Reaction time is very important nowadays, especially if you work as a blogger or as someone else who feeds on info. I need to fix some problems at my day job again so I didn’t write new posts, but had a few draft titles written up. I had a Prism review on my agenda three days ago, Lifehacker covered it yesterday; I had a Doomi review on my list since Monday, gHacks covered that this week too. As you can see a lot hangs in the balance and staying on top of all this info is an important task.

The way I found I can get there before anyone else (or at least at the same time), is to carefully plan my information scraping technique. Getting your news regularly as a habit will increase your productivity much more than if you would actually be sitting in front of your RSS feed for 24 hours a day. The reason is that you have to write and publish these stories as well, not just read them. Therefore I suggest two different approaches, you can decide which works best.

As I have said, I separate about 30 - 60 minutes of each morning to read news. This includes feeds, websites, even newspapers if I am so inclined. I transfer everything I want to write about into separate drafts and during the next 2 hours I write up the stories. I publish either the most interesting ones or the most relevant ones (like a Firefox update) and the rest of the day I can spend covering the less important stuff.

Another method, which is to read all about the news before you go to bed, transfer everything to drafts and then write about it first thing in the morning. This way you can probably get rid of those not-so-good ideas quickly and you are starting to write with a fresh mind, which is always very important in productivity.

Whichever you choose, I recommend separating the actual reading of news and writing as much as possible, to avoid distractions. I also advise writing when you are at your freshest, regardless of when you read news. A story which is perfect, but a few hours late will be fine, but covering something first with really appalling quality will kick you in the behind after a while.

While Photoshop can take care of any batch action needs you may have, few people know about these features and using a separate tool just for this purpose may prove to be easier and more productive.

I read about Squash a few days ago on gHacks and I very much like both the interface and the features, although features maybe a bit stretching it, maybe feature would do better. Squash is simple, choose images, choose an output directory, choose a file suffix if you need it, set the size and that’s it. I am actually all for lightweight apps like this, simply built for this one purpose, in which it performs pretty well.

I would appreciate a few added features like maybe choosing a file type, but otherwise the app is already fine, it is even available for Windows and Linux. If you need a simple tool for image resizing and don’t need any bells and whistles to go with it take Squash for a spin.

I am not a huge fan of clipping tools, there do seem to be a lot these days, but I found ClipClip worth the mention since it is so simple and for scrapping purposes it is effective.

The idea behind clipping tools is pretty simple, you can highlight a section on the web, pics and all, click the ClipClip bookmarklet and your clipping will be saved in your online ClipClip scrapbook.

You can use this tool quite productively if you are researching for a present, or for something else because you can clip pics, text and then later mix them up to form ideas. This is not the way I perform best, but scrapbookers will love the idea and using really is as simple as a few clicks.

When people start out with GTD I think they get overwhelmed because they’re expected to go from no, or unproductive organization to writing  everything down, categorizing and dealing with stuff. A method I read about on Stuff for Getting Things Done is very much like what I first did when GTD hit me.

The point of doing a mind sweep is to let everything transfer itself from your head, down onto paper, or on to the screen. On one hand, this will let you organize the most data you have, so you can create your GTD system fully, but on the other hand it also gives you clarity of thought and a warm fuzzy feeling that you’re not going to forget anything, since it’s down on paper.

I would actually recommend doing a mind sweep every now and again, say monthly, it would be the equivalent of reaching into the corners of the room when cleaning. You do take down your thoughts regularly, just as you also clean, but now and again it may prove effective to reach into the corners of your mind to get at those hidden thoughts.

During my dayjob my boss recommended an awesome application called RescueTime. Basically it is a simple app residing in the system tray that monitors what you do all the time. It periodically sends this data to the RescueTime server, and by logging on to your account you can view how productive or unproductive you were. I think this is one of the best productivity measurement apps I’ve ever seen, warranting it a bit more in-depth look on my part.

Setting up RescueTime

Setup is really easy, all you need to do is go to the RescueTime homepage and register for a free account. Once done, download the desktop application and install it (currently available for Windows and Mac). When you run the application it will reside in the system tray, right-click it and open the preferences. On the basic tab you can enter your registration details so the app knows where to send the data, and you can also set it to go to your dashboard with a double-click, I have this enabled.

On the advanced tab you can set the scanning interval of the application. I recommend you set this to a very low level, around 1-5 seconds. If you change windows very few times you can set it to a higher value, but it may lower the effectiveness of the logging. You can also set the time intervals between updates sent to the web. If you want to review your tasks every night I suggest setting it to around 15 hours, but you can also update manually using the button. I have it set to 5 minutes right now because I like my stats all nice and fresh, and I am also still in the process of setting things up.

In the privacy tab you can restrict your browser logging activity a bit, since RescueTime not only records that you are using your browser, but also the site you are looking at. You can create a whitelist by adding some entries, this will result in the app logging only those sites by name, others will be logged as “Other Websites”. You can also record only partial URL’s like “google.com” instead of “google.com/reader”, but both these options lower the effectiveness of the logging process, the fuller you record what you do the larger boost in productivity you could get with the app.

Using RescueTime

Now that we’ve got everything up and running its time to actually start using RescueTime. All you really need is to start working normally, the app will record what you do, and for how long. After you finish a few hours of work though, I suggest going to the dashboard and taking a look at some stats. Since you don’t have any tags yet, let’s make some, this will give you a lot of flexibility in monitoring your productivity.

Click on the Apps/Site List on the right and you will see a list of all the apps you have used. You will see that apart from Windows or Mac programs, you will also be presented with specific web pages you visited. You can click on Tag it! to add tags to each application. Once you add some, you will be able to view graphs on time spent on each tag and so on, which is very powerful on its own, but add tag rating to this and you really do have a productivity monitoring powerhouse.

If you click on all tags you will be able to rate each tag from -2 to +2 and based on this, RescueTime will calculate some valuable info for you. Once you are done, go to the dashboard and you will see some more stats now. You will see your efficiency level (time spent on productive activity vs distracting activity) and your productivity (compared to the RescueTime user base) level. I would mainly concentrate on the efficiency level, but trying to increase productivity could be a fun activity, and of course it forces you to be highly productive. You can also see various informative graphs about your top tags, top applications (time-wise) and total time spent.

Setting Goals and using RescueTime productively

Setting goals is a great help if you want to spend more time on a specific activity. Click on Goals and Alerts in the right sidebar and you will be able to add some specific goals in the form of “I want to spend 3 hours a day on blogging” for example. This info will be shown on the dashboard and you will see how you are doing. As all visual representations of data, it will be immensely helpful in bettering your performance.

The way to use RescueTime productively is to let it monitor you all the time. I found myself switching it off for 5 minutes, since setting up Netvibes for my girlfriend isn’t a normal activity in my day. I realized though that it is still an activity and should be logged, since in the long run, after thousands of hours it won’t make a difference too much and if it does, I won’t notice it if I always switch logging off.

Another way to use the app to maximize your productivity is to use the time views available. By analyzing your day to day performance, weekly performance, monthly performance and eventually yearly performance, you will be able to identify “trends” in your working method, and hopefully you will be able to extend high points in the graph and eliminate low points.

My RescueTime verdict

This application is the one I am most excited about and I will be covering it more in the future. The reason I love it so much is that after 20 minutes of setting up it will monitor your performance automatically, no need to constantly update, add tasks and so on. The beauty of it is that if you spend some extra time on it you will get 500 times the invested time back, but if you spend no extra time at all, you still benefit a lot.

Google is implementing Google Gears into Google Docs, a feature long awaited by many in the online community. This means that you will be able to use Google Docs without internet access, and when you do manage to go online your stuff will be synchronized automatically.

Offline access will probably mean that you will loose some features, but no loss of data, and the ability to edit documents online. I don’t really know what features you can use, since I haven’t got the feature yet, but I’m sure that basic text editing will be seamless.

The benefits of Google Gears is great, now you don’t have to worry about getting disconnected or if you’ll be able to work from the train or not. Just go to offline mode, write all you want and when you get wired again docs will sync on its own.

The feature is initially only offered in English, and for now only for text documents, no spreadsheet and presentation mode yet, but I’m sure the time will come. I am eager to try out this new implementation of Google Gears, if you have this feature already, do comment on how it’s working.