E-Mail

Have at least three different e-Mail accounts.

• One for work, use that on your work computer(s), but never on private machines.
• One for real communication. Keep this e-Mail-Adress as sectret as possible, never use it to register for anything (I only use it for the most trusted and important sites) and only give it to friends. Everytime you get a mail on this account, you may want to read that. If you have a smartphone, you should use ONLY setup this address on the device.
• And one for everything else (this will attract spam, so I often call it my spammail
  ). I have one mail account that I just use for everything on the web and it goes through several spam filters before it lands only on my primary private PC. Don’t check for mail on this account more than once a day.

Twitter

As with e-Mail, I use two different accounts.

• One is my main account which I use to follow everything and everyone that interests me. At this moment, I follow186 accounts, and if you’re between these, I really like what you tweet. I use this stream to feed my interest from time to time, but I won’t always read everything. Also, I don’t check in this stream when I have no time or I need to focus. Then I just switch to my private account.
• My private account only follows some few people that I don’t want to miss tweets from or that I know and that I only allow trusted people or people I know to follow. Again, on my iPhone I let this account notify me of @replies and direct messages, but not the “main” account where more often @replies come in.

Another point: Don’t set something up that pops up messages. This is distration you intentionally install. I use Echofon for Firefox on Windows and Mac and set the preference that it doesn’t pop up stuff. Therefore I can see how many tweets are waiting, but I must intentionally klick on the echofon icon to read tweets.

Facebook

I just don’t use it. It is a whole network just made for distration, so I just don’t visit it when I don’t need to. Therefore I feed my twitter account in Facebook so it looks like I’m posting there. And I set up notifications on iPhone for messages and use Meebo to communicate via “Facebook chat” if someone uses that.

photo credit: Big Fat Rat

Related Posts:

• Will Google+, Twitter or Facebook survive?
• Why Social Media only works for the Winners
• How to tell people to do Twitter?
• Find E-Mail of your Job Candidate / Mass Follow by E-Mail on Twitter
• All the little things & This year of my life

My job was hard the last few month, when I had some hard problems to sit and learn over, and that made me feel I wasn’t making any progress anymore. And my job motivated me most of the last year, so this was a big hit. Then I also made some mistakes, costing my company some money – made me feel even worse. Then I didn’t see my friends in a loooong time. I used up all the nice content in form of videogames and movies. Then my girlfriend tends to work a lot – also on weekends. And some few time ago, one of my cats died.

That was when I felt a big depression overcoming me. I seemed to have some kind of mid-life-crisis. Since then I made some corrections in my life, that all should help my motivation.

1.) ToDo lists: I need those to feel that I make progress and to not loose track of what I was doing. It also makes me feel good when I can check something off.

2.) Music. The iPhone 3G originally made me listen to music again after me having lost interest in it before. Sadly, synching with iTunes isn’t perfect and took a long time and when I more often heard songs I didn’t like while riding my bike to work, I switched to podcasts instead. Those podcasts are fine, but they’re all information and no emotion. After getting the iPhone4, I realized that through the clicker headphones you could easily get rid of songs you didn’t want and through the bigger capacity, I could have overall more songs on the device, giving more food to the genius lists. This also made me rediscover all the good old stuff and keeps my emotions slightly more packed with power.

3.) Friends. I visited an old friend of mine living 5 hours away from here – and it really pushed me. Then through the iPhone4 and Meebo, I’m back online on ICQ, which I dropped when beginning to work one year ago. Through this, I got back to being contacted for sit-ins and usual silly conversation, which made me feel better.

4.) Project: I try write more on the blog – it somehow frees my mind. I also try to work a bit on the ToDo Tool I wanted to do a while back – one should have some cool project instead of sad SOA stuff. You should have a project that you like – even if ou don’t have too much time to put in that.

5.) Job: The job always threatens my peace of mind. If there’s a big problem piling up or something that’s really hard to grasp, I’m feeling bad. But there problems are solved now, god bless it.

Somehow this post is incomplete, butI guess the crisis is over. Thanks to everyone including you dear reader who leaves a comment from time to time ;-)

photo credit: anomalous4

Related Posts:

• A Waste of Time – How (Not) to Reach Your Goals
• How to tell people to do Twitter?
• Who’s the Elite today?
• All the little things & This year of my life
• The Human Flaw

The point of this post is, that goals are no “wishlist“. I gave the example for goals you might want to reach (home or car, or a relationship with a partner you don’t know yet). These are more like a wishlist, as you don’t really know what needs to be done to reach these goals. If you want to reach them, you need to think about what needs to be done to reach them. Which can lead to other, more realizable goals like “get a better job” or “party every week” (sounds like a strange goal, but is closer to reality than “get a relationship”).

But these new goals are also pretty meaningless, if you don’t know how to reach them, and some of your goals might even be deleted from your list, as you realize they’re wishes and that it might really be the new job you need, or more friends to party with. Therefore, when you think about what you need to do, look at your goals and think of stuff that could bring you closer into the direction of these goals – like “watch [jobwebsiteOfYourChoice] for new possibilities”; “subscribe to the RSS feed of the fresh renting offerings website”; “arrange a party for my friends”. Make tasks out of them and put them on your ToDo-list. Do one of these every day. You’ll move forward faster.

One sentence productivity mantra from Penelope Trunk for free:

One thing at a time. Most important thing first. Start now.

Related Posts:

• Using GTD for more Blogposts
• Inbox Gravity Zero
• ToDo for Mac – Review
• Marketshare and Winning and Religion
• Merlin Mann Talking

1.) Like your blog. That means: Have a blog  design you like, have plugins that get the job done, have everything set up so it runs smoothly. If you don’t like your blog, you’re most likely not willing to invest much time in it.

2.) Know what to focus on. I don’t say “make a cooking blog”. Just know what you like to write about, so you can get the feeling that the readers will like to follow your content. Most of this is about motivating yourself to write.

3.) GTD (Getting Things Done) can help us with some simple methods and rules we should use.

3.1) Use a ToDo list that supports contexts, and everytime you have an idea, write a task into that context (call it “blogging” for example). Then, when you actually have some time, open that blogging context and begin writing. Due to having a “flow” you can often write multiple posts a time and schedule them with your in blog scheduler. (There’s usually a link somewhere in the writing-area, that say “publish now” or something like this, here you can set a time when the post should go live).

3.2) GTD tells us that Tasks should be “accomplishable”. So break down your blogpost-idea (that might be “write a guide for life”, which is way too much for a blogpost) into smaller chunks that you can handle in one writing session. Should your ToDo-list support nested lists (most computer-based lists don’t), you can write down these chunks as subtasks.

You shouldn’t plan on writing too long posts anyways. Usually you’ll be able to write more text then you thought about, and people only have so much time to read it.

3.3) If you don’t know what to write anymore and it really seems to be just two or three sentences, just don’t finish that post and keep it as a draft. Postpone the writing. There will be some creative time, when you just open your drafts and the words come flowing out. As it is saved in your drafts, you can easily go over them when you write posts the next time and will maybe have enough motivation and inspiration to go on.

3.4) Write the task title so it motivates you to take action. Also try to note as much of your essential ideas down when you enter your task-title, so you can later remember what you thought about when you jotted it down. Better than the title “New flat description” is “Describe new flat (surrounding, first day incident with neighbors, bath broken)”.

3.5) Throw away ideas that clutter your list and that you didn’t even begin writing on for more than two month. These entries will only clutter your list, and if it didn’t motivate you to write a post then you usually can delete it. Maybe the idea will come back later, but till then, keep your ToDo-list as clean as possible. Did I tell you to put this in a special context? This way your blogging-stuff won’t clutter your usual contexts.

Thats all! I can only add that you should be generall interested in something you’d like to write about. Your writing will get better, and if you’re blogging in a different language even that language might get better over time. Now go and write down some ideas!

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Agile Blogger: What Can You Learn from Agile Management Techniques? (shoutmeloud.com)
• Tools And Techniques To Manage Your Online Reputation | Edelman Digital (edelmandigital.com)

Related Posts:

• Scheduling One Post per Day & Reading Blogs
• Do not use the WordPress iPhone Apps
• Big Fonts and Clean Design
• Auto-Enrich blogposts with Zemanta and Web 3.0
• Inbox Gravity Zero

First, the author (thats me) get to concentrate on the content more. We all know that content is king, but when you’re having all these neat JavaScript and jQuery scriplets flying around, and pictures and badges and links all over the place, its easy to get distracted from that principle. The author also must not fear now, that his post is too small or too undiscoverable to make an impact on his own site, as every post is really BIG now.

Second, with less clutter on the page, the reader can better concentrate on the content. Additionally, the load times are faster, as most JavaScript does something that needs additional HTTP-requests, and thats bad for loading times. Faster loading times means less annoyed readers too. Also the rest of your blogs links and scripts are seen more, as there’s less noise. As I use a related posts-plugin, this means more readers can discover the content they look for more easily.

Whats up next: Having new motivation, there’s a lot to write about. I’ll try to optimize my blog more by decluttering it even more (I’ll make a static page for my recommendations, e. g. blogs, podcasts, posts, software and so on) and I’ll list up my new plugins and tell you why they’re AWESOME. I’ll also have a second look at the plugins I got, and maybe choose some that make the site load faster. That said, I’ll also analyse how I can make the site load faster in general. And look upon how you can blog easier by using simple GTD principles. Stay tuned.

Update: I just included a new font and reduced the font-size for not too big fonts. What you you think? Will post soon about using the new @font-face css styles and the problems with it on different browsers and with CSS compressing plugins.

Related Posts:

• Superb WordPress Plugins – Speed, Easy!
• Using GTD for more Blogposts
• What should a good ToDo Tool do?
• RDFa Editor Presentation
• Which JavaScript-Framework?

After trying out many different ToDo tools, I found that none of them makes using these tools fun. I don’t have a mac, otherwise I would certainly use something like “Things“, as the introduction movies look pretty nice and simplicity defines the software.

Nothing on the PC? Well, not entirely: we have A LOT of REALLY BAD solutions for Windows. Firstly, Outlook. This one is too simple, and office is high priced. You cannot organize ToDos with Outlook. Then an unlimited number of applications that fill your screen and give you 1 million buttons. Require about 10 hours to use first time. Missing a good PC-ToDo-tool, I looked for web applications. Toodledo is a nice service, but the interface just sucks. And you won’t use a bad interface anymore, as we’re living in modern times where usability engineeriing is reality … sometimes. Additionally, the web-software needs me to keep an eye on the browser everytime, which I just don’t like. If I want to get things done, I shouldn’t need the browser for that as we all know where that leads (youtube).

Therefore, I only depend on the iPhone-”Todo”-app, the only one thats pretty much usable. Sadly, I don’t have a 3GS, and the 3G needs about 5-8 seconds till I can see the screen and the app is started, so thats not perfect too. I often let this app run at work, but seeing the screen still takes 3 seconds.

So, what would you do? Usually, if you want a certain software-tool that exactly fits your needs, you just try out some, and after you didn’t find what you were looking for, you just use the next best thing OR just decide to throw away the idea completely. Well, that is, if you’re not programming software. So I decided to write down some requirements and asked at Abelssoft (the company I work at) if we could do something like this. Well, we could try :-)

So I’m asking you: What is the most important requirement, a todo-tool should fullfill, so that it would help YOU? What we found out is that it needs to fullfill the following:

• easy to use, intuitive to use
• small, compact interface thats in the background, popping up from time to time to ask if you still do <this>
• tells me what I should do next
• rapid way of adding new todos (and a rapid way of setting importance, due dates and stuff)
• only necessary properties of todos (some want projects, some categories, everyone contexts, some tags, some planned time…)
• good organisation of todos (projects? recurring todos? inbox?)
• good filtering (if I search something, I need to find it instantly)

We had another giantic list of things that COULD be nice, but we’ll be trying to keep it sleek. And we found out that most people have very different ideas, what a todo tool should do more than the above. My boss wants project planning stuff like how much hours will this item take (I won’t want this). I want it to be able to synch to my iPhone (others don’t use iPhones). Some want dependencies between single todo-items (like this one can only be ready after another one), but how can you build this in without blowing the tool up to one of the complex tools already available? Some want projects while others find them confusing. Some want time-management-functions inclused. Some want further project-planning stuff like delegating ToDos or connectors to projectmanagement solutions like JIRA included. Choose and divide, young jedi.

Also, the GTD-philosophy seems to get in the way sometimes. For example, “Folders” don’t make any sense to me when you have contexts. They’re some kind of tags gone worse. That said, I like tags more. For these and some more reasons, I’m not sure if we should follow a certain philosophy (like the 30-year old GTD), as these were born in times when computers were not that essential in people’s everyday lives.

What do you think? Which feature would let you use a ToDo-organizer?

Related articles by Zemanta

• 12 Lists That Help You Get Things Done (lifehack.org)
• Why using ToDo Lists & GTD? (ithoughts.de)
• No Time to Read This? Read This (online.wsj.com)
• Toodledo – An Online Task Management App With iPhone Integration (makeuseof.com)

Related Posts:

• Great Software Engineers Fail
• Those Nerds and their Tools
• Microsoft Office 2010 encountered an error during setup
• Big Fonts and Clean Design
• Windows 7

Its very impressive how our life shapes with all the little things we learn. And its all those little things we change in our lives that makes everything a whole new experience. You think I’m on drugs? Nope, I ain’t!

The most time of my life, I’ve been a logical person who had difficulties in understanding human nature and human behaviour. As a logical person, I advocated that no man should ever lie in no situation, and the world would be a better place. Teachers laughted, schoolmates laughted, some tried to persuade me that this just isn’t true. I only trusted upon my logical view of things and nobody could change my perception. Guess what? The human race would be long eradicated by a nuclear war if no man could lie.

These were the times when I trusted my own beliefs most, even when people told me something else. It was a very long stage of my life, but I finally made the next level: trying to understand, why people have another opinion, “try out” for some time if this opinion works for me and then accepting or rejecting that opinion/position/view.

For example: I have always had long hair and split ends. Guess that I didn’t understand that I need to use conditioner to make that go away. My opinion was: chemical stuff can’t help my health or the health of my hair. And I was wrong. When I began using conditioner, the split ends were getting better.

So many things just seem like utter nonsense when you see how people behave sometimes. Like watching casting shows in TV. Like smoking. Like going drinking and dancing in a discotheque. Like making music. I even thought listening to music was a strange behaviour when I was about 14 years old. But after some time, you try things out, and some work for you while others don’t. I began liking music and going out to parties for example, but I never liked smoking even if I tried. Well and then after some time, you even try to understand women – a hopeless attempt, some men might think – but even there you can make progress if you really try to understand their point of view.

What I changed this year

Its just that I have a little bit of free time for the first time in about one year – therefore I’m writing this post. And I’m reflecting on what I changed this very year. Change is usually something people don’t like, because their instincts tell them that change is dangerous and that they should just keep everything as it is, because it won’t get worse that way – that is good for survival, the instinct implies. This instinct is called fear. A small interlude from Dune:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

If you understand that you can choose what you want to change, if you conquer this instinct, you’ll recognize that every change that you do is a positive change in the end. Otherwise you wouldn’t have accepted it … or you just undo it and change back.

And I changed a lot of little things this year. My dear. I hope you my dear reader can reflect the changes you went through this year too. If you want, you should also make a small blog post about what happend this year in your life, because I’d really like to read that. I came to the point where I can say that I love changes – and hearing about them. So this year:

• I began my diploma thesis on 01.01.2009 and over the course of the year, I needed to unclutter my life to be able to get it done. Some would call this lifehacking. I just stopped playing computer games. Boom. 30% more time. I stopped organizing my week and began organizing my day. Boom. 100% more things got done. I began struturing my online information-digestion through feeds and twitter. Boom. Learning stuff while keeping yourself informed in the shortest time possible. All impressive changes, and needed ones, if you want to use time more effectively.
• I found a job at the local software company Abelssoft. My salary is fine and didn’t need a car to get to work – again a lot of money saved. My colleagues are very nice and I like working with them – and I also like the work itself, which is a very important matter in being happy, I believe. I also just learned a new programming language (C# .NET) and Abelssoft paid a certificate that measures this skill. Thanks again! You can follow @Abelssoft on Twitter, and this is the website (german verison here).
• I bought a flat with my girlfriend. A big one. In the times of economic crisis and a drop in (bank) interests, it seemed the smartest thing from a economic perspective. But if you think about the non-economic perspective, its a way more binding statement towards my girlfriend, than a marriage would be. And I’m very happy about my decision. Believe me, the flat is completely new, big and I feel superb when I’m there.
• I left the church. That means approximately +400€ per year. Nice. I never really believes in god anyways, and if I did, I don’t think Jesus would love me more if I paid the church’s fees.
• Now for some more little things which changed in my information-digestion: Feedly. After learning what feeds are and how to use them via the Firefox-addon Brief, I just switched to Google Reader to be able to synchronize my feeds (and mainly let those that I have already read not show up anymore) with my iPhone feed-reader. Now that I use Google Reader which in my opinion has a cluttered and unintuitive interface, I found the Feedly-firefox plugin, that lets my feeds look like a newspaper. Hooray, the times of dead paper are gone – and with this kind of interface, maybe I can teach my girlfriend to use feeds someday too.
• I began listening to podcasts on the bike. Used music before, but riding bike is pretty boring, and I more like listening to music while I’m cleaning up or doing the dishes or something. Fould the following podcasts (both german) to be very interesting: Z and Bitsundso.
• Another small thing that impact my personal life more than I would have ever imagined: the iPhone. I learned how to use this device as personal organizer (respectively main calendar), ToDo-list, shopping list, feedreader, client for all social networks I use (Twitter, Facebook, Xing, StudiVZ), TV-guide, online-banking-client (damn, I can do bank transfers everywhere with this thing!), (video) camera, instant messenger, radio, podcast-player, music player, navigation-device, pdf-document-reader, voice recorder, gaming device (did you know we have Command and Conquer, Duke Nukem, Need for Speed and many more really good things?), weather information service, eBay-client (which works better and more intuitive than the actual ebay-website), wireless USB-stick, translator, YouTube-client and even TV-reciever (okay, I don’t get too many channels with it). And I can use it as telephone too. You wouldn’t believe it! In one tiny device. All very usable. Thats definitely an upgrade for my personal management.

So I hope your lives got some upgrades too, I’m very pleased with mine this year. For the next year, I’ll have a small list of goals that I want to get done (and that I just entered in my ToDo’s goals section):

• Try getting more professional at my job.
• Buy some stuff, so the new flat isn’t all that empty.
• Write some more blog posts.
• Main point: I’ll try meeting more friends – I kinda lost sight of them this year and definitely have to change that. But from now on, I’ll have at least my weekends free to tackle that.
• Play more pen and paper role-playing-games. I miss that, was always fun.
• Go on vacation with my girl.
• Get a private server-machine running 24/7. Needs to be low-energy-comsuming and not too expensive. And needs to be silent.
• Set up a new blog. This wordpress thingy here is too slow, the design isn’t what I want now, and I plain hate PHP. Whats your pick for another blogging platform?
• Buy a playstation 3 – the Wii has too many bad games, I want more good stuff. And a blueray player too.
• Pay back the money my parents borrowed me.
• Upgrade iPhone when there’s time. If you’ll jailbreak, its more time investment, so you gotta plan wisely.

Feel free to answer with your own changes from this year or your plans for next year. Expect to hear more from me more regularly, like every week. Or something like that. Over and out for this week.

Related Posts:

• Timeframes of Life
• A Waste of Time – How (Not) to Reach Your Goals
• The good old times are gone
• Why using ToDo Lists & GTD?
• Increasing Speed: Evolution of Lifetime