Focus on getting things done with Project Management 2.0
Observing the tremendous amount of time managers waste, Andrew Filev of Tech Republic writes about how to reduce unnecessary tasks and strengthen one’s leadership skills: “Project Management 2.0 relies on the same concepts as Enterprise 2.0. The power of many, also known as collective intelligence, helps to build, maintain and evolve an up-to-date picture of operations. Flexible Project Management 2.0 tools merge this picture from various pieces, giving a perfect example of what enterprise social software researchers call “emergent structures.” The software supporting these two concepts, collective intelligence and emergent structures, open new opportunities for boosting your own efficiency and your team’s efficiency by cutting the daily routine and leaving more room for creativity and leadership.”

Hal Varian on how the Web challenges managers
James Manyikia interviewed Google’s chief economist about new technologies and how they are reshaping the economy, with the video and transcript made available in McKinsey Quarterly. “If you look at the beginning of the 20th century, we saw the rise of mass production. Henry Ford and the entire team were down on the factory floor raising this, lowering that, speeding up the assembly line, changing the way things were built, and were able to extract far more efficiencies than were available before. I think the same thing is happening now with digital technology. When we’re all networked, we all have access to the same documents, to the same capabilities, to this common infrastructure, and we can improve the way work—intellectual work, knowledge work—flows through the organization. And again, in my opinion, that will lead to a substantial advantage in terms of productivity.”

Bad Habits Slap Us Down, but a Theme Encourages
Karl Staib guest posts on Zen Habits, and his article tells the story of how changing his work perspective changed his life. “I’ve heard countless people complain about their jobs, but they never do anything about it because the pain isn’t strong enough. They don’t want to work at changing their habits because all they see is more pain. They see a pile of lifelong behavior patterns that aren’t worth changing. They are used to the emotions that they’ve dealt with for 10, 30, or 50 years. They don’t want to dive into their emotional mess and probably come out disappointed in themselves.”

HOW TO: Survive a Social Media Revolt
On Mashable, Muhammad Saleem chastises executives for their ineffective use of social media for listening to their user base in order to improve their services, citing examples of poorly managed incidents. “It baffles me to see that most of the people running popular social media sites (and new media sites in general) hardly communicate with their communities. When they do, it’s usually for one of two reasons, either an announcement of new features (which is useful for PR purposes), or to apologize for their mistakes (these apologies usually come after massive uproar, not in the absence of). Write to your community and participate in your community even if you don’t have something ground breaking to say, and definitely communicate with your community if you’re going to be making changes that will effect thousands of loyal users.”

ComScore Report: Fastest-Growing Sites and Top Ten Advertising Magnets
Erick Schonfeld breaks down the report with accompanying charts and lists over at TechCrunch. “During 2008, comScore estimates that 4.5 trillion display ads were served in the U.S. alone. That comes out to more than 2,000 Internet ads per month per person. And, believe it or not, the number of ads served up actually declined a little during the year as publishers tried to push up CPMs (the amount they can charge per thousand ad impressions) by reducing inventory.”

How to Friend Mom, Dad, and the Boss on Facebook… Safely
If you’re not too comfortable about letting certain people see a few things on your Facebook profile, ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez shares some tips on how to control access to them. “It’s still up for debate how much personal information you should share with others on your Facebook profile. Some people would argue that the time for us to hide behind our masks is over. If we’re professional, good employees at work and good sons and daughters at home, it shouldn’t matter so much if a friend tags us in a photo which shows us tipping back beers at the weekend party. The fact is, everyone has a personal life and it shouldn’t matter who sees it.”

HOW TO: Build a social media site cheat sheet for any topic
Meanwhile, Marshall Kirkpatrick will teach you how to find what’s hot in the blogosphere, in any industry, using a mix of social bookmarking sites, feed aggregators, people search and many more, automation and filtering, in a step-by-step guide on ReadwriteWeb. “People new to social media are often frustrated when they are told to “join the conversation” – because they aren’t sure where to find the conversation. Here’s how we find and track the most popular conversations in niche fields. Popularity isn’t a perfect judge of quality by any means, but it’s a good place to start from.”

Nomad vs. Stuff
Jay White of Digital Nomads tackles a common dilemma for road warriors: excessive baggage. “Wait, let me take a step back, I know why I carry this thing around, I want to know that I have everything I may need. I can write for a blog, answer someone on twitter and I can even pull a MacGyver if some hooligans tie-up me and my Starbucks cronies while they rob the place. In reality, I can’t think of the last time I needed more than one device at a time. Have I ever been so unorganized that I needed everything in one trip from home? No. Never.”