Tag: Productivity

As you may remember, the lack of task lists was my one complaint about Google Calendar. ZDNet’s Garett Rogers has done some digging in the code and discovered task lists are in the works.

Yesterday, Google launched Google Calendar. So far, I’m very impressed.

As far as I can tell, it does everything that Apple’s iCal does, except for to-do lists. A few things I liked:

• Importing events from an iCal file
• Each calendar generates its own iCal feed
• Notifications can be sent via pop-up, e-mail, and SMS
• You move and change the length of events by clicking and dragging

There isn’t much bad to say about the service. In about ten minutes of use, I did manage to find one display bug in the Agenda view, which was no big deal. But I was quite disappointed that they didn’t include some sort of to-do functionality. In my quest to increase the portability of my data, I was hoping to move my to-do/event list to Google Calendar. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that added at a future date.

Google Calendar has been launched. I’ll write more once I have a chance to check it out.

From the Observer Magazine:

Depression, unhappiness and happiness can be understood and dealt with only by understanding how we each interpret ourselves and our world. We create our own individual interpretations, and our interpretations determine what we do and feel. We cannot always change what is happening to us, but we are always free to change how we interpret what is happening to us.

Before you get all up in arms about this article being one of those “reality is what we make it” things, take the time to read it. It’s not at all. It’s about the lens through which you choose to view the world.

Beyond that, I’m not really going to comment. You all know which lens I’ve chosen.

I’m not staying up late anymore to work on things, unless it’s absolutely necessary. Lack of sleep has been making me very unproductive in recent weeks. I’m going to turn myself into an early-riser (via Evhead). It turns out that, with a little discipline, it’s really easy to do.

If you see me on IM late at night, please help me out by telling me to go to bed.

Today I managed to dig through the 500+ posts that piled up in my aggregator over the weekend. This is one of the side effects of going out of town when my data is tied to a desktop computer and a semi-broken, mostly-unusable notebook computer.

In December I fixed my e-mail portability problem by forwarding all my work and personal accounts to Gmail. Admittedly, I was hesitant to do so. What if Gmail went down for an extended amount of time? Would I be as productive using a web mail app as I am with a traditional one? What about those times I said that Google was becoming evil? None of those problems have really panned out. I couldn’t be happier with my decision.

The situation with my feed data isn’t quite so simple. At the time I started using Gmail, I also tried using Rojo as my full-time aggregator. Rojo would be an excellent choice for some, if not most, people. I was kind of unhappy with the idea of having to run a separate application for downloading podcasts. But the real deal-breaker was that Rojo is not able to handle private feeds, such as those generated by Basecamp and Instiki, both of which I use for my work. I immediately went back to using NetNewsWire, which meant that if I didn’t have access to my computer, I didn’t have access to my feeds.

Anyway, while I was digging through through all those posts today, I was happy to discover that NetNewsWire 2.1 had gone into public beta. The big new feature with this version is that it allows you to sync your feed data with NewsGator Online. Now I have one set of data that I can access through NetNewsWire on my computers and through NewsGator Online on anyone else’s.

This means that the giant pile of old posts is a thing of the past. You have no idea how happy I am about this. Does this make me a giant geek? You bet.

Marusin pointed to a good article at Lifehacker on the things you can do with wget. I wish I had known about the -m option a few months back. It would’ve saved me a ton of time.

If you want to install wget on your Mac, I suggest building it on your own rather than using the binary linked at the bottom of the Lifehacker article. It seems faster than copying files all over the place and is definitely much more fun.

In a recent (and recommended) post, Merlin Mann points to a good joke about engineers and managers. It’s funny because it’s true.

Bare Bones software, makers of BBEdit, are working on a new organization app called Yojimbo (via Brent Simmons). If I weren’t already using OmniOutliner to organize my life, I’d probably be using Yojimbo.

It strikes me that something like this would make an excellent replacement for the Finder/Spotlight mess that’s currently in OS X. It’s clear that Apple is moving toward turning the filesystem into a database. This is a direction that I, unlike some of my readers, think is a good thing. However, Apple hasn’t yet been able to build a good UI for this database. As much as I want to use Spotlight, I never do. It’s just not convenient enough. An interface like Yojimbo’s might change that.

Jason Fried, of 37signals fame, has posted what I think is a very useful productivity tip: turn your to-do list into a list of smaller to-do lists. It’s great for helping you to get started, which is a big problem for many procrastinators. In fact, I’m doing this right now to get through my backlog of unread bookmarks.