Mottainai (pronounced moht-tai-nai) is a Japanese word meaning "a sense of regret concerning waste when the intrinsic value of an object or resource is not properly utilized". There is no direct English translation, but it is similar to the idea of 'waste not, want not' and making proper use of resources.

In my Toolkit workshops, I often come across people who are already using some of the digital tools, platforms and apps I recommend. But rarely are they using them to their full capability.

Today, in the spirit of Mottainai and using things properly, I wanted to share 5 lesser known functions of 5 popular tools to encourage you to make the most out of your digital life.

1. TweetDeck: New Followers

TweetDeck is a third party Twitter application that you can use to manage all your social networks from one place. Whether you are using TweetDeck on your phone, your desktop or on the web, TweetDeck is a time-effective way of staying up to date.

A little know feature of TweetDeck is the ability to set up a New Followers column. By default, when you set up a Twitter account, you're sent an email every time you have a new follower. Exciting at the beginning, annoying when you start to have more followers. By setting up a New Followers column in TweetDeck, you can view the person's photo and bio and decide whether to follow or block (if they are spam) them straightaway.

To set up the column go to Add New Column > Core > New Followers.

2. Dropbox: Getting More Space

Dropbox is a neat tool that creates a 'mini-server' for your documents accessible from your desktop, the cloud and your phone. Your free account comes with 2GB of storage and you can increase this (250MB each time) by using your referral code to invite friends to join the service.

But did you know that there are other ways of easily increasing your storage? This article from LifeHacker suggests ways of increasing your storage by 768MB by social sharing on Twitter and Facebook, following Dropbox on Twitter, and by giving feedback to the Dropbox team.

To sign up for your free account, visit Dropbox today.

3. LinkedIn: Get Introduced Through a Connection

I am sure you are familiar with LinkedIn - the social network of choice for professionals. There are too many great features of LinkedIn to mention here, but one underused feature I wanted to flag up is the ability to get introduced to someone through an existing connection.

To contact someone through LinkedIn, you either have to have worked with them or know their email address. However, if the person you wish to connect with is connected to one of your 1st connections, you can ask your connection to forward a message to them.

I have used this successfully in the past to contact potential speakers for events I have run. I think that if a request comes through a trusted connection, this can be much stronger than an unsolicited email.

First search for the person you wish to connect with in the People Search box. If they have a 2^nd connection beside them, have a look at who connects you to them (see screenshot).

Then click on ‘Get introduced through a connection’ and fill out the required details. You can also leave a message for your LinkedIn contact so they know why you are trying to contact this person.

The more you build your LinkedIn connections, the more potential people you can have access to, and the more useful this feature becomes, so start building those connections today.

Start by connecting with me - I know lots of people ; )

4. Gmail: Keyboard Shortcuts

Gmail is my email platform for choice because of its powerful features that allow me to get through my Inbox super fast and get on with my important work.

An often overlooked feature of Gmail is the extensive keyboard shortcuts. Using these shortcuts and my computer mouse allows me to process email quickly and get on with more important things.

The shortcuts I use the most are:

# = delete. Use this shortcut to read/delete quickly.

e = archive. If you have set up Filters to add Labels to your emails as they come in (recommended), than use 'e' to quickly read/archive.

! = marks as Spam and removes this email from your Inbox.

s = stars the conversion.

To turn shortcuts on, go to the Gear icon > Mail Settings > General > Keyboard Shortcuts On.

5. WordPress: Schedule Posts

WordPress is the powerful content management system that allows you to build static and blog based websites like my website 8fold. (Do check out the free WordPress eCourse on the website if you want to know more.)

When you write a blog post, it is dated by default on the day you write it. However, you can use the date function in WordPress to schedule posts to run in the future. This can be incredibility useful if you know you are going to be particularly busy one week and miss your posting schedule; or if you have a run of inspiration and write three posts at a time; or if you are going away on vacation.

What are your favourite 'hidden' features of these popular tools? Do share in the comments.

Google Analytics (GA) is the industry standard for getting data about your website. There are many other solutions, some of them in real time such as Clicky, (GA has a 1.5 hour delay) but GA is easy to set up and use and gives plenty of information to know more about your website and it’s visitors. 

An important point to make at the outset is to remind ourselves that GA is not about looking just at how many people have visited your site or even admiring the pretty coloured graphs. The data is useless unless we do something with it.

The key thing with GA is not to look at numbers but to use the data to make better business decisions. For example, if you have a high bounce rate (someone visiting your site and leaving almost immediately) from your home page, perhaps the information on this page is confusing. If you are spending a lot of time on social media (Twitter, Facebook) but are seeing little traffic from these sources, then maybe you need to reconsider your marketing strategy.

Getting Started with Google Analytics

Sign up for a free account at the Google Analytics site. You will generate a little piece of code that will have to be manually inserted into each page of your site that you want tracked. If you have a WordPress site, there are a multitude of plugins that do this automatically for you. Ultimate GA is the one I use.

Set Up Goals and Conversions

Next, set up some Goals. Goals are useful to measure whether visitors are interacting on your site they way you want them to. For example, a goal could be to measure how many people sign up to your mailing list or how many visitors click on a Buy Now button.

To set up a Goal, visit the Settings button (the little gear icon on the right) and choose the Profile you want to set up a Goal for. Click on Goals and then set up your desired Goal. The screenshot below shows a set up for a mailing list subscribe. The destination URL is the URL of the subscribe confirmation page. 

You can also set up sales funnels to see where in the process your potential customers are dropping off. For example, do they get to the payment page and then leave? Perhaps you are not offering the right payment plan or perhaps this page looks unsecure. Use your analytics data to ensure you don’t loose potential revenue.

Learn More About Your Visitors

You can use GA to analyse data on demographics, specifically location and language. If you are seeing a lot of visitors from a certain country, it might be worthwhile having parts of your site translated.

Behaviour is an interesting addition to GA. This tracks if visitors are new or returning. You can then break this down by secondary criteria such as traffic source (see screenshot). This way you can see if there are any influencing factors to people returning to your site. You can also look at Engagement and see how long people are staying on your site.

Use the Browser and Mobile data to see what web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer etc) and mobile platforms people are using to view your site. Sort by bounce rate to highlight any potential problems with certain browsers or mobiles.

Look at where your Traffic is coming from. Apart from search and direct traffic, what are your top referring sites? For me it tends to be this blog, Twitter and Facebook or LinkedIn.

Have a look at your top Landing Pages. Where are people seeing their first page? Are these pages doing your business justice? Are there clear calls to action for new visitors?

You can track email links (for example in an email newsletter) using Google’s URL Tool. Do a / b testing on your email blasts and see which one is driving more traffic to your website.

Troubleshooting with Google Analytics

Use GA to highlight page level problems. If you're seeing a high bounce rate from a particular page, have a think about why? Is there information missing?

Use GA to highlight unusual activity. Set up Alerts and you will get an email if an event is triggered. For example, if traffic is less than usual this might highlight that your site is down or if numbers are up, that sales are through the roof!

Use the data from GA to experiment with changes to your website. See if changes to navigation, content or design make a difference to the number of visitors or conversions. Do a before and after and analyse the data.

Final Thoughts

We are all guilty of checking our GA stats obsessively (I know I am) but instead of obsessing over just the numbers, spend a few minutes drilling down into the data and start to see the bigger picture for your business.

[thanks to SEO and web expert Malcom Coles for the inspiration for the post - I attended a great workshop on this last night - thanks Malcolm!]

Running your own business can be challenging at the best of times. Being solely reliant on yourself and your ideas to generate a pay check can cause sleepless nights, especially if others rely on you to bring home the bacon.

This week I am interviewing the women who applied for my Digital Assistant Academy pilot project which will enable six low income women in East London to generate additional, flexible income for themselves and their family around their existing commitments. Over an eight week period, the six women in the pilot will learn the necessary skills to become freelance Digital Assistants working from their own home with a laptop computer and broadband.

The women who have applied for the opportunity are diverse. Some of these women have not worked for a long time and have lost their confidence; others are single mums who want more flexible work to fit around their children; others are young women desperately trying to get on the job ladder in a terrible job market. However, they are were really positive about the project. One of the women wrote about the opportunity:

“I am keen to take part in the academy as I want to begin the rest of my life. I aim to become independent of state benefits and support my family whilst being a strong, positive role model for my children. I feel that I will be better equipped to do this if I am working and building a career.”

But I can see some sleepless nights ahead for me. No work is guaranteed, especially for freelancers. Am I setting these women up to fail by encouraging them to work for themselves? I have to admit that at least twice a year I consider packing it all in and getting a ‘real’ job – one where someone else can worry about how to pay my salary.

In these moments of self-doubt and fear, the yogic concept of tapas is a useful one to meditate on. Tapas is translated literally as ‘fire’ or ‘heat’ but it is taken to mean in this context sacrifice, discipline and perseverance.

In our asana practice some of the more challenging poses can create a lot of heat and fire in our body. The immediate reaction is to resist this and move back to a place of comfort. Tapas invites us to go through the heat and accept it. Feel the fear and do it anyway, if you like.

Through asana practice, meditation and self-study, yoga asks us to feel our discomfort and stretch beyond our perceived limitations. Only by going through our fear, not around it, can we begin to transcend it.

We have good and bad days in our yoga practice. Some days the postures come easily; we deeply connect to our breath and the world off the mat melts away. Other days, we cannot concentrate on anything and the simplest of postures frustrate us. This is normal.

What we have to remember is to get back on the mat.

[image with thank to marmotchaser via CC]

 

Fast broadband, mobile technologies and social media have completed changed the way freelancers and small business owners work and communicate. We can (technically) work from any where with a laptop and wifi; we can collaborate with people on the other side of the world; we can use the web to create new incomes streams for ourselves. But these digital technologies can result in a daily digital deluge leaving less time to get things done and less time to focus on our core work.

Here are 5 tools and tactics to help you harness the power of the web to stay focussed, get more done and work effectively.

1. Gmail Priority Inbox

One of my favourite finds last year was the new feature from Gmail, Priority Inbox which has helped my transformation into an email ninja.

Priority Inbox learns which are your most ‘important’ emails and 'prioritises' them by posting them at the top of your inbox. Next are your 'read' and 'starred' emails i.e. those you have read and designated as actionable/important/stuff I must read etc. Lastly, comes everything else - 'unimportant' messages or important messages that have already been read.

I find that Priority Inbox allows me to see at a glance what needs to be responded to first and what can ‘go hang’ for a while. Gmail is fairly intuitive but you can also teach it by using the ‘important’ and ‘not important’ buttons. This way I can designate any emails directly addressed to me as ‘important’ and any emails I am copied into as ‘unimportant’, along with any newsletters or notifications.

Priority Inbox is a great way of ensuring that those important client emails or exciting opportunities do not get buried in your inbox.

2. Use Filters

In our increasing digital world, I am a big fan of using filters (see "F" in my free ebook From Apps to Zen: 26+ Ideas for Building A Business with Balance) to reduce the number of information streams coming into the day.

Filters are experts in your area who read and filter and best information about an area of interest. For example, a great social media filter is Pete Cashmore from digital blog Mashable. He consistently delivers the most up to date news and features on social media, online tools and the web. If you're interested in location independent living, Cory McKibben from Thrilling Heroics is a great person to follow.

Find out who your filters are in your niche and follow them on social media.

3. Equanimity App

Equanimity is a neat little app for the iPhone. Set a meditation time, for example 5 minutes, and a Tibetan bowl will ring once. Sit quietly, eyes closed and focus on your breathing. Focus on the sound of the breath as you inhale and exhale. Feel the cool air of the in-breath and warmer air of the out-breath as you breathe. After your time is up the bowl rings three times and it’s time to get back to work.

A great way to refresh, take a few minutes away from your screen, and refocus during the day.

4. Work in a Distraction Free Zone

Shutting down your distractions will help to focus your attention and supercharge your productivity, so shut off your email, turn your phone to silent and close down any social media if you have an important piece of work to focus on.

Brower extensions such as StayFocused for Chrome or LeechBlock for FireFox can limit your access to certain programmes such as Gmail or Facebook if you don't yet have the discipline yourself. For writing try WriteMonkey for PCs or OmmWriter for the Mac to provide an application free writing space.

5. Use Evernote to Combat Information Overload

We all suffer from information overload. The daily deluge of blog posts, email newsletters and useful links. You know the scenario where you take a short digital break from your work. One interesting blog post leads to another, and before you know it, two hours have past and you’ve wasted your morning. Sounds familiar? But how do you keep track of information that might be useful in the future without getting sidetracked in your day-to-day work?

Enter Evernote. Evernote’s CEO, Phil Libin likens Evernote to having an external brain – it remembers things so you don’t have to. Essentially Evernote is an information capturing and organization system .You can use it to type a text note, to clip a web page, snap a photograph of something, or record some audio. Evernote is cloud-based. So the information that you add from the web, or from your smartphone is automatically synched to your desktop. So you can capture information on the go, as well as at your desk.

Registration on Evernote takes minutes. It’s free, and you can watch a short, and funny, video explaining how to get started.

What tools and strategies do you use to work with the web not against it?

If you want to learn about more tools and tactics for supercharging your digital productivity, join me for my two-hour Build Your Productivity Toolkit workshop at The Cube in east London on Wednesday 21 September 2011.  

This blog post is part of The Business Yogi series – inspiration and thoughts for business based on the philosophy, principles and practices of yoga. [This is a guest post by Leila Sadeghee] 

I felt it for the first time yesterday; an edge of anxiety, a certain density in the atmosphere, the look on the faces of people on the streets - from Ladbroke Grove to Chelsea, from St James' to Fitzrovia; the felt sense is ...

Summer is over : (

The days are discernibly shorter - even though summer doesn't technically end for another three weeks - and the pace is starting to pick up. London is collectively preparing to make the jump to light speed for the autumn-to-Christmas race. 'Here it comes …' we all seem to be feeling.

In this last bit of lull before all of the action commences, I am taking time to re-focus and recalibrate my intentions. I giving myself some space to filter through my desires - what do I really want to create in the next phase of my practice?

As usual, in all my contemplations, the need to be fully creatively self-expressed keeps coming up. (And the desire to sharpen my organisational structures). Last fall was a brilliant creative explosion for me and some members of the Kula (the yoga community) - we started classes in Marylebone, and initiated 'Project Upshift', which was a way for many of us to make changes and transform our lives towards greater happiness and abundance. What does the Kula need this autumn? What do I have to share that can help uplift us and open new doors?

As we prepare to go back to school*, back to work, and back to the everyday after the summer holidays, we could use a little reminder of the nature of flow, and the role of fluidity in our lives. Having luxuriated in the natural lull of summer’s rhythm, and the brightness of summer’s leisure activities, our intentions and goals for the year may seem far away, and we might be host to the 'end-of-summer-blues'.

I feel it is so important now, more than ever, to focus on the essential. What are my highest aspirations and goals, and how can all of my words and my actions and choices support them? John Friend, the founder of Anusara yoga, mandates his teachers to think 'Highest First' - what is the expression/action that is aligned with the highest, the divine? The trick is, think 'Highest First', and move from there.

And so in this lull before the whirlwind, I would invite you today to think about what you're you focusing on? How are you opening to new possibilities? Or are you renewing commitments to fulfil goals and intentions from before the blast of summer leisure? What do your 'Kula', your community, your clients need? What is 'The Highest' for you this autumn?

*(Have a look at the post I wrote in August 2010 outlining how to do a ‘back to school’ review of your business).

Leila Sadeghee is an Anusara-Inspired Yoga Teacher and Therapeutic Bodyworker based in Fitzrovia, London.  Her teaching is inspirational, bio-mechanically savvy, superbly fun, and driven by a deep commitment to serve people in opening to their highest potential, both on and off the mat. Join Leila on 3 September at The Life Centre for an afternoon of recalibrating your intentions for the rest of the year, moving with music that supports those intentions, and charging your inner radiance so it can spill over into all that you do in the months to come. http://www.leilasadeghee.com/