I tend to write books when something in my life is very painful. My first book was dealing with the pain of all those non-programming things you have to do to sell commercial Windows desktop software; my last was getting my head around what a bootstrapping web startup needs to do.

The pain I’m feeling right now is huge and growing sharper day by day. Social media, Internet disruption, the Media Tsunami, infinite information and a thousand-fold increase in people and things wanting my attention is smashing into the old industrial ways I’ve depended on to be productive, make a living, get things done. It’s like watching the tide wash away the sandcastle you live in: increasingly, the ways to make value, communicate, get things done, build, connect don’t work. Or, they now work so badly they’ve become part of the problem: remember when people thought email would make individuals and companies more productive?

“The New Productivity: Producing Value in the Internet/Social Age” is the working title. (I just bought thenewproductivity.com ). It will not be an Apress book. It might not be a physical book at all – it belongs on Kindle/iBooks/ePub. But I’m going to go out there and see who else is feeling this pain and try and find some answers above and beyond the millions of existing tips on the web on being “more productive.”

Comments, suggestions, sharing your pain in hopes I can find something that will help are most welcome on this post or via bob.walsh@47hats.com or@bobwalsh.

[photo credit]

The Iron Law of running a startup or microISV is there’s never enough time to everything, especially the important but non-critical stuff. It takes lots and lots of time to do the strategic stuff – often you have to pump in some unknown number of hours just researching.

That’s why I’m excited by Fancy Hands – it’s fixed price virtual assistants for simple but time-consuming tasks. I recently used Fancy Hands (15 tasks per month for $35) to kick off two projects that have been stalled forever: engaging more with other startup bloggers and social media bloggers. Before you can engage, you have to know who to engage with – and that’s an easy task to hand off to someone else and get “good enough” results.

All it took was signing up with the service (FH uses Google Accounts for authentication), then send them an email for a task:

• Name, email and blog URL and name for the top 25 Social Media Bloggers.
• Name, email and blog URL and name for the top 25 software Startup Bloggers.
• (something private)

Here’s something worth mentioning: total elapsed time between putting in these two requests (and a third) and getting results: 45 minutes. Put another way, for that 45 minutes it was like having 3 Bob VMs running in addition to yours truly.

Fancy Hands isn’t a virtual bookkeeper, fashion consultant or speechwriter: they focus on scheduling, web research, making appointments. But getting 15 of those things off your plate for the month is worth a lot more than $35 or the X hours it would take you. Here’s some of their most requested tasks:

• Restaurant Reservations
• Scheduling a car service / taxi pickup
• Find the nearest place that has iPads in stock
• Find the advertising rates (or contact info) for the top 10 [industry] blogs
• Schedule a haircut with [stylist] on Friday after 1pm
• Call [three bars] and find out if they have a private room available for rentals
• Call [primarily offline company] and get the status of order number xyz
• Find a couple upholsterer options near where I work
• Call TD Bank and ask how many checks I can use for free on a standard personal account
• Call some hotel and extend my stay for three nights instead of two

I’ve been cajoling Mason Levey to add a more technical track to deal with the real IT pains in my butt like:

• Why are my iCal alarms doubled up?
• What’s the best online service out there to let people fill in a short questionnaire and book my time?
• A proven recipe for setting up 3 WordPress blogs on a new VPS.
• Best current tool for winnowing out low value Twitter follows?
• What’s the best automatic Twitter background maker out there?
• What should my Facebook privacy settings be?

There’s a huge market out there for these kind of Internet-related tasks – not just startups and IT people, but all those hundreds of millions of people out there being pulled day by day and step by step into our net-centric world. Give Fancy Hands a try (and here’s a StartupToDo.com Guide on Fancy Hands with a nice discount code), and bug Mason to offer an IT track: it would be awesome!

(P.S – and if you can make any of those IT pains go away, let’s talk: bob.walsh@47hats.com.)

The brave new world we are building online has it’s share of brave new problems:

• Does the Internet remain a level playing field or do large corporations “help” it by picking and choosing whose bits are more important (theirs)?
• How do we deal with the Media Tsunami that is growing to truly apocalyptic size day by day?
• Humans can only make so many decisions a day: after that our brains turn to mush. Between the web and social media, our supply of decisionmaking is wiped out before we start whatever we do to earn money.

He’s one answer to that last problem: reduce the number of trivial decisions you make each day by making checklists for all the routine stuff. Then instead of wasting XX decisions feeding the cats every day, you conserve those decisions for things that matter.

Thanks to MacRae Linton for turning me on to Checklist Wrangler today – it’s far from perfect, but if you pair a bluetooth mac keyboard to you iPhone, you can easily and quickly make checklist templates that will auto generate as you need them. Not a perfect solution, but it helps reduce decision fatigue.