Personal organization — GigaOM

Personal organization

Some of us make attempts to accomplish a few life and business goals. But how many people do you know who put everything on the line to pursue their deepest, most life-changing dreams? How many don’t wait until “someday” to go after the things they want? … Read More »

A recent survey of New Year’s resolutions found that workers want to get organized, stay connected, and respond more quickly to business communications. What are your New Year’s resolutions? How do you plan to manage your work life in 2011? Read More »

 
 

In my 6 month check-in documenting my move to Mac, I mentioned some of the general usability issues that I was still experiencing. My last post garnered a lot of comments in response, with some great tips from readers I thought I would share with you. Read More »

The rise of smartphones is having an impact across the entire technology food chain from chip makers to handset manufacturers. San Francisco-based Heroku, which has been focused on being a Ruby-on-Rails cloud platform, has seen a sudden demand for its service from mobile app developers Read More »

VMworld Met Expectations, But Is That Enough?

VMware used the past couple VMworld events to push visionary cloud strategies, but this year, the virtualization giant merely lived up to expectations — and possibly narrowed the competition gap. Read More »

5 Organizational Tools I Can't Work Without

I’m on the road this week, and it’s times like these when I really appreciate the tools I use to stay organized. Even while working remotely, I’ve managed to stay on track and not get behind because these tools rarely let anything slip through the cracks. Read More »

Embrace the Chaos With a Personal Knowledge Manager

I finally get to dig into all of the applications that I’ve been reading about for years but haven’t had the chance to try. My first foray was to look into the area of PKM. Would I find a tool that suited me on my Mac? Read More »

How I Stay Productive at Conferences

It is fascinating to watch how people behave during conferences in ways that either help or hinder their productivity. It is important to find ways to make the most out of our time at the event, while still getting other work done and remaining productive. Read More »

3 Productivity Tips for the Corporate Web Worker

I should admit to a dirty little secret: I’m a productivity junkie. I get an enormous amount of pleasure out of finding faster and more efficient ways to accomplish everyday tasks; I love to find better ways to gather and process information more quickly. Read More »

Diacarta: Picture Your Schedule

Are you bored with regular calendars? Diacarta, a new app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, has come up with a different way of visualizing your schedule. When you open the app, instead of the usual grid of hours, you’ll see an analog clock face. Read More »

Moving to Mac: Why Now?

In my last post I provided some background on my decision to move to Mac after 20 years using PCs. It wasn’t a decision I made lightly, with three major areas of concern that I needed to address before considering the switch: Support, software and usability. Read More »

Now that I regularly carry a cell phone, an iPod touch, an Overdrive mobile hotspot, a camera, and an e-book reader, I’m beginning to see how having a lot of pockets can be useful. Read More »

More Must Reads

I’ve been using the same task manager quite happily for years now; when I hear people rave about the next new thing I rarely see anything compelling enough to make me consider switching. However, a few days ago I stumbled across Thymer and was intrigued. Read More »

I have a confession to make. I am over-reliant on apps, and scheduling is a particular pain point for me. When my apps work well, my life hums along. This week, at SXSW, I experienced a catastrophic collapse of my scheduling systems. Read More »

Over the last few months I’ve seemed to neglect some of the interesting things that Springpad could do outside of my business endeavors. Features that, while appealing, I just never really got around to using. That’s about to change — and in a big way. Read More »

The early morning hours are a great time to do projects that require uninterrupted effort. But I find that it’s way too easy to get sidetracked. I’m tempted to sit down at the computer first thing in the morning to “check my email.” Read More »

Here I go again, writing about organization. This time, though, it’s not because I’ve found a great new app to help me. That’s my inbox, aka my “to-be-dealt-with” pile. And there are two more like it. If only there were an app that could help me! Read More »

Shhh, don’t tell anyone, but I have a little problem with my task list. About a week ago, I noticed that my task list had this distribution for prioritization: 90 percent “highest,” 4 percent “high,” 1 percent” normal,” and no tasks at all at the “low” … Read More »

One of the things I love about being a web worker is the variety of projects I get to work on. Things never get boring around here because of that. Every now and then, an opportunity arises that’s a little outside my usual scope, and … Read More »

The last week of the year is a great time to get organized. Chances are good that many of your coworkers and/or clients have the week off, so it should be a fairly quiet week for most of us. We could spend that extra time … Read More »

One of my “vacation” projects was to do some Twitter housecleaning. I needed to unfollow a lot of people who weren’t following me on one of my accounts. Twitter, as you know, provides no built-in options for filtering followers, mass unfollowing, or mass reciprocating (following … Read More »

In the corporate world, this is the time of the year for year-end performance reviews. But as a freelancer, how do you decide how well you’ve been performing? Do you even bother to assess your performance? While it might seem like unnecessary overhead, I still think … Read More »

gwabbit is a handy application that automatically identifies and parses contact information from your emails to help ease the process of creating new entries in your contact list. I’ve written about the Outlook version … Read More »

I sometimes struggle with staying focused on the most important tasks, and this is particularly important during the stressful holiday times. My love of fun side projects is a big part of the problem for me — I always have to be careful … Read More »

In this gimme-gimme-now-now-now! Internet era, even waiting just a few seconds can spell the difference between someone staying on a page or exiting immediately. To appeal to the instant gratification set, YouTube unveiled its “YouTube Feather” format today. Feather is basically a lightweight version of a YouTube … Read More »

For those perfect freelancers who remember to carefully record and track every expense, there isn’t much to do at tax time other than hand over their perfectly organized documents to their accountant. For the less perfect among us, we probably have some work to do. … Read More »

There’s one thing I can count on having on me at all times, and that’s my iPhone. It stands to reason, then, that in a pinch, my Apple wonder device is what I turn to in order to keep track of stray ideas and thoughts … Read More »

Online video and copyright have been through a lot in the past few years, evolving from a highly contentious relationship to more a transactional partnership. But media creators and technology companies have learned about each others’ businesses largely in conference rooms and in courts. Today, at … Read More »

There are times when things are so hectic that 9 am becomes 5 pm, Monday becomes Friday, and the first day of the month becomes the last before you can even turn around. The days and weeks run together, and everything seems to be moving at lightening … Read More »

One of the reasons that I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard was the new ability to sync the Mac OS X Address Book with Gmail’s or Google Apps’ Contacts. This function has been around for a while, but for some reason, it was … Read More »

I just finished reading Twyla Tharp’s book “The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life.” Although it focuses more on creative types, much of the advice can be applied to solo entrepreneurs and small business owners. One helpful tip was her organizational system: a … Read More »

I first wrote about the Springpad notebook organizer almost a year ago now and was immediately impressed by the offering. Since then, as improvements have come across my desk I’ve always … Read More »

Playing with applications on an Android phone got me thinking about how I use applications on my iPhone. I’m always interested in seeing what applications my friends are using on their phones, so I thought people might be interested in reading about the iPhone applications that … Read More »

I confess: I’m a terrible scatterbrain. It takes a lot for me to force my thoughts into a nice, orderly line and to keep them there — particularly in those busy times when I have a lot of competing priorities. In those times, I’ll often … Read More »

Online annotation and research service WebNotes has been a useful tool in my arsenal since I reviewed it last year. Since that time, the company has released a Pro version … Read More »

By positioning itself between traditional project management apps like Basecamp and personal relationship management apps like Gist, Liaise thinks that it has found a useful niche, which it calls “business interaction management.” It claims that it can do this with a very … Read More »

The problem with talking about how the Internet is revolutionizing entertainment is that in many ways, it isn’t. Most web series are basically shorter and cheaper TV series released online. Interactivity, social storytelling and community building are for the most part waiting around the bend. Meanwhile, … Read More »

If you’re a small business owner or freelancer, you probably feel like you’re being pulled in about a thousand directions. Everything seems to be competing for your attention, and you can’t figure out what’s the most important priority for this very second. You have phone … Read More »

In your quest for better efficiency, you’ve probably read books like “Getting Things Done” and “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” and tried to implement the strategies contained within them. Yet you know you can do better in managing your day and being more … Read More »

We all have to follow never-ending streams of information to varying degrees. Small business owners and web workers have to keep their fingers on the pulse of what’s happening in their markets and with their customers and clients. Writers and bloggers read for inspiration … Read More »

Which days of the week are the most productive for you? We all know that we have different ways of working, and that for each of us, a week (or given work period) represents a cycle, as Angus Kidman reminded us this week. That cycle … Read More »

Lately, I’ve been focused on arranging my schedule and splitting my work into chunks so that I can be productive for longer periods of time, while still having some flexibility in my schedule for the other things that I enjoy doing. One of the big benefits … Read More »

Many organizations block access to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social networks. NutshellMail can deliver your friends’ updates to you in an email digest, which neatly sidesteps corporate blocking software, and could also useful if you just prefer keeping tabs on your … Read More »

Whether freelancing, or in the corporate world, we all have to contend with deadlines. Deadlines generally come off sounding like shlock horror villains: they inch closer, approach, loom and grow larger. I’ve worked in settings where deadlines were paramount, and followed rigorously, and in situations where … Read More »

Do you ever wonder what is keeping you from making progress toward your goals? Perhaps you’ve set up a schedule for yourself, outlining the things you need to do each day so that you focus on the most important tasks related to your business, but … Read More »

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