Most of us spend a great deal of time reading, whether it be a blog, emails, articles, or news releases. Reading can occupy quite a lot of your time without you realising it - even if you only spend one hour per day reading, that adds up to a lot of hours per year! You might have heard about photo-reading or speed-reading, or heard what seem to be unrealistic claims about increasing your reading words per minute (WPM) to many thousands, and those that claim to read thick books in a few hours. Well speedreading can definitely improve your time reading, and for the mere mortal of us, even if you can’t make the 15,000 WPM, you can at least double your current reading speed if you follow some easy to use techniques, and practice with a fun free website application…

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I’ve just discovered a handy (and best of all free) text replacement application which will help to save you time if you regularly type similar text. It’s called Texter, and is available completely free to download.

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Many small businesses would think you’re crazy if you asked them whether they turned down business. In the first few years of trading, most small business owners chase or say yes to any business they can find - irrespective of whether they have to vary their operations to accommodate it. It is important to have a ‘core focus’ identified in a business, which encompasses all of your strategy, intended mode of operation and the process you use to get where you want to.

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Due to my workload starting to reach a critical mass in the last few weeks, productivity and increasing my efficiency has been a hot topic for me recently. There are always different aspects in life, whether it be personal or business, that can be optimised to result in more free time if we only did things ‘the most efficient way’. Of course I’m not talking about those creative processes (such as web design) which shouldn’t necessarily be rushed - in many instances creativity will decrease if you worry about getting it done more quickly. The kind of productivity increases I’m talking about are for the day-to-day tasks which you’ve got to get done, such as answering email and ironically surfing the web. Find out 5 productivity enhancing ideas that won’t change the world, but will help you get things done more quickly…

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Not only is Skype useful for the day to day calls made as part of your business, it also has an even more powerful application whereby it can increase the productivity of your cold calling - particularly if you are a large volume user. Certain features of the Skype service make it an advanced solution for completing those cold-calls even more quickly than using a standard telephone. Read on to find out how to increase your marketing team’s productivity by utilising Skype…

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If you run a small business then I’m sure you’re aware of all the day-to-day tasks that eat into your time and hence your bottom line. A 5-minute email here, a 10 minute application form there, before you know it these tasks mount up and you’re spending a third of your time on administrative tasks. If you were in a large organisation then it is likely that you would delegate to an employee, but why spare that expense when you can delegate some of these tasks to your computer, and they don’t even argue back!
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One of the major productivity-harming features of email is ‘spam’ – basically unsolicited bulk email that comes in a variety of forms on a scale of just annoying to downright disgusting. Unfortunately in this day and age it seems that no matter how well you hide your email address from spammers, over time you will likely be receiving a large number of spam emails. Most businesses also list their email address on their website, which is a sure-fire way to increase your spam by an exponential amount! Prevention is better than cure… Read the rest of this entry »

Well surprise surprise, the corporate giant that is Google is unveiling free tools at a rate of knots. In addition to the features useful for our personal lives such as Gmail, Book search and finding your house on Google Earth, Google has also launched a variety of free tools which can potentially be very useful for small businesses. Read the rest of this entry »