Category Archives: General Items

Just a category to put things which are not specific to a topic.

Did I Get Things Done in 2008?

Here we are at the end of another year.

This has been a challenging year for me with some great things and some not so great thing been thrown at my by life. Business has been good, and my company is growing and looks forward to an even better 2009.

I feel like my productivity has really come on leaps and bounds in 2008. I am one of those people who have to be productive. Productivity is essential for me to keep my head above water and to give me the quality of life that I demand.

This blog has grown from 1000 readers to around an average of 2600 readers. I want to get this to 3000 in the New Year so please help me by subscribing via RSS if you do not already. I hope you have all enjoyed my blog over the past year and I hope to make 2009 even better.

I will leave you now with the top 5 posts of 2008, based upon readership.

Enjoy New Years Eve and see you all next year!

Productivity, Motivation, and Personal Development Links – 28th December 2008

iXpenseIt iPhone App – Keep Track of Your Receipts

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iXpenseIt is an iPhone application meant to help users to keep track of their daily finances through easy management of purchases and spending patterns.

By making excellent use of the iPhone’s built-in features iXpenseIt can help both organize your expenses and/or get you started on the path toward using any sort of money management tool.

The application keeps records of all inputted purchases and tracks the information in a number of useful manners. Users can choose to view their data through a variety of different displays.

iXpenseIt is capable of creating solid graphs of your spending patterns over whichever range of time you wish to see and thus provides a great manner of creating a visual representation of your finances.

Your data can be exported to your desktop as well, a feature which should help users to archive their spending information into monthly or yearly folders.

iXpenseIt also has the very useful feature of using the iPhone’s built-in camera to capture photos of your receipts so that they can be digitally input before being thrown in the trash.

At $4.99 the iPhone application may be a bit too expensive for some to warrant downloading but it’s a fair price for what the software does manage to pull off. If nothing else, at least the price of the program can be the first item entered into it!

How to Encrypt your notes in Evernote

New Year Strategic Planning MindMap

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The great folks over at MindJet have just released a Strategic Planning Mind Map that I am sure will help us all in taking stock and reviewing 2009.

The Mind Map is broken down into 5 steps:

Preparation
Where are we now?
Where are we going?
How will we get there?
How will we manage the plan

I think this is a great Mind Map and something that we can all use for planning 2009. You can read the original post over at the MindJet Blog.

You do need MindJet MindManager to open this file as it is a MindManager Mind Map.

Productivity, Motivation, and Personal Development Links – 21st December 2008

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It is the final countdown to Christmas now, 4 days till the 25th and I am sure that everybody reading this blog will be totally organized and prepared for the festive season 🙂

I have just this minute received an email from Amazon stating that the David Allen Book, Making it all Work, has been delayed by the publishers and not due into the UK until the 15th of January 2009. Looks like my Christmas Reading is limited to the Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp as that has just shipped and will be with me before Christmas.

Here are my collection of links for this week.

My first link for this week is a link to a great post from A Wandering Mind that is about Picking a Tool for GTD. Josh from A Wandering Mind is a guy with an interest in Information Security, just like me!
My second link is a link to Spootnik.net. Spootnik is a web based system for synchronizing your OmniFocus tasks with Basecamp from 37Signals. I use both OmniFocus and Basecamp so I am going to try this. Although the system does look like you have to sync all tasks and it does not appear to give you the option of choosing which tasks to sync. I will provide more details
My third link is a link to a post about the OmniFocus Start date From MacSparky. This is anew blog I have just started reading via another blog and the content is very relevant to me.
My fourth link is a link to the Mind Depositor Index Card Templates – Nice little index cards ready for GTD for you to print. I know these have done the rounds on various blogs already but they are pretty neat if you use a paper based GTD system so check them out.
My fifth and last link for this week is a link to an article from the Times Online titled, Tough Times need a Cool Head and Clear Planning. It is a nice little article about surviving in these tough times and how productivity can help.

My next weekly links will be on the 28th of December when all the Christmas celebrations will be over and we will all be focusing on the New Year.

As it is the New Year, I will do a special New Year links section with all links focusing on planning for the New Year.

Hope you all have a very Merry, and of course productive Christmas!

Andrew..

iGoogle Procrastinator Clock

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Although it’s a simple enough concept to grasp, setting one’s clock ahead to stay on time can be tricky to actually pull off.

The mind usually pulls through to help us remember that we have tried to trick ourselves and cancels out the entire intended effect which actually making things worse than they were in the first place.

Luckily the iGoogle Procrastinator Clock has been released as an easy solution for the endless quagmire of getting things done on time.

Instead of simply letting our brain’s trust that we have put a clock forward by five or ten minutes, the Procrastinator Clock plays constant tricks on the displayed time in order to ensure that users are unable to rationalize away being late by a few more minutes.

The add-on allows a manipulation period of up to fifteen minutes early to play within so that viewers can never be really certain that their computer clock is showing the correct time. Procrastinator Clock can work a charm for those who remember changing their own displays by ensuring that there is no possibility of knowing exactly how fast the clock really is.

Considering that it’s entirely free of charge, chronic last-minute panic victims really do owe it to themselves to at least take the iGoogle Procrastinator Clock for a spin to see what it can do for their deadlines.

7 Things About Me

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I guess the prominence of my blog is growing as I have just been tagged in a meme game by Dragos from eDragonu.

Seems like a good idea to let all my blog readers know more about me as well as to get 7 more blogger’s involved so here goes.

First, here are the rules.

Link to the original tagger(s), and list these rules on my blog.
Share 7 facts about myself in the post – some random, some weird.
Tag 7 people at the end of my post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

7 Things About Me

Well, as the name suggest I have to tell you all 7 things about me that you may not already know. So here goes..

I am 35 years old and my Birthday is in March
I am married to Helen and have four children, Rosie (Age 9), Jack (Age 7), Tom and Poppy (Twins aged 2)
I am the co-founder and Director of RandomStorm a Vulnerability Management and PCI DSS ASV.
I am a published author with McGraw Hill and Cisco Press. I have written 7 books and 2 eBooks on Cisco Network Security. I am just working on another ebook for Cisco Press covering Router and Switch Security.
My Hobbies include Mountain Biking, Running, Golf, and Wing Chun Kung Fu. When I make time to relax I like to grab a good movie or take my aggression out on the PS3.
My favorite places in the UK are Northumberland and the Lake District. I try to visit both of these at least a week each year. Both have beautiful unspoiled countryside.
When I was 11 I was on the national news and front page of all major UK newspapers for bringing a live hand grenade home from the World War One trenches in Ypres, Belgium. I had it at the side of my bed for 6 months before we found out that it was “potentially lethal”.

Now I have to pass this on to the following bloggers:

I hope you have enjoyed this post. Be sure to check out the blogs I have just mentioned as they are all on my blog reading list.

Instant Photographic Memory – Using Evernote

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Evernote EyeFi
I have just read this neat little story and video that I thought I would share with you all. Now, I am one of those very lucky people with a very good photographic memory.

I am able to tune into the memory of sight to help me remember items. I have managed to utilize Mind Mapping techniques to really harness this power that I have and this has helped me pass numerous exams as well as impress people with my memory.

I was just reading about how Evernote have teamed up with Eye-Fi to bring you a digital electronic memory.

I have covered Evernote in great depth in this blog and my regular users will know that I love Evernote and use it daily to collect and share notes between my numerous computers and also the Web.

Eye-Fi manufacture WiFi enabled SD Memory Cards. These are the same cards that go into your digital camera for photo storage.

So, what has happened now in the collaboration between Evernote and Eye-Fi is that you can take a picture with your digital camera and with some simple setup it will be automatically sent to your Evernote account.

Obviously you need a WiFi connection to make this happen but you can take the pictures and then they will be uploaded when you are in range of a trusted WiFi Access Point.

Think of the uses for this!, here are some from the Evernote Blog

* Got back from a conference with a stack of business cards? Snap a photo of them.
* Just finished a big whiteboard session? Don’t copy it into your notebook, snap a photo.
* Just had dinner? Snap a photo of the receipt for your records.
* Doing some comparison shopping? Go to a store and snap a photo of the sales tags.
* Got a billion dollar idea sketched on a napkin? Snap a photo so you’ll never forget it.

How cool is that!

Just added one of these to my want list as I have to try this out, although I mainly use Evernote on my iPhone for image collection so I do have a feature like this already.

Evernote as a photo storage and automatic backup service, now there is an idea…

Productivity, Motivation, and Personal Development Links – 14th December 2008

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Hope you have all had a great week.

I have just been to my childrens Christmas nativity and right after this I am heading to my fathers Christmas party at the Hilton in Leeds for yet more festive fun.

Productivity is more important than ever right now as we just have more things to do, and there is a prominent deadline that we have to meet. More about that, as I feel a post coming on later in the week about festive productivity.

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