Photo courtesy of chrismeller

Being productive in the long term is always a challenge in the tough work environment of the 21th century, no matter whether you are a freelancer or work in a coporate setting.
Today’s financial crisis does certainly not help to make one’s life easier, with long-term job security being a thing of the past for most industries. Therefore, it is sometimes a good idea to take a step back and rethink the way you work.

Steven Snell has a nice article about how to be productive at www.FreeLanceSwitch.com. Although gear more towards freelancer, he has some very valid points to make.

Among his most important areas to focus on are (among others)

• Goals
• Email/Communication
• Tasks
• Time Management
• Organisation

Let me just higlight a few few aspects:

online casino netHave a Long-Term Plan

Freelancers can easily get caught in the rut of moving from one job to the next and focusing only on the short-term. If this is the case, you’ll probably find yourself growing decreasingly satisfied with your work at some point. Freelancing is no different than any other career in that you need to have a long-term plan. A long-term plan can guide you in the short-term by helping you to make decisions that will get you to where you want to be.

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Align Your To-Do Lists with Your Goals

Getting things done is great, but ultimately what’s important is that you’re working towards your goals. When setting up your to-do list, take a look at your goals and develop the to-do list in a way that will lead you to the accomplishment of your goals.

Very valid points, indeed. However, he falls short to answer the question how you best implement his recommendation in your daily life. “Align your tasks with your goals”? Most software tools in the market just do not cover these aspects. But there is help.

We will start a series of online tutorials illustrating how you can implement self-management best practice with the help of DAISHO, the integrated self management tool by DAISHO Blacksmith. (I’m one of the creators of DAISHO, so don’t wonder why we are focussing here on it )

Use a Contact Manager

As a freelancer you’ll definitely be in contact with a lot of people. Keeping everything straight and be a chore. A contact manager [...] will help you to keep track of everyone while saving time for more productive tasks.

Yep, we will demonstrate how to do it with DAIHSO as well. Stay tuned. raman amplifier

Get me right: I am not saying that you as an individual professional need to chase business all over the world. But, you need to be aware of your global competition. With high-speed Internet, well educated and trained people are available and reachable all over the world. Unlike last century, where low paid blue-collar work tended to be outsourced (or off-shored) to developing countries such as India or China, this is happening in the 21st century with white-collar job as well.

For example, More than 75 Percent of Financial Companies [are] Now Offshoring, Saving $9 bln a year.

Seems like tough times ahead, especially if you consider some of the aspects presented here (a pretty nice presentation, but lacks in my opinion a proper citation of the sources. Anyway, some good food for thought, if you take it with a grain of salt):

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So, what to do? In my opinion, the outlook is not as bleak: Although competition is global, professionals have an invaluable advantage when competing locally against global competition: Trust, reputation and transaction costs.

What do I mean by that? Outsourcing and offshoring comes with transaction costs for your customer: more travelling to set up remote operations, more controlling and supervision. Because your customer does not know your fellow competitors from another continent yet: He is not familiar with their culture, he can not judge easily on their reputation. He still needs to build up trust to lower his transaction costs. This is the main (if not the only) entry barrier professional from a different country or continent face (no matter where they reside).

Therefore, in the 21st century, it is essential for a professional to focus on a few things:

• Reputation: This is what helps a customer to decide. In the knowledge business most professionals are in, this is probably the most important factor. Knowledge is not tangible, and selling a service is just a promise for a future delivery. But it’s not only reputation about your knowledge. I would rate the reputation about your (business) ethics as even more important. We believe that the ethics of the ancient Samurai can provide some guidance here.
• Professionalism: Once you got the contract, make sure you deliver what you promised: on time, in budget, in quality, and in a professional way.
• Your personal and professional network: This is where your reputation ressonates, and this is also where your potential customers refer to in order to get recommendations for service providers: “Do you know somebody good at… ? Can you recommend me someone who…?” Here, they know, they get services for the lowest transaction cost: recommendations from people they trust.

Trust is the currency of the 21st century, and your network is your bank.

Treat it wisely.

DAISHO is the next generation software for Goal, Time and Contact Management. It’s a strategic weapon, which meets exactly the challenges of our century. It’s a software which puts you in control, not somebody else.

We are happy to announce that DAISHO 1.2.1 is now available.

With DAISHO you can…

• easily track your goals
• plan your work capacity goal-oriented and on a long-term basis with time budgeting
• manage your goals and activities effectively with the context concept
• save time
• create and cultivate your social network successfully
• get started immediately

The software is based on P2P functionality and is a pure Java application.

For more information view the Guided Tour. DAISHO is made for professionals of the 21st century.

You can try DAISHO 30 days for free. Please feel free to download it here.

If you buy DAISHO now, you will get all upcoming versions for free.

Keep control with DAISHO!

See it as a continuous process, based on the following questions:

• What do I want to achieve?
• How do I get there? What actions do I have to take in order to achieve my goal?
• What resources (human, capital, etc) do I need?
• Which people (influencers, decision-makers) do I know?
• What is their role “in the game”?
• Am I well connected in my target industry?
• What do I have to do in the short-, mid- and long-term to improve my position?

Those questions will guide you through the process and hence, help you to achieve your goal. Setting up appropriate actions (in form of tasks and activities) and measures to come closer to your goal is just one part of the operational implementation in daily business. Building up and maintaining your social network is another important part. Knowing people and having connections is quite essential in today’s business world. It often opens doors for you or allows you to easier reach your goals.

Just a few hints from us how to successfully maintain and build up a social network:

Analyze and maintain your network!
What often happens is that due to daily business activities, we don’t have time to maintain and build up an adequate business network to keep our position. But this is essential, so take your time and analyze your network. If you keep in touch with your contacts (e.g. colleagues, business partners, and clients) and hence, maintain the relationship, you increase your chances reaching your goals: You get informal information early on, you have better chances for background information before even a formal bidding process is started or a project initiated. And, nothing beats the advantage of getting a personal recommendation by somebody in your network.

Build up a contact radar!
Cluster all relevant people that are relevant for you in terms of industry, position or functions and check, which of them you have not contacted for a while. Just think about it: isn’t it embarrassing to contact somebody from your network just in time to get a possible deal? Keep in touch even without a real business reason, provide them with helpful information, offer your support (like answering questions on an informal basis, without charging for the hour, of course!)

Keep the overview and don’t loose valuable contacts!

To illustrate how you can effectively set goal, I will take our pyramide that you already know from my last article.

In practice, it is common that you have different contexts where you assign your goals to. Contexts are subject areas that are seperated from each other, for example acquisition, marketing, projects, sport, and further education. With the help of contexts, you are able to structure your goals, tasks, and projects more effectively and hence, keep an overview of your current and future activities.

Once you have allocated your goals to contexts, you can start breaking them down into subgoals or milestones, as we call it. Knowing what actions it takes to achieve your goal, you should roughly plan your work capacity by setting time budgets. Those time budgets tell you how much time you are planning to spend for which project. Now, you have to schedule your activities, meaning that you have to allocate the time budgets of your context to each single workday. Now, you know exactly how much time you are planning to spend for each context. The tartget-performance comparison shows you how exactly your rough planning through time budgets matches with the more detailed planning (scheduling).

Monitoring the process and of course, the results of your goal achievement is hereby essential in all three stages. That’s the approach we have also implemented in our software.