Personal organization — GigaOM

Personal organization

Logging whatever is important to you can be one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, whether it’s logging the time you work on any project, online activities, spending, progress towards a goal, reading, exercise and food consumption, or anything really. But developing the habit of … Read More »

Updated. ABC has made good on its promise to start syndicating content beyond its own site by announcing a deal with AOL that puts full episodes of ABC programming on the video portal. Earlier this week, NBC said it will debut its VOD service in … Read More »

 
 

Those of us who use the web all day long, every day, probably have signed up for at least a couple dozen different information services, all with different login information, all storing different information for us. We might have a to-do manager, a contact manager, a bookmarking … Read More »

Car enthusiast video sharing site Streetfire.net has just raised $6.1 million in Series A funding, and the site is putting the pedal to the metal, streaming nearly 1 million videos a day to 2 million car enthusiasts a month. The story of Streetfire reads … Read More »

Want pictures for your contacts in Microsoft Outlook? Look no further to your friends in Facebook, assuming that "friends" equals "contacts" in your world. Amit … Read More »

Declutter Your Desk to Improve Your Productivity

We web workers tend to focus on our computer setup and our online work setup, naturally. That’s where we do the majority of our work. But we don’t work in a vacuum — there’s always a real desk and papers and other work tools around us. And … Read More »

Tough Love for Email

Email. It’s the tool that web workers love and hate. We couldn’t work without it (could we?), but we spend an awful lot of our waking moments reading, organizing, answering, and despairing of ever managing to deal with it all. Here at WWD we’ve written about … Read More »

Abolish Your Task List

Web workers love task lists. Perhaps it’s our fascination with Getting Things Done, or our tendency to work without direct supervision that necessitates plotting the course of our own day. Whatever the reason, I’ve seldom run across a web worker who didn’t have some … Read More »

Jobs' Mea Culpa is Apple's Victory

Steve Jobs is sorry. He wants to give you $100 back for what you paid when you bought your iPhone too early. Provided, of course, you spend that $100 in one of his stores. I disagree with Om on this. I get … Read More »

While Gmail is a favorite with many web workers who love its ease of use, its quick archiving, its keyboard shortcuts and its storage capabilities, the problem many people seem to face is an archive that seems to get more and more full every day. It’s … Read More »

15 iGoogle Gadgets for Web Worker Productivity

While there are still many who love Netvibes, iGoogle has its share of fans in the start page world. And with more than 25,000 gadgets available for iGoogle, the array of choices is sometimes overwhelming. Choose wisely, and iGoogle can be a great tool for … Read More »

Cut the Fat to Get to Lean Productivity

In a Microsoft productivity survey done in the last couple of years, workers around the world said they only consider about two thirds of their working hours to be productive. If workers could cut those wasted hours, they’d work less and get the same amount … Read More »

More Must Reads

This week YouTube struck a long-term agreement with British music royalty societies to license 10 million pieces of music for an undisclosed flat fee. From scads of TV shows debuting online to the joint venture between News Corp. (NWS) and NBC — now … Read More »

The ever-popular productivity book Getting Things Done, by David Allen, caught on fire within the last few years through the power of blogs. And while many a blogger has fallen in love with GTD, and in fact many GTD blogs have been created, it’s time that … Read More »

The team here at Web Worker Daily has covered various GTD apps, methods, obsessions, and what-have-you over the years, but this index card-based system, PoIC (Pile of Index Cards) linked in LifeHack this week, is blowing my mind. It appeals to so many … Read More »

In recent weeks, we’ve talked about the useful concept of a Not To Do List, allowing you more room to focus on what to do. But still that leaves the question of what’s left on your to-do list, and how to manage it. It’s a question … Read More »

News of a recent study has been making the rounds, showing that email is the top cause of stress in most workers’ lives, and that people are increasingly addicted to checking email constantly, two facts that are not surprising to many web workers. Email … Read More »

As we’ve noted before, if you read a lot of feeds, or go for speed or feed organization, Google Reader is the best in its field. Many people have tons of feeds, check them often, and spend a lot of time reading blog posts. So … Read More »

One of the problems with opening your inbox and finding 20 new messages is that it can be overwhelming. The work required to sort through it all, delete unwanted messages, skip over unimportant ones, and finally get to the urgent ones, can be very daunting. You don’t … Read More »

The problem with being constantly bombarded by information, as we web workers are, is not so much that we can’t deal with it, or that it distracts us from our work, or that it shortens our attention spans or stresses us out. It’s that we have allowed … Read More »

Task lists have a natural ebb and flow. We all add new tasks to our own list of things to be done as they occur to us (or, in some cases, as they’re assigned to us), and cross them off as they get finished. You can … Read More »

My story evolved over the course of eight years, but can be summarized in very few words. I founded a software company with technology I developed at NASA. I licensed the software, raised two rounds of venture capital, and ran the company for seven years. Then, … Read More »

Not all web workers are the hip, trendy, just-out-of college types — quite a few of us have rugrats running around, making noise, spilling juice and demanding attention at the same time as our email and IM demand that same attention. I’ve got a 14-year-old daughter who … Read More »

There’s no doubt that for most people who do a lot of online work (and play), the numerous amounts of web tools, blogs, social media, incoming messages, files stored and just general information can be quite overwhelming. Sure, we’ve learned to cope with it all, but there … Read More »

As web workers, we spend our days moving through a constantly-shifting landscape of services and servers. Our lives, livelihoods, and identities are all wrapped up in a cloud of hardware and software maintained by other people. When it all works, it’s great. But what do you … Read More »

$10 billion in Worldwide Internet TV Ad Revenues by 2011? That’s the estimate from Understanding & Solutions, saying video could account for 18 percent of internet advertising altogether. (PDF, via paidContent) CNN/YouTube Debate Attracts Young Audience; pulling in a record 407,000 from the precious … Read More »

Facebook has to be the most talked about, and the most misunderstood, web service/platform right now. If you haven’t gotten drawn in by the hype, it may surprise you to learn that many people have already found Facebook to be an essential addition to their … Read More »

As web workers, we know that the very medium that makes us so productive — the web — also interrupts our work and slows us down at the same time. The solution, of course, is to batch process … but it isn’t always as easy as it … Read More »

A few of the things that are emerging about web workers is that 1) we do just about everything online; 2) we want to be able to access it from any computer, anywhere; and 3) it’s hard to organize all the stuff we use and do, … Read More »

Treo owners running Palm OS might want to update their Google Maps application to version 1.2.0.8, which became available within the past week. Why would you want … Read More »

We’ve talked before about one of the big divisions in web workerdom, the one between pilers and filers. But how you do your work is at least as important as how you put things away when you’re done, and there’s a potential personality clash lurking … Read More »

If there’s any area of personal organization that web apps haven’t gotten right yet, it’s the contact manager. As web workers, we need to be able to quickly add contacts, and pull them up from anywhere, on any computer. An online contact manager that works smoothly would … Read More »

If you’re anything like me, you’re deeply interested in social computing and join pretty much every social network you can snag an invitation for – even if only to check out features and functionality. At the end of the day even with all these memberships, … Read More »

Prominent software consultant Christopher Hawkins announced yesterday what we might characterize as the “baby and the bathwater” solution to dealing with information overload. He’s unsubscribing from all his RSS feeds, deleting all his browser bookmarks, and leaving all his social networks: There is a limited amount … Read More »

In the Starbucks today I officially met this guy: who works for the company that makes these drives: Read More »

“A filer is a person who organizes information using a rigid structure, and a piler is someone who maintains a mostly unstructured information organization.” [From Surviving the Information Explosion: How People Find Their Electronic Information (pdf)] Google Docs & Spreadsheets now offer folders for those … Read More »

Thomas Edison famously said that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. But that’s old economy thinking: for the web worker, working hard is no longer enough. These days, genius is one percent attention and ninety-nine percent stack management. Whatever your online field of … Read More »

Just as in real estate, location is big news in web apps these days. Today, we’re going to take a quick look at three applications that leverage the power of presence — Upcoming, Plazes, and Dopplr — and see how you might … Read More »

First Germany, now Portugal – looks like Vodafone, world’s largest mobile company is pretty serious about becoming a broadband player as well. The company has launched an ADSL 2+ service in Portugal, called Vodafone Casa Duplex ADSL. Interestingly, the company offers those who … Read More »

Yahoo is making some noise this morning, and it has got nothing to do with Terry Semel, Jerry Yang, Rupert Murdoch, and Sue Decker. Yahoo says that their Yahoo! Go 2.0 software, that allows you to access various Yahoo services on your mobile phones is … Read More »

Former Netscape CEO and now Ning overlord, Marc Andreessen recently posted something of a manifesto with respect to personal productivity. Given productivity is an issue dear to the hearts of WWD readers, I thought we’d take a look at some of Marc’s ideas and … Read More »

We are thrilled to tell you about the Metacafe and NewTeeVee Pier Screenings speaker and judge lineup for next Tuesday’s event. Gregg Spiridellis, co-founder of JibJab and a founding father of viral video, will be our guest interview on the topic of parody. Spiridellis will grace … Read More »

Wow those guys work fast! No sooner did Steve announce the availability of Safari 3 beta, and there’s an update for 1Passwd to work with it! Awesome response guys! 1Passwd is a fantastic utility that saves all your passwords and unifies them across your … Read More »

What do you do with your to do list when you’re feeling stressed? Software developer and coworking inventor Brad Neuberg makes a Not To Do List: Every so often I look back over the projects I’m doing and take stock. I have a little inner thermometer … Read More »

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