Indispensable

21. January 2010 · 2 comments · Categories: Productivity, Technology, Tools · Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Scott McLeod recently shared 13 tools he couldn’t live without. Here are 12 of mine and 2 honorable mentions.

iPhone – I know there was a world before the iPhone, but I prefer not to think about it. Increasingly, I use it more and more around the house in lieu of my laptop if all I’m doing is Tweeting or reading my RSS feeds.

My iPhone

My iPhone

Google Docs – Almost everything I write at least begins life as a Google Doc. Sure, it may end up in Scrivener or Pages for fine-tuning or formatting when it’s ready to be published, but for just getting something down “on paper” it’s tough to beat GDocs.

Gmail – Other than my work email (FirstClass. Blech.), all of my various email accounts are managed in a single Gmail account. I’ve been a Gmailer since it debuted (2004?) and can’t imagine not having it.

Fever – My RSS reader of choice. We all have “top-tier” feeds that we never want to miss and “lower-level” feeds that we read if time allows. Plus, how guilty do you feel when you have “713 unread” in your Google Reader? Fever is a single-user web app that you run on your own server. Basically your top feeds or daily reads are “kindling” and your secondary feeds are “sparks.” The sparks are kept out of the main view and there’s no nagging “unread feeds” indicator so you can ignore them guilt-free.

Fever

My Fever homepage / 92 feeds and zero clutter

Why have sparks at all, then? Here’s where Fever gets interesting… There is some magic algorithm that monitors all your feeds for common topics or links and then gives you a “temperature reading” of the hottest topics and links in all of your feeds. So – for once – it is actually BETTER to subscribe to more feeds as they’ll provide the sparks. Then for daily reading you just cruise through your kindling. There is also a web-based iPhone version (no native app) that looks as good as the full browser-based version. Geek Note: As mentioned above, you have to run Fever on your own server or hosted web space. There is some setup involved, but it took me less than 15 minutes. After that I was able to import my OPML from Google Reader and I’ve done zero maintenance since.

TweetDeck/Tweetie 2 – As I’ve mentioned before, Tweetie for the iPhone and TweetDeck for the desktop.

iTunes – I’m a music fanatic. I have music on constantly when I’m at my desk.

Adium/iChat – Indispensable. I wish more of my colleagues were on AIM or GTalk. I use Adium mostly because it keeps my contacts all in one list. iChat, on the other hand, supports video chatting.

Quicksilver – “Act without doing.” When I sit down at a Mac without QS, I am immediately lost.

Firefox – It’s a little pokey lately, but my plug-ins don’t work in Safari.

Skitch – This was an easy one to almost forget, but I use it at least 2 or 3 times a week. Someone wants to know what settings to use in Adium or where a certain preference is located in our district email client. Instead of writing, “Open Preferences. Click the ‘Accounts’ tab. Find the box for SSL and check it. Then enter ’443′ in the ‘ports’ field…” it’s easier to just pull up my settings and use Skitch to make a screen capture.

Dropbox – Provides access to your stuff from multiple computers as well as the peace of mind to know that your stuff is backed up in the cloud should your hard drive take a dirt nap.

ActionMethod – The best task and project manager I’ve used in a long time. Complete with an iPhone app. After trying many, many other apps this is the only one that works like I think. Plus, there are nifty paper products to complement your online setup.

Honorable Mention:

Evernote – The place to dump everything that has other place to go. Scans of receipts, software licenses, anything.

Caffeine – Not an “every day” application, but it’s nice to have when you need it. Click on the coffee cup in your task bar and it fills up. Now your display won’t go to sleep. Ever. Very useful if you’re presenting. Saves you the embarrassment of being in the middle of a presentation when your display goes to sleep or your screen saver comes on.

Get your life back, Part 3

13. August 2008 · 3 comments · Categories: blogging, Productivity · Tags: , ,

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve captured what you need to do and set up a system to help you actually do it. But what about those odds and ends that you may need to revisit? Those little doodles, emails, handouts, or reference documents that you are just certain you’ll need agan?

As I indicated up front, I have untrained myself from the old habit of scribbling notes during meetings. Instead, I capture things that need to be done; actions that need to be taken. Yet I still find myself staring at piles of stuff that may need a home for some unforeseen time in the future when someone might ask me for it. Old meeting agendas, handouts, memos from the district, and the like.

For me, stuff like this breaks down into two basic categories:

Electronic Stuff

  • Emails with information that may not be immediately important but may be important later. Dates for trainings for teacher mentors, for instance. I don’t need it now, but may need it when an interested teacher approaches me about mentoring.
  • Other important documents you may need access to later. We have an emergency phone tree at my school, for example. Or maybe you got a PDF of a workshop registration attached to an email.
  • PDFs or other articles you keep meaning to read. I receive a lot of publications via email. Many of them are compilations of articles from around the web and there are always a few I’d like to read at some magical point in the future, “when I have the time.”

evernote1Evernote has become my digital dumping ground. Enough has been written about Evernote that I’m not going to spend a lot of time on what it does or how it works, rather I’m going to share with you how I make it work for me.

I keep a few notebooks for various purposes. I try to keep stuff that is work-related in its own notebook. In my “LHS Reference” notebook, you’ll find math content standards and frameworks, an emergency phone tree, and a list of important district phone numbers.  If I see an article I like, I ask Firefox to print it as a PDF and dump the PDF into my “Articles & Papers” notebook. Receipts for, well, anything get dumped into “Receipts” and anything without a clearly defined place goes into “Random Stuff.”

I recommend starting with one giant notebook and letting things happen organically. For instance, I think I’m going to have another notebook eventually called “Recipes” where I save recipes I come across online.

Non-Electronic Stuff

For stuff that doesn’t exist in electronic format (handouts, whiteboards from great brainstorming sessions, completed classroom observation instruments, etc), my first question is usually whether I can get it into electronic format (and whether I’d want to). One of these days I’ll get a Fujitsu ScanSnap, but until then I have a few other tricks up my sleeve.

Print“For handouts, I ask the hander-outer if they can email a copy to me or, “Put it on the wiki.” If it’s an Office document – or anything non-PDF – I’ll turn it into a PDF (this functionality is trivial on a Mac). For whiteboards I’ll shoot a picture or two with my iPhone. Both the PDFs and digital images can get dumped into Evernote where it will happily scan all the legible text and make even digital pictures of my whiteboard searchable.

But, alas, there are some things that just don’t make the jump to digital. For instance, I don’t have the time or the need to scan all the data-collection instruments I use for classroom observations. I have a folder for each teacher I evaluate and the instruments go in there. Once I complete a summative evaluation, I usually shred the instruments and move on.

As I mentioned in my very first post in this series, I don’t keep a lot of random stuff in hard copy format if I can avoid it. Having reference items in Evernote makes them easy to search and access if and when I need them.

Putting it together

We’ve come a long way from capture, to action, to filing away stuff you may need to get your hands on at some future time. Regardless of the system you put in place for yourself, make sure it’s something you can stick with and that it becomes a transparent part of your daily routine. The less you have to think about it the better.

By spending some time up front deciding how you plan to capture, act, and file you can free up your valuable time for other things. Plus you’ll feel less stressed because you’ll know you have at least some of your world under control.

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