Archive for April, 2008

Hi Everyone!

It’s another bad month here at my normal job so please stay with me a bit longer! I will be back to posting regularly soon, but I do need some time off. Just as a breadcrumb, I am working on another webpage when I have the time, hopefully I can unveil it when I get back, which I really hope will be Monday. It will be an organization and planning related blog which is mostly about products available in stores, rather than technology. It will mostly look like the product posts (see the Moleskine Notebook roundup), but it will have good articles too to keep the interest of people who don’t want to buy stuff all the time.

I actually had two reasons for doing this, the first is that I always wanted to do a product oriented blog, that’s why I had some posts like that here, and the second is that I do not want to post products on Hack Your Day, I’d rather “outsource” to a different blog. I am guessing that my audience is mainly here for the articles, not the products and I’d rather have a smaller but more content audience, than a larger one that earns me more money.

Also, I am thinking about making some changes to Hack Your Day (yes, again), although nothing major. I want to start the blog on a course that will take me from dayjobbing blogger, to a someone who can safely quit. I like my day job, don’t get me wrong, but having a type of business of my own gives me a firmer foundation. Also, it would give me more time to concentrate on some other stuff, like making a music page for myself and so on.

I hope to be back to blogging a lot soon, so see you then, I’ve been missing it!

Highrise, by 37signals, is a very powerful contact management system that lets you keep track of anything contact related. You can use it for customer care, networking, team management, even task management if you want to.

Basics

At its core, Highrise is a place to store contact information and interaction. You can create contacts, enter various contact information and you will see a list of these contacts. Nothing really special there. Once you’ve created someone, you can add a an entry to his history, anything you did together, or agreed upon for example. This entry will be saved and once you’ve been using the app for a while you will have a neat log of events that took place with different people. All searchable, with different views as expected from a quality application.

This alone gives you a lot of power and flexibility in your organization, but what really boosts your productivity is the ability to add tasks, follow-ups and dates to remember. You assign tasks contact specifically, but you can also see them aggregated and you will also get email notifications if you so choose. The reason this is so awesome is that it allows you to separate the log from the to do list. This way you can keep a tab on what is actually happening and separate it from what you want to happen and once a task is complete, it will be placed into the log as an entry about a completed task.

Features

You can find millions of ways to use Highrise, and little details to love, here are some of my favorites. When you view all your contacts, separate groups get created for companies, showing the amount of contacts inside. This is great, since there is no need to create folders for this.

Titles and companies are also shown below each contact and they are all clickable, so under my name if you see “owner of Hack Your Day”, you can click owner to see all your contacts with that job position and Hack Your Day to see everyone working at Hack Your Day.

Searching works extremely well because it seems to be an AJAX based type-as-you-search box, which means that results get filtered as you type along. Apart from speed, this also helps you refine your search and while doing that, it also looks really smooth.

You can import and export contacts into and from the most common formats. Importing can be done from vCard, Basecamp, Outlook, ACT! and export is available to vCard and Excel files. This is a great backup option, or a starting out option for those who want to switch to Highrise.

Free vs Paid

The free option for Highrise gives you 250 contacts, 1 case, 2 users but lacks SSL and file uploads. Cases are basically folders to group people in. They are great because they allow you to cross-connect people in different ways. Two of my contacts primarily work elsewhere, but we also share a project, so creating a case will let me see both of them in the same context. Overall the free plan is fine for light users, but if you need some serious space for contacts you should consider the other options.

The paid plans are quite well though out, the best option if you aren’t working in a team is the Solo plan. For just $29 a month, you get 20,000 contacts, SSL, unlimited cases, 1 GB of file storage but only one user. This is the option I will be switching to soon.

Other plans are geared toward teams, with 15, 40 and unlimited users, 3, 10 and 50GB storage (that last one’s pretty impressive), and 20, 30 and 50 thousand contacts respectively. The top of the line will put you back $149 a month, although if you have these needs, I don’t think this is a huge price to pay, I would dish it out happily for this app.

Overview

I am using Highrise regularly now to keep track of everyone and it is working really well, and I’m still in the free version. I love the ease of use (just type an entry), the searchability and the way it sneaks some productivity into my contact management, something I’ve been looking for for a while now. In the end though, you need to use it regularly for it to work. If you do though, you will become a happy camper indeed.

Martin from gHacks usually writes great technical posts, but it seems he’s not bad at productivity at all. He wrote a post explaining why he keeps his Windows taskbar on the right side of the screen.

“Moving the taskbar to the side makes it possible to display additional windows before the Windows grouping feature kicks in”

Sure enough, he reports that you can minimize about 25 applications to the tray before they become totally unreadable, so if you work with a load of windows, this may be a breath of fresh air. This is great for widescreeners, since they have the screen real estate to do this anyway. While I despise having so many windows open, sometimes you just have to, so this is a great tip, although it does take some time to get used to.

A great new tool Mozilla is working on is called Prism, and it gives you the ability to create an application for your desktop out of any web service. Great examples are Gmail, Google Docs, Remember the Milk, but you can do it for any web page really.

Essentially it is a sort of browser that opens up a page, but does so outside you normal environment, making everything browser free. This means that you can focus more on a specific page, which may lead to productivity, but it also means that there will be no data loss if Firefox or IE crashes. It also enables you to keep your email app or other page open all the time easily.

You can create an application out of any page using a simple dialog, just type the URL and the name you want to give it. Simply clicking ok will create a one-time app, but you can save it to the desktop later. Saving it to the desktop (or creating a shortcut) means you will be able to launch your app any time from the place you saved it to.

I simply love Prism because it is a very simple, yet very useful and productive program to use. It is badly missing the feature to minimize to tray though, I think the point of Prism is that you can have Gmail or a calendar app open at all times, independently from your browser. Because of this it would be awesome to be able to minimize the window to the tray, maybe even binding a universal shortcut to it to be able to call it up whenever you need it.

I am not really into showing people job opportunities, but this is too good to miss! Gmail is hiring people for four different positions in seven locations including Europe, so all you European computer wizzes take a look!

Although I’m perfectly happy doing what I do, I would love to work with Google, I’m really sorry I don’t live in the US, or have the programming skills it takes, it seems the only position for me is CEO.

If you’d like to be a rapid prototyper, an analytics engineer, a software engineer or a user interface software engineer head on over to the hiring page for more info. If you get the job from my referral, you could implement an idea I have maybe, perhaps put an ad fir Hack Your Day into every simgle piece of email that goes through Google. Best of luck to all the applicants!

People who work a lot at a computer may find that their productivity is defined by their speed typing skills. The faster you type the less time you spend doing it (or the more you can type), ultimately you do more.

If you want to find out just how fast you are, take this handy Typing Speed Test my friend Karl from Ask The Admin found a week or so ago. I would say that a score of 50 or so is average, I got 63 if I recall correctly.

If you are concerned about some health issues get a nice squishy gel hand rest and buy a natural keyboard which will suit your wrist positions better. Learning to type quickly is a must for online entrepreneurs, but you also need to type correctly, so be sure to master both aspects.