We have several exciting additions to announce!

We are pleased to announce that Jeana Adkinson has stepped in as our Business Development Specialist after spending eight years at Entercom Radio. With well over a decade of experience in media, Jeana is accustomed to working on complex accounts that have a wide range of needs. From large corporations to more localized organizations, Jeana routinely creates out-of-the-box promotions and product development programs that showcase her clients’ strengths and help them achieve their goals. She has developed programs for Coca Cola, Frito Lay, Dannon, Pantene, Olay and Baja Fresh to name a few.

Jeana has won multiple industry awards including the Entercom Rising Star Award and the National Entercom Sales Club Award. She is also a two-time winner of the Entercom Creative Award. You can see why we’re excited to have her on board!

We are also very happy to announce the addition of two new clients to Edge Multimedia: Oregon Clinical Research and TW Productions.
 
Oregon Clinical Research is a medical research facility that partners with pharmaceutical companies to develop new medicine. We will be working with them to build their clinical testing database. One of the first things we did for them was develop their new logo.

TW Productions is the magic behind many award winning trade show booths, custom stage designs, themed rides, mall decorations, exhibits, corporate theme parties, decorations for civic events, haunted houses and elaborate weddings. We will be working with them to help promote their nationally recognized event, Scream at the Beach.

Next to people skills, time management could perhaps be one of the most useful skills you could master in business. Learning to manage your time goes hand in hand with being organized and productive. What will continually prove to set top performers apart from the rest will be their ability to handle a very large workload with grace. Here are a few helpful tips to assist you in mastering this skill:

Accept that multitasking is evil
Multitasking doesn’t work. I write this as I am – guess what – multitasking. Sometimes it’s a necessary evil – if you want to watch the Stanley Cup finals and have an article deadline, well…
“Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,” says David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.”

Read this helpful New York Times article, “Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don’t Read This in Traffic”, which highlights this and other research on the harm of multitasking.

Check your email on a schedule.
Email does not need to be answered immediately - it’s simply not the most effective use of your time. The incessant start and stop of interrupting your work flow to check your email continuously halts your momentum. You will take on average 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, according to a recent study performed on a group of Microsoft workers.

“I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research scientist. “If it’s this bad at Microsoft,” Mr. Horvitz added, “it has to be bad at other companies, too.”

It’s critical to have a calculated balance of technology. Use technology and its related tools to supplement your brain, but remember to harness technology and all of its distractions to help keep you from being thrown off track. 

One key way that you can increase your productivity is to adopt the habit of checking your email on a schedule. Some suggest no more than once per hour, some suggest twice per day – for some email addicts (I can relate) this is equivalent to asking you to throw a lasso around the moon.

Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Workweek, a runaway best seller, suggests that you check your email twice a day… or once every 10 days. “E-mail (and all of its Crackberry/digital leash/Twitter cousins) is the largest single interruption in modern life. In a digital world, creating time therefore hinges on minimizing e-mail. The fastest method I’ve found for controlling the e-mail impulse is to set up an auto responder that indicates you will be checking e-mail twice per day or less. This is an example of “batching” tasks (performing like tasks at set times, between which you let them accumulate). Your success with batching will depend on two factors: 1. Your ability to train others to respect these intervals; and, much more difficult, 2. Your ability to discipline yourself to follow your own rules.”

I encourage you to try batching your email responses – my bet is that you’ll increase your productivity and lessen your frustration.

The One-Touch Rule
Whether it's snail mail, a memo, files on your desk or your email, adopt the One-Touch Rule. The One-Touch Rule means that you only touch (or click) something once – then you deal with it. For snail mail, you open it, respond to it, file it or toss it. With memos or files – stop moving them from one space to the next in the search for something else that you’ve lost in the rubble that is your desk. Master the art of One-Touch and address what you need to deal with and put it away. Don’t start something new until this has been done.

With email – and this is a doozy for most of us – the One-Touch Rule means that the moment you open an email, you process it: respond to it, drag it to your to-do list, your calendar, file it or delete it. Don’t leave it sitting in your inbox. For best results, combine this rule with “batching” as mentioned above.

Have a to-do list
You need to know what you need to do so that you can manage your time doing it. If you don’t have a to-do list and you’re managing your tasks simply by relying on your brain, then that is your first mistake. You must have a to-do list in order to manage your time well. Don’t rewrite your to-do list each day, that’s a waste of time. Use a tool like Outlook tasks, tasktoy, or even a simple Word document or Excel spreadsheet.

If you’re one of those people that need to cross things off the list and add things to the list while you are on the fly, then print out your electronic to do list each day. At the end of the day, remove the completed tasks (that you manually got the pleasure of crossing off throughout the day) and add the tasks that you hand-scratched onto the list.

Get into the habit of doing this and you will be more organized and more productive. Take the next step and mark the top three tasks that you will tackle first thing the next day so that you can walk in to work and not get off task.

15 Minutes a Day
In training a long time ago, I was taught a principle that has stayed with me and helped me succeed. The “15 Minutes a Day” principle is a simple one.

If you are normally off of work at 5pm, stay an extra 15 minutes. Those extra 15 minutes can be spent making that one last phone call, writing that one thank you note to a client or sending that one last email. These extra 15 minutes add up and create a mountain of momentum.

I would usually spend my 15 minutes at the end of the day prioritizing a list of the things I would do first thing the next morning so that I could keep my productivity up. I didn’t wander into the office wondering what I would start my day doing.

Take 15 minutes at the end of each day to pave the way for tomorrow’s productivity -- you can walk in ramped up and ready to go to work without hesitation.

It’s okay to take your time and focus uninterrupted on important tasks
If a task is important, move it to the top of your list and do it first. Block out distractions, including the email notification envelope that pops up whenever you get a new email. Turn it off and you’ll enter the almost-forgotten world of focused productivity. Let your mind sink into the depths of your task and enjoy doing a fantastic job completing it – notably with fewer mistakes because you aren’t multitasking.

Dan Markovitz, president of the productivity consulting firm TimeBack Management, writes: “Obviously there are more important tasks than processing email. Intuitively, we all know this. What we need to do now is recognize that processing one’s work (evaluating what’s come in and how to handle it) and planning one’s work are also mission-critical tasks.”

One more resource…
For those of you with chronic time management problems that are beyond anything that this article can begin to address, a national study group has been developed just for you. Please print out and post Time Management Tips for the Chronically Disorganized Individual or Household.

6/10: Brokers' Open at Riverside Homes' Solano neighborhood in Hillsboro, Oregon. Enjoy a tasty lunch from Pizza Schmizza and tour their beutiful model homes. Enter to win a Summer Beach Tote!

6/21: Fruit Tasting & Growing Event at Kniffings Discount Nurseries in El Cajon, Califnornia. Fruit Tasting & Growing with Tom Spellman of Dave Wilson Nursery, with Garden Compass radio and Black Gold®.

6/21: Summer Block Party at Riverside Homes' Copperleaf neighborhood in Hillsboro, Oregon. Enjoy a great lunch of hamburgers and hotdogs from NW Natural. The kids can enjoy a fun activity from the Portland Children's Museum while you tour their gorgeous model homes. Enter to win a $50 gift card to New Seasons and a family pass to the Portland Children's Museum.

6/28: Live with Ed Hume and KOMO 1000 AM event at Sky Nursery in Shoreline, Washington with Black Gold®.