Productivity Power Links 12-10-09

Ok this is somewhat cool…

You don’t have time to tether yourself to a wall while your cellphone, PSP, DS, or other gadget charges. Next time your portable gear starts running low on juice, strap on gadget manufacturer Brando’s clever wristband battery recharger and keep on keepin’ on.

via lifehacker

Getting to much done?

Too much GTD or too much effectiveness in your life can become annoying at some point. Being highly productive can really help you become some sort of a freak, even if you obviously don’t want that. All those lists, thoughts capturing devices, advanced task processing systems. All those fancy words like “next actions”, “hipster cards” or “mind like water”. All those tasks carefully squeezed into your agenda, well, all that could give you a very hard time in a normal, non-productivity related, social conversation.

via dragos roua

Trying hard not to player hate this guy…

This past summer, for example, I completed my PhD in computer science at MIT. Simultaneous with writing my dissertation I finished the manuscript for my third book, which was handed in a month after my PhD defense and will be published by Random House in the summer of 2010. During this past year, I also managed to maintain my blog, Study Hacks, which enjoys over 50,000 unique visitors a month, and publish over a half-dozen peer-reviewed academic papers.

via i will teach you to be rich

What to eat if you want to be unhealthy…

Cattle evolved to eat grass, not grains. But farmers today feed their animals corn and soybeans, which fatten up the animals faster for slaughter. More money for cattle farmers (and lower prices at the grocery store) means a lot less nutrition for us. A recent comprehensive study conducted by the USDA and researchers from Clemson University found that compared with corn-fed beef, grass-fed beef is higher in beta-carotene, vitamin E, omega-3s, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), calcium, magnesium, and potassium; lower in inflammatory omega-6s; and lower in saturated fats that have been linked to heart disease. “We need to respect the fact that cows are herbivores, and that does not mean feeding them corn and chicken manure,” says Salatin.

via living healthy

Woo Hoo Quicksilver has been updated…

Quicksilver’s been updated!

Quicksilver is one of those applications that simply genius and once you’ve used it you can’t understand how you survived all these years without it.

Get it here.

via minimal mac

Visual alerts don’t work…really?

Growl notifications, alert add-ons for Firefox and for the desktop, and other tools can all help you keep on top of goings-on in your digital world by displaying visual cues whenever new activity appears on your social networks, email, or other web apps. A new study, however, indicates that these tools might not be helping you at all. In fact, they could be seriously hamstringing your productivity.

via web worker daily

Productivity Power Links 07-21-09

Mr. obvious strikes again!

You know what you need to do. You know why you need to do it. You even know what steps you must take to get it done. But there’s one small problem: you can’t seem to get moving. It’s a common problem. Maybe it’s chronic procrastination or maybe you’re just so overwhelmed that you feel paralyzed.

link: 10 Ways To Give Yourself A Procrastination Inoculation

Darren please tell us how you gtd with Evernote?

I have been using Evernote as one of my capture tools recently. I set it up with 3 and only 3 Notebooks. Simple. My default is INBOX. This is where all my incoming notes, emails, photos etc go. This is my collection bucket and is completely unprocessed. I get this INBOX to zero daily most of the time.

link: GTD and Evernote | darrencrawford.com

Skype for OS X is updated…thats good right?

Mac OS X only: Back in January Skype released a beta version of the popular VoIP application that added screen sharing tools, integration with Wi-Fi access service Boingo, better audio and video, and several other improvements.

link: Skype 2.8 for Mac Adds Screen Sharing, Wi-Fi Access, and More – Skype 2.8 – Lifehacker

How us home bound info workers can be better slackers…

But we do all need mental breaks to recharge. I can’t just not take breaks because taking them is too much work. So to cope with this challenge I’ve developed a system of being able to partially dial back my level of work activity. This gives me some of the mental feeling of taking time off without the break itself causing a stressful workload.

link: How to Take Mini Mental Breaks

What is productivity in the light of our post modern reality????

There has been rising concerns that “productivity is dead” and that people are moving on to new things. The conditions have changed that created the initial excitement around “productivity.” Most people are now comfortable with the internet, their computers, and the associated “knowledge work” that they no longer need ways to help them cope. In that sense, “productivity” is no longer needed.

link: On the Horizon: The New Productivity

After 12 years of waiting….

Many, many months ago, it looked like an official solution for syncing BlackBerry devices with the Mac (including media and iTunes playlists) was right around the corner. Now, almost a year later, RIM is finally making it official. But don’t get too excited. You still have to wait until September before the new software will be available for download.

link: Official BlackBerry Desktop Software for Mac Coming in September

Hacking your sleep? Riigghhhhhttttt….

One of the ways to force your brain into REM sleep and skip the other phases is to make it feel exhausted. If you’ve gone 24 hours without sleep, you might notice that you drift away into dreams straight from being awake. This because your body goes instantly into REM sleep as a protection mechanism. The way to hack yourself into entering REM sleep without being exhausted is to trick your body into thinking you’re going to get a tiny amount of sleep. You can train it to enter REM for short periods of time throughout the day in 20-minute naps rather than in one lump at night. This is how polyphasic sleep works.

link: How To Hack Your Brain, Part 1: Sleep | Dustin Curtis

Creative Workspaces

The Economist takes a look at some creative workspaces…

The laptop is a part of me. Everywhere you travel, everywhere you go, it’s part of you. It’s a very strange object because a laptop is something where your private life and your friends meet your working life and stress. It’s all on one object now, and it’s the centre of my little world. I’m a writer, that’s what I do most. My ideas happen while I’m typing.

The Economist: Thinking Space

Getting Rid Of The Leaks…

So I work from my home office for a local University. My job requires that I use a email client that supports Exchange Server which my OS of choice does not support at the moment.

So I finally gave up trying to get Apple Mail to work with Outlook Web Access and just installed Windows 7 on my Macbook Pro using Bootcamp. At first it seemed like the perfect solution, I could install all the junk I needed for work on the Bootcamp partition and still enjoy the simple elegances of OS X.

But what I noticed is that after I installed Windows 7 I started installing a bunch of games to you know, help me unwind after work. I mean everybody needs a little a playtime after sweating over a burning hot keyboard all night… right? But what happened is that after making all these grandiose plans for world domination during my weekly review I was spending hours playing Topspin and Tiger Woods.

What was suppose to be a little fun turned into a big time leak.

So I deleted the Bootcamp partition and installed Entourage and guess what? I’m getting a lot more stuff done.

You can have the best plans in the world but if your not willing to get rid of the time leaks it may take you longer than necessary to actualize them.

It’s Good To Be Home…

Yes I’m still whining about the slow interweb speeds I got while on vacation.

What I got on the road…

What I get at home…

What Is The Deal With Slow Hotel Internet?

So I get about 12 Mbps at home and am getting 0.35 Mbps on the road in a hotel. This is a fairly decent business dude type hotel, so how is this in anyway acceptable?

A few days ago I was at another hotel and they made me pay 15 bucks for their high speed internet and when I did a speed test I was barely getting dial-up speeds.

This outrage most be put to a stop! Business dudes and info workers must unite and demand our God given right to have free high speed interwebs wherever we go!

originally posted on productive life

Xpad A Simple Text Editor For Mac

Xpad is a really simple text editor for Mac…

According to the developer, “xPad is a single solution replacement for Stickies, NotePad, Scrapbook and TextEdit.” Although the latter claim might be a stretch, given TextEdit’s advanced functionality in Tiger, xPad is indeed quite flexible. The latest version lets you create notes with full RTF support, paragraph formatting (including styles, tab stops, spacing, and lists), and character-level formatting. You can also perform non-contiguous selections—select some text in one part of a document, hold down the Command key, highlight text in another part of the document, and then perform actions on both selections.

via macworld

I use it to store all my serial numbers and to do lists. It’s best feature is it’s simplicity. You can download it here