Another week is almost over. I hope you can look back and say to yourself, “That was a good, a productive week, and I even had enough time for my family and friends.” So far we have learned that a stronger focus does help you being more productive, which in turn helps you being able to spend more time with fun things.

Now a question,

“Do you already have an outline for a plan of actions for the upcoming week?”

Today's lecture deals with that, “Priorities and Planning”.

Priorities for your tasks should be derived from the impact areas that I have talked about in my time management and productivity article last week.

A short reminder: You should assign a time slot of one (1) hour each week to assess the status of each of your impact areas and define actions for further improvement during the following week. In a large corporation you will go into meetings with your team, in a small home office situation you analyze your stats by yourself.

The advantage about focusing on impact areas is that you are less likely to miss something.

Our post “Use Safe Identifiers In Your Web Templates” has been featured in the Blog Carnival

• “Web Development 2.0 Carnival September 24, 2007 (↑)”

Check it out, if you wish to learn more about tips and tricks in Web development. This issue contains titles like,

• “Make Web Site Development Easy”
  
  
• “Why Are CSS Frameworks Important to AJAX Development”
  
  
• “Forget Webcams and YouTube. How I Created My Own Music Video For Free Online in 1 Day”
  
  
• “Get Brendon Sinclair to Answer Your Question Interview Contest !”

Last week I introduced the “Touch It - Do It - concept for more productivity.” It basically requires that you stay focused and complete a task, once you have started working on it. No more task switching! It always takes ( = wastes ) some time to get tuned in for the current task in front of you. Don't switch it. Start and complete it. Then the next one, and the next one, etc.

But how to deal with all the interruptions during the day?

The phone rings, a co-worker comes into my office, …
If it happens that you work in your home office, your kids or your wife may come in, … How are you dealing with it or how should you deal with this?

When you are reading articles from successful business people, artists, managers you quickly see that they value their time highly and don't allow interruptions. They have certain time slots during the day, when they don't pick up the phone and have the door to their office closed.

Some may have 1 hour, some even 4 or 5 hours depending on the kind of work they do. They only deal with the most important tasks of their business. This is not limited to business it could also be the daily training for an athlete, or practicing for a musician.

The secrets of not getting interrupted are:

Steve Pavlina (*) made an interesting point on his blog today: “Reaction vs. Response (↑)”.

Steve writes about some teachings in martial arts, where the difference between reacting and responding is a subject of training. To put it short in my own words:

• Reaction is dictated and controlled by the other party, whereas
• Response is under your control.

This is an analogy for business life as well. Now, my opening question becomes a different, a deeper meaning.

Some find it difficult to understand the credit system behind

BlogRush (↑). Let me try to explain it, now. I actually needed a piece of paper to scribble on, before I “got” it in such a way, that I am able to explain it to you.

When having the widget installed on your pages, you serve headlines from other blogs to your readers. Five (5) different headlines with every page impression. Your readers might find some titles compelling enough to click through to some featured blog occasionally. The other blog gets another reader this way, at least for the moment. Whether the reader can be retained is a totally different story and will mostly depend on the quality of the blog and whether the headline was shown in the right context.

John Reese (↑) — the mastermind and founder of BlogRush — is someone who preaches,

“You have to leverage … You have to share …”

His spirit is deeply …

John Reese, a master mind of the Internet marketing community, wrote on his blog,

“… Tonight We Make History! …”.

• What is all about?
• Who is John Reese?
• Will he hold his promise?

His new platform BlogRush - Blog Syndication Network has been launched this morning.

BlogRush is a free service that will help any blogger to generate more targeted traffic and readers for their blog. As you can see (left sidebar, top), I already have installed the JavaScript Widget on our blog.

The first association that I had, when reading about how it actually works was: “That reminds me on Google^™ AdWords/AdSense, but with major differences”:

How many times do you think did the following happen to you?

You think about something like getting more traffic to your Web site, or finally writing an article. Then you start doing it, but next you bail out at the first opportunity. You stop and do something else. You dig even deeper into the next task just to create an excuse and gain confidence that you are doing the right thing.

Most likely this next task is more enjoyable and less important at the same time. You get it done, but you don't achieve as much, when you repeatedly put off more important tasks.

The more often you put off the “first” task, the more difficult it will become next time and instead of working on it, you probably start to look for another “less important” task right away.


Does this sound familiar to you?

Today people all over the World remember the tragedy of Tuesday, September 11^th, 2001. Do you remember that day? I certainly do.

I was living in Vienna/Austria at this time. All of this happend in the afternoon and evening.

At first, a colleague in my office told me that the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York is burning. He showed me a live video stream on CNN.

The twin-towers stood there with smoke coming out, but the video feed was of poor quality that one could not see any details. Honestly, I did not pay much attention. I thought, I had seen that before.

When the WTC had been attacked by terrorists the first time in February 1993, I had been living in New York. Back then, I had gone up to the roof of my office building in Chelsea and had been able to see the “smoking” WTC from quite close. Not on TV, I had seen it live with my own eyes.

I found this comic today and thought this fits perfectly to my recent post “Small Talk About Business - Comments Closed”.

You might attribute low self-esteem to people who close comments on their blogs. But most likely you will be wrong. Too Low quality comments and comment spammers are said to be the real culprits. However, it's a funny little comic. I hope you like it , too.

I came up with a simple way of addressing the comment-spam problem in a less offensive way.