The Cranking Widgets Blog

Featured Blog: Patrick Rhone and His Journal

Friday, December 5, 2008

This is the first post of many over the coming months as part of an ongoing attempt to help shed more light on bloggers who aim to help you get more done and reach your goals. If you’d like to suggest a blog, check out my original post “How to Help Great Productivity Blogs Get Discovered” and leave a [...]

Ask The Readers: Can You Disconnect And Still Be Productive?

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

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I hope everyone out there in the US enjoyed their Thanksgiving holiday! Many of us enjoyed a 4 day weekend away from work or our normal responsibilities. As for me, I spent all but about an hour completely disconnected from the Internet world. The greatest part was that there weren’t any of those nervous ticks that I might have expected. [...]

Why Working Long, Hard Hours Gets You Behind (?)

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

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I was at a dinner party the other day and observed the following fascinating exchange (names have been changed to protect the innocent ):
Cheryl is enjoying her wine and poking away at her Blackberry when she notices her acquantance Jude had just arrived. Cheryl gets up and walks over to Jude. They greet eachother with a hug’s and hello’s. Jude asks, “Hey! [...]

How to Help Great Productivity Blogs Get Discovered

Thursday, November 20, 2008

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It is my observation that writers of niche blogs have a fairly predictable shelf life. Most non-news-telling bloggers that see some early successes last a good 2-3 years before they stop posting. Most of the time the value posts are made within the first 12 months and it goes downhill from there. (Side tip: whenever you discover a new blog [...]

My Scandelous Confession and A Royal Rant About GTD

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

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I have a confession to make. Actually, I’m pretty sure most lovers of GTD have a similar confession, but first I need to start by expressing some assumptions about most of us who are reading this right now (and feel free to challenge any of these via comments).
Most of Us…
Most of us have read Getting [...]

On New Beginnings (And More About Your Host)

Friday, November 14, 2008

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Now that Brett has officialy retired from productivity blogging, I’m sure long-time readers are wondering what will come of The Cranking Widgets Blog. The short answer is easy: CW is, and will continue to be, mainly about productivity. There is, however, a long answer.
What a blogger blogs about and the spin they put on topics will always be driven by their own experiences, [...]

How to Use Basecamp and Backback In Perfect Harmony

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

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I’ve read a lot of posts out there in the blogosphere trying to answer whether Basecamp or Backpack is the best solution for managing projects. The fact is that there is no reason that you should have to, or want to, choose one over the other. I have been using both for about a year [...]

Productivity Tweet of the Week(ish): Efficiency vs. Effectiveness

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

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Not only am I a GTD late bloomer, I’m a Twitter late bloomer too! Before giving the service a fair shake, I kept reading blogger after blogging telling the same story: “I didn’t get it until I tried it for a week, now I love it!” I tried it for a week, I didn’t get it. [...]

Productivity Systems Don’t Suck, But Sometimes I Do

Friday, October 24, 2008

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Few would argue that Merlin Mann is the Godfather of GTD/productivity blogging. About a month ago he posted Four Years and followed it up with Time, Attention, and Creative Work. If you haven’t read these, please do so now… It’s good stuff.
What do you think?
I look at both of these posts in a positive light. [...]

Ask the Readers: What happens to “Do it Now” Actions?

Thursday, October 16, 2008

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As we process our stuff and determine next actions, as good GTD practitioners we do any action we’ve just defined that will take less than two minutes to complete. After doing the action, how do you handle the piece of stuff and the action that was just processed & done?
Some things I’m thinking about while [...]