December. The month of the mile-long to-do list. With so many things to take care of at work and at home, it can feel like you’re trying to break the world record for fastest marathon time - except you’re not a runner. And you’re attempting the feat in 4 feet of water. It’s understandable that at this time of the year all you want is a productive day, where by the end of it you feel accomplished. You’re able to wind down and forget the rest of the items on your list (until the next day). I feel you, and so do our GoToMyPC Facebook friends. We asked them what the keys to having a productive Monday were (even in December), and they came forth with some useful and clever tips, shared here for your trying-to-be-productive-on-a-Monday-in-December reading pleasure. So, without further ado… How to have a productive Monday Having a productive Monday starts with how you leave things on Friday. In addition to tying up loose ends before work is over on Weekend Eve, be sure to clean off your desk. This chore should take all of three minutes, and when you get back to work on Monday, a clean workspace will signal the start of a fresh week. This helps you begin in the right frame of mind. (Thanks Lee J. for the tip!) Before you get back to your desk on Monday, use the weekend to rest up. Saturday and Sunday are supposed to be your downtime, and while family obligations and random to-dos can keep it from feeling so, scheduling even just an hour of me-time can make all the difference in your replenishment department. (Thanks Linda M. and Jennifer S.) If you get to work and start tackling tasks willy-nilly, you’re doing everything wrong. Okay, fine, not everything - but at least one thing wrong. To be more productive, write out what you want to accomplish that day. You only have eight hours or so in your work day, so make a plan, prioritize your tasks and tackle them, leaving a bit of room for the unexpected fires that will no doubt spark and need to be put out. (Thanks Darlene W.) Next on the list for your productive Monday bliss, stop reading this blog post right this minute. Kidding! What I meant to say is that social networks and other sites can be quite a time and productivity suck. That’s why Sara R. recommends getting off Facebook so you can get down to doing some real work. When all else fails, Bridgette B. recommends consuming a cup of coffee. Sometimes that little bit of extra energy can make all the difference. It can really perk up your day. Working from home on a Monday (or everyday)? Sarah H.B. recommends putting your young’uns to bed for a long nap. That or a sitter will grant you the downtime to hunker down on work without distractions. When none of the above tips work, maybe it’s time to just take a day off. You can’t do it all, and sometimes personal matters just matter more, so make your Monday your own. If you do, Tuesday is sure to be better. (Thanks Mark B.) Finally, when you need to tend to matters both personal and professional on a Monday, I recommend being in two places at once. Stay home or work from wherever you want and use GoToMyPC to remote into your work computer. Two birds, one stone. Magic. Life-saving. Whatever you want to call it, GoToMyPC can help you make your Monday a productive one. What are your tips for a productive Monday? Photo Credit: seeveeaar via Compfight cc

Technology means it’s now possible to work from anywhere. Some companies have taken this to the next level and abandoned the office completely. We caught up with the co-founder of one such company, Andy Bargery of Klaxon Marketing, to find out the secrets to his team’s success. If you’re interested in learning more, make sure to follow Andy on Twitter. Thanks, Andy! Tell us a little about the rationale behind Klaxon’s remote working strategy. We wanted to create a more flexible working environment where we could concentrate on delivering outputs rather than spending a certain amount of time at a desk. We also wanted the freedom to balance our professional and personal lives, working at the times we are most productive and spending plenty of time with our families. What are the strategies you use to collaborate successfully as a team? The most important strategy is to get the right people. It takes a certain mindset and level of experience to be able to work remotely and stay motivated to get the job done without a stable office environment. This means we have to recruit team members carefully, and typically we work with experienced marketing and communications professionals. They’ve often spent time in big agencies but want a new challenge. They have the right mindset: just putting in the hours is not good enough; they have to be able to focus on delivering outputs against a client brief. We also couldn’t work remotely without a very good communication infrastructure and solid processes. That means being able to share documents seamlessly or get in touch easily through instant messaging or conference calls. It also means we have a documented system for how things get done, which helps people to work within our environment. We call it the Klaxon Playbook. How do you maintain a team spirit when you’re all working in different locations? The key is regular and open communications, both remotely and in person. We’re currently planning a team dinner where we’ll get everyone around a table to discuss our strategy for the next year, but in the past we’ve done things like taking everyone for a snowboarding lesson. This helps to build a platform for team working and a team spirit. What are the essential tools your business couldn’t live without? The key tools are cloud-based file sharing, instant messenger, Google Apps, GoToMeeting, email and SaaS accounting applications. What advice do you have for companies who are seeking to establish their own remote working models? Get the right people on the bus. This style of working is not for everyone, so hire carefully. Make sure you choose the right technologies and tools, too. Define the processes that go into running your company. This is essential, as you can’t simply lean over the desk and ask your colleague. Are there any companies or individuals who particularly inspire you? I like what the team at KindredHQ are doing to drive forward the notion of co-working. It’s a great way for people to work independently but without the fear of isolation. They have a great community vibe going on there. Where do you see technology taking SMBs in the short term and longer term (5+ years)? Technology is completely transforming the future of the workplace. It’s increasingly easy for people to work anywhere at any time, and you can see this trend impacting companies of all shapes and sizes. The digital revolution and the impact of social technologies within businesses are fascinating to watch. Mobile and the consumerisation of devices and applications is also a big challenge, particularly for large traditional enterprises. Who knows where we will be in five years’ time? Technology is evolving so rapidly at the moment. Tech startups are creating new apps and tools all the time that have the potential to transform how we work and live. One thing I wouldn’t bet against is that in five years there will be another dozen-or-so big technology brands shaking up the status quo. Quickfire! Top 3 workplace anthems? Looking at my iTunes play count these are the three most played artists: Kings of Leon, Blur and Doves. Where does your to-do list live? In my moleskine notebook. What would be your ideal alternative career? Scuba-diving instructor. Tell us about a secret talent you have. I make the best scrambled eggs in the world. Who’s your favourite superhero? Batman. But then is he a super hero, or a man with lots of gadgets? Favourite time-saving tweak/hack? Anything Excel-related. Favourite productivity hack? Cloud-based accounting application FreeAgent. I couldn’t work without it. Best way to start the day? Breakfast with my family followed by a flat white. Want to implement your own remote working strategy? Our free trials of GoToMeeting and Podio represent the perfect starting point. Photo Credit: nic519 via Compfight cc

The holidays are here, and so is GoToTraining for iPhone and iPad! If you’ve been aching to gift mobile learning to your students this holiday season, now you can. We just launched an update to our free universal iOS GoToMeeting app that enables GoToTraining customers to provide a mobile live learning experience to attendees on iPhones and iPads. Using the GoToMeeting app, your students can: Join and participate in live GoToTraining sessions. View and respond to in-session polls and tests. Raise their hands to indicate that they want to pose a question or comment. Communicate with instructors and other learners via text chat. View learning materials shared via the GoToTraining content library You can use the app to present from an iPad during GoToTraining sessions, too. iPad presenters can: Share content from cloud services (ShareFile, Dropbox) or email attachments. Share a website from a browser. Share a whiteboard and sketch ideas with drawing tools. To access these new, interactive capabilities, instruct your learners to download the GoToMeeting app from the App Store today and give them the gift of mobile learning!

Back in 1979, Darryl and Vita Dworkin found themselves burned out on corporate work. Darryl was a vice president in the toy business, and Vita was a director for a large pharmaceutical, but both wanted something more. "So we formed a corporation (DNV - for Darryl ‘N’ Vita) and in 1980 bought a 25-year-old retail store business called The Bright Acre," explained Darryl. Today, The Bright Acre is a fireplace store that has successfully served the Ocean and Monmouth Counties in New Jersey for many years, thanks in part to lessons Darryl and Vita learned in corporate life. They were quick to adopt new technology like computers to replace inventory tracking on cards, and they recognized the importance of a company culture that values people. "We have always provided paid health plan costs for employees and treated people in a way that has allowed us to have a company that today has the average employee with us almost 20 years - and as many as 30 years," said Darryl. Partially due to the burnout they experienced, Darryl and Vita wanted The Bright Acre to be a company that would allow them to get away frequently. The Bright Acre was initially a summer business so they could ski in winter. But as the company grew, they needed a way to run the business year-round from wherever they went next. So they hired dependable staff and then chose GoToMyPC as a remote access solution. "Before GoToMyPC, we called and were sent reports," said Darryl. "Now we just go to the company server to set up check runs or review inventory or do any of the thousand other things that running a small business requires after the daily reports." GoToMyPC has also been useful for business continuity at The Bright Acre. Last year’s destructive Superstorm Sandy passed right over them in New Jersey. "GoToMyPC allowed us to leave at the end of November and still guide the business from our winter home in Nevada," explained Darryl. But there was a silver lining in that storm cloud - they’ve since increased staff by 40 percent to assist in rebuilding the New Jersey Shore. "As business owners, we’ve learned that we just don’t know what to expect next," said Darryl. "It may be a recession or it may be a hurricane; either way it may require late nights going over the changes to make intelligent decisions. And it sure is a lot nicer doing it from home than staying alone in a closed store to crunch the numbers or watch the finances." Check out Darryl’s video below to hear more about his experience as a long-distance owner with GoToMyPC. Want to be in our next Small Business Story? Click on over to our video gallery where you can record a short snippet about you, your business and how you’re using GoToMyPC. We’ll post your video to our web and social channels, and our favorites will be featured in our Small Business Stories here on the GoTo Blog.

Oh the weather outside is frightful, and the fire might be delightful, but we’ve still got stuff to accomplish this winter! Have you ever noticed that productivity (like the daylight hours) seems to dim during the colder months of the season? You’re not alone - up to 50% of Americans report feeling less productive in the winter, and a whopping half-million people are diagnosed annually with seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. If you find yourself feeling a little sluggish in the winter months, we’ve got a few suggestions to help take you from pooped to productive: Get active Get your heart pumping and feel yourself become more alert as the fresh air fills your lungs. Even if it’s too cold to step out your front door, try jumping jacks or running stairs to get a little cardiovascular activity. If you can get outside, use the weather to your advantage and hit the slopes or go for a hike. The important thing is that you elevate your resting heart rate and let the added benefits of the endorphin rush kick in. Get a hobby Keeping your mind active is just as important as keeping your body active during the long winter months. Sign up for that cooking class you’ve always been curious about, learn another language or crack open a book you’ve been meaning to read. The sense of excitement and accomplishment you’ll feel about your new hobby can lead to happiness throughout the seasons. Get productive Staying warm during the cold months has shown to cut winter office complaints by up to 70% - and that’s nothing to sneeze at! Try setting up full spectrum light bulbs to increase the light, dress in layers to keep yourself comfortable and, when it’s sunny, take a break outside to enjoy the fresh air. Being proactive is an excellent way to beat the winter blues. Don’t forget, your office might have a telecommuting or workshifting policy to let you work from the warmth of your own house. If that’s the case, make sure you’ve got what you need to stay connected and collaborating with your team. For more ideas of fun activities and hobbies to help keep you working in a winter wonderland, check out this infographic.

Today we have a guest post from Gihan Perera. Gihan is a consultant, speaker and author who helps professional speakers, trainers, thought leaders and other business professionals to leverage their products, services and business practices - particularly with their online strategy. He is also the author of the books Secrets of Internet Business Success and Webinar Smarts, among many others. Find out more at www.WebinarSmarts.com. Collaboration is the key to business success, but if you find yourself wishing for the "good old days" when everybody in your team was based in the same office and your meetings took place in front of a white board, you’ve fallen behind the times. Collaboration tools were born out of the necessity - they enable geographically dispersed teams to communicate fast and easily. But these tools do more than just instantly overcome the barriers of distance. Surprisingly enough, online collaboration is often faster, smoother and more productive than in-person collaboration. Here are five ways to elevate your team’s collaboration and leverage the advantages of virtual meetings in 2014. 1. Get the right people on board. In the past, the only practical way to choose the best project team was to choose from your existing staff (or make expensive hiring decisions). Now, online collaboration software opens up numerous other opportunities for bringing a team together, for example: Bring in expertise from other departments located in other cities and countries Outsource specialized tasks to external contractors Work more closely with customers and clients Create partnerships with peers, colleagues and even competitors 2. Include your virtual team members in the team. If you have a hybrid team, with people in the office and others located elsewhere, ensure you include the latter group in team activities and decisions (where appropriate). It’s easy for them to be out of mind because they are out of sight. You don’t have to bring them physically into the office regularly. But do keep them in mind when planning other activities, such as: Setting goals, objectives and roles at the start of a project Team meetings to make important decisions Celebrations and feedback at the end of a project Ongoing training, mentoring and professional development for their careers 3. Stop making decisions via email. If you find yourself engaging in long sequences of back-and-forth email discussions within your team, stop using email and call a meeting! This can be an in-person meeting or a video conference, but face time is often the best way to quickly gain agreement on a complex issue. 4. Meet face to face to save time and money. Online meetings are typically more efficient than in-person meetings (even after excluding travel time and idle chit-chat). They also have other advantages, such as an in-built recording facility, easy screen sharing and the ability to join from mobile devices. Video conferences are even more effective because face-to-face communication fosters familiarity and engagement, which are both critically important in business communications, like all communications. 5. Share ideas and insights with other teams. Another powerful use of collaboration software is to share ideas, insights and progress with other teams and other stakeholders. You can now do this quickly and cost effectively using online tools, such as webinars and social workspaces. Photo Credit: susanvg via Compfight cc

A penguin, a panda and a hummingbird walk into bar. What does that have to do with your content marketing strategy? A lot considering all three are actually Google search algorithms that decide the ranking of your content. How so? Each weighs "quality content" heavily in their search results, meaning the better your content, the better you rank in online search results. In fact, a recent survey from the Custom Content Council reported that 78% of people feel companies that publish strong content are more interested in building relationships with them, and a whopping 68% said they would be more likely to buy from organizations that deliver informative content. With stats like that, it’s hard to ignore that the frequency, relevancy and quality of your content matters more than ever. Don’t panic! This doesn’t mean that you have to start churning out content like a tabloid magazine. Creating great content is about quality and consistency, and with the New Year swiftly approaching, you’re probably evaluating what worked this year and what you need to do in 2014. No matter if your content marketing program is nonexistent, planned but not kicked off or quite established, you’re probably thinking of ways to get more content with less effort. The best strategy: build a hub-and-spoke content model This strategy focuses on dissecting and repurposing content to get more out of each asset you produce. Great content marketers take one asset and turn it into multiple assets, using a variety of formats, like video, webinars, blogs and so on. While this sounds like a tall order, it’s easier than it sounds, and when the payoff is reaching new clients and freeing up your time too, a repurposing-focused content model is a win-win. Win with webinars To improve your content marketing model in 2014, start with webinars. By nature, webinars collect rich data about your prospects and customers, let you interact with them in real time, not to mention that webinars recordings can be truncated into multiple assets for your content marketing promotions. Turn the webinar recording into a video highlight reel. Share the slides from the presentation as another form of content, and curate the questions that you didn’t get to during the live Q&A and send them to the webinar speaker to respond to via email and then post the Q&A as a blog post. When you’re starting (or improving) a content marketing program, getting more bang for your buck is key, and webinars can be chopped and repurposed. Now, that’s called working smarter. For more tips on getting started with content marketing via webinars. Download our free ebook "How to Build Your Content Marketing Hub." Photo Credit: nick_russill via Compfight cc

Family owned and operated since 1980, Thelen Service Center is an automotive shop offering a variety of services from repairs to regular maintenance in Albany, Minnesota. Now in its third generation of Thelens, the shop still provides the same helpful and friendly service as always. They even offer free vehicle pick up and delivery for people too busy with work to drop their cars off. Speaking of busy, part-owner Amanda Thelen works as a secretary for the shop, helping her brothers Ben and Bob run the business. But she also has another full-time job at a company 25 miles away. "After working a full day at my other job, I would pack up my kids once a week, every week, and drive 30 minutes to drop my kids off at my Mom’s and go to our business," said Amanda. "I’d try to do all my work, bills and checkbook balancing for the week in a few hours before I would have to pick up the kids and drive 30 minutes home." Unsurprisingly, Amanda began to get fed up with the back-and-forth. She realized the best solution would be to use her laptop to simply do her work from home, but she could not get her computers networked no matter what she tried. But then she came across an advertisement alerting her to GoToMyPC remote access. "It was destiny!" joked Amanda. "Now that I have GoToMyPC, I don’t have to make that dreaded trip. I can go online anytime and stay caught up when the kids are watching a movie or napping." Now she’s more in control of her busy work schedule, and she can spend extra time with the family to boot. Check out Amanda’s video below to hear more about how GoToMyPC has changed the way she works. Want to be in our next Small Business Story? Click on over to our video gallery where you can record a short snippet about you, your business and how you’re using GoToMyPC. We’ll post your video to our web and social channels, and our favorites will be featured in our Small Business Stories here on the GoTo Blog.

If your 2014 is shaping up to involve a lot of presentations, you should consider utilizing a template for building your presentations and maximizing workflow, if you’re not already. Simply put, templates are a great way for presenters to cut down on prep time and have professional-looking standardized documents. You get more time to focus on the quality of your content, not to mention all the time you’ll save not having to create new presentations from scratch each time. Moreover, templates allow the non-designers out there to elevate their brand using professionally designed documents that have visual consistency, which can go a long way with audiences and customers. So why not resolve to jazz up your presentations in 2014 with templates? To help you get started, we found a few reliable presentation template resources with plenty of variety - and some of them are free! Whether seeking a new look or just trying something different, there’s bound to be a few worth trying out: Imagine Layout: A resource for Power Point and Keynote templates, diagrams, charts and more. You can filter for presentations that will best suit your industry or needs, and there’s even an archive of free options that are pretty user friendly. Inkd: Every template design can be downloaded as both a Keynote or a Power Point source file. You can search for industry-specific options, and there are plenty of free options to choose from that you can modify to fit your needs. Templates Wise: A website that features templates, charts and image resources for Power Point presentations. With filtering for your industry and needs as well as royalty-free music and imagery that can help brighten up your presentation or illustrate a point. Microsoft: A no brainer when it comes to finding compatible and reliable Power Point templates online. There are both free and paid options, and their library and customer support are top notch. If you already have a presentation template that works for your needs, shift your focus to improving your presentation style in 2014. Here are some presentation musts to get you started: Turn on your webcam in online presentations to connect better with your audience. Video conferencing is especially effective during Q&A sessions and panel discussions for helping the audience keep track of who is talking and for adding an extra visual engagement element. Use built-in feedback features to improve your future presentations. Polls and surveys work really well for this. Send out a survey or poll after your training session or webinar for feedback not just on the topic or speaker, but the overall presentation flow, the slides and anything else you want feedback on. Record presentations or training sessions and upload the recordings to your website or social channels to add to your on-demand content library. For more tips and creative suggestions to shake up your presentation style in 2014, read the white paper on transforming presentations from monologue to dialogue.   Photo credit: Fuelgrafics

In recent weeks I’ve grudgingly marveled at New Zealand’s world champion rugby team, the All Blacks. Having defeated all comers, including an indefatigable and inspired Irish side that came agonisingly close to beating New Zealand for the first time in 108 years, the All Blacks can now justifiably claim to be one of the most dominant teams in any sport. What’s the secret of their success? In this professional era, with its advanced nutritionists, specialist trainers and analysts, comparatively little separates teams in terms of physical conditioning. Players in both the northern and southern hemisphere are fitter, stronger and faster than they’ve ever been. But in the dying seconds of the Irish game in Dublin, when it looked as if defeat was inevitable, what allowed the All Blacks to finally prevail was their self-belief. Of course, this doesn’t materialise out of nowhere. Self-belief is founded on skills, leadership and strategy - all of which are bound by teamwork. I want you to be able to create a team that has the capacity to be as awesome, in its own field, as the world’s top teams. Read our new ebook, The Citrix Guide to Great Teams, to take the first steps. The Citrix Guide to Great Teams from GoToMeeting   Photo Credit: geoftheref via Compfight cc