Handheld Copy Machine

Quick Tip: A digital camera can serve as a simple hand held copy machine.  If you need a copy of a rebate before mailing it in, just snap a photo.  Want a copy of a deposit before mailing it off?  Grab your camera.

Links On Remote Assistants

I asked my remote executive assistant to put together a list of a few posts that discuss working with a remote/virtual assistant. Below are the results:

• The Personal Outsourcing Olympics: Bangalore Butler or American Assistant? - Tim Ferriss
  Very appealing but informative article on the latest trend of entrepreneurs - Outsourcing. Having had a positive experience on all the jobs assigned to a virtual assistant, the author invites others to give their comments through this article. For a novice at outsourcing, he has chalked names of reputed companies in this field.
• How to get your virtual assistant to schedule your doctor’s appointments - Ramit Sethi
  Should you have problems interacting with your virtual assistant, this article by Ramit, would assist you. It’s a mail to his remote executive assistant to fix an appointment with the dentist. Also, the reader gets suggestions on whom to contact, experience of another entrepreneur, and options to get effective output of outsourcing.
• Myth… Busted! You CAN Have Great Help on the Cheap - Patricia Mayo
  Encouraging, one and all, to hire a virtual assistant. Very comprehensive about this technology and how effective and useful can the dealing with a remote executive be for someone with lot of innovative ideas. However, very slyly does mention about the drawback one might have to face.
• Working with a Virtual Assistant - David Phillips
  Should you feel uneasy with the whole concept of Outsourcing, this article would put an end to it. Although it’s a personal experience that is narrated, but the basics, benefits and shortcoming of working with a remote executive assistant is well projected.
• Tips for Working with a Virtual Assistant (and Why You Might Want One) - Leo Babauta
  The author narrates as to how he seized the opportunity that came by and satisfied his doubts on virtual assistance. The article also explains why, where, what and how aspects of remote executive assistance. Very informative for the reader who is seriously thinking about outsourcing tedious errands.

Bigger Monitors

WSJ has a post referencing a study showing that people with a 24 inch monitor were 44% faster than people with 18 inch monitors on a particular set of tasks.  They said that performance started to go down again when given 26 inch monitors.

I find that most people don’t really know how to use a big monitor–especially with Windows.  I’ve watch a lot of people open an application and maximize it regardless of how big their screen is.  Then they jump back and forth between screens just like they would with a smaller monitor.  You have to learn how to get the most productivity out of a bigger monitor–especially if you are in the habit of working with a smaller computer screen.  This is especially true when you start getting to the large monitors. If you have a larger monitor, take a look at  your actual usage.  Are you really taking advantage of all that space?

Folder Template Video

Several months ago, I did a post where I talked about creating folder templates. I’ve created a short You Tube video that shows the folder templates in action. I’m a bit disappointed with the You Tube quality, but I’m going to post it anyway in hopes that someone will find it useful.

Group Interview - Distraction Free Internet

The internet can help your productivity, but it can also be a distraction. How do you obtain the benefits while avoiding the downsides?.

I finally had to do two things that are working for me:

1. In the Bookmark Bar, I narrowed the categories to only those related to business.
2. I allow myself a set amount of time (20 minutes) to check the newsfeeds and other favorite sites for 20 minutes maximum 4 times during the day. On minute 21, I close the browser window.That means I potentially “lose” 1:20 minutes of work. As a result of the routine, it never amounts to that much.

Steve Roesler from All Things Workplace (rss)

Steve’s suggestion to allow a certain amount of time for “unproductive” browsing is a good one. It is easier to stay focuses if you’ve already used up your allocated browsing time, than if you’ve just decided you aren’t going to do any browsing at all.

Assign your e-mail/internet to a specific time during your workday. If you train yourself to only answer e-mail/check the internet at certain times, it prevents random surfing when you need to do work.
Scott H Young from ScottHYoung.com (rss)

This can be a very useful practice as well. You can schedule your web browsing for times of day when you aren’t at your peak productivity anyway. For example, right after lunch.

I track my time using the web-based timers we built into Intervals.Having done this for a while, I know how many hours I should have tracked by the end of the day. If I check my timesheet midday and see only 3 hours tracked, I know I lost an hour to distractions and need to focus more on work. There are so many distractions out there, it really helps to quantify my time each day. My coworkers track their time using Intervals, too, so there is a competitive feeling in the air that helps us stay focused. I’m going to work better knowing that we’ll go over everyone’s timesheets in our weekly meeting. The key here is that I’ve had to discipline myself to focus on work and ignore distractions. I did it using timers, but it doesn’t matter what you use as long as you can learn to stay focused.
John Reeve from Intervals find time (rss)

Peer pressure is a powerful motivator.

The internet is no different from any other tool, i.e. you can make any tool be a distraction! The way I obtain benefits while avoiding the downside is to make sure I know what I have to do for work. I chunk my work into small pieces, so I always have a way to make progress.
Johanna Rothman from Managing Products Development (rss)

Personally I find I can stay more focused when I feel like I’m making, small but continuous progress. When I’m completing a bunch of smaller tasks in regular intervals, it is a lot easier to stay focused and “in the zone” than when I’m working on a large project where I don’t feel like I’ve made any progress for the last 4 hours.

First of all I only use websites and online applications that will provide value and help me achieve my objectives. If you signup to every new social site or web application that is launched you will end up wasting a lot of time.Secondly, focus on one thing at a time. If you are writing something it would be a good idea to turn off your IM client, for instance.
Daniel Scocco from Daily Bits (rss)

I’m generally pretty careful what social networking tools I invest time in. I’ve been amazed at how many friends I have who sign up for every new application that comes out (and then invite me). I constantly wonder how they have time to get anything else done.

It’s a constant struggle. One of the ways that I’ve found to curb distractions is to set time limits and schedules. For example, I check my RSS feed reader twice a day, for 15 minutes each time. I start by
reading the blogs that are of highest priority to me and then comb through the others as time permits. When the 15 minutes have passed, I select “mark all as read” and close down the reader.
Erin PJDoland from Unclutterer (rss)

This is a great strategy for dealing with RSS feeds. If you practice this, you probably won’t miss anything important, but you’ll keep your news reader from becoming a huge time sink. I like having my reader setup so I can read it from my Blackberry. That way I can catch up on feeds while I wait for appointments, etc.

Well, I try to limit extra Internet “white noise” as much as possible. I pull this off by limiting my IM, Twitter, Facebook, Email, and any other outside chatter that puts the brakes on my productivity. Also, I think overly complicated productivity systems can get in the way as well. Constantly trying and “tweaking” your productivity setup can be a huge time sink and always keeps you looking for the next best thing. I try to combat this by switching or changing my productivity system only when something is really not needing my needs. Otherwise, I try to stick it out.
Glen Stansberry from LifeDev (rss)

A lot of the value of a productivity system comes from having a system–not having a superior system. If you invest 30 hours in finding the perfect notebook to write your tasks, it is unlikely that you’ll gain those hours back over just using typing paper. It is easy to feel like you are becoming more productive because you are working on your system, but sometimes it is just a form of procrastination.

Michael Sampson on the Dvorak Keyboard

We’ve talked about the Dvorak keyboard before when I learned Michael Sampson was making the switch. Since it has been a few months, I thought it would be interesting to checkup and see how it was going so I sent him a few questions about the change. checkout his responses below.

What promoted you to switch to the Dvorak keyboard?

There was one main reason that I switched: I was suffering from severe RSI in my left lower arm and hand, and I needed to find a better way of doing things. I knew of the Dvorak layout, and had recently read Mark Hurst’s excellent book (Bit Literacy) in which he talked about his own transition from QWERTY to Dvorak. So I did some online study on the Dvorak layout, and three “facts” stood out to me: (a) some people had been able to make the transition within 4-8 weeks, (b) if you could type 50 words per minute on QWERTY you could do double that on Dvorak, and (c) some people had found that the transition had eliminated the RSI that they were experiencing under QWERTY, due to the less intensive typing movements.

How fast did you type with QWERTY?

I actually don’t have a number to give you, and I think that a pure number is largely a theoretical measure that may not mean anything in practice. What I was able to do with my typing was:

1. interview someone across a table, look them in the eye, and pretty much type word for word what they were saying, and the essence of our conversation;
2. attend a conference and live blog what was being said by the speaker … and I could take notes so quickly that I could even capture the Q&A, and press “publish” while the applause was still going on; and
3. type completely “mindlessly” … the mechanics of typing were completely ingrained that I didn’t need to think about what I was doing.

How long have you been on the Dvorak layout and what are your typical speeds?

I made the switch to Dvorak in September 2007, with the expectation that I would be fully up-to-speed within 4-8 weeks. And by “up-to-speed”, I mean according to the measures above, not a word-per-minute rating.

I am not back to where I was with QWERTY, but I think that I am getting there. Perhaps another 6 months … so a full year for the transition … and I’ll be there. I was super glad that there were no major conferences to attend in the last few months, because I wouldn’t be able to live blog them.

When I started the transition, I purchased a Dvorak keyboard overlay for my Apple keyboard. This was a rubberized overlay that fitted over the keys, and had the Dvorak letters in the right place. Now that I can fully type Dvorak, I just use a stock standard keyboard and trust my fingers to go to the right place.

Looking back would you make the change again?

I think that, on balance, I would. I wanted to get rid of the RSI, and that has cleared up completely, even though I still spend all day glued to the keyboard. It has, and is, taking a lot longer to transition that I thought it would, but I know that my fingers and hands work less now than they did before, and that’s good. One of the measures that struck me when I was researching the change was this: in a full day of typing, a QWERTY typist will move their hands 16 miles, but a Dvorak typist will only move them 1 mile. Big difference.

The other reason that I said I would still change was that I made the change with the idea that I will be typing for the next 35 years, and thus my measure wasn’t not done in the short-term.

The biggest annoyance I have is that mobile devices don’t permit Dvorak input. So I have to type QWERTY on my BlackBerry or Treo 500v, and I am pretty sure that the new iPAQ 210 Enterprise Handheld will be a no go for me because it won’t accept Dvorak input on an external keyboard.

Do you have any problem switching back when you have to use a QWERTY keyboard?

I have not tried to type QWERTY again, and don’t want to try. I have given it up for good. When I have to use a QWERTY keyboard, I watch the keys and do not touch type.

What advice would you give someone who is thinking about making the change?

• don’t make the change for the short term
• once you have started, stick with it. Keep going … it will eventually come.
• know the reasons that you are changing, and when you are discouraged, pull out the list and review and recommit to those.

And finally, I don’t think of myself as a “Dvorak typist”; I just type to get my work done. Typing is again almost completely mindless, as I want it to be, and I forget that most other people do things a different way.

I really appreciate Michael taking the time to answer these questions.   Be sure to checkout his site at http://www.michaelsampson.net.

5 Tips for an Organized Computer

1. Use Your My Documents Folder

The My Documents folder is there for a reason. If you don’t have a My Document’s folder, create one. The idea is to keep all of your documents in this folder. This makes it easy to backup your computer and easy to find stuff instead of looking all over your hard drive.

You can take this idea step further and create folders for the types of items you produce on your computer. Here is an example of how OS X sets up your home directory by default:

One of the big benefits of this type of setup is that you can go to one place to start looking for anything you’ve previously saved. It also gives you a single place where you can tell your backup software to start to archive everything. I’ve seen people keep files all over their hard drive. When they need to switch to another computer it is a nightmare. With files all over their computer it is very difficult to be confident that everything got moved over because you are bound to overlook some obscure folder that contains some of their important data.

2. No Top Level Files

A lot of people just throw their documents directly into the My Documents folder. You organization will improve if you promise not to allow yourself to put documents directly in this folder. Create subfolders and put the documents in there. The advantage to this method is that you create a way to associate similar documents–by putting them in the same folder.

If you have a file that is truly a one-off document and you will never have another similar document, you will still benefit by creating and putting it in a “miscellaneous” folder.

An important way to think about folder creation is to stop asking “where do I save this” and ask “where will I look for this when I need it”. You’ll be amazed at how much easier it is to organize when you start out planning for retrieval instead of focusing just on the storage part.

3. Create a Downloads Folder

Part of using the Internet is downloading files. Many people have their computer setup to store downloaded files on their desktop. If you are extremely disciplined about keeping your desktop clean this might not be a bad setup. However, if you keep any files on your desktop the downloaded files can quickly clutter things and make it hard to find what you are looking for.

By creating a folder specifically for downloaded files, you can keep all of these types of documents together. If something is important and needs to be saved, you can move it to a different folder. If your “downloads” folder only contains downloads, then it is much easier to clean out. You can just scan through it to make sure there isn’t anything important and delete the contents every few weeks.

To make this work effectively you’ll need to make sure your web browser is set to automatically put downloaded files in your new folder. Here is the place to change the setting in Firefox’s preferences. Other browsers have similar settings as well.

4. Version Control

Version control lets you keep multiple versions of the same document. Instead of keeping a bunch of different versions of the same thing, you keep one version, but you have access to the document’s history to go back to prior versions.

There are several ways to implement this. On OS X, TimeMachine gives you this type of capability. There are several version control systems that will give you this capability as well. Subversion is probably one of the more popular systems for this. Subversion comes already installed on OS X. It can function in a variety of different settings, from a simple local repository to a repository with multiple users on an external server. Both Windows (TortoiseSVN) and OS X (SCPlugin)have some nice add ons that let you use the version control directly from the graphical file system browser. This lets you use a menu system instead of learning a command line interface.

If you set it up correctly Subversion can give you version control and backup capabilities. For most users, TimeMachine is quite a bit easier to setup, but it doesn’t give you the full capabilities of version control.

5. Aliases, Short Cuts and Links

Sometimes you need a file to exist in more than one place. For example, you might have your contract stored under each client’s folder and want to have another folder somewhere that contains all of your active contracts all in one place. Normally you wouldn’t want to just make a copy of the documents. Not only would the copy take up additional space, but if you made any changes you’d have two different versions of the same document.

By creating a short cut you can make a pointer to the original document. These types of links are also sometimes called aliases. To make a short cut on Windows, right click and copy the file, then right click and select “paste shortcut” in the directory where you want to put the short cut.

In OS X, option click and select “Make Alias”. It will create an alias in the current folder and you can then move it to where ever you want.

Note: Since OS X is based on a Unix style operating system you can also create links using the command line. I’m not going to get into the details here, but links will allow you to basically put the file in two directories at the same time while still only storing it once on the hard drive. From the graphical OS you’ll have a very difficult time telling which one is the original and which is the link. One of the advantages of this is you’ll get a thumbnail preview–something that is missing with the alias function performed with the gui.

Online Backup Options

I’ve been trying out several online backup tools. I plan to write in more detail about my experiences with each one later, but here is an overview.

My wife and I travel quite a bit. While I can take an extra hard drive with us for backups, but this seems a bit pointless since the biggest threat to my equipment is probably theft. If someone breaks into my hotel room and steals my laptop, they probably aren’t going to overlook an external hard drive. I need a solution that will give me quick access to all my information if my computer is stolen or damaged.

Here are three services I’ve tried.  If you have any suggestions of other services I should check out please post them in the comments.

.mac Backup

This would seem like the ideal solution, but until recently .mac accounts only came with 1 GB of storage space. They recently upped this to 10 GB. This is more useful, but it doesn’t take long to fill it up. On the plus side of things, it can be scheduled to run automatically to keep your backup up-to-date.

The .mac Backup software will also allow you to backup to DVDs, CDs and external HDs. So I could conceivably come up with a plan that backs large files that don’t change much up to external media while storing all of my documents that are smaller but change frequently online.

As I move toward a paperless office, my storage needs are just going to go up and I don’t think .mac Backup is going to be able to keep pace. I’m still using it for backing up certain documents just for added redundancy, but I’m not using it as my main backup system.

Mozy

Mozy is an interesting idea. For about $5 per month you can backup everything on your computer. (I have heard that in reality they have a limit of 50 GB of online storage space.) Mozy has a nice looking client that installs and lets you setup your backup to run automatically. However, I was never able to get it to backup more than about 20MB at a time. After weeks of emailing them for support I finally gave up. I have heard that their Windows product is much more stable, but I haven’t tested it. Support said that other OS X users were not having problems.

If you have a PC this might be worth looking into as it is fairly inexpensive.

They also offer a business class service that can backup databases and email servers.

Jungle Disk and Amazon S3

Jungle Disk doesn’t actually store any of your data. They just make a product that allows you to upload your data to Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is a storage service with a pay-as-you-go pricing setup. You pay $0.15 per GB of storage space. So 20 GB of storage will cost you about $3. You also have to pay for your transfers. That is an additional $0.10 per GB transfered into the system and $0.18 per GB transfered out. There is also a $0.01 charge for each PUT, GET, or LIST request.

Jungle Disk automatically keeps track of what changes on your system and uploads a new version of the file whenever necessary to keep the online copy up todate. If make changes to huge files every day, you’ll pay more than if you make changes to small files because the entire file has to be uploaded–not just the changes.

My experience in uploading around 20 GB of data and running a backup for about a week was in the $15 range for the month. Obviously a good deal of the expense is just getting the data uploaded the first time. After the first month I’d expect to pay $5 to $10 per month to Amazon.

The Jungle Disk program is $20 and that gives you a license to install it on as many computers as you like. It works with Windows, Linux and Mac so it is a pretty good deal if you have multiple machines.

Jungle Disk recently came out with an added service that gives you additional capabilities.  Most notable is the block level backup.  If you change a file the software will figure out what is different between the file on your computer and the one on the server and upload just the changes.  If you make a lot of changes to large files this can really reduce the amount of bandwidth required to keep the server in sync.

Don’t forget if you have any suggestions of other services to try, I’d love to hear about them.

Habit List Web App

Tom from App Engines put together a web app based on the Habit List.  (Thanks Tom!) It keeps all your data in a cookie on  your local computer.  (If you delete your cookies your data for the app will be gone.)  Check it out here.

Time Machine in the Real World

Today I used Time Machine on my first real world data loss problem.  I’m embarrassed to even describe what happened, but here it is anyway.

I am working with an online store that sends me an email each time an order is processed.  At first this was done just for testing, but there is some automation that happens when certain types of orders come into my mailbox.  This is a temporary setup, so I don’t want to take the time to move everything over to a separate mailbox.  The downside is, one of my email accounts gets 10 to 40 emails that are just copies of sales confirmation.  Each one represents an interruption to my day.  So the logical thing to do was to setup a rule to take these out of my mailbox automatically.

When I started to write the rule I thought about how to identify these messages.  First they call come from sales@adomain.com.  Second they are BCCed to my address, so they aren’t actually addressed to me.  A good rule seemed like one that would check the from address to see if it was from sales@adomain.com and then check the to address to make sure my email wasn’t in the To field.  That way if the system sent any messages directly to me, I’d still get them.

Here is the rule I ended up with:

Take a quick look and you’ll see a not so subtle error.  If you don’t see it, I’ll explain it in a minute.

Mail asked me if I wanted to apply it to existing messages.  I said  yes.  Then I thought, “why don’t I go ahead and empty the trash just to get rid of all those messages it just moved there.”  (Some of you are seeing the problem already.)  So I emptied the trash.

Several hours later I discovered that every message not sent to mark@gmail.com (not the real address) was missing.  The problem of course was the line that says “If ANY of the following conditions are met”.  I meant to say ALL of the conditions.

I encourage you to take a moment and pretend you just did what I described above.  How much pain would it cause you if you lost all of your emails?  Could you quickly recover your missing emails or would they be gone for ever?

Now I am a bit more prepared than most people.  I have five different types of backups that I could use to restore the mailboxes.  I have a backup to a hard drive, two online backups methods, my mail server backups, and the Time Machine backup.  I don’t have all of these because I’m paranoid–I just happen to be trying out several different types of backup tools right now.  Normally I’d have two different methods for restoring this type of thing–my mail server backup and my nightly hard drive backup.

What follows is a brief description of using Time Machine for this type of recovery.  If you have no interest in OS X, it probably won’t be particularly useful.

I figured this was a good time to give Time Machine a whirl.  The first thing I tried was restoring my entire inbox which consists of six different mailboxes.  I got the emails, but it wasn’t really useful.  When you restore a Mailbox, Time Machine puts it into a special folder called Recovered Mailboxes.

Time Machine lets you see what your inbox looked like at each point it was backed up.  I was able to find the point where all the messages disappeared and choose the previous backup.

Since I have multiple mailboxes I went through and did each one individually.  It looks like there might be a way to recover all of the mailboxes at the same time, however in my testing the results seemed a bit strange.  I have six mailboxes and one of them has several sub-folders.   When I attempted to recover all of the mailboxes at the same time, Time Machine put all of the messages from five mailboxes in one folder into one Recovered Mailboxes folder and the mailbox with subfolders into a different Recovered Mailboxes folder.

Over all the restore process went well and it is something the average user could figure out.  None of my other restore processes are something that could easily be done without a lot of computer experience.

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