You know the Cliche "Time is Money", now a days seconds are even more money. Regardless of who you are or where live there is only 24 hours per day. The art of time is about putting every hour, minute and second into productive work. So lets do it...

Due to Health lets give our bodies a 5 hour sleep period. That's right 5 hours, you are young and can do this, unless you're not then you can sleep for 6-7 hours max. The point here is that sleep is a good thing, it refreshes your body and with no activity your brain power can rest. It is important to have a great sleep while you sleep because of have i have in store for you.

So we are left with only 19 hours now, so much for 24 hours of productivity! Lets make this 19 hours really work for you. Before you jump into filling up you daily schedule with lots of tasks lets take a step backwards. Look back to the past week or so, what are the most important things you need to for the FUTURE. If you have immediate tasks and responsibilities coming up then they take the higher priority so make a list of them. Now, try to come up with a LONG list of everything you think you should be doing for today. A long list is a very detailed list in case you didn't know. Divide each task into smaller elements, for example, if you are going to write a blog post then dividing it into little tasks mean counting research, inspiration, draft write up, image creation, factualization, link baiting, to finalizing draft and publishing it. Knowing the little details allow you to dedicate a certain amount of time to each task this way if you thought writing a post would only take an hour would not end costing you 2 hours on researching alone. Keep doing this for all the tasks you have to do for the day.

Listing all the stuff in your time sheet is not enough, you have to actually stick to it and perform each of them to the second, so if you assigned yourself with 20 minutes of research as soon as your 20 minutes are up stop the research and move on to the next task. Don't worry if your research sucks, you don't expect to become extremely efficient in just one day did you???

Practice makes perfect! The first a few days are going to be rough but after that your brain and positive energy adjust themselves to your new routine. The trick is not to go back to the old you, it's like quitting smoking for 2 days but picking it up again, you won't live cancer free because of those 2 days.

When your level of efficiency picks up you'll realize that before you were spending 2 hours on research like tasks that were getting you no where to now that you can do resulting research in just 15 minutes. Now just imagine with your new level of efficiency if you had 2 hours to do tasks you normally do in 15 minutes, imagine the glorious results. This is actually how quality and innovation happens. You can apply this to almost any task you can imagine. I personally even analyze my driving, shopping, online surfing, books and magazine readings and everything else you can imagine.

I only started to really care about my time since mid last year and it has done wonders for me in terms of my performance at work, my side projects and running multiple sites and managing couple of web projects. Without managing my time i would have never been able to take care of 2 projects let alone the things i do now!

Time Management is one of those important elements that contribute to any type of success. Manage your time effectively and efficiently and you'll be managing a huge bank account!!!

here are some great resources for managing time that would help you get going:

BOOK - Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

BOOK - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

BOOK - Time Management for the Creative Person

SITE - Mind Tools - Time Management

ESSAY - First Things First  < Very important Essay

SITE -  Time Scheduling and Time Management for dyslexic students

Software - ToDoList  or something similar

I've been talking a lot about "everything is a process" and how you should incorporate this mentality into your every project, if you want to become successful! This article is to prepare you for the challenges a project might have, sort of like "what you should know before jumping into building you business"

Goals are a great thing have, they give you a target to achieve and motivation to achieve them but most often we disregard the challenges that we might have to face in favor of the sweetness of the outcome. The truth of the matter is if your goal is to make a $1,000,000 (1 million dollars) you won't wake up one day and have that in your bank account, the fact is you have to first make a $100, then $1,000 and over come more challenges, innovate more solutions to get to $10,000 then $100,000 and if everything works out then you achieve your first goal. It takes time and a lot of work, consistency and efficency are the absolute requirements.

But before you set a Million Dollar goal for your self, there are a few things you should know:

1- How well do you know your self?

• if you want to get into business you should NOT wake up later than 7am. I'm practicing to move my current wake up time from 6:30am to 5am. The Earlier you wake, the longer day time you would have to work. Contribute the early hours to answering emails, reading the news, making comments, discovering new sites and working on your blog if you have one.
   
• We all need to have routines, we need to be disciplined that way. Try to make plans for your entire day, hour by hour and stick to it. If everyday you tend to do different things that do not relate to each other then you are very confused. Organize you time and manage it within your abilities. After a while your routine will become natural to you and as a result your productivity will increase.
   
• Measure how long it takes to do the basic humans needs, like how long it takes you to eat lunch, commute to work, shower, shopping, and etc. When you are aware of the minutes you spend  doing everything you have to do everyday then you you can find better more efficient ways to increase your working times. Don't over kill your self, what i mean is taking a shower should take about 10 to 15 minutes at max but if you're spending an hour in shower then here is an opportunity to save 45 minutes and put it towards working on your blog, making phone calls, making new connections and finding more ways of making your business better.

2- Do you REALLY know what you're doing?

• if you're going to start a blog, are you familiar with the blogging world. Regardless what the topic of your blog is about there are several key blogs working in that category already, familiarize your self with them and everything they do, the last thing you want to do is to have a blog that has the exact same topic and discussion, what you want to do is to find out where these key blogs are lacking and start your blog knowing that you're filling a gap and contributing to the well being of the category. Having a complimentary blog grows much faster than a copy blog, over time when you have a lot of traffic then you can move into other blogs' category.
   
• if you starting your own web app (web 2.0 or semantic) project, then how well do you know the industry, you need to know how it works and how you're going to make it big. Promoting a web app has its own set of challenges and before you jumping into programming you need to consider all the roadblocks. Getting traffic is a big issue and before you assume that you're going to get a lot of traffic consider why people would want to use it and why it should become a part of their routine. The worst thing you can do when building a web app is to assume everything will workout on its own, trust me it doesn't. Always prepare with the worst case scenario in mind!
   
• Know everything about your competition (small or large). for example, If you're going to make something that compliments DIGG but you don't know about MIXX then that's a huge problem because if you don't know what everybody in the category is doing and how they are doing it then you probably won't be able to come up with a solution that solves big problems. You also don't want to be compared to other websites, avoid "YET ANOTHER WEB APP" attribute at all cost!

3- How well do you know BUSINESS?

• Business is a game, a dog eat dog world. Just because you can make a great site doesn't mean you can make a big business out of it. In business you have to know how to manage people, employees, PR people, your network and etc. If you can't manage people then you cannot attract talented people to do the tricky parts of your business, they just won't stick around. If you don't know how to make deals or negotiate to get maximum benefits then you're business won't have a chance to grow. Managing innovation, money, growth, revenues streams are a few of the other things you need to be very familiar with.

I'm not trying to scare you, but i'm trying to prepare you. remember if it way easy everybody would have done it, it's difficult and that's what makes it interesting and appealing. Now i only mentioned a few things you should know before jumping into muddy waters, there are many other things you need to consider such as choosing the right business partners, knowing your audience, optimum design, naming and branding, strategy, and last but not least knowing when you want to launch, how you're going to do it, and what you need to do to promote it. The list goes on and on, the more you know the better you will do.

i've been engaged in quite a few conversations in the last couple of weeks regarding strategy and process involved in constructing web projects. We all have different methods of practice, we do things differently based on the orientation that is most comfortable to us. Notice in none of articles so far i have tried to push for a single way of doing things but i've been trying to lay everything out on the table and let you chose your own methods.

There are a lot of blogs, magazines, and books that talk a great deal about how to build a great looking site, or a successful site, blog whatever. Everybody has his/her own way of doing things and just because they saw great results doing it their way doesn't mean it work the same for you as well.

before i launched this site, during the time i was still thinking about the design and what kind of CMS i should go with, i researched, bookmarked and printed out most of these articles (i plan to release my entire sources this weekend), and I found out that each person walked a different path that seems different but has a lot of things in common with another person but at the same each path was engineered, by accident or not, to fit each individual's unique situation.

Each article in one way or the other emphasized the process that got them to where they are now, which is a great deal of success. So while i was reading all these articles i started picking out the ideas that i liked best, i did not choose based on performance but based on my own personal abilities, I even became as brave as tweaking some of the ideas. Before i knew it i had so many plans and ideas for making a great site that i needed 10 of me to do it.

Doing everything you want to do takes time and effort and sometimes it takes so much effort that you can't psychically do it by yourself. Since i had no help i decided to divide my process into phases, i ended up with 5 phases in total. Right now i'm at phase 1, and i'm only %20 through the process.

The point is, there are lots of great articles out there, keep reading them and take notes but don't pick one and bank all your money on it. As our Wall St. friends always say "Never put all your eggs in one basket"

here are some great sites to get you started with, i promise to have a great list of articles soon.

ProBlogger - self explanatory

DoshDosh - blog and SN marketing

HipMojo - great set of blog/project articles

Will Price - about blogging and creating traffic

Smashing Magazine - blog and blog design articles

I love Typography - content in essence is typography

A List Apart - I think everybody knows this one already

Andy Rutledge - probably better than "A List Apart" wink!

Seth Godin

Brand Autopsy

Branding & Marketing

Buzz Marketing for Technology

Conversation Agent

Web Ink Now

Entrepreneur's Journey - The name says it all

BNet - Business Management Articles

Get Rich Slowly - Knowing your finances is just as important as knowing your CSS/HTML

Simple Dollar - Another finance/saving blog

 Above though a lot of links are still a small fracture of my own resources for wishing to get somewhere on this internet. I know i can because i've made plans and have calculated every step of the way but this how i do things in general, also in part it's my job.

I hope this little blog article give you the hope and motivation to start researching your own next big break! remember we can only make it happen for ourselves, nobody is going to hand a successful business you have to fight for it.

Process is so important that i'm going to dedicate this post to some of the examples of great processes GONE WRONG!

My victim is the beloved TWITTER, yes you read it right, TWITTER is a prime example of a great process gone wrong. As i mentioned earlier, to have great success we must take things step by step. Every little thing is made up of small details that working together make up the substance of that object. Now i'm not bashing Twitter here, in fact the opposite, twitter has a lot that we can learn from it. in the last post i mention that in order to fix something it's always easier to split the project into different key proccesses and analyse each process to figure out the root of the problem. here is what happened to me when i signed up for twitter, and what can be done to fix it!

I started my account on twitter on March 20th and it was a horrible experience at first. in fact i almost gave up. Now at that time i was starting a blog that would be dealing with user experience, branding and strategy. so it was kind of shameful that i couldn't figure out some simple stuff in probably the web's simplest site, according to many other geek sites. i was feeling dumbed down because i couldn't figure out how i can find interesting people on this site, i put in my email to add my friends, guess what!! none of my friends had an account on twitter, i had no connection and didn't know i could start one!!

Before i was about to tell my self "F*&# twitter, lets move on to something else" i decided to click on every button to see what they do, i clicked on 'Home' i saw another version of my own home page, which was very odd, clicked on 'find & follow' didn't know any names, so much for that promise, frustrated and about to give up, at last try i thought why don't i go to my Google RSS reader, go to some of the blogs that talk about twitter and use their names to add. Scoble from Scobalizer was the first dude i checked out, and walla after 2 hours i had my first friend. but as i added my friend #1 i discovered 'public timeline' which made life a lot easier, i had no idea what public timeline meant so i never clicked on it, i simply thought it had something to do with my account info since setting and help were right beside in the same font and color just like all the other menus!!

Where i think twitter failed for at the beginning was the fact that i signed up but after that i was kind of clueless, i learned a great example from one of my teachers, he said "always assume the people you're designing/building for are dumbest people on earth"

My solution is even better than the problem i ran into. it doesn't change the layout of the site, doesn't event change the styling all that much. to program it would probably take 30 seconds. My solution is visually shown on the image above. the change is not drastic nor is it layout altering. the new top menu is better organized and at the same time categorized. related menu items are kept together while the other ones are separated into another block.

Here is where TWITTER fails in the beginning, some times less is more is so little that we, the users, feel dumb for not finding them. People love twitter because it doesn't allow you to do many things, which is ironic since every single software, innovation, industrial, chemical and political company in the world wants to add more, do more, be more!

i think as a society we have become to used to the idea that everything must be so complex and that technology is complex by nature that when once in while we come across a really simple piece of software, for the life of us we can't figure out how to use it! isn't that funny!!
I admit i use Twitter for practice rather that anything else. i use to so i can get my points across in 140 characters or less with the same efficiency if i was writing a 1000 word essay.

Before jumping into turning all my thoughts and resources into readable content i've decided to first go over what this site is about and how it can help you. An introduction is very necessary to avoid any later confusions. Also this article by it self is the basis and foundation that design, branding and strategy projects heavily rely on.
 

Intro

There somethings you need to know about me, first of all math is my strongest subject, you can see my %95+ marks in my university and high school transcripts.  it's worthy to mention that i'm also strong at logic, statistics  and economics. however, somehow i discovered that i also have a unique talent in design and when you mix an eye for design and style with math, logic and economics you get branding and strategy. my talent and vision in branding and strategy is a natural one, what i mean is that i don't force my self to think this way and i don't struggle to find solutions, they come to me automatically, i have done a lot of practice and have many of years of experience to get my brain to function this way.

i look at everything from logical point of view, meaning i put aside the emotional implications and focus heavily on the core details. When i'm presented with a project or challenge, i don't immediately look for answers or solutions but rather i start asking a lot of questions. i religiously believe in the 5W's, WHY, WHEN, WHERE, WHO, and WHAT and then i add the "H" factor, "HOW", you can call this method 5W+H.
 

EVERYTHING IS A PROCESS

Everything we do in life is a step by step process. knowing the details of each process allows us to find the roots of problems and figure our the best method in fixing them. Example, when you want to put your pants on you first select which of your pants you want to wear (this by it self has many process factors, like the type of events, dress code, weather, impression, fashion, ...) when you have selected what you want to wear you proceed to taking off the pants you're wearing now, then you put one of your legs into one legroom and then pull up on one side and proceed to the next leg. this was just give you a very brief example. back to the main point...

The 5W+H dissect the entire project into smaller pieces for a more efficient analysis. you can achieve results by asking question starting with some really simple ones like: (a website example)

WHY does it work this way? WHY would it become successful?
WHO is using it? WHO should be using it? WHO is not using it?
WHEN did they find it? WHEN did the problems start?
WHERE do they go after? WHERE are things located?
WHAT makes them leave or stay? WHAT contributes to the current state of crisis?

Above questions are a few really simple questions, normally for every project i ask about 200-300 of this questions. After the 5W's you move into the most important aspect of project analysis which are the questions regarding the "HOW" factor.
HOW people got to the site? (every single click involved)

HOW do people navigate through the site?
HOW people found each section of the site?
HOW people missed a section of the site?
HOW they registered? etc... etc...

The HOW factor lays out the process steps in multiple perspectives. what you want to achieve is a view from a user point of view, developer point of view and general point of view.
We want to know the details of each process involved so that we can locate root of problems, or areas in need of greater enhancements. it is much easier and more effective to improve a site process by process rather than changing the whole site to achieve a certain result.
in this site i'll try to write as much about this topic as i can.
 

WHY IS PROCESS IMPORTANT

knowing the process is knowing the path. Before we can set goals for our selves we need to figure out a way to get to where we want to go. Also knowing the path is very different than walking the path. To start i'll be talking a lot about the finding the path and follow each article with how you can walk the path and achieve your goals.
 

Knowing the process allows you to set efficient and strategic goals.

Next: Everything is Strategic