Putting everything in the cloud, from personal data to private documents, is now a mainstream hype. A sure sign is the recent article in the German news magazine SPIEGEL online titled “Packen Sie Ihren Krempel in die Wolke! (“Put your stuff in the cloud“).

I’m not sure whether this is a contrarian indicator like in the stock market bubbles when taxi drivers provide you with free stock recommendations…

At least it is a funny coincidence that the SPIEGEL recommends a service like Dropbox, while at the same time the renowned IT magazine Heise online reports security holes in the Dropbox client discovered by security expert Derek Newton.

But why should you worry? The SPIEGEL is relaxed:

“Wer Angst hat, dass andere mitlesen, für den ist die Web-Wolke nichts. Wer Hunderte Megabytes Daten auf diversen Servern auf der ganzen Welt speichert, muss eine gewisse Wurstigkeit an den Tag legen. Denn ganz sicher lesen da welche mit.”

(engl: “In case you are afraid about other people reading your data, the cloud is not for you. If you store hundreds of Megabyte of data on a variety of servers around the world, you need some kind of “I don’t care” attitude. Because it is for sure that there are other people  reading your data.” – Translation by the author).

Now this is a twist! Just put everything in the cloud – privacy and security is soo last century. Don’t worry, be happy!

I don’t know about you – but this approach makes me speechless.I strongly believe that personal data are private, and of nobody else’s business. Putting selected (personal) data online should be a cautious and well-considered decision, which takes both the risks and advantages into account. But where to draw the line?

• photos of your last holiday?
• photos showing your kids?
• photos showing drunk friends?
• scanned bank statements?
• salary slips?
• insurance contracts?
• personal health information?

A first rule of thumb might be which of these information and documents you would share with your

• family
• friends
• neighbors
• co-workers and colleagues
• strangers?

How would you feel if they would see these documents accidentially?

And this is just for private documents. When I was working as a freelancer, I had clauses in several contracts which explicitly forbid to store any documents on third party infrastructures, like cloud services. Explaining the CEO of a company why an internal strategy paper or some new marketing concepts show up on Google or Dropbox or any other cloud services is something I definitely would want to avoid.

Deciding about the privacy risk you are personally willing to accept is one thing. To decide this for others,  for friends, customers or clients, is a completly different story.

It is so true: “You have more time than you think”  -  Stop doing things which are not important.

Laura Vanderkam sums it up nicely:

So whenever you find yourself saying “I don’t have time to do X, Y, Z,” try changing your language.
Instead, say “I don’t do X, Y, and Z because it’s not a priority.”

Freeing your calendar can be that easy and simple. (However, this requires to have a clear picture of your priorities  and about the price you are willing to pay. But that’s a different story…)

A tool like Daisho can help you then to implement your prioritized time schedule. Determine how much time you want to spent on a context (family, friends, a given project, sports etc.) and budget your time accordingly (e.g. 3 hours of sport a week).  Visual timeslots help you to pre-structure your calendar on a high level, before going into the details of scheduling meetings or tasks.

But the best can’t help you to free up more time for things which are important to you, if you don’t have the courage to get a clear picture on your priorities, and to decide what’s import for you and what’s not.

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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Or

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 DAISHO as well. Stay tuned.

Every decision you take has a price tag assoicated with it. That’s even more true for your time management decisions. It’s not necessarily a price tag in US-dollars or Euros, it is quite often a price tag in “time not spent with others”.

I’m not sure whether I mentioned already that I do not really like the term “time management” – as time is nothing you can really manage, you can not increase (or decrease) the amount you have available at any given day (although quit smoking might give you a few bonus days – but -hey- you’ll never know…).

You only can decide how to allocate your time: how much time you want to spent at work, how much time you dedicate to your spouse or kids. Quite often, it’s a tough call. But – as Dave Navarro points out in his article Wake Up, Damn It! You Won’t Get A Second Chance make sure you do not postpone all your “valuable” time with kids or family until later. Because later might never come…

So, how do you determine the price you are willing to pay in your professional career? I can not give any advice here. A rule of thumb I usually use is:

“компютри втора употребаIf I would die tommorrow, would I regret my time allocation during the last month?”

If your answer is a screaming YES, you might consider changing something.

Almost everybody is working today in a crowded market: no matter whether one works as a carpenter, as freelance writer or business consultant. Chances are, there are tons of other people offering the same service as you do.

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Like for products, where a brand helps to differentiate a product from similar offerings (as Gordon Graham puts it in his presentation), a brand can help to distinguish yourself from the crowd as well. Sounds strange? Well, in this context, branding is just another word for reputation.

But while reputation is something which is the result of your past (either positive or negative), branding is forward-looking.
Branding is about the reputation you want to have five years from now.

You better start thinking about it.