I have mentioned in a few posts that I have been working on a new theme for this site and also looking to update the content to broaden the sites horizons.
Well, I am glad to say that the new design is imminent and hopefully will be on the site in the next couple of days.
I have used Unique Blog Designs to carve me a custom theme to facilitate my new launch.
Got a few things planned for the new site that should widen its appeal.
Over the next few days the format and layout may go a bit strange whilst we iron out any issues.
Look forward to speaking to you all via my updated blog.
I cannot believe that I have never done a Top 5 list on this blog. In fact I have never done a blog entry based around a list before so here goes.
What better place to start than with a list for my Top 5 Productivity Tools on the iPhone.
I love my Apple iPhone. it has to be the single gadget that has most affected my productivity. Being an advocate of the Getting Things Done methodology, I love to talk about ubiquitous capture, and the iPhone is my capture device of choice.
In my opinion, Apple have brought together an amazing collection of tools that you can carry around as a single device in order to help you achieve what is required from your working day, as well as leaving some room for the fun and social aspects of the iPhone.
Here are my Top Five iPhone Apps for Productivity.
Calendar – Bit of an obvious one this but my life runs around my Calendar. The built in Calendar application is one of the most used apps on my iPhone. I sync to my desktop using MobileMe which now works fantastically after the initial teething problems. I can enter an appointment on my iPhone or on my Mac and they sync in the cloud without having to do anything. What a great technology and it means my calendar, and work schedule is always on my iPhone.
OmniFocus – OmniFocus is the current GTD application that I use. I have multiple projects configured both for my home and work lives and this application is in constant use. I capture my thoughts to OmniFocus and they sync again over MobileMe back to my Mac. I have not really played with the location aware profiles yet but I am sure I will.
EverNote – I record all my receipts and photo notes straight to Evernote. I have every invoice and purchase order in PDF from my business as well as all the other files that I want to share between multiple locations stored in EverNote. The Web application, Mac Application, and iPhone application make this a killer note taking and storing app for me.
iBlueSky – I recently reviewed iBlueSky, the newest Mind Mapping application for the iPhone. I have found myself using this app rather than creating paper Mind Maps. The developer assures me that my little niggles with it are being addressed in a later version for which I cannot wait.
Zenbe – Zenbe for me is about making lists. OmniFocus in my opinion is too heavyweight for simple recurring lists so I have tended to create these in Zenbe. These sync with Zenbe on the Internet and the very simple click process for ticking off your list items makes this my list manager of choice.
I would love to hear from the rest of you to see what your best apps are for productivity on the iPhone.
I came across the ProBlogger site when I first got into blogging a couple of years ago. I used to read the ProBlogger blog and picked up some great tips from it in the early days. The ProBlogger blog is written by Darren Rowse.
The Problogger book caught my attention when it first came out although I never got around to buying it. I then met Chris Garrett at a Northern UK Bloggers Meetup and thought it was only right at this point to buy the book and see what I could learn.
One Amazon order later and the book arrived.
The book is 211 pages long split into 10 chapters. Each chapter is written by either Darren Rowse or Chris Garrett.
The book is about blogging for money. The reader is introduced to the concept of blogging and taken through the necessary steps to set up your blog and the popular blogging platforms with the emphasis being placed on WordPress as the blogging platform of choice.
The chapter on blog income and earning strategies was very useful and provided me with a great insight into what can be done with your (and my) blog. The book then goes into blog networks and blog promotion and marketing.
The main purpose of the book is how to start a blog and monetize it in order to one day become a six figure blogger. I must admit that the blogger lifestyle does appeal to most but in practice the self discipline needed to write is not for everybody.
I wrote a review of a great book called the War of Art, be sure to check this out if you have not already done so. This book covers the demons, or muses that we have to fight against in order to produce creative work. One statement from the War of Art that I love is the following.
The act of writing is not hard, the act of sitting down to write is what causes us the challenge.
The same can be said about blogging. If you can get over the first hurdle of starting a blog, and the second hurdle of passing the six month stage, as I heard over 90% of all blogs stop after six months, then you are in a good position to make the blog pay.
The book is written by two authors and it is clear from the writing style that the book was split into two, with each author writing their own content. The book is complete, and the chapters flow nicely into each other. All the jargon is explained before it is used and all in all I really like this book.
The typography of the book is good and to the usual Wiley standards. This helps in making the book a pleasure to read. I am still amazed when I read books like The Magic of Thinking Big and see how bad the type is. This makes the book much harder to read in my opinion and maybe this is one area where the second generation of eBook readers will really win.
I feel that I could give this book to a novice blogger and they would get great benefit out of it as well as to a more advanced blogger who would be able to skim a lot of it but still pick up some very good advice.
I learned some things from the book and it gave me some great ideas. That makes it worth the price.
As always, would love to hear any comments about this review, or the book.
I have been at the A4U Expo for the first half of this week and this gave me a well needed break from work to recharge my mind. Listened to some great search engine marketing talks from people like Joost and Mediadonis. Had a really good cruise down the River Thames on the Silver Sturgeon and generally enjoyed myself with old and new friends.
Oh well, back to work and here are the links for this week.
My first link for this week is a great post from fellow Blogger Chris Garret about overcoming your own constraints. Another great post from Chris and his blog is one that makes great reading, especially if you are a blogger.
My third link is a link to a GTD Competition from GTD Times. Enter the competition and fill out a simple survey for the chance to win a full days executive workflow coaching from the David Allen Company.
My fourth link is a link to a Windows Mobile GTD post from JeffKirvin.net. Now I am a Mac user but the post gives some great easy insights into using Outlook and Windoes mobile to achieve a GTD system.
My fifth and last link for this week is from the Tools for Thought blog about how to maintain separate GTD systems for home and work. Personally, I use the same system for home and work. I tried with multiple systems but I found that my life pretty much intermingles. Maybe this is because I have my own companies. Anyway, read the post, I found it good.
My new theme for this blog has now gone to coding so hopefully I can release it to you all in the next week or so. Looking forward to this as it is a well needed relaunch of the blog. The past few weeks have been very busy and I have a busy end of the month.
I recently did a review of MindMaker, the first Mind Mapping tool for the iPhone and iPod Touch. My review outlined a great concept but it was lacking some key features such as the ability to import and export maps and work in landscape mode.
I was very happy when i received an email from the creator of iBlueSky asking me to take a look at their app that provides competition for Mind Maker. I got the app installed and working right as I was leaving the house to attend the A4U Expo in London.
I was planning on writing the review when I got back from the A4U but I did get the chance to try it in the very first session of the A4U Expo. The first session was from Joost de Valik and was about Search Engine Optimization for WordPress.
Rather than take notes for the session in my trusty Moleskine, I decided to give iBlueSky a live test and use it to take the notes in what was an excellent session.
iBlueSky is very similar in operation to Mind Maker, it is after all a Mind Mapping application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The entry was working out a treat. You are able to use landscape mode and the addition of branches is very straightforward and anybody who has used a Mind Mapping application would be able to pick ip up in no time at all.
There is a default map already installed for you to play around with. The map I created got quite big, quite fast and I found it easy to add new branches, sub branches and also to navigate around the map.
This is in my opinion the best Mind Mapping tool to date for the iPhone and iPod Touch. There were a couple of little niggles which will hopefully get sorted for the next release. These were that the addition of new branches to a busy map sometimes overlapped existing branches. This made organization a bit cumbersome.
The branches were also quite difficult to move as it required an extremely accurate drag to move the branch and not the entire map. Some way of selecting a branch in drag mode would be great. The only other niggle is that when moving a branch, the sub-branches stayed put, creating a nesting overlapping issue.
All of the issues do not distract from what is a great app. Landscape mode works great, although the screen is restricted by the bars at the top and bottom.
The killer feature that really separates this from Mind Maker is the ability to email the maps. Once the Map was created, I emailed it to myself.
The map arrives in four formats:
PNG Image
PDF Document
OPML For Importing into various mapping and flowchat apps
Freemind MM Format for use with Freemind, the Open Source Mind Mapping app
How cool is that!
Great app, and look forward to seeing more of these cool apps arise for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Oh, and for those of you interested in the session from Joost, which was fantastic as usual. Feel free to download the map by following the links below.
Well, this is the only blog post I have managed this week but there is a good reason. For the past four weeks I have been writing a new ebook for Cisco Press entitled Securing Networks with ASAs Fundementals.
My deadline for the ebook was today, 12th October. I had a slightly delayed start to the project as I needed to free up one of my ASAs so that I could work through the configuration and make screenshots etc. So, for the past week I have been working on the ebook in every spare minute I have had. I have had around 5 hours sleep per evening and really put in the hours. Turning out 20,000 words and 82 figures for the ebook which Cisco Press will launch in a month or so.
Being so busy and so focussed has given me some ideas for some more posts, which I will hopefully get done this week as I am away for the next few days at the A4UExpo in London.
Oh, I also eventually got a 30″ monitor this week. Wow, how much better is working with so much screen real estate!
Here are my links for this week, although I have not has nowhere nearly as much browsing time as usual!
My first link for this week is has to be AwayFind from Set Consulting. AwayFind is a great new web application aimed to help you adopt an email practice where you check it twice a day but still get notified of urgent messages by other means, such as a text message to your cellphone. I have started using this and I love it as it fits in with my email productivity series perfectly. There will be more to come on this in the coming days. AwayFind is currently in private beta but be sure to check it out.
My third link is a link to a students GTD#1 – Collect. I always enjoy picking up on these lesser known blogs where real people are learning and writing about GTD. I like this purity of this one.
My fifth and last link for this week is How to Use Parkinson’s Law to your Advantage. Parkinson’s law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Check out this post and see how to use this to your own advantage.
So, off to London tomorrow for three days and the A4UExpo. Should be a great conference as the line up of speakers looks amazing and it is always good to meet fellow bloggers and affiliates to share knowledge, and of course a beer or two!
Another busy week, mainly due to the fact that I had a news story published by the BBC in the UK and it got a lot of coverage. Sometimes things happen that change your planned work week and this week definitely was one of those weeks.
Here are my cool links of the week for all things GTD and Productivity related.
My first link for this week is a great post from upcoming GTD Blogger John Kendrick. The post is titled Journaling your way to GTD and is well worth the time investment.
My second link is a guest post by Leo from ZenHabits.com on the Four Hour Work Week blog. The post is titled How to Never Forget Anything Again and it is a great post that goes through some of the great tools that are available for running our busy lives.
My third link is a great post about Ubiquitous Capture from Freelance Switch. This is a great blog with some fab guest bloggers who write about a whole host of topics aimed at the freelance worker.
My fourth link is a collection of GTD Wallpapers from Smart Productivity. These are aggregated from other sites but brought together in a neat post. Gives me some ideas for my new rebrand which is coming soon..
My fifth and last link for this week is an old classic, but one that I just re-read recently. This is the getting started in GTD post from Merlin Mann at 43Folders.com. This is flagship content from Merlin Mann and a great post for anybody looking to get started with GTD.
I have a crazy week ahead as I have a book deadline for Sunday the 12th so I am going to be busy evenings this week writing away. I also have a new brand coming for this blog. All exciting stuff and I cannot wait to get it out there.
Just thought I would post these great videos from Zig Ziglar. Zig is one of my all time greats when it comes to motivational speakers. His mix of humor and great beliefs make him a pleasure to listen to an learn from.
Enjoy the videos and I would love to hear your comments on them.
GTDAgenda is a Web Based application based around the GTD philosophy. One downfall is the fact that you need an Internet connection in order to use this system so you cannot easily take it with you. GTDAgenda.com is a website designed to assist individuals in increasing their productivity through David Allen’s Getting Things Done model. It does an admirable job of shaping the foundation of his advice into a practical, easy-to-use system that could easily change people’s lives through regular use.
The site’s aesthetic are plain but well conceived and goes a great length toward marrying functionality with a myriad of useful features. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the design is found after playing around with categorization tools and discovering exactly how deep the system actually is.
Seemingly nothing has been overlooked by the GTDAgenda team but the entire page never comes off as overly complicated or confusing. GTDAgenda instead chooses to let users dive into the various functions at whichever level they desire. It’s perfectly possible to use the page as nothing more than an electronic calendar, checklist or broad planning tool but for those who look deeper there is also a ton of great details to take advantage of as well.
The layout of GTDAgenda is in itself worth taking the time to discuss. The simple design and ease of use mix together very well. Although the page is relatively plain looking, there is nothing so offensive as to keep users from wanting to use GTDAgenda as a frequently viewed hub for their planning activities. Much like the Word document ‘to-do’ lists which Allen displays in Getting Things Done, GTDAgenda allows for an immediate response from users simply through its simple, upfront look.
All of the features are designed with Allen’s GTD model firmly in mind and go a long way toward allowing the site’s users to fully embrace the productivity system. GTDAgenda hosts a header which lists key organizational points (such as Goals, Projects, Tasks and Next Actions) along with appropriate sorting options within each one of these categories. For example, clicking on ‘Tasks’ displays a sub-category wherein users may prioritize their work to fit different criteria.
Each header keeps a few features the same so they may be referenced no matter what you’re concentrating on at the time. A handy calendar hangs on the right-hand side of the page and opens scheduled tasks and action steps by clicking on a given date.
The context menu is also an excellent implementation of core GTD philosophy as it allows users to sort their various work into categories such as @Computer,@Home and Errands. A checklist feature goes even further toward allowing for the kind of satisfaction Allen recommends from crossing off completed work and visualizing what must still be done so it can be taken off one’s mind.
GTDAgenda is difficult to criticize as it does perform a fantastic job of offering a productivity system styled upon the core principles and tools purported by the book. Nothing at all presents itself as ineffective or worth taking the time to negatively address in a review. The bottom line perhaps is that, like every organization tool, GTDAgenda will work for some and not for others.
Anyone even remotely interested in the GTD productivity model should at least check out GTDAgenda. The site and application does a great job of providing a system that allows for as little or as much customization and organization as any user could hope for.
Please note, the links to GTDAgenda are affiliate links so anybody signing up will result in myself getting paid a referral feed. This has not tarnished or influenced my review of GTDAgenda.
After the last installment of this series, I had changed my email collection timer from the default 5 minutes to one hour. I had seen quite an increase in productivity as I was working on emails in batch rather than what seemed to be every five minutes.
I decided that the next step was to check my email four times during the working day. These times were to be at 0900, 1200, 1500, and 1700.
There is no automated way to do this within Mail.app, the default mail client on the Mac and the one that I use so I had to turn off the automatic mail collection setting and set this to manual. So, from now, I received email when I manually clicked on the Get Mail button within Mail.app.
For the first few days this was going great. I informed the people directly involved with me that I was only checking email at these times and if something was urgent, then they needed to tell me in another way.
It generally worked out very well. Just like with the one hour gaps, the time between email on a three hour gap soon came around and I was amazed at how fast time was going in between email. It was nice and actually felt quite liberating to be free of the feeling that you have to check email.
All this was very well and good until I stumbled across a little item that resulted in me working very closely with the BBC and other journalists for just over a week on what became quite a well covered news story, even making the front page of Digg!
Because of this, I found most of my good work go straight out of the window as I had to check my mail frequently as I had to answer time sensitive questions. So, I found myself checking mail very frequently to ensure that I had not missed anything from any of the people I was working on the story with.
This has identified to me that strict email systems like these have to give sometimes, unless that is I can find a way around this. Some way of being able to filter the mail before I get it to my mailbox so that if I am working on something like this in the future I will be able to selectively receive mail. I could use a second address but that is not really an elegant solution so off I go looking for a way to achieve this.
The report went live on Monday and it has been a very busy week. I am back to checking email once an hour and aim to go back to the four times in a working day from next Monday.
This has been a great lesson to me about flexibility in systems and the fact that sometimes the system has to give. It was in my interests for it to give as it was a priority for me to ensure I gave a speedy response to questions asked.
