Below is live coverage of the Productivity Tips For The Busy Search Marketer from SMX West 2009 conference.
This coverage is provided by both Barry Schwartz, the editor of the Search Engine Roundtable and Keri Morgret of Morgret Designs.
We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed. In addition, you can interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog.
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| Productivity Tips For The Busy Search Marketer | (02/12/2009)
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| 2:47 | Barry Schwartz: Matt McGee mods up this panel
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| 2:47 | Barry Schwartz: Thomas Schmitz is up first from Portent Interactive
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| 2:48 | Barry Schwartz: Tools
- Prepacked
- Written by smart people
- Save time
- Avoid aggravation
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| 2:49 | Barry Schwartz: Tools
- Limited to program abilities and outputds
- Stuck with programs faults
- Can be expensive
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| 2:50 | Barry Schwartz: Scripts
- Save time
- Save money
- Avoid aggravation
- Custom & targeted
- Use anything you cfind and can gather on the net
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| 2:50 | Barry Schwartz: Scripts
- Limited to accessible data
- Limited by scripting ability
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| 2:51 | Barry Schwartz: Start with PHP or MySQL if your getting startted
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| 2:53 | Keri Morgret: He's talking about brute force tools.
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| 2:53 | Keri Morgret: Go into Word, replace characters with other characters so you can then dump it into Excel and run things without Excel choking on those first characters.
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| 2:53 | [Comment From Pedro Sttau]
Looking foward to this. Hello Barry and Keri. :) |
| 2:54 | Keri Morgret: Access is worth the learning curve, since it's relational.
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| 2:54 | Barry Schwartz: KEyword research example will bring this all together...
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| 2:55 | Keri Morgret: He uses iMacros, a firefox addon that automates repetitive tasks.
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| 2:55 | Barry Schwartz: He shows a script to grab data, parses it and then adds a macro code to automate repetitive tasks
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| 2:56 | Keri Morgret: He's showing a lot of great things, but I'm not able to write it down fast enough. This is why you should come to the conference. ;)
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| 2:57 | Keri Morgret: You do need to do hand filtering, you can't automate everything.
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| 2:58 | Barry Schwartz: David Wallace is next up, he is the picture above
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| 2:58 | Barry Schwartz: David will share more of his routines to be productive
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| 2:59 | [Comment From Pedro Sttau]
I used to use Macros on My Excel sheets to handle pretty much everything that needed calculations done, but today most of the "repetitive tasks" are repetitive but not so much "automizable", dont know if you have the same experience. |
| 2:59 | Keri Morgret: Begins day with email, bloglines, and twitter.
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| 2:59 | [Comment From Prashant]
can you give an example of what you would use these macros for? i'm a little confused |
| 3:00 | Barry Schwartz: @prashant to help automate the clean up for the data grabbing tool
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| 3:00 | Keri Morgret: - Take care of new emails that don't require a lot of time -- get it out of the way.
- Categorize blog feeds, can sift through those based on current priorities
- Open new posts in separate tab that I want to write a post about.
- Click on TwitterFox icon and look for DMs or @ replies only.
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| 3:01 | Keri Morgret: Writing New Posts:
Creative or resourcevful posts can be scheduled anytime.
Posts covering industry news need immediate attention
Read, write, and publish.
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| 3:01 | Keri Morgret: Everything else:
can be client projects, RFPs, finances, etc.
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| 3:02 | [Comment From Prashant]
sorry, which data grabbing tool? i feel like i'm missing a piece of information |
| 3:02 | Barry Schwartz: @Parshant, he writes his own with scripts
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| 3:02 | Keri Morgret: Managing email overload:
Uses outlook express.
Has extensive category structure
Only keep "pending" emails. If it's done business, saves it to hard drive.
Non-important, non-pending emails are discarded.
Outlook Express Backup Genie
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| 3:05 | Barry Schwartz: He uses bloglines !!! ugh! why why why
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| 3:05 | [Comment From Pedro Sttau]
OutlookExpress? Am a bit surprised there. Thunderbird is so superior at organizing email , prioritizing it and making it "actionable" |
| 3:05 | Keri Morgret: He shows the multiple social bookmarking sites he uses.
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| 3:05 | Barry Schwartz: His blog reader folders looks very similar to mine also :)
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| 3:06 | Keri Morgret: He tries to be selective, avoids time wasters.
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| 3:07 | Barry Schwartz: He uses TwiterFox, never uses the Twitter web page
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| 3:08 | [Comment From Prashant]
i heart twitterfox. makes the whole "process" of twitter so much quicker |
| 3:08 | Keri Morgret: Tries to make sure all scheduled work is done by the 20th of the month to make sure you have time for your stuff in addition to client stuff.
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| 3:09 | Barry Schwartz: Next up is Jennifer Slegg, JenSense
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| 3:10 | Keri Morgret: How to make non-desk time productive. COmmuting time, waiting time, kids' activities.
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| 3:10 | Barry Schwartz: OMG! She uses notebooks and pens and paper!
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| 3:11 | Barry Schwartz: I am the anti-paper, so this is weird
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| 3:11 | [Comment From Pedro Sttau]
Getting client related tasks done 10 days before the month is over? Dear me I am definitely doing something wrong with my time here. |
| 3:12 | Keri Morgret: This is a way to keep you on task -- if you just write something down on paper, you're not going to get on and check twitter and email and get your spouse to give you a nasty look when you want to write a quick reminder note to yourself.
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| 3:12 | Barry Schwartz: She makes an excellent point, my wife won't yell at me if I open a small notebook, but when I open my laptop or my iPhone -- oh boy
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| 3:12 | Keri Morgret: Personal voice recorder. New ones are great. You can dictate blog post ideas, reminders for yourself, etc. It's digital, so you can copy it to your computer.
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| 3:13 | Keri Morgret: Dragon Naturally Speaking. Converts words to text, imports into word, dreamweaver, wordpress.
Can either dictate directly into computer or use a digital voice recorder to convert your voice file into text that you can import.
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| 3:14 | Keri Morgret: Buy the best rated recorder you can afford. Dragon rates many from expensive to top of the line. If you plan to dictate while driving, buy one of the better recorder / microphone options.
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| 3:14 | Keri Morgret: Dragon's website is the one that rates the recorders.
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| 3:14 | Keri Morgret: Dragon is trainable, so it can understand SEO, PPC, AdSense, etc.
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| 3:15 | Keri Morgret: Netbooks and MiniLaptops. It's a fast bootup, easy to carry anywhere, can work on it during downtime. Can upload to webserver or thumdrive .Can't run World of Warcraft or anything, but most business things you need. You've got great battery life with it.
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| 3:15 | Keri Morgret: BBs, iPhones, etc. She loves it, wonders how she got along without it (so do I! km).
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| 3:16 | Keri Morgret: At Jott.com you can leave a phone message and it is sent in an email to yourself. It starts at $3.95 a month.
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| 3:16 | Keri Morgret: She's never had a problem with the transcription. They can also go into your voicemail and transcribe your voicemail to text.
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| 3:17 | Barry Schwartz: Stephan Spencer is the last speaker, here is a picture
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| 3:20 | Keri Morgret: GTD-getting things done. Best thing that's ever happened.
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| 3:21 | Keri Morgret: Multiple action lists running concurrently in your brain? Ideas buried w/in files, folders, emails, Post-Its, to-do lists? Bad, bad, bad!
GTD stands for Getting Things Done, the best-selling book by David Allen
Get stuff out of your head & into a trusted system that also tracks the “open loops” you’re waiting on
Reach a state of flow, i.e. “Mind like water”
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| 3:21 | Keri Morgret: - Processing: For this project/idea, what is the “Next Action”? What is its context?
- Contexts: @home, @office, @errand, @computer, @email, @blog, @tweet, @read/review, @agenda, ...
- Review your Next Actions by context. Do in batches.
- In addition to Next Actions, you can also have Projects, Someday/Maybes, Waiting For, Deferred, Agendas
Project = anything requiring more than one action
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| 3:22 | Keri Morgret: You get things into an in-tray of sorts, and you process it as you put it in. YOu process it and decide the context.
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| 3:22 | [Comment From Pedro Sttau]
One of the best productivity sessions I have ever seen was done by Prof. Randy Pausch on Time Management. Changed my life. :) Anyone mention it so far? |
| 3:22 | Barry Schwartz: @Pedro, not yet
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| 3:23 | Keri Morgret: For contexts, this means you can do a task list that's just for your phone -- here's stuff I can do on my phone. You only have 15 things on this list, instead of trying to sort through 300 to dos.
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| 3:24 | Barry Schwartz: Selling your home is an "actional item" it is not something you put on your "to do list"
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| 3:25 | Keri Morgret: Project can be something like "buy a house", to do is "contact neighbor about the agent she used"
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| 3:25 | Keri Morgret: - Horizons of focus: runway (next actions), 10000 ft view (projects, this yr), 20000 ft view (areas of focus), 30000 ft (1-2 yrs), 40000 ft (3-5 yrs), 50000 ft view (life goals)
- Weekly review: a weekly appt with yourself. The key to successful GTD, though most neglected. 1-2 hrs long.
-- "Process" your intray
-- Revisit Someday/Maybes, Projects, Waiting For, Next Actions
- Two minute rule: if the item can be completed in |
| 3:25 | [Comment From Prashant]
@pedro where did you see/attend that productivity lecture? |
| 3:26 | Are you productive?
Yes
( 20% )No
( 80% )
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| 3:26 | Keri Morgret: Horizons of focus is the big picture.
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| 3:27 | Keri Morgret: Calendar: Only what must be done on a certain date.
Tickler file: 43 folders, labeled 1-31 and January-December. Use it to park physical items like bills not yet due. Look at the current day’s file. On the new month, look at that month’s file and if necessary move those into the appropriate 1-31 folders.
With GTD, easy to fall off the wagon. Also easy to fall back on.
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| 3:27 | [Comment From Pedro Sttau]
So from what I understant its all about breaking things down into small little actions. I tried that aproach, but it seemed that my "actionable to do list" was so large and time consuming that it simply didn't work. I had to break those little tasks into actionable groups and then sort those groups by relevance. Sounds freaky, but it worked for me. Keri: "Horizons of focus is the big picture". Wont forget that one, nice. :) |
| 3:27 | [Comment From Prashant]
you have to admit, that "are you productive" question was a bit funny...i am assuming everyone who is here reading this live blog isn't really being too productive :) |
| 3:28 | Keri Morgret: Mac: Things, Journler, OmniFocus, iGTD
PC: GTD Outlook Add-in, ClearContext for Outlook, MyLifeOrganized, TimeTo, Easy Task Manager, ThinkingRock
Web-based: Tracks, GTD V2, Backpack, MonkeyGTD, ActiveCollab
Paper: “Hipster PDA”
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| 3:28 | [Comment From Pedro Sttau]
Prashant: Why not? Learning to be more productive is itself productive. |
| 3:29 | Keri Morgret: He's showing us screenshots of the software he uses.
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| 3:30 | [Comment From Prashant]
@pedro because personally speaking, i could be working on a client's project but instead i am viewing this live blog which i could read later too when i know i have time ;) |
| 3:30 | [Comment From Pedro Sttau]
Keri, can you post some of the software in the screenshots? |
| 3:30 | Barry Schwartz: @Pedro you can download the PPT
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| 3:31 | Keri Morgret: Read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss fourhourworkweek.com
Your secret to success: Delegate everything! Let go!
Tim even outsourced his online dating – successfully!
Hire 1 or more “VAs” at Calculate your hourly rate. Annual income is a very deceptive number that people use to justify unsustainable workloads.
Repetitive task? Delegate it.
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| 3:32 | Keri Morgret: Be sure to download his presention. There are lots of great things there, very well written.
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| 3:33 | Barry Schwartz: That ends the speaker presentations, time for Q&A. |
| 3:33 | Barry Schwartz: ~10 mins for Q&A
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| 3:34 | Barry Schwartz: Someone asked David, how would Stephen's idea fit in his schedule?
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| 3:35 | Barry Schwartz: David said he has to read the book first...
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| 3:36 | Barry Schwartz: Matt talks about the difference between working at home vs in an office...
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| 3:36 | [Comment From Pedro Sttau]
Any tips on managing constant client phone calls that you simply cant "filter"? |
| 3:37 | Barry Schwartz: Stephen said he is more productive in an office, at least when he worked in NZ
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| 3:38 | Barry Schwartz: Now he has his own office to get stuff done... So agree, you need to close the door.
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| 3:38 | Barry Schwartz: Thomas said, set "busy" on your IM
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| 3:39 | Barry Schwartz: Get yourself headphones, so you wont be distrubed
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| 3:39 | Barry Schwartz: The bigger the better
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| 3:39 | Keri Morgret: Get yourself BIG headphones so they don't come up to you.
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| 3:40 | [Comment From Prashant]
i like using a separate computer all together for any chat/email. that way i can turn off the monitor/close the lid of the laptop and only check when i can instead of constantly seeing a flash/hearing new email sounds and being impelled to check out what's going on. |
| 3:40 | Barry Schwartz: Check email only a few times per day (I cannot do that)
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| 3:41 | [Comment From ian]
You can, of course, turn OFF your IM. |
| 3:41 | Keri Morgret: Thomas: use the simplest form of whatever you're working on. Use a shared Google Docs document instead of passing around a Word document in email.
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| 3:42 | [Comment From Prashant]
@ian well if you are using IM to communicate with clients/colleagues on a project then it becomes a little difficult to simply turn it off because then (at least for me) i get phone calls which become even more distracting overall. |
| 3:44 | Barry Schwartz: That wraps up the SMX West Live Blogging coverage. Thank you so much
for reading and particapting. Hoping on a plane to NY tonight.
Check www.seroundtable.com daily for news and subscribe to our feeds. :)
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| 3:45 | Barry Schwartz: Thank you Keri for everything!
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