Archive for the ‘Productivity’ Category

Stephanie Buck at Mashable rounds up 8 Simple Digital Tools for Scanning Documents. This is a great list of apps which will let you easily scan in douments, business cards, receipts and more with your smartphone. I can’t wait to try out DocScanner and CardMunch.

Corina Mackay at the Social Media Examiner offers an in-depth look at 3 New Bookmarking Sites and What They Mean for You. If you’re looking to boost your productivity by saving websites, images, and articles for easy access later, you’ll want to check out this post. I personally can’t wait to get started with Pinterest. The bookmarking sites covered include:

1. Licorize
2. Diigo
3. Pinterest

Melanie Pinola at Lifehacker writes a guide to How to Set Up a File-Syncing Dropbox Clone You Control. Learn how to “roll your own cloud” and sync your files to your own web server or just on your local network with this helpful article. Here are the main sections of the tutorial:

• Why Set Up Your Own Syncing System?
• Why GoodSync?
• How to Set Up Your Dropbox Clone with GoodSync
• Other Options Besides GoodSync

Alan Henry at Lifehacker rounds up the Five Best Desktop Calendaring Applications. Each application review in the list includes a discussion of features, costs, benefits, and a screenshot.

Matt Silverman at Mashable rounds up 5 Simple Web Apps For Saving Time at Work. These five free online tools will help amp up your productivity on the job with no downloads required. Here are the first three tools, be sure and read the article for the rest plus reviews:

1. Zamzar
2. Ge.tt
3. Ninite

Sarah Houghton-Jan, the LibrarianInBlack has shared the slides from her ALIA Information Online pre-conference session titled 3.0 tools without 3.0 million dollars. This presentation is chock-full of excellent free resources that budget-conscious libraries will want to take advantage of.

Thursday Bram at GigaOm recommends 4 Project Management Apps that Will Rock Your Mobile Device. Each of these tools enable you to manage your project and collaborate on the go. These all look great for increasing productivity.

1. Outpost (iPhone)
2. Nozbe (iPhone)
3. Project Schedule (Android)
4. Mobile Project Manager (BlackBerry)

Be sure to check out the full article for the reviews!

Kristi Hines at the Social Media Examiner comes up with 8 Innovative Uses for Delicious. If you’re looking for ideas for how to effectively use the largest social bookmarking site on the Web, you’ll want to check out this quick post. Here are her eight suggestions:

1. Organizing Your Resources
2. Action Plans
3. Company Sharing
4. Backlink Recording
5. Social Networking Profiles
6. Social Mentions
7. Writing Showcase
8. Don’t Lose Your Bookmarks!

Are you looking for ways to get organized and increase your productivity? If so, you’ll want to check out Whitson Gordon’s Top 10 Ways to Organize and Streamline Your Workspace on Lifehacker. Here are his first four suggestions:

• Pick the Right Desk for Your Space and Workflow
• Re-Evaluate Your Office Gear and Get Rid of What You Don’t Need
• Use a Camera to Help Find the Worst Clutter Spots
• Reboot Your Workspace Each Evening

Google has announced a new feature called Priority Inbox for Gmail users.

“Priority Inbox is an algorithmic solution to email overload. Gmail attempts to automatically process your email by factoring in variable such as who the email was sent by, how many people it was sent to and the keywords included in the subject and body of the message.”

And Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable has already put together 5 Tips for Better Productivity with Gmail Priority Inbox.

Jason Fitzpatrick at Lifehacker rounds up the Five Best Personal Project Management Tools. Each list entry includes a brief feature review, platform and cost information, and a screenshot. Here are his top three recommended apps:

1. Todoist
2. mGSD
3. Tom’s Planner

The Official YouTube blog has announced that the massive video-sharing site has just launched an online video editing tool. It’s now available on their Test Tube, ideas incubator page. This new application enables you to:

• Combine multiple videos you’ve uploaded to create a new longer video
• Trim the beginning and/or ending of your videos
• Add soundtracks from the AudioSwap library of tens of thousands of songs
• Create new videos without worrying about file formats and publish them to YouTube with one click — no upload necessary

Jason Fitzpatrick at Lifehacker writes about How to Maintain a Project List that Doesn’t Crush Your Soul. If you have a growing to-do list and are looking to improve your productivity, you’ll want to check out this informative article.

“Whether you’re an adherent of David Allen’s Getting Things Done or any other system that encourages you to capture all the ideas floating around in your head and commit them to paper (or a digital medium), it’s likely you’ve gotten pretty good at the capture side of things. It’s on the other end of the conveyor belt, where the ideas get sorted, categorized, and made useful, that things tend to get murky. In my productivity workflow, the capture side of things has always been the most enjoyable and easiest—all it really takes is a stack of index cards, a pen, and a wandering mind! Even though ubiquitous capture is an awesome habit to have, it has an often overlooked downside. The more ideas or to-dos you increase, the more things you have floating around in your potential workflow. If you don’t effectively deal with those things, you end up with a stagnant pool of ideas and the feeling that you’ll never do anything with all these ideas/tasks/to-dos you’ve captured.”

Google Docs has rolled out a new feature which allows users to upload and store any type of file up to 250 MB, providing 1 GB of storage space. Lifehacker discusses the feature in Google Docs Now Allowing Any Type of File Upload.

Web Worker Daily has posted a helpful guide to 10 steps you can take to Be Your Own Tech Support. These are all very good tips. And I’ll add a couple of quick ones to the list which deal with problems that I am often emailed about by my students:

• If you’re on the Web and are having trouble with a Web site, or a Web form, try switching browsers before determining that it’s “broken”…some sites just work better with Firefox vs. IE, etc. Also, make sure you have the latest version of your browsers installed.
• If you’re in your library and can’t view a website or video, the link may not be broken but may be blocked by your systems office…try it again when you get home.
• And I can’t agree more with Meryl’s sixth suggestion which is “Search the web for a solution” – I have found nearly all my troubleshooting answers this way. There is a wealth of information posted in forums, message boards, and help sites and I’ve found more often than not that I’m not the first person experiencing the problem. If you can’t find the answer this way, I’d also suggest finding an appropriate forum and posing a question. I’ve received tons of advice, code snippets, and resolutions from helpful people who have responded to my queries.

Got a troubleshooting tip to add? Please share it in the comments!