I’ve blogged about some inspiration to keep improving what I do, and it’s something I’m trying to put into practice by improving my computer habits as well as in the rest of my life.
For example:
I’ve stopped hoarding 3rd party videos and cleared GBs of space. The amount I’d squirreled away to update my videogames sites ( OnlineRaceDriver.com, FPSPrestige.com and HotModGaming.com) was getting ridiculous, and I’d run out of storage space so my main hard drive was filling up. Now the mantra is get it uploaded, get it published, or delete it.
I’ve also started becoming more strict about email. It’s easy to let the almost infinite space in Gmail seduce me into keeping every email ‘just in case it comes in handy’, but while the space in my email account my be almost limitless, my time and attention isn’t.
No more hoarding stuff in browser bookmarks either. I’ve got hundreds of bookmarks which are just sat there, with no tags or easy way to find anything that’s actually useful. While I’ll keep using it as a quick scratchpad as needed, I have both Diigo and Delicious for actual storage. And cross posting from Diigo means I have a backup if anything should happen.
Computer Desk by Tatiana Lapina (CC Licence).
And I’m once again looking at the collection of websites I’ve built up over the years, and deciding what’s important to keep going, what has the possibility to grow, and how to best manage the relationships between each of them and social media.
Part of that has been to try and organise myself and other collaborators in Slack, which has the benefit of cutting down on emails as well.
Sadly I still haven’t found an answer for my natural tendency to get lost in brilliant articles on random topics around the internet, but I am trying to limit it more to weekend reading as my digital equivalent of a Sunday paper.
I’d love to hear more suggestions for improving productivity, and better organisation, that people have actually used and found beneficial, rather than trawling through countless lifehacker posts….
Hi Dan, we are all struggling (more or less), with the same issues… daily. 🙂
I use following tools in order to increase my productivity and so far i am satisfied – a little by little improvements are here. Some of the tools I use for various productivity purposes (majority free or free version is enough for my needs):
– RescueTime
– Bookmax
– Kippt It
– Pocket
– LastPass
– Slack
– Google Keep
– Checker Plus for Google Calendar
– especially Streak for Gmail!
…and some others 🙂
I hope some of these will help you out!
Br, Ivica
Hey Ivica, hope you’re well and the improvements are coming for you! There’s a couple of there that I haven’t investigated, so thanks for the suggestions and I’ll have to check them out!
Dan
Thx Dan, I am good, business as well: there are 4 of us working now on various topics (I’m mainly helping them out – in a management/project role :-)), improving constantly in order to work less, but smarter and with higher quality. So far everybody / all sides are satisfied 🙂
I believe that 1st one would be very interesting (to see how much time you work and how much time you think you “work”) as well as the last one: it is a killer application for better mail efficiency.
However, all others are very good as well… each one in their part.
Ivica
I thought my eyes were getting blurry but last year i went away for a week with no access to any form of computer and my vision ‘unblurred’. So i recommend not spending unnecessary time at the screen.
Time away from a screen is definitely a good idea. I’m slowly getting into the habit of getting out of the office every day for some exercise, and spending more time away from the laptop and Xbox when I’m with my son.