Yesterday, I posted an article on the JJL site called “Where’s the fire?” and it is starting to gather some excellent advice in the form of comments. Go check it out – and stay tuned for a review later this week of an awesome book I’m finishing up – I’ll be posting it here on this blog.
Genuine Curiosity
Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.
New Year’s Resolution: No more mystery chargers
OK, so sometimes I’m slow. I’ve had an excellent Brother label make(the linked one at home, and an older one at work) for a looong time now. I started using one in 2002 when I first drank the Getting Things Done elixir, I believe. And I’ve had a ridiculous number of chargers and power adapters for even longer.
But it just dawned on me that I can actually use my label maker to mark my power adapters so I don’t:
- throw one away because I don’t know what it’s for (yes, I’ve done that);
- unplug the wrong one while crawling around under the desk (yes, I’ve done that);
- accidentally bring the wrong charger with me on a trip (and I’ve done that once, as well).
So from this point forward, one of my resolutions is to label my power adapters when I first acquire them.
Learning the hard way is still learning…
Read MoreTaskwriter is a cool tool for GTD
I’ve just started trying out Taskwriter, which is an online tool designed to help you with Getting Things Done (GTD). As you might expect from a GTD-oriented tool, Taskwriter understands the notion of Next Actions, Contexts, Projects, etc.
I’ve included only a couple of tasks on this screen grab, but Taskwriter’s UI makes it easy to filter, print, and manage lots of items through the selection boxes on the left side of the screen. This makes it easier to take the distractions of irrelevant contexts out of your view, for example.
Another thing that is pretty cool is the Calendar view they provide – anything that has a due date on it will show up on the calendar. This helped me recognize, for example, that I had too many things due this Friday so I renegotiated a few to push them out.
Wish list
As you may know from some of my other posts, I often have a hard time with online-only tools because I spend a lot of time without connectivity. I can work around this by printing lists, etc. with Taskwriter, but wish it had some integration with Outlook, Google, etc. One workaround might be if they had an email parser that I could send tasks to and have them show up on my Taskwriter dashboard.
With that in mind, I will be making some requests / suggestions for future enhancements to see what happens. Based on what I’ve seen at the Taskwriter blog, I stand a pretty good chance of seeing my suggestions show up someday.
Give it a try
If you want to give Taskwriter a whirl, you can set up a free account from their homepage, or use it as a guest (obviously, this won’t save what you enter, but you can try all aspects of the product without providing any contact info).
Keep an eye on these folks – I like what they’ve done so far.
Read MoreEver been in the doghouse?
Someone sent me a hilarious “viral video” about being in the doghouse. Yes, it’s an ad (of sorts) but you don’t see anything commercial until the last 5 seconds or so.
The production quality and humor of this piece are great, so I expect lots of people to send it around. You don’t have to go far – just watch it below (or use this link if you’re not reading this in a browser).
I love this kind of advertising.
Read More“I just saved a bundle on my data insurance…”
Good news - I just got word about some discount codes for Mozy for the month of December, which will save you money if you sign up for the Mozy online backup service I posted about earlier today.
To get the discount, click here to go to the Mozy site, pick what plan you want and enter the following discount code at checkout to get 10% off annual and biannual MozyHome Unlimited and MozyPro subscriptions.
The magic code is: DECEMBER.
Enjoy!
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