Comments on: Ten Things that Increase My Productivity

By: Caroling Lee

Caroling Lee — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:48:27 +0000

Dave:

Good advice. I’m going to reset mine to check every 5 minutes instead of every minute….

Baby steps.

Thanks,
Caroling

By: Caroling Lee

Caroling Lee — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:46:41 +0000

Christian –

Good point on the whiteboard. We use one for our production schedule and after looking at all the other options like Google Calendar and sharing calendars, this lo-fi method actually seems to work the best.

I’ve also tried disabling notifications or closing down email and chat altogether, but I confess, I’m still working on perfecting that…

Caroling

By: Caroling Lee

Caroling Lee — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:44:07 +0000

Eric!
All the way from Uruguay — and reading our newsletter…I’m flattered.

RE: Pidgin and Skype – I bet you’re not the only one that’s interested in that feature. I did a quick search on the pidgin.im site and found this plugin:
http://code.google.com/p/skype4pidgin/

Not sure how this works or if this is what you’re looking for, but worth a look.

If that’s not it – try sending them a note, the more feature requests they get, the more likely they are to add the functionality.

Thanks for the comment.
Caroling

By: Caroling Lee

Caroling Lee — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:36:39 +0000

Hey Chad:

Let me know what you think of 1Password. If I could start over with it, I would have set up folders first and been more careful with duplicates.

Good luck and glad it was helpful!
Caroling

By: Dave Hime

Dave Hime — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:18:16 +0000

What a great list (easy for me to say, since I already do 8 of the 10 things on it!) and a great resource for everyone already working too many hours. One of the things I started doing last year that has made a huge impact on my productivity is scheduling when incoming email is delivered to my desktop. Previously, I was allowing incoming email to interrupt me every 3 minutes; now I only receive notification of incoming email once an hour.

Thanks!
Dave

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:47:12 +0000

You finally motivated me to set up Roboform – what a relief! But can you believe they don’t have Uruguay as an option for your home address?! And I set up Pidgin too, which is wonderful. But it doesn’t seem to have Skype, I guess one can only ask for so much.

Thanks again,
Eric

By: czdebel

czdebel — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:06:32 +0000

Caroling,

All outstanding suggestions! In addition I have found a dry erase board to be an indispensable kind of “random access memory” for the real-time desktop. The other key productivity tool I use is *disabling* all of the visual and audio email notifications; if something is super urgent I expect a phone call or SMS.

Cheers,
Christian

By: Chad Jewell

Chad Jewell — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:04:14 +0000

Thanks for the 1Password suggestion. I have been getting very frustrated with all the passwords and trying to figure out where I wrote them all down. With the new security required by many sites, you can’t remember them when they require 9 characters with the first being a digit! I have downloaded the trial and think it will really be useful.

Thanks!