Home » productivity (Page 8)
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.
So since it does pretty much does the same things as Quicksilver why would I want to switch?
Last month, I made the switch to Google Quick Search Box from Quicksilver on my Mac. While Quicksilver improved my efficiency and cut the time I spent searching for files, Google Quick Search Box has upped the ante even further by adding in the ability to speedily access all my Google services through the same interface. I’m very impressed with it.
Google Quick Search Box is available as a free download for OS X. On the surface, it seems fairly simple. Just like with Quicksilver, you hit a keyboard shortcut and up pops a box where you can run a search. You can access applications and files from there, too.
via web worker daily
Look’s cool right?
Firefox/Internet Explorer: Meeting planning web site ScheduleOnce has a new Firefox and Internet Explorer add-on that adds a new widget to your Google Calendar that helps you and your co-workers find a good time for a meeting.
via lifehacker
The difference between being active and being productive is that productive people are moving towards and expected end, while active folks are reacting to the demands of life.
So before you take your next action you need to ask yourself, “am a acting with purpose or simple reacting?”
Throughout human history, it was the super achievers — and only the super achievers — who knew when to say “No.” They always knew what to reach for. They knew where to place themselves. Now all of us will have to learn that. It’s not very difficult. The key to it — what Leonardo da Vinci and Mozart did — is to record the results of our decisions.
Every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen. The most important decisions in organizations are people decisions, and yet only the military, and only recently, has begun to ask, “If we assign this general to lead this base, what do we expect him to accomplish?” Three years later they look back at what they had written. They have now reached a point where 40 percent of their decisions work out.
via leader to leader
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.
I had been using Geektool to display the date on my MacBook Pro desktop but Dateline is also a really simple and elegant option…
via the weekly review
Mr. Rhone reveals how he’s able to share his iCal calender with his wife…
The solution is a product called BusySync. It installs as a pane in System Preferences and seamlessly allows you to do real iCal calendar sharing between multiple Macs – with read write and password control. It is a fantastic solution and works so well you wonder why Apple has not implemented this feature in iCal themselves. It could not have been simpler to set up and make the switch. Here is what I did: With the Backpack calendars subscribed in iCal on one of the Macs, I exported each calendar individually. To me, this is the simplest way to get the data out of Backpack. I then deleted those calendar subscriptions from iCal. Next, I imported the calendars I had exported back into iCal, being careful to make sure it imported each one into its own new calendar. I then installed BusySync and followed the instructions for sharing the calendars. Finally, I went to the other Macs, installed BusySync there, and followed the instructions for subscribing to the calendars.
link: patrickrhone / journal » Blog Archive » Changing The Landscape
