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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.

4 ways your computer can help you to protect your time

September 7, 2011

Feel like email and social media are stealing your time? Great news: your communications technologies can give time back, too.  I’m not talking about productivity boosters or clever ways of getting even more work done in even less time. I’m talking about protecting your time from the many incursions (many of them brought to you [...]

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Respecting the billable hour

August 29, 2011

Can I have $500? One of the interesting things about being a consultant or entrepreneur is that people ask you for that kind of money all the time. I was reminded of this recently while catching up with a friend who (unlike me) is still involved in the daily work of running a web company. [...]

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4 great ways to use Evernote with Skitch today — plus 14 new possibilities

August 19, 2011

You know how happy you feel when you find out that two of your good friends have hooked up and are now a couple? That’s how I felt yesterday when I heard that note-taking and information management powerhouse Evernote had acquired screen capture and image uploader Skitch. (If you’re unfamiliar with these two awesome tools, [...]

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The 3 essential questions every blogger should answer

July 7, 2011

Any blogger — newbie or pro — should be able to answer these three essential questions about his or her blog.

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11 social media tools that put entrepreneurs on the right strategic path

May 31, 2011

My latest post for the Harvard Business Review was inspired by a trip I made to Romania earlier this spring. I visited Bucharest and Cluj as part of the School for Startups, a highly successful UK-based entrepreneurship program created by Doug Richard. S4S is running in two different Romanian cities this year, with about a [...]

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6 web technologies that don’t suck anymore

April 27, 2011

If you placed a Skype call in 2003, you might remember the joys of echo-filled connections and dropped calls. The service may not be bullet-proof today, but the improvement is remarkable. What was once a service you use in spite of the glitches is now a service you can rely on for your day-to-day work. [...]

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8 browser extensions that will make you more productive

April 26, 2011

In 2002, Mozilla developed the first version of the code that would ultimately turn into the Firefox browser. There’s a lot to love about Firefox, but to my mind its greatest impact has been the introduction of browser extensibility. It’s now not only Firefox that lets you add extra bells and whistles to your browser: [...]

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Search party: 10 tips for better searching on Google and beyond

April 14, 2011

Once upon a time, before Google became a verb, people used to do this thing called “searching”. Searching was similar to googling, except that instead of getting a list of links to information you wanted, you would get a list of links to information that might or might not have anything to do with what [...]

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6 ways to beat time zones with technology

April 6, 2011

If you want to pinpoint the moment when the machine takeover officially began, look back to 1982. That’s when Time Magazine named The Computer as its “machine of the year”, the first time the magazine awarded that honor to an object rather than a person. When Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic 55 years earlier, it was [...]

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10 ways spam taught us to focus our attention

April 2, 2011

First seen in 1978, spam has become the vaccine for your attention span. It’s the toxin that has stimulated our immunity system’s defenses. Thanks to spam, we’ve had to find technical, social and personal ways of keeping our eyes on the 22% of e-mail that isn’t pure junk, and to avoid the 78% that is.

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How many e-mail clients do you need?

March 23, 2011

Jodie Tonita is a lovely person. She is passionate, funny, kind to children and small animals, and an amazing hula-hooper. Unfortunately she was sent by our alien overlords to ensure I never do my actual work. As evidence, check out this message Jodie left on my Facebook wall: I realize that it is theoretically possible [...]

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