For the everyday Marketer, there are often five overlooked things you can do right now to become more productive in your day to day work.

1. Turn Off Instant Messengers
2. Turn Off Your Email
3. Turn Off Your Phone
4. Close The Door To Your Office/Get In A Quiet Place
5. Turn Off Twitter Updates

Now you have the guidelines. The common theme in all of these methods is to get rid of distractions and just focus on the task at hand. The problem with having email, phone, etc on is you are subconsciously multitasking all the time. What multitasking does is it takes away solid focus on one item.

You may think you are accomplishing massive amounts of work in your sessions. Although if you look back you will find you are actually completing less work overall. One minute writing a blog post, the next you are checking an email about the latest Viagra offer. All those little minutes here and there add up to staggering amounts.

(I will concede to the ADD/ADHD crowd. I have seen it first hand how bad those folks have it. Its extremely tough to concentrate on one thing at a time.)

Regardless of your setup, these simple tips can really help you cut out the distractions and get some seriously focused productive work done.

It has been a tremendous help in my daily work, even if its only for a few hours, its worth the effort. With a little effort I have been able to make it a habit.

If you wanted to be an overachiever you could take it to..a…whole…notha..level, and you could make a habit out of taking care of yourself personally. Basically working out, eating right, exercising your brain and doing some reading.

Have fun, Talk Soon.

-Ryan

I am constantly registering domain names for all sorts of projects and crazy ideas that come to me. I recently blogged about using Domize to find yourself a domain name, but I’ve never talked about where you should register your domain names.

I constantly hear just about everyone praising GoDaddy and how easy it is to use and its so cheap at $10 to register a .com and another $3-4 for the privacy service.

OK lets count it up, thats $14. Doesn’t sound like much right? Well when you own 100+ domain names at $14. That starts to seem like a good chunk of change.

Now I started using GoDaddy way back about 6-7 years ago. Right when I got into marketing online. It was the only destination, for a while, for good domain name pricing.

What if I were to tell you there was a cheaper solution? Well there is, Dreamhost.com. I’ll be honest, the hosting isn’t the absolute greatest, but if all youre doing is serving up some information products. Then its not such a bad idea, actually its pretty damn cheap. Back to the domain names, Dreamhost does all of their domains for only $9.95 per year, which includes a FREE privacy service on the domain. I recommend that anyone use them for domain name hosting.

In the last two years with them I haven’t had a single moment where their domain system was down or didn’t work. I currently host all of my domains through them which compared to GoDaddy has saved me a bunch of cash. Check them out and save yourself some money.

Wanted to share a really good IM client resource. Recently I have been looking to decrease the amount of time I spend checking email, IM’ing and Twittering. Mainly because time is an increasingly important thing in my day to day work load. By chance I happened upon Digsby. Digsby basically mashes everything together; IM, gmail, twitter. My three main items I have been using on a day to day basis. This has saved me heaps of time by not having to open Gmail for everything and I can twitter and IM right from one piece of software. If you feel like giving something new a shot, definitely check out this program.

Download Digsby 

Has Digsby helped you cut down time in your day to day work?

-Ryan

So for those of you who are part of the massive Twitter Revolution! Something I have become quite annoyed with lately. Mostly due to the massive amounts of trash messages that come through it. I have found a better solution for me, namely Pownce. Pownce really pulls together all the elements of Twitter and add some file and event functionality to it. Overall its user interface is extremely streamlined and easy to use. The big benefit to me, is that Pownce allows you to easily reply directly to other peoples messages, rather than the whole ‘@youtwit’ Twitter method, this is a direct and inline messaging system. Makes things much more simple and easy to understand.

The system is still going through its growing pains, so it has the occasional hic-up.  The only things I have had trouble with, was finding friends and looking at older messages in the system. Pownce has some quirk in the system when you add a friend it stop displaying their old messages. Makes it a little difficult to check out and comment on the older things they have done. Regardless Pownce does have a desktop app and a mobile app to keep you jotting notes where ever you may be.

If you’re on Pownce feel free to add me as a friend: http://pownce.com/ryanyockey/

Or just go over and sign-up for an account: http://pownce.com

So in case you’ve been hiding under a rock in the tech world, Flickr has recently added a nice new feature for its users, or so they thought. They gave users the ability to add 90 second video clips to their accounts. You have to be a PRO user to be able to use this feature. Now there are three schools of thought on this topic, let me break it down.

1. The New User: Looking at Flickr from a completely new user standpoint. I’m here to upload photos, maybe meet some new friends, but most likely connect with family. Now the addition of video for these users, probably not a highly used feature never the less its probably used here and there. I know a lot of my family likes to snap some quick video clips with their digital cameras. So really not getting any problems from this group. I’m sure this take up roughly 50% of the user base of Flickr.

2. The Casual User: This is most likely the user that uploads new photo sets weekly from various things around the net. Maybe he has purchased the PRO account for the cheap 25$ a year. Now that this new video ability is here, why not take the extra five minutes and upload your latest clips of you jumping on a couch or getting plowed at the bar. This is the group I would say I fall into. I have the PRO account, but i’m no avid photographer. This user group would most likely land about 30% of the Flickr user base.

3. The Die Hard User: These are hard core photographers or they are part of the original group who started using Flickr. They tend to take everything photography very seriously. They have been doing since long before Flickr, or learned and done it professionally, or as a serious hobby. Either way they are photographers and at heart they love the camera and not the camcorder. To this group the addition of video is an abomination to photography, the very thing Flickr stood for from the start. Now I would peg this group at the remainder of 20% of the Flickr user base.

Now really I personally am glad they added these short video clips. It shows that Flickr is thinking outside of the box and ready to gain even more marketshare. Whether these Die Hards accept it is up to them, but unfortunately their voice isnt big enough to sway the good folks at Flickr. People lack the ability to change and adapt. I try to look at it from their perspective, but its just the elitist attitude. I see no problems with it, its not like people are being forced to watch the movies or even forced to stare at the pictures. Time will tell how this develops. Regardless, good job Flickr. Lets see some more great ideas from their group.

Where do you stand on this one?

Just finished doing the third episode of The Net Raiders. A very rocky start, but we’re coming along with our radio skills. Check it out if you have a few free moments. If you have time drop us a line at our site.

TNR Episode 3

Recently I got together with some friends of mine and started doing a live podcast show. We don’t really stick to just one topic. It tends to run around between Tech News, Entertainment, and lots of Gaming discussions. We have some basic topics set in place and just discuss everything we can gripe or praise about it. Over all its pretty fun show to do.

You can listen to it here: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/thenetraiders

So I broke down and finally bought an Apple product. I ended up buying an Apple iPod nano. *giga-gasp!* Yeah well its a great little MP3 player. My wife has the old nano and she is totally jealous now. So score one for me.

Overall I made my decision because I like the sleek small style of it. I like that it plays video. The clarity on movies is surprisingly very good. I wasn’t expecting much from it. I also wanted something small for when I go out jogging. I will most likely rarely use it for anything other than jogging or maybe when I’m reading.

So what kind of MP3 player are you using?

I am pretty much all about listening to music while I work. These days I listen to just about anything I can get my hands on. What keeps me the most productive while working though is mostly instrumental music. Mostly movie score soundtracks, classical music, or trance. I also frequently listen to KCRW. Its a great Los Angeles radio station that I used to listen to a lot more when I lived in LA, but now that I’m in Seattle this is the next best alternative. You can find them on Shoutcast if you want to give them a listen.

So my question for you is what music keeps you productive while working?

During a few research quests I’ve been on. I stumbled upon a site by Rob Abott who deals with user experience at Ribbit. He made a real interesting post about the YouTube video player and how it could be improved. Now I’m not looking to make the next YouTube or anything, but I do find his ideas very interesting. It also makes you want to take a step back on your own work and really look at it from more of a user perspective and see where you can improve it.  In any case take a moment to read his post.

Link: YouTube Video Player Redesign