New Year, New Productivity Tools

December 31st, 2008

I’ll be doing my business planning in a few days and I’m excited to use my new productivity tools. Here they are, in order of techie-ness:

1. Legal yellow pad

I learned about the virtues of a legal yellow pad from Frank Kern and Trey Smith of Infomillionaire. They use it for goal setting and planning.

I like the size of a legal yellow pad, but prefer the blankness of bond paper. However, bond paper is much more expensive, so I’ll settle for the yellow pad.

This is perfect for brainstorming, brain dumping, making diagrams and mind maps, and making master lists of to-dos.

2. Spiral notebook

This is my learning journal, which I learned about from Troy White’s post, “56 of the best tips for growing a small business on budget”. This is where I write down all the new stuff I am learning from my various memberships, courses, readings, interaction with people, etc. Most importantly, I make a list of action points – things I need to implement to improve my businesses.

This list is one of the bases for my daily to-do list, which I write on my:

3. Moleskine Weekly Planner + Notebook

I looked in a number of places before finally deciding that the Moleskine weekly planner would be my planner for 2009. I wanted a fairly large space to write in each day, plus an entire page for my weekly most important tasks, goals, etc. This fit the bill. Plus, the fact that I’m using the same notebook used by Picasso and other artists is very motivating (Note: I am a frustrated artist).

4. Ipod Touch

Believe it or not, I’m using the Ipod Touch to increase my learning. When the toddler is refusing to stay asleep without me beside him, I play some sleep music and read Ebooks and my RSS feeds, or interact with business connections via Twitter. I have found the following free Apps to be indispensable for this:

Twitterific – for reading and sending Twitter messages
Files Lite – for accessing files from your hard drive
Free RSS – for subcribing to and reading RSS feeds

And while I’m making dinner, I plug the Ipod into our boombox and listen to Podcasts. This way, the Ipod touch has accelerated my education, leaving me more time to actually implement my learnings.

When resources permit, I will also invest in a new set of colored markers. I am a visual learner and having colorful diagrams is very helpful for me. Unfortunately, my daughters have managed to lose our marker collection, which is quite expensive to replace. But I’m sure the time will come when I can have my colorful diagrams again.

So there you have it, my new productivity tools for a more productive new year. What productivity tools could you never live without?

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