-
What I'm Doing
-
My GTD Tool of Choice - Try it!
-
Vote for Topics
-
Recently Written
- 8 Ninja Uses for Binder Clips
- Reasons to Get a Tattoo (and Reasons Not To)
- Getting Things Done with 37signals’ Backpack - Why I’m Switching Back
- 11 Tips for Better Tech Support
- Cranking Widgets Theme Updated!
- Keep Your Notes in Order with the Daily Scratchpad
- The Single Most Useful Contact on Your iPhone
- Happy Monday: Odds, Ends and other Minutiae
- Bloggers: Show the World What You’re Up To
- Describing Twitter in Plain English
-
Categories
-
Archives
Trick Out Your iPhone with These Smart Playlists
As I mentioned previously, i received an iPhone for this past Christmas. While I really love it, having to go from a 60gb iPod which held all of my music to having only 8gb of space took some getting used to. I started out by hand-picking various albums and tracks and changing the contents each night in preparation for the next day. It got to be pretty arduous, needless to say, and I was only listening to about 15% of my music, and it was almost entirely tracks that I really liked. In other words, roughly 85% of my music was sitting quietly in iTunes with very little hope of making it onto my iPhone. I sought a way to change all that…
Being a big fan of the Macbreak Weekly podcast, I’d heard Andy Ihnatko discuss his fantastic book, iPhone Fully Loaded. Wanting to really get everything I could out of my new toy, I ordered myself a copy (great book, highly recommended). One of the best chapters in the entire book is “How to Make 8 Gigabytes Seem Like 80″, which directly addressed the problem I was having with the music rotation. So, a good bit of what I’ll share below has been built upon the tips given by Andy in his book (which you should go buy).
Sandy v. Remember the Milk: The Web-Based Reminder Cage Match
Within this little GTD cult of ours, there are an alarming number of battles fought over the best tool, notebook, web application, etc. In my mind, it’s a little silly - just use what works, right?
Well, sometimes there will be two “competing” services/devices/things that both offer a compelling solution to a common problem. Today, that problem is reminders and the two services I’ll be covering are Remember the Milk (hereafter referred to as ‘RTM’) and Sandy.
Now, before everybody starts frothing at the mouth about how the service they use is better than both of those, let me reiterate - I don’t really care what you use. If a stack of cocktail napkins, a set of soap crayons and a shoebox get the job done for you, then that’s great. My point here is not to decide on the all-time greatest way to remind yourself to take the pizza out of the oven or pick up your kilt from the dry cleaners. I’m simply going to compare the capabilities of these two services and tell you which one I like best. Mmkay? Mmkay.
Top 1 Thing To Keep Your Toddler Away From
Your laptop computer.
This is a picture of my Macbook after my 2.5 year old son got his hands on it:
6 Websites That Will Certainly Make You Smarter
Ah, the Internet. It’s one of those things that regularly inspires awe in me, even though I spend several hours a day interacting with it (both professionally and recreationally).
But with such an immense amount of information, it’s difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. While there are many fantastic websites chock full of accurate data and intelligent ideas, there are probably 100 times more that are pretty much useless. A sad fact, but a fact nonetheless. Which is why it’s so important, if you spend any amount of time poking around the web, that you have a few oases - diamonds in the rough, if you will.
In my many, many hours of perusing the Internet, I’ve come across my fair share of websites. I’ve selected a few that I consider to be the least likely to rot your brain (but be warned, all of these can very easily rob you of an entire afternoon if you’re not careful).
The iPhone as a GTD Swiss Army Chainsaw
I have to be honest - this past Christmas, the item at the top of my wish list was the completely drool-worthy Amazon Kindle. I had watched the video intro a dozen times and was completely smitten. And while I had been secretly longing for an iPhone since they were released, I simpley never thought of it as a plausible reality due to my current cell phone contract, the new T-Mobile Sidekick I had just bought, etc. But, thanks to my terrifically perceptive wife, a shiny iPhone found its way under our tree. I seriously haven’t been the same since.
Obviously, I’m a little late to the game when it comes to this little piece of technological magic. It’s been out for well over 6 months now, has been hacked, jail-broken and otherwise futzed-with to seemingly endless degrees. But, it was new to me and I was in heaven. And, as with most Apple products, it did exactly what I expected it to, and did so (almost) flawlessly. Without rehashing what thousands of people have already said, let’s just say that it’s the single coolest piece of techno-gear I’ve ever owned.
Coming Up: Somebody Interviews Me
I thought this might be a cool thing to mention, especially since I haven’t ever been interviewed for this productivity stuff. This weekend, my new buddy Mike from Effing the Dog and I will be having a friendly conversation that will go out on his podcast at some point in the near future. Should be a good time, hopefully you all will enjoy listening!
Oh, and just because I like being straight with you folks, I’ve made Mike promise to pull the plug on the audio bit if I feel like I’m sounding like a tool 
But don’t worry - in that event, we’ll still do a print interview for your reading pleasure.
The next post should be a doosey - I got an iPhone for Christmas and it’s turned my notion of “digital” GTD upside down. Stay tuned!
Technorati Tags: gtd, interview, etd, productivity
How to Work Effectively for 24 Consecutive Hours
In my line of work, having to stay at the office through the night in order to meet a deadline is a reality (albeit an occasional one for most of us). Well, my number has come up a couple times in recent weeks. A work project fell behind and required a borderline-unreal amount of work be completed in an extremely short time frame (as is usually the circumstance surrounding the “all-nighter”).
So, after having plowed this road yet again, I’ve had some time to reflect on what I had to do in order to not only stay awake, but crank out code of reasonable quality. While such circumstances aren’t ideal for “knowledge work”, sometimes you simply have no choice but to buckle down and not raise your head until the job is done.
Here are a few tips for making the most of your 24-hour shift:
