EPR Creations LLC

Collect your Ideas

A great way to jot down random ideas is to use the Evernote note taking program. You can create different folders within your Evernote account and even share those notes with other people. Name one of those folders “Ideas” and begin adding quick notes to that folder. That way, you can always go back and look at the ideas. They won’t be on a napkin that gets thrown away. And with Evernote, you can add notes from your phone, tablet, or computer, making it easy to jot notes at any time. Even if you aren’t connected to the Internet when you write the note, Evernote will save it and add it when you are connected again.

This is also a great way to collaborate with other on a project where ideas are welcome and important to the project,

New Time Management Tools

I’ve been told that I am very productive in my work. Over the years, I’ve learned different techniques that have helped in accomplishing tasks faster. I’ve also wasted a lot of time. So I approach this topic as one still learning daily on who to better utilize my time to get major projects as well as simple tasks completed.

Luckily, there are so many new tools now that make time management even easier. I’d like to highlight a few of these tools below:

Evernote
Evernote is a free note-taking tool. I use it for everything from shopping lists, clipping online news articles, and collecting notes about particular projects. I will create a folder for a project and then place all notes and relevant information in that folder. With Evernote, I can also share these folders with other collaborators on the project.

For time management purposes, I use Evernote to create a weekly to do list. My boss in my first job strongly encouraged the use of daily to do lists, so I have carried this over from my first job experience. Evernote makes this easy. You can create check box lists. There is something truly divine about putting a check in that box once the task is complete.

With Evernote, I create a weekly table for days Monday – Saturday. I list any meetings or phone calls set up for the day. Then I create a check-box list of tasks to fulfill each day. Under the 6-day table, I write in goals for the week and other big-picture items. This helps me focus the to do tasks around those goals to make sure the given projects are completed by the end of that week. Oftentimes, I will need to move certain tasks from one day to another. That is easy with Evernote as well.

And with Evernote, you can keep up with and edit your to do lists on any other computer, phone or tablet. If you have an idea of something that needs to be completed while you are outside of the office, just add it using your phone.

Email
If you use more than one email account, use Gmail to combine these emails into one location. Gmail allows you to gather all of your emails together into one Inbox and then send from all of those different addresses. This will save a lot of time so that you are not looking at multiple email locations during the day.

Also, there are two main formats in which you can receive your email. One is POP and the other is IMAP. You want to be using IMAP. IMAP allows you to make a change on one device and have it affect all of your other devices. Therefore, if you are accessing your email on your phone and delete a message, it will be deleted when you look at your email again on your computer or tablet. It’s a waste of time to use POP and have to delete messages separately on all of your devices.

On a project time management basis, it is best to set specific times to check your email. If you are working on a big project and are interrupted every few minutes with a new email notification, you won’t make it very far on that project. It’s better to set times during the day where those are the designated email times. I know that is harder for some than for others as some emails do require an immediate response. However, if you can check email in the morning, around lunch, and then towards the end of the work day, you will have more uninterrupted time to work on your projects.

Another time saver for email is setting up filters for different messages. For instance, if you receive emails that you need to keep on file, but don’t need to read, filter those to go directly to the email folder where they should be stored. This saves you time having to move the email to that folder every time it comes into your inbox.

Dropbox
Dropbox is another free tool (at least to 2GB of space) where you can begin saving your files in the cloud. The benefit is that your files are saved in one location that is not tied to any of your work stations. Therefore, if you have an office and also have a different computer at home, and you do work at both of these locations, Dropbox will save you a lot of time emailing files back and forth or saving them to an external drive.

Connect both computers to your Dropbox account and whenever you save an updated version on one computer, you will be able to access it on your other device.