Christmas is all over with, the decorations came down today and here we are at the first weekly post of the New Year. I hope you all had a great time and I hope you are all ready for the year ahead.
I am sat in a hotel in Basingstoke, UK with only a 2G connection as the hotel has no WiFi. One day all hotels in the UK will have WiFi as standard without charging us £15 for a days usage and ripping us off. Anyway, rant over.
Here are my collection of links for this week.
- My first link for this week is a link to 7 Reasons Why I Love OmniFocus, a great post from GearFire.net, a new blog for me. I am still loving OmniFocus but I must admit that I am tempted to try out Things this week when it is launched fully if not just to reaffirm why I love OmniFocus.
- My second link is a link to a Things, the main rival of OmniFocus and the polished Apple Mac GTD App which finally goes live at MacWorld on the 6th Jan. I am going to install this and give it a real run for its money and follow it up with a subjective review. I cannot see my swapping from OmniFocus but who knows..
- My third link is a link to GTD-IQ. This is something that is mentioned in the first chapter of the new David Allen book, Making it All Work. GTD-IQ is a a website with a set of simple questions to test your GTD-IQ. Worth a look at to see where you are with your GTD-IQ
- My fourth link is a link an article outlining the 11 qualities of a successful manager. This is a blog post from Ajay Matharu. I am sometimes appalled by the management skills found in some large organizations. If you are a manager, see how many of these qualities you think you portray in your style of management.
- My fifth and last link for this week is a link to a GTD Summary from the 20something finance blog. Again, another good read and great to see people getting real benefit out of Getting Things Done. I like how the author has broken the book down into simple sections. I have always been meaning to do something similar and this has sparked an idea so watch this space.
Ordering a sandwich and then calling it a night. You would not believe how slow my Internet connection is, hoping it is better tomorrow. Let’s hope I have enough juice to publish this post…
Understand your pain w.r.t. UK hotels and WIFI reception – been on the receiving end enough. Normally see Basingstoke in passing on the train though (no connectivity there either but that’s great for GTD in it’s own right!).
All the best,
Tom
@Tom:
Luckily I am back in the land of the connected, just a pain that I have no access in my Hotel. How can a 4 Star hotel not have WiFi?
@Andrew Mason:
Like you say, they try it on big time with the charges!
My favourite is when you get the hotel which offers “Internet Access” and all you have available is access via the TV and still get charged an arm and a leg. Thankfully this is becoming rarer. I treated myself to a G1 for the new year whilst on the hoof – useful tool (bit slow though) and can use GTD with GMail.
Still, we’ll be looking back at the good old days soon when the Web N.0 world is so in our face we’ll think a green screen and 9600Baud modem was the mutts nutts in terms of a productive environment!
@Tom:
Yeh, at least my Vodafone 3G card generally works when I need it to although sometimes only at 2G speeds.
9600 baud modem, you must have been posh 🙂 My first was a 2400 baud, connected to Compuserve and other Bulletin Boards.
It just gets to me that the UK seems to charge a premium for Internet access when other countries always include it in the price.
@Andrew Mason:
Posh no lol, my first exposure to the land of the integrated circuit was the venerable BBC Micro at school back in ’82, remember fannying around with modems before the InterFangleWeb came about – 9600 was of course what it said on the tin but invariably due to line speed it would be knocked down to 4800, then 2400, then 1200 until finally the noise on the line dictated 300 – can you imagine Youtube clips on 300Baud – ‘it would certainly teach a lot of people the meaning of the word patience!
Connectivity will pretty soon be always on everywhere for zero cost given the UHF analogue network will be opened up for sale.
Bring back the horse, cart and candle!
😉
@Tom:
BBC Model B, that brings back memories. My GCSE in computers (1989) was to write a program that calculated Golf Scores and gave hole averages etc. BASIC was so easy back then! I also had the Acorn Electron but I started with the ZX81 and Speccy..
@Andrew Mason:
Ahhh, Nostalgia – It ain’t what it used to be… 😉
Last time I was in London the WiFi was broken and not even the hotel staff had internet access… The previous time I managed to get miserable (but free!) WiFi access by placing my laptop near the window – thank God for that!