It’s one of those days. Maybe you have technical problems, or a project that isn’t going well, you couldn’t sleep last night, you’ve run into a writer’s block or thinker’s block or city block. Maybe you just lost a client. Or learned about a powerful new competitor. Or maybe it’s simply just a bad day. It happens.

These are things that help break up a bad day.

1. Clean up the clutter.

Put on some music you like. Throw things out. Find the desk space down at the bottom of all the papers, books, cables, envelopes, and so on. You’ll be amazed at how much better you’ll feel in just a few minutes.

Second prize: clean out your digital clutter. Start with email. Sort into categories (folders or tags) for things you should keep, and archive. Empty the inbox.

Grand prize: take an hour or two. Do both.

2. Do one of those nagging-annoying tasks you’ve been avoiding.

Your business life is full of small annoying tasks you put off. Most of us rationalize that we have other more important, or more urgent, things to do, and we let this go. It’s that list you promised, the research you wanted to do, maybe it’s a call or a letter or email task you’ve been avoiding. Get this one done and you’ll feel better about everything else.

3. Exercise. Take a walk. Or a run.

Break out of your routine. Exercise is funny because of what John Jantsch, the marketing guru, called the math of exercise: the time you take gives you more time later. Particularly when you’re in that droopy slump time. Break it up, get out, come back to it later, fresh.

4. Do something Creative. Draw something. Write a haiku. Or a blog post.

What I mean is do something creative. Seriously, a haiku is a great mood changer: just three lines. Try this search for haiku on Twitter, and you’ll see. And if that’s too much, do whatever you do when you want to break the mood. Or, how about this: write an email to somebody you care about, not about business, just catching up with things.

5. Indulge somebody else.

My point 4 above reminded me: if the first thought is to go get yourself a chocolate and a hug somewhere, indulge yourself. But this is even better: indulge somebody else. Don’t get yourself a candy and a hug, give both to somebody else. Or call your mother or your sister or your spouse. Buy a kid you know a book you think they’d like.

There’s research I saw in the New York Times that shows spending money on somebody else is more likely to buy happiness than spending it on yourself. Here’s a quote:

“These experimental results,” the researchers conclude, “provide direct support for our causal argument that spending money on others promotes happiness more than spending money on oneself.”

So, seriously, have a good day.

(Note: I posted this on Huffington Post yesterday. I’m reposting here because this is my main blog.)

Focus: in personal productivity, focus is power. Or maybe I should call it concentration. Have you ever borne down on a task, locked out all distractions, and gotten more done in an hour or two than you thought you could get done in a day? I have the feeling I used to do that a lot;  but now, only rarely.

Part of the problem is the obvious computer-dominated workplace, with emails, instant messages, Twitter, my office phone, and my cell phone, all competing with the task at hand.

But it’s more than just technology. It’s like in an office, more to do, more distractions, more of everything. Especially, more meetings.

I was struck the other day by Paul Graham’s recent essay Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. He says time is different for different types of jobs and people:

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

So the manager’s day divides into 5, 10, and 15-minute pieces. The programmer’s, designer’s, or writer’s day doesn’t.

I can relate to this. In 40 years of adulthood I’ve had three lives as a maker and one as a manager. For years my real work was developing a software product, which included some of the code plus content and even documentation. Meetings were big interruptions. Then for a lot of years I was building and running the company, doing nothing but meetings. During those years I was unable to get much writing or software content done at all.

People are different. I like the maker’s life better; but then I’m a hermit by nature, I can go for hours concentrating on a task without talking to anybody. I know people who would hate that, and live for the actions, the thrill of the chase, the decisions, the jockeying for position, the sense of getting things done (in a different way) and, with it all, the meetings.

What are you: Maker or manager?

Oh dear. How would you like to be the sender whose name I’ve blocked out here? Charged, apparently, with emailing a press release to bloggers, and struggling with a technical problem, he ends up creating this blight on my inbox (and probably doesn’t even know he’s done it):

I count 11 repetitions, the same message, the same sender, and even the same sending minute (although you can’t see that in this view).

And I wonder … do you think one of the 15 absolutely important things recommended is to test all email list sending utilities before hitting ENTER? Or would that be the 16th?

You and I and a lot of students, parents, and teachers ought to thank my friend Matthew Scott for posting this on his Strategic Incubator blog. Do yourself and your kids and their teachers a favor, take five minutes, and look/listen to a great presentation. Matthew was making the point that all businesses are sometimes about presentations, and that’s true, and this is a good example. But it’s good for a lot of other reasons too.

If you don’t see it here, then you and I have some video formatting problem. You can click here to go to it on Matthew’s blog or here to go to the original on SlideShare.

Email: can't live without it, but damn! Spam and spam filters, the huge volume of email. There is the temptation to declare email bankruptcy. And I have seven email addresses I check regularly.

I'm still learning how to do email right. I'm guilty of the occasional gruff and cranky message, the unneeded extra message, being misunderstood, including too many people, or including too few. I've done the awkward and embarrassing thing of accidentally including the thread below a message and sending it to the wrong person.

So I was interested when somebody suggested three things to think about before you send that email. I'm borrowing this from another context — a speech — but it seems to fit.

1. Is it true?

A simple enough test. Of course if we get picky or technical, you don't always know, but come on, you really do. Truth is hard to figure in philosophy, not so much in business email. 

 2. Is it beneficial?

Will sending this email do any good for you, your business, your colleague, or anybody? Does it serve business objectives?

3. Is it Timely?

Timing makes a big difference. Is it too late for any action or result? Is it too early?

I've started watching now, and not all the emails I get, and not all the emails I send, meet this 3-point test.

I was going to suggest a fourth test — is it kind? — but that's a bit much in this context. Still, at least I mentioned it. And the thought brings up an interesting addition: the list doesn't include the problem of making people mad, or hurting their feelings, or making business enemies. What do you think: if it's true, beneficial, and timely, but is going to make somebody either very mad or very sad, do you send it anyhow?

In the beginning, multitasking seems like the way to go. It’s very satisfying to have your email open, manage IM, take a call, and have your presentation you’re working on and a memo or document too, and — why not? — a spreadsheet open as well, working on your projections. Boy, am I getting a lot of things done. I love it. The magic of technology.

And then there’s the driving time. Years ago it was listening to the radio while driving, nice music or conversation (talk shows), pass the time, but pay attention to the road. That kind of multitasking never bothered me.  Then, through the magic of technology again, we get cellphones. These days it seems like a third of the drivers I see (it’s not illegal in Oregon) have one arm dedicated to holding the phone in their ear.

The New York Times, however, recently cited research that confirms what I (and the states of New York and California and I don’t know how many others) suspect: that I can’t drive as well when I’m on the phone. And neither can you. Here’s the reference: Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don’t Read This in Traffic:

Several research reports, both recently published and not yet published, provide evidence of the limits of multitasking. The findings, according to neuroscientists, psychologists and management professors, suggest that many people would be wise to curb their multitasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving a car.

These experts have some basic advice. Check e-mail messages once an hour, at most. Listening to soothing background music while studying may improve concentration. But other distractions — most songs with lyrics, instant messaging, television shows — hamper performance. Driving while talking on a cellphone, even with a hands-free headset, is a bad idea.

I’m guilty. I confess. Have you been on the phone lately, talking to me, and I seemed not all there? I probably wasn’t all there, because I was also reacting to instant messenger, maybe reading email, maybe working on a presentation as well. And sometimes my cellphone rings too, while I’m on the office phone.

Is that insulting to you, the listener. Yes, actually, and I apologize.

I’ve done it while driving too. A couple of years ago I was waiting at a red light, dialed the phone, and instinctively let up on the brake exactly as I pressed the send button. Thankfully, I caught it in time, nothing happened but it scared me, reminded me that this is sort of crazy. I can walk and chew gum at the same time, yes; and I can drive and talk to you at the same time too, when you’re in the car with me. But can I drive and talk to you on the phone as well? Not sure.

I guess it’s not just coincidence that I’m starting to see people writing about how you need to do only one thing at a time as a tool for productivity. Read your emails just a couple times a day, and focus on one task at a time. Suddenly, or so it seems, doing just one thing at a time is, ironically, a way to be more productive.

Take, for example, this post by Tim Ferriss quoting at length JoshWaitzkin. Or perhaps this one, subtitled work simpler and saner, on Zen Habits. It’s enough to have us all give pause — except that we can’t, because we’re too busy.

Two of the three winners of SlideShare.net’s 2008 World’s Best Presentation contest are deeply disturbing.

This one, which took first place …

And this one, in third place:

Click and watch. It’s striking how much can be said with no voice and without a lot of words. Most SlideShare presentations suffer the lack of voice, making the site useful as a repository, and assume that voice will come via telephone. These stand alone very well.

And here’s the other one, the second place finisher, which is just fun …

And a tip of the hat to Guy Kawasaki, one of the judges, who announced the winners yesterday on his blog How to Change the World.

I’m happy today to not be the author of Marketing Plan Pro. Why? Because the author of the new version is John Jantsch, marketing guru, the man who built Duct Tape Marketing.   

Getting John on board was a big deal for us. He’s the ideal author of marketing plan software.

Not that it wasn’t very easy to work with him. He’s a hero around our offices: smart, unassuming, fun, and effective. The ideal partner. So on the contrary, it’s been a pleasure to develop the new version together.

What’s really the big deal is moving our platform beyond the single-intellectual-author model that we’ve had for more than 20 years, built around my relationship with Business Plan Pro and Business Plan Pro Premier. I love business planning, I work with it almost every day, and I write about it constantly. It’s easy for me because I believe in it.

The trouble was, as the company evolved, that we weren’t leveraging that model with other experts in other areas.

That is, we weren’t doing that until now, with the release of the new Marketing Plan Pro 11. Now we are. In the same way that I live and breathe business planning, John loves marketing, and his "Duct Tape" genius has given marketing a much better place in the world of small business. John’s kind of marketing is accessible, manageable, and practical (Duct Tape is a great name for it). He loves it, he works with it every day, and writes about it constantly. It’s easy for him because he believes in it.

I’ve come to believe that this kind of business, the expert-in-a-box (sort of) that we’ve built with Business Plan Pro, needs authorship. Our product development team does the code, and the interface, so they’re the ones who really build the software (and it’s a team, in fact the largest team in our company). No one individual could do that. But the core content, the idea of it, the main concepts take living with, and working with, those elements come out best when there’s an expert as author. As John is with Marketing.

This is the second big release of the new management team that took over Palo Alto Software last year. I’m really proud of this product, and proud of that new team.

I just logged into my iStockphoto.com account and found this picture as picture of the year on the main page. Title is "Late for the Trash," and the photographer  is Trent Bell. I don’t know what presentation I’ll use it for yet, but I couldn’t resist. It’s a really good visual.

I’ve been a happy customer of iStockphoto for two or three years now. They have a great inventory of stock photos, with a very serviceable keyword search, and I can download immediately when I’m working on a presentation. It’s not expensive. This one (it’s smallest size, 447 x 268 pixels, which is fine for blog purposes) cost me one credit, and I can buy 10 credits for $14, or 50 for $65. It used to be 30 credits for $25, so maybe I shouldn’t be posting this. The pictures come in four sizes, from extra small to large, and the large, in this case, would have been 3000 x 1804, which would have been 10 credits.

This is what I do nowadays for presentations. Nobody wants to read bullets anyhow, so I use a photo to highlight, a title, and I pretty much know what I want to say. I hate PowerPoint as a teleprompter.

And, by the way, gulp, I don’t take money to plug sites or products. I pay iStockphoto, for example, they don’t pay me. I was about to publish this post when I realized some people, especially newcomers to this blog, might think I’m just hidden advertising. I’d hate for you to think that. I do recommend books, and occasionally software, and especially books and software I’ve written and helped to develop; but you know which they are. My bias on my own books and software is out there and I hope very open.

I make that addition for newcomers. I think if you’ve been with me for a while you’ve already figured that out.

Jing’s an interesting example of keeping it simple. Do one thing well, no frills necessary. John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing tipped me off (thanks John) with a recent post. I picked it up quickly and did the quick mini slide talk here in about five minutes.

(If for any reason you don’t see the video below, please click here to get the original file.)

This is one of my favorite presentation slides, and favorite planning fundamentals, the important difference between planning and accounting:

Jing is published by TechSmith, which also makes Camtasia Studio, a $300 product that I often use for doing online slide presentations, sometimes for other things. It’s free. I downloaded, installed, set up a video capture around the slide, talked into my USB headset, saved, and posted it onto this blog.

The idea spreads itself. I got it when I saw John’s post on it, and you have it now. Click the download link that appears after you see my video, or go to the Jing Project.