Certainly, some of us make half-hearted attempts to accomplish a few of our 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? What are the rest of us doing, and what are we waiting for?

Choices and Challenges

Of course, circumstances get in the way. There are challenges, setbacks and detours. But each of us has a choice. Although it won’t be easy to navigate back to the right path, if we say that we can’t find our way around obstacles, we’re making a choice to leave things as they are.

Last night, I was reading about Roald Dahl, author of such hopeful and imaginative books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That might be my absolute favorite story about an underdog who overcomes obstacles while continuing to believe in something, even when all is stacked against him.

It turns out Roald Dahl was a lot like his character Charlie. Dahl’s personal life was filled with hardship and tragedy. In spite of all the challenges he faced, he remained positive and achieved great things. As it says on his website, “The series of misfortunes and tragedies Dahl… suffer[ed did not] made him more bitter. Loss and physical adversity seemed to stimulate his enormous energies to positive action. He fought misfortune as if it was a dragon to be slain.”

Time to Dream Big

I hope that 2011 will be a year of great progress toward achieving our deeply-buried dreams, and a year of doing things that require us to step out of our comfort zones and test our abilities, even if they lead to failure or, even more frightening, success.

I challenge you, as we round out these last few days of 2010: dust off those gutsy dreams and ambitions you’ve kept to yourself until now. Dare to put yourself out there; do something big this coming year. It doesn’t need to look big to anyone else, but you’ll know it is, because it will require you to go out on a limb and do things in an entirely different way.

For 2011, live the way you truly want to live, and achieve what you’ve only ever dreamed you could achieve.

What big, audacious goals do you have for 2011?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Neal

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated
• How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace

The survey was conducted online in December 2010 by Harris Interactive on behalf of Intermedia. Respondents were employed U.S. adults who have a New Year’s business communications resolution.

We’ve written extensively on how to get more organized, how to tame your inbox, and how to improve collaboration, but we’d like to hear your ideas in the comments.

What are your New Year’s resolutions? How do you plan to manage your work life  in 2011?

Image by sxc.hu user ba1969

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Are You Empowering Your Mobile Workforce?
• Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated

My post garnered a lot of comments in response with some great tips and tricks from readers that I thought I would share with you.

The “Black Hole” of Minimized Windows

One of my issues was getting used to the Cmd-Tab functionality of Mac, compared to the Alt-Tab of Windows. While similar, the Mac Cmd-Tab doesn’t restore minimized windows; I’ve been struggling with the “black hole” that minimized windows seem to disappear into. You all came to the rescue though with these handy tips and tricks.

By far the most popular suggestion, and the one that I ultimately ended up using, is to use the “Hide” command or the Cmd-H shortcut to hide windows rather than minimize them. Not only does this remove the window from view but it also shifts the focus to the next application in the stack. This actually helped solve another issue, too, because I was still occasionally bitten by seeing what I believed to be the active window on my screen but having the Application Bar really focused on something else. Hiding the application works to resolve both issues for me.

There is one caveat, though (and I guess this could actually be seen as desirable): if you’re using an application like TweetDeck that is hidden and something happens that prompts a notification, it will bring that application to the forefront. I find this to be pretty distracting so have learned to continue to minimize those windows rather than hiding them.

Another very popular suggestion was to use the add-on utility Witch, which promises to make window switching fun.  I tried an evaluation of this utility and found it really useful, but found its plethora of options bit overwhelming, so I’ve settled on the more conventional shortcut hiding method. With Witch it is possible to completely customize how items appear, enable pop up previews and change the appearance of the app switching windows. I have a feeling that as I continue to become more comfortable and my needs increase this is something that I will be revisiting.

Other folks in the comments discussed using a combination of Exposé and Spaces. While I do like Exposé, Spaces just doesn’t seem to click with me. If I could segregate apps, or instances of apps, into different Spaces for different tasks, then I think it would be more useful to me.

Where Am I? How Did I Get Here?

I mentioned that I missed being able to see the full path for the current directory in Finder.  Commenter Ted provided the solution: In Finder, open a folder, go to the “View” Menu, then click “Show Path Bar.” This was exactly what I was looking for and really makes the structure of my data make more sense to me.

Where Did I Put that Menu?

With the separation of the Application menu and the program window, I got particularly perplexed when working with a second monitor attached. Having to look to another screen to the see the menu of the application  I’m currently using just never seemed right to me. Many of you suggested MenuEverywhere, which adds a staggering number of ways to add menus to just about anything, while another suggestion was Secondbar is more of a single tasker by adding a very useful duplicate of the menubar on the second screen.

Much like with a PC, I am finding that there are a staggering number of utilities designed to fill gaps and provide extra functionality to the OS, and a staggering number of ways to work with and around your process. I am thankful for all of your suggestions and hope you find them useful as well.

Share your Mac window management tips below.

Photo by Flickr user neys, licensed under CC 2.0

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Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian (foreground) speaking at GigaOM's Structure 2010 conference in San Francisco

The rise of smartphones is having an impact across the entire technology food chain. Not only are companies like Motorola moving more phones, app developers are seeing a quick jump in their fortunes. But far from the bright lights and attention are companies that provide vital building blocks, who are also enjoying the good times. These include chip companies like Qualcomm and cloud services provider Heroku, which offers its platform as a service and is based on Amazon’s raw infrastructure.

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, according to Byron Sebastian, chief executive officer of the two-year-old company, which is backed by the likes of Redpoint Venture Partners and Ignition Partners. The biggest boost for Heroku is going to come when RhoMobile, an open mobile framework company, shifts RhoHub, its hosted app development platform, to Heroku. That move alone will add 8,000 mobile developers to Heroku’s cloud service.

According to Heroku, in a survey, nearly 30 percent of its customers said they are building mobile apps, and nearly 60 percent indicated a high interest in developing mobile offerings. Heroku currently has over 83,000 apps (mobile and web) using its platform. Some of the more popular apps are doing 1,000 to 3,000 http requests per minute. Many are offering mobile-friendly HTML, but many are also using RESTful interfaces.

Mobile apps using Heroku’s infrastructure services include Spreadsong’s Freebooksapp and Intridea’s Oil Reporter. Colin Plamondon, co-founder and CEO of Spreadsong, points out that most mobile applications are essentially a pretty interface for web services content and have similar needs to any web application. That’s good news for companies like Heroku.

P.S. If you are a cloud services provider and want to discuss trends with me, drop me an email.

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For the most part, we saw what we expected from VMware. It delivered vCloud Director and announced a forthcoming PaaS-like solution, called vFabric, as well as expanded on its service-provider business with the vCloud Datacenter Service. The first two weren’t surprising at all, given how closely industry watchers have been watching “Project Redwood” and the ever-growing SpringSource platform.

However, I think VMware’s most-interesting announcements were also the most underreported: the vCloud Datacenter Service and the acquisitions of Integrien and TriCipher. The former is a big deal because it gives service-provider partners a secure, robust offering that will appeal to enterprise customers more than vCloud Express ever will.

Regarding Integrien and TriCipher, the moves are hardly earthshaking, but they do show that VMware has a vision beyond delivering applications and infrastructure. However, any management vendor that wants to be taken seriously in the cloud simply has to have a firm grasp on cross-system monitoring and identity management. VMware already has the former with Hyperic, and Integrien takes it another step with its focus on data correlation and analysis.

At this point, VMware’s big goal should be maintaining its status as a cloud computing thought leader and innovator, which means keeping a safe distance between itself and the competition. That didn’t necessarily happen this week. CA, Citrix, Eucalyptus, Red Hat and Microsoft all took steps to show they’re playing in the same ballpark.

VMware certainly advanced its cloud vision at VMworld, but it didn’t do a lot to demonstrate that it’s still several steps ahead of the competition. Perhaps I’ll change my tune once I’ve had time to digest all the news and connect the dots, or perhaps I expect too much after the past couple of visionary VMworld events, but, for now, I feel like the competition narrowed the gap during VMware’s biggest week of the year.

Read the full post here.

Photo courtesy Flickr user cote.

Here are my personal favorites; the tools I’d definitely hate to have to work without:

1. Gmail. Although there are plenty of times I wish I could avoid email altogether, it’s still a fairly decent tool for keeping me organized, especially by using Gmail. The “Superstars” feature (available in Labs) helps me to highlight and flag emails that require some sort of action or attention on my part. Labels allow me to organize types of communications and information for quick sorting and recognition. The advanced searching functionality helps me find things quickly and easily, and canned responses (also available in Labs) save me from having to reinvent the wheel when sending routine messages. So long as I make sure Gmail is working for me, instead of the other way around, it really keeps me organized and productive.
2. Google Calendar. I keep all my time-sensitive appointments and recurring to-dos organized in Google Calendar. On a busy day, it’s very easy to forget about phone calls or other items on my schedule, but customizable alerts keep me in check. If I anticipate an overly busy week, I’ll set myself multiple reminders to make sure nothing slips by me. I also love the ability to create multiple, color-coded calendars. I’ve created three primary calendars to organize specific types of activities and tasks: A “personal” calendar (color: pink), a “work to-dos” calendar (color: blue), and a “booked calls” calendar (color: orange). This provides me a quick overview of the week, and if, for instance, I see an orange appointment block, I know I have a call scheduled with someone.
3. TimeDriver. I used to attempt to manually coordinate my schedule with that of clients, interview guests, and other business contacts, but it became a nightmare, and several times I came close to double-booking myself. Although I’d love to have an assistant handle a lot of these types of tasks for me, tools like TimeDriver are a good substitute. I simply set my availability for the coming weeks, and when it comes time to coordinate appointments with others, I send them a link to my calendar, and they pick slots that work with their schedules. I know Google Calendar could provide this functionality in some ways, but I prefer TimeDriver for this purpose.
4. Zoho (Writer and Spreadsheet). Lately, I’ve been in the mood to simplify my organization. One thing I’ve been doing is creating a simple weekly to-do list, organized by day, within Zoho Writer. As I work through the list, I strike through tasks, making it really simple to see what’s left to do. I also like being able to see my accomplishments at a glance; I can look back over the entire week and see the tasks I’ve completed, which really helps me maintain focus. I used to create my to-do list on paper or within Backpack, but the paper list tended to get lost under notes and other items on and around my desk, and the Backpack list seemed to be ever-growing (more like a catch-all, master to-do list). The new system is simple and also keeps me from having to rewrite the list as things get moved around.
5. Pen and Paper. I know there are tons of note-taking tools available online and within different gadgets, but my personal favorite is a simple, 5″ x 8″ notepad and a good pen. I have to be able to catch notes and ideas on the fly, and paper is a good way to physically organize things into the right order or priority. I used to use (and occasionally still use) index cards, along with every size and shape notebook on the market. I eventually settled on the 5″ x 8″ since it seems to be the perfect size to capture and divide thoughts without wasting a lot of paper or running out of room. Although I’ve gotten away from paper-based systems in almost every other area of my work, I think pen and paper will always have its place in my organizational toolbox, even if it is old-fashioned.

With the right mix of applications, it’s much easier to stay on track and prevent things from being overlooked or forgotten, and with all the great tools available online, it’s possible to stay productive no matter where you are.

What tools keep you on track and organized?

Photo by Flickr user brdwatchr1, licensed under CC 2.0

I find there are two different schools of thought when it comes to PKM and organizing all of the bits of information that we compile; it seems that the tools are either page-based or note-based. Page-based tools, like ConnectedText or OneNote on Windows, use a page metaphor to store related bits of information. You can often embed notes, images and files but they are all inherently tied to a “master page” that “owns” that data. I like to think that I work this way — with the ability to have discrete and tidy pages for clients and projects, all defined and ready-to-use. When I picture my information, that is how I see it. I looked at a couple of page-based options like this for my Mac; my favorite being VoodooPad by the wonderfully named Flying Meat Inc. If I had ended up choosing a page-based manager, VoodooPad is the “no-brainer” choice.

However, my reality is somewhat different than my vision when it comes to organization. I’ve got a snippet with notes from a meeting here, a phone message here, a bunch of URLs, a password for an FTP site, and it’s all been entered on whatever page I happen to be on — all with the intent of moving and organizing later. But they don’t get refiled, moved or organized, which means I cant find them at a later date.

So I decided that It’s time to embrace the chaos, find a tool that works like I do, and not like I think I need to. I decided it was time to look at note-based information managers. This type of app is based upon the ubiquitous capture of anything that you need to store. A block of text, a picture, a receipt, a PDF, a URL, all in a simple note document.  Notes can be tagged, filed, sorted, based upon any number of criteria. Each note is a distinct piece of information and through efficient organization and search, hopefully you can pull them together as needed.

This is a crowded field, so I looked at a number of options before ultimately choosing Yojimbo. I looked at Yojimbo with high hopes based on Will’s great review from back in September. He was spot-on in highlighting the cool usability features that it offers. Even though I found the functionality, look and feel very similar to some of the others I looked at, one of the big selling features was the presence of a screencast video on the website. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to take the time to learn all about the products that I was looking at but I found the head start that I got by watching the video left me feeling more comfortable with it than the others. It was one of the first programs that I trialed and I found myself liking it quite a bit.

There were, and still are a few things I wish it did better or differently, but I found that all of my notes about the other products I was looking at ended up being being stored in Yojimbo, together with meting notes and other snippets of info. I don’t think it was conscious decision that I had made my choice until my trial had expired and I was faced with exporting my data in to another product. Yojimbo isn’t my perfect PKM; it just outlasted all of the others I looked at and sort of just fell in to place.

With that said, it isn’t that I don’t really like Yojimbo. It has a great mix of simplicity and power and I was able to start amassing information quickly and easily and then build my organization around it. The tagging is brilliant and it is just so easy to get data in to the system. I am also slightly addicted to the “print to Yojimbo” option as a means to get receipts and other info captured nicely in PDF format.

Choosing a Personal Knowledge Manager was among my highest-priority projects as I am collecting so much information since my transition, tips and tricks, utilities, software, training, blogs and other resources, all along with my normal day-to-day work, and I didn’t need the headache of information overload on top of everything else. Without my even noticing, Yojimbo stepped in and saved the day.

Yojimbo is a Universal Mac Application requiring Mac OS X 10.5.7 or later. A 30-day free trial is available and if you find it as useful as I did, it will run you $39 to license.

Did I make the right choice? What do you use to keep all of your information organized?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Conferences often come with very long days that start with breakfast and move on to sessions, lunches, more sessions and then evening events and after-parties; all of which can leave you feeling exhausted and overworked, if you aren’t careful. Before you start thinking about how to approach the event, you need to think about your goals. Are you there to learn, to network, for press coverage or some other purpose? Most of us probably have overlapping goals for any event, but it really can help to understand what you want to get out of the event.

I’m here at OSCON partly to blog about some of the interesting sessions talking about the community that I manage and to network with other people in the industry. As a result, I needed to attend a few sessions and spend time talking to people, while still finding time to keep up with work and blog about the event. The trade-off is that I spent most of the breaks talking to people while doing my work during times when there weren’t any sessions that I needed to attend.

The key to attending events and getting the most out of them is to stay focused on what is important: Your goals and the purpose for attending in the first place. It can be easy to spend the whole time multitasking — trying to attend sessions and work simultaneously — while not managing to do well at either task. When I attend sessions, I try to ignore or even shut off my email and the social networking streams on my laptop, while leaving a note-taking window open so that I can jot down any key points from the presentation. Admittedly, I’m not perfect, and I find myself checking or responding to email sometimes, but whenever I do that, I become much less engaged in the presentation. On the other hand, I skip some sessions entirely and use that time to catch up on work or blogging. This helps me make sure that I carve out enough time for event activities and my regular work while accomplishing both of them relatively efficiently.

One common mistake I see is when people try to do all of their regular work and attend the conference at the same time. Usually this means neglecting the conference or falling short on sleep. I’ve seen colleagues and friends who fly to a conference in another city and then spend most of their time sitting in on conference calls. If you are going to be spending all of your time attending your regular meetings and doing your regular work you might as well save the company some money and stay home to work. When I attend a conference, I cancel every meeting that I don’t absolutely have to attend and limit the number of non-event meetings. This gives me a break from the regular routine and lets me focus more on the conference. I also try not to work late into the night so that I can get a reasonable amount of sleep to avoid being a zombie during the day. So far this week, I’ve been pretty good, but I’ll admit to pulling a couple of late nights despite my best efforts to get my work done during the day.

What are your favorite tips for staying productive while still getting most out of your conference?

Photo by Flickr user wesleynitsckie used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Generic 2.0 license.

Now, I should admit to a dirty little secret: I’m a bit of 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. I actively look for ways that I can streamline activities to accomplish more in less time, and I wanted to share a few of my tips.

Less Multitasking

I know, I know, you are all expert multitaskers who can accomplish more when you do multiple things at the same time. Maybe, maybe not. There have been some recent studies showing that we are more efficient when we do one thing at a time. I’ve talked before about organizing my work into chunks where I focus on specific tasks; I believe that it’s a more efficient way to work.

This tip becomes critical for corporate web workers because if you are constantly multitasking, then you seem distracted and less productive, especially when you are multitasking on conference calls. After a few times of asking people to repeat the question that you missed because you were doing something else, your boss and coworkers are likely to become suspicious about whether or not you can pay attention when working outside of the office. They don’t know if you were distracted because of email and other work or if you were distracted by the television, your kids or other home activities. We need to stay sharp and pay attention on those conference calls, so reduce the multitasking and focus on the task at hand.

News Feeds

Remote employees can’t always rely on the hallway conversations to stay caught up on industry or company news, so if we want to stay informed, we need to do some of our own legwork. Monitoring information can take a lot of your time if you aren’t efficient, but with a few tricks, you can pare it down to something more manageable. You can start by setting up a little monitoring dashboard that you can use to keep an eye on important information at a glance. Add your company blog and some news feeds that look for keywords mentioning your company or area of expertise to get started and prioritize your feeds to put the most critical ones near the top of your dashboard and searches for less important keywords near the bottom. If you want to get really efficient, you can use a tool like Yahoo Pipes to filter your information down to only the most important items. While a dashboard or feeds of keyword searches can take a little while to set up, this work will pay off over the long term. Ultimately, you want to be able to stay on top of all of the important information about your company and industry while spending very little of your precious time.

Hack Your Email

No, not that kind of hacking. I’m talking about the good hacking where you tweak your tools to better suit your needs. Let’s face it; almost everyone working in a company spends way too much time in email. The key is to be able to process your email quickly and efficiently to make sure that you are responsive without spending too much time. We all have a different way of approaching our email and different needs based on our role and the tools we are using. Here are a few of my favorite email tips that I’ve used:

• Use color to quickly pick out important email. I currently have a specific color for the people that are the most important (bosses, employees, etc.) I’ve also used colors to designate client emails when I was doing client work. You can use colors in many different ways to help you catch anything important at a glance.
• Filters are your friend. For low priority items, you can process the email immediately by moving it to a folder without spending any extra time on it. I also use tags or smart mailboxes to allow me to efficiently process groups of email while still seeing it appear in my inbox. I use this extensively for mailing lists and other lower priority email that I can scan and process quickly in batches.
• Make canned or template responses for those common questions or regular emails that you need to send. Having a template ready to go for status reports or other regular communication can save more time than you might expect over the long term. Celine wrote some handy tips on how to use canned responses in Gmail that could also be applied to other email clients.

Of course, these tips apply to everyone, and there are many more productivity tips that I could have covered (great task lists, organizational tools, etc.), but I thought they would be especially helpful for the corporate web workers.

What are your favorite productivity tips to get more done in less time?

Photo by Flickr user Ryan Ritchie used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

When you open the app, instead of the usual grid of hours, you’ll see an analog clock face marked with AM or PM. Click the plus sign, and you’ll be presented with over 50 icons that can be used to create different types of events. These images are imaginative, and include a check mark, a golfer, a dog, a party hat, a sailboat, a skier and a blank one that you can add text to. Once you’ve selected the icon, you can drag it to attach it to the clock, or double-tap on it to add details. The result is a visual representation that’s surprisingly easy to understand at a glance. It works well for “dinner at 7″ but is probably not so useful for “train at 5:28.”

Diacarta has some cute touches, like a “ticking” sound that plays for a couple of seconds while it’s loading. It uses some unusual gestures like rotating the clock face — clockwise to move forward in time, or anticlockwise to move backward — so it takes a bit of learning. But I figured it out in only a couple of minutes, even before watching the entertaining and narration-free video.

What makes the app stand out are the graphics, which are elegant, and a real change from Apple’s usual clean, if slightly sterile, design. The app looks good on my iPod touch, and I suspect it’ll look even better on the iPad’s larger screen. The only jarring note is the use of a monospaced font in certain interface elements, which looks out of place to me, but which doesn’t detract from the app’s readability.

This is an initial 1.0 release, and it lacks some features that would make it more useful, like a way to sync information with the iPhone’s own Calendar, or with other services like Google Calendar. It also doesn’t have a way to create recurring events, or a backup and restore function.

But if you’re an analog sort of person who’s not “so amazingly primitive that [you] think digital watches are a pretty neat idea,” (thanks, Douglas Adams) you may find Diacarta a refreshing change from the traditional interface.

How do you manage your schedule on a mobile device?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Support

I’m a naturally inquisitive person; this is especially true when it comes to computers and technology. Over the course of my PC lifetime, I’ve been fine-tuning my knowledge, learning how to take advantage of everything that a PC can offer. While I thought it likely that some of this knowledge would be transferable to Mac it was a concern of mine that, as a new Mac user, I would be starting over from scratch. I’ve always been the support person; rarely have I needed one.

I wanted to make sure that I had a support system in case I needed it. Fortunately, my new employer has a team consisting almost entirely of Mac users, so I knew those folks were only a Skype call away. As I’ve started working more with other independent folks, the number of my colleagues who use Mac has also increased. With Twitter, Google and other resources also available, I felt confident that I could find answers to my questions.

Software

I started out by making a list of all the programs that I most rely on and made sure that there were either Mac versions available or suitable replacements. The fact that a lot of my work is done in my browser means that the software issue was much less of a barrier than it might have been in the past.

The software choices are overwhelming. Even in instances where there are cross-platform versions available, often times there are also Mac-specific options that I’ve never been able to evaluate. Finding the right software is going to be an ongoing process, but I needed to be sure that I had an viable option in each category from day one.

Usability

To persuade me that this could be resolved, I took advantage of the personal shopping experience that Apple offers and made an appointment to meet with an Apple Expert who could answer all my questions and address my concerns. I had a very specific list of topics I needed to address. I didn’t want a canned demo of how cool iPhoto is — I wanted to know how the touchpad works, how the menus work, and the differences between Ctrl and Cmd. I wanted to make sure that I could replicate all the processes that I was used to on the PC. Magali from my local Orland Square store did a wonderful job of answering all of my questions and demonstrating what I needed to see. She was also able to show me some of the benefits that the Mac platform could bring me when I described my workflow.

I’m still early in my transition, but following a clear and logical process of defining my requirements made me feel confident that I would have the support I need, access to all of the right tool, and the ability retrain myself to make the necessary adjustments. When it was time to really pull the trigger, I found that the Mac wasn’t nearly as scary a choice as it had been in the past.

What made it possible for you to switch? What is holding you back?

Photo by Flickr user sciondriver, licensed under CC

Simon recommended a SCOTTEVEST hoodie as a stocking filler a few months ago, so I checked out SCOTTEVEST’s sale page, and discovered that the “Ultimate Hoodie Microfleece” was discounted a few days ago. It’s a pretty nice piece of gear. It “only” has 11 pockets, including outside “handwarmer” pockets with surprisingly-nice magnetic catches, a pocket designed for an MP3 player on the left upper arm (but which fits the mobile hotspot nicely), and a several inside pockets, including one that has a clear cover for letting one operate an iPhone without removing it from the pocket. And yes, it has holes and slots for stringing wires from headphones to the interior pockets. The manufacturer’s website includes a short video showing how to string the wires.

My only complaint about the specific hoodie that I bought is that it’s very right-handed, and many of the pockets are not conveniently-placed for me as a lefty. Some of the manufacturer’s other jackets appear to have pockets placed more equally on both sides.

The Ultimate Hoodie Microfleece seems to be nicely warm but not overly so, and I imagine that it will be appropriate for spring and fall days. The manufacturer offers a range of jackets and hoods for warmer and colder weather. SCOTTEVEST also sells trousers, shorts, vests, shirts … and a baseball cap, and some of the clothing line even has pockets large enough for an iPad! Most items look like they would work for either men or women, but a few are specifically designed for women.

The hoodie is stylish, and the myriad pockets are actually useful. I just hope that I don’t run into Gollum while I’m wearing it.

How do you carry your portable devices?

The instant appeal for me with Thymer is the straightforward data entry process. Thymer uses a natural language parser, so I can type simple statements and it knows what I want and where I want it. There’s no tabbing through multiple selection boxes needed; a single carefully-constructed statement can tell the system everything it needs to know about my task.

The key to productivity in Thymer is learning the syntax needed to enter your tasks. For example:

Write Thymer Review @WWD @today @review @1.5 @important @waiting

will assign myself a task, due today, called “Write Thymer Review.” It will add it to my WWD project and tag it as a review, with an estimated time of  1.5 hours. The other items make use of built-in flags to show that the task is important and that I’m waiting for someone or something to complete it.

While keyboard entry is prominent, the interface makes nice use of drag-and-drop functionality: Move and reorder your tasks as needed. One of the slickest features allows you to move the input box down to the specific area of the page where you want your tasks to appear.

There is a bit of a learning curve to getting used to the syntax, and to set up the searches and views you will use on a regular basis. It’s a very freeform system, which makes it flexible enough for a lot of different task management processes, but some may be put off by the lack of structure, at least when getting started.

As a one-person shop, I didn’t have a chance to test the team features, but planning functionality is built-in and you can easily assign tasks to others. Each task can also handle discussions and comments.

While expected features like emailing tasks into Thymer, daily reminder emails and even Twitter integration are done well, I’d really like to see some better auto-complete options for predicting existing tags and projects.

There is a lot more to Thymer that I haven’t even begun to implement yet — specifically, the time tracking. Each task can be given an estimated time for planning purposes and individual timers can be set to track work completed. Additionally, multiple time entries can be added to a task and totaled upon completion for billing purposes.

Mobile access is proving to be an issue for me, though, — perhaps even a dealbreaker. While an iPhone app is available the site doesn’t seem to function on any of the mobile browsers I tested it on. Ubiquity of the data entry and access is key for me, so I’m struggling to keep up when away from my computer.

Pricing starts at free for a basic no-frills but functional account, while paid accounts start at $5/month for a solo plan. A 30-day trial is available.

I’m undecided if it’s worth the time and effort to move over from Toodledo — but Thymer is something I’m watching closely.

How do you track your tasks? Is Thymer right for you?

First, let me say that the experience I’m about to describe will not stop me from using the apps I mention. However, I found some weak spots that put me in a jam, and thought I’d share to help you avoid the same situation.

Where TimeDriver Falls Short

I’ve been singing the praises of TimeDriver, the personal appointment scheduler, because I love the way it lets me break my calendar into smaller chunks — or “Books” — and share them with groups of people who I want to see specific open time blocks on my schedule. I have a Book for my phone demos for WebWorkerDaily, one for my women in business podcast, another for my Second Life podcast, and then I set up one specifically for in-person interviews at SXSW.

What I learned the day I arrived here is that TimeDriver doesn’t translate to a third time zone, meaning that I saw the calendar as Alaska Time (where I live and work), every interviewee saw the scheduler in their time zone, and then we both arrived in Austin, which is in Central Time, we both got the meeting times wrong. The way I found out about this snafu? Missing a long overdue meeting with C.C. Chapman, a colleague and friend. Because of the time zone issue, our meeting actually coincided with my flight into Austin. There was very little I could do to rectify the situation from the air.

When I finally did get TimeDriver tech support on the phone (note: they are excellent and patient), the only solution they could offer was a workaround. Basically I should have switched my computer to Central Time before setting up the schedule Book, then reverted back to my time zone. Then the Book would be in the wrong time slots for Alaska and for the interviewee, but the correct ones for Texas. But then I would have to inform the interviewees (of which there are over a dozen) that they have to note the timezone discrepancy and make adjustments accordingly. Yikes.

Until TimeDriver adds the capability of an alternate “common” time zone for when meeting parties are traveling to meet in a time zone other than their own, you’re going to get very messed up using its scheduling Books.

The Quick Workaround With Meetwith.me

In a panic, I spent my night going through TimeBridge‘s new scheduling solution Meetwith.me (which I recently reviewed) to see if it could be an alternative solution to my appointment dilemma. Unlike TimeDriver’s Books, TimeBridge doesn’t let you designate different time chunks from your calendar for different audiences. However, I figured out that I could sign up again to claim a second Meetwith.me page using a different email address, and then narrow my time availability to just certain blocks of time during my stay at SXSW.

I was able to then send out invites, get responses back and manage the first wave of responses to nail down times. But later, I realized that after the first wave of responses, more had arrived and since I was using a secondary email address, I didn’t see them and missed a number of interview opportunities. Luckily, some persistent PR folks tracked down my primary email and were able to make contact with me through other channels.

In the course of stressing over my scheduling apps dilemma, I ran into Mark Gingras, the CEO of Tungle, another scheduling app. I told him what I was going through and then scolded him. Why? Because when I tried signing up for Tungle.me to see if it might be a good interim solution, I could not access my newly-opened account. We discussed the third time zone issue, and Gingras admitted that Tungle.me did not have a specific solution for it, but he said it was a much-requested feature and hinted at integrating in the future.

It just goes to show that SXSW can test applications to near-breaking, but also provide unprecedented access to heads of application firms who can troubleshoot for you in-person and on the fly!

How do you manage scheduling in multiple time zones with two or more people and with calendar integration?

For the GigaOM network’s complete SXSW coverage, check out this round-up.

Over the last few months I’ve continued to use it for that purpose, but always seem to have neglected to utilize some of the interesting things that it could do outside of my business and work endeavors. Features that, while appealing, I just never really got around to using. That’s about to change — and in a big way.

Instead of just being a “place for my stuff,” the newest release of Springpad now helps me do things with that stuff. It processes what I place there and then presents me with some contextual options that let me actually do something with that data.

For example, if I capture a CD that I think I might want to buy, it automatically recognizes what it is, links me to some shopping sites with price comparisons and gives me a list of tour dates for that artist. For movies it links to reviews, showtimes and a way to buy tickets.

This anticipation of why I added something in the first place makes it easier to take action whenever I happen to revisit that item, thus making the act of capturing and storing that information in Springpad much more useful to me.

Even the act of capturing the data has gotten easier. The new “Quick Add” bar not only does a web search so I can pull in structured data but it also live searches my friends’ shared data so I can easily find items that they have already captured, and possibly reviewed.

While Springpad is much more than just a bookmarking tool, I tend to use the “Spring It!” bookmarklet most often for data entry. It lets me grab and store items as I encounter them. The bookmarklet has been greatly improved as I can now more easily tag and identify items and add notes, all without needing to go in and tidy things up in the full interface.

An email dropbox has also been added, which is nice for entering story pitches, receipts, and other interesting items that come in via my Gmail. I use this feature often with Toodledo and my CRM app and have grown quite accustomed to it. Email items need a bit of cleaning up, however, and I haven’t figured out a way to tag or categorize them while entering them with the dropbox.

An iPhone app has also been released with options for capturing data by type, photo or even viah a bar-code scanner. I’ve resisted the urge to buy an iPhone up until now but the lure of easy, ubiquitous access to Springpad and some of my other favorite apps is making that more difficult to do recently.

All of these new features make it much easier for me to capture what I’m thinking, what I’m seeing, and what I’m finding and then put it in a place where I can easily process it, use it and store it. Not only does the capture process clear my mind from trying to remember the minutiae, but when I do need to use some information I can do so quickly and efficiently.

I’ve watched Springpad change quite a bit since I first looked at it, and with each release it becomes more useful. If I have one concern it is that the focus of the service on the apps and other tools that originally hooked me is somewhat diminished. For example, the apps folders have moved from the main page to a tab of their own. Everything still works the same and no functionality has been lost, but there is a sense that it is moving away from the product that I started using to becoming something else. I guess since that something else is also quite useful, perhaps it’s just a matter of me evolving right along with it.

Springpad is free and should work in any major browser. The iPhone app (also free) is now available in the App Store and other mobile versions are forthcoming.

I keep a lot of stuff in my Springpad — how could it help you?

These days, though, I’ve been getting up at 5 or 6 a.m. In a lot of ways, the early morning hours are a great time to write and do projects that require uninterrupted effort. But I find that it’s way too easy to get sidetracked. Since I work at home, I’m tempted to sit down at the computer first thing in the morning to “check my email.” Unfortunately, too often, I find that “checking the email” has turned into a marathon session of “checking the email, responding to email, reading online news, and catching up on Facebook and Twitter…” and the next thing I know, it’s already 9:30, and I haven’t yet eaten or gotten dressed.

So I’m going to try a few things to regain my mornings:

• Turn off my computer at night. Not only will I save energy, it will require an extra effort to turn it back on in the morning.
• If I must leave my computer on for some reason, I plan to shut down my mail software, web browser, RSS reader, Twitter client and anything else that’s likely to send notifications overnight. I’ll probably leave my IM client on, but will set my status to “away” or “not at desk.”
• Route my business email accounts through a service like AwayFind. I used this a while ago, but haven’t tried it since Thursday wrote about its new features.
• Use a VoIP service like onSip to set my business phone lines to take messages, or forward calls to me in an emergency. I’ve found that most clients are quite understanding about what’s really an emergency.
• If I do turn on the computer in the early morning hours (for instance, if I get an idea that I want to write down), I won’t fire up my email client or my browser, but will instead go directly to my word processor or to Evernote.

It’s going to be a challenge to follow these recommendations, especially since I live on the U.S. West Coast, and most of the rest of the world is already working by the time I get up. We’ll see how I do.

How do you keep your mornings to yourself?

Photo by stock.xchng user swissboy

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