Wednesday
03Feb2010
Thursday
21Jan2010
Bumptop for mac has arrived
Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 5:29AM This might be worth checking out: http://bumptop.com/
Available for mac and pc.
Sunday
27Dec2009
Getting things done (GTD) for scientists-Intro
Sunday, December 27, 2009 at 6:47PM This is an introduction to a new series that I'm writing for the folks in my lab (and anyone else interested) on productivity in academic science. Nowadays the average grad student has to manage course work, thesis meetings, qualifying exams, writing papers/grants, and crushing it with experiments. In order to maintain sanity and not get completely overwhelmed all of these things must be approached in a sensible, balanced, and low stress way. The last series was about scientific productivity apps which will serve as the tools for a lot of what I'll discuss in the coming weeks. In this series I'll give examples of how I set goals and manage my time to accomplish these goals. I also think a lot about this and so I'm constantly trying to improve the things that are working for me (like batching tasks) and get rid of the things that aren't (like checking email 1000 times per day). I should also mention that this approach works for me but may not work for everyone so folks should take from it what they like and create their own system for getting things done (GTD). The most important thing is to have a GTD strategy..... having no strategy is a complete disaster. Tentatively, these are some of the upcoming post titles:
- The big picture: What are you about? What do you want? How are you going to get there?
- The plan: 3 months, 1 month, and 1 week
- The Day: Using reverse scheduling, Parkinson's law, and laser focus to get 14 hours of work done in 8 hours.
- The Sunday review
- Inbox zero to manage incoming information
- Multitasking is for chumps
tagged GTD
GTD Saturday
12Dec2009
google voice--one phone number to rule them all
Saturday, December 12, 2009 at 3:47PM I'm happy to say that all the phones in my life now use google voice. The gist of GV is that google gives you a number which can route to your cell, home, or office. Depending on who calls, you can have google ring any or all of your phones. Alternatively, if you don't really want to talk to the person, you can have it go straight to voice mail. Think spam filter for the telephone. There are lots of other little bonuses including:
- Free domestic calling
- Cheap international calling
- Machine voicemail transcription that is sent to your email (not super accurate but usually good enough)
- Do not disturb mode
- Free text messages
- GV widgets for website like the one at the bottom of this page (I have it set to go to voicemail)
The list goes on and it seems like they keep adding features. As a science hack we are setting it up to receive calls in the lab so that the person responsible for checking messages can do so very quickly on their computer and we can block unwanted calls. Right now the service is invitation only and I have a couple of invites to give out, so anyone who's interested can shoot me an email and I'll hook you up. If you want more info, check out this link and video:
Chris Pepper at Macworld.com also wrote a good article on this. Click here to check it out.
Sunday
08Nov2009
igoogle gadgets
Sunday, November 8, 2009 at 10:06PM I wanted to suggest afew useful gadgets for igoogle as folks get their feet wet. To find or browse gadgets, all you have to do is go to the add stuff link toward the top of the igoogle page. It's so nice to have all of your important information on one screen. I also like arranging all these little gadgets to get a little Feng shui action going for information flow. I'm sure you'll find lots of other cool gadgets and I would love to hear about any that you can't live with out.
Here are the gadgets that are loaded every time my browser opens: