Cloud Productivity

All You Need to Know about Business and Personal Productivity in the Cloud

Checklist

Formulating Tasks To Get Things Done

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Before working through your task list, you need to have a good strategy behind actually creating and adding to that list. You can’t just put any old thing on a task list. Creating a task involves a number of subtle steps, which, with practice, will become so natural you won’t recognize that you’re actually doing them at all. In assessing a potential task your mind does a number of things. Some take time. Some are practically instant.

1. Identify the Objective

When you’re given a task or a project to do, it’s usually pretty vague. It’s up to you to understand what it means and how to get it done. Identifying the objective is understanding what the end result should be. How will you know when you’ve finished the project? This is more complex than it sounds. If the project you’ve been handed is, for example, “write a report on X”, it would seem like the object is to simply write the report. But, there may be other factors to consider before the project can be considered “completed”. Does the report need to be reviewed by someone? Do you have all the necessary information to write the report? Is the deadline reasonable? Only after these questions have been answered can you move on to the next step. Most of the time, our minds ask these questions internally in a split second. If we get stuck in identifying the objective, it’s time to ask the person that handed you the project, or if you created the project on your own, you’ll need to reconsider what the expected outcome looks like.

SugarCRM

How to Setup SugarCRM Part 1: Installation

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This guide will take you through the necessary steps to install and log in to SugarCRM Community Edition. Once installed, you can optionally upgrade to the latest version of SugarCRM Community Edition, or upgrade to SugarCRM Professional or Enterprise. SugarCRM Community Edition is a free application. The only costs involved in the below guide is the web hosting from HostMonster (which is the most cost-effect, feature-rich, and most flexible, hosting provide that I have found – that’s why I host all my websites, including www.cloudproductivity.net with them).

Email Clock

The Right Time for Email

Productivity6 Comments

There are a lot of applications out there that are aimed at helping you be more productive, either individually, or as a team. However, there are just as many, or maybe more, that make you unproductive. In today’s day and age, the biggest killer of productivity is email.

In my time sitting a desk in a 9-5 job, I’ve learned a couple of very effective strategies for managing email and the time spent in the inbox.

Evernote. Remember Everything.

How To Use Evernote – My Story

Productivity, Technology4 Comments

Evernote has changed my life. It’s such a simple thing, but it has had a massive impact on my day-to-day life. I have a really bad memory, so I use it to remember everything, so I don’t have to.

I remember first hearing about Evernote in mid 2010 and dismissed it pretty quickly, thinking “why would I need another note taking tool when I can use the Notes app on my iPhone or a text editor on my computer, or Google Docs?”. A few months later, I thought it might give it another go as a way to write down and keep notes from meetings and be able to easily reference them again later.

And that was just the beginning…

CRM Strategy

CRM is Business Strategy, Not Technology

Business, Technology4 Comments

In my years working for the SugarCRM Partner, InsightfulCRM, I continually got the impression that customers and prospects were in the market for a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system because they’d heard the term CRM thrown around and believed a CRM system would help their business. Also, people believed that CRM was a piece of software that was managed by IT and was a burden to use. This is not the case.

What is CRM?

CRM is best understood by looking at the full expanded version of the term. Customer Relationship Management. As a business, we care about customers, prospects and partners, so let’s remove the term ‘Customer’. CRM now becomes simply Relationship Management. Nowhere do we mention “software”, “system” or even “technology”. Relationship Management is about effectively engaging, and tracking the relationships you have with you customers, prospects and partners. What does this mean? In it’s most basic form, you do not need technology to perform effective Relationship Management. Sure, there is technology around that helps make it a bit easier to keep track of and manage these people, but such technology is not essential.

Do ERM, not CRM

Effective Relationship Management (hmm… ERM…. that’s got a nice ring to it) is the way in which an individual tracks and manages their relationships. This can easily translate beyond the realm of business and into our personal lives. And it already has! Your email, address book, social media such as facebook and LinkedIn, are all different methods of ERM. While these systems are indeed technology, I want to stress three points:

  1. None of them are labelled as a “CRM system”
  2. They each serve a separate and unique purpose, but we all use more than one
  3. We would be able to perform ERM without them!

Why Going to Tender is a Waste of Time

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Tenders are a waste of time, effort, and money. There, I’ve said it. Every business I’ve been involved with when selling a product turns tenders away (unless there has been involvement prior to the tender being released). Why?

What is a Tender?
A “tender” is a a process by which a company that is going to market in order to find a solution to a business challenge or to assist in growing the business, asks a number of vendors to submit multiple pieces of documentation in order to compare, contrast and eventually select and implement a solution presented by one vendor.

The process starts with the company performing internal requirements analysis. Typically, the tender process is championed by one internal stakeholder who then asks each department that will be involved in using the end solution to submit a list of desired functionality. This internal stakeholder then compiles these responses into one document and often a spreadsheet, the latter being kept internal for the process of later comparison. The document itself is normally a set of questions in the nature of “Can your system perform X? What is the process to perform Y?” etc. These questions are aimed at covering off each of the desired pieces of functionality that the departments involved have requested. The resulting document is then either issued on a website and available for any vendor to respond to, or the champion handpicks a few vendors to participate in the tender.

Each vendor must then compile a response document answering each of the questions (there could be dozens and dozens) in as much detail as possible, including use cases, screenshots, and anything else they feel would help win the business. The vendors then submit these responses back to prospective client. The client reviews (this is a problem in itself), updates their internal comparison spreadsheet and more often than not, a few shortlisted vendors make the next step of meeting with the prospect to discuss moving forward.

The "Do it Now!" Mentality

Productivity3 Comments

There are many different types of productivity plans and programs. They all take a somewhat similar approach to getting things done. Most of these systems require planning and diligence in order to execute a predefined set of tasks. However, there is one, very old, very simple system that doesn’t require this and still means you will get a whole lot done. It is the “Do It Now” mentality.

The system is simple. Think of a task. Do it. Now.

No planning. No software. Just action.

As simple as it sounds, there is but one rule – finish it. So perhaps, the Do It Now mantra could be better understood as “Start it now. Finish it now.”. This productivity mentality has it’s place in the world of getting things done, and it shouldn’t necessarily be used everywhere at all times. “Do It Now” is best suited at tasks that take no more than one hour from start to finish. No planning.

It’s easy. If you see something that needs doing, or one of your colleagues asks you to work on something, take action, straight away. No hesitation, no delays, no procrastination.

Data Storage with Dropbox

Technology2 Comments

File sizes are getting bigger. Security is always a big concern. Sharing and collaboration gets things done. It used to be that as computer programs evolved, the size of the files they produced (that is, that you could save and load) grew in size too. This meant that you would constantly be looking out for a bigger hard drive so that you would keep using the programs you love and not have to delete anything to avoid running out of space on your computer.

And if you wanted to access a file (be it a document, spreadsheet, photo, movie, or anything else) on another computer, you would have to first copy the file from your own hard drive to a either a USB stick or thumb drive, a CD/DVD, or external hard drive, and then carry that device around with you, connect it to the other computer and hope it recognized the device and the file would open ok for you.

I was part of this cycle and was a big advocate of CD/DVD storage, especially as a backup medium. I would backup my photos, copy files and take them around with me. There was definitely problems with this solution, many of which are obvious:

  • Devices are fragile
  • Devices can be lost
  • CD/DVDs were a pain to use multiple times and re-writable discs were always messy

And of course, they have a limited lifespan. And who could forget the constant worry of a hard drive clicking it’s way to death.

Now, services are popping up on the internet that act as your hard drive. There’s services from Amazon, box.net, Syncplicity, Ubuntu One, Google Docs, SugarSync and more. One that I’ve found very powerful and flexible, is Dropbox.

What is the Cloud?

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Definition and History of the Cloud

The are many version of the history of the term “cloud” as it relates to computing. In my university days, the “cloud” was called the “internet”. The “Cloud” is basically another term for a network of machines. I think the best way to explain this is with the graphic below. In it, all machines and devices that do certain functions, outside of the devices we know and care about, are collected into a cloud shape – usually the big fluffy thing in the middle.

Traditionally, computing has been done with applications installed on a local machine and in more corporate situations, these applications may talk to, and store data on a centralised server inside the corporate network. Cloud computing throws all of that out the window. As shown in the graphic, the only device that people actually use is the screen, the interface. The entire application, storage, processing and communication between interconnected services, is handled by some other device, somewhere else. And that really is the basis behind the “cloud”. It’s data being processed and loaded for you, by a machine that you don’t necessarily know where it is, what it is, or even if it’s doing anything else at the same time.

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