Back in June I contacted a number of individuals who run blogs about time management, personal productivity, and organization. I asked them all three questions and posted their answers along with my commentary. If you haven't read through these posts, I encourage you to check them out. The different perspectives and opinions give a lot of insight into common problems and solutions with the way we all approach personal productivity. What is the single biggest way people waste time without even realizing it? What change has made the most difference in making you effective in life? If someone were to read just one post from your site, which would you recommend they read and why? … [Read more...] about Productivity Expert Interviews Recap
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Setting Up Gmail
Last week I talked about how I use IMAP for my main accounts. I do have some Gmail addresses as well, and I think I've come up with an optimal setup for keeping things synced with my main laptop computer. Basically I only download emails to my main laptop. If I need to read something from somewhere else, I'll use the web version and look under the archives if I need to lookup older emails. Under Settings > Forwarding and POP you'll want to Enable POP so you can download it with your email client. Then you have to decide what to do with messages once you've downloaded them. You can keep them in your inbox, delete them or archive them. I prefer to archive them. That keeps them … [Read more...] about Setting Up Gmail
Tuesday’s Tip: Movie List
Video rental stores are one of the most frustrating places for me. It always takes so long to find a movie and once I get to the store my mind goes blank of all the movies I want to see. On the other hand I really like services like NetFlix because they let you make a list of all the movies you want to see and then send them to you one at a time. You can use this same idea to help you in the video store. I started keeping a file with a list of movies I want to see on it. When someone says that a movie is good, I just add it to my list. When we want to find something to watch, we use the list to find an appropriate movie for the evening. This has turned what use to be a 45 minute … [Read more...] about Tuesday’s Tip: Movie List
Productive Blogger
For the next several Monday's we are going to be doing a series of posts on Productive Blogging. I've kind of avoided meta-blogging (blogging about blogging) in the past, but I think enough of the readers here are running some type of blog, that it will make for some useful content once a week for a while. If this is or isn't useful, please let me know. … [Read more...] about Productive Blogger
Two Task Lists
Franklin Covey (formerly Franklin Quest) training teaches you to keep all of your to-do items in one place. I don't think this is the best approach. I think it is important to separate your important todo items from your list of "habit" type tasks. For example, if I have a to-do item of paying my taxes, it doesn't seem that this should be on the same list as exercise. If I miss a day of exercise, it isn't a big deal. In fact I expect to miss a few days of exercise here and there. However, paying my taxes isn't one of those things I can miss. It should be on my list of things that absolutely have to get done. Exercise and things like that are more of habits that I want to practice … [Read more...] about Two Task Lists
Why I Use IMAP for Email
I have been very impressed with GMail. Especially now that they will let you host your own domain. However, IMAP is still too important for me to give up for my main business account. Let me explain why. There are three main ways to read your email. Webmail is one. The other two are called POP3 and IMAP. POP3 is what Google uses. It allows you to download your emails to your local computer. The problem is that it doesn't keep things synchronized or allow folders. So if I move an email to a "to-do" folder on my client, the server doesn't know anything about it. If I just used one computer that wouldn't be a problem. However, I have three computers that I use on a fairly … [Read more...] about Why I Use IMAP for Email
Google Reader
Reading RSS feeds is the ideal filler for small periods of downtime. Most articles are short so I can make use of even 45 seconds at a time. This means given the right technology, I can work my way through news feeds while waiting in line at the bank, stuck in traffic, waiting for an appointment, etc. Up until recently, I used NewsFire because I wanted to have a offline copy for times when I didn't have an internet connection. However, with the addition of Google Gears, I decided to give Google Reader a try again. While I miss some of the advanced features of NewsFire, the ability to keep my feeds synced regardless of whether I'm reading them on my Blackberry, laptop, or desktop … [Read more...] about Google Reader
Cost vs. Benefit Revisited
A while back I wrote a post about how to measure cost vs. benefit and talked about how we often make poor choices because we don't consider all the facts. The example I used was the idea of buying a hybrid car to save money on gas. I was simply pointing out that every person I had talked to who said they were saving money by purchasing a hybrid hadn't actually done the math. They were actually spending a lot more. Several readers commented that they had purchased a hybrid vehicle because of the pollution impact and were perfectly content to pay more in order to have smaller environmental footprint. For the past few weeks these comments have bothered me. How could a hybrid vehicle … [Read more...] about Cost vs. Benefit Revisited
Contest Update
When we revamped the contest last week there were still 1320 chances up for grabs. With all the recent entries, there are now only 857 left. As a quick reminder, here are the four ways you can enter: Full Review - 10 chances to win Link to Site & Contest - 5 chances to win Subscribe to RSS - 1 chance win Subscribe to Email - 1 chance to win So the easiest way to get two chances of winning is to subscribe to this blog via email and in your RSS reader. Checkout the full details of the contest in this previous post. … [Read more...] about Contest Update
Ideal Backup Solution–OS X Version
Yesterday we talked about the ideal backup solution. Today we are going to look at how to implement this solution on OS X. The disk utility with OS X allows you to create a live copy of your hard drive that can be started up and run just like it is your computer. You can even create the backup while using your computer. As far as I know, this process will only work when you are using a firewire hard drive. I haven't had any luck booting OS X to a USB drive, so while you may be able to make a backup with a USB connection, I don't think you can make the backup bootable. The Disk Utility application stored in your Application > Utilities folder. It is simple to use, but you have to … [Read more...] about Ideal Backup Solution–OS X Version