To get you sorted in this digital mess, we present to you the 5 most important tools you can use to de-clutter your digital existence Evernote, Simplenote, Dropbox, Push the Page and Instapaper:

1. Evernote

   I have already told you about Evernote and how I’ve been trying to use it as a digital information manager, gathering my links, snippets, texts and quick notes. While the software’s user interface is not impressive, one can’t deny that Evernote is a real powerhorse, able to store pretty much everything you send to it, and even automatically tag the images/photos to allow for text search inside them. The main advantage of using Evernote is as a powerful sync tool of information files – be they text notes, web snippets, photos or other documents. The clients for iPhone / iPad / Android will sync these, so you can always access your data on the go.

2. 
   

   Simplenote

   Whenever I mention Evernote on my Twitter posts, there are always some replies like “Yeah.. Evernote is nice.. but I kind of prefer Simplenote“. Unlike Evernote, Simplenote only lets you edit and sync text notes, but does so with style and a fast minimalist user interface. It only has a web interface(a great one) and clients for iPhone & iPad (there are no official desktop clients), but there are 3rd party apps that fill the need(such as the highly recommended free editor Notational Velocity)

3. 
   

   Dropbox

   You surely remember Dropbox from my previous articles. The ease of use of the desktop client and the free official clients for iPhone & iPad make it a perfect tool to keep most things in sync across your various devices – so if you save a file from your computer, you’ll be able to retrieve it afterwards from your iDevice. If you want it the other way around, there are many apps with Dropbox integration to help you: for instance the free PlainText iPhone/iPad text editor or the $0.99 iPad text editor Clean Writer (developed by yours truly) that will save your text notes directly to your Dropbox account.

4. Push the Page

   To be honest, this is the real reason why I wrote this post in the first place. You might have heard of all these other apps, but chances are you haven’t yet heard about Push the Page. It is an amazing free app that does one simple thing.. but does it extremely well. Kind of the thing you didn’t know you missed until you see it. What Push the Page does is help you send, instantly, a link from your desktop to your iPhone or iPad.

   Let me explain this a bit.
   
   Imagine you are browsing the web on your computer, looking for a pasta recipe, which you want to cook tonight. When you finally find it, you usually have 3 options:
   1. you can take the laptop with you in the kitchen. But you probably don’t want to, ’cause there’s no place for it there, and it’s too risky anyways
   2. you write it down on paper, so you can take the paper with you. But it’s time consuming, and kind of beats the purpose of all the gadgets in the house
   3. or, you can open that web page on your iPhone or iPad, which are much more suited to help you in the kitchen(being smaller and more kitchen-proof than a laptop)
   In order to open that same web page on your iDevice, you used to have 3 ways : a. either type the url on the device to match the one on your computer, b. email yourself the link, or c. save the link in Evernote or Simplenote, open the Evernote/Simplenote clients on your device, sync, then finally click the url in the latest note.

   Push the Page brings a 4th, most direct variant: all you do is, on your computer’s browser, click on a bookmarklet and the page’s address is instantly sent to your iDevice. You’ll get a notification and tapping it will eventually load that page in the browser. Free, quick and painless. All you need is to set up an account on www.pushthepage.com, download the free Push the Page apps on all your devices, set them up and drag the bookmarklet to your browser’s Bookmarks bar. Easy peasy.

5. Instapaper

   Like its headline says, Instapaper saves interesting web pages for reading later. It’s more than a bookmarking tool, because it actually saves the web pages content, strips off advertising and clutter and magically saves the web article’s actual content, so that you can read it later. What’s best is that there’s a free iPhone client app (or a $4.99 iPhone+iPad universal app) that will retrieve these articles from your account, for you, so you can read them even offline, using your favorite iDevice. I can’t recommend Instapaper enough, and I think it’s probably the greatest web-related invention since the RSS reader. But that’s just my opinion.

This year I promised myself not to make any public personal New Year resolutions. Life is unpredictable enough as it is, and year-long commitments are way too often bound to be broken. So, why purposely aim to disappoint myself later on? Why should I want to feel like shit sometime later for not having been able to do stuff that was not in my power to do so, in the first place?

Instead, for the past days I’ve started to try out some new professional, productivity and lifestyle changes. The difference from New Year resolutions is that they are just that – try outs; I won’t feel like shit if they don’t work out, but I will like it if they eventually turn into habits.

One of the things I decided to try out (for the past 4 days, but the outcome looks promising so far) is to use of a more organized note taking method(and tool). There are countless methods to do it, some of them already built into your computer. However, the difficulty is to stick to just one system, and to use it at its full potential.
Long before I owned my Mac, I used to take quick notes either using Windows built-in Notepad, YM-ing myself over Yahoo Messenger (along with enabling Yahoo Messenger message archiving), or even emailing myself. I also left out post-it notes all over the place, scribbled on the margins of notebooks or used online tools like Yahoo Mail Notepad. This combined approach resulted in a huge mess of information.
Since I got my Mac, I got into the habit of using the built in Stickies app, which I had immediately placed on my Deck. It is the simplest note taking tool you could get, at the same time pretty powerful(colored notes, multimedia capabilities, decent looks and, above all, small enough to launch in a matter of seconds). I’ve been using it pretty often; however, after a while, the Stickies space got really crowded and you’d need to remove older notes; also, it wasn’t fit to accommodate larger notes, such as blog posts or short stories drafts. Last but not least, it wasn’t compatible with the iPhone and the notes I take on the go. So I ended up needing to delete older Stickies notes(which later turned out to have been pretty important), and to have my blog post drafts scattered all over the place.

Another built in alternative that kind of takes care of the last two problems would be the use of Mail.app and its built in notes; they do sync with the iPhone’s notes app and can be used also for larger texts. However, the Mail.app Notes weren’t suited to my taste, not only because of the cartoonish design, but also because they were hard(read almost impossible) to organize, and sync-ing them requires my iPhone connected to the Mac(one thing that I almost never do).

The alternative I found out so far is the well known Evernote:

For the past 4 days I’ve using the free Evernote tool on a daily basis. I had actually given it a try long time before, by the time it had started to make the news. So far I feel that Evernote is a pretty complex app, with the Mac client a bit too constrained, of a cluttered design missing some pretty important(for me) features (fullscreen writing, quick appending). But I also feel that after the initial pains and the first day of using it, it has made me considerably more organized. It also seems like the perfect gather point for all the web snippets, quick ideas and long texts I try to write. I even(painstakingly) managed to manually import the list of interesting bookmarks from Chrome into it, and start using it as an imperfect(but still useful) research aid, by using its Chrome plugin to capture interesting web snippets and pages. The iPad and iPhone free app clients make for a great addition, ideal for quick note taking and photo snapshots, which easily syncs over Internet with their web service.

My setup is pretty simple so far:

• Evernote Mac client running all the time on my desktop
• 4 Notebooks
  • Personal
  • Projects
  • Cool links and web things
  • Other
• I’m not really using the tag system, although I might get to use it some time
• I’ve installed the Evernote iOS clients on both my iPhone and my iPad.

This tool is not perfect, and there are others(probably way better) out there. But my non-resolution for this year is to pick just one system and stick with it for as long as possible. Consistency is the base for all habits; the perfect tool might not exist, but it’s way better to pick one and use it all the time than to pick many and never use them(or use them all simultaneously).

Happy New Year and to many successful New Year’s non-resolutions!

So, here’s a couple of productivity-related links received from my readers during the last year or so, togetger with a bit of link love :

• 45 mobile resources for the road warrior
• A simple GTD online tool – Task Writer
• Time management teleseminars from time experts
• GTD agenda – another nice looking GTD online tool
• Eluma – “It’s like iTunes, but for your web stuff instead of your music, a free desktop-downloadable personal productivity tool”
• GTDInbox, a Firefox addon for Gmail that “transforms Gmail into a powerhouse of productivity”

Enjoy your productive day, and keep in touch : I’m back, baby!

You might already know Robert Scoble reads 622 RSS feeds each morning. But I’m not him, I don’t even want to. My brain is too tiny to even try to skim through such information; my time is too precious to spend it reading that many posts – I’d rather linger in bed some more. So I dare suggest a different approach to reading 728 new feed articles in less than 1 second:
…(suspense)
…

Mark all as read – just skip over; delete them; erase them.

You knew this was coming. It’s a no brainer – if you feel overwhelmed by otherwise trivial things, the smartest thing to do once in a while is just cut back. You knew it was coming, yet so few of us actually apply this. Whether it’s about iCal meetings that no longer give you time to see your family, or about bulk mail piling up, or even social events you must attend or else. Really now, get serious, nothing is as important as it seems, and few things are really life changing.

How many life changing feed articles have you read the last year? Can you survive for one day/week/month without learning about the latest Windows Vista shortcut, or the Top 10 ways you should walk your Cat?
I think you can, as you can survive without reading this article too. So, instead of stressing over the accumulating unread email, paper mail or unread feed items, just do the clean cut, destroy the Gordian knot and start anew. The feeling of liberation is totally worth it.
[tags]feed reading, google reader, gordian knot[/tags]

You might remember my article on turning your desktop into a productivity tool which is one of the most popular articles on this blog so far. At the time I wrote it, I was finding it strange that no other productivity blogs had tackled this subject yet. Boy was I wrong – the subject of organizing one’s desktop proves to be a favorite topic of discussion for a lot of productivity-oriented blogs and bloggers. Talk about insufficient research –

Since the subject of the perfect “productive” desktop is far from being closed, I decided to give you the

Top links list for a more Productive Desktop

- introducing you to the best ideas around the web about setting up your computer desktop for improved productivity.

1. First of all, our article – Turn your Desktop into a Productivity tool. Main ideas:
   

   • Desktop used only to store shortcuts to Folders. All downloaded files go in the folders.
   • Simple/No Wallpaper
   • On the Desktop, put only shortcuts instead of real folders themselves to avoid accidental erasing
   • Folder Shortcuts present: Work/Job; Projects; Research for Work; Research My Websites; Research Others; Documents

2. Antbag.com has a different approach on How to Organize your Desktop to Boost Productivity. Ideas: simple wallpapers that identify colored “zones” according to the type of the file stored on the desktop – PDFs, Shortcuts to Applications, Images, Word docs, Misc, etc…
3. Lifeclever.com talks about How to organize your cluttered desktop and regain your sanity. You implement your Desktop following GTD’s principles, in 5 main folders:
   

   • “0. Inbox” – unprocessed items that don’t have a place yet in here. This folder must be emptied everyday, at the end of the day.
   • “1. Actions” – items requiring an action that takes more than 2 minutes in here.
   • “2. Incubate” – items you aren’t yet ready to do or complete in here.
   • “3. Current Projects” – files related to active projects in here. Each project gets it’s own unique folder.
   • “4. Archive” – completed projects, general reference items, etc. Also aliases of Mac OS X’s “Music”, “Pictures”, and “Movies” folders

   Cool Tip: prefixing folders by numbers makes it an easier access from Quicksilver

4. AJ’s blog told us, since April, the ways to a Desktop Zen – Reducing Visual Clutter on your Desktop – Windows -centric tips, but pretty interesting ones on organizing your most used items into the quick launch bar and the start folder.
5. Antonio Marque on Digital-Folders tells you How to Keep your Desktop Organized (without getting insane) tells us of a similar GTD-centric desktop:
   

   • INBOX The first stop for everything.
   • Ongoing Files belonging to ongoing projects go here.
   • Freezer Files that you are nor currently using but will do so in a near future.
   • Archive If it’s ready and done, archive it.
   • Daily – templates, files that you really use on a regular basis.

6. Kinkless.com tells us the 5 steps to a Kinkless Desktop – OSX – centric tips : besides the obvious advice on clearing up the desktop and having some important organizing folders, it also introduces us to cute tips on styling your folders, keeping them aligned and assigning them custom icons.
7. Lifehacker.com has an intensive photo gallery on Top 10 Ways to Digitally Declutter – tips not too different than the previous ones, but on a more broad subject – decluttering your entire digital life instead of limiting to just your Desktop

Conclusion?
Some think that your desktop is a reflection of your personality. I say it’s vice-versa – your desktop influences your computer usage habits, efficiency and productivity.
The procrastinator will have his desktop filled with funny videos, games shortcuts or downloaded pictures, ebooks or files of jokes.
The really productive, on the other hand, must strive for order and organization in all aspects of his/her life – be it analogical or digital. Bad habits can be born out of any kind of mess – and a desktop mess is guaranteed to become, sooner or later, a barrier to your productivity.

This is why organizing your computer’s desktop for a maximized productivity is a necessary first step towards your goal – to become a better, more efficient and eventually happier person.
[tags]productivity, gtd, organized desktop, osx, kinkless, lifehack[/tags]

But is the iPhone the ultimate productivity tool, as some have been hoping? I take a look into how this device will impact your working style (disclaimer – I wasn’t lucky enough to be born in the iPhone country, so all information below is based on blog reviews and Apple’s documents) and what applications to use for your organizing and productivity purposes.

Collecting

The device seems to have a decent score at this point, thanks to the easy-to-use software keyboard. Reports claim that you can get pretty fast to a decent typing speed in the built-in apps. Most importantly, it comes with a note-taking app, almost perfect for scribbling down a quick idea. iPhone Notes does have limitations(no “doodle” mode and a strange font) but writing stuff on the screen keyboard is definitely easier than on other PDAs. If Apple decides to sell iPhone keyboards accessories, it might even become your on the road writing tool of choice, replacing even your laptop. The best part of Notes? You can send your notes as email in just a couple of touches.

Planning

The iPhone Calendar looks great and works better than any other smartphone calendar. Its killer feature seems to be the list view, listing today’s next actions. Unfortunately, you can’t manage multiple calendars the way you got used to in Outlook or iCal makes any attempt of implementing GTD the iPhone’s built-in calendar impossible. Not being able to schedule separately contexts or projects kinda ruins the whole idea, doesn’t it? Things are not desperate yet, as Leopard might bring a solution by merging email, notes and tasks in a single outlook-like application. And we all know that GTD can be implemented on Outlook, right? In the meantime, the fact that you can sync it with the Mac one should be enough for the unpretentious.

3rd party To-do lists

Nope, the iPhone doesn’t have any to-do list software. But all is not lost – future updates might bring it. In the meantime, 43 Folders has a roundup of the already announced 3rd party To-do apps:

• OmniFocus – it seems the OmniFocus development team is planning something tasty for the iPhone users : an iPhone compatible web front-end of OmniFocus, running as a webserver on your own computer and syncing tasks with it.
• Ta-da Lists – The wonderfully simple app from 37 Signals has been quickly adapted into a lovely iPhone-friendly interface.
• do.Oh
• @task for iPhone
• Nozbe

Office productivity

Zoho, the online office suite, has announced the iPhone version of their online office suite – iZoho. It’s free and covers your major needs – online Word with Zoho Writer, online Excel with Zoho Sheet, online Powerpoint with Zoho Show and online Access with Zoho Creator. Rivaling the Google Documents suite, using iZoho from the iPhone seems like the perfect choice for the office manager on the go.

Remote computer access

A little birdie has just brought the breaking news: your OSX desktop is now available remotely on the iPhone, thanks to the magic hands of the QuickSilver creator(QuickSilver is the world-famous application software launcher we’ve written a while ago). The technical wonder doing this is called Telekinesis and allows you to stream music and movies, run apple script programs, control iTunes(so you’d use the iPhone as a very expensive music remote control) and generally do whatever you want with it – you can pretty easily build your own iPhone apps. Talk about never leaving your computer shut down, right?

Finance

Managing your budget becomes a critical matter now that you must pay the iPhone AND the monthly fees. It’s compulsory to keep them under control, also by means of 3rd party online apps that are iPhone ready. The first apps that come to mind for managing your expenses are ExpenseView and iPhoneMiles (for tracking your car mileage), but I bet my monthly finances that new ones will appear in the following days. Oh, and since we’re talking Finance we shouldn’t forget the Stocks widget showing you live updates of your portfolio. It comes pre-installed, so no 3rd party here.

Deal finders

Thanks to the unlimited data plan, you can stay online all the time and find great deals for almost anything. Some of the services designed specially for the iPhone include: travel bargains via iPhoneTravel, shopping(comparing Amazon prices) or movies.

Procrastination? Just a bit…

The iPhone was designed with a specific demographic in mind: the kind of users who’d rather watch the stocks go up and down than play Tetris or Snake. Sure, once you get an iPhone you’re bound to spend a few days playing with its UI, learning new tricks, testing the widgets, camera or maps, but eventually you’ll end up using it for what it is: a phone that can also play music and videos, send email and browse the Internet. Notice that? No pre-installed games, no Flash player, no Java virtual machine – while it’s really a bad point, this lack of features can be a great plus for the productivity-obsessed crowd – less procrastination! After all, you don’t want to spend that much money on a gaming hand held – you want to be productive with it instead. Still, for the hopelessly addicted, there are already several websites out there offering online iPhone JavaScript games, as well as rumors of soon-to-be-launched actual iPhone games. Beware, though, new addictive games for the iPhone appear every day: chess, itouch or avalanche are only a few of them. My favorite so far? Diamenty, a gorgeous bejeweled clone.

Conclusion

‘Nough said for now. From the looks of it the iPhone is here to stay, and although the packaged-in software is far from satisfying the productivity-oriented manager, 3rd party apps come to the rescue, revolutionizing the entire software application paradigm along the way. No GTD app for now? There may be a great one in development just around the corner. If it’s not, maybe you should get started building the perfect one. The iPhone users around the world will be grateful.
[tags]iPhone, productivity, get things done, applications, roundup[/tags]

One of the most obscure parts of the GTD-like productivity systems is the “Research” part. David Allen’s method calls it the Collect bucket – the place where you collect anything that’s of interest for your current or future projects. He even describes a physical way to do it – the “tickler file” – mostly known as the 43 Folders technique. I won’t go into further details on that, as it seems a pretty nice way to organize your physical paperwork.

But having 43 Folders just for organizing files becomes extremely complicated to use on your computer. We need something different.

I introduce you to the way I’ve recently reorganized folders on my Mac OS X MacBook, in a manner that maximizes my productivity, making my daily information collection process a simple, organized and efficient one. This kind of setup can be made on any computer’s desktop(Windows or Linux) – it’s the method that matters, not the design.

Disclaimer: in my live setup, the folder icons are smaller, so are the font sizes. I’ve made them bigger just for clarity’s sake.

Hack the Day’s desktop productivity method

1. On the Desktop, put only shortcuts instead of real folders themselves.
   • There are no “Real” folders on the Desktop, only shortcuts to external folders. This makes it easier to access the real folders from the command line, and keeps them safe from accidental deletion(you never know when your cat might press Delete while walking on your keyboard…).
   • The Real folders are located under the /Users/username/ folder. In Windows XP I prefer them to be directly on the C: or, more frequently, D: drive (instead of subfolders of C:/Documents And Settings/username/).
   • Making shortcuts to the real folders is as simple as Right-Click + select “Create Shortcut” on Windows, while in OSX it’s called “Make Alias”. In order not to append the “Alias” suffix on OSX, I used a different trick: from the Finder, I dragged the source folder onto the Desktop, while keeping the Cmd+Option keys pressed.
2. Only see Folders, not Files
   Our daily work combines accessing things we already have on our computer with downloading stuff from the Internet. We always download pictures, audio or video files, spreadsheets, pdfs, documents or application kits. Throwing them altogether on the desktop is against any productivity principles. Instead, you’re better off placing the things you need, download or access in folders organized by categories. (PS. The only exception is the gtwiki I set up using the MonkeyGTD tiddly wiki software; but just like the rest, it’s just a shortcut to the real file that’s to be found in the Documents folder…)
3. Research/Projects Folders
   You only need to have on the desktop the folders you use on a daily basis. Anything else is just clutter that needs to go away. Here’s what I use, in sync with GTD’s Research folder principles:
   • Work/Job – contains the files I use in my daily work – the trunk folder for my project’s main svn branch, for instance
   • Projects – the root folder of other projects I may have – future, past or current side-projects. Might contain an Archive folder with subfolders for the years before and their corresponding past projects. Very useful whenever I need to look for things I did long time ago
   • Research for Work – contains documentation, bug reports, other sources, plugins and most anything else that’s related to my work project
   • Research My Websites – contains wordpress templates I downloaded from the web, plugins, texts I haven’t plublished yet on my blog, etc..
   • Research – any other type of pdf’s, cool pictures or temporary files I download from the web. It’s all temporary, so its contents will eventually move away to other folders or to the Trash. Also, contains a shortcut to an external Docs folder, that contains all the e-books, scientific papers, tutorials or otherwise useful documents I’ve been saving for research and study.
   • Documents – the OSX Documents folder – besides CV’s, resumes, paperwork or saved email, also contains an Archive folder with past documents organized by year and project

   These Daily Useful folders are marked with color codes(no particular priority, just for making them stand out from each other and the others), and kept within reach, on the right-hand of the desktop. Being a righty it’s more natural for me that important things stay on the right.

4. Persistent Folders
   On the left hand I added the Persistent folder group, containing the media folders (Movies, Pictures, Music), the Kit folder(with the main applications I use install disk images) and a shortcut to the Games folder(subfolder of the /Applications one) for quick stress-relief gaming sessions – hey, anyone is allowed to have a small weakness, don’t you think?
5. Simple Wallpaper
   Having a productivity-oriented desktop is impossible with a live-colored wallpaper image. I’m an adept of the simple way, the wallpaper that eases finding and regrouping things instead of the lively-colored one that makes it difficult finding your items. But if the simple-colored Apple default wallpapers aren’t your thing, you might be interested in this “Layered Desktop” wallpaper productivity solution from my friend Gabriel Radic.

Conclusion:

Here they are, my 5 steps for a computer desktop layout that works FOR you instead of AGAINST you. Ever since I spent some time organizing my clutter into the above setting, I’ve gotten sensibly more productive – I always know where my stuff is, and it’s usually on or two clicks away. Still, you might have other desktop productivity methods. I’d be thrilled to publish or link to your testimonials, if you link to this article, drop in a word in the comments or simply add the “hacktheday productivity desktop” Technorati tag to your blog post.