Today’s practice: Tighten your online security.

You’d think that writing a dissertation about political computer hacking would make a girl sensitive to the challenges of online security. And it has, up to a point. But I recently decided to up my level of tech security, and in the process discovered some handy new tools that make good security easier to achieve.

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I have a love-hate relationship with task management software. On the one hand, I’m kind of obsessed with it: trying out new task and project management tools is one of my favorite pastimes, and it’s hard for me to resist trying out each shiny new entry in the market. On the other hand, I’m a fairly resistant user: once the honeymoon wears off,  and my task management program is full of a huge list of tasks that I MUST DO TODAY, I find that list so daunting that I tend to avoid looking at it, and go back to keeping my list in my head.

Recently, however, I’ve returned to the task management fold. For the past month I’ve been using Things, a task management app that runs on both my Mac and my iPad (and would run on my iPhone too, if I paid another $9.99). I hate to jinx it, but this time, my task list feels different. Not because Things is the Holy Grail of Task Management I’ve been looking for — I used Things for a while last year, and ended up in the same old avoidance pattern once I accumulated a few dozen items on my to-do list — but because I’m using my task list in a new way. Here’s what seems to be working, and could also work for you:

1. Minimize your list. In the past few years, I’ve followed the GTD religion of writing down every task that is in my head, so I can free up my brain power to cure cancer or crack the problem of nuclear fusion. But in this iteration, I’ve returned to a piece of wisdom I read many years ago: for right-brain people like me, task lists tend to be generative, inspiring so many ideas that we soon get overwhelmed. So this time out, I’m writing down only the absolutely crucial tasks that I don’t want to lose track of — not the “some day” or “shoulda coulda woulda” tasks that tend to clutter up my list.
2. Use existing software. As usual, I began my return to task management with my beloved process of investigating new software options. But I caught myself, and decided to just use the same damn software I had already purchased last year. I took everything that was in my old Things list, and archived it, so I didn’t have to deal with that backlog.
3. Use one device. Syncing is another obsession that typically gets me worn-out with my task management regime.  Even though I use two computers, an iPhone and an iPad, I’ve resisted the temptation to pour hours into figuring out the right Dropbox setup to keep my Things list in sync across all of them. I’m just using it on the single computer I use most of the time, and since I’m only trying to track my major tasks — and not every damn thing — that is working just fine.
4. Go solo. As a social software addict, I’ve been an intermittent evangelist of tools like Basecamp and Manymoon, which let me share tasks with my team. But one of the reasons I am now afraid to look at my Manymoon list (oh yes, it’s still there) is because of all the tasks other people have recorded for me, and one of the reasons I avoid Basecamp is that I get distracted from my own tasks by looking at other people’s. With Things, I fly solo, and if someone needs to get a task onto my list, they simply tell me about it — and I decide whether and how to put it on my list.
5. Check rarely. One trigger of to-do list resistance is the feeling that I’m being ruled by my task management software, rather than vice versa. So I look at Things relatively infrequently — once or twice a day, or sometimes not at all. The only reason to look is if I have a major item to add, if I’m trying to decide what to work on next, or if I’ve just completed something and need to check it off.   Looking at my task list when I don’t have any time free to actually work on it is simply a source of stress, and my daily glance is enough to ensure nothing drops off my radar.

I’ve fallen off the to-do list wagon far too many times to feel confident that I’ve finally cracked the task management nut. But I’ve been shocked at how much more productive I’ve been in the month that I’ve used my task list in this moderate, non-fetishistic way. And it’s that productivity payoff — rather than the joy of using geeky software — that could keep me on track and to-doing.

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How many people do you receive e-mail from that you read and reply to every single time?

I’m guessing it’s just a handful: Your best friend — the one who sends you short periodic updates with a single recent photo, not the one who sends you weekly 2-pagers. The super-smart former colleague, now a rising star at another firm, who e-mails you two or three times a year with useful introductions or a succinct request for help you can actually provide. The client who sends you the latest round of project notes in a friendly, tightly-edited bullet list. And maybe, for the sake of self-preservation, your boss (unless your boss is one of those 45-separate-emails-a-day types, at which point I bet you’re doing some subject line-based triage.)

What do these correspondents have in common? Each one offers:

• A benefit for reading each message: it’s pleasurable or it helps you do your job better/more efficiently
• A limited claim on your attention (both in the frequency and length of messages)
• Emotional gratification: the tone of their messages reinforces your positive feelings about your relationship (and if your boss consistently writes in a way that doesn’t make you feel positive, it’s time to consider a move)

In other words, each of these correspondents provides a high return on investment — either because the time required to read their correspondence is very low, or the pay-off is relatively high (compared to the other messages in your inbox).

This is the kind of e-mail correspondent we should each aspire to be. But it’s not something you can achieve by signing a manifesto or adding a sig line that says “I hope you enjoyed this friendly, concise and valuable message.”

You’ve got to get there by actually writing the kind of messages you want to receive — and only those messages. You’ve got to ask three questions of each message you send, before you send it:

1. What problem does this e-mail solve, or what benefit does it offer, for the person I’m writing to?
2. Could I make this e-mail shorter? If I’m going to e-mail this person again today or this week, could I usefully combine multiple messages into one?
3. Does the tone of this e-mail reflect my affection and respect for the person I’m writing to?

Ask yourself these three questions, and you can become the kind of e-mailer you wish to see in the world. If we each work towards that goal, we can look forward to a day when opening our inboxes is a moment of delight rather than dread.

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I am always amazed at how much I get done on my focused writing days — the days when I leave the office and camp in one of the cafés or restaurants where ambient noise helps me concentrate and write, write, write.

But it’s not my word count that amazes me: it’s all the other stuff I get done while desperately trying to avoid the blank screen, daunting paragraph or elusive synonym. Here’s what a typical hour looks like:

10:00: Check email. Reply to four messages.
10:10:  Check Twitter. Retweet something.
10:12    Look at the document I’m working on. Read three paragraphs from my last writing day.
10:16   Check Facebook. Like something.
10:20   Check email. Reply to a message. Remember a related task, and add it to my task manager. Decide it’s easier to just write that memo memo right now, so quickly knock it off.
10:28   Look at my document again. Read another paragraph. Write two more.
10:42   Check email. Reply to a meeting invitation. Google to see if I can find a solution for the calendar syncing issue that’s been bugging me, and fix the problem.
10:48   Write another paragraph
10:57   Brainwave while writing inspires me to tweet something. Look at other tweets while I’m in HootSuite. See a few things to retweet, and schedule them to retweet later.

And so on. OK, so maybe this isn’t the textbook version of “focused” writing, but I am getting a good page written every hour. And while I’m at it I’m also catching up on email, restocking my Twitter queue, and troubleshooting my tech.

I’m such a productive procrastinator, in fact, that it makes me wonder why I schedule any other kin dog work day. If I can get all my tasks done on the days that I’m writing, why don’t I make most days writing days, and fit my tasks into these interstitial moments?

If it weren’t for meetings, I would. So if you have any thoughts on how to make meetings work in 5 minute, between-paragraph increments, please let me know.

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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 something off your to-do list.

Maybe you’re the type who saves up for a big reward — like a day at the spa after you wrap a major project.

I’d love to hear your secrets to staying motivated at work, or the way you reward yourself for a job well done. You can leave your thoughts in the comment thread below, tweet them to me (@awsamuel) or drop me an email (alex [at] alexandrasamuel [dot] com).

Thanks in advance for your help!

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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 relax before the kids woke up, or at least to getting a bit of work wrapped up before hitting the road. Instead, I spent three hours converting, transferring and syncing video files so I could catch up on my favourite shows while in flight.

About two and half hours into this process — after reading up on iPad video formats, updating to the latest version of HandBrake, finding and tormenting a couple of video files, queuing up my video conversions, troubleshooting our home wifi network,  testing transfer options, clearing hard drive space on my Macbook, and syncing my iPad so it would be backed up before I started transferring video — I stopped to ask myself:

What would a normal person do?

You know, a normal person: somebody who doesn’t want to learn about video codecs, install new software, tweak IP settings or do any of the other little techie fidgets that geeks like me accept as part of the price of online living. I am told that the very device I wanted to watch video on — the iPad — is designed for these normals. Apparently many of them use it to watch video. And I’m guessing that none of them use Handbrake or bit torrent. So what’s their secret?

Imaging the normal person alternative is something that has occurred to me during many of my recent tech (mis)adventures.

Like when I found myself two days into learning the Google Maps API…because I wanted to make a photo album of our latest family vacation. Surely, normal people make photo albums without learning any APIs whatsoever.

Or when I nearly clicked “buy” on a $200 WordPress Plugin that would let me integrate Amazon affiliate links….so I could monetize my compulsive shoe shopping. Surely, normal people indulge their shopping habits without expecting a direct ROI.

Or when I spent 10 hours trying to create a bootable dupe of my Windows netbook’s hard drive….before turning it into a “hackintosh”. Surely, normal people who want a Mac, buy a Mac.

Thinking about a normal person would do when confronted by a particular obstacle has proven to be a useful check on my habit of diving deep into a tech challenge without asking how much of my time it’s really worth. Unfortunately, by the time I think to ask the question, I’m usually several hours into the process, and so many steps past what a normal person would take on that I can no longer fully imagine pursuing the normal person path.

From what I see, the normal person path is usually one of the following:

1. Pay money for it. Instead of doing my 8-step video download, conversion and syncing process, a normal person would just buy the damn show on iTunes.
2. Take it or leave it. A normal person would use the digital photo book software as designed, even if it didn’t offer the ability to make a map of where all the photos were taken. If she didn’t like the way that photo book looked, she just wouldn’t use the software. Modifying it to make it work the way she wanted wouldn’t be a viable alternative.
3. Don’t even think about it. A normal person wouldn’t try to do half the stuff I end up wasting time on. It just wouldn’t occur to a normal person that you might want to turn your PC into a Mac.

Of course, the normal person path has its limitations. Much of the knowledge I have to offer my clients and colleagues is acquired in the course of attempting some time-wasting, non-normal endeavour: just a week after I “wasted” the weekend learning all about Google Maps, a client asked me to mock up a web app that was a perfect use case for a photo+maps combo, and I knew just how to do it.

More profoundly, my fundamental ease with technology comes from a willingness to knock my head against a wall until I finally accomplish what I’m after. Sure, I may spend a lot more time than the task really warrants, and I may not always prevail.

But most of the time my efforts are guided by a simple philosophy: Big woman, small computer. I’m bigger, so I will make the computer bend to my will.

For some reason, normal people don’t make the assumption that being physically larger than a laptop or desktop means that you will prevail in a battle of wills. While they may miss out on the opportunity to test and strengthen their tech skills, they make up for it with sheer efficiency. They can crank out a lot of wax tablets (or more realistically, Word documents) in the time it takes me to set up an RSS aggregator that automagically creates a single web page with a highly customized content structure.

The normal person lifestyle isn’t for everyone. If you get a rush from making a computer or website do something that you weren’t sure it could do, you’ll continue to spend lots of time on tasks that no normal person would undertake.

But if you’ve ever found yourself wondering where the day is gone, only to realize you’ve spent it delving deep into some tech-low challenge you’d have been better-off pursuing in a low-tech way, it’s worth adding the normal person mentality to your repertoire. The more often you practice, the more quickly you’ll stop to ask: What would a normal person do?

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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.

Intention span: The amount of time that passes between intending to work on something and actually starting to work on it.

1/12/2012 6:16 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@awsamuel

AlexandraSamuel.com

“I’ve got to reply to that Twitter mention,” you think. “It’ll only take a minute.”

“I forgot to post that photo on Facebook!” you suddenly remember. “I have to do that before I can get down to work.”

“I owe her a comment!” you realize. “How rude it would be to overlook that post.”

If social media is your professional responsibility as well as your creative, social or expressive outlet, those rationales are even more compelling. Taking care of your social media outreach or replies is part of your “brand management” or “reputation management”.

But the reason you care about your brand or reputation is because it helps you do your work in the world. You know, the work that is beckoning to you from that Word document or Excel spreadsheet or desk full of paper, just behind the window with all the shiny tweets.

Social media will wait for you. And when you come back to it, there will be even more for you to read, share and engage with.

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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.

1. 25 rules of social media netiquette: As part of my 40-day blogging project on the first 40 years of life online, I round up wisdom from 25 different bloggers on how to behave well online.
2. On the dangers of crowdsourced surveillance: This blog post about the social media response to the Vancouver hockey riots was published on the same day as my Harvard Business Review blog post, among the first to raise concerns about the prospect of online vigilantism.
3. 10 ways Evernote can train you to think like a social media power user: Evernote is more than the most awesome digital notebook you could ever want on the web your desktop your iPhone your iPad your Android every device you can think of. It can actually train you in the work habits and thought processes that will make you a wickedly effective social media user.
4. How to write a blog post in 10 minutes: As part of my series on social media in 3 hours a week, I explain how to write a useful, polished blog post in 10 minutes — and just in case you don’t believe me, supply a real-time screencast of me doing just that.
5. How to sustain a social media presence in 3 hours a week: From finding inspiration in Google Reader to scheduling your blog posts and tweets, this post walks you through the steps and weekly workflow that will allow you to maintain a useful and effective social media presence in just 3 hours a week.
6. Using Syncplicity and Dropbox to put Google Docs on your desktop: If you spend a lot of time uploading and downloading to and from Google Docs, or you simply prefer working in Word and/or Excel, this neat trick will help you keep your Google Docs automatically synchronized to your desktop or laptop (and even your iPad or iPhone, if you use Dropbox on them).
7. Delete your Klout profile and be more than a Klout score: In a companion piece to the Social Sanity Manifesto at Harvard Business Review, I walk you through the steps of deleting your Klout profile — even if you didn’t know you had one.
8. Respecting the billable hour: Would you ask someone for $500? If your answer is no, read this post so you’ll know whether, when and how it’s ok to ask for (or give) a pro bono hour of someone’s otherwise billable time.
9. 4 great ways to use Evernote with Skitch today — plus 14 new possibilities: With the news that Evernote acquired Skitch, an image capture tool, two of my very software products became part of a single company. This post outlines the ways these two apps can and should be used together.
10. Crowdsourced repression: Could it happen here?: This post digs into the the question of how the social media response to Vancouver’s hockey riots raised the spectre of authoritarianism.
11. The dangers of relying on Facebook and Twitter authentication: Pinterest may have been my favorite new software tool of 2011. But its early reliance on Facebook and Twitter authentication kept me from sharing it with my best friends — and demonstrated the reason you should be cautious in designing sites that do all their sign-ups via other social networks.

I’m pleased so many people have enjoyed these 11 posts from 2011. In the next part of this series, I’ll show you 11 more posts that are worth a second look.

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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 48 hours. The truth is that I go into each project as if half the value I bring to a team is the opportunity to introduce them to new software tools that will make them smarter, happier, and more attractive to the same or opposite sex.

But the door-to-door, project-to-project evangelism of productivity tools is not a scaleable model. So here you have it, an inventory of the software tools that I bludgeon gently encourage my colleagues to use. These are all web apps, except as noted, and are all free, except as noted.

Project management, time tracking and scheduling

1. Basecamp: A project management platform that includes task management, messaging, file sharing, calendaring, time tracking and “writeboards” (shared documents). Use it as the hub for planning and tracking your project tasks and deliverables, and to exchange all project-related emails so that they are archived in one place without overloading your inbox. By setting up separate permissions levels for members of your immediate team, and your client, partner or subcontractor teams, you can keep selected task lists and email threads private to your inner circle, while coordinating communications and planning with a larger group. Free for one project, $24-149/month for premium plan.
2. Google Calendar: Online calendaring tool that lets you see your calendar on any web-connected device, or even sync to your computer or phone’s calendar. Use it to manage your personal schedule, share your availability with your team, view teammate’s available windows (you can each set your calendars to show available/unavailable rather than full calendar details), subscribe to your closest colleagues’ calendars, and invite people to meetings or calls.
3. Harvest: Time tracking and invoicing tool. $12-90/month depending on the size of your team. Use it to log and track time on your projects, track expenses, invoice clients, and see reports of invoices paid and outstanding.
4. Doodle: A scheduling tool that lets you identify a set of potential call or meeting times and find a common time that’s convenient for everyone invited into the Doodle poll. For scheduling any call or meeting that has to accommodate the scheduling constraints of more than 2 people.

Communications

5. Skype: Audio & video teleconferencing tool, running off software you install on your computer. For one-to-one video calls, or calls where we want to exchange links via text during the call. But not for group calls if I can avoid it, because I have yet to do a group call on Skype that didn’t spend the first 15 minutes trying to get everyone on the call before inevitably losing one or more callers sometime during the meeting.
6. SMS: Text messaging on cell phones. For urgent issues, for “I’ll be there in 5 minutes” when running late, for sending passwords to someone after just emailing them with a username, for “sorry can’t talk in a meeting” messages when I fail to take a call.
7. AIM/Gmail chat: Instant messaging/chat service, accessed through web interface or a desktop chat client (like iChat).For conversations with my immediate team or closely collaborative subcontractors, just about anytime day or night. Opening an IM to a colleague is less intrusive than calling them; if they are in a meeting they can still answer quick questions or tell me when they’ll have time to reply. It’s also one of the fastest and most reliable ways for my close colleagues to get my attention, which is why I only use it with a very small circle.
8. Email: For heartfelt thank yous or confidential exchanges that don’t belong in the Basecamp record.

Writing, file and document management

9. Google Docs: Online document management with real-time collaborative editing, in doc or spreadsheet form. For tracking project tasks and contacts (in a spreadsheet); collaboratively drafting documents or project plans, particularly with more than 2 collaborators (Word’s “track changes” rapidly becomes a nightmare if you send a document to 2 different people for comments at the same time.)
10. Evernote: A flexible online notebook to hold all your documents (or snapshots, or voice memos), synced across multiple devices (web, phone, tablet); install the (free) software app for your computer and phones or use the web version when you’re away from your own machine; . Create a shared Evernote notebook for minutes of team meetings, drafts of documents and notes you want to share with the team, a single note with the contact info of everyone on your team, snapshots of whiteboards creating during meetings (so they become searchable thanks to Evernote’s text recognition) or web clips of any pages you want to include in a shared compilation of project-relevant research (you may want to create a separate shared notebook just for that research file). Pay for Premium service ($45/year) to enable editing of notes in a shared notebook, plus other benefits listed here.
11. Subethaedit: A document editor you install on your mac, which lets two or more people collaboratively edit a document in real time; free for 30 days, 29 Euros for purchase. As long as I’ve invited you into the document over wifi, you’ll see what I type as I’m typing it. I use this for real-time collaboration when working with a colleague in a setting that doesn’t have reliable wifi, by creating a computer-to-computer network over wifi. (If there’s solid wifi, I now use Google Docs since it’s completely real time, too.) We use this to take collaborative minutes during team meetings (so the person who is talking doesn’t have to type while they talk) and to have a set of collaborative minutes and backchannel during every client meeting or pitch.
12. DropBox: Cloud-based (i.e. online) file storage and file sharing. Create a dedicated project folder in the top-level of your DropBox account, and invite other members of your project team into the folder. Use it to store all background documents on your project plus any working documents and deliverables; organize these into subfolders.
13. Syncplicity: A DropBox-like cloud-based file storage service, but with automatic syncing to Google Docs. Use Syncplicity on its own or with DropBox so that the latest version of any doc or spreadsheet in your Google Docs account is automatically synced to your local computer here’s how), so you can edit it while offline or simply work in Word or Excel. Move files into your Syncplicity folder to have them automatically upload to DropBox.
14. Scrivener: Mac or Windows application for writing long documents, especially books and scripts/screenplays. Store a project on DropBox so you and your co-author can each keep it synched to your respective computers, and take turns writing or editing your common project. Instructions on using Scrivener for collaboration are here, but be sure to read this page about Scrivener + DropBox and note the warnings against opening the same file on two different machines at the same time. Free for 30 days, $40-$45 to buy.
15. MindMeister: A brainstorming and mindmapping tool for creating flowcharts or mindmaps, and sharing those with a team (you can give others permission to view or modify). Free for up to 3 mindmaps (or for even more for the first 30 days), $5-15/month after that. Use it to map out a project vision, outline and organize a document, break a large group into smaller teams, map out the structure of a website or analyze any challenge visually. If you haven’t used mindmapping as a thinking or planning tool, read http://www.mind-mapping.co.uk/make-mind-map.htm”> a good introduction here or here.

Twitter and social networking

16. Twitter: Post 140-character status updates or private messages. For exchanging quick questions-and-answers via DMs, posting mentions of my colleagues that give them kudos for their work, compiling Twitter lists of tweeters who cover the topic we’re working on, and reaching out to others about our work.
17. Hootsuite: Tool for viewing, composing and scheduling updates to Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. Upgrade to a premium account ($15/mo) so you can share access to a Twitter account with colleagues, assigning tweets to team members for response, or queueing up tweets for review before sending.
18. Listorious: A list of Twitter lists (I know, I made fun of it, but I’ve seen the light.) Use it to jumpstart the Twitter account for a new project by finding and following a few relevant lists, or to find experts whose tweets will be helpful to your work.
19. Facebook: Social network. Friend the people you are working with on a project or on an ongoing basis, and get to know them as actual human beings; this is a great way to build your working relationship. If you don’t want to share all your adorable kid pictures with your colleagues (I recommend that you don’t), or if you have other reasons for keeping some of your Facebook posts off the radar of your clients and collaborators, follow these instructions on how to use Facebook lists to share different content with different groups of people.

Link and citation sharing

20. Delicious: A social bookmarking tool for storing, organizing and sharing links to websites; use it alongside or instead of your browser’s built-in “bookmarks” or “favorites”, or better yet, use a tool that keeps your browser bookmarks in sync with delicious. Choose a common tag or tags that you and your team members will use to bookmark relevant resources (after first double-checking to see that the tag isn’t already in use), and share links by tagging them instead of circulating them by email; subscribe to the tag from within Google Reader or iGoogle so that you can see the latest links from your team.
21. Zotero: A Firefox extension for creating and managing a citation library, organizing your notes about articles/books, and inserting citations (endnotes or footnotes) into a document. Create a Zotero group for your project team (see this how-to) and use it to share the resources (and especially, the annotations) you add to your citation library.
22. Papers: A Mac application for finding, downloading, organizing, annotating and citing PDFs instead of leaving them scattered all over your hard drive. Create a Livfe collection (“>here’s an overview) to share your citations and notes with other colleagues who need to work from the same documents (for copyright reasons, they’ll have to re-download the PDFs to their own Papers library. Free to try for 30 days, $79 to buy.

Image sharing

23. Pinterest: A tool for collecting, curating and sharing images you bookmark from across the web and organize into “pinboards” (like bulletin boards) of favorite images. Set up one or more pinboards for your team and set the board settings to allow “me + contributors” to pin images. Create a pinboard of design inspiration for your team, a set of product options you are considering purchasing, an image file of photos or pictures you may want to incorporate into a document or website, or infographics you want to tweet.
24. Skitch: Image capture and annotation software tool (Mac and Android only, iOS coming soon). Use Skitch to capture screen shots of web sites or applications, annotate them with comments or change requests, and upload them to Skitch servers for sharing with your team members.

Blogs & content management

25. Google Reader: An RSS reader for aggregating the RSS feeds of different blogs or searches, so you can read them all in one place. Set up subscriptions to the blogs that are relevant to your project, or to the RSS feeds for relevant Google news or blog searches. Place those feeds in a single folder within Google Reader, save that folder as a bundle and then share the bundle with the other members of your team. (Note that your bundle will be visible to anyone who has the URL.)
26. WordPress: Blogging and content management system. Use a WordPress or other blog to share news about a project-in-progress, or to create an internal (password-protected) site for project musings that are shared only with team members.
27. Drupal: Content management system for running blogs or complex web sites. I often work with teams to build and manage Drupal sites, or to create ongoing content (e.g. blog posts) for those sites. The key to working effectively as a team on a Drupal site is to make good use of its roles system, so that you can safely assign a new team member to a role that lets him create content without worrying he’s going to nuke some other aspect of the site.

App management

28. Mailplane: Gmail client for Mac, with easy switching between different Gmail accounts. If you are responsible for reading or responding to email on behalf of a website or project team, set up the website’s email hosting through Google Apps, and add the email account you’re managing (e.g. info@yourwebsite.com) to the list of accounts in Mailplane. Now it’s easy to switch between your own Gmail account and the Gmail account you’re managing for the team. Free for 30 days, $25 to buy, SO worth it.
29. Prism: Firefox extension or standalone app. If you are using a lot of web apps, it’s easy to lose them in a mess of browser windows. I wrap each of my favourite web apps as a separate app, and put links to each app on your desktop or in your launcher or doc. Mac users can also use Fluid to do the same thing.

That’s the roundup of tools I currently use on a regular basis, and that I’ve used as collaboration tools this year. I add new apps to my toolkit all the time — Google+ is just starting to make its way into my collaborative workflow — so I’m always eager to hear about new collaborative tools that could change my life. What are the essential tools in your toolkit?

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How many project software tools does it take to collaborate effectively?

If you’re anything like me, your answer might run to the double digits. I mean, how can you work with someone unless you can communicate through a combination of e-mail, Twitter, Skype, SMS, and chat? How can you share work in progress and avoid duplicate effort unless the whole team uses Google Docs, DropBox, a shared Evernote notebook, a collection of citations in Zotero, MindMeister for mindmapping, a board of images on Pinterest, a common folder of Google Reader feeds and an agreed-upon tag in delicious? How will you keep track of your tasks and time unless you’re all using Basecamp and Harvest? And let’s be honest, how viscerally annoying will you find it to watch your new teammates take screenshots without using Skitch, update their status without using HootSuite or access PDFs without using Papers?

Lest you think I exaggerate, I have foisted everything except Harvest upon one or another of my Emily Carr colleagues this past year. As far as I’m concerned, the first two weeks of any project should be dedicated to the sign-up process and learning curve that will turn my new team-mates into Web 2.0 productivity nerds.

Strangely, however, some of the people I work with seem to be more interested in getting our project done than in choosing or learning the project software tools that I insist are absolutely required in order to work effectively. And since I notionally recognize that the term “collaboration” isn’t just a category of software, but also a philosophy and practice of working closely and respectfully with other human beings, I have tried to open my mind just a tiny bit to the possibility that not every aspect of group work requires a different web application.

What I’ve learned is that the geekiest person in the group is not, in fact, the right person to drive collaborative software choices. In fact, if you’re a passionate early adopter, you’re probably the last person who should drive which software gets used. After all, your early adopter-ness means you are both experienced and skilled at learning new software; you’re also much more likely to be familiar with the tools your colleagues like to use than they are to be familiar with yours.

So instead of jumping in with your awesome lifechanging software picks, how about hanging back and seeing how the rest of the team likes to work? Find out what they use already — most often a combination of Google Docs, email, and sometimes Twitter or Evernote — and then take the lead in strategizing how to use it for this particular project. And if you’re working together over an extended period of time, and the tools your colleagues like using are failing in some very obvious ways, then and only then can you think about introducing one or two tools that can maybe fill the most painful gaps.

The beauty of this strategy is that when you avoid overwhelming your collaborators with a tidal wave of new software, you actually create some space for them to notice and get interested in the tools you use. Maybe they are still taking notes in Word, but they see you using Evernote; maybe they are trading files by keychain, but get intrigued by your use of Dropbox; maybe they are writing down their appointments in an actual paper calendar (I actually do have several colleagues who do that!!) until they see the jaw-dropping beauty that is Calvetica.

People, when that day comes, you will be ready. And until then, you and your favorite software tools will just have to collaborate on your own.

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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 you don’t have to be a hard-core geek to see that giving your blog some occasional tech attention — in addition to your ongoing content creation — is part of keeping your site functional and useful.

A successful blog relies on an effective maintenance routine.  Here are 8 secrets to a smarter blog maintenance routine:

1. Set a maintenance budget. Dedicate a specific amount of time (or money — i.e. someone else’s time) to your blog’s tech maintenance each month. Figure on spending at least 1 hour on tech for every 10 hours you spend on content: if you spent 50 hours a month writing for your blog, replying to comments, and promoting your blog on Twitter, you should spend at least 5 hours on tech maintenance. If you love the geeking out, you can spend as much as 35% of your blogging time on the tech side: if  more than a third of the time you dedicate to your blog goes toward playing with the box it came in, you should probably shift your energy back into creating actual content.
2. Know your goals. As with everything, your blog tech work will be most constructive if you keep an eye on the prize. Are you trying to increase your traffic? Get people reading your best work? Land a certain kind of business opportunity? Whenever you make time for tech maintenance, start by thinking about those goals, and ask yourself which fixes or upgrades will do the most to move you towards your goal. Just as important, think about how you’ll know if you’re making progress towards those goals: Will you see more conversions? (Customer inquiries, RSS subscriptions, book sales.) More overall traffic or more new readers? More pages per visit?
3. Track your changes. If you know what you’re trying to accomplish, you’ll be better able to set priorities for each bout of upgrades. But how will you know what paid off? Your best bet is to keep track of all your changes in the same place you track your site metrics. I do this with the annotation feature on Google Analytics: whenever I fix or enhance some aspect of my blog, I make an annotation noting what I’ve changed. So if I’ve made an adjustment that I hope will increase my RSS subscriptions, or bring in more traffic to a section of the site, or lead to more page views per visit, I can later compare my traffic before and after the change, and see if my tweaking paid off.
4. Keep a queue. I have a separate notebook in Evernote for “Alex blog tech”, where I keep notes on plugins I’ve tested, code snippets I’ve implemented, and tweaks I want to undertake. Inside my tech notebook is a single document where I keep a (roughly prioritized) list of all my tech maintenance needs: the glitches I’ve noticed and intend to fix, the improvements I’d like to implement, the structural changes I want to consider. When I have a window available for tech work, I can take a quick look at my list and tackle the top-priority items.
5. Shoot your work. One way to help track your  changes is to take screenshots of your site’s before-and-after states. Use Skitch to take screenshots of your site before you start experimenting, and then take a shot afterwards that captures what you’ve accomplished. Store your before-and-after shots side-by-side in Evernote so that you can see what you’ve accomplished.
6. Follow your bliss. When I’m working on a client site, the top of their queue is the top of my queue. When I’m working on my own site, I get to follow my bliss: if the to-dos at the top of my task list are too boring to tackle, I work on whatever catches my fancy. There’s no point short-circuiting my tech maintenance urge by trying to force myself to undertake a routine job I can’t bear to plow through.
7. Multitask. One secret to undertaking those boring tasks (as well as the more enjoyable parts of tech maintenance) is multitasking. I do my tech maintenance while watching multi-taskable TV shows, and I often pair a fun tech job (like adding a new sidebar block) with a boring tech job (like backing up my database) so that I can get through the routine stuff and have some fun.
8. Blog your tweaks. When I implement an upgrade that requires me to customize a plugin, write or modify a code snippet, or combine off-the-shelf elements in a creative way, I try to turn that into a blog post. The more challenging the fix, the more effort I put into the blog post, because I figure I’m working out a solution that others will find useful too — like how to choose the right widget control plug-in, or how to create a category-specific teaser box. Some of these blog posts have become consistent traffic-drivers on my site, and they help ensure that when I next feel like hacking on my site, I remember what I’ve done!

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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 most crucially, think. And those shifts aren’t limited to the way they engage with social media: they’re deeply embedded in the way web users have reconstructed — and socialized — their entire toolkit. Beginning with the simple notebook.

What is Evernote? Evernote is the notebook of choice for social media users. This extraordinarily flexible digital, online notebook gives you a single place to create or compile all your notes, web clippings, snapshots or documents. And because it syncs to the web you can even use it as a collaboration tool (building shared notebooks with colleagues) or a publishing engine (by connecting Evernote to your blog, or publishing entire notebooks). Using Evernote doesn’t just make you more efficient: it actually retrains you as a social thinker.

Here are the 10 mental shifts Evernote can help you make, transforming the way you relate to the online (and offline!) world:

1. Think creative. Thinking social means thinking like a creator, not a consumer. Whether you’re going to blog, snap, video or tweet, you need to maintain an ideas file that captures all your moments of creative inspiration, and provides a source of renewal during those times when when your inspiration runs dry. An Evernote ideas notebook can capture topic ideas or partial drafts, quick sketches, voice memos, or web clippings that spark new thinking. Get in the habit of adding to your ideas notebook whenever you have the faintest glimmer of inspiration, and you’ll discover that the more you jot down, the more inspiration flows.
2. Think sharing. If the work you are doing for yourself can also be useful to others, share it. That’s one of the fundamental principles underlying many of the web’s great social successes, from people who share their browser bookmarks on delicious, to people who share their bibliographies through Zotero. As any frequent sharer will tell you, what seems like a selfless act is repaid many times over, thanks to the feedback and resources you get back once you start sharing yourself. But in a culture built around the mythology of scarcity, it takes conscious effort to develop the instinct to share. You can develop that instinct by sharing selected Evernote notebooks with the world, so that other people can benefit from your effort — whether that effort was expended on evaluations of 14 different software tools, or compiling the best tips on taking kids to Disneyland.
3. Think collaborative. You don’t need to do everything yourself. The proliferation of tools for online collaboration means it’s often more efficient to make a rough start yourself, and then invite others to contribute to your efforts. Every article on Wikipedia is a collaborative effort, but you don’t have to be that public in your collaborations. Develop your capacity for collaboration by inviting just a few people to contribute to a shared notebook, whether it’s a group of colleagues pooling their notes on taming the office bureaucracy, or a group of friends pooling their research into summer vacation spots. Once you discover how easy and effective it is to collaborate within a small team, you’ll be ready to venture into other forms of online collaboration.
4. Think tagging. Keywords are more useful than file folders. That may seem heretical to anyone who grew up with the Dewey decimal system or a cabinet full of topic-specific files. When you’re dealing with online content, however, you have the flexibility to organize content in multiple ways, which makes it easier to find and harder to forget. Instead of  (or in addition to) filing that document about end-of-year performance evaluations in your Evernote “HR” notebook, you can tag it with keywords like “year end”, “evaluation”, “performance”, etc. Now you’ll see it when you’re looking at everything related to “year end”, and you won’t forget to build time for those performance evaluations into your December schedule.
5. Think searchable. What you can find, you can use. Social media ninjas are power searchers: they know the ins and outs of Boolean syntax, and tame their email backlogs with a single search string. Evernote’s built-in character recognition makes just about everything you add to Evernote fully searchable, so that you suddenly have a single place to look for every back-of-the-envelope notation, every business card, every thought you’ve jotted down.
6. Think cloud. If you’re relying on daily backups to prevent losing your work, there’s always a little part of your brain that’s worried about what could happen to your data between now and the next backup. (Because you wouldn’t consider not backing up, would you? No, I thought not.) But as more and more of our work moves onto the “cloud” — i.e. web servers that store your data remotely, rather than on your local computer — we free up that brain space for productive thinking. Every Evernote notebook is automatically backed up to the cloud (as long as you check the “synchronized” button when you set it up) so you know that every note you type, record or snap will be there forever.
7. Think visual. Photos, drawings, videos and info graphics constitute much of what people share through social sites and networks. That’s because we’re visual creatures: images often communicate more powerfully than words. Evernote can help you cultivate your ability to think visually by helping you get past one of the biggest obstacles to thinking visually: the difficulty in organizing or making sense of all those images. Snap pictures of whiteboards (they’ll be searchable, thanks to Evernote’s text recognition), work you love (whether it’s a sculpture or a window display) or sights that make your heart sing.
8. Think mobile. You bring a social sensibility to everything you do once you stop leaving the social web at your desk, and start carrying it in your pocket. Every major social web service has its own iOS and/or Android apps, or a mobile-optimized interface that makes it easy to contribute to (or tap into) the social brain while you’re at the local coffee shop or on the road overseas. Evernote helps you keep your own brain with you by syncing your notebooks to your phone or iPad, so you never need to feel choose between accessing your notes or getting some fresh air!
9. Think web. There’s no point in you remembering a fact or developing a solution that somebody else has already written down or solved. Worried that relying on other people’s work will stunt your brain power? The web is your brain — or at least part of it — so the sooner you get comfy treat the great magical internet as an extension of your grey matter, the sooner you’ll be able to apply your neurones to the stuff other people haven’t or can’t tackle for you. Evernote’s web clipper makes it easy for you to compile an extended memory bank by snapping and storing the most useful parts of the web to your local computer (and iPad, and smartphone).
10. Think connected. As powerful as a service like Twitter or Flickr might be, it’s a thousand times more powerful once you start combining it with other types of software. Evernote connects with many other web services: you can post to Evernote from Twitter, create documents from Gmail, or clip interesting blog posts from your favourite RSS reader. Learning to create your own toolsets and workflows is crucial to unleashing the power of the social web.

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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 with initial tweets about how to troubleshoot the hotel wifi, I couldn’t wait to get down to Seattle and join them.

Now that the conference is over I wanted to stay in touch with all the great folks I met. I could individually follow each person who tweeted at the conference, but that is a lot of work, and then everybody else has to do the same thing. So I figured: if you really want to nourish post-conference community, the best way to do that is by creating a Twitter list that everyone else can follow, too.

And today I discovered a great, free Twitter tool that lets you do just that: TweetBe.at. TweetBeat has all kinds of handy tools for managing Twitter lists, including just what I needed: the ability to search for everyone who’d used a given hashtag, and add them all to my new Twitter list in one go. Here’s how I did it.

1. Create your list

Set up the list you want using Twitter’s web-based interface. Make sure the list is public, and consider giving it a clarifying description (e.g. “This list is made from everyone who tweeted at AOIR 2011. Tweet me if you were at the conference and would like to be added.”)

2. Login to TweetBe.at

You’ll need to authenticate with your Twitter account, but it’s self-explanatory.

3. Search for conference Tweeters

Use TweetBe.at to search the conference hashtag. You’ll get a list of everyone who has used the hashtag recently. Note that TweetBea.at loads fewer than 100, initially, so you have to click “older” off to the right if you are searching on a heavily-used hashtag that has been used by hundreds of people.

4. Add the found users to your list

Once you have the list of everyone you’ve found, you need to click “all” (see image below) to select them all. You’ll see checkboxes get checked. Then you just use the “add or remove from lists” dropdown menu to add all the checked names to the list you created on Twitter.

And that’s it! You’re done. You now have a great list of all the amazing people you met at AOIR 2011.

You can imagine lots of other great uses for this tool:

• The fans list: Quickly create a Twitter list for everyone who has ever tweeted @You or @YourOrganization
• The bigwigs list: Create a Twitter list of everyone who follows you and has more than 10,000 followers
• The research list: Create a list that automatically adds anyone who tweets a keyword of interest (yes, TweetBeat can automatically add people to your lists on an ongoing basis).

Are you thinking of using TweetBeat to build a list of your backchannel participants? Are you already using TweetBeat in ways I haven’t yet imagined? Do let me know in comments below, or on Twitter.

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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, which didn’t include @SimCentre. Easy enough to fix — right?

When viewing someone else's Twitter profile you can click an icon to get the "add to list" option.

Actually, it’s not so obvious how you go about adding yourself to your own Twitter list, even though there are lots of reasons to do so. (If you’re creating a list of influencers in your field, for instance, don’t you want to include yourself?) If you look at your own profile page, you won’t be able to access the drop-down menu that gives the “add to list” option when you’re looking at someone else’s profile. And the alternatives that Google turned up were either too hardcore (do I really need to learn Ruby in order to solve this problem?) or too dated (this methodology relies on switching to “old Twitter”, which is no longer an option).

Happily, I came up with a quick and easy workaround myself. Using HootSuite, it’s easy to add yourself to your own Twitter list. All you have to do is open your own profile within HootSuite (just click on your username in a tweet that mentions you, as per #1 in the screenshot below), click “add to list” (#2) and then select the list you want to include yourself on (#3).

If you aren’t already using a Twitter client, this is yet another reason to start (here’s how). And if you aren’t yet using Twitter lists — well, that is going to rock your world too.

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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 the recent need to reinstall the software on both my iPad and iPhone, I somehow detonated an excessive number of syncing systems.

Three, to be precise. That’s right: I had Google Sync Services, MobileMe and BusySync all merrily running on my computer, trying to keep my various calendars harmonized. With all those services running simultaneously, it’s amazing that my biggest problem was missing a few calendar events: I would have expected to rip a hole in the space-time continuum.

Meanwhile, my iPad was set to sync with Google, and my iPhone was set to sync with nothing at all — or rather, nothing cloud-based. So I guess that explains why events I added to my iPhone never showed up on my Google calendar or desktop: it’s kind of tough to make syncing work when you’re relying on the bi-monthly event in which I physically connect my iPhone to my computer.

So in the interest of preventing future mishaps (which will likely be precipitated by future upgrades), I want to capture the lessons of my recent misadventures. These really belong in the category of “notes to self”, but then again, so does a lot of my documentation. The main reason I blog it is because I figure while I’m helping myself, I might as well try to be useful to others.

Current setup:

• On my Macbook: iCal is set to sync via Google CalDav (selected in iCal preferences/Accounts). MobileMe is disabled in iCal Accounts. I have thinned iCal to a single calendar (my awsamuel Google calendar) in the hopes this will prevent confusion, but let’s be realistic: I’ll subscribe to more calendars over time, and probably create multiple calendars of my own. BusySync is still installed but is not running (I will double-check that it is still not running next time I reboot, in case it’s set to turn on at startup, but I don’t think it is.)
• On my iPhone: Calendar syncing is currently turned off while I see if this new setup is working. Once I’m sure the Macbook-Google sync is going well, I’ll turn syncing back on by following Google’s instructions.
• On my iPad: Calendar syncing is currently turned off while I see if this new setup is working. Once things are working smoothly between the Macbook, Google and the iPhone, I’ll follow the same iPad setup I use on the iPhone.

Notes and vulnerabilities:

• Fewer calendars more better: I want to avoid the proliferation of calendars that happened in iCal. If I add more calendars in the future I want to add them from within Google rather than from within iCal, so I don’t end up with multiple sets of calendars (worse case seems to be three sets: On My Mac, MobileMe and Google). Ideally I will keep subscribe-only calendars (e.g. Rob’s, and other colleagues) separate from my own read/write calendars.
• MobileMe calendaring upgrade: The new version of MobileMe changed how BusySync works, which may have been when things started to go sidewise. I need to keep an eye on what happens when iCloud comes along; if it adds syncing services to the current setup I could end up with another nightmarish dual-sync scenario.
• Software reinstalls: Upgrading to Lion, restoring my iPad and restoring my iPhone are all moments when my calendaring could have gone off-track. Likewise when I introduced my shared Emily Carr calendar into the mix (necessary to fit with Emily Carr’s scheduling system). In future I want to double-check all my syncing setups after any major upgrade (i.e. look at account and syncing settings on the Macbook, iPhone and iPad).
• Delegation: I don’t really understand what the “delegation” settings are for in iCal, which makes me nervous. I’ve got to dig around and find out how these should be set up so that I don’t accidentally publish my electrolysis appointments to Facebook. Also, I should really make some electrolysis appointments.
  

  Delegation settings in iCal

• Emily Carr syncing: Speaking of Emily Carr, I still don’t feel like I’ve got the right structural relationship between my Google calendar and my Emily Carr calendar. I need to figure out which direction I want the sharing to work and which account should write to which calendar. This may require installing a new brain.
• Tungle.me: I’m curious about trying Tungle as a way of making some of my scheduling back-and-forths a bit easier. Again, this will introduce a wrinkle into my sync-a-thon so I will want to check everything over again once I see how it’s working.
• Morgan: The current wetware alternative to Tungle is one Morgan Brayton, who actually has to deal with the insanity of keeping my schedule vaguely in order. We need to make sure that nothing I’ve done has altered her access to my calendar, since any limits on her access will indeed bring this whole show to a grinding halt.

Of course, it’s possible that I’ve messed something up along the way, thereby deleting items from my calendar. So if you have a meeting scheduled with me in the next few weeks and I don’t show up, that’s why. In fact, this sounds like such a useful excuse that I think I will henceforth write monthly blog posts about my calendar tweaking, and accompany each one with a blanket disclaimer.

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