Some of the solutions are high-tech, some are lower-tech. Some are better for big companies, others are good for small companies and families.

On balance, here are the things we couldn’t live without:

List Manager

Some we like are Evernote, Remember the Milk and Toodle-Do.  A small ring binder with tabs works too, but there’s no sync/backup that way!

Shared Calendar

We like electronic calendars because they’re quick and easy to update, share with others and carry around (handheld sync). Google calendar and Microsoft Exchange are our favourites.

A Good Handheld Device

Our choices are Blackberry or iPhone for calls, email, SMS, calendar, electronic lists, access to online apps and music/white noise. Remember that these gadgets have off switches, voice mail and autoresponders. YOU are in control.

Integrated Email/Task Manager

Microsoft Outlook or Entourage – configured well and used wisely, these are fantastic. Out of the box and without a smart system, they’re just big, dumb email programs

Project Management Tools

We love Mind Manager (for whole brain thinking and collaborative planning) and Teamwork (linear but brilliant platform for driving action).

My amazing virtual assistant told me the other day she doesn’t have SMS on her phone. What?!

She has every application known to modern man on her computer, but I can’t send her a message when I’m not at my desk? I just didn’t get it. I’ve always thought she lived on Planet Earth where we ALL have SMS…but then again, we’ve never actually met. She says she’s somewhere in Canada, eh.

I realised our entire working relationship for the past 18 months has been through Skype, so I only bug her when I’m sitting at my computer. Now she can run, but she can’t hide…

Since Milk wouldn’t run on my trusty Treo, it has now been retired and – at long last – there’s an iPhone in my bag. Seems the folks at RTM should have gotten commission on the sale.

I’ve weaned myself from desktop-driven Outlook Tasks and am now living 100% on Milk – no matter where I am.

I used to make fun of my husband for the amount of time he spends ‘playing with his phone.’ I’ve  just spent the weekend doing the same thing, and I am one happy – and productive – camper. Now he and I are sharing tasks through Milk and talking about standardising our tags so our smartlists will play nicely with each other. Our poor children have such geeks for parents.

Besides Remember the Milk, here were my other must-haves on the Home screen: Outlook calendar sync, Zoho and Google Docs for omni-access to our company info, Plaxo for personal contacts, Kodak Gallery for the pix and a nifty Hong Kong Weather app for typhoon season.

I’ve only had one hiccup with my new set-up: My kids selected the ringtone (a very loud ‘old phone’) and SMS alert (an equally loud old car horn), and I hadn’t worked out how to set the phone to silent before going into my first meeting today – during which I received 2 calls and 3 text messages. I do know how to switch it off now – ahem.

For years I have said that any good task manager must be portable. This has posed a real challenge for our clients who love using Outlook Tasks but carry handheld devices which are not as Task-savvy as Outlook. (Note – all my praise for Outlook Tasks is reserved for the OL 2003 Task Pad. 2007’s To-do Bar has taken us backwards.)

But I digress…back to the problem with Outlook and portable tasks. All the time and energy people spent configuring the Task Pad at the desktop was completely lost in a sea of All Tasks on the handhelds. The Palm OS used to do a pretty good job of acting like Outlook, but that’s all over now.

The other problem arises when Outlook users are out and about, wanting to put a Task on the list but limited by the weak or non-existent task creation capabilities of their particular handheld devices.

Thus it would seem that to get our tasks to behave consistently between the desktop and handheld, we’re going to have to look for organised-task-sync solutions in the cloud.

The good news is that the folks at Remember the Milk are doing a great job of exactly this…and the Pro version with Milk Sync plays nicely with Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices so that we can stay organised and focused on the road. Naturally,  iPhone users get their own app, and Milk’s integration with Gmail and Google Calendar is heading in the right direction for Firefox users.  Google Gears means we can use Milk even when we’re offline.

Good googley golly – this could actually be the full package, at long last.

I could go on forever about email and SMS reminders, locations (spooky), tags, notes, smartlists, and all the other workflow-friendly features of Remember the Milk, but we’ll save that for another time and place.

As usual, my better half was right; Milk does indeed look like Task Nirvana. Watch this space.

We’ve all got loads of these to manage, and we’re way past being able to keep track of it all in our heads. Some people keep a written list or store the information in a computer file, but this is risky as others could easily access your private information.

You need a system that is secure and accessible anytime, anywhere.

The folks around here have used two applications quite happily:

Splash ID
1Password

Which to pick? Depends on your operating system and which handheld device you want to sync with, so have a read through the sites and go for the one that suits you better.

Both operate the same way: You just have to remember a master password, which unlocks the password vault on your desktop as well as on your handheld.

Like all important passwords, we recommend you don’t use anything easy for others to guess, and that you do change it frequently.

Both also integrate with your web browser to securely auto-fill login data to save you time.

Is it safe? They say it is, and I believe them. It’s your call. I’ve got a couple of critical passwords that are still stored only in my head – and my husband’s,  just in case.

System Set-up

These password managers are super easy to use, so we’d suggest you set aside just 1-2 hours to:

1. Make your selection
2. Download and install the software
3. Enter all your passwords, web logins, etc.
4. Sync with your handheld
5. Back up your data and test the backup
6. Get rid of all the other places where you were storing passwords (exception: keep your head)
7. Create a shortcut to the password manager on your Start Menu or Quick Launch Toolbar (PC) or in your Dock (Mac)
8. Pat yourself on the back for organising something really important

Maintenance

Establish a regular backup routine for the password manager so your updates remain safe, and set this recurring date in your reminder system. Monthly is probably a good cycle.

From now on, pop new passwords straight into your password manager the moment you set them up. No more ‘forgotten password’ requests!

Here are some of the silly, expensive, time-consuming and embarrassing things I’ve done to cope while out and about:

• Called directory assistance multiple times to get numbers I need
• Called our office manager multiple times to get numbers I need
• Successfully logged into our online contact database through the web browser in my Treo (after a few tries and wracking my brain to remember the password), only to be told the page was too big to be displayed. Called my husband, asked him to log into the database to get the numbers I need (our office was closed).
• Told people our appointments were tentative until I could get back to my computer, then had to remember to email and confirm
• Called people to double-check the time and place of our meeting

This is crazy…and I’m supposed to know better! How many minutes of my own time have I wasted? How many minutes of other people’s time have I wasted? How many times did I skip making a call to move something forward because it was just too much trouble to get the number? How many first impressions have I squandered?

I can’t afford to lose this much time or that many opportunities…so I’d had enough and decided to fix the problem.

Total # of minutes it actually took to permanently fix the problems with synchronising: 46

It really goes without saying that I wish I’d done this sooner.

Now it’s your turn…

What persistent, time-consuming problem could you solve (or get solved by someone else if you don’t have the time/tech skills, etc.) in less than 46 minutes that will improve your ability to function more effectively on a day-to-day basis? What can you sort out that will ultimately save you time, save money or improve your ability to make money?

I urge you to go for it – do it TODAY. Set a timer to see just how few minutes it actually takes. Then enjoy the rewards of this effort!

So what’s Zoho? It’s Address Booking (contact management) for your business. Well, that’s how it begins anyway…and then you discover everything else the ZohoCRM can do…and then you stumble upon all the other Zoho apps…and then you’re good and hooked. In less than a month of converting our team’s Outlook Contacts, Excel sales management system and a few Google docs bits and bobs to the ZohoCRM, I can measure the improvement in company systems in cold hard cash. In other words, we’ve just closed a bunch of new business that we had sort of forgotten was even in our pipeline!

Our team has been reviewing CRM options for a few months, and we’re pleased as punch with our choice. To save you a bit of time, here’s a look at the features we love and a few we’re hoping for:

Why we went with Zoho instead of others

• It’s web-based, i.e. accessible by our consultants and support staff scattered around Hong Kong as well as our VA in Canada.
• It’s free for 3 users. Additional users are only US$12/month.
• It’s not software. Your membership gives you all the benefits of ongoing development.
• It’s super flexible. How many custom fields does a girl need? Well, it’s a bit like shoes, isn’t it…
• It’s really hard to muck things up. You can undo just about anything…even your data imports!
• The tutorials and how-to Wikis are comprehensive and actually do what they’re meant to do (tell you how-to…)
• The support is incredible. Ask a question and get a friendly, spot-on answer from my new best friends Adam or Gopal within hours – usually within minutes. If they’re not sure what on earth you’re trying to ask (ahem), they’ll jump onto a desktop sharing session to have a look…using Zoho Meeting, of course!

My Zoho Wish List

• Click-through tracking on the Zoho mass emails (hard to beat Constant Contact for this feature)
• Mass email autoresponders and surveys (a la iContact)

I think my family is happy I have now ticked ‘Zoho set-up’ off my to-do list. Little do they know that I’m about to start playing with the marketing automation features! Maybe I won’t mention that just yet.

1. Are you comfortable with your data being stored by a third party? Be sure you are happy with the security set-up.
2. Will you regularly backup your data in case said third party ever goes under?

We use a number of web-based apps to manage personal and business contacts, finances, and photos. In all cases we chose to go with reputable and well established service providers (Plaxo, Zoho, QuickBooks, Kodak). In all cases we also do a monthly backup (export) of all our data, just to be sure we have our own copy on an external hard drive or DVD (or both, for the pix!).

The protection/backup notion also works nicely in reverse: if anything ever happened to the set of data at home/at the office, we’d have duplicates online. Over the top? Well, we have lived through the fall of the Soviet Union in Central Asia, the Great Hanshin Earthquake in Japan and SARS in Hong Kong, so we’re a wee bit cautious about these things. It all kinda happens in an instant…!

Besides indulging in silly TV shows, we have been getting ourselves
ultra-organised at home, particularly in the area of “Address Booking,” a term coined by one of our WorkFlow program
participants last month. I love this phrase, which describes
how and where to store all the contact details of our family, friends and work
relationships. Like many people, we had partial data in a few different places
and are usually too busy in December to sort everything out in time for a
Christmas letter! We decided it was time to solve this problem once and for
all.

As a household that sports both PCs and Macs, we chose to go with good ‘ol Plaxo because it is web-based and allows us to
synchronise family contact data with the Mac address book as well as Outlook on
my (annoying but unavoidable) PC. We can all access or update the information
from anywhere, anytime. We can also share our family calendar through Plaxo.
Set-up is quick and easy…and it’s free!

If your Address Booking could be better organised, why not set
aside a couple of hours to sort it out? You’ll be SO glad you did – as will
your family and friends who would love to hear from you. I sure hope ours still
remember who we are…!