Saturday 5 December 2009

Personal Productivity 2.0: Twenty Tips in 20 Minutes

How do you stay on top of e-mail, Web browsing, Twitter, podcasts, and taking part in on-line communities? Today we share 20 ideas for better personal productivity in a Web 2.0 world.


MP3 File

Watch the slide show here:

Here are the 20 (+1) tips ...

E-mail

  • Use the spelling chequer!
  • If you receive high volumes of email then turn off automatic email checking.
  • Don't use e-mail for urgent notification.
  • Don't use your in-box as your To Do list.

Web browsing

  • Use the Read It Later plug-in for Firefox.
  • Find RSS feeds wherever possible.
  • Get Google's toolbar.
  • Use tabbed browsing, in particular, Google's search preferences provide a non-default option to open links in separate tabs.
  • Use auto-completion features in Google and your browser.

Participating in communities

  • Position your Facebook "Status Updates" above "News Feed".
  • If it doesn't add value, don't do it.
  • Get extra value after participating by cutting-and-pasting into your blog.

Twitter

  • Use TweetDeck ("like air traffic controller for your Twitter feed") or the like.
  • Separate your reading time from your writing time.
  • Be ruthless - unfollow prolific tweeple whose mundane tweets push more interesting stuff out of view.
  • Alternatively, use Twitter Lists to group together, say, high-value interesting tweeple vs. your boring friends.

Audio/video

  • You can listen to audio while multi-tasking, so choose audio over video if possible.
  • Fast forward (e.g. Gihan's iPhone has an option to play podcasts at 2x normal speed)
  • However, don't overdo multitasking (e.g. It's difficult to listen to podcasts whilst reading/writing/coding).
  • Subscribe to the Focal Point podcast!

Bonus tip: Use the Cloud: Contacts, bookmarks/favourites, web feeds, appointments, email, documents and much more can be stored on-line, allowing these resources to be accessed from any location or device, and shared with others.

Do you have a favourite personal productivity tip when using the Internet? Share it in the comments below.

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