A friend told me about an online mind mapping tool that helped him to organize the 1,000 ideas in his head. So let me pass on this little productivity tip to you.

Without further ado, here is the tool he recommended to me.

MindMeister.com (↑)

Mind mapping allows you to lay out your ideas and thoughts kind of visually. Related items are close together. Therefore, you don't need much space and keep the overview easily. I am not going into the details of mind mapping (sorry), but some advantages of using an online tool like the one my friend recommends.

Advantages

• It's easy to rearrange items. You don't run out of space, like you would probably on a sheet of paper.
  
  
• Major advantage: You can share your maps with a team easily.
  
  
  
• Your data is accessible from anywhere.
  (Check terms of service, etc. and make your own decision about the risks of outsourcing your sensitive data that way.)
  
  
• MindMeister.com (↑) offers a free basic version, besides that the rates are very reasonable.

I have signed up for a free account today. I just started to check it out myself. I am not affiliated with MindMeister.

Have a nice weekend.

Yours
John W. Furst

Update: Vic Gee left a comment pointing to his extensive, great resource about various mind mapping tools. You definitely should check it out.

• Web Based Mind Mappers (↑)
  
  
• The master list of mind mapping & information management software (↑)

Thanks Vic

A couple of days ago I have written, “Your Business Needs To Grow Continuously”. Today I want to combine that important fact with a very easy to do management or personal development practice, that helps you to achieve your goal, tune out distraction as you learn to focus on what's really important.

You will see it's not about time management or life management as some call it. You still have to come up with a way to use your time efficiently. Of course you can refer back to my original series of articles about Productivity and Time Management, “Touch It - Do It - Get More Done”. I wrote a total of 4 articles on that subject and they are available combined into a single PDF report in the download area for my newsletter subscribers. Actually the PDF contains some extra content that is not released on my Blog.

Might be the right time to sign up to my newsletter, right now. (To my existing subscribers: I'll send you the download info as soon as I have finished this post.) Sorry for the little detour.


Let's get back to productivity issues. The little, but nonetheless important advice I'll give you fits almost everybody.

It seems that people respect their boss and they do whatever they demand — more or less — in exchange for their salary. That's how this boss-employee relationship works. What can you learn from this for your own business?

Even if you have changed the sides in the meantime and become your own boss, either as owner of your company or manager of a department, you will remember the days, when you worked late or on weekends to meet the deadlines given to you by your superiors. All of a sudden everything became less important: your plans for Friday night, the date with your new acquaintance, the movie premier, etc.

You absolutely needed to finish your assignment, because your boss would not accept any excuse and even could fire you. Even, if your assignment appears to be ridiculous to you.
Your boss is your boss.


I will cut a long story short (… and save your time).

Certainly I was taking some time to write this post after I have asked my readers to submit a question for me to answer. 4 questions qualified. In the meantime I have sent an even more detailed answer to those folks, who dared to ask a question.

Now it's time to share my answers in public. I don't want to carry that as liability into the next year. But since I am lazy at the end of the year, while my assistant enjoys a nice skiing vacation in Switzerland, I only will answer 2 of those questions today. I will deal with the other 2 topics in future posts in January.


1. You have hosted some blog carnivals on your blog. Do you recommend that?

Yes, and no.

It appears to me that hosting a carnival gets you more traffic, while using the same amount of time for writing and submitting your articles to other carnivals will get you more back links, which leads to more residual traffic in long term. What do you prefer?

I found the response from the folks whose articles get used in a carnival is less than it could be. Not many digg, sphinn, stumble, or bookmark your post with the carnival edition. That seems to be the reality.

Unless you see hosting or organizing a carnival as part of your content strategy, and you are willing to put some effort to work, you probably should just stick with submitting.

However, if everybody only submits, there won't be good carnivals left soon. Then it might pay off more to organize or host a carnival, again. I noticed that many recent carnivals are basically just link lists. If you don't have any problems with that, Blogcarnival.com (↑) makes it really easy to publish such a “list”. You only have to press the InstaCarnival button and copy the HTML code as is to your Blog. Finished.

It's up to you, how far you want to go. I will host other editions on my Blog throughout 2008, but I will have an assistant doing the actual work.


2. In “Sad Story About The Million Dollar Secret” you wrote “You cannot leverage consulting, unless …”. What's the unless part of it. You never wrote that following post.

Good observation, I never wrote that post here. I only wrote parts of the answer in my time management series of articles Touch It - Do It - Get More Done! and in some comments on other Blogs, and I believe in one of my newsletter editions. Anyway, the answer is very simple.

You need to teach and train others to do your type of consulting in a similar fashion. Those folks will have to be employed or contracted by you. Then you will have the time to work on your business, expand it, and make it more independent from you.

One example:

If you are often hired as consultant for doing project management, then you need to start building a real business, a company around it. You'll need other people doing the work in the future that you are still doing by yourself right now. It's moving from being a freelancer towards being a business owner.


Yours
John W. Furst

You probably already have seen, that I promote Rich Schefren's latest milestone type of report — The Attention Age Doctrine Part 2 — very prominently on this Blog. I even have shot a brief video.

The core message of the report for many businesses is

“You are no longer in control of your branding, positioning and marketing.”

Wouldn't you believe someone, who had made enough money to retire at age 25, but has so much drive that he just moves on and since then helped his coaching clients to make some hundred millions of dollars additional income.

“Don't ask any further questions?
Just download the free report and read it.”
(It won't be available forever!)

So what are the lessons that I have learned from this?

I had 2.7 times more visitors on my Blog than usually on Sundays. I am already curious for todays figures. All because I decided last minute, that I will participate in Rich's 66 seconds promotion video contest. So why did I get more traffic yesterday? Because I took action to participate in an event (the contest) that has a lot of attention. It is that simple.

Do you remember my post about one key factor for success: The Speed of Implementation. If not, go back and read it. It is one of my top posts.

Even though the video contest had a sharp deadline only 36 hours after it had been announced, my situation was worse. I did not “pay attention” until 2 hours before the submission deadline. That's when I decided to do it.

All of a sudden I had hundreds of ideas, but no time to put them on screen. Furthermore I never made a promo video like this. But I wanted to participate, I wanted to see, how it effects my Blog. So I focused on the essentials and kept everything to the bare minimum.

• Writing a script, the text.
• Filming myself speaking
• Trying different setups, quickly.

I just didn't like any of the intermediate results. But I kept going. The clock was ticking. Finally I realized, I have to make the video some kind of funny to cope with all those no-time, no-budget, no-preparation, no-outsourcing type of issues in this Saturday night mini project. Originally I wanted to get into the informational or compelling category, but … no music, no third party material to be edited into the video, …

I kept rolling, registered for those sites, and submitted the video 6 minutes before the contest submission deadline.

• What do you think? Is the video funny or just plain stupid?
  About Rich Schefren's Doctrine (John's Video)
  Please, leave a comment here on the Blog.
  
  
• Do you have anything else to say about the doctrine, Rich, or myself?
  Say it, in the comments.

Do you see what was driving me?

It was not perfectionism. And excuses like there is not enough time or how could I win and compete against everybody else, … could not stop me. Today I have seen videos from my competitors in this contest that blew me away. I am also relieved, because — at least in my opinion — my video is not the worst one.

I was driven by the determination to enter this competition. Nothing stopped me. I used what I had available, which was not much at this time as far as my Internet video skills and tools are concerned, but I am proud that I did it.

I have proven to myself that I am an action taker and that I am capable of getting to speed quickly. That is what counts. It is much more important for me than this particular contest. Of course, if I won, it would boost my business tenfold or more, But I am confident that I'll be able to boost my business anyway.

Yours
John W. Furst

I warn you at the beginning. This will be a short article. Why? Because everybody of us has work to do. No matter in what position you are. So I will quickly give one of my popular “generic - this helps everyone in every situation” rules. It's not limited to business. All you need is the drive for “getting results”.

Here's the tip:

“Implement your ideas as quickly as you can!”

Are you

• A business owner (home based, small or large, …)
• A manager (first level, middle or top management)
• A freelancer
• Or simply an employee

Even if you are a student or if you are unemployed, you should get out something from this lesson.

Ask yourself, how many times in your life you had a “great idea” or a “great opportunity”, but you didn't really follow through. Instead you switched yourself into “research mode”. Or in “waiting mode” and never switched to “taking action”. Later you simply dropped the idea. Another, “what would have been, if this had worked …” story is born. Think a little:

About a week ago I wrote “How To Add A Different Perspective To Your Blog” (↑). I mentioned Chris Garrett (↑) — a professional Blogger, who currently offers to write guest posts on the Blogs of and for his readers. Today, Chris announced the first posts that he wrote. Here they are, and believe me, they are a great “read”.

Here are the direct links to those posts: Each one will open in a new browser window:

• 5 Skills That Boost Your Design Career (↑)
  
  
• My Top 5 Biggest Freelancing Mistakes (↑)
  
  
• 5 Tips For a Less Stressful Moving House Experience (↑)
  
  
• WP_Submission WordPress Plugin Makes Reader Submission Projects and Blog Carnivals Easy (↑)

Each of these posts demonstrate what skilled writer Chris Garrett is. The posts are condensed to the essence, contain valuable, to the point information and are fun to read at the same time. Chris Garrett is a blogging and internet marketing consultant. Read more about him on Chris Blog.

I hope Chris will continue his “5 Tips” series of posts. Since I suggest that click through and read these posts, I let you go here. I will stay tuned, definitely.

John W. Furst