Posts Filed Under ‘Workflow’
February 8th, 2010, 2 comments
A week ago I asked readers to tell me how they're using Google Wave in their daily lives, and despite a bit of "ha! no one's using Wave!" snarking on the Twitter, I got lots of interesting responses. Unsurprisingly, most Wavers use it as a real-time wiki, but some take advantage of features unique to Wave, like inline and private replies, public tags, and gadgets. I featured the most unique use cases I got in a brand new chapter just added to The Complete Guide to Google Wave. The following is the text of the just-published Chapter 10, which describes ways in which a few people who don't work for Google are using Wave to get things done--with screenshots.
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February 2nd, 2010, 12 comments
I'm thrilled to announce a new series of weekly videos and blog posts that I'll be publishing at FastCompany.com called "Work Smart," which will cover personal productivity in a digital world. Long-time Lifehacker readers will recognize much of the material, but some fantastic editing and animation make each 2-4 minute video segment a whole new, fun format. The debut Work Smart video segment takes on the age old digital productivity problem: email overload.
In this 2 minute, 45 second segment, I describe my three-folder system for emptying your email inbox on a day-to-day basis, and keeping on top of everything you have to do, are waiting for, or want to keep on hand for reference.
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December 21st, 2009, 1 comment
Getting up on stage, taking a microphone, and facing an expectant audience scares the crap out of most mere mortals. But rock star public speakers from Al Gore to Tony Robbins inspire and inform thousands of people with their talks--and charge $30,000 an hour to do so. Scott Berkun's new book, Confessions of a Public Speaker, explains why, how, and what goes on before and after a great speech.
"Good public speaking is based on good private thinking," Berkun writes in Confessions, where he recalls years of his own successes and failures traveling the country giving presentations. Preparation is the key to reducing your anxiety about public speaking, Berkun says, as is the awareness that humans are literally wired to fear the situation.
Our brains, for all their wonders, identify the following four things as being very bad for survival:
- Standing alone
- In open territory with no place to hide
- Without a weapon
- In front of a large crowd of creatures staring at you
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December 11th, 2009, 2 comments
Just like the rest of us, Outlook user Scott Hanselman gets too much email, and he's come up with some rules that auto-prioritize incoming email into folders before he even looks at it. Scott uses Outlook at work, and messages from his co-workers inside his company are higher priority; also, he gets invited to a lot of meetings via Outlook. If this is similar to your situation, check out Scott's strategy. He set up three rules which separate incoming email into 1.) messages that were sent directly to him (he's in the To: field), 2.) messages he was CC:'ed on, 3.) messages from outside his company, and 4.) meeting invitations. Hit up Scott's full post for step-by-step directions on how to set up these rules.
As always, your preferred email processing system depends on your situation. As a freelancer who doesn't use Outlook, rarely gets meeting invitations, and almost always gets messages from outside my non-company, this strategy doesn't work as well for me, but for a nine-to-fiver inside a corporate firewall, it makes a whole lot of sense. Thanks, Scott!
The Three Most Important Outlook Rules for Processing Mail [Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen]
Alerts Help You Stop Obsessively Checking Web Site Stats
December 10th, 2009, 4 comments
One of the conditions I set for myself when I started this blog was that I would not, under any circumstances, spend too much time navel-gazing at web site traffic graphs. For a year now, I've been pretty successful--but I still want to know if some big spike or dip happens, and I don't want to have to check by hand to see that. So, I'm pretty stoked about Google Analytics' alerts feature. You set it to shoot you an email when something happens--like your traffic goes up more than 10% from where it was the day before--and you're done. I like software that comes to me when something I care about happens. (That all said, Google Analytics is still a little too complicated and hairy for me at times; I've been meaning to try out Mint for awhile now, which looks simpler, but doesn't appear to have alerts.) How do you track your site activity without staring at graphs every day?
Note to Self: Don’t Forget to Use the Phone
October 30th, 2009, 1 comment
My friends who know what a telephone phobe I am will surely guffaw at the sheer hypocrisy of my latest post at Harvard Business Online, an exercise in self-talk wherein I declare that a phone call beats out email in a lot of situations. In my defense, for the last month or so I've been working on a project that involved several super-productive calls per week, so I have been practicing what I preach (a little bit, anyway). Here's the whole piece: Don't Forget To Use the Phone.
September 28th, 2009, 1 comment
In their new-to-me "Lifehacking"* section, Slate asks a few celebrities what kind of tricks they use to get things done. Here are my favorite responses.
Patty Stonesifer, chairwoman of the Smithsonian Institution Board of Regents:
I do a short exercise with every request that comes through—I ask myself "If I had to do this today, would I be glad?"
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Debunking the Lone Genius Myth
August 5th, 2009
During their session at OSCON, Google programmers Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick say that it's coders who can collaborate with others, not lone ranger geniuses, who are best at what they do.
July 30th, 2009, 4 comments
It's 2009, and we all know how to leave a voicemail. We don't need explicit instructions on how to do so from a robot, yet you get just that almost every time you call someone's mobile: "To page this person, press five now. At the tone, please record your message. When you are finished, you may hang up, or press one for more options." To reduce your cell minute usage and stop letting carriers waste your life with Silicon Sally's dumb monologue, you've got to know the right keystrokes. Every carrier lets you skip voicemail instructions, but the keystroke is different for each.
Blogger Jeremy Toemon runs down the three-key combo that will cover major cellphone carriers in the U.S.: One Star Pound. When you call a friend and want to leave a VM fast:
- Step One: Push 1. If your friend is on Sprint (or possibly Verizon, but not always), this skips the greeting and you are done, skip to End. IF you hear a message that says “One is not a valid option” skip to Step Three below, otherwise continue to Step Two.
- Step Two: Push *. If your friend is on Verizon, you’ll hear the beep, and can leave your message. Skip ahead to the end now.
- Step Three: Push #. This works for both AT&T and T-Mobile subscribers, and you’re all set to go.
So just remember One Star Pound (and listen to what happens in between). NY Times technology writer David Pogue is so incensed by carriers upping minute usage with lengthy automated messages he's launching the "Take Back the Beep" campaign. Here's how to let your feelings known to your carrier about wasting your time on the phone.
July 28th, 2009, 9 comments
In his latest essay, Paul Graham describes the difference between what he calls the maker's schedule and the manager's schedule. Makers--the writers, coders, designers, editors, creative types--need half or whole days to produce anything that solves complicated problems. Managers schedule out their workdays in hour-long blocks. When managers schedule makers into midday meetings, they kill creative productivity in real but not-obvious ways. Graham considers himself a maker, and describes why meetings are the enemy of creativity:
I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.
This resonates with me deeply.
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July 27th, 2009, 5 comments
Writer Dominic Ali came up with an unusual way to make office meetings more bearable--one that would make Ellen proud. In the comments of my recent post about meetings, Ali says:
At my previous job, I once took on a temporary acting communications director role. All of a sudden, I had eight people reporting to me. To keep impromptu meetings short, I instituted Dance Meetings. By playing some funk at low levels through my computer speakers, I'd encourage my colleagues to dance. We'd dance for the duration of the song as we discussed their projects, challenges, personal troubles, etc. The benefits were immediately clear.
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July 13th, 2009, 6 comments
I've always been an avid daydreamer--so much so that my mind can wander off at the most inopportune moments, like in the middle of a conversation. But I've always come up with my best ideas and even made difficult decisions in the midst of totally idle thought. So it doesn't surprise me that a new brain-scanning study shows that a wandering mind isn't idle at all: in fact, it's hard at work moving you toward a flash of insight. The Wall Street Journal reports:
By most measures, we spend about a third of our time daydreaming, yet our brain is unusually active during these seemingly idle moments. Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.
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June 30th, 2009, 1 comment
Rather than put up a new post every time I do something somewhere other than here, I'll save it up and get it all over with in one giant self-promoting shot once a month.
Here's my Mac-heavy byline roundup for June.
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June 22nd, 2009, 8 comments
New York Times technology writer David Pogue offers a few of his biggest productivity tips, from working at home (thus avoiding a time-intensive commute) to using voice-to-text transcription software, text expansion, and keyboard macros. What caught my eye is how he uses a personal database to store and find information he needs. Pogue writes:
Years ago, I started using an address-book program that's now called iData 3. It's a freeform database, meaning that the "cards" in this database don't have separate fields for Name, Street, City and so on; instead, you can type or paste whatever you want into each freeform card.
This program doesn't play well with field-based contact managers like Google's or the iPhone's, but the beauty is that it holds whatever you want: recipes, brainstorms, article fragments, driving directions, lists, Web addresses and so on. And you can find anything in a fraction of a second. (Actually, iData now lets you create field-based databases as well, but my freeform database has been growing since about 1988 and I'm not about to convert it.)
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June 18th, 2009, 4 comments
Former cubicle jockey Jonathon Wilson now works from home, but it's almost exactly as if he's at his desk at the office. In the comments of my recent article on working remotely, Jonathon explains his unconventional setup:
I still have my computer at work, in my office cube (right in the middle of things). I set up a webcam there along with speakers. I have second cam at home, and I simply Skype in to my own cube at work. Skype can be configured to auto-answer, if desired, so my 'cube' Skype simply picks up when I dial in...
... for hours at a time.
I also pipe my home desktop onto my cube's monitor (using VNC). This combination is very close to actually being there in the cube. People walk right up to my cube and talk to me, just like they do when I'm in the office. Because my code's up on the screen, we can work through issues there at my desk just like normal. Similarly, people glancing at my screen can see exactly what I'm doing (coding), so there's never a question of whether I'm actually doing my work from home.
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