This is as much of a post about sharing Evernote with you as it is an apology to Evernote for not giving you a chance until now. My mistake and my loss, learn from me and your gain. The simplest way to explain Evernote to those of you who don’t know is that it’s a database for you brain. If you have ADD (like me) it’s a must have tool! Evernote collects information in almost any format that you could ever want to throw at it, and it creates the ability to log, categorize, and store that info. Then, when you need to find something from a random though a few months back, you can search and the search is amazing! One crazy example of the technology is that you can write your name on a white board, take a picture of the whiteboard, then save that picture to Evernote and search for your name. Evernote will pick-up the text from the picture and make that text searchable…incredible!

For so long I had heard about people using Evernote for notes, picture search, and other menial tasks and I dismissed the service. I was actually using the Notes iPhone app and TextEdit saving files in this format, “4/22 notes”. That was dumb. Now that I use Evernote I can tag thoughts, search history and “appear” to the world that I have a great memory.

As a person with brutal ADD, this web service may become my most valuable. I’ve only been using it a week but I’m in love already.

Here’s a little tip on importing old notes into Evernote:

1. Download RTF/TXT Evernote importer

2. Install the application

3. From Evernote, make sure these preferences are selected.

4. File > Import … select all your files and your entire ‘Notes’ history is searchable, backupable, and awesome!

Let me know if you have any questions ryan [at] thedreaminaction [dot] com

Vacation is important because…

Vacation, as the Europeans have discovered, is critical to ones ability to contribute effectively in the workplace. As I’m in Sweden this week and our project time lines are surely impacted by month long (or more) vacation schedules, I figured there would be no more appropriate time to write about vacations and the value of them.

Note: This trip is for business and not a vacation, however, I am spending a free weekend in Stockholm. A mini vacation I guess.

Although the “American way” seems to criticize the European vacation mentality, I think that it may be important to consider the value of extended breaks for multiple reasons.

1. Taking a break allows one to recollect their focus and return to work with a laser focus on their work.
2. A vacation allows one to recharge their batteries, release the pressures that can build at work, and return energized and excited.
3. Taking a vacation, perhaps a luxurious one, gives you a sense of reward and helps you to feel really good about giving 110% to your work.

Don’t focus on refocusing.

It’s important that when taking a vacation you don’t think ‘to much’ about work. Recently, there has been a big push towards the “stay-cation” or taking your vacation time at home. This is being encouraged due to conditions in the economy and also the green aspects of reducing your travel when vacationing. I am strongly against this. I believe that vacation is for getting away, seeing something new, and putting yourself in a different environment so that you can remove your thoughts from the norm and focus on something new.

Focusing on something new is the key to getting ‘mentally’ away. Using this time to focus on refocusing is counter productive. If you do this, you’re really still focused on work. You’re essentially trying to find a way to work better. I am a huge fan of continuously finding improvements in behavior and maximizing productivity but your vacation is not the appropriate time for that.

Lastly, although your away from work, I believe it is important to stay productive on vacation. If you stay in bed until noon everyday during your break and never really accomplish anything then you may be well rested but you’re going to feel like you’ve wasted your time away from work. Make sure to keep a busy schedule even on vacation so that you can look back to your time off and feel that you’ve made the most of it. When I’m on vacation I like to get up as early as the night before will logically allow :) and maximize the time I have to see new and interesting things. That’s why I love abroad travel so much, there are always new experiences to be had.

Finally get some rest.

To combat the maximize your time sentiment, it is important to get much needed rest on a vacation. Although it may seem impossible to satisfy both of these ideas, here is a solution: Early in your vacation it’s all good to maximize your day. During the beginning of your vacation, do what you want. Get up early, stay up late, and do it all in between, it’s fine. However, towards the end of your break it’s important to be conscious of the amount of rest that you’re allowing yourself. You want to return to work fresh, sharp, and at the top of your game!

For people who have trained themselves to operate on only a few 3-6 hours of sleep, you must be careful! I’m not going to tell you need to get 8 hours of sleep, I usually get about 6 until the weekend (then I binge sleep). However, you do need to be careful not to lose your ability to only sleep a few hours. If you take your 2 week or your 1 month vacation and sleep 10 hours a night, you will not be able to jump right back into your 4 hour plan without any affect. These habits are conditioned so you can potentially derail your sleep pattern during your vacation, so be careful.

The most fun, must energizing, and most rewarding aspect of my vacation is the time I get to spend with the people I care about. In August of 2007 my girlfriend, now fiance, and I went to Ireland for 2 weeks and drove the southern coast from Dublin to Galway and back. The trip put us in so many situations that challenged our relationship but made it so strong. One night we got to Cork and realized we did not have a hotel, B&B, or hostel booked. We ended up sleeping in a tiny Nissan Micra Sport all night…freezing. Yes, it sucked but the time we spent and laughs we shared together were priceless. If your spending time with the right people, it almost doesn’t matter what you do for your vacation time.

You earned it.

Finally, by taking a vacation, whether its 2 weeks or 8 (the French), you’ll be able to be proud of your time off. Knowing that I have a vacation coming up always helps me to drive towards it knowing that my hard work now will really make the off time sweet.

Because of the build up that comes with a vacation, I seriously recommend doing them big. Do something that you will remember. Don’t do the stay-cation at home, instead plan a trip to somewhere you’ve not been before that will create memories. It’s a big world out there so don’t do the same trip over and over. Explore!

When you come back to work you’ll be relaxed, re-focused, and rested. In short, you’ll be ready to kick ass. The time spent off will have a significant affect on your productivity and your contribution to your business. It will also have a profound affect on the relationships in your personal life. You’ll be able to relate with people from another part of the world and you’ll have common experiences shared with the people you traveled with.

Vacation is worth taking as an employee and it’s worth paying for as the employer. Vacations are all around valuable and necessary. I hope you enjoy yours!

photo via mavericksmath

This thought came from a comment I made on Mashable’s post on personal branding using Social Media. The book written by Dan Schwabel, Me 2.0, inspired the post.

When using social media for branding I would make 2 points.

1) Use the tools, don’t be the tools. Keep in mind that the value of social media comes through communication. You’ll need to leverage the communication but more importantly you’ll need to back up that communication. It is unlikely that you’ll be valuable to a company for social media’s sake. You need to use the social media tools to communicate your expertise or value in other areas of business/life.

2) Don’t drowned. A while back I fell into the trap of losing the productivity battle solely because I wanted to stay informed on what was going on in the social web world. Staying in tune with every update from my Twitter friends and trying to consume tons of data, I was becoming very unproductive. I spent so much time staying “informed” that I was accomplishing much less. I wrote on my blog (http://bit.ly/o07w8) about how I reduced the noise and increase the value of tools like Twitter. If you don’t appear productive, employers will not be attracted to you.

The tools can kill opportunities if used incorrectly.

image via rabataller

Taking Charge Of My Finances

I’ve recently started reading and employing the tips and tricks of “I Will Teach You to be Rich” by Ramit Sethi. His blog iwillteachyoutoberich.com is one of the most popular personal finance blogs on the web and his book promises to be very valuable.

The reason that I chose Ramit’s book over the thousands of other personal finance books is that he has many of the same beliefs or philosophies that I do. He argues that being actively involved in your finances on a daily basis and worrying about them is not the way to success. He argues simplification and automation, many of the same principles from “The 4 Hour Work Week“. I’ve worked hard in the last few months to really improve my productivity and effectiveness of my work days.

With my upcoming wedding and other big financial decisions looming, I decided to get this book and really take charge of my situation. I’m very lucky to have such a solid income during such a crazy time and I owe it to myself to take advantage of that. I would highly encourage buying this book and employing a more automated savings strategy . Stop worrying about savings and create a system that will both simplify your life and maximize the results of your financial situation.

Now Where To Invest?

As financial control is regained, we will have to make some decisions about where to put our money. This decision is a tough one, in a time where many of our parents, the baby boomers, have lost significant portions of their net worth it’s very difficult to trust the stock market.

When I was 12 years old I put $500 dollars (a ton of money to a 12 year old) into Motorola and AOL stocks, two companies that were “supposed” to remain strong for in the long term. After the 2001 tech bubble both stocks plummeted. Even today they remain practically worthless from the amounts I first purchased them. More recently, in the last 3-4 years, as I started getting some decent money to invest in my 401k and other retirement accounts. I again trusted ‘the market’ and I’ve lost huge with the recent financial crisis. I now hate the stock market.

My father has always been a real estate guy. He owns a few apartments and has done well with them. I’m very tempted to save as much money as possible outside of retirement accounts so that I can get into the real estate game as soon as possible. But this post from Charlie O’Donnell’s blog, ‘This is going to be big’, challenges the existing belief that real estate will be the investment savior it has been in the past.

So this question from Charlie’s post raises a large internal debate. Where should I put my damn money?

What are some of the other things young people might invest in?  Well, think about my specific case?  In order to buy an apartment (you know, since I did the silly thing of buying something I could afford), I moved out to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a 45 minute commute into the city.  On average, I go into the city six days a week.  That’s about an extra 4 hours of time compared to if I was living in the city per week.  Multiplied over a whole year, at a rate of $100 an hour (let’s say I chose to do consulting with that time), you’re talking about $20,000 a year.  I never factored that cost in.  Nor did I factor the social cost.  Who am I not building better relationships with because I live further away?  Isn’t investing in my social network at this point a higher potential return than real estate as an asset class–especially given that I’m an entrepreneur?

Maybe buying a cheap home away from everyone isn’t the best decision. Maybe splurging to put myself in ridiculous, freedom limiting debt isn’t the best decision either. So where will I focus my time and efforts?

My Investment Focus

With so much uncertainty in the stock market, and the social costs of a potential real estate investment, I’m investing in the asset class that I have the most confidence in, myself. My financial investments will be moderate for now with many traditional savings accounts, waiting for the right opportunity to buy a house. I’ll continue to expose myself to the upside of a recovering stock market through my retirement accounts (401k, Roth IRA, etc.)  But, as far as my most valuable resource, my time, I’m going to continue to focus on my professional development at work,  my web startup SocialDreamium, and never stop learning.

It’s extremely important to me to enjoy every minute of my life. I have a specific list of dreams that I keep open in RTM and I monitor it almost daily. I am going keep the level of international travel as high as I can afford and focus on the personal and professional relationships I have with the people around me.

When making investment decisions I would strongly encourage you to look at more than just your finances. Think about your life as a whole and think about what kind of return you want from both financial and life investments. Keep the big picture in mind,  periodically (but not obsessively) monitor the results to your  investments and you WILL reach your goals both financially and otherwise.

If you’ve struggled with these investment decision and want to share please do in the comments below.

image via Robert Scoble’s flickr

Over the past 2 months I’ve made some drastic changes to how I use Twitter (which I will share below). When I was in China, as I was reading The 4 Hour Work Week, I realized that my control over my own productivity was slipping from my hands. I spent so much time on non-productive tasks and it was time for a drastic change. I realized that my Twitter habits were guilty of productivity theft and I needed to put an end to it. Here’s the experiment…

Before

At one point, I was following 1001 people on Twitter. At home on my Mac I used Tweetdeck and REACH to manage my twitter followers. The constant flow of Tweets was entertaining for sure but because of my desire to see as much as I could from the “Twittersphere” I dropped other important tasks. At work I limited Twitter but used iGoogle’s Betwittered to follow the streams. It got to the point that I couldn’t even see the Tweets from people I knew personally because of the huge number of people I followed that I didn’t know but were just interesting to me.

I have always been a huge fan of taking Twitter relationships offline. Late last year I met Ross Kimbarovsky, founder of crowdSPRING via Twitter. We had dinner one night and now have a solid, offline friendship. Same goes for Steffan Antonas, a WordPress & Twitter guru out in San Diego. When I was home I met Steffan for drinks and we now stay in touch, sometimes via Twitter and sometimes via email. Another example is Fraser Kelton, VP of BizDev for AdaptiveBlue (maker of GLUE), who I’ll be meeting up with in two weeks on my trip to NYC. These are just a few examples of many more!

There are some incredibly valuable relationships to be had out there and I’ll always love Twitter for making those relationships easier to develop and find. But it got to the point that I couldn’t separate the social networking from the social noise making. I didn’t want to lose the ability to develop those relationships into valuable ones only because I was trying to keep up with so many other people I’d never met.

Realization

As I realized that I had to make this change I first had to decide how. Another relationship that I’ve begun to nurture through Twitter is the founder of Seesmic, Loic Lemeur. I follow his blog closely and saw him post on his drastic change in Twitter usage.  He had the Twitter folks write a script that would “unfollow all”. He did this because his direct messages got out of control. He was following 23,o00 people and understandably it was overbearing. 

I realized that I wanted to take a similar action. My goal was to get back to my close friends and people I’d met in person. I wanted to see the random actions, “I fed my dog ice cream and he loved it”, from my friends (so I could later make fun of them) but I didn’t need to see these posts from everyone. So how would I do that? What would the affects be and how could I test before making the jump?

Change

In China I basically didn’t use Twitter. This was my test. I think I had a total of 10-15 posts the entire month and it was relaxing. It freed me to focus on what I was learning from my training courses and it freed me to explore China. I reduced my blog posting to ‘travel only’, and I focused on the experiences I was having. I felt freed, I felt focused, and much more productive. I knew that when I got back I needed to apply some of the Tim Ferriss (4HWW) principles to really change my productivity and focus. I would employ the low(er) information diet.

So, when I got back, I promptly got in touch with Loic and asked if he could share the script with me. He couldn’t give me the script but I got in touch with Zac Bowling (@zbowling) and he ran it for me. In a total of about 20 minutes I was following O people. I had completely started from scratch with Twitter and it was scary. I started re-adding people like my parents (yes, they’re on Twitter), my sisters, my college friends, the people who I stated above, and other people that I knew in person. It was easy to find who I communicated with most often using saved Twitter searches in REACH (coming to beta soon!). 

I definitely do need to apologize to some people because I haven’t yet added everyone back that I should. I’m doing this gradually. If I know you in person I’m probably following you (again). However, for those who I don’t know in person I’ve limited my consumption of your tweets to regain my personal productivity. Please don’t take it personally. If we have had conversations, please @reply me and get back in touch, I’d love it. I should say that there is no goal here of having a ridiculous follower/following ratio. I could careless. I only care about the value that I get out of the tool and I’ll take almost any action that will increase that value measure.

After

The results of my experiment have been pretty interesting. Right away I lost about 150 followers. It dropped from 1500 followers to about 1340. Losing those followers didn’t bother me at all. If people are following me only/just because I’m following them then peace. Then, people started following me at a much faster rate and even though I’d lose about 10 followers a day, I’d add about 11. Now my follower number is about 1360 and I sincerely hope to interact with many of those people in the future.

Twitter is very much a two way street. Those who interact with my question type tweets I’ll follow and interact with them, those who don’t, well I guess they’ll continue to just follow my tweets. I definitely engaged in the question tweets of anyone who @replies me or that I’m already following. I’m a huge supporter of the platform and now that my Tweets go directly and quickly into Facebook it’s engaging even more friends!

My productivity has sky-rocketed due to my low information diet and reduction of Tweets to consume. Now I rarely consume Tweets and send Tweets at the same time. By doing this it’s easy to spiral into a Twitter session that lasts much longer than it needs to. I can’ t say I’d recommend this experiment to everyone, but I would recommend identifying what and who are important to you and making sure that the tool enables better communication instead of the tool becoming a barrier to solid communication. 

Below is a hilarious video about the “Twittershere” shared by my sis @taylorgraves

When I bought my iPod Touch in preparation for my trip to China I had been hoping to double it as a PDA and was shocked to see that my calendar syncing options on a PC consisted of either syncing with outlook via iTunes, or – wait for it – syncing with outlook via iTunes (you’ve gotta be kidding me). And on a Mac, I’d have to go through iCal which also requires a manual sync, not interested.

On the surface this might seem reasonable, except that:

I’m not going to sync through iTunes on my work laptop because my Mac, at home, holds all my tunes. I did not want any manual sync’ing to have to be done and getting Outlook at home was absolutely not an option. I like the web interface for Gmail and wasn’t interested in trying an option like Thunderbird.

I found the solution to my problems with NuevaSync, which allows direct over-the-air, native synchronisation between Google Calendar and my iPod – which basically means that my appointments are synced both ways without manual intervention or iTunes. You’ll need to sign up here for an account, but it’s free and pretty straight forward to set up – just a matter of configuring your NuevaSync account to look at your GCal, and then configuring your iPod to point at NeuvaSync. The interface is awesomely simple with no frills, just functionality. In addition to  the iPod touch, NuevaSync also supports the various flavours of iPhone and Windows Mobile based PDAs and smartphones.

No I have both my Gcal and my Gcontacts completely sync in real time with no manual effort. Glorious!

Taylor: what’s Friendfeed exactly, what you’ve done online? what you’ve posted, commented, etc?
Taylor:  what’s the purpose of it, i’m trying to understand
Me:  it aggregates all of your online activity from twitter to flickr to blog posts…it brings everything to one platform.
Taylor:  alright, i can’t see that being that useful for a company, maybe just individuals
Me:  try and change your thinking… don’t think, “would this be helpful or not”, instead think, “this would be helpful, how?” You almost have to force yourself to find how a tool would be helpful first…then test it with that attitude. Then if it really isn’t helpful, then dump it…but a lot of times people aren’t able to find the value in their first glance at a tool.
Me:  make sense?
Taylor:  yeah it does!

This notion of forcing yourself to find value in new tools comes from the fact that people have a very difficult time thinking outside the box. The reason that people have to think outside of the box to find the value of many of these new social softwares, or web tools is because these tools force people to create entirely new workflows for getting things done. These tools cause people to change habits and change pre-conditioned understandings of how things are done. That’s never easy, at first! At first the re-tweaking of “how” may seem unproductive but often that re-tweaking allows for greater productivity once that new workflow becomes the “norm”.

Example: If I normally open my browser and open my top 3 sports sites, top 2 political commentaries, and my 2 family members blogs it is not going to make any sense to me when somebody tells me that I can just open Google Reader to read all of that. Without the knowledge of how an RSS reader works opening up one tool to read all 7 of those sites won’t make any sense. At first it may seem weird to just open Google Reader to read my sites but when I dive into the tool and actually use it I find that it is significantly more productive to centralize that consumption of information.

This is just one simple example of how not understanding a new technology might hide the value of it. Just as I encouraged my sister to use a technology, in this case Friendfeed, before she says, “I can’t see that being that useful…”, I would encourage you to test out a tool before deciding if its useful! I’m asked all the time how I think a growing business can take advantage of the web and the interaction it enables, and many times my response is, “try it out and you tell me”. So much of the time the value will be totally different for one person or company than it will be for others.

It is similar to the notion of ‘innocent before proven guilty’. You have to give new technologies or tools a chance before judging them