Making Myself More Efficient and Productive
I don’t normally write these types of Medium posts. Since I’ve gone out on my own, I’ve not had the resource I had at Mozilla, The Media Kitchen, kbs+ Ventures, or other places, so I’ve had to lean on technology and the on-demand economy to aid me in productivity. Note, I think I am actually MORE productive now that I’ve been in the past.
Here are a few tips/companies you should consider checking out. Note, I’m not an investor, shareholder, equity holder, options holder, warrants holder for ANY of the below. If they asked me to invest, I’d probably invest.
#1 ON DEMAND RESEARCH
Wonder: These guys re-introduced themselves to me in the past month (they were a former startup that pivoted) and I’ve been hooked since. They provide on-demand US-based research professionals which help save me time and money. You pay $29.99 (or some rate similar to that) for a simple question and within 24 hours, they have answers. I’ve used them for questions on Artificial Intelligence, top CMO’s to talk to, and understanding co-working financing. The use cases for new business and agency world is tremendous. Here’s a list of other uses.
- New Industry: What is the market size and growth rate for mobile-based microfinance in Africa?
- Insight: I want to understand trends in retail behavior for millennial moms buying toys for their kids (age 5–11)
- Data / Statistics: What are the key trends and stats describing growth in the mobile industry in 2015?
- Competitive Landscaping: Who are the primary competitors in the eLearning industry?
- Prove / disprove a hypothesis: What is HSBC’s share of negative media coverage?
- Prospecting / List building: Please create a spreadsheet with contact info for senior engineers at EOS
#2: MAKING SCHEDULING MUTUALLY EASIER
Calendly: Since I’ve known you, you’ve also known Lara. She’s been my work “other-half” and she’s been amazing at scheduling and helping keep me organized. Since Lara and I left Mozilla, Lara’s been helping out on my new business. I’ve started using Calendly to help schedule meetings and it’s been incredible. You can setup various types of meetings an send links to people to pick the times that work for them. It saves at least 2–3 email correspondences and is pretty darn good. Check out some Calendly tips here.
#3: SIGNING THOSE DOCUMENTS
Signing documents is a pain in the butt. Printing them out, signing, scanning, PDF’ing, then emailing (or fax) is antiquated. I’ve been loving DocuSign. I’ve been using this for my consulting business as well, as, signing documents that people have sent me. I’ve even signed documents from my iPhone while traveling. If you don’t yet use DocuSign, this is a no brainer.
#4: WORKING TOGETHER, WITHOUT NOISE
I’ve been publicly promoting Slack thru my Tweets. One of my former business partners emailed me recently and introduced me to his new company, Workgroup.IM. I’m currently using Workgroup for a consulting project that a few of us are working on and we like it a lot. I like the ability to setup multiple collaborations thru a single interface and it’s not purely predicated on a #. There are many reasons why Slack isn’t the end-all-be-all and Workgroup picks up on a lot of that. Workgroup is NOT perfect but I’m really enjoying the use cases.
CONCLUSION
Again, I don’t earn a dime if you download or use any of these. I just want to share some fun tools that I’ve experienced being away from the “corporation”
Enjoy these — let me know what you like (or not). I am easy to find @dherman76 and here.
