The go to page for Firefox extensions just got revamped and they did a really good job with it at that. The overall design is much smoother and more eye-pleasing, but they managed to pour some usability in as well.

Rating and commenting is now very simple and viewing screenshots is much easier using the menu below as well. Now extensions reviews look much more like Amazon reviews giving you info at a glimpse, and detailed info as well if you need it.

Mozilla is probably ready to roll out Firefox 3 soon and is getting ready with this makeover. Even if FF3 is a bit down the road I always like to see companies actively upgrading their sites.

I used to find myself so many times in situations where I needed to do a lot of work, but actually didn’t do anything because sorting out the initial chaos seemed so impossibly that I just pushed the whole load in front of me. Doing some scheduling works wonders if you have similar problems, just writing it down will clear you head and you will know what to do and when.

Keep in mind that the approach below works best when you need to sort out a lot of stuff in a short time, but I am finding it increasingly useful for my day to day stuff too. I use a 3 step process here’s how.

I create two lists and one table at the end. You could merge all these into just one table, but I find that having them separately helps, so you can view your tasks in context. As my first step, I jot down the projects I need to work on, usually in order of priority.

1. Write blog(s)
2. Create my main personal site
3. Record CD

After I’m done, I write down the sub-steps that need to be taken for each project. I try to get medium detail here, I don’t want to be to anal about it, this is just scheduling, not breaking down stuff into actions, like in GTD. For some reason I find it useful to group these by project, but not actually write down the project name. I think I like it more because the project names are five lines above and it just makes redundant information.

• Daily Hack Your Day Post
• Daily gHacks Post
• Make Use Of post twice a week
• Create a site template
• Install content management system
• Create all the content
• Record guitar tracks
• Sing the song
• Mix the songs
• Create album art

Now that I can see all my items, I create a table with the following properties. The first column contains the day of the week and the date. The next column contains the deadlines and the following ones the tasks. I also have some rules set up for my task columns. For example, I only allow myself two tasks a day (apart from blogging). This is most useful when you have many projects, you can restrict yourself to 2-3 for example. You can take a look at the table I made in the picture, it contains all the tasks and projects.

The reason I allow only 2 tasks per day is that this is for emergency work, when I need to go through things fast. I can’t have my mind wandering everywhere, I need to keep focused. I would limit it to 4-5 in a normal schedule and the table would probably be more elaborate.

I think you need to spend about 30 minutes on a fairly complicated table, but the clarity of thought and productivity it can give you will be worth it. You can also tweak and tune it any which way you like, I prefer to keep it as simple as possible.

I just found a cool service called GoodSearch which is simply a search site, but promises to give half its revenue to charity. You can even specify which charity you want to support and if they can verify it, they will send the money to them.

The reason this works great is that you can also buy from adobe.com or Bestbuy through them for example. This way, even if you don’t normally use GoodSearch, you can just buy through them and know that you will be donating some money to charity as well. For you this means a warm fuzzy feeling, the charity gets money as well, and so does GoodSearch, so everyone is now a happy camper.

I wouldn’t exchange simple Google for anything, but I think whenever I order online I will do it through them, if for nothing else, just to acknowledge that I love this idea and I think there could be hidden possibilities here. We search hundreds of items every da, why not try and use this to do some good?

If you hate confirming that yes, you do want to delete the file in question (hence the reason you pushed delete) I just found an application via Mysticgeek’s Realm that could save you from a lot of OK pushing.

PTFB (Push the freakin’ button) basically sits in the background waiting for dialogs to appear and presses the pre-designated button for you. The great thing is that you can make it dialog specific, so you can enable it only for file deletion notifications, or only for overwriting and so on.

You can set up the delay time as well, although I don’t really see the point, maybe unless it’s part of a macro. By the way, there is a pro version which can do a lot more, but for basic usage this is perfect, especially if you are batch deleting some files one by one, it will save you a lot of time (time saving = productivity).

I know that there are certain definitions for each of these, but let me tell you my views on how I use them, and how I think using them leads to productivity. Usually you can only use one of these, occasionally two, like in Wordpress, but you can usually substitute one of them by using folders, or other structure elements.

Categories

I think categories are the simplest to use, I just think of them as folders. I try to limit categories as much as I can in many cases I come up with a pre-fabricated category list. It doesn’t matter if you add to it a bit, but you should keep it as simple as possible.

The biggest problem I see is that people try to use categories to search for specific things. If you are looking for one specific article on the site for example you should not be able find it using categories. From user’s point of view it doesn’t make sense for two reasons. First of all, users can just use the search box or use tags as you will see later on. Second of all, if someone is looking for all Productivity posts, how would they be able to find them if all my categories are post specific?

Therefore categories should be used sparingly, splitting your content (or data) into well defined, easily identifiable groups that have something in common.

Tags

Tags are the ones you can use to individually “categorize” data. My post on how sleeping helps you in productivity would fall under the categories of lifestyle and productivity. I would (and have) assign it tags like “sleep” for example.

Tags should give you the answer to the question “what is this article about?”, sort of like keywords. Categories give you the answer to “What is the theme of this post?”. Tags enable you to search for content specifically, even though you don’t exactly know what you are looking for.

Tags can contain a lot of information, especially if you have the flexibility of a tag cloud like on del.icio.us. I hate having a flood of info, so at first I wasn’t happy using tags. I ended up with hundreds and never thought they’d make sense. Then along came tag clouds. The more I have of a tag the bigger the font and i can even choose to cut off unique tags. This truly helps in productivity, and organization, because it lets you tag your stuff with a lot of info, but allows you to view the most important ones if you need to.

In reality if you have a huge spike for one tag, say the word you tag second most is “shoe”, with an occurrence of 40. If your most used tag is “games” with 250 occurrences, you should consider making it a category.

Labels

Labels are a bit weird because different apps use them differently. I would say that most applications use them like tags, but this is sort of a gray area. If I would have the option to use all three at once, I would use labels just as I do in real life. I would label my posts with “important”, “general”, “specific”, and so on, to give me an idea of some other characteristics.

Here are some of the links I liked today, from hard drive problem anticipation, to advanced Thunderbird, you are bound to find something to make you a bit more productive, happy reading!

Don’t forget, if you have any link suggestions for me you can send them directly by email, or add it to your del.icio.us account and label it with “for:danielpataki” and it will show up in my account as well.

How to tell when your hard drive is going to fail - Lifehacker
Four ways to run webapps from your desktop - Make Use Of
Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron Screenshot tour - Lifehacker
Quickly resize Photos in Vista - Sizlopedia
Five advanced Thunderbird tips - gHacks