We all know that some personality types find that the lack of structure when telecommuting hobbles their productivity. And most of us have experienced the phenomenon that some environments are less conductive to certain types of work than others, from noisy offices interrupting concentration to sunny days luring you away from a stack of unappealing tasks. Now a new study by economist E. Glenn Dutcher that’s soon to be published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization and was outlined recently in The Wall Street Journal, put this anecdotal evidence that remote work productivity gains vary depending on the person and the task to the test. The WSJ’s Week in Ideas column summarizes:

Researchers assigned two tasks to 125 participants. The first was rote and repetitive; the other involved coming up with as many unusual uses for ordinary objects as possible, a test often used by psychologists to measure creativity. About half the participants did the tasks in a supervised lab, the other half remotely.

On the uncreative tasks, people were 6 percent to 10 percent less productive outside the lab. The fall-off was steepest among the least productive third of workers. (People who reported procrastinating on their homework were also, unsurprisingly, poor telecommuters—as were men.) On the creative tasks, by contrast, people were 11 percent to 20 percent more productive outside the lab.

“Lack of structure often abets creativity,” concludes the column, but the inverse is just as obviously true. The abundance of alternatives at home, from that suddenly urgent load of laundry to the siren song of your favorite guilty pleasure TV show, can make it harder to get routine (read: mind-numbing) tasks done. For these less exciting to-do items, this new research suggests, locking yourself into working by heading to the office might be a better bet. And if you’re prone to picking up the remote rather than face even relatively enjoyable tasks, this is probably even more true.

Do you find you have to corral yourself into certain environments to get boring tasks done, and if so, where do you head?

Image courtesy of Flickr user herval.

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Working from home has obvious benefits, but it has equally glaring and hard to fix drawbacks: the loneliness, the endless supply of interesting links and the tendency for work to seep into more and more of your personal life. So what’s to be done to make working from home, well work? Fast Company’s Kevin Purdy, a veteran remote worker himself, recently polled fellow web workers about their best tips.

The exercise turned up commonplace but utterly correct advice such as changing out of your pajamas and explicitly planning time for face-to-face human interaction, and is well worth a read in full to those new to the world of remote work or just looking for a well written post to buck them up and improve their work habits. But one bit of advice may be more of a jolt, even to those experienced at resisting the pull of one more cute cat link:

Realize when the problem is motivation, not space. Distractions, temptations, and kids can all legitimately get in the way of doing work at home. But sometimes you have to step back and look at other reasons why you’re avoiding the work that needs doing. Is it really because you don’t want to do it?

This is perhaps the hardest part of working from home. At an office, you are very likely to be found out and penalized if you spend all day checking Facebook or replaying Portal 2, so you at least make a stab at moving forward on even the most painful tasks. At home, it’s up to you to stay motivated, and the things toward the very bottom of the Awesome Challenging Fun list might never get done.

With the web awash in posts suggesting every imaginable variation on the to-do list and providing a seemingly endless parade of gadgets and pointers to be more productive, it’s refreshing to see someone acknowledge that the problem may actually be the content of your work rather than your system for accomplishing it. In that case, no number of colored flags or minute-by-minute scheduling will fully solve your issue. In fact, it’ll probably distract from the true solution, which is finding a way to begin to do more of what you enjoy and less of those truly soul-sapping tasks. Even if that means a career shift of some kind.

Do you ever obsess about tweaks to your productivity routine as a way to avoid acknowledging that the true, underlying problem of simply not liking your work?

Image courtesy of Flickr user edoardocosta.

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Now, with the advent of things like smartphones, tablets, and the iPad, new applications designed for those devices are making it easier and more practical to go paperless.

Penultimate: Your iPad notepad

Penultimate by Cocoa Box turns your iPad into a notebook, allowing you to jot notes and create sketches in multiple colors, separate them into notebooks by topic or project, and then email all or part of your notes in PDF format. It even includes three built-in “papers” (graph paper, unlined and ruled), but you can import images of different backgrounds or papers — or download paper packs — to create your own texture or style. Price: $1.99.

SignMyPad: Simple contract sign-offs

The Android- and iPad-compatible PDF reader SignMyPad has built-in annotation functionality, allowing you to sign and date PDF documents right from your iPad and then email it to another party. You can also save documents into versions for gaining multiple signatures, and the app can import documents from and save them to Dropbox. Price: $3.99 for the basic version, $19.99 for SignMyPad Pro, which adds geolocation tagging.

MyFax: Fax without a fax

If you work with clients or colleagues who still use fax machines, MyFax’s mobile faxing app, available for iOS and Blackberry, lets you send and receive faxes from your smartphone and via your email account. Just snap a photo of the document you want to send (the app is optimized for sending photos of text), choose the recipient from your Address Book and send. To fax by email, attach the document to an email message, address it to the fax number plus an @myfax.com and send. To receive a fax, simply give out your MyFax number, and your received documents will be available as an email attachment. Price: Free app, service costs $10/month after a free trial.

JotNot: Turn your iPhone into a handheld scanner

JotNot lets you scan from your iPhone, email the scan as a PDF or image, and fax the scan to U.S. numbers. You can add pages to documents, creating a multi-page scan, as well as delete and reorder pages and send documents to EverNote, DropBox, or Google Docs. JotNot can scan and save a variety of documents, including receipts, business cards, and notes. Price: Free.

DocScanner: Simple scanning

DocScanner is a scanner app for the iPhone, Mac, Android, Qt, and the Symbian S60 that allows you to scan documents simply by taking a picture. It then automatically crops everything other than the document out of the picture and even detects your document’s paper size. Other helpful features include the ability to search multiple-page documents, as well as words within documents. Price: $4.99.

Business Card Reader: Quickly add new contacts

The multi-platform Business Card Reader from SHAPE Services lets you take a photo of a business card, and then it “reads” the picture, extracts the contact data, and enters it into your smartphone’s address book. The built-in browser even lets you check out a new contact’s LinkedIn page right from the app. Price: $4.99 for multi-language support, $3.99 for Asian languages only.

OfficeDrop: Scan to the cloud

OfficeDrop‘s app scans documents directly to the cloud for storage and sharing. The ScanDrop desktop app is available for both PC and Mac, but the iPhone and Android Scanner apps allow you to scan and upload documents using your smartphone. Once uploaded, the document’s text is searchable, thanks to OCR, and sharable with colleagues. Price: Free

Square: Easy payments and receipts

Square, available for Android and most iOS devices, lets you accept credit card payments directly from your smartphone and uses “smart receipts” to send to customers via email or text message. You can create a display with photos and prices so that customers can view your products directly from your iPad, for example, and then keep track of the number of sales you’ve made in a given day. Price: Free app and reader.

Image courtesy of Flickr user mattjiggins

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In a recent Harvard Business Review blog post, Scott Barry Kaufman talks about the difference between harmonious and obsessive passion.

“Those with harmonious passion engage in their work because it brings them intrinsic joy. They have a sense of control of their work, and their work is in harmony with their other activities in life.”

… “those with obsessive passion perceive their work as representing a passion for them, and view their work as highly valued. A major difference is that they have an uncontrollable urge to engage in their work. As a result, they report feeling more conflict between their passion and the other activities in their life.”

I see a lot of both types of passion within the web worker community. I have friends who have selected a web working career because it allows them to travel the world and have the free time to have amazing experiences while others work constantly and can’t disengage from work for even an afternoon of fun without worrying about what they are missing.

Here are a few tips to help you shift your passion from obsessive to harmonious:

• Delegate. Spend some time with a coworker or employee that you trust and start training them on providing coverage for you when you aren’t available. This is the person you’ll list as the contact while you’re out, and you need to delegate the work to them while you’re out of the office. As a last resort, they can always contact you in the case of a dire emergency, but make it clear that it should be a real emergency before they call you on vacation. If you are a solo web worker, this can be more difficult, but you can usually work something out with your clients to cover some basic tasks while you are out of the office.
• Go cold turkey. Take an exotic vacation on a beach where your technology would be in danger of getting covered with sand and water. This forces you to leave that cell phone and computer up in the room safe. Just make sure to actually leave it there — don’t try to sneak up to the room to check email every five minutes.
• Buddy system. Just like in grade school, you can work with someone else and hold each other accountable. On vacation, you can give your significant other permission to help you enforce your no work time by making sure that you aren’t always checking into work. A helpful friend who can remind you to put your cell phone away can also help.
• Wean yourself off of work. Maybe the cold turkey approach won’t work for you, but you can gradually wean yourself away from work. Start with 30 minutes every evening where you read a book, go out with friends or go for a walk without checking email or other work and gradually increase the amount until you are spending a couple of hours a day — and more on weekends — away from work.

The key is to shift your obsessive work time into fun activities that you enjoy to help bring your work and life back into balance. At first, these activities may need to be fun enough to really distract you from your obsession with work, but eventually, you should be able to shift into a more harmonious balance.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user tashmahal.

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Dear Email, this isn’t working out. It’s not you, it’s me.

I definitely have a love/hate relationship with email, but I know that the majority of my issues with it are a result of user error more than a problem with the technology itself.

User problem #1: Elaboration and niceties

At this minute, I have over one hundred emails in my inbox that need an action or response. Any time I get the nerve to tackle them, I think about having to read through paragraphs of explanation and niceties in order to get to the meat of the message so that I can take action.

As a regular sender of emails myself, I’m just as guilty of adding unnecessary elaboration and niceties to my messages as the next person. I feel the need to start with the typical, “How have you been” and “Here’s the latest this way” chitchat, followed by a detailed explanation of why I’m emailing, but as a reader (and someone with 100+ emails to process right now), I’d love to know I could open each one and find a simple and direct message that tells me what the sender needs. “Hi, Amber. I’m emailing to see if . . .” Ah, wishful thinking.

User problem #2: Deceptive and inadequate subject lines

How great would it be if everyone started using more helpful and direct subject lines? Even just adding simple lead-ins like “Quick question” or “Urgent” could help us hone in on those messages that need attention more immediately than others.

User problem #3: Abuse

We all have to pay the price for those who abuse email, like spammers, contacts who automatically subscribe us to their newsletters, and others who use this more personal and private medium for uninvited messages.

User problem #4: Poor filtering

One big mistake I make with my own email usage is not using filters effectively. There are many types of emails (messages from social networks, newsletters, and other notifications) that could easily be marked as read and archived without my ever having to touch them. The only reason they’re not is because I don’t take the time to set up filters to sort them.

User problem #5: Using the wrong medium

Instead of sending five emails back and forth to set a single appointment, it would be more effective to use another service that streamlines appointment-setting, like TimeTrade, Google Calendar, or SkedgeMe. As with this example, a lot of our communications could be cut down or eliminated, if we’d choose a better medium for them.

But what about the technology?

While user error is a big part of the problem, technology is not completely in the clear.

Technology problem #1: Poor spam filtering

Until we get to the point where spam is successfully filtered out each and every time (which, let’s face it, is not likely to happen), email will always be somewhat of a nuisance, no matter how effective we get with our use of it.

Technology problem #2: Inadequate sorting

Some messages are notifications, some are spam, and a tiny portion are actually important enough to warrant our attention more immediately. It would help if these messages were automatically separated somehow.

It would also be helpful to have smart sorting based on people (example, important people, new people, companies). When I can zoom in on emails from clients and important business contacts, I’m much more likely to stay on task and not get distracted, but by the same token, I’d also like to see a filter to sort out new people, which could help with identifying new prospects and opportunities.

Fixing the world’s email problems might be a tall order, but the good news is that developers are listening. Even better, they’re asking us what we want from the applications we use on a daily basis and how we would like to see them improved.

What suggestions do you have for fixing email?

Photo courtesy Flickr user ilamont.com

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• Focus. Last week, I talked about minimizing distractions, which is a good first step toward giving yourself the space to focus on what you really need to accomplish. Having the willpower to focus and achieve a real state of flow helps you can accomplish a large amount of work in a shorter amount of time. So turn off all of those distractions, avoid multitasking and focus on the work that is important to you.
• Importance. Not all activities are created equal, but most of us struggle to balance the urgent work with the important work. We need to think about how we spend our time and the impact of what we do over the long term. Email is a good example of this concept: most people consider email to be urgent, and some of it is urgent, but most of it is not important. I could easily spend all day on email, but I’d rather accomplish something real and tangible. In a year, will it really matter than you responded to all of your email immediately or would you rather be known for doing something really amazing and interesting?
• Love your work. I think a lot of people misunderstand this idea. Unless you are in a really unique position, most of us have a love/hate relationship with our work. There are things that we love doing, but we also have those tedious or unpleasant tasks that come with every job. The big question is: Where do you focus? Do you focus or dwell on the unpleasant parts of your work or do you get those unpleasant tasks out of the way so that you can focus on what you enjoy? If you spend all of your energy thinking about the things that you hate about your job, you’ll never be happy in your work. Find the things that you love about your job and focus your energy on thinking about the good, rather than dwelling on the unpleasant. Loving your job is all about having the right attitude about your work.
• Live. While loving your work is important, most of us work as way to support the rest of our lives. Workaholic tendencies are common among web workers, so we need to take the time to remind ourselves to take some time away from work to really live our lives. This one is hard for me, but I’m making a big effort this year to take advantage of business travel to see more of the world by combining vacation with trips to visit places I’ve never been. I’m also making more time to meet new people and spend time with family and friends away from our computers to have good food, great conversation and human interactions. Doing something new and learning from it can give you a whole new perspective on a work problem when you least expect it. Even a short vacation or an evening with new friends can help improve your mood and help you feel refreshed and ready to tackle your work with a new outlook.
• Fitness. So many of my friends ignore their health, leaving them drained of energy and lethargic. Getting outside or to the gym to get your blood pumping can make a huge difference in your energy levels and mood. The more social among us can find group activities that can be done in pairs or groups, or you can use your fitness time as a way to spend some time alone. I tend to run in the summer and lift weights in the winter, but I have friends who walk, bike, go hiking, play sports, do martial arts or yoga and so much more. The key is to find something you enjoy doing to improve your fitness. Those endorphins can make a big difference in your productivity.

While tips and tricks to improve productivity are great, the real key to better long-term productivity is in your attitude and how you think about your work.

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Communication has evolved with technology, but many of those now IMing colleagues cut their teeth writing internal memos on typewriters. Cultural and generational clashes are both common in distributed collaboration, and more damaging than they might be if the working relationships had a face-to-face component.

Many have discussed email etiquette, but for the average web worker, the notion of politesse can seem archaic — or even counterproductive in some circumstances. Here, then, are five golden rules for respectful, productive digital communication, whether you’re using email, IM, video chat, phone, or other communications tools like document sharing and time tracking systems.

1. Have an agenda, and meet it

To keep digital exchanges functional, set an agenda. Whether it’s a one-line email, or a one-hour video conference, your interaction will be more productive if you stay on track. Your colleagues will appreciate it, because it shows respect for their time. And it’ll let you identify any part of the exchange that’s off-topic, and end it — perhaps suggesting an alternative time to address it — before it gets out of hand.

Having an agenda helps cut down on time-wasting, but it also encourages responsiveness, since your collaborators know what you need, and don’t need to wade through the waffle to give it to you.

2. Don’t spam

In this context, spam is any form of unwanted or unnecessary communication. It doesn’t need to involve multiple recipients: leaving your colleague a phone message, then sending a text, and following up with an email, is example of spam. Sharing your new document with a colleague who’s on your team, but doesn’t need to use it, is an example of spam.

Spam overwhelms us. It makes us stressed and cranky, and it makes maintaining focus difficult. Be astute in working out what to share with which team members, and learn to differentiate between information for information’s sake, and necessary communication.

3. Respect time constraints

Having respect for the time constraints of your colleagues governs a range of collaborative behaviors.

Give collaborators time to receive your communication, digest it and formulate a reply around the other work they’re doing before you bug them for their response. Prioritize your communications points so that colleagues know what’s most important, and tell them if something’s urgent. Conversely, don’t earmark a task or communication as urgent if it’s not. As well as indicating the reason for your communication, identify your expectations of a response timeframe, so your colleague can prioritize your request.

Remember: while digital communications tools may seem immediate, we’re only human, and none of us can be in two places at once.

4. Be clear

Clarity and directness underpin digital collaboration. But, particularly in written or very short communications, choose your words carefully. Short can very easily come across as terse. Speak in a way that’s appropriate to your colleague, and your relationship with them, as well as the communications medium your using.

Choosing the right tool for the job can influence your ability to communicate what’s needed. Limits on length, or attachments and other inclusions, can hobble communications, so make sure you choose the medium that suits your needs best. Don’t try to wedge a phone conversation into a voicemail, for example — your garbled, rushed message will just add to the “noise” to your colleague’s day. Instead, just explain why you’re calling and ask them to call you back. Explain the details in person when they do.

Being clear is particularly important in shared, multi-party systems like document sharing and contact management systems. Stick to the guidelines your team has set for aspects like naming and storage conventions — it’ll reduce confusion and communications noise, and generally make life easier for your colleagues.

5. Be open

Digital workers can end up hiding behind a smokescreen of task managers, email autoresponders, and voicemail all too easily if they feel overwhelmed. Lead by example. If you’re asking a team member for something, be available to answer their questions about your request. Be diligent about responding to colleagues in an appropriate way using the foundations outlined here.

Accept that good digital collaboration takes time and mutual understanding — it is, after all, communication between people. Relegating a colleague whose communications approach annoys you to the back of the queue is rarely productive; the best way to encourage others to collaborate with you in the way you want is to take the time to explain your preferences to them.

That conversation could eradicate the kind of uncertainty that undermines good distributed working relationships, and cement the foundations for ongoing productive collaboration.

Image courtesy stock.xchng user JR3.

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The key to remaining productive is to not let distractions sidetrack you from your primary job. Here are a few tips for taking charge of your day and kicking a few of the most common distractions to the curb.

1. Social media. Turn it off when you need to focus. Seriously. Shut down your Twitter client and log out of Facebook and other services for at least part of the day when you really need to focus on your work. If you can’t turn them off, you can still disable notifications so that you aren’t having them pop into view constantly. This doesn’t mean that you can’t check social media while you work, but you can minimize the impact by only checking in periodically. Maybe you look at Twitter and Facebook once per hour, or when you finish one task and are moving to the next. But really, if you are checking Twitter every few minutes, are you really going to get as much work done as you would if you weren’t checking it?
2. Visitors. Whether you work in an office or at home, people will drop in and distract you. I’ll admit it, I often listen to music or put my headphones in just to signal to people that I am not available. If people see that you have headphones in, they will at least think twice about bothering you. Leaving your phone headset on can also work. You might try “do not disturb” signs or shutting your office door, if you are lucky enough to have one. I’ve even had pretty good luck with hiding and working in a super secret location until I finished a piece of work that needed focused concentration.
3. Unnecessary or unproductive meetings. I’m a big fan of not attending meetings that aren’t valuable in some way. Now, this probably doesn’t mean that you can blow off your manager’s staff meeting or important meetings with clients, but you can probably skip a few meetings. I’ll often look at the agenda for a meeting, and if there isn’t anything particularly relevant for me, I’ll send the organizer an email to let them know that I won’t be attending. On the flip side, you should be considerate when scheduling your own meetings. Cancel them if you don’t have anything important for the meeting, and always send an agenda in advance to let people know whether or not they need to attend.
4. Email. Most of us get more email than what we can possibly read anyway, and it just keeps coming in! You could probably spend all day just responding to email, but then you would never get any work done. The first thing to do is turn off any pop-up notifications that you get every time someone sends you an email. Next, set up some filters and color code email from important people to help you notice the ones you care about while ignoring the rest. Now, the hard part. You have to actually ignore your email and focus on other work without that distraction. You can occasionally glance at your email on a regular schedule or between tasks and look for anything critical. If it’s not critical, ignore it for a bit until you are ready to spend a little chunk of time focused on doing email.
5. Instant messages. For really serious work, you might think about logging completely out of your instant messaging client. For most of us, we can use custom status messages to signal to people how urgent their request should be before they interrupt you. I recently set my status to “cranky, interrupt at your own risk”, and I don’t think I had a single IM during that time. I also use the generic, “busy – priority interrupts only” status, and you can get pretty creative with these to let people know that they really should think twice about interrupting. It is also perfectly acceptable to not respond immediately to an IM. If a friend or co-worker sends you a message on a topic that isn’t going to be critical, ignore it until you get to a good stopping point or when you are ready to take a break and respond when it makes sense for you.

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Fortunately, new apps and devices are being created almost daily to help us improve our productivity and collaboration.

Coolendar

Coolendar is attempting to go where no calendar has gone before, integrating traditional calendar and task apps into a “planning experience.” It works as a simple list, instead of the standard calendar view, and provides alerts of tasks and plans via email, messenger, desktop, mobile and Twitter notifications. One interesting feature is its use of tags to organize items and create group plans so that events are more social (think Twitter meets Google Calendar).

Making task entries is seamless and intuitive (the example it gives: “tomorrow 8am make sure to grab the #umbrella!”) and allow for one-click rescheduling and recurrence.

Let’s Crate

We all love the days we stumble on solutions that make some aspect of our work “ridiculously easy,” and that’s exactly what Let’s Crate claims to do for file-sharing. Create an account, select a crate for storing your files, drag and drop to upload them, and then send the link to the individual file or crate you want to share. It’s that easy, and the free plan of 1 GB of space includes six crates, 1000 downloads, and a 50 MB file-size limit, with higher-capacity plans being very inexpensive.

MyDataNest

MyDataNest is another online storage and file-sharing solution, but unlike Let’s Crate, it offers the ability to edit files online without installing any software. Files are stored online and are available to your team through shared online work spaces.

Using similar functionality to Let’s Crate, you simply upload your files and then share a link with members of your team. With their basic and free plan, you can upload files up to 50 MB in size, and that includes three collaboration folders, 2 GB of online storage, and 10 GB of monthly transfer. As with Let’s Crate, higher-capacity plans are still very affordable.

GroupZap

GroupZap takes the “cool factor” award in this roundup of apps, offering real-time brainstorming and online collaboration, as if you were in the same room with your team. Quickly set up your group’s whiteboard by simply entering your email address and sharing a link. Then use sticky notes to each add your own ideas and thoughts to the board. Team members can also upload images and files by dragging and dropping them onto the board or use boxes and arrows to further annotate concepts, processes, and dependencies.

Once all the ideas are in place, your team can then use stickers to vote on different items within the board, and when the meeting is over, you can create a PDF to send to your team as a record of the meeting or for follow-up. It even records the brainstorming session to show the progression of ideas throughout the meeting.

GroupZap is free for up to 100 MB per board, with each board remaining active for seven days. There are also pay-as-you-go and subscription options, which extend the life of a board to one year and include increases in storage capacity.

Twilert

Social networking has become the distraction of late, but if you want to keep a pulse on what’s being said about you or your company, it’s hard to navigate away from the live feed for fear of missing something. Enter Twilert, an online app that sends email updates of new tweets on topics of interest to you. Advanced search options allow for monitoring of specific keywords, people, locations, and even links and attitudes (positive or negative posts or questions).

What are some of your favorite productivity and collaboration apps?

Image courtesy of Flickr user imglighting

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Input devices

• The Magic Mouse. For the Mac user, the Magic Mouse is a multi-touch mouse that is itself a button that allows you to click anywhere on its surface to scroll, swipe, and click. Simply brush along the surface of the mouse to scroll, or use two fingers to swipe left and right and flip through pages or photos. Cost: $69 from Apple.
• The Phantom Lapboard. This is a combination wireless keyboard, laser mouse and hard surface that you can use from your sofa or arm chair. The keyboard opens to a hard surface for use with your mouse, and with rotating angles which allow you to find a comfortable setting for creating a mobile desktop. Cost: $130 from Phantom Entertainment.

Power devices

• The TruePower U-Socket power outlet. This power outlet provides two USB charging ports, in addition to two standard three-prong power outlet ports, making it perfect for charging any USB-powered device without a computer, including your mobile phone or PDA, iPod or MP3 player, and digital camera. Cost: $23 from FastMac.
• The Sanctuary. The Sanctuary is a universal charger and USB port for electronic devices (currently compatible with 3,767 devices, or so its product page touts). Charge your mobile phone, iPod or MP3 player, Bluetooth headset, and PDA in this single charging station. Cost: $130 from BlueLounge.

Mobile phone accessories

• The Jawbone ERA. This Bluetooth headset eliminates background noise and auto-adjusts inbound call volume to match your environment. With HD-quality sound, you can take calls and listen to your music collection from the one headset. Cost: $130 from Jawbone.

Audio gadgets

• The Pod à Porter. Pod à Porter is a light-weight neckband for the iPod Shuffle that allows you to listen to your iPod, while keeping the controls accessible, but out of your way.  Simply run the headphone wire through the Pod à Porter, attach your iPod, and you’re ready to go. Cost: $30 from Shapeways.

Video gadgets

• Kodak PlaySport Video Camera. If you’re looking for a sturdy digital video camera, look no further than the Kodak PlaySport. It’s waterproof up to 10 feet under water, has built-in image stabilization, and can handle being bumped around a bit. Cost: $150 from Kodak.
• Veho Muvi Pro Micro Camcorder. At less than three inches high, the Muvi Pro comes in as one of the smallest camcorders, yet still manages to capture high quality digital video and sound and can record up to three hours of footage. Cost: $65 through Amazon.

What are some of your favorite media gadgets?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Jorge Quinteros

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