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The Lowdown on Productivity Tools

Welcome to another new LOWDOWN, that part of the Production Office that brings you tips and tricks on all the tools you need to enhance your career as a filmmaker and creative.

Today, it’s Productivity.

Anyone who follows my blog will know I’m pretty hot on productivity. For far too long I spent my days being busy, but rarely productive. Since harnessing some of the tools I’m talking about today and putting some best practices of getting things done into place, I’ve become much more focused, much more productive and much more successful.

Let’s have a look, then, at some of the tools you can use to make your life easier.

EVERNOTE

Evernote comes at the top of the list today for two reasons: number one, it’s the tool I was most recently introduced to and two, it’s the tool I now find the most invaluable.

Evernote is a desktop and web-based app that you can also get for almost all smart phones.  It’s free to get started, but if you go over a certain storage limit you have to start paying.  That said, I’ve used it quite a lot and still not exceeded my free allowance.

What Evernote does is to collect together all those bits and pieces of things on the web that you want to take note of, as well as allowing you to compile your own To Do lists, projects and other notes.  It’s the simplest, cheapest and easiest way of keeping track of just about everything you need to remember. The Evernote logo isn’t an elephant for nothing.

THINGS

The second tool that works hard to keep you on time and on-topic is Things. The biggest down side? It’s Mac-only. So all you Windows dinosaurs can’t take advantage of it. You also have to pay around £30 for it, which puts it a step below Evernote to begin with.

Once you get past those elements, though, Things is brilliant for tracking To Do’s, project files, notes and reminders. Most usefully, though – and what helps to elevate Things to a point worth paying for – is it’s interaction and syncability ((new word alert!)) with iCal and iPhone. If you use Apple’s MobileMe syncing solution to share your calendar across all your home computers, like I do, Things swaps and shares data seamlessly with not only all of your computers, but your phone as well. An invaluable way of keeping track of everything you need to know when you need to know it.

BASECAMP

There are numerous online project management tools that help you and all your collaborators to keep track of all the strands that make up your project, but the best one I’ve found (and used) is Basecamp.

Unlike other, equally useful online tools like Huddle, it’s Basecamp’s pricing structure that really makes it stand out. You pay a flat monthly fee from $24 (£15) and upwards that allows unlimited numbers of people to join your project and work on things with you. Huddle, by contrast, charges you per user per month, meaning a major film or creative project would quickly rack up sizable fees.

Basecamp ((and, in fact, all online project management tools)) is best used for sharing documents and keeping track of project timelines and goals in a way that everyone involved can see. Not only is that a great motivational tool – if everyone know what you should be doing, you’d better be doing it – but also a great way of making sure key things don’t get missed and that everyone knows the timeline their working to and the goals their aiming for.

There are hundreds of different tools of productivity for you to explore, but I’d suggest you limit yourself to trying one or two at a time, otherwise you risk undoing all their good work by spending all day getting to know them and setting them up as opposed to using them to help get your work done.

For more o productivity, keep an eye on my blog here, as well as checking out the99percent and lifehacker, my two online bibles of productivity tips and tools.

Stirring Debate to Fuel Creativity

Create Debate to fuel your creativityStarting a debate is a great way to engage your creative muscles. Not only does it force you to examine your own perspectives, it also opens you up to taking on board new ideas.

Great debates create new angles to examine problems and new ways to solve them.

As a writer, stirring debate can also help you to write both sides of an argument. I frequently start writing scenes between two characters and realise that it’s totally one-sided because I agree strongly with one of the characters. By entering a debate with my friends and Twitter buddies, I can get different views and arguments that help me round out my characters in a much more successful way.

What debates have you used to aid your writing or creativity? How did you get them started – is the interactivity of Twitter the best way to go, or the public discussion of Facebook?

Why I’m Right

Happy Monday from Calvin and HobbesI posted on Friday that you shouldn’t start anything on a Monday because it’s generally a mess of doing things other than those on your To Do’s.

Case in point: today I knew I had all morning taken up with a schools project I’m working on at the moment, then a meeting in MK at 3pm and one immediately afterwards.  I knew I had a couple of hours in the middle, so I’d scheduled some time to make some calls and catch up on the weekend email.

It’s now 8.45pm and I’ve not only haven’t I made any of the calls, answered (or even read in detail) any email and, which is even more of a crime ((in my mind, anyway, INCEPTION-style)), is the fact that I’m only just getting around to my Monday blog post.

So, in an odd sort of way, what I’ve achieved today is prove myself 100% right. Sometimes it’s no fun being right.

Finding your Productivity Peak

a productivity peak

My most productive time of day is very early in the morning. I’m used to being up at 6.30am to take K to the station for her commute to London and I know I work best in those 2-3 hours immediately I get up.

I have another burst of focus around the 5-6pm mark, where I tend to push myself into completing things before calling it a night.

Finding these productivity peaks not only helps you be more productive, but is much less likely to allow you to become distracted by other things. Just remember to close down Twitter and Facebook while you’re trying to make the most of your peaks.

When is your productivity peak?