So, without further adieu, I give you the five ways I stay productive:

Embrace your internal clock. I am an early bird. I’ve always been an early-to-bed, earl-to-rise type of guy. Through my high school and college years, I tried to fight it. But it’s no use, it’s just who I am. I like to wake up early. In fact, I feel stressed when I wake up late. I feel like I missed out on too much of the day. As a result, I tend to come in to work between 7AM & 8AM every morning and crank out as much as I can during the early and middle parts of the day. I do most of the important / brain cell-consuming work before 3PM or 4PM, because once it hits late afternoon, my productivity takes a dive. It’s important to know yourself, understand your peaks and valleys throughout the day, and plan your work accordingly. You’ll do better work on the things that really matter if you do it that way.

Stay organized.

One of my biggest challenges is organization, which is unfortunate, because one of the most crucial aspects of being productive is staying organized. Slip for even a day, and you’ll find yourself fighting to catch up, spending exponentially more time down the line on getting back to where you should have been had you just taken the time to stay organized in the first place. Staying organized can help alleviate a lot of unnecessary stress and open up time you never thought you had.

Keep well-fed & hydrated.

Hungry? Thirsty? Have a headache or low energy? You probably need some food! I know, I know. You don’t have the time. Or maybe you get in such a groove that you forget. Food and water are essential to keeping your energy and motivation up throughout the day. For example, it’s 8PM as I write this post. I’ve been in the office for over 12 hours. I hit a point about an hour ago where I thought I needed to call it quits for the day, but after a nice meal and glass of water, I feel like a new man. Can’t stress this one enough. There is always time for food and water. And don’t forget!

“Step away from the vehicle!”

I’ve always heard that after every hour or so of work, you should take a ten minute break. I’m not sure of the exact formula, but I do know that short breaks in between focused work sessions is something I would highly recommend. And I don’t mean simply clicking over to your favorite leisure website (e.g. ESPN or Perez Hilton), I mean getting up out of your seat, taking a walk, or grabbing some fresh air. In my opinion, a change of scenery goes a long way. It’s nice to clear your mind; think of it as a quick reboot of the system, much like your computer gets (or deserves) when it’s been working for a while.

Understand your optimum working conditions.

Do you prefer complete silence or some background noise? Are you more comfortable when the temperature is a bit cool or do you like it warmer? Are you more focused when you’re working alone or when you’re side by side with coworkers? Think about the environmental conditions around you at your workplace. Is the mess on your desk forcing you to lose focus? Take ten minutes to clean it up, you might feel a lot better. The point is that everyone works best under different outside factors. Do as much as you can to help your surroundings help you.

There are clearly more than five ways to stay productive. These are just the ones that have most helped me. What else helps you stay effective while at work? Would love to hear your thoughts on the topic, so please share them in the comments below!

Total read time: 8 minutes

Cyclical Iteration. It’s a philosophy that underlies everything we do here at VaynerMedia, from development cycles to client strategies to administrative processes to sushi/sake team dinners.

What is iteration?

-It’s the systemic acceptance of short term failures to ensure long term success.

-It’s the embracing of the cyclical and chaotic nature of growth and the absence of formal long term planning.

-It’s the investment in human capital and relative disregard for protection of existing assets.

This systemic embracing of the inevitability and strengthening nature of human failure that pervades our company culture is, in my estimation, the surest indicator of our eventual success.

Fail harder, fail better.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett

Iteration is not the process of stepping consistently forward. In fact, quite the opposite, it is predicated on the acceptance of stepping backwards.

Each cycle (or iteration) follows a classic trial-and-error pattern. The first few steps are usually incorrect, but they help expose the complexity of the problem and eventually lead to a more robust and often more innovative solution.

Iteration not only accepts short-term failure, it embraces it. Failure now leads to strength later on.

Seek failure and you will find real strength. Seek perfection and you’ll find weakness veiled as strength.

Disclaimer: I feel obliged to mention that this does not mean that as a company we are releasing substandard or half-cocked strategies or products to our clients. Quite the opposite — the iterative cycles take place internally and help us ensure we can deliver consistently great results.

Safe is risky.

“Safe is risky.” – Seth Godin

If your goal is to never fail (or admit failure), you’ll find that the more you acquire, the more frantically you’ll have to struggle to maintain your “winnings”.

You can’t monitor or control everything. No matter how much you try to keep everything moving consistently upward, something you’re not monitoring is going down.

You know, it takes so much damn energy and cognitive dissonance to convince yourself that you are unfailingly headed on the right path. Why not just admit that there are going to be peaks and valleys??

Sometimes you’re going to forget important things. Sometimes you’re going to do embarrassing shit. Sometimes you’re going to offend and disappoint people you care about or look up to or need approval from.

If you would just RELAX and be ok with losing a few battles, you’d find it’s much easier to win the war.

One of our greatest weaknesses as human beings is our inability to go beyond linear projection. You decide not to lose three battles in a row, because that translates to 9 and 18 in your head.

All important fundamental dynamics are so clearly cyclical, yet we can only take into account a singular slope in our projections, and that chains so many people to overly conservative or risk-averse approaches.

A risk-averse approach is safe in the short term and self-destructive in the long term. And not the fun kind of self-destructive. The slow, crippling, succumbing to death at 24 without realizing it until 42 version of self-destructive. No thanks.

Trust the actors, not the script.

In order to operate on a daily basis, human beings need to ignore a huge number of variables and attribute the continued functioning of those variables to an abstraction that some would call “faith”.

Corporate strategies and sitcoms like Two and a Half Men ascribe that faith to a rigid “plan”, and operate with an implicit wary distrust in the human actors involved.

Iterative strategies and genuine comedies like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Eastbound and Down have rudimentary guidelines for each scene but the director is happy to throw the script out the window on any given scene because her faith lies with the characters and the actors that breathe life into them.

Get attached to the people, not the product or the processes. The only asset that can flourish without attention and demonstrate true exponential ROI is a human asset.

Make more chairs.

When you get attached to your accomplishments, as a company or an individual, you’re putting your money on a commodity with diminishing returns.

Because anything you build is bound to wither eventually no matter how closely you protect or hoard it, you’re putting yourself or your company into a game of musical chairs; a game that degenerates into a dystopia ruled by scarcity and marked by fearful, animalistic competition between otherwise decent human beings.

The solution? Cut that cord, my friend. Put your faith in your future, not your past.

With each iteration you should focus on increasing your ability to do it faster and better next time rather than clinging to your creation, no matter how valuable it appears.

Anything man can build will inevitably crumble. The tires lose their traction and the hinges rust and the sheen fades. One of the saddest things to see is an organization or a person frantically patching together or attempting to bail out a decaying symbol of their past glory.

The second that glue starts unsticking, you want to confidently assess your dying creation like the million dollar man — “we can rebuild him”.

Don’t fear the reaper.

“Don’t fear the reaper (we’ll be able to fly)” – Blue Oyster Cult

What iteration really comes down to is letting the weak or old parts die the deaths they want to die.

If you don’t keep a healthy population of wolves inside, if you don’t have a certain modicum of ruthless killing in your organization or yourself, you’ll eventually find your business or your life unmanageable due to the unchecked, brimming caribou herd that will overwhelm the system.

So many things would be so much better if people could accept minor losses and deaths in the interest of “strengthening the herd”.

Imagine if you could actually “take a break” in a relationship before the relationship was over on one or both sides, how much more stable and secure would that relationship be?

Imagine if laws were repealed as often as they were passed, how much more accurate and fair would laws be?

I hate to get all Eastern philosophy and Yin/Yang on you here, but failure and death are a necessary counterbalance to (and enabler of) success and life.

If you do it right and embrace the failures in your personal actions, even the final, faltering act will be pleasurable.

Hell, I fully intend to have an open bar and a live band at my funeral.

Life’s a joke, if you let yourself exhale and you celebrate the little deaths instead of dreading them, you might be able to laugh at it again.

I used to train new customer service reps in the order department at Wine Library. In that case, the job primarily consisted of procedures. Various people served the same role, and essentially needed to be interchangeable. If John Q. Customer called and spoke to Customer Service Rep A on Monday, then called again and got Customer Service Rep B on Tuesday, B needs to be able to pick right up where A left off and understand the status of an order, what the customer wanted, and so forth. The job required little in the way of specific product knowledge (trained wine consultants handle that part of the business), and had everything to do with understanding how the various back-end systems interfaced with each other, what company policy was in each situation, and standard procedures that everyone had to follow in the same way.

Training Phil for the assistant role is a very different kind of training. I have procedures that I use, but they are my own. There are certain things we’ve worked out over the years that will remain the same (for instance, how Gary expects things to appear in his calendar), but other than that, it’s the results that matter: making sure Gary is in the right place at the right time, making sure he takes the meetings and calls he wants at appropriate times, and etc. Some of that takes specialized knowledge, which I am teaching as best I can as things come up. Unlike for the Wine Library job training though, most of the procedural stuff is personal, just the way I keep myself organized. I am sure other people use different systems, and my system might not necessarily be the right one for Phil.

I basically showed him how I do it, but I don’t want him to treat that as gospel. He has to make it his own. At this point he’s spent a few weeks being cc’ed and bcc’ed on correspondence, with me explaining why I made this or that choice or who so-and-so is, but at a certain point he just has to get in the trenches and lean on me when he has questions. And that point has come! I’m creating a glossary document of various people in Gary’s world for his reference, and he’s off to the races. Now he’ll cc me and I can lurk and make suggestions and improvements, and Gary will provide feedback as well.

Wish him luck!

Toodledo

This is my big gun. I started using Toodledo about a month ago and it’s blown me away with how useful its been. The basic functionality of Toodledo is creating tasks and checking them off when they’re completed. I prefer this style of organization because I flat-out enjoy checking things off, whether on paper or virtually. The advantage of Toodledo lies in all the ways you can customize your lists, from due dates to repeating tasks, and allows for a surprisingly sophisticated task management system.

Additionally, Toodledo has Firefox and Gmail plug-ins, allowing for even easier access to the service. Instead of going to the site to add a task, I can click on the green check mark next to the navigation bar. Without even going to the site, I can bring up the Toodledo side bar with a hot key and quickly see what tasks I need to be working on or to check off something I’ve completed. Toodledo makes it easy to access your lists, which is essential for getting me to use it. To give an example of how I use it, here’s a screen shot.

I browse through my folders every day to make sure that I’m on top of every initiative I’m responsible for, but throughout the day I sort by due date more often so I can get what needs to be done, done.

Email

Email is my second wave of organization. For anything important that needs to be completed by a certain date, I use Toodledo, but in order to keep tabs on open conversations and make sure I don’t forget about something, I use a Gmail labeling system.

This system has two tiers, the first being “high”, “mid”, and “low” labels that segregate the emails by urgency. I make sure I always know exactly what is in “high” and the second I can act on something, I do so. I check “mid” throughout the day to complete anything I can move on there, and I leave “low” for whenever I have free time. I also use three different color stars to determine whether I need to respond, whether I’m waiting for a response but should follow up if I don’t get one soon, or if I should just wait for a response.

Google Calendar

Google calendar is my final, and least important, organizational tool. While I could probably replicate a lot of Google Calendar’s functionality with Toodledo and consolidate what I need to look at, I like the ability to visualize my schedule and compare it to that of my co-workers. I don’t do anything special with Google calendar so I’ll toss in this little tip which AJ showed me a couple weeks ago. When adding an event on the calendar, instead of letting it default to one hour and going in to change the length of the event, if you include the length in the name of the activity the event will adjust automatically. For example, “Write blog post for ten mins” makes a ten minute event.

In the end, a good organization structure can only limit mistakes, it can’t prevent them. Despite the fact that I’m way more confident in my ability to stay on top of what I need to get done now, I still make mistakes and let things slip by me. Controlling the human element and giving the system all the information it needs to assist you is the true key to becoming more efficient. A good system, however, will give you a major head-start.

WordPress
Price: Free
Stars: 3.5/5
Description: A great app, specifically because of the vast number of bloggers who use WordPress for their blogs. It has all the features of WordPress for no cost. Perfect for an impromptu post on a time sensitive topic or approving/disapproving comments. The only bad thing is that it doesn’t include the traffic stats for your blog; you have to pay $3 for a separate app.

Awesome Note (+todo)
Price: $3.99
Stars: 4/5
Description: Especially for disorganized, spontaneous people, this app is great. Not only does it allow you to organize your to-do list, but it also supports notes for quick ideas whenever they may pop up. The main folder page comes with tabs titled “Hello”, “My Idea”, “Study”, “Shopping”, “To-Do List”, “Work” and “Travel Diary;” however, the user can add any folder they think is appropriate.  I personally love this app, as it has effectively “un-chaosed” my life.

Tweetie 2
Price: $2.99
Stars: 4/5
Description: If you have an iPhone and a Twitter account, odds are you are well aware of all the Twitter apps on the market. In my opinion, Tweetie 2 is the best out there because it is phenomenally user-friendly and can easily support multiple Twitter accounts. Don’t be fooled by its more expensive competitors.

WorldCard Mobile
Price: $5.99
Stars: 3.5/5
Description: If you’re chatty with your fellow train-riders during your commute like I am, this app is a must. Not only does it allow you to effectively manage your contacts but it prevents you from losing their info (which has happened to me before – it’s a huge bummer). Just open the app, take a picture of the card and hit “recognize.” All the info on the card is automatically classified as a contact in your phonebook.

Tips and Tricks- iPhone Secrets
Price: $0.99
Stars: 3/5
Description: A cool app, especially for the new user; even if you’ve had your iPhone for a while, this app can help you learn tricks and shortcuts to make sure you’re as efficient as possible. It includes advice that most people can figure out on their own, but when going through the content, most people are bound to have that “oh, that’s how you do that” moment. I had mine regarding the best way to use my voice-control function, and it helped make sure that it was a feature I could depend on.

Mashable
Price: Free
Stars: 3.5/5
Description: A great way to stay up to date with all the stories on Mashable. Their app enables the user to not only view stories that are breaking on the website, but also by categories, tags and authors. Specifically for those working in this industry, it’s a must, especially since it’s free.

JotNot
Price: $4.99
Stars: 3.5/5
Description: Basically, JotNot allows you to use your iPhone camera to take a pic of a document, specify the size of the page and then convert into a email attachment. This not only takes scanning items mobile, but it makes it way less of a hassle. “Scanned” items are surprisingly clear. I really like this app, though it’s not one that I use on a daily basis. However, when I have to use it, it’s irreplaceable.

9,000 Awesome Facts
Price: $0.99
Stars: 4/5
Description: This app is very different than the rest on this list, but I put it in here because it does enhance the user. Instead of zoning out, you can peruse 9,000 random facts. These may not make you that much more productive, but you’ll certainly be more knowledgeable.

Dropbox
Price: Free
Stars: 4/5
Description: Dropbox is a fantastic tool for sharing various files on your internal network. With this app, you can easily access, download or edit those files from your iPhone.  Especially with time sensitive situations, you can rely on this app to get what you need ASAP without having to use your laptop or desktop. Considering the price (or lack thereof), this is a must-have for anyone with a DropBox account.

1. Dropbox

Dropbox is an amazing utility that allows teams to share files. Using Dropbox cuts down on unnecessary dialogues (asking coworkers to send files via email or aim) and creates a central location for relevant documents. We use Dropbox to share case studies, client information, photos, videos, design work, and much more.

2. MeetingMix

MeetingMix is a nifty application that aims to improve the meeting experience. At VaynerMedia we don’t have a ton of internal meetings, but when we do, MeetingMix helps us cover topics in an efficient manner. If you didn’t know, meetings can be a waste of time.

3. Action Method

Action Method is a great application that combines to-do lists with vital reference information. I use the actions tab to keep track of tasks and the references tab for contact information and important reference documents.

4. 5pm

5pm is a project management system our design and development team has been using for VaynerMedia related projects. We have found this system to be a perfect fit in terms of how we work and how we manage client projects.

5. Google Calendar

Google Calendar is an application that I have used to manage my calendar for years. Whenever we have a new employee start at VaynerMedia we suggest they use Google Calendar. Sharing calendars has been a major help in project coordination and communication for us.