6 Tips for Great Personal Productivity for Small Business Success - Great Personal Productivity is achieved with a great set of tools and an understanding on how to apply them.

I spend a part of my days recommending to others the best tools for certain types of tasks, and thought it would be useful to write down all the tools I usually recommend and personally use to achieve the levels of personal productivity I enjoy today. To find any of the tools listed here, just google their names, and you'll find them.

Getting the Right Task Management in Place for You - Tip #1 on Personal Productivity

Remember the milk (RTM) - A task management tool to capture everything. I've tried a large number of task management tools (over 10), and my top three favourites are: RTM, Omnifocus and Things. I'm 100% mac & iphone (hence Things which is mac based), but both Omnifocus and Things have the single flaw of poor synchronisation options between the iphone and the desktop - over wireless is limiting when you are in between locations regularly as I am. To know that your list is updated at all times is critical if you have to keep your mind empty for optimum focus (did you know your mind can only cope with 7 items at any one time (give or take 2)?), so having a task management system that you TRUST is the most important thing for Personal Productivity. I've had times in the past where I stopped trusting my system, and my mind instantly overloads as it tries to take everything back into the limited space (7 items), to a point, where you have to stop what you're doing and write it all down - has that happened to you?

It's taken me 10 years to get to my level of personal productivity, and usually with my business owners I get them to start with a pen and paper, and then move them towards Get Things Done (GTD) principles, but assuming you are either comfortable on computers, or looking for your next level of productivity, I'd recommend Remember The Milk, as its sync to the cloud and absolute simplicity in taking notes & tasks is the best I've found in all my time of investigating task management tools for my own Personal Productivity.

If you think in pictures like I do, then a mind map tool would be a great addition to your tool kit - try freemind which is free and both mac and PC based - the most simple mind mapping tool I have found, and I personally have been using this for over 5 years - it's helped me both in work, at home and whilst I was finishing my MBA - a great tool for a great price (free!). It also allows exporting to websites, pdf, and a whole lot more.

Worry Free Email - Tip #2 for Effective Personal Productivity

Google Apps - portability, always there, always backed up, always worry free - a small cost to turn your google email into your business email, and well worth every penny or dollar, which ever currency your spending. In terms of personal productivity, you can use the stars or flags to park emails for later when you do a quick run through. Filters in the settings allow you to run rules automatically to clean up your inbox to save both time and over-bearing lists of emails in front of you. For two examples from my settings, any emails from twitter telling me someone is following me (which i get 30-50 a day) are marked as read and moved into archive automatically, with a twitter tag applied for easy recall later if I choose. The same for any newsletters I receive, they are marked as read, tagged with newsletter, but left in my inbox, so i can quickly scan, and star those i want to read when I have my allocated newsletter reading time.

Add into this a very clever tool from awayfind, which helps answer the question "but I always need to be in front of my email in case I miss a message from 'so and so'" - does that sound familiar? If you want to know when someone important writes to you (ie a VIP customer), then register on awayfind, and you can get a text when you get that especially important email. Why is this important? It means that you only need to check your emails twice daily. It's a mind altering concept for most, but always a liberating one - visit awayfind to see what I'm talking about.

Effective Website Setup for Personal Productivity - Tip #3

Wordpress - for my website, which allows me to both share my companies brand, and allows me to write these types of articles with ease. Bringing your web and blog into one place also helps on the Personal Productivity side, as you are not doubling up on sites to keep updated, and adding extra things your mind needs to think about. Keeping it simple... To make wordpress even more powerful in terms of web prominence, I use a number of wordpress plugins:

Wordpress plugins - ScribeSEO & SEOPressor - two SEO tools to do the same job? Not really, they both offer slightly different things in terms of SEO, and so to have two SEO 'experts' sat with me whilst I write is always going to be better than one. I'll see how I go in terms of "will one win out in the end?", but at the moment, these two are treating me just fine. I also have google xml sitemap plugin, allowing Google, bing, yahoo and the other search engines to always keep up to date with my changes (the quicker you tell them, the quicker you keep strong rankings!).

Keeping in Touch Virtually - Tip #4 of Personal Productivity

Skype - where would we be in our global neighbourhood without this? A little lost and lonely perhaps. Aside from keeping in touch with the family, so my UK based folks can see their grandchildren grow up (for the times they are not together), I use skype to keep in touch with the global network of Alchemy Partners and Consultants, where we help each other with both business challenges (ie someone else would have already solved the challenge) and also gives me the reach to afford my NZ based customers global distribution channels (and vice versa). I also have offshore teams who deliver work for me, and skype is the 'red phone' for me to my team. Skype on the iphone now allows to keep in touch when you're out and about, adding to the flexibility of where you work.

Simplify getting your message to your customers - Tip #5 of Personal Productivity

Hootsuite - a way to better manage my time with scheduled twitter updates. I've also integrated twitter with LinkedIn, so that one post goes to two places. Whilst Hootsuite is online based, you can download desktop based tools if you want to.

Mailchimp - a free email marketing tool (to a point). It's designed so simple the people at mailchimp say "monkeys can use it", which makes it very easy to setup for those non technical, and gives very powerful reporting on opens, demographics, geography and much more. Ability for web sign up forms, A/B split testing and multiple lists (and sub groups) means a lot of power available free if you only need to send to under 1000 people. Mailchimp also allows you to automatically send your emails to wordpress (your website) and it works the other way around (so this post will be emailed via Mailchimp). Maichimp also posts to Twitter & Facebook for you if you ask it, and so Twitter, LinkedIn, Wordpress and Email (all your potential customers), can be updated very effectively.

Having your important files to hand, always - Tip #6 for Personal Productivity

As the last tip of the 6 tips, mobility for your files is an important one that I almost left off.

What do i mean by mobility?

Reading, Editing and sharing your files from anywhere. There are two tools for this: Dropbox and Google Docs.

Dropbox allows you to store files (upto 2GB for free), and they sit on your computer, and at the same time are synchronised (automatically) to the internet. So that means all files stored here are backed up, in case something happens to your desktop. The other really good thing about dropbox is that you can share files, photos and directories with other people, which for me I use to share folders with my clients, so any documents we have promised each other get saved into that folder, and it automatically updates their computer, my computer and the internet. All my clients files are kept on dropbox, so if my computer crashes, or is stolen, I can be back up and running within 1-2 hours, rather than days or weeks. This is a top recommended product for anyone, work or home.

Google Docs is worth a mention with its new updates on the mobile side, which means you can share, in real time, documents and spreadsheets with others than can be worked on at the same time, and also accessed from anywhere you have an internet connection (so wifi or 3G). More and more features and power is being added to Google docs, so its worth keeping an eye on this to how it could help you.

Personal Productivity - To Wrap Up

You may look at that list above and think "I don't have time to do that". If that is the case, then the answer needs to be "I NEED to make time to do this". I can say from both my personal experience, and watching my business owners as they progress to take on board pieces of the personal productivity tips above, their time becomes more and more their own. They start to have more freedom in their choices, which leads to better choices, because they've had more time to think about their choices and the next steps in every part of their life.

I've not met one person yet who hasn't benefited from personal productivity improvements - are you ready to give it a go? If you are, good luck!

Personal Productivity is step 1 in The Profit Partnerships '5 Simple Steps to Business Success' - if you'd like to learn more, then feel free to visit The Profit Partnership (.co.nz) to find out more.

If you have any personal productivity experiences you'd love to share, that I can share with others, I'd love to hear them!