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Productivity

Sometimes social media feels like the thing we’re trying to cope with, and sometimes it feels like the thing that can help us cope. This page offers resources to make social media work for you instead of against you.

The posts here focus on project management, contact management and time management tools and strategies. You’ll find that most of the posts in this category combine established web tools with my own recommended workflow or practices.

For Harvard Business book: How do you reward yourself at work?

February 3, 2012

How do you reward or motivate yourself to complete a task or project? I’m tackling this question in one of my pieces for a forthcoming edition of Harvard Business Review’s Getting the Right Work Done. And I’d love your help. Maybe you’re the kind of person who takes a five minute break every time you check [...]

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How to stop wasting time on technology challenges

January 16, 2012

Today’s practice: The next time you dive into a time-consuming tech challenge, stop to ask: what would a normal person do? Saturday morning I woke up at 4 a.m. in preparation for my flight to London — and accompanying time zone readjustment — later that day. I looked forward to having eons of time to [...]

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Protect your intention span from the distractions of social media

January 12, 2012

Tonight I coined the term “intention span” to refer to the amount of time that passes between intending to work on something and actually starting work. Social media may be the leading contributor to the growth of your intention span, because it throws so many obstacles in the way of you focusing on whatever it [...]

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My 11 most popular blog posts of 2011

December 22, 2011

I published 231 blog posts on this site in 2011. Of those, here are the 11 most popular posts: the posts that had the most pageviews. I’ll be sharing more top 11 lists over the next few days, including my own favorite posts of this year — both on this site, and elsewhere. 25 rules [...]

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29 free or cheap online collaboration software tools for you and your team

December 21, 2011

Under “fire, pants on”, please file my blog post of not two weeks ago, claiming to have seen the light on how to choose online collaboration tools so that you accommodate the least-geeky member of your team. As a philosophy, that lasted for 10 whole days, but as a practice it survived for less than [...]

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Let your team choose project software for your online collaboration

December 7, 2011
Cartoon: Why don't you collaborate by yourself for a little while?

If you’re a project software or online collaboration geek, you want your team to use your tools. Here’s how to make their tools work for you.

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8 secrets to a smarter tech maintenance routine for your blog

October 31, 2011
Girl with drill attacks computer

This weekend I had one of my periodic orgies of blog maintenance. Now it  happens that 14 hours of software upgrades, plugin installs, widget testing and css tweaking is my idea of fun, so giving my blog a weekend of tech love is also a way of giving myself a weekend of delightful relaxation. But [...]

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What is Evernote, and how can it make you a social media power user?

October 25, 2011

Making effective use of social media isn’t about which tools you use, which networks you join or how many followers you have. People who have made social media a valuable, joyful part of their professional and personal lives are people who have made a number of fundamental shifts in the way they work, relate and [...]

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4 easy steps to creating a Twitter list from your conference backchannel

October 18, 2011

You know you’re at a conference with a great backchannel when you want to stay in touch with all the folks who’ve been tweeting away under the designated hashtags. That’s how I felt about the Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR) conference last week: from the moment that I saw the conference hashtag (#ir12) bust out [...]

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How to add yourself to your own Twitter list using HootSuite

September 28, 2011

Today I noticed an irony on the SIM Centre website: our Twitter sidebar widget, which does a lovely job of displaying tweets from all those who are connected to the SIM Centre, wasn’t showing tweets from the SIM Centre itself. I realized that was because our sidebar was fed by a Twitter list called @Simcentre/sim-people, [...]

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Troubleshooting calendar syncing with Google Calendar, iCal, MobileMe and BusySync

September 8, 2011

A couple of nights ago I spent an hour cleaning up what I initially alleged to be a problem with Google’s calendaring servers, but which closer examination revealed to be a case of user error. And I must reluctantly admit that user was me: in my infinite enthusiasm for all available technologies, not to mention [...]

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