Category: productivity

Life lessons from the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony

(pic courtesy: flickr user yggg)

Lifedev.net has a great article on some life lessons to be learnt from the Opening Ceremony of the recent Beijing Olympics. The gist of it is in the following points:

  1. Step outside your comfort zone
  2. Hard work 
  3. Always strive for better (for yourself)
  4. Do your homework
  5. Work around obstacles
  6. Thing big. Really BIG.
  7. The details pay off.

Read the full article here.

20 new tech habits

A great list of 20 tech habits, that can make you effective computer users. A lot of helpful advise here – ranging from telecommuting to automatic backups to reminder tools to password management. All in all, I think it is a good collection. 

Read the full article here. 

Warning: Annoying irritating PC world article, which splits the article into 4 pages, and you have to click ‘Next’ after every 5 habits. Grr.

Lifehacker’s portable office

Gina Trapani, in a fantastic article in Macworld, gives a behind-the-scenes look on how the lifehacker team of editors work seamlessly, even though, they are so geographically dispersed. I think they have the framwork just right. A gist of the tools they use:

  1. Campfire for chat
  2. Gmail for email
  3. Gcalendar for calendaring
  4. Google Docs for collaboration
  5. Mediawiki for documentation
  6. Backpack for Project Management
  7. Del.icio.us for bookmarking

Read the full article here.

While at it, you should also look up The Lifehacker Editors’ Favorite Software and Hardware.

Set gmail as default mail ‘client’

For those who are using Firefox 3 (if you dont, and want to try, go here), the official gmail blog has a great how to on how to set your default email client to gmail. I think this is great for some of us, who use gmail more than any other email. I do not have my outlook or OE set up for any email service, and most times, I end up copying the email address into clipboard, and then opening up gmail and pasting into the To: address bar. I think this hack will save a lot of time.

Go ahead, and take a look. This might for you as well. [link]

Two ultimate utils – Gmailit and Goosh

And yes, they are shareware. One is a firefox extension and the other is best described by experiencing.

The first is a gmail it extension. I do this a gazillion times a day – things to remember, things to blog, important phone numbers etc – I just email myself. Using this extension, just select what you want to email, right click and say gmail it. How is that for ease-of-use.

The second is goosh. For CLI (command line interface) or shell lovers, this is sure to tingle your spine. This is a shell version of the great Google itself. It is not a supported google product. It runs on the browser. And see below for a screen shot. (or) just go to goosh.org to see for yourself. Wow.

I have circled the commands that I passed. To search the web, just type web <keywords> ; to search images just type images <keywords>; for help type help. Amazing and it is blazing fast – like a good shell should be. And yes, clear, ls, and command history using up-arrow is supported. Yaay for that.

Ninja dictionary

(image courtesy ninjawords.com)

I empathize with the author in openculture.com, who said, it used to be such a torturous wait while looking up meanings of words in the ‘famous’ dictionaries of the net. I have had my share of twiddling-my-thumbs and waiting for meanings at m-w.com, dictionary.com etc etc.

Enter the Ninja dictionary! I tried this out, and yes, it really is fast like a ninja. Try it out yourself here.

Are you a morning person?

I have been getting up fairly early in the last month or so; but I am not the happiest person for some time. I do get used to it – I keep thinking that, I can catch up on my lost sleep in my bus ride to work (which is about an hour). But the following article seems to suggest a much better way to cure morning blues. I am defenitely going to try this out. Out of te 5 points mentioned, I think the first one struck me the most – and which is what I am going to try out.

1. I get up easier. Ever since I’ve starting morning quiet times, I’ve been able to get up refreshed, without hitting the snooze, and ready to start the day bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. This is directly because my day doesn’t start with the grind. It starts with the knowledge that I have around an hour of my day dedicated to Me. That can change anyone’s perspective in the morning.

Check out the article here at lifedev.

Getting challenging projects done

All of us have been in these situations, where we have fought for a challenging project to be assigned to us. Now, we have it for ourselves. Hmm. Now what? How do we start? It slowly sinks into you that it is indeed a very challenging project, for a short time line. Some of us start feeling jittery even.
Lifedev.net has a great writeup, for just this sort of situation. Read on here.

The essence of the article is:

  1. Start small
  2. Make small timelines
  3. Frequently review the details
  4. Don’t sweat the details… yet.
  5. Think outside the box
  6. Think INSIDE the box
  7. Ask advice

Each one of these bullets is important – ones that we often tend to ignore in high-pressure situations.

Two excellent quotes on ‘Trying’

The first is from a small placard an ex-manager gave me, when he left our group (He was a great guy!).

 Try is a big word. If you try, you risk failure. If you do not try, you ensure failure. 

And the second is from the Empire Strikes Back (Starwars), and said by the Yoda.

 Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.

Credit for the second one goes to todays post in Zen Habits.