So I’m grooving along using my Textpander (old skool, baby) and thinking about doing even more with it. I mean, it is handy as it is, but I really hate going into the preference pane and walking through the mouse-heavy interface to add a new snippet. Sometimes, I realize that I’m going to type the word “existentialism” a bunch for the next few pages, and I want a quick-and-dirty, on-the-fly snippet added.

As far as I can tell, no can do.  read more »

I am trying to find a way to make my powerbook live longer on just battery, without getting an extra apple battery. is there such a thing? want to be able to work longer on my flights :)

Hi all Is there any way to convert a Smart Mailbox to a regular Mailbox using Mail.app? I’m using Smart Mailboxes to collate all relevant emails for each project. However when the project is complete I want to put the project’s Smart Mailbox into a Completed folder, however I can’t drop SM’s into a folder. Is there a work around for this? I guess the essence of GTD is deleting all emails that have been dealt with/completed, I’m just not ready to let go yet!!

One of the complaints about the iPhone is that there is no way to create a to do list. While I don’t have a perfect solution, I do have an idea that can get you started.

Create a password protected blog and enable comments. Each blog entry is a “To Do” item and you can keep track of how you are doing on the project with the comments section.

Here’s the how-to using iWeb:

1) Create a New Page using the pull down menu or the handy + button at the bottom. From the template of your choice, select the blog.  read more »

Hey everyone,
I'm Marc. I recently graduated from Southampton Solent University in England and moved back to Germany. Now I work as a web developer at a small agency in Düsseldorf. I enjoy Apple products, giving presentations and turning crappy code into nice looking websites.
I got into GTD about half a year ago and so far it's been working fine for me. It helped me especially to get through my final weeks at uni.  read more »

Acting without doing SOUNDS good, but… (Ask MetaFilter)

I really liked this AskMe question about Quicksilver, since it’s one that comes up a lot for folks who don’t get as enthused about the app as I (and many of you) do:

Everywhere I go on the internet, Mac users rave about Quicksilver. I’ve downloaded it a couple times, and I sort of get that it COULD be really useful, but I am not sure how…

So what am I missing with Quicksilver? I see so many other people who get a lot of use out of it, and I am sure I can fit it in somewhere, too, but I just can’t seem to figure it out….

Here’s a portion of how I responded in comments:  read more »

I love my Hipster PDA, but I don’t love how the metal binder clip is nicking the back of my iPhone.

Any recommendations for replacing said clip? I’d rather not put anything in a case because I prefer to just whip it out at the ready. ‘Cause that’s how I roll.

I recently moved a load of actions from a project (things to write about in my tech blog) [1] into my Someday, Maybe Never project, and then it suddenly struck me that maybe it wasn’t a project at all, but a context. It makes sense if you think about it from the Contexts view - when you’re executing, you just look at the context you’re in at the time (calls, errands etc) and because you’ve never given one of your active contexts to the actions, you never see them in your current context context.  read more »

I’m in my first year of university and trying desperately to come up with the best way to take notes on my mac…

I’ve been looking into notae and yojimbo (I like the tagging features alot, but dislike that I can’t put in pictures and such) but have heard good things about journler and devonthink.  read more »

Hi

This is something I found to be both sacrilegious to GTD and very much a core part of its “capture everything” philosophy.

Over time, I’ve found that more and more, I need to capture something at any possibly circumstance. Now I usually carry a small pad and pen right in my pocket, but there are times when you don’t have access to that, in fact a lot of the time.  read more »

What is IM used for in the workplace?

My office mates and I figured out this week that we have an IM client on our corporate workstations. Novices to the world of corporate IM, we don’t really know what it’s used for. I’ve used IM clients at home, of course, but never at work and we’re all at a bit of a loss on how this would be useful, if at all.

A quick session of searching 43f reveals that most of the discussion up until this point has been about managing the distractions of IM and managing your coworkers’ expectations of your responses. But I’m wondering, what’s IM used for in business?  read more »

Hi all

I’m a self taught freelance storyboard artist for advertising in his fifth year of struggle in an industry that no longer bothers to train or groom anyone like it used to. In this field you are on your own and there is little to guide you in skills acquisition and finding connections. It’s the fuzziest of fuzzy edged jobs.

I always meet deadlines (They are short and brutal) and work pretty much every hour of the day I have available to me at improving my skills and speed.  read more »

I am an illustrator who does storyboards for advertising and I am trying to make my self teaching more rational and to the point. The outcome I’m after is that I’ll have the ability to keep my train of thought recorded using words as well as my sketches so that when work sporadically comes in and interrupts my explorations I wont come back two weeks later with only the memory of something exciting I was doing but can’t quite remember what it was.  read more »

ok that’s all i wanted to say this isn’t actually an ‘ask 43folders,’ sorry.

I’m in NYC right now to do visit with folks at Tekserve. So.

I have a friend who told me he was thinking about giving his project managers a weekly pile of chips that could be redeemed for person-hours in meetings. So, to schedule firewalled, group face-time, the PM would need to cough up the equivalent number of tokens from her pile. Thus, one, long, all-hands meeting might require the whole week’s stack. While, fewer, shorter meetings with smaller groups made the pile go further.

It was just an idea, and I’m pretty sure he never implemented it, but I think it’s a fascinating concept. Why? Because I love the idea of re-introducing scarcity into systems that lack boundaries.  read more »

Perhaps in response to LifeBalance, Funky Cloud presents LifeShaker (To Do manager): http://funkycloud.com/lifeshaker/

Great video, even if you don’t want to look at another To Do manager, go for the video.

Mac OS X 10.3 or greater

Merlin and web dudes, the new site ROCKS!

But…

As a longtime reader, first-time registered user here, I’ve yet to find a consistent link to the user account settings. You could usually get to it by clicking on your name in the Online Users section on the right. However I’ve noticed my username doesn’t consistently show up there every time.

For some reason I keep looking for an Account link in the upper right of the page near the Username | Log out section. Not sure if this is just something Drupal’s missing or what. Bug? Missing feature? You decide.  read more »

The A2 hosting ad and the Search Form are out of alignment with the rest of the sidebar.

I’m an alignment nerd. There, I’ve said it.

While I’m being anal, you might also want to clean up the title underline in the 43f jobs section (add padding or margin), and remove the redundant title “Online Users” from the sidebar (“Who’s Online” says it all).

…still love the design, though.

Hope posting about a fantastic indie band isn’t too “off-topic” for the Grabass forum. If I am out of line, please someone, put me in my damn place.

So anyways, one of my favorite indie-rock acts Division Day are releasing either a cover or a remix of something from their current catalog over the span of 8 weeks (8 songs total) which will make up a “Covers and Remixes EP”.

Last Tuesday they released this little doozie - a cover of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence”  read more »

As a longtime Windows user, I was really impressed by a lot of OS X. Not only the look, which is not my primary concern, but the intelligence of most things. OS X reminds me of the opposite of the feeling you get when using some products. Reactions like “Jeeze, didn’t anyone ever try this to see how bad it sucks?” when trying to configure certain phones or other devices. So Apple hardware and OS X both are pretty cool.  read more »

My pal, Penney, once told me that when she was a kid, and her family went on vacation, they would “drop the spoon” every afternoon. I knew this was a cousin of the disco nap, but I never knew it was a purported invention of Salvador Dalí, (according to QuestionSwap):

Lie down or sit in comfy seat holding a spoon in your fingertips. you should be holding it in a way that - when you loose consciousness (sleep) you drop it… the Clatter (put a big plate on the floor under your hand) will wake you…. and you get woken JUST as you enter the best “dreamy” bit of your sleep.

Related (though pretty insane, if you’re asking me) is the notorious “Thomas Edison Nap,” which, repeated through the day, is intended to stand in lieu of an actual solid night’s sleep (and which seems to have partly inspired some of the polyphasic sleep nutjobs proponents). Edison is said to have naturally needed less sleep in a day, and seldom slept very much in a given stretch, claiming that excessive sleep was a sign of laziness — and yet:  read more »