One of my favorite marketing blogs, Neuromarketing, recently ran a post about the positive side of daydreaming.

As blogger Roger Dooley notes, when business teams need to brainstorm a new idea, the knee-jerk action is to get people sitting down together to spend a segmented amount of time concentrating on thinking and talking about one topic until something sticks.

Don't think so hard. According to psychologist sources, daydreaming can be productive.

However according to Karina Christoff, psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, this tried and true method is not always the best approach.

It’s not that concentrated thought is a bad idea. But daydreaming, Professor Christoff suggests, isn’t as unproductive as it is said to be. In fact, daydreaming improves your creativity.

Christoff explains: After all that mind-wandering, eventually you start seeing connections that you wouldn’t have seen before, because you would never have logically allowed your mind to make those connections. Now it’s going to make them for you.”

I’m sure that most marketing experts have their own unique take on the creative brainstorming process. Few people can come up with something truly innovative by staying within the lines.

So what’s your approach?

Image source:Â http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4567659/Americans-embarrassed-by-poor-spelling-performance-compared-to-Britons.html

iCal Events
This product is a widget you can put on your dashboard, it draws calendar events out of your Apple calendar and gives you a summary of up to two weeks in advance. The events are color coded to define which calendar events are out of. It is a great reminder, it has saved me on a few occasions already!

Website: http://www.benkazez.com/icalevents.php
Cost: Free
Requires: Mac OS X 10.4 or later

I came across MacJournal as a means to keep my notes organized. I often find myself at events, talks, seminars etc and need an organized place to keep track of my notes and ideas. MacJournal is almost like a personal log from StarTrek (I’m out of the closet ), you can keep a daily journal, written or video, as well as notes.

What I like is that your notes are dated so it is easy to go back and find specific entries. The MacJournal also has cool features like export to blog, Picasa integration, password protection and encryption options. It is a great tool for the creative professional as it allows you to collect your thoughts and ideas in one place, it also doesn’t limit you to just using words to express yourself. It is also priced well at $34.95US

Website: http://www.marinersoftware.com/
Cost: Free trial and then can purchase for $34.95
Requires: Mac OS X Leopard.

Barack Obama photographed by Joe Crimmings (via Flickr)

Obama’s answer hits not just one but several of the oldest entrepreneurial problems at their core. To start off he makes clear who’s advice he is listening to and how he goes about handling that advice …

“…the only people that really know are the collection of ex-Presidents that we have. And I want to protect the confidentiality of those conversations since I expect to go back to them for advice, and I want to feel that they can give me unvarnished advice.”

This short introduction to his full answer (see below) already covers two huge lessons for politicians, entrepreneurs and managers alike:

Lesson #1. He focuses on listening to people that have done what he aspires to do, that have been in the role that he is getting into an have succeeded in overcoming the challenges (at least in part) that he is going to face in the near future. In the business world there is so much advice available that comes from people who have never started a small business in their lives, that were never responsible to close a sale, to get new work in for next month, to get a couple of projects done for next week, send invoices out and make payroll at the end of the month and – of course – have supper ready for the kids every night.

Simple but effective Obama lesson #1: Listen to people that have done it and are willing to share honestly. Everything else is wasting your precious time.

Lesson #2. He makes very clear that he wants to protect and deepen the relationships with the ones who know by protecting their privacy and the confidentiality of those conversations.This seems trivial but when you think of it he could have just talked about the things that aren’t confidential and not mention anything that is. Instead he sends a clear message to his network and his supporters, strongly underlining how he appreciates their support and how he’d never compromise relationships i.e. for a quick headline. This one sentence sends a powerful message: “You can trust me.”

What can we learn from this? Trust is a prerequisite for any successful business relationship. The formula is simple: No trust, no transaction. And yet too many businesses, small and large, choose to compromise their relationships – and by doing so their own lifeline – by jeopardizing the trust of their clients, employees and partners, sometimes for very short term benefits.

Obama’s lesson #2: Never, ever compromise the trust that people have in you, in fact; take every opportunity you have to deepen their level of trust and strengthen your relationships.

So, what has Obama learned form his presidential predecessors?

From the short but insightful introduction above he moves on to let us know what stuck out as a very valuable lesson for him …

“I can tell you that all of them have said that it is important to carve out time to think and not spend your entire day reactive. Because there’s always a crisis coming at you, there’s always a meeting you could be doing, there’s always a press conference or a group of supporters that you could be responding to. And so I think maintaining that kind of discipline is important.”

Wow. This is one of the best lessons any entrepreneur and manager can learn. Every business owner, every manager (including myself) gets sucked into dealing with the daily struggles any business has in store (pun intended) in such abundance. It is so easy to get caught up in doing another task, meeting another deadline, finishing this project and ultimately working IN the business 100% of the time instead of working ON the business on a regular basis. By working ON your business I mean focusing on creating clockwork instead of continuing to tell the time over and over. It means looking at your business form a strategic and tactical perspective and putting measures and activities in place that get you where you want to go. The problem is that too often a business’s development (or lack thereof) heads in the wrong direction because nobody looked at it from and ‘outside’ perspective. By outside, I don’t necessarily mean ‘external consultant’ but outside, as in, not being overwhelmed by a stack of tasks, an endless list of E-mails or a brewing crisis with a customer.

For myself, I will take the advice that Obama received from a list of ex-presidents to heart. My goal is to carve out half a day per week to think and to work on my business. I plan to keep you posted on this blog on how that works out for me and what that ‘protected’ time to think gets me. Stay tuned and watch for posts titled ‘Time to think: …”

By the way, the E-Myth Revisited and all the other versions of this book by Michael E. Gerber explain the concept of working on your business instead of in your business from every angle. I consider it a must read for every active or aspiring entrepreneur, manager, physician or contractor.

I recently discovered an amazing web-based application called Evernote. The application is compatible for both Mac and PCs, in addition there is a great mobile app. Basically, this tool helps you to keep track of ideas, lists, notes, thoughts, phone numbers – any detail in your life that just suddenly comes up that you want to remember.

Currently, I have Evernote on my computer and my iPhone as an app. When I’m connected to the web both applications automatically sync to my online account so I never have to worry about plugging in my iPhone to sync my apps. I find this feature extremely useful.Â

I used the photo functionality to take pictures and store them as notes. Afterwards, I can tag these pictures so that they are searchable. Evernote can also read the text in your picture (such as a sign or handwritten note) which it then uses as a searching reference. To date, I have used Evernote for Christmas shopping, maps to the dog park, stealing a recipe from a overpriced book (evil grin) and for storing business cards.

Evernote is an example of a great web-based application with loads of real world practicality. For start-ups especially, it is essential to find an underserved market, find a solution to their problem and properly execute the solution. Evernote has definitely capitalized on this notion and has produced one of my favorite web-based applications available.

For more information check out www.evernote.com or their tutorial at http://www.evernote.com/about/what_is_en/tour/

The tips they provide for a commitment and guilt-free weekend away from the office are very helpful it often surprises people that simply organizing your daily tasks and upcoming projects, and (very important) keeping them where you can see and manage them, returns a great deal of peace of mind. When it comes to running your small business there is no such thing as out of sight, out of mind. Keeping a strict system for managing your contacts, follow-ups and to-dos is the next best thing to actually “shutting down” your brain from the stresses of the office.

Another tactic of equal importance is finding the little ways to manage stress. Oftentimes we enable ourselves to work up a fuss over things that can’t be helped, thereby putting undue strain on what is manageable on that day’s agenda. Things that we make out to be a big deal rarely end up costing as much time and effort as we anticipate, so why put your mind and body through trouble in advance when experience and instinct should remind you that it won’t be that bad? Taking short breaks when you need them and setting aside time in the evenings to get outside and enjoy doing nothing can help everyone to feel more rested and energetic about the upcoming work day/week. Managing your stress levels all week long is a much better formula for a fun, guilt-free weekend than the inevitable crash of sleep and pigging out that we are often tempted to do when given an opportunity to forget the office.

Dumblittleman.com, where I found the above article, has lots of great lifestyle articles that are very applicable to this topic. A great stop for a quick browse.