For all of you who are unfamiliar with the blog HackCollege, let me give you a little introduction. HackCollege is an incredible college productivity guide. Yearly they team up with Lifehacker to feature a “back to school” series of blog posts. It is one of my most frequently read blogs. I recommend you all check it out here. I happen to personally know one of the contributors over there and she does amazing work and she has agreed to share some of her insight, I hope you find it just as useful as I did.
Reduce Stress, Do More by Taking Advantage of Unused Time
-Emily Chapman
College is one of those few times in your life where you will have odd chunks of free time: 15 minutes between classes, or a couple minutes while you wait for a professor to show up to your meeting. If your high school was anything like mine, with five minutes between classes and a tight schedule, this whole new world of waiting times can be a little strange–even stressful, since you think you ought to be doing something with the spare time. It can be tempting to fritter away these minutes spacing out, surfing Facebook, or napping because there’s nothing you can start and finish in such a short span. However, if you take advantage of these short bursts of time during the day, you can actually accomplish things that you couldn’t think of doing during your bigger blocks of formal study time.
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Popularity: 73% [?]
No cool piece of software or tool can help you become more productive if you don’t have the concentration and motivation to really get work done. For people who struggle with this, like myself, there is a great method/tool that can help you. The Pomodoro method is a way of blocking off time of intense concentration and work and allowing yourself to become distracted shortly after each session. It is similar to the technique described here. This technique really allows you to focus on the task at hand without becoming to overwhelmed.
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Popularity: 18% [?]
It’s really been a while since I last posted. Everyday I read blogs thinking “wow, I really should work on my blog more.” I have been incredibly neglectful of this wonderful little project of mine. There is good reason, however. I have been immensely engaged in a few activities that I am going to briefly discuss here. I am also going to talk about the future of this blog and whats in store for the upcoming few weeks.
What I Am Working On
I am currently in the process of learning Ruby/Rails. I have been dabbling in some programming recently and have finally settled on ruby. I love it’s clear syntax and pragmatic nature which lead to a more enjoyable coding experience. I have been getting into web development and want to potentially begin designing web applications (more about that later) and have decided that Ruby was the best and most fun language to learn. Due to the immense amount of tinkering and reading that I have been doing, it’s been hard to transition back into the whole workflows/systems/productivity game. By turning my focus away from that, however, I have been neglecting this little obsession of mine. School begins again on the 28th, so i’m trying to get as much Ruby in as I can before I have homework. I do hope to pay more attention to this blog in the upcoming weeks however.
In other news, I am dabbling in freelance web design and productivity consulting. I have been in contact with a few parties that are interested in my services. I am in the process of sorting all those projects out as well. Hopefully I will have more information about that to post soon.
Whats New
I am really having a problem. I cannot for the life of me choose between Things and Omnifocus. Omnifocus is the obvious winner when it comes to features and workflows. It also is the best utilization of the “GTD” philosophy. Things, on the other hand, is just so beautiful and feels to nice to use. I know its merely an aesthetic thing, but I just love using Things. I am actually simultaneously using both right now and hopefully I will make a final decision soon. Any comments/help would be greatly appreciated. I am going to write a post on each program, hopefully this will help me sort out my thoughts and lead me to the right decision.
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Popularity: 20% [?]
Just a small little post on some miscellany…
On Gmail Labels
I currently have labels set up for all categories of “life” in Gmail, categories such as work, personal, school etc… I only have three labels visible, however. Those labels are: Follow Up, Hold, and Waiting. Most of my other labels are paired up with filters that assign labels to emails containing certain content or from a certain sender. The 3 labels I have visible are containers where I put actionable email. It’s quite simple; if an email needs to be acted upon on a certain date, I label it hold. If an email requires a contribution from someone else, I label it as waiting. If it needs a direct follow up, I label it accordingly. This way I can triage my emails quickly and apply “actions” to them when needed. It’s a simple system inspired by GTD and aids in a more productive email system.
On (almost) Quitting Facebook
I have hated Facebook for a while now. It really serves no real purpose. It’s only goal is to aid me in keeping in touch with people that I don’t really care about. If someone really wants to contact me they can simply take a second and email me or better yet, call me. By habit I sometimes still check Facebook and find myself doing nothing. It also bothers me that people genuinely get upset when they are “rejected” as a friend and people judge each other on the number of friends they have. Ridiculous. It’s a total distraction tool and just bugs me. I have set a reasonable goal; checking Facebook only once a month. Eventually I will be deleting the account, but I have to start small.
Hope everyone is having a great week, and look forward to a more comprehensive post soon.
Popularity: 23% [?]
I love Gmail. I recently completely converted from using Mail.app to using Mailplane, which brings the Gmail interface to my desktop and enables features such as drag and drop attachments, and making it my default email client. Many people complain about Gmail because you cannot have multiple email accounts side by side, like in mail.app, but quite honestly, I don’t need that.
I have Gmail managing all my different email accounts in one central location. Gmail is incredibly smart, when it sees an email to one of my “non gmail” accounts, it will reply using the same email address. Super cool. I have no need to sign in to different email accounts, it just all goes through Gmail.
Gmail has really enabled me to practice more productive email techniques and maintain “inbox zero” (more about that later). Today I am going to talk about a few of the powerful tools that Gmail has that will allow you to maintain a more manageable inbox and a more powerful email system.
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Popularity: 36% [?]
Posted in productivity, web
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Tagged email, gmail
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