 days, promises to change that.
Peters told me he was inspired to start an analytics company when he realized that most valuable data doesn’t currently exist in the cloud, but is stored on-premise, typically in a data warehouse. Peters told me that data will eventually move to the cloud, but we’re not there yet. He likens the process to jumping into a pool of icy water — “scary at first but you get used to it.”
Business Intelligence has been accused of being bound by old technology. Companies are increasingly dedicated to the task of exploring the value in their unstructured data, such as emails, tweets, videos and documents. When asked about innovation from Big Data startups like Datameer, he said: “Data isn’t useful until you can count it, graph it, structure it.”
BI vendors from Oracle to Qlikview will tell you that with their solution, companies can truly harness the power of their data. Birst’s CEO claims the solution is cheaper and more flexible than most; “overall it will probably cost you one-third less.”
This is the San Francisco-based company’s first major product update since nabbing $26 million in its fourth funding round.
Filed under: VentureBeat 
Overcome Procrastination with "Solar Flaring" [Productivity]
There are two ways you can overcome procrastination. You can jump right into the task, or you can ease yourself into it. The first method requires commitment and willpower to do, but there will be times when you will be lacking them. That’s when easing yourself into work can help you overcome procrastination—and that’s what is called solar flaring. More »