Hack the Day

Ever since I bought my sweet white Mac Book, it’s existence has been threatened by a minor yet annoying little thing: the startup sound.

While the startup chime doesn’t bother me a bit, it drives my girlfriend mad, and her threats of throwing the damn thing away have been getting more and more frequent. As any Mac Book user out there knows, there’s no way to change the chime sound or disable it from within the system. Even plugging earphones before booting up fails, and if you don’t want to hear the annoying chime each morning, you’d have to carefully(or automatically) switch off the sound before shutting the computer off.

But all these worries are now gone, as today was my lucky day - randomly browsing macosxhints made me discover the little free application that’s bound to save my laptop’s life.

StartupSound.prefPane 1.1-BETA comes form Arcana Research Japan, is free and available at this link (direct download link here). Being a beta version makes it possibly unstable, but so far it worked out great on my Intel Mac Book.

Your computer productivity is directly influenced by the ease with which you are able to launch applications or find, organize and retrieve your internet downloads. A cluttered desktop only makes you lose time and focus trying to find the things you look for among the zillions of icons.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

I know, I know: I promised to make this a bi-weekly column and, so far, I only wrote one article in the series for the past two weeks. But, please, indulge me a bit: last week was a busy one for me - I wrote an article as a guest blogger for none other than Zen Habits, I had a lot of work to do for my day job, and above all I had to take a trip to Paris, France for some personal and administrative purposes.

But now I’m back and gettin’ serious. So, here’s my best links of the week selection:

• CNN’s article on How David Allen mastered getting things done - an amazing insight on the daily life of the GTD inventor. If you loved the book, take a look on this article as well to see who’s the man behind the system.
• How to be great at networking - How to Work the Room - you know it too well, success comes mostly by social means. Being the right person at the right time is also a matter of knowing the right contact. So take a look on this list, it might change your life!
• How to brainstorm domain names gives you a basic view on how to pick the names for your online business. I have a lot more to add on the subject, but I’ll come back someday with a detailed article…
• Innovation is a 4 hour process - how to check if an idea is good, bad or great? Give it a try for 4 hours, the time to get your feet wet.
• Gina Trapani from Lifehacker - Separate your email from your to-do’s practical advice on productivity; this time, about the importance of separating your systems
• Planning a startup? Here’s Crash Course In Startup Assumptions and Lessons Learned - never hurts to hear a fresh opinion on a startup, right?
• This week’s personal favorite? Life Learning Today’s Break These Rules for Success! - change the rules, think outside the box, stop bending to social conventions

A post I wrote as a guest blogger on ZenHabits.net came out today, and you’d better be interested in it:

8 practical tips to cure your internet ADD - I talk about the quick ways to discover and track your internet dependency, and a few easy steps everyone can do to keep their internet addiction under control, remaining productive by eliminating distractions.

Zen Habits is an amazing blog on zen, healthy living and productivity, written daily by the extremely talented and very cool Leo Babauta. If you were to pick the one blog you MUST read to make your life better, Zen Habits would be it. I swear!

Starting today I’m going to put together a bi-weekly link roundup of the best articles that I read in the field of productivity & computing tips and personal improvement. After all, it’s a pity to spend so much researching my favorite hobby and not share my findings with the world

• 10 Diet Hacks to keep you slim  (lifehack.org) I particularly digged  the part with “accelerating your metabolism by eating 5-6 small meals a day”. I’ll tell about it to my mother as well, she’s been trying to get slimmer for ages.
• Here’s a Tip: Start Thinking for Yourself - I agree, sometimes I fear thinking in “tips” might become the default way our society sees things, and analytical thinking will disappear hidden somewhere in Wikipedia’s pages.
• How To Get Off The Treadmill: A Detailed Guide To Becoming Self-Employed -probably the most detailed and complete article on the subject. Better, for instance, than Steve Pavlina’s  series on self-employment : 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job or 10 Myths About Self-Employment
• Lifehacker’s detailed how-to  on Virtualize AND dual-boot the same Windows on your Mac -I was always reluctant to install BootCamp on my Mac, being afraid I might mess things up. This detailed tutorial walks you through it and, even more, details using BootCamp with Parallels.
• Zen Habits has one amazing piece detailing, by the minute, the blogger’s life - How I Work: Zen Habits Applied to My Life - yes, apparently living a full and productive life IS possible.

You want to get more productive in your computer usage? In today’s lesson, we’re introducing you to a power-user time-saving trick.

First, here’s the context: I’ve seen lots of people for whom simple computer taks such as launching Word, Firefox or Outlook take at least half a minute. Most of the time is spent with: minimizing the opened windows, slowly moving the mouse aiming it towards the Start button, clicking on the Programs Menu in the Start Menu, missing it, finally getting it right, slowly looking for the right application folder & icon, risking to click outside the Programs menu and restart the process, etc. Average users are a bit more productive - they save frequently-used applications shortcuts on the desktop. But this forces you to minimize everything on it to find the right shortcut and clutters the desktop with shortcuts. On Apple computers the issue is similar for the ordinary user - sure, there’s the Dock, but it has a limited shortcut capacity and to find a less frequently used application you’d still have to open the Finder, open the Applications folder and look, again, for the app you wanted.

So what can you do?
Remember, you want to stop wasting your time moving the mouse all around looking for applications, folders or files. A first step would be to get your desktop organized - instead of just throwing stuff on it, you create folders for the most important tasks and start placing things right where they belong. For more info on how I did this, take a look at my article - Turn your Desktop into a Productivity tool. But the power user trick is to use the right tools for the job, and this can only happen once you start using your keyboard more.

What are Application Launchers?
Application Launcher is a fancy term for a simple tool - a piece of software that stays in the background and, when you type a given key combination, gets up and helps you find the right application, file or action you want to execute. Instead of moving your mouse around, aiming and clicking at things, you just type a shortcut (usually Ctrl+Space), start typing the name of the program you want to execute and hit Enter. Simple and fast, and takes a tenth of the time you’d have needed to search the shortcut with your mouse.

Neat trick, but what’s the software I should use?
There are, as always, free pieces of software and for-money ones that do the trick. Some of them do more, some do less, but for the simple task of launching apps, the free ones will do:

Read the rest of this entry »

On the ZenHabits blog I read about a cool meme spreading fast around the blogosphere. It was created by The Instigator Blog and has so far impacted tens of productivity blogs.

Here I am, joining the meme with Hack the Day’s Greatest Productivity Tip

If I were to give you one and only one productivity tip (but, trust me, in the days to come you’ll learn tens and hundreds of them), this would be…

Get Started! Now!
Don’t just sit there planning about doing stuff. Go ahead and DO it!

What’s it all about?

You can have zillions of extraordinary ideas, wonderful plans and amazing strategies. None of them matters if you never get started. Trust me. I should know best.

I am an amazing dreamer, always conceiving plans, thinking of business ventures, projects and the like. How many did I actually try? Less than 5, most of them failures right from the start. But from each failure I learned a lot more than from all the plans before it.

Each failed try only makes you wiser and more prepared for success. Fear of actually starting something only makes you waste time and intellectual resources.

That’s about it, my huge secret, the most important single tip I want to give you.

I’m going to (almost randomly) tag this further to eDragonu, todoorelse and Lifedev. Hope this meme gets through to them…