I’m exploring a geeky office hack. Here’s the deal. I’m assistant to my organization’s vice president and president. We’re in a pretty big building, and my office plus their two offices are hidden off in a far corner.

There are days when people will walk back here six or seven times hoping to catch one of them, to ask a quick question or get their feedback on something small. And every time the bosses aren’t in their offices—they’re off at a meeting or in someone else’s office.  read more »

i’ll just copy some of my notes here. i’m trying to find a specific application. i’ve tried the 37signals stuff, stikkit, google-stuff. So far nothing fits the bill very well.

it doesn’t have to be all-in-one (like stikkit) but i wouldn’t mind. either way as long as it all works as one.

stikkit is so close. but the lack of further development and the inability to display data to people who don’t want to start their own stikkit account makes it difficult to keep using.

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i want a

contact (highrise, stikkit) notes (writeboard, stikkit, backpack, basecamp, phpbb, wordpress)  read more »

William F. Buckley Jr., one of the fathers of modern American political conservatism, died Wednesday. Whether you agree with his politics or not, it’s hard to ignore this positively startling fact from his New York Times obituary: in addition to writing and editing more than 55 books,  read more »

In Pakistan, bootleg copies of software are the norm. When you buy a computer, if you tell the people who are setting it up that you want genuine software, they look at you like you’re crazy. So you go buy a computer, tell the tech support guy what software you want on it, and take it for granted that practically none of it will be legally yours.  read more »

Organized people keep lists: to-do lists, shopping lists, lists of books they want to read, movies they want to watch, restaurants they want to try. Sometimes, the lists become a way of taking care of the people in our lives, like gift ideas or reminders for a spouse or co-worker. I keep lots of lists, and depending on what I’m working on at the time, I might have a dozen or so sitting around to keep track of things.

On the whole, lists are a good thing. I certainly feel better when I write things down. But a certain kind of list, that long-running, chock-full wish list of stuff you want to try or buy, can do more psychic harm than good. They’re a great way to keep track of all the cool stuff you hear about, but there’s the rub. How often do you actually pick something off your wish list? And how often do you look at your wish list and feel bad because you’ll probably never get to any of it?  read more »

I’m disciplined about doing my weekly review. I knock through it every Monday morning and feel great after.

For a couple years now, however, I have had two items on my Weekly Review Checklist that I rarely check off. They are taken verbatim from David Allen:

“Empty my head” “Be creative and courageous”

I don’t know if it’s a problem relating to the altitude of my mind during a weekly review (which I suppose is generally in the range of 10-30k feet), or if these checklist items are too vague to be useful (and not meant to be ripped from the David and put in this context).  read more »

How-To: Truly reset your .Mac sync data [Ars Technica]

I never have trouble finding company when it comes to whining about the reliability of .Mac syncing. It’s surely not fair to lay all of this at the feet of the .Mac developers — sync is, we are often reminded, “hard.” But if you want to rely on syncing your Calendars, Contacts, Preferences, snippets, Yojimbo, and what have you via .Mac in a battlefield environment, you’re going to need a strong stomach, a lot of patience, and reliable backups. Plus, friends, you will regularly have to reset frickin’ everything.

Entirely overfamiliar with that particular reality, I was pleased to get pointed toward David Chartier’s tutorial on saving your .Mac’s village by burning it to the ground. It’s a handy, illustrated companion piece to Apple’s own advice on scorching earth. Very handy, and, yeah, you will eventually need it. So print it out. Maybe even have it laminated.

Apple’s .Mac syncing features are sometimes no exception to these problems, and even though Apple provides a number of decent solutions in its .Mac sync support pages, they don’t always work. Fortunately, a brief adventure using .Mac sync chat support (found at the bottom of that aforelinked page) cleared up a repeating “merge/overwrite” sync dialog problem for me, and we felt the procedure was worth sharing.

FWIW, here’s a few other things I do (as a raving .Mac paranoiac):  read more »

TWiT 133: Jonathan Coulton - Functional And Elegant

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jonathan Coulton, Merlin Mann, Veronica Belmont, Ryan Block, and Tom Merritt

Jonathan Coulton and niche broadcasting, HD DVD finally kaput, YouTube goes down, frozen RAM and more.

Here’s a free, direct MP3 download of TWiT 133.

Man, I really loved this episode. Jonathan Coulton’s music and performances are inspiring in themselves, but as a fellow (albeit, much more modestly successful) “microbrand,” I have huge respect for how he runs the business of his career. (more after the jump, including why we were all on this episode together in the first place)  read more »

I recently read an interesting post at Study Hacks about building a research database. The program used was Microsoft Access and I was looking for suggestions for a Mac program which might accomplish the same tasks. I have Devon Think and will take a look at Filemaker Pro, but I was looking for some other suggestions.

Thanks for any help.

Ok, the title is intentionally noobish. Please don’t disregard my question.

I’m a little overwelmed by the whole web environment. Even though my major is IT/ web development I have only learned enough about css, xhml, asp.net, php, js, and mysql to make me feel like I will never learn how to put it all together. Currently my .Mac page is still the simplest way for me to put stuff on the web. Feature shortcomings not withstanding.  read more »

Ask Chicagoist: Help Me Wake Up!

The always useful Ask Chicagoist addresses a recent obsession of mine, making yourself get out of bed in the morning. I used to be a morning person. When I faced a 30-mile reverse commute to get work by 8:00 a.m., I had to. And for a few months last year, I was possessed by a spirit that made me get out of bed at 5 every day so I could squeeze in some work before the toys started flying.  read more »

I want to put up a Web site that offers a portfolio of my writing samples, along with a blog, and probably other professional stuff that escapes me at the moment.

What do people recommend for setting up a site like this? Would you use a CMS? If so, which one?

If anyone can offer any examples of good writing portfolio Web sites, please let me know. Thanks!

Robyn

Does anyone have any observations and (or comparisons) of these applications (both on the web and mobile)?

Hi all, I've long been a reader and follow the site, but I've recently just got a simple idea for an app that I think could be really useful to people. My hope is that if it's good, that someone would like to code it. I'm not sure if this is the right place/site, but I figure you guys would have some good ideas/feedback.

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On the mac there are plenty of apps for time management and keeping track of what you need to do in the day. Being a terrible procrastinator I've probably tried them all.

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I’m a recent convert from Windows to Mac and have been loving it so far.

One thing I really haven’t gotten solved yet though is email. Since my work uses Exchange, I was using Outlook 2007 before and had this wonder add-in called ClearContext (http://www.clearcontext.com/) that allowed me to quickly assign a category/topic to a thread, and then with one click, the entire thread would be filed away into the topic’s folder and out of my inbox.  read more »

Been thinking a bit about getting rid of some old paper files I have and want to get them on a pc for the lowest cost possible.

I wanted to kick this idea around a bit and see if it fights back…

The problem: I have a cheap scanner and my budget doesn’t stretch to a nice automated scanner like the ScanSnap.

Solution: My idea is this, scan the pages as images and ocr them. Ocr isn’t perfect, as you all know, but as long as it can produce valid search text I don’t care too much.  read more »

New to using the system, but I’ve been interested in it for a few years.

My wife and I are about to kick off the new organization style, but we have a question: do we use multiple sets of 43 folders, or try to manage both our lives with one set?

I can only imagine that we should be using multiple sets, but she’s an engineer and demands proof before moving on to next steps.

Here is our situation:

We both have day jobs, and we also run two different businesses on the side. Do we cram all of our lives into ONE set of 43 folders?  read more »

So I was on LifeHacker and saw a recent post mentioning a sticky note program called “Hott Notes” (http://lifehacker.com/358564/make-and-take-your-sticky-notes-with-hott-notes) which seems like a very productive little app. Its your basic sticky note program with lots of little graphical and optional details you can tweak and change. Until now, I’ve been using the tried and true “ToDo.txt” method and that’s working just fine. But for now I’ll be giving this a whirl.  read more »

I’ve heard a lot about the Fujitsu Scansnap and how people have been utilizing it in their paperless lives. I was wondering if anyone has a less expensive alternative to the Scansnap. Perhaps similar product on the cheap(er)? Or has someone found a nice All in One type printer that works for their paperless workflow?

Right now I have a heaps of tags in del.icio.us where this is only 1 item associated with the tag.

Do people actually try to minimise this? if so, do you have your own tagging standards? or do you just leave them alone and not worry about it?

Cheers

I have this dry-erase board I use for quick notes — dashing off phone numbers, little reminders, that kind of thing. I’ve found it much easier than searching for something to write on/with when I’m on the phone, and I can’t stand typing notes while I’m talking.

Thing is, a lot of the items on the board are short-lived, especially the phone numbers; I need them when I need them, but they don’t make the cut when it comes to inputing them into Address Book or whatever.Obviously, I erase the white board fairly regularly.  read more »

NPR: Tech Junkies Crazy About ‘Getting Things Done’

As an insufferably huge public broadcasting nerd, I was happy to hear (via our pal, Ryan) that 43 Folders was mentioned in tonight’s All Things Considered story about Getting Things Done.

Since this may be the first time some folks have visited the site, I wanted to highlight a few of my favorite GTD posts from the past four years. We talk about lots more than GTD here, but it’s definitely a lot of my readers’ favorite topic.

Thanks for stopping by. Ton of links after the jump…  read more »

Oprah’s Clutter Man: “It’s Never About the Stuff”

Clean Sweep’s Peter Walsh (previously) has a new book out, and Mediabistro had the chance to chat with him while he was out promoting it.

While I wish Peter had held out for a more cromulent title (“Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?” Ouch.), I so admire this guy’s grip on what clutter does to your mind. Or at least what it does to mine.

Typically swell quote:

Our show was never about the stuff. I told the producers early on that you can only organize so many closets and garages before people lose their minds… We all have stuff. What we had to do was tell people’s stories through their stuff, and see them realizing what their relationship to the stuff had become.

and, later:  read more »

The wife and I are expecting and rather than spending the first half of her labor phoning everyone, or the first bit of the baby’s life phoning everyone re: the birth, etc, I would much rather send a quick SMS to a service that then sends it on to a group of people that I have predefined.

I do plan on setting the GrandCentral voice mail to keep people updated on the baby, but for the beginning of labor and when the baby arrives, I need to send out a quick message.

Does something like this exist? I was looking at Pinger (www.pinger.com), but I am looking for other services.