6 Reasons to Think Like A Four-Year-Old

August 17, 2006 at 3:30 pm · in Office Productivity · Comments (1)

Somewhere between the age of two and four, kids start asking ‘why?’ about absolutely everything. The smart ones never stop, they just don’t say it out loud every 5 minutes. David Allen teaches the value of asking ‘why’ as part his Getting Things Done mantra. Glen Stansberry at LiveDev offers six solid reasons to keep asking why about everything you do in order to establish a clearer picture of what you’re trying to complete.

Rule of Thirds for PowerPoint

August 17, 2006 at 8:13 am · in Office Productivity · Comments

PowerPoint gets the bad reputation as being the evil piece of Microsoft Office designed to create disinterest and loathing of all public presentations. That’s mostly because people simply use it incorrectly. Instead of complementing a presentation, people have a bad habit of using slides as notes they read to an audience, which translates to boring. Presentation Zen offers an interesting perspective on applying photography’s rule of thirds to PowerPoint slides by analyizing a number of promotional videos and looking at what makes them interesting. Peter over a blog.forret.com adds to the discussion Peter Forret’s Flickr stream.

How to Stay Focused at Work

August 16, 2006 at 10:16 am · in Office Productivity · Comments

With all the potential distractions, staying focused at work can be a full time job by itself. There are articles to Digg; YouTube videos to watch; jokes to forward; IMs to answer - how can anyone actually get their work done? Dave Cheong offers a great list of 18 ways to stay focused at work. Most of these are common sense, but a few like time boxing will genuinely amount to productivity breakthroughs.

10 Free Apps to Increase Personal Productivity

August 14, 2006 at 12:19 pm · in Office Productivity · Comments (8)

Whether you’re trying to achieve the Zen of David Allen’s Getting Things Done or simply want to make more effective use of your computer, here’s a hit list of 10 Free apps to increase your personal productivity. I could probably include some obvious apps like Thunderbird for email and Firefox for Web browsing in this list, but instead I’ll assume you already drank the Mozilla kewl-aide and want to extend your productivity with something you might not already use. Feel free to add additional favorites in the comments.

DupKiller - Duplicate files on your system can create confusion, waste space and generally reduce productivity. Instead of wasting brain cycles on which file is the one to keep - eliminate all those dupes efficiently with DupKiller. This is the best freeware duplicate file remover I’ve ever used. Just make sure you don’t confuse dupes with a backup copy (see Replicator below).

Free Accounting Software - The name says it all. With features on par with basic products from Quicken or Microsoft Money, you can easily manage your finances without ever needing to spend another dime.

FreeMind - Mind mapping software is the ultimate tool for free-form idea generation and organization. While some of the competing pay applications have a few more features (like Microsoft Office integration), FreeMind does an awesome job of getting you most of the features you might want to use mind mapping for.

Folder Marker - Keep track of projects, files and deadlines by visually marking folders on your desktop. For the Getting Things Done crowd or simply for those who want folders in more flavors than just Windows yellow, Folder Marker helps you quickly locate and act on information.

Folder Size - Add folder size information to Windows Explorer. If you ever run low on hard disk space, the detective work to find the culprit can be brutal without drilling down on every folder. Folder Size adds the all important folder size data to Windows Explorer to make locating file bloat a breeze.

Karen’s Replicator - Backup files, folders or entire drives on a schedule. While duplicate files can be a nuisance, having a backup of files is a must. There’s nothing worse than losing your work. Replicator is quick, easy, and the scheduling makes it a breeze to make sure you don’t forget to do it.

Kurlo - Contact management that actually works. While Thunderbird (and dare I say, Outlook Express) both support basic contact management, they still don’t hold a candle to full fledged PIMs like Outlook. Kurlo bridges the gap, giving you all the contact management you’ll ever need and making it portable on a USB keychain drive. Manage full contact info, get birthday reminders, receive event notifications and manage group lists all within Kurlo’s interface. The only downside is it doesn’t sync with cell phones.

SimpleOCR - Call it the hack for getting around the DRM that is paper; optical character recognition is one of the most useful reasons to own a scanner. From manipulating old printed materials to quoting passages from some long forgotten text, SimpleOCR is among the best free OCR solutions I’ve ever tried.

Stickies - Post-it style notes don’t really fit the Getting Things Done mold, but I can’t live without them. When I need to jot something down for future completion, a paper note or a digital equivalent is a must. Stickies replaces all those notes stuck to the side of your monitor with a digital version on your desktop, complete with live URLs, custom fonts and color-coded backgrounds.

WinMerge - Merge text files, difference two documents or simply compare the contents to discover similarities. WinMerge is a great solution for combining files to make the sum greater than its parts.

8 Tips to Help You Clean Off Your Desk

August 9, 2006 at 3:29 pm · in Office Productivity · Comments

My desk is in a constant state of disarray. I usually have a handful of gadgets, a few papers, flash memory cards, empty drinking vessels and other random stuff crowding the edges of my desk. Ian McKenzie offers 8 tips to clean off your desk, in a n effort to restore order from the chaos. What tips do you have for keeping your desk free of debris?

Ten Ways to Search with Technorati

August 7, 2006 at 4:16 pm · in Office Productivity · Comments

I can’t live without blog and feed search. I usually start with TagJag and drill down through the niche blog and feed resources, although I’m gravitating more toward Ask these days, because they’ve got very little spam in their results. Technorati is another resource I use almost every day. Lifehacker just compiled an awesome list of ten ways to search with Technorati, which ranges from basic search options to really geeky stuff like microformats.

How to Publish iCal Calendars without .Mac

July 29, 2006 at 1:53 pm · in Office Productivity, Computing · Comments

Apple offers an awesome calendar sharing feature as part of the OS X Calendar app, but it requires a .Mac account or some other WebDAV enabled server to make it work. Unless you’re an ubergeek, setting up WebDAV is really tricky. System Boy found a slick solution for sharing iCal calendars online without the hassle of configuring WebDAV or the fees of a .Mac account. You do need to sign up for a free Box.net account to get on the iCal bus, but that’s a minor inconvenience for major calendar accessibility. System Boy offers detailed instructions on publishing iCal without .Mac.

GTD: Doing a Fast Mind Sweep

July 29, 2006 at 1:32 pm · in Office Productivity, Self Improvement · Comments

I admit I never fully applied Getting Things Done to my daily life. I use some of the organization techniques, but I’m currently too stubborn to change existing methods to fit the GTD program verbatim. One important takeaway I internalized is the need to clear your mind of all those nagging tasks by writing them down. 43 Folders offers some good tips on accomplishing this using David Allen’s mind sweep technique of collection.

Make Your Own Floor-to-Ceiling Whiteboard

July 28, 2006 at 10:58 pm · in Office Productivity · Comments (2)

For all the time I spend at my computer, there’s still no real substitute for standing in front of a whiteboard and brainstorming. Microsoft’s OneNote is okay for real quick brainstorms, but if I need to dive in and detail out a plan, a whiteboard is the way to go. Buying a whiteboard from an office supply store will set you back several hundred dollars for the useful sizes. Instead, some white tileboard from the bathroom section of Home Depot will work just as well. 4×8 sheets are under $20, letting you cover an entire wall for less than the cost of buying something off-the-shelf. Cover that woodgrain panelling with dry erase paradise using the tips from Kevin Kelly’s Marker Board Walls.