Achieve-IT!

10 Tiny Things That Make My Life Easier

Beth Ziesenis a blogger at Avenue Z posted her 5 favorite things that make her life easier.

I happen to agree all the shortcuts she listed and have written my comments below her list:

As a sometimes stressed small business owner, I appreciate little things that save time and make my tasks less difficult. Here’s a little list:

1. Recent Documents Lists

2. Avery Write On Tabs

3. The Rules Wizard in MS Outlook

4. Two Screens

5. A Programmable Keyboard

Recent Documents - Although I’ve known about the recent documents list for ten years or more, I only recently started using it.  I had written a Word doc and forgot what I named it.  A friend said "Just look in recent documents."  aha.. yep, that was simple.

Avery Write On Tabs - I don’t know if brand names make any difference, but I like the post-it flags.  They make great bookmarks for important data I want to remember.  The colors are nice, sometimes I color code sections of my journal.

There’s a great mailbox overload fighting feature in Outlook in the Rules wizard.  I use it to flag my most important emails for follow-up.  And emails such as newsletter subscriptions get filed automatically.  Really handy for keeping a squeaky clean inbox.  (P.S. If you are drowning in email, you might want to give Speedfiler a try)

You’ve seen my enthusiastic recommendation for 2 monitors.  Dual mons allow you to switch between views without having to minimize windows.  It’s a great way to boost your computer productivity.  You have to get used to turning your head though.

A programmable keyboard is a great time saver when you’ve got a start menu (schwartz) as big as mine.   Rather than search through the muddied start menu, I can click my quick button and launch Visual Studio, Mind Manager or Live Writer.

Good list Beth, here are 5 back at ya:

Five little things that make my life easier

Dash Command

Dash Command is a light and quick launcher application that is great for quick launching every application on your computer. 

But it goes beyond launching.  It auto-pastes text snippets (like email signatures).  And it has some perks built in such as searching the dictionary from any program and getting to the command prompt instantly.

Jott

Jott is one of the best productivity apps out there.  Like a personal secretary, it takes notes, sets appointments and transcribes your blog posts.

I find that while driving, I get hit with many brainstorms.  I think of great blog posts or Achieve-IT! software enhancements.  These would often go to waste because I didn’t want to key it in while driving or I’d record them into my Pocket PC - which would sit for weeks until I transcribed the notes.

But now, I call Jott and insert reminders into my Google Calendar.  My GCalendar syncs with my Outlook, so it all ends up in one place.  Also, I often outline blog posts in it by calling Jott and getting it to transcribe my notes to Evernote.  Check out my Lifehacker post on the subject if you haven’t already.

MobiPocket Reader

MobiPocket is a free eBook reader for the Pocket PC. Sure, there are a lot of different readers and I’ve tried most of them.  I like MobiPocket because it supports both a large collection of bestsellers and you can also load in different formats such as text and html.

But most importantly, you can load it up with the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.  It may not sound thrilling at first, but hear me out.  When I’m reading a book and I come across a word I don’t know, I just highlight it and a menu pops up "look up in dictionary." 

This turns almost any book, article or novel into a learning experience. 

As someone who resisted reading novels (as being a waste of time) I can now read a novel with the feeling that at least I’ll pick up a few new words to increase my vocabulary.  That’s my story anyway…

Google Desktop

Where Beth points out the obvious benefit of the recent documents feature in Windows, what if the document you need isn’t so recent?  That’s where Google Desktop comes to the rescue.  I use it about every day to track down emails and find code components that are scattered about my hard drive.

The indexing system of GDS is remarkably fast and can pull up my results in less than a second. 

free download: http://desktop.google.com/

NotePad

Yes, you read that right, I said Notepad.  Notepad is the most basic word processor on your computer, yet it’s simplicity can be a great time saver. 

With all the CSS, XHTML and sophisticated document formatting, you can’t just copy and paste text anymore.  It picks up all that formatting and inserts it into the target document.  That formatting can sometimes wreck havoc on the document you want to save.

Notepad will instantly strip out any and all of that formatting.  Just paste in that text and away goes that hidden formatting.

Well, those are mine.  What are 5 simple things that make your life easier?

Finding Your Most Important Task of the Day

If you have ever struggled with what you should do here’s a simple tip that can help.

We know we are supposed to first focus on our top priority.  But sometimes determining which is the top priority, that’s the $1,000,000 question.  

I know when I’m stuck between two or more top priorities, I get stressed and often it takes much longer to start.  So here’s a trick I use to sometimes find out what I should be doing so I can get to work.

It’s pretty simple really.

1.  Take the tasks that are on your immediate mind, write them all down.   You don’t have to spend an hour doing this, spend five minutes if you’ve got it.

2.  Rank each task for DIFFICULTY:   You might say that taking out the garbage is a 2, while sitting and writing 3 pages of your book is a 9.

3.  Then, simply pick the most difficult task on your list and get to work.

Odds are, the task you feel is most difficult is also your most important. We have a tendency to put off tasks that we feel are most difficult. But tough work is also what brings the highest value. We get more rewards for completing the tasks other We get a lot of benefits from doing the most important tasks on on our list. We might be paid higher, we might receive more love or more commitment or more energy.

Do you have any unique ways of divining your most important action of the day?  If so, feel free to let us know about it in the comments below.

Power Posts from March ‘08

Today being the number 1 fools day of the year brings to close a cold and windy March. And March, although a tough month, was good for the self-development posts here on Persistence Unlimited. (How’s that for a segue?)
Here are 5 of my favorites:

The Little Roomba That Could; Or 5 Reasons Why Persistence [...]

Joshua Radin Turns Lemons Into Lemonade

Indie/Folk Music fans may be familiar with the artist Joshua Radin. He’s got a quiet, but emotional music style reminiscent of Elliot Smith and Damien Rice. But there’s a secret about his music style you may not know…
Joshua Radin says when he was living in a small apartment, he had a problem with his [...]

107 Simple Ways To Turn Your Dreams into Reality

Goal Setting… Time-intensive. Frustrating. Sometimes confusing. Yet Unavoidable. Because ultimately, it’s still the most efficient way to achieve your dreams.

Many of us never learned how to do it. Others know how but don’t do it. Both are headed for trouble…

Two important questions:

1. Does goal setting work?
2. If it works, is it worth doing?

Answers:

1. Goal setting is something you do every day, whether you are conscious of it or not. You want things, you “set your mind” to having a new TV, microwave or iPod and eventually you get it. That, my friend, is goal setting. If it didn’t work, you wouldn’t have any of the things you want.

2. Goal setting is worth doing because it makes you more efficient at it. Put another way, what good is it to want a new car only to wait 10 years to get it? Increase your goal setting efficiency and you get the things you want faster. You don’t have to struggle so hard. And the confusion surrounding it fades to where you can make success a habit.

And a warning to those who want to dismiss this outright. The difference between those of us who have goals and those who don’t are obvious. Those with goals simply do better financially, mentally and socially than those without a goal to hang their hat. And the gap is widening. With warnings of a shrinking economy, debt at an all time high and other economic woes on the horizon, do you really want to leave your future to chance?

Now is the time to take things into your own hands. Take control once and for all.

Instead of wishing for the outcomes you want, you follow a roadmap that takes you there.
I want this to be the end-all be-all goal setting breakthrough guide. The excuses stop here. When you are done, you’ll have every tool you need to get started and follow through for the rest of your life.

Oh and yes, this is a compilation of the 31 day series I wrote called 101 Goal Setting Breakthroughs. I edited it for brevity and it still ended up being more than 12,000 words! And… Oddly enough, there turned out to be 107 tips in the series that are reflected in this post… Hope you like it

Note to Subscribers: I purposefully did not send you this full post because it is so large it would be a long download. You can still read it in it’s entirety here

Do Some Dreaming With The 4-Hour Workweek spreadsheet

Jared Goralnick created a pretty cool “Dreamline Worksheet” based on Timithy Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Workweek. (see my mini- review of the book here.)

The worksheet looks to be a well-thought out Excel spreadsheet that is attractive as well as functional. You can enter your dreams for having, being and doing on page 1 and do a budget on page 2.

“It’s been almost eight months since 4-Hour Workweek Dreamline spreadsheet; it’s been both an inspiring (many success stories) and enlightening (many helpful suggestions) time. I’ve used much of the feedback that I’ve received to create a new version, which you can download below.

The most noteworthy new feature is allowing both one-time and monthly expenses. In the previous version, one had to determine the monthly cost of each of their goals. Now one can enter the full cost and the spreadsheet will divide that total by the number of months for the Dreamline…”

You can download it and get more info at Technotheory

February Favorite Posts

February was another busy month for me personally and professionally. But there were still some good posts that seemed to hit the right nerves. This blog even had it’s first guest post!

Here’s my list - if yours is different let me know.

• 5 Reasons Why You’ll Never Amount to Anything…
• 15 Inexpensive or Free Software Tools for Goal Setting & Success
• How I Nearly Doubled My Feedburner Subscribers in 1 Day…
• 9 Ways to Recession-Proof Your Life

The No-Fail Flashcard Technique Update

How would you like to be able to memorize virtually anything fast and with very little effort?
I covered a great way a few years back in my post The No-Fail Flashcard technique. Basically, the trick to this method is to put only one question and one answer on each card and to review the [...]

9 Ways to Recession-Proof Your Life

“It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose your own.” — Harry S. Truman
Experts are debating whether the US and inevitably the world economy is headed for a recession.
Currently opinions among economists are split at about 50-50 to whether the US will experience recession in 2008. Other [...]

Short-Circuit Stress Fast with These 7 Feel-Good Tips

photo by zweetooth
“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” — William James
If there’s one emotion that can cut into productivity, it’s stress.
Stress is what happens when we feel we have more to deal with than our minds can handle. There’s an old I Love Lucy episode [...]