StumbleUpon – The Second Northern Bloggers Meetup
Well, I have just arrived home from the second Northern UK Bloggers Meetup. After the success of the first meetup, I could not wait to see what else I could learn from the second, and also what people I would meet.
As before, the event was organised by Jamie Harrop and the main speaker for the evening was Tim Nash, who presented a fascinating talk about StumbleUpon. Now, I have not really used StumbleUpon, apart from playing with a paid campaign for one of my other sites at the beginning of this year and it was great to hear Tim, who obviously knows one heck of a lot about StumbleUpon, share a few of his secrets with us. I have already signed up for StumbleUpon and added the toolbar to my installation of Firefox, so let's see if I can put his great advice to use.
David Allen Getting Things Done GTD Seminars
Just received an email with some updated dates for two of David Allen's seminars. These are the GTD: Mastering Workflow Seminar and GTD: The Roadmap Seminar.
Here is the intro to the GTD: Mastering Workflow Seminar
This one-day seminar delivers a dynamic, systematic, five-phase approach to dealing effectively with the incoming "stuff" of our lives - mail, memos, meetings, email, ideas, notes, to-dos, projects, reference materials, etc., and provides a practical methodology for utilizing paper-based and computer-based systems to organize it.
GTDInbox – Review of the GTDInbox GTD and Productivity Application
I am starting a process where I review all of the available GTD and Productivity applications available and then make them available via this blog and a simple applications page that lists the applications as well as links to their reviews.
To kick this process off, I have provided a review of GTDInbox. I met with Andy Mitchell, the creator of GTDInbox at the recent Northern UK Bloggers Meetup so I thought it would be great to start with a review of hid GTD Application.
GTDInbox is one of the best (and most popular) applications designed to help advocates of David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity model implement the system into their day-to-day life. Designed by Andy Mitchell and continuously supported by a community of users, GTDInbox is an ongoing project (started in 2006) that seeks to add greater functionality to the pre-existing and widely used, Gmail.
GTD and Productivity Links – 14th September 2008
Well, I completed my 10K run today for cancer research with my wife, Helen. It is the furthest I have ever ran and we did it in 1:07. I was hoping for a time under and hour but we were really held up over the first 3000 meters due to hilly sections and a very narrow path. There were 1200 people running and the hill was a bit of a bottleneck that we got stuck in.
I have loved having this as a goal and it felt great to do it. I will start to look for another physical challenge now.
So, here are some links for this week.
Email Productivity Experiment – Update 2
This is the third post in my mini series about email productivity. For those of you who missed the first two I have provided links to them below.
Email Productivity Experiment
Email Productivity Experiment - Update 1
Well, I have had a rather busy week this week and not had a great deal of time scheduled for writing. I have however being able to implement a few changes to my email system and track the outcome. It is always great to schedule things like this when you are at your busiest so you can get a real grasp of how effective the changes have been. This week has been a great week for this next test.
Using MindManager as a Single Project Dashboard
Mind Mapping is something I have blogged quite a lot about and something that I use on a daily basis. The visual representation of your thoughts and ideas really can help in the planning phase and it is a fantastic way to study or learn pretty much any topic.
Well, I had just found a great link on the MindManager website that provides a ready made Mind Map to show you how to use Mind Mapping as a project dashboard. There are some good links within the Mind Map to further enhance MindManager with third party plugins.
The Mind Map can be downloaded direct from this link or you can go to the MindJet website where I found the Mind Map by following this link.
GTD and Productivity Links – 7th September 2008
Well, Sunday has come again and it is the time to bring together some great links over the past week. I started to write this post last week and I am saving the links to the post as I find them. Saves me from having to duplicate work when Sunday night comes.
Big thing for this week was the two excellent GTD Seminars from the Office 2.0 Conference. Be sure to check them both out as it is great free content.
Right, here are my links for this week.
Office 2.0 Conference GTD Panel and Keynote
Email Productivity Experiment – Update 1
Over the past few days I have been using my trusty Moleskine to record the number of times I have checked email. I did not change anything about the way I worked, I just checked mail as normal using the default settings on my laptop. I was out a few days and in the office a few days so I evened out my results in order to get a view from a pretty average day.
What I found was quite shocking! I checked email 84 times in an average day. This was split into 62 times during my working day and 22 times outside of work, whilst at home.
ScribeFire – Blogging Plugin for FireFox
I am writing this post using ScribeFire, a plugin for Firefox that enables you to blog direct from the browser.
I have been using Safari as my browser of choice for the last year or so but Firefox 3 really has got my attention and I feel a switch to Firefox is real close. It is the plugins such as ScribeFire, Delicious, and a host of SEO related tools that really attract me to Firefox.
Check out this great video below for an introduction to ScribeFire and some of the features it brings. It looks like a great tool but one that has to be learned and hopefully it will save me time and improve my writing ability so I blog more.
