Category — productivity

A lot of people always wonder how long certain documents need to be kept for Tax purposes and I found this post at Consumerist by Ben Popken very helpful for this purpose. Very helpful to reduce clutter and keep what you need for the future.

Lifehacker Gina Trapani has a very nice write up of Practicing Simplified GTD which is something I am currently in the process of implementing myself. It’s very detailed but not long enough to be boring. The article is to the point and basically offers a simplified version of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” productivity bible. It tells you to make three lists which include a To-do List, Projects list and a Someday/Maybe list. If you need help creating the perfect to-do list here is an article to help you do just that. It also points out that you need to perform daily and weekly revisions to keep everything updated and productive. It also has tip on how to organize you email inbox and here you take advantage of Gina’s three folder “Trusted Trio” system. In the end as you keep practicing these techniques or any other ones at that you will eventually develop your own customized version of GTD that suits your needs.

I am personally applying the above mentioned GTD system to increase my productivity and so far it has been working great.

On another note over at Keener Living you can download an ebook based on the website articles themselves which help you use technology to your advantage when organizing your lifestyle.

As usual Lifehacker Gina Trapani has a great article about how to optimize your resume to include specific keywords so it can show up more easily in front of recruiters. It points to a website that has a updated list of the Top 100 keywords. It also points to another great Lifehacker article about having a say in what Google says about you.

It sucks when you feel like you don’t wanna concentrate on things that are important and you try your best to avoid them. Lifehacker has a nice post about how to counter Brain Drain. Definitely worth a look if you are feeling down and of course drained!!

Lifehack.org has a really nice roundup of mostly productivity related web apps that came out last year. The round includes a Mind map generator bubbl.us, Flash based word processor created by Adobe called Buzzword, Empressr a dynamic slide show creator, Highrise an enterprise-grade contact manager developed by 37Signals, Jott a note to self service which also offers transcribing notes from voice to text and the ability to post to your blog and todo list, A really interesting financial or I should say budget management service called Mint which you can use to setup all your accounts including bank, credit cards, loans and look at the big picture, A web app Nozbe based on David Allan’s “Getting Things Done” approach, you can have a virtual assistant via Email called Sandy whom you can email reminders etc.. just like a real secretary, Another similar to Sandy app is called Scrybe which follows the same theme as Sandy meaning you can email the things you want showing up in your calender and setup a to do list, a simple online to-do list interface called Todoist which does exactly what it implies, Another similar app to Scrybe and Sandy you expect people to still behave somewhat, Vitalist seems to another app focused towards productivity and whatever other needs one has to accomplish during the day.