52 Creative Ideas for Finding New Clients: Bootstrapper

You should be able to tell where my mind has been recently.

As a bootstrapper, you know that clients equal business. Without them, you’d just be another one-man (or woman) shop with an office trying not to go into debt. Fighting for and retaining clients against your competition can be a struggle, just like recruiting new employees or searching for a job yourself is a frustrating battle.

Bootstrapper » 52 Creative Ideas for Finding New Clients

How To Increase Business While Beating The Summer Heat: Freelance Folder

Start a marketing blitz, or a newsletter with your church, check in with old clients, contact your local chamber — all sorts of great ideas here.

How To Increase Business While Beating The Summer Heat | Freelance Folder | A Blog For Freelancers And Web-Workers

12 Filtering Tips for Better Information in Half the Time: RSS, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon

 Tim Ferriss’ blog is about to help me once again — this time, cutting out some of the “surf time” for information I use every day using RSS, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.

In a digital world, the race goes not to the person with the most information, but the person with the best combination of low-volume and high-relevancy information. The person with the least inputs necessary to maximize output.

I admit I used to use RSS, but I stopped using it as soon as I started using tabbed browsing in Safari (and now Firefox). It’s so simple to just call up all my favorite sites by “opening all tabs” that I just stopped using RSS altogether. However, I’m missing the key timesaver of RSS feeds now –the ability to only read new posts, and skim content on multiple sites simultaneously.

On to the tips, from Ryan Holiday:

Using RSS Effectively:

1) Don’t Use Categories
Organizing all your feeds by genre is tempting but will burn you out.

2) Don’t check it on the weekends

3) Clean House
If an author isn’t delivering consistently, cut them out. If they ever improve enough to be worth reading again, you’ll probably hear about it.

4) If it Piles Up, Throw it Away
Just click “Mark All As Read” and move on. If you’re utilizing Delicious and StumbleUpon correctly, both later in this article, all the important stuff will come back to you.

Stumble Upon Tips

I haven’t used StumbleUpon yet — but from these tips, I think I will:

StumbleUpon is a valuable tool as a reader or a blogger. As a reader, it allows you to hierarchically rank the Internet–thumbs up or thumbs down, Gladiator style. Based on your voting history and interests, it lets you “stumble” on to pages that you’ll like…

1) Actually Joining the Community
… your votes won’t mean anything if you haven’t voted often and voted well for other pages you actually think are worthwhile.2) Guide, but Don’t Direct
…go through your archives and make sure anything that has been submitted is in the right place. By keeping up on this, you can optimize your site for the traffic it deserves.

3) Dial in Your Interest, Let Computers Do Your Work
Every time you vote, tag, and review a story, the Stumble Upon algorithm gets to know you that much better. Start by voting in all your favorites, sites who’s feed you subscribe too, and writers you read everyday…

4) Use Only the Essentials.
…Go to “Toolbar Options?Position Options” and place it anywhere you want …  thumbs up, thumps down button– [is] everything that you need.

Del.icio.us tips

Although (IMO) stupidly named, I actually used del.icio.us for awhile as my personal bookmark aggregator (before I started using Google Browser Sync to handle the same task). When I was using delicious, seems I missed the social part a bit:

Delicious, if you use it right, not only makes your bookmarking system [highlighting good pages for later reference] portable but it hires all your friends as personal news shoppers for you. If you were looking to outsource your morning read, but didn’t want to pay those Indian MBA’s, this is how you do it.

Making your Bookmarks Del.icio.us:

1) Use the “Links for You” section
Delicious’ killer app is its ability to facilitate sharing. When friends read a story they think you’d be interested in, they tag it to you and it shows up in your account to be read at your leisure.

2) Give to Receive
While you’re doing your regular read, keep your friends in mind. If you see an article that’s relevant to a friends business, tag it “To:UserName” and it shows up in their account.

3) Mark them “To_Read”
When you see something that you know you have to read, but don’t have time for now, set up a category that delineates that you’ll go back to it. Think of it as a DVR that saves the stuff you need to watch but didn’t want to be chained to the clock for.

4) Be Simple
Use the Classic Del.icio.us buttons and nothing else. In Firefox, it puts them right next to your navigation bar, one for tagging and the other to view your bookmarks. Use as few tags as possible…  And lastly, only befriend people who provide quality material. The last thing you need is the website equivalent of chain-emails showing up in your account.

Here’s to more efficient browsing!

DO-based resolutions: DO more/less, start/stop DOing

Thinking about what I want 2008 to be like, it occurred to me that there’s some real actions I can take, or shouldn’t take, and that would be an easy way to keep it all manageable. The goal is to make the list more task/next-action oriented, and therefore easier to stick with. Here then, are a few things I’ll be doing more or less of, start or stop doing.

START DOING

1. Work out every day — starting small, then building the habit
2. Implement GTD fully — next actions, 2-minute rule, projects lists
3. Implement a 4 Hour Workweek “muse”
4. Blog regularly here

STOP DOING

1. Procrastinating

DO MORE OF

1. Reading business books
2. Eat healthy foods
3. Play with the kids
4. Go on dates with the wife
5. Visit with friends

DO LESS OF

1. Snacking on junk food
2. Surfing the web without a specific purpose
3. Taking on projects with little/no ROI

Have any others I should add, or care to weigh in on what you would DO? Let me know!

Shave Ten Hours Off Your Work Week

From Where I Sit: How to Shave Ten Hours Off Your Work Week

It takes a ton of time to do the routine things if you don’t keep close tabs on what you’re doing. In light of Tim Ferriss’ brilliant “Four Hour Work Week,” here’s some suggestions from Michael Hyatt to bring big time savings into your day without jumping off the grid or hiring a company in india to do your taxes. My favorites:

1. Limit the time you spend online. In my experience, the Web is most people’s #1 time suck. Yes, I know it is a wonderful tool for research, blah, blah, blah. But I often catch myself and my family members mindlessly surfing from one page to another with no clear objective in mind. Before you know it, you can eat up several hours a day. The key is to put a fence around this activity and limit your time online. Set a timer for yourself if you have to.

I’ve taken to timing my web surfing into 15 minute slots, often as “reset points” between big projects. It’s way too easy to burn an hour or more if you don’t stay mindful of what you’re doing.

2. Touch email messages once and only once. Okay, let’s be honest. How many times do you read the same email message over and over again? Guess what? The information hasn’t changed. That’s right. You are procrastinating.

One of my biggest challenges — I still tend to keep things in my inbox as long as they’re “undone” — leads to way too much rework. GTD and do/delegate/defer, along with the 2-minute rule of handling (“just do it if you can complete the next action in 2 minutes or less) would save me hours a week. My big challenge for ‘08.

4. Stop attending low-impact meetings. If there’s one thing we can probably all agree on, it’s that we go to too many meetings. Either the meeting organizer isn’t prepared, the meeting objective isn’t defined, or you can’t really affect the outcome one way or the other.

I still have a lot of these on my calendar — and am actually getting rid of three of them as a result of this thought.

5. Schedule time to get your work done. This is crucial. As the saying goes, “nature abhors a vacuum.” If you don’t take control of your calendar, someone else will. You can’t spend all your time in meetings and still get your work done.

Instead, you need to make appointments with yourself. Yes, go ahead and actually put them on your calendar. Then, when someone asks for a meeting, you can legitimately say, “No, I’m sorry, that won’t work. I already have a commitment.” And you do—to yourself!

Biggie. I have some dedicated slots — mainly at the beginning of the week, mid-week and then at the end of the week to check in with myself and then hammer out next actions.

7. Engage in a weekly review and preview. Part of the reason our lives get out of control is because we don’t plan. Once a week, you have to come up for air. Or—to change the metaphor—you have to take the plane up to 30,000 feet, so you can see the big picture.

Keeping control and planning can seem like a lot more work, and if you’re already strapped for time and stuggling to keep up it can seem insurmountable to take on “one more thing” in your calendar. But if you don’t plan for completion and add some structure to how you handle your tasks, it’s only going to get worse.

Today

Look to this day
For Yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow is only a vision,
But today, well lived,
Makes every yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.

- Sanscrit proverb

How to do more by “farming it out”

I’ve become something of a crusader for Tim Ferriss’s “The 4-Hour Workweek,” and have recommended the book (and blog/website) to at least a dozen friends, relatives and acquaintances. So when I saw that another of my favorite info sites, Merlin Mann’s 43 folders, had featured one of the book’s key nuggets — outsourcing your life — I knew I needed to dig further. And guest-blogger Ryan Norbauer’s post gave me a ton of great tips that I want to pass along.

Enlightened outsourcing, Part 1: The psychology | 43 Folders
I recently encountered a weirdly tantalizing idea in Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek, which would ultimately disrupt my addiction to the extraneous. The book advocates farming out the more mundane tasks of your existence to outside firms and consultants, which Ferriss calls “outsourcing your life.” Probably because it would give me an excuse not to do something else more pressing, I decided to give this a go a few months ago. While I did learn quite a lot about outsourcing in the process, my experiments led me to a far grander epiphany about the way I approach life and work generally and helped me form a new set of habits that have utterly rocked my workaday world.

Part 1 of this 2-part series gets into the “why consider outsourcing” question. Best reasons from his post for me include the chance to “do business like the big guys”:

Outsourcing has become something of a fad in the past few months, thanks to Mr. Ferris. I think this is in part because many people hadn’t realized that they could do just what American and British corporations have been doing for years: hire workers in the developing world at rates that would make any domestic contractor laugh.

And the necessities of taking the plunge that force you to get it together in such a way as to be able to hand some things off:

Making good use of outsourced help requires being able truly to open yourself to the possibility of asking for help, getting over your delusions of importance, surmounting any weird hang-ups you might have about entitlement or your worthiness to get assistance, and having the creativity necessary to identify the ways in which you can open your workflow up to external aid.

Then, Ryan makes the leap all the way into GTD to explain the big nugget in part 1:

David Allen, when defining productivity “tricks” puts it this way: “the smart part of us sets up things for us to do that the not-so-smart part of us responds to almost automatically.” And philosopher John Perry suggests something very similar in his structured procrastination, which involves taking on ever more grandiose projects so that you’ll work on the projects you’re actually supposed to do as a way of avoiding those bigger projects. I’ve merely taken this one step further (or flipped it on its head, depending on how you look at it.) By outsourcing the means of avoidance, I’ve committed myself to working on the grandiose.

So there you go. Taking care of the small junk that you’d be tempted to do instead of your big projects actually frees you up (or removes all your excuses) so you can get down to the business of the big things you’re taking on.

Now, things get really interesting in Part 2.
Ryan sets up a detailed explanation of the kind of work that’s best to outsource and how to figure it out (watch your habits over a couple days, continually asking “can someone else do this?”), plus a GTD trick to help you on the way:

Ethan Schoonover recently wrote a fabulous piece here at 43folders about the value of formulating your GTD next-action lists as if they were written for someone else to do. If one of your projects isn’t moving forward, as the theory goes, you probably haven’t sufficiently clarified precisely what physical, visible actions need to be done in order to complete it. When approached with an eye toward outsourcing, it becomes clear how important and powerful this strategy can be. Not only have you figured out precisely how the thing needs to be done, you’ve already packaged it up to outsource to someone else with no (or little) additional work.

Some examples of work Ryan offers as good for the outsourcing model: Virtual assistants, design, fulfillment, A/V editing, scanning, transcription, “artificial” artificial intelligence (doing work that needs automation but that’s hard to automate, like picking photos), software development and domestic work. He gives fantastic examples for each, and gave me a ton of great ideas for ways to make the leap to outsourcing a reality.

He also offers a ton of places to look for outsourcing providers, anything from eLance to Amazon, India to Boston. Plus links to top choices and things to look (and look out) for when choosing and matching a provider with your needs.

Fantastic write-up — if you’ve been thinking you’re too busy and need some help, do yourself a favor and check out both parts.

400+ Resources To Make You Smarter & Faster

ONLINE PRODUCTIVITY GOD: 400+ Resources To Make You Smarter, Faster

Getting things done isn’t easy. In fact, it’s incredibly tough. In this article, we look at four ways to get through your work faster: running your life online, mastering RSS news feeds, aggregating your social networks and using keyboard shortcuts to save precious seconds.

Some real gems in here, especially in the shortcuts and “how to do things online” sections. Be sure to check out the links at the bottom of the page as well.

Be Your Own Executive Assistant in 3 Easy Steps

How to Be Your Own Executive Assistant in 3 Easy Steps | zen habits

Aside from outsourcing your life via tricks in Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Workweek, the easiest and most affordable way to get some extra help for many entrepreneurs is to learn a few of the “master techniques” of EA’s. Zen Habits (via guest columnist Chrissy from EA Toolbox)has 3 steps to get you on the right path to becoming organized and reaping the benefits of having dedicated help. As EAs often fill the role of “professional organizers, time managers or simply “professional keepers,” here are 3 steps to help manage some of your time, tasks and life:

1. Schedule a specific period of time every day for performing these [EA] tasks.
   These are the kinds of tasks that are easy to put off, however, once they pile up become a daunting and overwhelming project. Schedule time (generally about an hour) each day (preferably in the morning) to complete the basic office maintenance that your business requires. This may involve filing paperwork, scheduling meetings, sorting through mail, or reviewing and prioritizing task lists. Simply sit down and take care of these things one by one, before you get busy “doing business”.
2. Utilize tools of the trade.
   As your own assistant, it’s critical to develop routines and standard procedures that are rigorously and consistently followed. This will help streamline your daily activities. As an Executive Assistant, I use a variety of detailed checklist to make most activities “standardized”. For example, when gathering materials for a meeting for my boss, I run through a checklist to make sure he always has the same things with him. Of course, there is some minor tweaking for each meeting, but the basics always remain the same. Taking the time now to standardize your processes will save you time in long run.
3. Establish a proactive tracking system
   Executive Assistants are great at making sure things don’t fall through the cracks. There’s nothing worse than having a client call you to ask the status of a request that you’ve let go by the wayside. As your own E.A, you will need to create a system for following up on client requests and other time sensitive tasks. These days, the best practice is to use some kind of electronic calendar system (such as Outlook). During your dedicated daily E.A. time slot (see number 1), do the following:
1. Review your pending task list.
2. Rank each by priority level.
3. Make note of the next action for each and create a firm deadline.
4. Review progress of established next actions and make note of what has been completed.
5. Gather your next action tasks for the day and rank them by priority.

Most of these are pretty close to the tasks and general principles of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (link to Merlin Mann’s excellent round-up on all things GTD) — but the additional metaphor of setting yourself up as your own EA may help you reframe your activities in those time slots, or help you shift gears from “big picture” to “next actions” and organizing/prioritizing.

Hack Your Work to Work Less and Achieve More

Hack Your Work: 23 Ways to Get Ahead, Work Less and Achieve More – Dumb Little Man
none of these tips will turn your life around. But they can make a big difference, and when used together, your work life might just be enjoyable, productive, low-stress and high fun. My favorites:

Work from home. This is not a miracle solution, but it’s something many people would love to do. And it’s completely possible — more people are doing it every day. Is it something you want to do? Give it some thought, and find a solution that works for you. You could telecommute for your current job — plan your pitch to your boss today, making sure to focus on how it will benefit your company. Or you could find another job that allows you to work from home — even if the pay is a little less at first, you will have reduced costs from not having to commute or eat lunch at work or buy expensive work clothes, and you will also have increased satisfaction.

I recently switched to working from home, and aside from the real-time benefits (saving 90-plus minutes each day of commute time) and obvious savings for parking, bus passes, etc., working from home has allowed me to really focus in on

Come in early. If telecommuting isn’t your thing, try getting to work 30-60 minutes before the rest of the crowd. Or even more. This might require you to learn to wake up early, but the benefits are many: you skip the morning traffic, you can work without distractions until the rest of your coworkers come in, you can get a jump start on your day, you can be ahead of the crowd and get more done. Getting an early start is a great way to start your work day and to become more productive.

Before I worked from home, I did this for five years — first as part of a compressed work week, and later just as a way to beat traffic and get tons done before anyone else came in. It also helps that I work with a lot of East-coasters, and the 1-hour time difference meant I was still in before my boss usually, and always avaiable for morning meetings.

Work 4 days. If you can control your work schedule (or can convince your boss to change it), try working fewer days. Working four days a week not only gives you an additional day off, but it forces you to be more productive in the days you do work. Think about it: if you knew that you had to get your work done by the end of Thursday, you will focus more on what really needs to get done, and goof off less too. What would you do less? Email? Read stuff on the Internet? Chat? Play solitaire? Those unimportant things fade away when your time is limited.

I really miss doing this, but it’s fraught with danger in an office setting. People get really jealous of the “extra” 50 days of “vacation” you get, and I’ve found that those who are pulling “normal” hours (and then some) get very bitter, regardless of how much you’re getting done.

MITs. Each day, make a list with only three items: the three Most Important Tasks you want to accomplish today. Make at least one of them related to your One Goal. The others might be something you’ve been procrastinating on, or a big project that’s due today, or something similar. Ideally, these MITs are really important tasks — ones that will gain you longer-term recognition or income. Now focus on these, making sure to accomplish them. It’s best to do your MITs first thing in the morning, before you get interrupted by a bunch of other things. If you do only three things today (you could choose more or less than three MITs, but I’ve found that three works for me), make it your MITs.

This is where I spend my early-morning hours. Huge help to get a good running start and know that the “big stuff” is in progress or behind you by mid-day.

Batch process. There are usually a bunch of smaller tasks that we have to do that aren’t that important. Email, paperwork, phone calls, things like that. Instead of doing those little things throughout the day, giving you busywork to interrupt and distract you from your important tasks, batch them together and do them at one set time each day. Write these tasks down on a small list, and with an hour left in your work day (or whatever works for you), start processing them as quickly as possible, ticking them off your list.

I don’t do this yet, but I love the idea. Doing these at the end of the day would really make me crank them out so I could get done and out of the office!

Freelance as a 2nd job. This is something I do, and I earn an extra $2,000 a month doing it. It’s extra work, but it helps me to pay the bills (and pay off debt and save). Eventually, if you get good at the freelancing gig, you could make it your full-time work. To do this as a second job, set aside some time each day for freelance work. I’ve used early mornings (I get up an hour earlier and do one assignment), my lunch hour, work time (with permission), or evenings. If you could do 1-2 assignments a day, you will be making a decent extra income, and starting yourself down the road to working for yourself.

I need to keep reminding myself to get after these freelance shots — so much of my volunteer time is eating into BizzyWeb time that I need to re-evaluate how much I’m doing. Aside from paying the bills, having an iron or two of my own in the fire does wonders for my level of engagement and happiness with my career.

Take high-profile projects. If you just take the grunt work, your boss might or might not appreciate it, but it certainly won’t make you a star and you won’t go very far. Instead, volunteer for the big projects, the ones that will make a name for both you and your company. If there aren’t any available, make your own. Be sure you can do them well, but if you do, these projects will have a huge impact on your life. The tasks on these projects should be your MITs every day. If you take on high-impact projects, you can be more productive working a half day than if you worked 10 hours a day on tasks that won’t matter next week.

I’d wager that 75 percent of my forward momentum in my career has been a result of high-profile projects that I’ve taken charge of.

Automate your business. If you have your own business, or set one up on the side, find ways to make it automated as much as possible. Everything can be outsourced, from manufacturing to mailing to advertising to taking orders to customer support to credit card processing. Put your business front online, with online ordering, and give your outsourcers the ability to make decisions (with certain limits, following rules you set) without your approval, removing yourself from the bottleneck. If it’s completely automated, your business will require minimal work from you once you’ve got it set up. Now all you have to do is check now and then to make sure things are running smoothly, and make sure your money is being deposited in your bank account. Nice.

I really need to do this with BizzyWeb. Going to be the key to making a successful run at expanding.

Clear your desk. A messy desk might be the sign of a creative mind, but in my experience (I’ve tried both messy and now clean desks), having a desk that’s clean is much more calming, much more productive, and more organized. Most importantly, it reduces visual clutter and allows you to focus on the task at hand, increasing your productivity. Clearing your desk can take a chunk of time, but it’s worth it: take all your papers (everything!) and put them in your inbox, or in a pile if they don’t fit. Now process through them, one at a time, from top to bottom, filing, acting upon, delegating, trashing each document or noting tasks on a to-do list for later (and filing the to-be-acted-upon documents in an action folder). Remove other knick knacks and put any office supplies or tools in a drawer (and empty out your drawers while you’re at it). From here on out, everything goes in your inbox, and you process it to empty every day using the steps outlined here.

Obvious hints at GTD here, and I’m working on the processing of tasks every day now. Regardless, I’ve found that whenever I’m feeling overworked or overwhelmed, and getting lost in a project, cleaning my desk gets me back on task faster than anything else. In fact, you can probably guage my stress and productivity levels just by looking at my desk on any given day — the messier it is, the more stressed out I am, and my productivity is on its way down. When I’ve just cleaned up, it’s GO time.

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