Organize Your Business & Personal Lives: Smartphones Make it Possible

Organize your home and work life through your phone. With the prevalence of affordable smart phones and applications, there’s no excuse for disorganization if you are starting a business, running a business or building a site for your business. Don’t expect to live your personal or work life solely through your phone, though. You have more important things to do than check your email every five minutes.

You don’t always have to be available, you don’t always have to be “on the clock,” and you don’t always have to have all the answers. But you need to be available when it counts, prepared with a plan when you go “off the clock” and know where to find the answers when they’re needed. Luckily, your smartphone can help with pre-installed or easily sourced applications.

Calendar

You can link to calendars for your favorite sports teams, put your home and work calendars in the same place and add events on the fly. Sync up your phone calendar with your work calendar so they automatically update. Trying to duplicate events from your email or post-it notes on your monitor to your phone is a recipe for disaster. If you’re the type of person to run late, set reminders to prompt you to prepare for and travel to meetings.

Email

Keep your personal email and work email up to date by receiving both on your cell phone. You don’t have to read every email and you certainly don’t have to respond to all of the emails do read on that tiny keyboard. You should read all of the subject lines and delete junk mail as soon as you see it. Keeping your inbox as manageable as possible will save you time in the long run.

During his time as CEO at GoDaddy, Bob Parsons told Inc Magazine about his style of management. He didn’t expect his team to be tethered to their phones and he chose not to be tethered to his. Because he’d established a strong team, he had the freedom to be out of the office working on other projects or just enjoying life.

Website Tools

In the words of Bob Parsons on his video blog, “these days if a company doesn’t have a solid website and a professional web presence people see that as a [bad] sign.” Keep your website current with simple web app.

You can register and manage domains with domain name server control, forwarding, nameserver management and renewal, according to the GoDaddy site. You can send and receive Go Daddy email in the Mobile Workspace mail client and manage private and virtual private servers, hosting, email accounts, Go Daddy account settings, and Online Files, according to the iTunes app page.

Notes

Have you ever had the nagging feeling you’re forgetting something? It’s awful. If you’ve checked your calendar and you’re all clear, the next place to go is your to-do list. Oh? What’s that? You don’t have one?

You do now.

Use the provided note app on your phone, or install Evernote — a free app — and create an account. Once you have an account, you can view your notes on nearly any computer, phone or other mobile device. Keep a to-do list and refer to it daily. Clear off items that are finished or unimportant. Keep a separate list or section for long-term goals, business ideas and other notes. Your to-do list needs to be readable, manageable and actionable.

Twitter

Though you’ll have to wade through lots of shameless self-promotion and attempts at humor, you can use twitter to monitor your brand presence online. It’s also a great way to research a new client or business partner on the go.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a smart phone app that’s worth having so you can network on the go. You can add a new connection at a business meeting, look at a company profile quickly before a meeting or read up on trends while you’re in between things.