If you want to pick up $500 fast, just impress Lisa Haneberg with your artistic skillz. She's got a Web 1.0 thing going on with the current cover of her book High Impact Middle Management (a book I love, by the way), and she want to bring it up to at least Web 2.0.
You can find out more on Lisa's cover art competition here - this is your chance to make the big time!
By the way, I always thought this book should be called "Badass Middle Management" because it has some fantastic advice for anyone who wants to be more effective as a manager, particularly those of us "in the middle" of an organization. Another reason to love this book is that it takes you through an abbreviated version of one of my favorite topics: Goldratt's Theory of Constraints.
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If you're tired of writing and re-writing your shopping lists (and you've got some cash to spend to solve this problem), you should check out "SmartShopper." This is a device you can hang on your fridge to capture your needed items as they make themselves apparent.
You press the Record button, it listens to what you say, it shows you what it thinks you said and asks you to confirm, then stores a running list of items you need. Then, when you're ready to go shopping, you press the print button and it prints out a categorized list (click here for a sample).
It has a glossary of about 2500 common grocery items, along with a bunch of common errands ("Go to the dry cleaners" for example) so you can use it to manage your list of errands. And, you can add your own items to the database if your item isn't found.
It's pretty cool (you can see an online demo on the SmartShopper site) but it's spendy - $150 at this writing (though I found SmartShopper on Amazon for $131.15, with free shipping for Amazon Prime members like me). If list creation is a real pain for you, it may be worth it. If you get one, let me know how it works.
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A friend of mine pointed out a very cool Firefox add-in called MeeTimer that I really think is a good idea. If you've ever spent waaay too much time on YouTube after someone sent you a link to a video, you should check this out. Same goes for getting sucked into web "research" that causes hours to go by without you noticing.
What's MeeTime do? Well, I think they describe it pretty well on their site:
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"MeeTimer has a simple role: it records where you spend your time online. It does it in a rather useful way, by allowing you to group websites into activities (e.g. Facebook = procrastination; Gmail = communication) so you can make sense of where your time is going. Finally, it accumulates time spent on a site over the course of a day, so when you think "just another 2 mins won't hurt" you realise that actually, yes, it will ;)" |
Meetimer provides some easy-to-understand reporting to make it easy to tell what's sucking your time online, and they provide some good tips for reducing procrastination online.
And, if reporting isn't enough for you, you can configure MeeTimer to popup a warning dialog when you spend too much time on a particular site.
Like most Firefox add-ins it's free, though the author does accept donations if you find that this tool is useful (and you probably will). If you're a Firefox user and want to reduce the time you waste online, install MeeTimer right now.
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Lisa Haneberg has recently shared a couple of great items at Management Craft:
Good stuff. Also, Lisa's book "10 Steps To Be A Successful Manager" cracked Amazon's top 5000 titles the other day (actually way cracked it - this book was at #3876, and its companion workbook was at #3882). Congratulations, Lisa!
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