How do you start your workday?

And if you start workday with a routine, is it an optimal routine?

In one of my previous posts, Be Successful First Thing in the Morning, I emphasized the importance of starting your day the right way. Over time, it makes an enormous difference.

Perhaps you already have your “ritual” to start your workday – for example, you might start your workday by brewing coffee and checking and answering your email. But have you ever considered other (and possibly better) ways of starting your workday?

It might seem that checking your email first thing in the morning makes a lot of sense, as it helps you stay up to date. Unfortunately, it comes with a very high price: It throws you into a reactive state. Even if you’ve already planned what to do after you are done with the email, it will will open dozens of “drawers” in your mind – and it will become much harder to focus on your planned task at hand.

Focusing on a single task at a time is the best way to get anything done. However, focusing on a single task can be a great challenge in today’s information-overloaded environment.

For this reason, I recommend starting your workday by working on your most important task first – after you start your computer, check your Swift To-Do List to see what’s the next most important task for you to do right now, and immediately take action. Don’t do anything else until you make a progress on that task – don’t check any news or social sites, don’t check your email, don’t chat with your co-workers.

Even if you work on this chosen task for just 15 minutes, it will make a huge difference in your overall productivity and ability to focus. After you make a progress on the task, feel free to check your email – now it won’t affect you as much, as it will be easy for you to get back to your started task after you are done with the email.

Plus, you will feel really good about yourself. Right from the start of your workday, you will feel productive. And that can carry you quite far.

I’ve used this approach myself to write the Swift Mind Freedom e-book. Every morning, before doing anything else, I’ve been writing the book for 45 or 60 minutes. It worked great. However, whenever I didn’t start the day by writing, I usually didn’t get to it at all. Remember: Opening email can be dangerous :-)

Related Posts:

• 30-second check: Do you get the maximum from Swift To-Do List?
• New research explains why you can’t get anything done
• Be Successful First Thing in the Morning
• 3 easy techniques to instantly stop procrastinating
• So, do you want to build 100 tiny houses, or 1 skyscraper?
• Always get stuff out of your head

Start your workday the right way is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

We’ve all had those times where we wish we could add hours to the skimpy 24 hour days we’re limited to on this planet. As the work day rolls along, we look at the clock and say “Hey, where did the time go?” Well I haven’t figured out a way to actually add hours to a day, but here are 10 ways to at least preserve the precious hours you do get:

1. When a task comes along that you can do in less than 2 minutes, do it and be done with it. E-mails are a great example; it takes time to read an e-mail, so when it’s something quick, deal with it right at that time.
2. Related to tip number 1, don’t be a slave to your inbox. Studies have shown that it’s better to concentrate on one task and finish it before moving on to the next. Turn off your e-mail notifications, finish your project, then check it and follow rule number 1 for e-mails that you can address quickly.
3. Make phone calls standing up. Research shows that you’re less likely to shoot the breeze when you are standing. (As an added bonus, you actually burn more calories for those of you interested in that).
4. Batch similar activities. If you have several calls to return or e-mails to send, group them together to do at one time.
5. Use a scheduler. I know it sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how many people don’t schedule their day – plan the work and work the plan.
6. Don’t multi-task. Research has shown that you actually get less done when you try and pack 10 activities in at the same time. Sequential is better.
7. Use information management software. Statistics show that office workers spend an average of 48 minutes a day just looking for misplaced information.
8. Delegate. Not all of us have this option, but for those of you who do, there are probably plenty of tasks that could be done by someone else. Even if you work alone, you can get outsourced help for just about every task imaginable online these days.
9. Cut down on your e-mail newsletters. Most people are subscribed to way more e-mail newsletters than they’ll ever read and having them in your inbox still takes time to deal with them. Take the time to unsubscribe.
10. Limit the amount of socialization you engage in. I know it’s fun and it does provide a nice break, but try to limit it to a set amount of time.

These 10 tips come from Telexis. Telexis produces software that helps offices stay organized and manage their time: GroupReady scheduling software and PHONEslips office management software.

Related Posts:

• 30-second check: Do you get the maximum from Swift To-Do List?
• 3 easy techniques to instantly stop procrastinating
• Is your to-do list impossible to finish?
• New research explains why you can’t get anything done
• Start your workday the right way
• Swift Mind Freedom released!

10 Ways to Get More From Your Work Day is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

You can now drag & drop emails into the task-view directly from your email program (Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Lotus Notes, The Bat! and possibly others). When you do that, magical wonders and miracles happen – the email is automatically converted into a task!

Lots of tasks come to our lives via email. This feature can be a considerable time saver.

But that’s not all! You will be also delighted to know that:

• You can drag & drop multiple emails at once
• Email subjects are used as task names
• Email body is used as task notes
• Email attachments are added as embedded task attachments
• The email itself is added as an embedded task attachment, so you can easily open the email again, and reply to it from your email program
• When dragging from Outlook, the notes will keep the HTML formatting, otherwise, the plain-text variant is used
• You can also drag & drop .eml, .msg and .mim files directly into the task-view. This can be useful if your email client doesn’t support external drag & drop – simply export the messages to files, then drag & drop the files into Swift To-Do List.
• When dragging from Outlook, you can drag & drop not just emails, but also Outlook tasks, and Outlook appointments
• The original messages are left intact, of course. Swift To-Do List works with a copy.

When drag & dropping a single email, Add Task window will open, enabling you to tweak the task as needed before adding it. When drag & dropping multiple emails, they are added immediately. You can edit them with the Batch Edit feature via the right-click context menu.

Quick video demonstration

What if my email client isn’t supported?

Some email clients, like Pocomail or Evolution don’t support external drag & drop. However, despair not, as there is a remedy! You can simply export the email(s) from your email client to a .eml or .msg file. Then, drag & drop these files into Swift To-Do List.

What if I use web-mail only?

You can either start using a desktop email client, like Mozilla Thunderbird, or, if your web-mail supports export to .eml or .msg, you can save the emails to your HDD, then drag & drop the files into Swift To-Do List.

Feedback welcome

If you have any questions, suggestions or comments regarding this new feature, post them below.

Related Posts:

• How to attach emails from Outlook to tasks (Video)
• Swift To-Do List 7.10 released: Embedded file attachments, attach emails to tasks, and more
• What’s New in 7.25: Import Wizard, better Batch Edit, more
• 30-second check: Do you get the maximum from Swift To-Do List?
• Is your to-do list impossible to finish?
• How to use Due Dates in your to-do list correctly

Turn emails into tasks – just drag & drop them into Swift To-Do List! is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

To keep the program simple, we’ve removed hourly and daily reminders – you can use recurrence for the same purpose. Your existing reminders will be automatically converted to recurrence (if possible).

More detailed information about the new features follows.

Hourly task recurrence

Hourly task recurrence allows you to make a task recur every X hours, or X minutes. You can specify if you want it to recur only when the program is running, and the time from which it recurs. The time can be absolute (Eg. 4:00 PM), or relative (“From now on, and then from the next program start”).

Hourly recurrence completely replaces the hourly reminder feature. Hourly recurrence has far greater flexibility.

Email reminders and email recurrence notification

If you have Professional edition, you can now receive reminders and recurrence notifications via email. All emails are sent directly from the program, so the email reminders work only when the program is running and you have correctly set the outgoing mail server (SMTP).

In case of email reminders, normal reminder window will be still displayed.

Emails are sent only if you check “Send me also email reminders” in the Reminder tab of the Edit Task window, or “+ Email me” in the action configuration of recurrence (in the Recurrence tab). You have to do this for each task individually.

Reminders before due date and start date

Before version 7.20, you could set any custom reminder, sure. But there were also due date and start date reminders. However, you could only set reminders on due date or start date. Some of you have requested the ability to set reminders before due date, so we’ve added it! But not only that, you can now have both reminder on due date and at the same time a reminder before the due date. (Same goes for start date).

You can now easily set reminders like “3 days before due date”.

Ability to edit snoozed reminders

This feature is long over-due. When you snooze a reminder, it will show up in the Edit Task window when you later edit the task. You can then edit the reminder or disable it just like a common simple reminder.

New Task ID column + ability to find tasks by ID

Some of you have requested a “Task ID” column that displays a unique number identifier of the task. We’ve added this column. You can display it using Manage – Columns…. All task IDs remain constant for your tasks.

You can also easily find tasks by ID. Open the Find Tasks window (eg. using Edit – Find Tasks), and enter ID=number, or ID:number (or just ID number) as the search term.

Smarter task recurrence

This is basically a fail-safe for “duplicate” recurrence that is supposed to happen multiple times at once. It makes sure you are not flooded with recurred tasks when you haven’t been using the program for a while.

For example, if you were on holiday and haven’t started Swift To-Do List for 2 weeks, you will not find 14 new copies of each of your daily recurring tasks in your to-do list. Instead, Swift To-Do List will ask you for each task if you really want it to recur 14 times, or just once (or not at all). Just like this:

What’s next?

We will now focus on automatic online synchronization between computers. It will take us some time, but it is absolutely the most important update. This will also allow us to introduce mobile and web access to your tasks soon, and much more.

Related Posts:

• Preview task recurrence, recur tasks after completion, and more in Swift To-Do List 7.33
• How to attach emails from Outlook to tasks (Video)
• Swift To-Do List 7.10 released: Embedded file attachments, attach emails to tasks, and more
• Swift To-Do List 8 launched!
• Coming Soon: New Swift To-Do List 8 with subtasks!
• Overcome procrastination with new Swift To-Do List

What’s new in 7.20: Email reminders, hourly recurrence, Task ID column and more! is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Supported email clients include Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, The Bat! and possibly others – please let us know if your email client is not on the list. PocoMail is not supported, as it doesn’t support drag & drop between applications.

Basically, all you have to do is to drag & drop the email message into Swift To-Do List. You can drop it in the Notes panel or Attachments panel.

This video will show you how easy it is to attach an email to a task in Swift To-Do List. (Click “Play”)

You can also drag & drop calendar items and tasks from Outlook the same way.

To learn more about embedded file attachments, see the previous post “Swift To-Do List 7.10 released: Embedded file attachments, attach emails to tasks, and more“

Related Posts:

• Swift To-Do List 7.10 released: Embedded file attachments, attach emails to tasks, and more
• Turn emails into tasks – just drag & drop them into Swift To-Do List!
• Coming soon: Attach emails, embed file attachments
• Overcome procrastination with new Swift To-Do List
• New Swift To-Do List 7 Ultimate edition released
• What’s New in 7.25: Import Wizard, better Batch Edit, more

How to attach emails from Outlook to tasks (Video) is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

You can download the new version. As always, this upgrade is free for users of version 7.

Embedded file attachments

You can now store files directly in the Swift To-Do List database (.stdl)! Versions prior to 7.10 supported only shortcut file attachments, that linked to the actual file. Version 7.10 allows you to add both shortcut and embedded attachments. So you can always decide if you want to store the actual file in your database, or just have a shortcut to it.

Embedded file attachments have some advantages over file shortcut attachments:

1. When you copy the database to another computer, the attachments are copied as well, because they are all stored in your database (which is a single .stdl file)
2. When you backup your database, the attachments are backed up as well
3. If you lose the files, you can restore them from your database
4. If your database is encrypted, the embedded attachments are encrypted as well

They also have one disadvantage: They make your database file significantly larger. Although all embedded attachments are automatically compressed, having many embedded attachments can quickly make your database file quite large. That is usually not an issue, unless you have really large attachments.

Clipboard is of course supported: You can copy & paste the embedded attachments just like regular attachments.

Converting file shortcut attachments to embedded file attachments

Adding new embedded attachments is obvious and simple. How about converting existing shortcut attachments to embedded? Well, it’s simple as well!

All you have to do is to right-click the file shortcut attachment, and click “Make Embedded”:

The attachment will be automatically converted to embedded attachment and stored in your database.

Save As (another new feature)

As you can see on the previous screenshot, you can now also right-click any attachment (both embedded and shortcut) and use “Save As”. This allows you to save copies of the files to a specified location. You can even use this for multiple attachments at the same time.

Opening and editing embedded attachments

You can open the embedded attachments just like shortcut attachments. However, there is a significant difference: Because the embedded attachments are stored in the Swift To-Do List database, they must be unpacked into a temporary location first.

When you open an embedded attachment, it will be automatically unpacked into a temporary location and opened from that location. If you then change the file (for example, when you edit a Word document or .txt file), Swift To-Do List will detect the change, and ask you if you want to bring the changes back into the database – if you select Yes, the attachment will be re-embedded into the database and thus updated from the temporary location.

New Options related to attachments

There are two new options related to Attachments, in Options – Notes:

If you check “Embed attachments by default”, all pasted / dropped files will be automatically embedded.

By default, files over 6 MB display a warning about their size. You can disable the warning using the second option.

Attach emails from Outlook, Thunderbird, The Bat! and other email programs

This is extremely useful and exciting new feature. I’m going to write a separate blog post about it. But basically, you can now just drag & drop emails from most email programs into the notes and attachment panels in Swift To-Do List. We’ve tested it with Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, The Bat! and Windows Live Mail. PocoMail unfortunately doesn’t support communication with other programs.

All email messages are added as embedded file attachments, so you can work with them even if you do not have the original email message stored on the computer from which you are running Swift To-Do List.

If you open the attached email message, it will be opened in your default email client.

If you are using Outlook, you can even drag & drop calendar items and Outlook tasks to attach them to your tasks in Swift To-Do List.

We’ve published a blog post about attaching emails that includes a video.

Additional information for advanced PC users

Embedded attachments are super-smart:

Embedded files are automatically compressed. If the file is already compressed, Swift To-Do List will not compress it again, so you don’t have to wait unnecessarily. The detection is based simply on file extensions (eg. Swift To-Do List does not compress embedded mp3 files and zip files, as they are already compressed).

Duplicate attachments are automatically detected, and stored only once in the database. You will still see them attached to the tasks that you attach them to, but the actual data is stored only once. This allows you to quickly copy tasks with attachments, without waiting or worrying about the size of your database.

Also, if you edit one of the duplicate attachments, the changes will be saved only to the attachment that you edited and 2 different files will be stored in the database from that point on.

We’ve decided to put a limit on the maximum size of a single attached file: 240 MB. This is because extremely large attachments could slow the program down.

More new features coming

We are already working on another update with useful new features and improvements.

The most important thing that we are working on is an online synchronization feature, that will allow you to easily synchronize Swift To-Do List between computers with a single click. However, this will take us some time (2-3 months at least).

Related Posts:

• How to attach emails from Outlook to tasks (Video)
• Turn emails into tasks – just drag & drop them into Swift To-Do List!
• Coming soon: Attach emails, embed file attachments
• Overcome procrastination with new Swift To-Do List
• What’s New in 7.25: Import Wizard, better Batch Edit, more
• What’s new in 7.20: Email reminders, hourly recurrence, Task ID column and more!

Swift To-Do List 7.10 released: Embedded file attachments, attach emails to tasks, and more is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog