Today's guest blog post is by Jocelyn Mathewes, a wedding and lifestyle photographer who works in both Boston and Baltimore. Given that it is a Monday and the start to your work-week, I figured her topic was highly appropriate. Follow her on Twitter and read her blog.

It's happened so often now, I've finally taken the time to listen: when folks look over my shoulder and see me taking notes, or have a chance to glance at my work notebook, they all say the same two things: “My, you're organized!” and “I love your handwriting!”

Yes, it's important to be organized (and there are several wonderful resources you should make use of below), but I'm here to tell you one thing that will be utterly amazing if you don't do it already…

Keep Track of Your Time

Much like the way financial advisers tell you to track every penny so you know where you're spending your money, track every minute of your work so you know where you're spending your time.

When I worked as a graphic designer in-house at a non-profit, I had to keep detailed records of all my activities and projects we worked on. The design department didn't really have a budget on its own; all of our work was funded by other peoples' budgets. When the end of the week came, we had to enter every increment bit of time we spent on a project to keep the engine going. My timesheet was a patchwork quilt of craziness!

This sounds daunting, scary, and annoying as hell, doesn't it? I'm going to tell you why it's SO IMPORTANT that you do this in your own business.

As it turns out, knowing where your time goes is an incredibly valuable thing, because it gives you feedback on how your business functions, and what (and how much) activity it involves.

I'm a mom with small children, and this is my part-time full-passion business. I know many others are in this very situation, or similarly restrictive ones. The moment they step away from the computer or return home from a shoot, they're flooded with the patter of feet, the dishes in the sink, or some party or practice to get to.

Having that restriction is a huge motivator to know where my time is going. Every minute I get to spend on my business is absolutely precious, because there's no guarantee I can make up work later in a day without sacrificing some part of my personal life or leisure. (I mean this literally! Have you seen the cost of childcare lately?)

Tracking your time reveals:

– inefficient processes that need to be refined.
– large chunks of work that could possibly be outsourced.
– repeated tasks that could be batched together for more efficiently.

Tracking your time also:

– shows what percentage of your effort going in to each area of your business.
– lets you estimate future task lengths based on past experience.

How I Do It

I have a notebook that I keep by my desk. Each spread is a week in my work life. Early in the week I enter in my tasks and prioritize them. As I go day by day, I write down the times I worked on certain projects, and tally the hours. I have set categories of activities that I keep track of in a separate tally.

Every so often (and this isn't entirely regular), I take all these numbers and enter them into a simple Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet tracks number of hours worked on each of the days of the week, and the number of hours spent in particular categories I've determined are of interest to me. It then tallies the averages and spits out percentages: the heartbeat of my work.

The categories I'm interested in tracking are:

– shooting (time spent behind the camera or on my way to/from a shoot)
– editing (time spent in Lightroom or Photoshop, working on a shoot)
– correspondence (e-mail, phone calls, snail mail, and the like)
– marketing (social media time, designing marketing materials, distributing materials, and blogging)
– meetings (viewing sessions, prospective client meetings, conference calls)
– design (album designs as well as general in-house design work for my branding)
– administrative (filing, Quickbooks and accounting, analyzing my SEO, anything introspective)

Looking at all these tasks and percentages and numbers can make a person cross-eyed! But I'll tell you: it sure helps me to understand and the weeks where I worked hard and felt extra pressure, and where that pressure went (was I designing a lot, or was it a heavy shooting week?).

Also, knowing that particular kinds of activities take up a certain amount of time helps me designate days that I devote to that activity. Things that require minimal interruption (like editing and admin tasks) will happen on different days from more interruptive activities (like correspondence or social media tasks).

If you like, feel free to download my little hackneyed spreadsheet and re-purpose it to your liking.

Of course, there are plenty of other electronic-based time tracking resources out there, but I prefer the paper version, because it forces me to take time and examine my priorities in a deliberate way. I also prefer to keep my work tasks and personal tasks in separate physical places, so that when I'm off work, I'm off work (a tough thing to do when running a business out of your home!).

Make it Yours

My system won't work for everyone, of course. The important thing I want you to take away is this: find a way to track your time. Build a system that works for you, and that gives you the insight into your activities that you need! Your life will thank you.

Productivity Resources

Making Ideas Happen
Scott Belsky of Behance.net, writes in an inspiring and clear way about what makes creative people (or teams) productive and effective.

Getting Things Done
David Allen's classic is a must-read for anyone who wants to get a little more task-oriented. Read more about it here.

43 Folders
Merlin Mann has an amazing set of articles available. Be sure to read his treatise on how to set up a “tickler file”.

Moleskine
Beautiful planners and notebooks that are just hecka fun to use.

Freckle
Time-tracking software for the iPhone and internet, also with invoicing capability (seems super useful for graphic designers).

So, tell us … do you track your time like Jocelyn? Do you have another system? What has worked for you and why?

One clear problem I see online is that websites are starting to all look the same. Web designers are no doubt busy working on new designs all the time, but take a quick look at what is available on a site like ThemeForest and you'll see what I mean. I am frankly quite bored with the choices there.

So, “what's the solution wise guy,” you ask. Simple. Distinguish yourself from your competition by creating or having a website designed that speaks to who you are and what your specific needs are.

Here are two examples of what I am talking about – Essential Imagery and Totally Rad Actions. These websites are an extension of their fun and may quirky personalities. They both produce great work but what's that little something that's making you stick around longer? Think about it. Think very hard about it.

So customizing your website is really your only option. But how do you go about doing that? Do you simply slap together elements willy-nilly and hope that it makes visual sense? No way, right? We all have a vision for what we would like to see, but there are very few photographers who are also good at design. I am a huge believer in working with experts who have the experience and street-cred to produce web sites that stand out.

One such person is Sarah J. Bray, a web designer and strategist based in Virginia Beach.

Here's a short interview with her:

She discusses what is required to differentiate yourself online and offers a program called Hot Dates With Your Website that will guide you through making all the right changes to your website.

The “Friday” Sarah refers to in the video is TODAY. If you want in, today is your day to do it. She is closing the program for some obvious reasons – 1) the more intimate the group, more gets done and 2) everyone will be working on about the same things on their websites so people can actually have meaningful conversations about their successes and challenges.

So, click the banner you see right above this line or visit Sarah's site.

Full disclosures – I paid for this program. Because I think the first few “dates” have been useful to me, I am recommending it to you through an affiliate link. You are going to see lots of changes here on Tiffinbox and it will all be wholly due to the hot dates I am having with my website.

If you do sign up for this, please comment below and I'll connect with you through the private Facebook group Sarah has set up for all of us.

Thanks to Kristen Kalp of BrandCamp for introducing me to Sarah.

A familiar lament among wedding and portrait photographers goes like this – “I found my images on another photographer's site and they are using them as their own.”

Thievery online isn't anything new. People have been, um, “borrowing” images for a long time. As one person erroneously told me, “If it's on the web, it's public domain.”

Yeah, right.

If you are a professional you'll want to protect your images. I recall Michael Grecco‘s tedious, but necessary workflow where he sends a batch of his images to the US Copyright Office ever time he wraps up a photo shoot. That takes some discipline, no doubt.

Registering your images at the US Copyright Office is the first step. But I have to wonder how many of us actively do it. When ownership of an image online does come into question, we've had TinEye for some time. You may have also used Myows (which claims to provide free online copyright protection).

Now Google wants to get into that sandbox too.

While Google doesn't offer to protect your images, it appears that this new service will help you search for them. So, if you were to have any question about where or how your images are being used, all it would take is popping them into the search engine and finding where it appears online. Given their larger database, I suspect this is going to be an important tool for photographers who are serious about their art.

Now, what else could you do to protect your images? Well, here is something that my friend Mark Higgins told me about. Instead of retaining your original file name, say, “DSC_3456.jpg,” rename it like so – “110616-smith-park-sb-001.jpg”

So, try and give each of your images a unique file name, if you can.

The other thing that might help is to use the “Alternate text” field to fill it in with text describing the image. This is easily done if you have a WordPress blog. As you upload an image, you'll be given a set of fields to fill out if you wish. The Title and Alternate Text fields (red in color in the screengrab below) are the most important as search engines count on these fields to understand and file away or index what it is they are looking at.

If the description of the image matches the content of your blog post, then search engines are more likely to link the two and give it a higher priority.

When it comes time to ascertain whether you are indeed the owner of an image or a clutch of images, there would be no doubt in anyone's mind, based on the information that you have baked into the files before they go online, that you photographed them.

There is more to search engine optimization, of course, so take the time to learn about it from the best. I highly recommend Zach Prez's Web Marketing Guide + Photography Blog Success ebooks. Yes, they are both affiliate links but I promote them only because I have found it very beneficial to me and feel they may be of use to you as well.

So, will Google's new ‘Image Search' option give photographers some peace of mind that their images aren't being used or misused anywhere outside of their control?

To give credit where credit is due, this blog post was inspired by A Photo Editor.

Update: It's nice to see other photographers discuss this new Google service. Read my friend Scott Wyden's review.

The very core of the Strobist experience is to use your flash units off-camera or studio strobe units on location. There are a lot of options in the market now that can help you do just that. From personal experience, though, I have used the PocketWizard Plus II Transceivers. More recently I switched to Paul C. Buff's CyberSync system. Now I am considering returning back to PocketWizard.

These two videos below by Mark Wallace have convinced me to make the move back. The videos show how the new units work with the Nikon camera and flash systems. I suspect, however, the way these units operate won't be too radically different if you are using a Canon system. So everyone is welcome!

How To Shoot With PocketWizard MiniTT1 and FlexTT5

How To Use The PocketWizard AC3 Zone Controller

For using these units on a Canon system, check out these video tutorials.

By sheer coincidence, I won these units some time back. So, you'll see an “open-box” video very soon. Stay tuned! Thanks to Mark Wallace and Phil Bradon of Mac Groups for sending me the Nikon version of these PocketWizard units. I can't wait to go out and play with them.

Below, tell me if you have considered buying these units or you have already invested in a RadioPopper or some other wireless system. Do you work with flash off-camera or studio units for your shoots? Do you have questions on how to set those up? Would you find it useful if there were more tutorials posted here on Tiffinbox? Let me know!

This guest post is by Matt Brandon, a travel photographer now based in Malaysia. He works with NGO's “to tell their stories and to train their field staff to do the same.” Please follow Matt on Twitter. He is a terrific resource, as you will see from his blog post here.

One of the most frustrating things that can happen to you when you travel is getting to a new and amazing place only to get sick. Then having to spend the next several days recovering. It happens way too often and used to happen to me … a lot. In fact, travelers' diarrhea (TD) is the most common illness affecting travelers. Each year between 20-50% of international travelers, an estimated 10 million persons, develop diarrhea. (from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) I used to suffer from TD a lot till I got a few simple little tricks under my belt. Please, don't misunderstand what I am saying, I still get sick, just not as often with travelers' diarrhea . Quite frankly, most of the time it is just a cold or the flu because I have pushed my self too hard for too long. Thankfully for me the infamous “Delhi belly”, “Montezuma's revenge”, “Aztec two step”, “Thai-dal wave” or the “Katmandu quickstep” is much a thing of the past. Why? Because I take some simple precautions.

First let's define some terms. There is travelers' diarrhea or TD and traveler's stomach. I differentiate the two because often when you travel you eat new and strange food and it takes a few days for your system to get use to it. Don't panic, often these new spices are hard on your gut and on top of that, your internal clock is messed up so you just need time to adjust. It is a recipe for upset stomach. After a few days things will settle down and life will be good again. But, full-on TD, aka Delhi Belly, is a sanitation issue and can be quite dangerous. It is often bacteria from bad water, poorly handled food or quite frankly from your own hands and it is bad news. Not to gross you out, but this bacteria lives in feces – as in poo – you know, sh*t. So how does this … stuff get into your mouth? The reality is in many of the countries I visit people often use their left hand to clean themselves after they defecate. Thus, the whole idea of the left hand being unclean and eating with your right hand. But unfortunately cooks don't use only their right hand to prepare food. Plus many of the countries I visit have water systems that have long ago failed. To get clean water you would have to drink it right from the filtration plant. You see, most of the city's pipes are rusted and cracked allowing every sort of germ and bacteria to enter the city's water system. So, what do I do to prevent these little germs from entering my system?

Pretty simple really. The best way to insure this is: if in doubt, don't. If you think the water in your hotel is not properly treated or that the country as a whole has dicey water purification, then drink bottled water. For the most part bottled water is fine. If it is legitimate. I am sure you saw “Slum Dog Millionaire” where they casually fill old bottles with tap water, reglue the tops and serve them to unsuspecting guest. This isn't very common, but it is good to inspect and open them yourself.

I know many people who will also brush their teeth with bottled water. It is a good practice to get into. I generally don't, but then my gut, after living in India for 13 years is a little stronger than most. What if you don't have bottled water available? If you don't have it, then you can boil it. This last trip to China, I went off to bed and didn't have any bottled water and I needed to take some medicine. The hotel had a tea kettle in the room so I simply boiled some water and then let it cool and I was good to go. Boiling water is great, but remember, if you are at higher altitude water boils at a lower temperature. To kill those bugs the water temp needs to be at or above 170º F or 76º C or so I have been told.

Another little thing that some folks forget, is avoiding ice. Freezing water does not kill anything and once you put frozen bad water into your clean water, you get a nice cup of cold bad water.

I generally don't worry about tea and most of the time coffee. Most tea needs to be boiled to be steeped and so you are safe. If the coffee is Nescafe, like most coffee in Asia (who knows why?!) make sure the water is boiled. It only takes warm to hot water to make Nescafe and warm water won't kill all the bugs. Here is a general rule of thumb, if it can't burn your tongue it wont kill the bugs.

Here is another little tip. Stay away from uncooked food like raw fruits and vegetables unless you can peel them. In many South Asian countries you are served raw onions or radishes in a small plate before the meal – sort of a salad. Think of them as a plate of poison! Don't eat them. There are many reasons why they could be contaminated. First is they just might not be washed and you could be eating something that was handled by everyone in the market where it was purchased. Yuck! As your mother once said, “You don't know were those hands have been!” Another reason is the cook's hands may not be clean. One more reason is that if those veggies were washed, the water used was probably right form the tap and may still be present on the food. Not good. OK, now that I have grossed you out, lets move on.

Stay away from shellfish and most uncooked sea foods. Sea food is a risk anytime. It can harbor all kinds of nasties, but when you are traveling to countries you might describe as “developing”, make it a habit to just say no! It is not worth hours and hours of hugging the toilet or wearing down the carpet between your bed and the bathroom in your hotel room.

One last way you can prevent these guys from kicking your butt is treating them prophylactic. Now, I don't do this, but I have known a few doctors who I have traveled with that will take 2 tablets of Pepto Bismol 4 times daily or 2 fluid ounces 4 times daily as a prophylactic for travelers' diarrhea. They swear by this and I never saw them sick on the trip. At least not with E. Coli or giardia.

So prevention is great, but what happens if you get E. Coli or giardia in your tummy? First understand that E. Coli is bacteria and giardia is a little bug and they do different things to you and must be treated differently. Not all baddies are created equal.

Let me say here, I am not a doctor and I am not prescribing a treatment. I am telling you what I do and that is it. There is a good chance you have a bacteria like E. Coli when you have a sudden onset of nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal cramping, bloating and fever. If I can, I will go to a medical lab and give them a stool specimen. But often I am not in an area where I can do that so I must self diagnose and self medicate. Commonly prescribed treatment is 500 mg of ciprofloxacin twice a day or 400 mg of norfloxacin twice a day for 3-5 days. I have had doctors tell me if the symptoms leave after a day then you can stop. It is not like taking a full course of antibiotics. If you can manage to ride it out and have time to stay in bed for a day or two… or three it might resolve its self. Most cases are benign and resolve in 1-2 days without treatment. TD is rarely life-threatening. The natural history of TD is that 90% of cases resolve within 1 week, and 98% resolve within 1 month. (source, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) But I never have that kind of time or the willingness to hang out at my toilet bowl for a month. So I nuke these guys.

Giardia's symptoms are not as violent as E. Coli. Usually giardia will show up over a longer time and come on gradually as diarrhea, nasty rotten egg smelling gas or flatulence, greasy stool that can float, stomach cramps, upset stomach or nausea especially after a meal. Again, if you can, it's best to go to a clinic and get tested. Often you will have to give several stool samples for giardia as it shows up intermittent. Treatment for this little bug (and it is a real bug by the way) is with metronidazole or tinidazole.

Often diagnosis is hard to tell without lab test and if your up in the mountains that just might not be possible. In India and other countries where these bugs are prevalent you can find a cocktail of one of the “zole” drugs and an antibiotic i.e. tinidazole and norfloxacin. This combination will just about kill everything. When I say everything, I mean it and that is not always good. Your gut needs bacteria in it. So you can travel with pro-biotics or you can eat the local yogurt. I know many folks don't like yogurt, but the local stuff is really good for you. Because it has all the local bacteria and can actually strengthen your tummy.

So, there you go. That is how I keep my gut healthy when I am on the road in some really dicey places. In closing, remember, I am not a doctor and you should never use this blog post as a way to diagnose your illness, The best thing you can do is get to a good clinic or hospital if you think you have these symptoms and get checked out and listen to your doctor.