1. Notelife – A flexible repository for: the miscellaneous information that we encounter throughout the day but don’t have time to process, great ideas as they strike (notes, audio, and pictures), and even getting work done on the move (draft emails, blog posts, etc.).
2. Omnifocus – After trying, literally, every task management app on the iPhone, I have decided on Omnifocus because of its location awareness. Being a small business owner I do work at home and work at the office and having a task management app that excludes irrelevant work is priceless.
3. Dropbox – Have all the files you need with you at all times and peace of mind knowing they are safely stowed away on your computer and backed up in the cloud. (Integrates with many of the following apps…)
4. Quickbooks Online – Not technically an iPhone app, they have a web-based iPhone site that gives you access to your books if you use their online service – which, as an aside, I find quite capable relative to the desktop version after recent improvements.
5. Bills ~ on your table – Never miss a payment again. Keep track of upcoming payments due to vendors and government agencies. Organize by category, view stats, beautiful interface, cloud sync, and more.
6. Carbonfin Outliner – Perfect for planning, syncs with the cloud, and is easily accessed for later transfer to your project management solution of choice.
7. Dragon dictation – Dictate and then email it. Great for when you are driving or just need to get something short out of your head fast.
8. Calengoo - The best app for accessing your Google Calendar (trust me on this one – head and shoulders above the competition).
9. Documents to Go Premium – Edit and create Office documents on the go. Geek bonus: Google Docs access.
10. ScannerPro – If you keep receipts in your wallet long enough, the ink rubs off and the IRS gets angry. Immediately scan them and, geek bonus, store them in your Dropbox.
11. PomodoroPro – I’ve already discussed the specific benefits of the Pomodoro method – this app keeps you focused, motivated, and productive by timing your Pomodoro’s and keeping a daily total.
12. GoodReader – They have perfected the PDF reading experience on the iPhone. Geek bonus: keep your PDF library in Dropbox and connect to it through this app.
13. 1Password – You’ve got enough to worry about it… tracking down your log in information shouldn’t be burning any time or brain cycles.
14. Lynda.com – Downtime? Learn some new software.
15. Lumosity Brain Trainer – Sharpen your mind.
16. Breathpacer – When you are relaxed and calm you can focus and do your best work.
17. Momento – Keep a business journal and use tags to group threads of important information you have documented such as hires, new clients, predictions, ideas, etc.
18. LinkedIn – What app list would be complete without social networking?

Looking forward to the iPad…

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2. This Week’s Top Three: Grow Your Business, Double Your Sales, and Improve Your Blog

I downloaded the free Pomodoro Technique ebook close to a year ago, skimmed it, and decided it wasn’t for me – I tend not to do well with structure when it comes to time management. About a month ago I noticed a few Pomodoro Technique iPhone apps  springing up, purchased one, and decided to give it a go.

My results using the Pomodoro Technique have been spectacular. I am in love. Here’s why:

• It forces you to pick a specific intention.
  One big problem with the free form, unstructured approach to time management that I naturally gravitate toward is that my time tends to get spent on the squeakiest wheel. Very little thought goes into where my time would be best spent. At most, I would stop several times a day and say to myself, “What should I be working on right now? What would I like to get done?” Part of the Pomodoro Technique is deciding what you will accomplish before starting the timer. This forces me to prioritize and pick where my time would be best spent rather than reacting. I am more focused (by knowing my intention, I know when I am off task).

• It forces you to reevaluate your intent every 30 minutes.
  I get into the zone pretty easily so time has a way of getting away from me. It’s not uncommon for me to “wake up” and find that I’ve spent fours hours on a project, that I shouldn’t have spent four hours on, and neglected to do something else. By stopping and reevaluating where the next Pomodoro should be spent, I am able to maintain awareness of when I should stop working on one project and begin something else.

• I get competitive with my past self.
  Competition brings out the best in me and I find myself constantly trying to beat my previous days record on Pomodoro’s (I use the Dayta iPhone app to track them). Never before has it been possible for me to measure my productivity so I’ve never been able to leverage my competitive nature to become more productive.

• I have a different perception of time.
  It’s hard to describe but time feels more measurable and discrete than it ever did before and I feel like I have more control over it. It’s as though, by giving units of time a name that is closely tied to productivity (a “Pomodoro”), I have shifted into thinking of my time as something that is spent more concretely, the way I would spend a dollar, rather than the more ambiguous concept of “spending time” I had before.

• I am much more aware of where my time is going.
  Another step I have taken to improve my time management is to define my roles as a small business owner (accountant, business development, manager, marketing, etc.). By tracking where my Pomodoro’s are spent, I am able to measure exactly how much time and attention I am giving to each role giving me a perspective on where my time is going and what roles are being neglected.

I am very pleased with the benefits I’ve gained from using the Pomodoro Technique and recommend it – if you, like me, have an aversion to structured time management, maybe take it as a sign you need something like this.

UPDATE: For Mac users only: I just discovered the super awesome, free Pomodoro Desktop.  It uses growl, allows you to label your Pomodoros, track your Pomodoros, and has more features than you’d think a Pomodoro app could have. HIGHLY recommended for anyone using the Pomodoro Method on a Mac.

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1. How to Stop Not Delegating

Have you ever worked hard all day but failed to accomplish anything significant? You worked like a dog, but you didn’t move your business forward an inch.

You probably said something to yourself like, “Today was not a good use of my time. I worked all day but didn’t get anything done that really matters. If I keep doing this, I’ll never make any progress.”

You had “the epiphany,” the one every small business owner has at some point: you have to do less to do more. You reach a point where what seems paradoxical, becomes the key to getting your business to the next level. You need to stop doing some things in your business so that you have more time to focus on important, business-building activities that only you can take care of.

Nevertheless, probably not much has changed since that important realization. You are probably still spending your time doing things you shouldn’t and neglecting to do the high-leverage work that actually moves your business forward as opposed to just maintaining and staying afloat.

You know what the problem is: you can only do so much. If growth and forward movement is going to happen, at least if it is going to happen soon, you can’t continue doing everything yourself. You need to start delegating.

For you to actually change you approach to managing your time and delegating, it will take a conscious, committed decision on your part that you’ve reached a new stage in your business. A stage where you’ve gotten busy enough that you trying to do everything yourself is actually holding your business back. A stage where delegation is key to future growth. You’ve got to internalize this to the point that you commit to start delegating and focus on freeing your time.

Perhaps the best way to internalize this is to imagine how much progress your business could make if you had 40%, 20%, or even just 10% more time to focus on business-building, strategy-oriented tasks.

Once you’ve committed to making the necessary changes, the following 3 step process may help you get there faster.

STEP 1: Find someone to delegate to

You need someone to delegate to. Of course, I hope that you will use our small business virtual assistance service. For small business owners like you, we offer the opportunity to have someone on hand to help you without the committment and cost of hiring someone to work onsite. The ability to purchase small quanities of time and use them flexibly over the course of the month makes it suprememly affordable and convenient. Finally, getting access to our entire small business team – all of their talents, skills, and resources – means that you are getting tremendous value for a flat monthly fee.

STEP 2: Clarify your “do”s and “do not”s

Make two lists: one list is what you should be doing – those high-leverage, profitable, business-building activities that make a big difference to your bottomline – the second list is those things you shouldn’t be doing – either because you procrastinate them, you aren’t good at them, or they simply aren’t the best use of your time. These two lists will give you clarity – you’ll know exactly what you should and shouldn’t be spending your time on.

Post those lists in clear view from your desk. You want those two lists memorized. You want to remember them constantly throughout the day. When you start on one of your “do not” tasks, a red flag should be raised in your mind and you should know to stop and delegate. When you look at your “do” list and realized you haven’t touched it, you should think back to what you spent your day doing and add those things to your “do not” list.

STEP 3: Make delegation simple, easy, and reflexive

Spend time considering how to make delegation likely to happen. You want to eliminate potential barriers to delegation such as resistance from yourself. You know yourself better than anyone. What communication tool are you most likely to turn to? This is one of the reasons we allow clients to send in tasks so many ways (IM chat, email, phone, dictated audio, web form, fax, etc.), we want delegating to us to fit into your natural working style. Whatever you decide on, you need to make it systematic, quick, and as simple as possible.

Once you’ve decided on how you are going to communicate the task, decide on what information needs to be passed along. We recommend you pass on four pieces of information: 1. What you want done, 2. When you need it back, 3. How long you think it should take, and 4. A description of what the final result should be ideally.

Taking these three steps makes you dramatically more likely to actually begin delegating tasks so you have more free time to spend on business building – or just relaxing.

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1. Make Your Business More Profitable by Focusing on Constraints

There are many ways to make plans to improve your business (improve = make more money). You can create goals, set priorities, flesh out your businesses strategy, etc.

While all of these approaches are useful, and will certainly help you identify more to-dos than you can handle, I’ve found that focusing on removing constraints creates a kind of complete clarity on “how to get from point A to point B” I can’t get any other way.

The Theory of Constraints and Your Business

For those unfamiliar, the theory of constraints was developed by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and made popular by his book “The Goal” in 1984. A constraint is “any element or factor that prevents a system from achieving a higher level of performance with respect to its goal.”

Obviously, the goal of your business is to make money. Viewing your business as a system of processes, what is holding you back? What internal or external resource, person, or process is preventing you from making more money?

In every business, there is something. It may be funding, qualified employees, effective advertising, unreliable software, etc. Focusing on constraints is about identifying the bottlenecks in your business that are slowing the output that brings money back into the business, then trying to find a way to fix the constraint with existing resources, and, if that fails, finding a way to remove the constraint altogether. Once the constraint is removed, the flow of money increases.

How Does it Work?

For instance, in your business the constraint may be the amount of traffic your company website receives. This is the constraint because it is what is keeping your carefully honed sales copy from converting more people into customers. Delivering on your promises isn’t the issue because you’ve developed a scalable business. It’s just a matter of driving more people to the website.

STEP 1: Once you’ve identified the constraint, figure out exactly how to get the most out of it in its current state. Without throwing additional resources at the constraint, is there anything you can do to increase output?

Using our example, you could try to further increase conversions with existing traffic. As mentioned, your copy is converting well and any improvement there will yield diminishing returns so it’s probably not the best use of our time so we proceed to step 2…

STEP 2: If you can’t do anything to eliminate it, or raise it to the point where it is no longer an issue, figure out what other resources in your business could be applied to the constraint. You may have to take resources off of another area of your business to do this but it is necessary. Increasing output here will help every process that occurs further down the line.

In most businesses time is one of the most limited commodities. Should you take people off other projects to focus on bringing in more traffic to the website? If not, or if this doesn’t solve the problem, move to step 3…

STEP 3: If you don’t have the resources to eliminate the constraint, you may have to add something into your business that takes care of it. This probably means spending money. What you need to decide is: Will lifting this constraint bring in more money than what I am spending to lift it? Most of the time, if you’ve truly hit upon the right constraint in your business, the answer is an easy, “yes.”

You may need to hire an internet marketing firm or a consultant that specializes in creating targeted traffic. Yes, it will cost money, but if the problem can’t be helped internally, this is the only answer.

STEP 4: Find the next constraint in your business and repeat steps 1-3 continually.

After there is plenty of traffic coming to your website, you may find that the next constraint is how many of your customers are making repeat purchases so you’ll start with Step 1 again… and so on…

As you can see, running through this process even just once or twice a month would quickly lead to a much more profitable business.

Now, constraints can be many things so don’t get stuck thinking of it any particular way:

• Paradigm constraints are beliefs that are holding you and your business back.
• Policy constraints are those rules that keep you from fully tapping available resources.
• Physical constraints are basically those things that determine your capacity to produce (employees, machinery, software, etc.).
• Money constraints are perhaps the most common (funding, cash flow, credit, etc.)

In fact, there are probably many other types of constraints – it’s anything that limits you from taking your business to higher levels. Heck, it might be how much stress you are feeling or how much sleep you get at night. The great thing about this process is that it doesn’t matter, you can address anything with it.

So why aren’t you making more money?

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