Monday, December 31, 2007

How to Manage Your Online Profiles: 3P Idenities


Problem: Have you ever found yourself staring at website registration set up screen, twisting your brain on figuring out if you should give up your email address, or whether to use your real name or made up user name?

Solution: 3P Identities. You should only manage 3 identities. Here's how:


1) Personal Identity. Should be your main email address and most protected. Only use with family, friends, and trusted contacts. For this account I recommend Gmail because it is the absolute best email service out there hands down. It will also allow you to forward all email addresses into and send email from the account. Email address suggestion: firstname.middeinitial.lastname@gmail.com

2) Professional Identity. This is your work email address, only for work and work related associations, blogs, and networks. For email address I would keep professional sounding nothing to high schoolish and set it up with Yahoo, a decent secondary account.

3) Political Identity. This is your anonymous account that you don't have to worry about future employers figuring out what kind of music you listen to, youtube videos you watch, networks you join, comments you make, and blogs you read and write. When ever I sign up for a new social network or webapp I always use this email address to protect my main inbox from all the spam and updates that come when you give up your email address. For this account I use Hotmail which is making a nice comeback these days and I would come up with some fun original nickname that you will never have to worry about it being already taken and hints a little something about you.

Once you have these three email address set up you can use the same user name and passwords for each area of your online experience, so you will only have to manage 3 accounts.

See Also:
What is OpenID?
5 “DISPOSABLE” Web Accounts to Keep Your Identity Safe

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Weightloss Social Network



I tried a couple health social networks and I have found DietTV to be the best so far. Although it's still in the beta stage they have a large community and great features like weight, activity, and food trackers that count up and graph your weightloss, calories burned and calories consumed.

GTD Mobile Webapp Quest

Just listened to Get Things Done Fast in one sitting during my 10 drive back from the family holiday visit. It was a great refresher on my productivity system. One thing that has changed since the first time I read the book has been the boom in mobile web and ease of use with my new Verizon Voyager iPhone Killer. So I am in the market for the best mobile GTD Webapp that could finally kinkless integrate and all my systems and make them accessible anywhere.

The finalist were:

Remember the Milk vs. Nozbe vs. Vitalist

My Rating:

*All have good mobile versions
*All have a fair free membership
*Remember the Milk and Nozbe have a Netvibes widget
*Remember the Milk and Vitalist have better user interface
*Remember the Milk allows you to add your tasks to Google Calendar
*Remember the Milk saves your completed task so you refer back to.
*Remember the Milk is the most customizable (Nozbe has preset contexts you can not change - Big turn off and Vitalist have 10 limited) See GTD with RTM: Getting Things Done with Remember The Milk for a great post on how to customize Remember the Milk to meet you GTD needs. Basically make your bucket lists (waiting for, tickler, someday/maybe, inbox) then use tagging to label your contexts.

My Pick:
1st Remember the Milk
2nd Vitalist
3rd Nozbe

Saturday, December 29, 2007

20 Minute Nap.com

1) Go to 20MinuteNap.com
2) Press the play button
3) Enjoy 20 minutes of "power napping” music."

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

How to Organize Your Email Folders- GTD Style

There is no reason to confuse yourself with too many folders or labels. Search has been perfected making it very easy to digg up old emails. Here is my GTD inspired email folder system:

Archive: for all emails that you are done with and want searchable
@NextAction: for emails that require action
@SomedayMaybe: for emails that you may or may not want to do something later with.
@WaitingFor: for emails you are waiting for a person or date

* Note the @ symbol gets these names alphabetized to the top of the list

Here are few others I use:

Accounts: for all website registration email records
Money: for bank and reciept emails
Networking: for correspondence that could lead to network opportunties

How to Organize Your Digital Files

Let the computer do its work. You can sort by date and search. There is no reason to bury your folders into sub-level after sub-level folder directories (try to stick to the no more than 3 level rule). Here is my system that I adapted from a lifehacker post Geek to Live: Organizing "My Documents" and GTD principels

@backup: for blog, contacts, email, etc. back ups

@docs: all your working files
WaitingFor
SomedayMaybe
Tickler

@docs-archived: all files you are done with

@junkdraw: temporary holding place, good place to download temp files into

@multimedia: video, pics and music files, makes it easy to add to libraries
Music
Videos
Pics

@scripts: code and shortcuts files

* Note I use the @ symbol to get these files names up to the top of a list when alphabetized.

Monday, December 24, 2007

Office Politics

Worth the read: How to Improve Your Skills at Office Politics

I particularly found this tip useful.

It's very difficult to do office politics because you have to figure out the Venn diagram of what people are having a hard time with, and what you are particularly skilled at, and where those circles intersect. This means you need a lot of self-knowledge about your strengths, and you need a lot of emotional intelligence to understand what other people struggle with.

Saturday, December 22, 2007

How to Back Up and Transfer Your Outlook Email to Gmail

If you have converted to gmail this will convince you.

Problem:
You use Microsoft Office and download email off the web and onto your computer and it is stored and archived in Outlook. How do you back the emails up or transfer them to your next computer?

Solution:
An excellent article with very easy to follow directions called Export and Backup Emails from Outlook to Gmail Online

I spent many hours trying to use that gmail loader software, failing every time feeling fustrated and defeated that Microsoft controlled my emails not me. I was finally able to do back up over a thousand emails from the last 6 years from 3 different email accounts that I had stuck on my old laptop in Outlook. Now my email is safely backed up and assessible from any computer.

Tips:
*In the first place don't delete emails from web-based email if and when you download to Outlook. Leave a copy online
*Before backing up and transferring email to gmail, clean up and organize. Of course delete all email you don't need to transfer.
*Then organize email into folders so you can export it smaller batches and when you do transfer them it will make it easier to label and archive once it is in gmail.
*Also get your gmail inbox to zero before you start it will make it much easier to label and archive incoming email from outlook.
*Add an "imported" or a "backup" label when you archive in gmail.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Top 20 Entrepreneurial Quotes

"Here's a list of quotes from entrepreneurs and other quotes that are relevant to entrepreneurship." see Top 20 Entrepreneurial Quotes

Perfection vs Performance Oriented People

"..People can be roughly divided into two categories that she called perfection-oriented and performance-oriented.

The people in the category perfection-oriented have a natural intellectual curiosity. They are constantly searching for better ways of doing things, new methods, new tools. They search for perfection, but they take pleasure in the search itself, knowing perfectly well that perfection can not be accomplished. To the people in this category, failure is a normal part of the strive for perfection. In fact, failure gives a deeper understanding of why a particular path was unsuccessful, making it possible to avoid similar paths in the future.

The people in the category performance-oriented on the contrary, do not at all strive for perfection. Instead they have a need to achieve performance immediately. Such performance leaves no time for intellectual curiosity. Instead, techniques already known to them must be applied to solve problems. To these people, failure is a disaster whose sole feature is to harm instant performance. Similarly, learning represents the possibility of failure and must thus be avoided if possible. To the people in this category, knowledge in other people also represents a threat. As long as everybody around them use tools, techniques, and methods that they themselves know, they can count on outperforming these other people. But when the people around them start learning different, perhaps better, ways, they must defend themselves. Other people having other knowledge might require learning to keep up with performance, and learning, as we pointed out, increases the risk of failure. One possibility for these people is to discredit other people's knowledge. If done well, it would eliminate the need for the extra effort to learn, which would fit very well with their objectives..."

see the rest of The Psychology of Learning article