Over the past 12 months I have worked with industry experts, listened to podcasts and read numerous blogs on how the digital evolution will change the way we behave at work.

My question isn’t about ‘if and when’ this will occur. It’s about who will lead the change in your company?

IT was once the domain (pardon the pun) of the IT department and it was manly hidden from users. If I oversimplify it, IT’s core role was twofold:

1) Keep the system running
2) Keep users on the system.

The advent of apps, tablets and a sea of emails has changed the landscape and IT teams are generally ill-equipped to keep up with the pace of change and the demands of users.
I work with senior leaders in large multinational companies every day. I ask them one simple question: “Who is helping you with your company’s individual digital footprint?”
In most cases, the answer, sadly, is no one. In defence of the poor IT department, they have the skills but not the time and resources. A lot of helpdesk support has migrated off shore and users are left to fend for themselves.

This is OK in a world where proficiency in email and the Microsoft Office suite was once acceptable. That world is fast disappearing and leaders need to open their eyes to the digital evolution, not just for themselves and their fellow workers, but for those younger generations who will pick a company to work for based on their digital footprint – hardware and software – as much as their salary.

Younger generations have come through uni at the bleeding edge and want to make quick progress through an organisation. To be quick, you need to make great decisions. To do this you need the right information at the right time. Asking people to regress is like expecting fast lap times in a 1980s car.

So what is the solution? Well like most of these complex systems, there isn’t a single magic bullet to solve it. You should start thinking about:

• Engage human resource departments to think about behaviour change through digital and how they can take greater ownership
• Increase discussion at executive team level on how you can inspire people to choose your company based on your digital footprint
• Encourage sharing of best practice
• Engage outside help to train and develop people.

We all know there are solutions out there that could make us more productive, meaning we could spend more time on decisions that matter most.
For too long we have accepted second best, in an environment where the top line ticked along OK. Those days are over and it is time to think differently.

There is a lot of talk about native productivity apps today and recent research suggested that tablet computers are still only used 4% for business (The Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) report 2012).

With all the hype around apps, web based productivity tools can sometimes go unnoticed as they are not easily found on marketplaces such as iTunes and android

So I would like to share with you a few I use and suggest some ways of making it easier to find others.

I recently listed all the web based tools I used in a month. In my consulting business to corporate clients, I am surprised with how few tools people use. I also appreciate how busy everyone is and people don’t have the time to research tools. This is where I would like to help.

This list was determined based on frequency of use and value generated. I have kept the descriptions brief. You can look at reviews on youtube to get more information.

• ConnectedHQ.  Networking tool. Combines twitter, Facebook, address book and linkedin into one view
• SurveyMonkey. Survey tool. 10 free questions to seek 360 degree feedback
• Google docs. Cloud spreadsheet tool. One version of spreadsheet that can have multiple viewers using the spreadsheet in real time
• Dropbox. Cloud storage. Access to files at anytime. Some corporate restriction on access. Still use for personal files – beats USB keys!!
• Flipboard. Reader tool. User friendly for reading and sharing. OK not web based, but I had to squeeze one app in!!
• Google bookmarks. Save website URL tool. Categorise websites and write notes for later reference
• Google alerts. Email daily or weekly websites from keyword search. Targeted research.
• Sliderocket. Presentation tool. Diagnostic tool on when people read presentations and time spent per slide. Gets around file size restriction with email
• TeamworkPM. Project management tool. User friendly task management tool which reduces email

The tools listed is a sample. To find other tools that meet your specific needs I suggest you;

1. Set up google alerts under topics of interest. I use terms like productivity, web based tools etc
2. Ask people you know for their top 5 web based tools
3. Read blogs

The elephant in the room for many corporate people today is ‘firewalls’. Many employees feel restricted by their company blocking access to leading edge web based tools. One solution is to demonstrate the benefit of the tool and weigh that against the specific risks. By having the conversation, it may lead to more access. If not, the other alternative is bringing your own device to work and using it. Not ideal, however the benefit of using the tool may outweigh the inconvenience.  For many people with a corporate blackberry and personal phone or tablet – this is happening anyway.

The last point is around subscriptions. Market places like iTunes and Andriod can point us to buy free or $0.99. I am all for value and I encourage you to do a back of an envelope exercise on the value of a paid subscription for a web based tool v cost. To help you, most tools have a free trial period.

We live in a world of rapid change – one full of excitement and opportunity. Native apps are extremely beneficial and I fully endorse their use.  This article should get you to thinking about the many incremental options available on the web.

Who can remember the days when you were sent on a two day Microsoft project workshop and you couldn’t wait for it to be over? You went back to work vowing never to use the complex gantt charts again. Well I must say that experience put me off project management tools for life – or so it seemed. I created my own excel spreadsheet which worked OK for me, however scared other people and they used it under duress. I also used emails inefficiently to manage all my tasks – all those flags in Outlook. I was confused, let alone the people involved in the project.

So when my Virtual Assistant encouraged me to look at the latest project management tools I was very sceptical. I had visions of complexity and wasn’t prepared to slow my productivity, as I learnt a new tool. I thought project management tools should be the domain of project managers. After spending 30min looking at a tool, I must say I was pleasantly surprised how far project management tools have come and it made me think why I had held onto some outdated and incorrect perceptions for as long as I did.

At this point I must confess I didn’t investigate every tool on the market. I looked at two, used one and I have fallen in love with it.

So what can it do? It basically runs all my professional and personal projects. You can set them up by company, project, task list and task. It gives you full visibility to tasks and allows people to collaborate without the noise of emails. It gives you a holistic view of all the projects running in your life and for me a realisation that I was too fragmented and unable to achieve all that I had planned.

So what are some of the advantages of a project management tool;

• Define key milestones and align deliverables and timeframes. The tools provide a structure which guides critical collaboration upfront
• When setting up projects, it helps you make a choice as to what is most important. Transparency of all the things you are working on in one place can be confronting for some people
• Reduces email noise. When you delegate a task it structures your thinking – you select a responsible party (can be multiple), due date and a priority. This forces you to be more specific about a task – something email doesn’t do
• It can integrate tasks into your calendar so you know what is needed to deliver for the day
• You can chose to have a daily summary of tasks outstanding sent to you each morning via email – saves you time in going through numerous emails to get the same information
• There is flexible privacy options. You can invite people to have visibility on any project you like and within the project, you can make tasks private to yourself or select whom from the project has access. This gives you excellent control over internal and external people working on projects
• You can have task templates so you don’t need to remember all the steps to a common task list
• Allows you to message people linked to a task. This helps reduce email noise as it links the message directly to the specific task
• Web based tool supporting the growing need for mobility
• There are Apps available for smartphones so you can enter tasks whilst mobile – reduces the need to email yourself a task and cut and paste later. Worse still, write it down on paper and misplace it
• Visually it is very easy on the eye and you can change the colour scheme to suit your liking and incorporate your company logo
• Intuitive and easy to pick-up – trial period of 30 days gives you plenty of time to learn and make a decision
• Support and help is very responsive – replied in a couple of hours to my email suggestions
• Log of tool improvements so you can track your requests
• Archive old projects that reduces the number of active projects – can get them back as your monthly payment is dependent on the number of projects you use
• No ongoing license fees and contract lock in

So what does it cost? Pricing differs by project tool, however the one I use ranges from $29 per month for personal to $149 per month for an enterprise solution. You can adjust your subscription at anytime – up or down.  Unlike some apps that I use 5% of the time, I find I am using this project management tool 50-75% of the time. On a per minute basis, this makes the investment very affordable.

I have my personal preference, however the purpose of this article is to make you more aware of some great productivity tools out there and for you to then make the best choice for your circumstances. This tool has made the greatest positive impact on my productivity since I made it part of my career to help people with productivity.

I did a search on goggle for a list of providers to help you on the journey of discovery;

• TeamworkPM
• Basecamp
• PlanPlus
• Zoho
• NO KAHUNA
• TODOIST
• mGSD
• Things (Mac)

Finally people can often wait for an enterprise solution and revert to email, excel and ppt. The options explored above allow you individual and team flexibility. I would encourage you to check compliance with your IT departments, however as they are web based you should be OK.

There is a great world of productivity out there if you are brave enough to step beyond paper, email and spreadsheets.

Productivity seems to be the ‘new black’ in business today. There were 250million hits when searching for productivity in google. Everyone has their own definition of what productivity means. Mine is very simple;

‘Maximising output given a set input’.

No matter what you decide is the right definition for you, I think the more important question is ‘What does it mean to me as a leader and how can I improve it?’.

To help you in answering this,  I would like to introduce a simple concept based on my experience as a productivity expert. Overall I think productivity is a combination of personal discipline and leveraging technology.

The framework I use for productivity is PAPA. Where;

P = Preference

A = Attention

P = Plan

A = Apply

I will briefly go through each section and then give you some practical tools.

Preference

What is your thinking preference and how does this relate to your productivity. I spend a minimum of two days a week consulting on productivity and I ask people this simple question -

” How much do you know about the brain and in particular your brain and your preferences?”

People look at me quizzically and generally answer – VERY LITTLE. We use our brain ever second of the day and invest little time in better understanding how it works. The way you see the world is coloured by your experiences and this impacts your perception of reality. Your preferences are well defined and typically only change when you have a major event in your life e.g.  having children. Preferences are different to behaviours. For example, you may have a low preference for planning and organising, however you have learnt behaviours to overcome this. Often communication is clouded by our preferences and a break-down in relationships at work can be rebuilt through better understanding each others preferences. A practical tool is the Herrmann Brain profile. If you know your preference and that of your colleagues, it can make a significant difference.

Attention

Multi-tasking is a myth as our ability to focus our attention on complex tasks simultaneously is poor. Try this simple exercise to help illustrate the point – Hold your nose and ask a friend to read two to three sentences to you. Then you read it back. Hard? Yes as your ability to concentrate on two tasks at once – breathing and listening is difficult.

Todays modern world is full of choices and distractions that constantly attack our attention. For many people the addiction of doing trivial tasks e.g.  email can distract their attention from doing what is most important. We are wired to react to stimuli in the lower part of the brain. True innovation and thinking comes from the top part or the pre-frontal cortex of the brain. Some practical tools to help overcome this are;

• Allocating our tasks into the time matrix quadrants (see image) and actively eliminating waste and distractions in Q3 and Q4
• Ability to SAY NO. If we constantly say yes to tasks we often become over-loaded. By using a framework of PAUSE, CLARIFY and DECIDE (5 Choices to extraordinary productivity from FranklinCovey) we allow the top part of our brains to be involved – the thinking part of our brains – whilst pausing so we can do the other two
• Spend a maximum of an hour a day on email. Create rules to reduce in-box and don’t save emails as TO DO’s. Turn them into calendar, task, contact or note. Additional reading on email development @ http://ecoaching.net.au/blog/2012/03/how-much-development-time-do-you-spend-on-email/
• Default calendar. List the key activities that are most important to you and block them into a 5 day week. Be disciplined in sticking to it
• Work blocks. Spend a maximum of 90 minutes on a major task and resist the temptation to check phones, email or whatever else you do to avoid doing what you had planned
• Social networking. Turn off the notifications and read then once a day through a Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeder. I use flipboard on my ipad

Plan 

For me there is a direct correlation between high productivity and weekly and daily planning. Everyone has their own way of planning and tools to help them. This is a summary of some key points that you may want to incorporate into your planning process;

• Clearly define your 5-7 roles and plan activities that cover all roles. This helps to get greater balance in life.
• Set a goal for each role based on the simple framework of X to Y by when
• Planning tool. Pick one that works across all your mobile platforms – avoid sticky pad notes and single page notes
• Daily reflection. Capture your key highlights at the end of the day. I use the Chronicle app on my iPhone

Who can remember the days when you were sent on a two day Microsoft project workshop and you couldn’t wait for it to be over? You went back to work vowing never to use the complex gantt charts again. Well I must say that experience put me off project management tools for life – or so it seemed. I created my own excel spreadsheet which worked OK for me, however scared other people and they used it under duress. I also used emails inefficiently to manage all my tasks – all those flags in Outlook. I was confused, let alone the people involved in the project.

So when my Virtual Assistant encouraged me to look at the latest project management tools I was very sceptical. I had visions of complexity and wasn’t prepared to slow my productivity, as I learnt a new tool. I thought project management tools should be the domain of project managers. After spending 30min looking at a tool, I must say I was pleasantly surprised how far project management tools have come and it made me think why I had held onto some outdated and incorrect perceptions for as long as I did.

At this point I must confess I didn’t investigate every tool on the market. I looked at two, used one and I have fallen in love with it.

So what can it do? It basically runs all my professional and personal projects. You can set them up by company, project, task list and task. It gives you full visibility to tasks and allows people to collaborate without the noise of emails. It gives you a holistic view of all the projects running in your life and for me a realisation that I was too fragmented and unable to achieve all that I had planned.

So what are some of the advantages of a project management tool;

• Define key milestones and align deliverables and timeframes. The tools provide a structure which guides critical collaboration upfront
• When setting up projects, it helps you make a choice as to what is most important. Transparency of all the things you are working on in one place can be confronting for some people
• Reduces email noise. When you delegate a task it structures your thinking – you select a responsible party (can be multiple), due date and a priority. This forces you to be more specific about a task – something email doesn’t do
• It can integrate tasks into your calendar so you know what is needed to deliver for the day
• You can chose to have a daily summary of tasks outstanding sent to you each morning via email – saves you time in going through numerous emails to get the same information
• There is flexible privacy options. You can invite people to have visibility on any project you like and within the project, you can make tasks private to yourself or select whom from the project has access. This gives you excellent control over internal and external people working on projects
• You can have task templates so you don’t need to remember all the steps to a common task list
• Allows you to message people linked to a task. This helps reduce email noise as it links the message directly to the specific task
• Web based tool supporting the growing need for mobility
• There are Apps available for smartphones so you can enter tasks whilst mobile – reduces the need to email yourself a task and cut and paste later. Worse still, write it down on paper and misplace it
• Visually it is very easy on the eye and you can change the colour scheme to suit your liking and incorporate your company logo
• Intuitive and easy to pick-up – trial period of 30 days gives you plenty of time to learn and make a decision
• Support and help is very responsive – replied in a couple of hours to my email suggestions
• Log of tool improvements so you can track your requests
• Archive old projects that reduces the number of active projects – can get them back as your monthly payment is dependent on the number of projects you use
• No ongoing license fees and contract lock in

So what does it cost? Pricing differs by project tool, however the one I use ranges from $29 per month for personal to $149 per month for an enterprise solution. You can adjust your subscription at anytime – up or down.  Unlike some apps that I use 5% of the time, I find I am using this project management tool 50-75% of the time. On a per minute basis, this makes the investment very affordable.

I have my personal preference, however the purpose of this article is to make you more aware of some great productivity tools out there and for you to then make the best choice for your circumstances. This tool has made the greatest positive impact on my productivity since I made it part of my career to help people with productivity.

I did a search on goggle for a list of providers to help you on the journey of discovery;

• TeamworkPM
• Basecamp
• PlanPlus
• Zoho
• NO KAHUNA
• TODOIST
• mGSD
• Things (Mac)

Finally people can often wait for an enterprise solution and revert to email, excel and ppt. The options explored above allow you individual and team flexibility. I would encourage you to check compliance with your IT departments, however as they are web based you should be OK.

There is a great world of productivity out there if you are brave enough to step beyond paper, email and spreadsheets.

By 2016 there will be a predicted two billion ‘smart connected devices’ in the world (source: IDC). If you use your tablet and smartphone predominately for email and calendar, you are not alone, but you’ll soon be a dying breed.

The untapped potential to use the same devices to change the way you work has never been greater. Take, for example, the process of ordering a taxi. In theory this should be a simple task: a quick phone call and the cab arrives.

This ’simple’ process turns into waiting on hold for five minutes, or better still, using a voice-automated service that puts you in a loop that gets you frustrated and annoyed.

For people who have migrated to a taxi app, the experience is bliss. Download the app in a minute, order and then track the cab to your door.

To help illustrate the power of this app, I will recount a pressure situation I experienced the other day. I jumped out of a cab at Melbourne airport and remembered my glasses were on the back seat. I was to catch a flight to Karratha in 15 minutes and running a two-day course in sunglasses was going to be hard to explain! I used the app to get the taxi back and all was solved in under five minutes – demonstrating the power of a smartphone.

I could go on with productivity-saving app stories and I am sure you can think about your own powerful example(s). The great news is this is just about to get even better. Not only do we have commercial apps, but an emerging trend is customised apps developed to remove headaches for you at work. That’s right: technology working for you in a way you would never have imaged.

When I run productivity workshops across the country, the single biggest single time-waster is email. People spend hours and hours on it and I once heard up to 90% of email is spam (where spam is defined as email that doesn’t positively improve your life). This blog provides some tips on email, however it is not addressing the root cause: we do too much in email that could better be handled by an app. Email was not invented to transact data; it has just evolved that way.

OK, I hear you say, what does that mean? Well, developing a customised app can replace either an email or a paper-based process. I remember at uni in the ’90s experts were predicting we would have a paperless office by now. We might use less paper, however there are still too many tasks completed with paper that are open to human error. Think of the paperwork that occurs in your role and then multiply that across your organisation – there are big dollars at stake here.

Customised apps will change the way people behave at work. The opportunity to quickly move past diagnosing the problem to providing fun and easy to use solutions is upon us. Think of how far the web as come in the past 10 years.

So what is meant by a customised app?

Picture a business manager who takes two or three hours to prepare a static presentation in PowerPoint for a client. The client has seen thousands before and they both go through the motions, spending a lot of time in the rear view mirror and spending little time on positively changing the future. Sound familiar? Well, image if you could have an interactive presentation on your iPad where you have ‘what if’ scenarios that visually illustrate the profit impact of future decisions you make together. The client is engaged and the business manager explores innovative solutions in a fun and entertaining way. What do you get more enjoyment from: doing the admin or creating new and exciting possibilities? I will let you answer that one.

What makes a good customised app? The keys are:

• Identify: what is of highest value to users and focus on that as a priority
• Design:  should be inviting and engaging to use.  About 70% of an app’s build should be spent on design, so keep this in mind

• Intuitive: limited instructions necessary

• Bespoke: heavy user involvement in the design

• Personalised: not simply a desktop process placed on a mobile device

• Connected to other sources: leverage existing systems

• Accessibility: 120 languages and cater for all users, ie visually impaired

• Solutions: Focus on solutions and not features. Use GPS, camera and near-field technologies

• Simplicity: Do one or two things exceptionally well. No mega apps. Have several that fit into an ecosystem

• Speed: Version one is the start and improve from there. Be imperfect in your pursuit

There are three types of apps
1) Native (on device)
2) Web-based, and
3) Hybrid (a combination of both).

My prediction is hybrid apps will continue to grow. Here is a video on a collaboration with Apple and GE as an example http://www.apple.com/ipad/business/profiles/ge/

Where to from here?

This is a little like ‘how long is a piece of string?’ There are a lot of companies moving into this space as the initial barriers to entry are low. You have web design companies expanding their footprint, digital agencies adapting, app-specific development companies and in-house design. There is no right or wrong approach; it is what best meets your needs. I recommend taking a broad look into all options and then use a well-defined criteria (potentially combining the key points above) to make your decision. The greatest risk I see is not making a decision.

I truly believe that apps will change the way people behave at work in a very positive way. Just think what you could do with 25% more productive time in your day – now that’s exciting.

If you take one thing from this article, it’s this: take action now.

Can I say upfront – I love my iPad and I am just waiting the arrival of my new iPad3. I need to declare that I have not used other tablets. I am not sponsored by any company and my views are independent, formed from practical experience after using my iPad for 7 months.

With the timely release of the iPad3, here I go;

Depth not Breath. 

• I find apps a little like share trading back in early 2007 – everyone has a suggestion but there are only a few good ones
• Make some golden rules (criteria) and measure  the app against it
• I have downloaded hundreds and found that I am most productive when I focus on a top few
• My top 5 are – Evernote, Linkedin, Youtube, Skype and flipboard
• Boring I hear you say – well I wasted a lot of time using apps only once

Most if not all of us at some point in time have an Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTS). It is the little voice inside your head that pops up when you are put in a pressure situation. It can often make the situation seem a lot worse than it really is.

For example, someone calls you and mentions the word test. Your little voice remembers all those stressful times in the past when you haven’t performed as well as you would have liked and you start to have negative thoughts. In fact, the test might be very simple, however you start to think the worst based on your previous experience. I think you get the picture.

I recently came across this simple but effective technique called ANTS in a video from the  5 Choices to extraordinary productivity program. Daniel Amen http://www.amenclinics.net/ talks about the following simple technique;

• When you are feeling pressured or stressed and the ANTS start to appear, simply write them down
• Once you have them in front of you engage the ‘fact’ part of the brain to either prove or disprove them

As I go around Australia facilitating 5 Choices to extraordinary productivity and coaching clients , the common noise in peoples work life is email. People spend a disproportionate time on email – some as high as 4hours a day. On average people get 150+ emails a day. Someone recently told me that 90% of the world’s emails are SPAM. Most people underestimate the time they spend and would be shocked if they kept a log for a week and saw the true picture. So if we spend so much time on it, why don’t we set aside some development time to improve this skill. Well I have asked over 100 people this questions and I am yet to find the answer – me included. That’s not to say there aren’t people doing it, they are just very hard to find.

So – what are some options. Here are some tips I have gleamed from my development to get your started;

• Block 10min a day in your calendar to work on improving your email skills ( tips on making habits stick http://ecoaching.net.au/blog/2012/02/making-habits-stick/)
• Find the propeller head in your office (every office has one) and ask them for their top 5 email tips
• Run a user group once a month where you share email tips
• Use rules to stop emails getting to your inbox. The two most common are Auto send to delete and auto send to folder. Keep an eye on the number of folders as you can often spent wasted time trying to remember where you filed it
• Unsubscribe to emails that you constantly delete each day. This was a big one for me. If you cant unsubscribe, set-up a rule to delete it automatically
• Turn an email into what it is – appointment, task, contact or note. Don’t have tasks sitting in your in-box or folders. How often do we touch an email before we finally delete it. Turn it into what it is and then delete it  - saving yourself  a lot of  time. This makes it easy to plan when you have all your tasks in one place, as opposed to buried in email everywhere
• Did you know that in some versions of Outlook you can drag and drop from your inbox to make one of the four mentioned above? Try it – it’s easy and not used by many people.
• Turn off the pop-up. Our brains are not wired to multi task and each time you get distracted by the pop-up you loose your place on the important task you were working on. Try doing a moderately complex maths problem, look at the pop-up and then go back to solve the problem. Chances are you will have to start again or take time to get back into it
• When creating an appointment, link all the information you need into it so you turn up prepared
• Out of office message. On holidays put a message that you will be deleting all emails except those with IMPORTANT in the subject. Ask them to kindly resend their email. Have a rule to file these and act on them when you get back
• Your brain works best in 90min blocks. Look at your emails 2-3 times a day and when you are least effective
• Avoid the cc’s. Every one email sent creates 5 in the world

I have just completed my 6th facilitation of 5 Choices to extraordinary productivity from FranklinCovey. I have met over 80+ people across multiple industries, geographies and organisation levels and listened to their frustrations and challenges. People are exhausted and feel as if it will only increase, as the dark economic clouds loom on the horizon. For many people it is comforting to know it is not just them.  On the 5 Choices program they have the chance to share learnings, change behaviours and take more control.

There is an overriding consistency and there are  three key opportunities people face;

1. Decision management
2. Attention management
3. Energy management