I think I’ve talked about this before, but I really want to stress this again. If you have ideas on how to organize yourself, keep yourself to one method for an extended period of time. Also, don’t switch on a whim, even if a new method seems to be, or really is better.

I am a perfect example of being an utter failure in this. I have pretty good ideas on how to get organized, but I bore pretty easily, and I want to try the newest stuff. This ultimately makes me knowledgable in the area, but not really able to show any great improvements myself.

One area I’m really angry about right now is my blog. My adsense earnings are not high at all, but it is impossible to find any patterns in them. It seems to me that the more people visit my blog the less my ad revenue, not just comparatively, but absolutely as well. I am pretty sure I have an idea on why this is, but I can’t test it, since I have changed so many things, so many times all over the place, that I have no solid basis for my comparisons and testing.

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I’m thinking about getting a Wacom Cintiq 12″, and since I have ties with non-profits and I have a company of my own, I asked around if anyone would want to donate one to my company, or even better, donate a 22″ model. I got home late that night, and I was busy with some stuff, so I only got around to writing the email at around 23:30. As I was about to send it, I realized the error of my ways!

My company is not that big yet, but the goal is to look as corporate as possible, since people will only take you seriously, if you show that you are serious yourself. I’m not talking about lying that I have 20 employees and a budget of 3 trillion dollars, but the time you send your email for example may be very indicative. Do you know any CEO’s, managers who send official emails at midnight? They might well be up at that time, sending emails to employees, but I don’t think that sending an email to an external company at 23:30 is a good idea if you’re a small company.

This projects the image that you probably don’t have any employees, and work any time possibe to get things done. This is not necessarily bad, and a one-man company can be very powerful, and can still have a hefty turnover, but the image the recipient sees might not be the one you want. So in the end, I would suggest waiting with emails of this nature, and sending them in the morning hours. Does anyone have any input on this, do you think I’m right here?

I ran into a weird problem today, after getting home, I wanted to scan my due bills, and I got errors all the time, the scanners process just stopped working. It was fine a week ago, and I haven’t made any huge changes to my system. Little did I know, that my little tablet I installed today is the cause of all the trouble.

If you have any tablet functions enabled on your Vista or Windows 7 system, and you have a HP scanner, chances are that you won’t be able to scan. This is very odd, I would imagine that folks who have tablets also use scanners, since this is how they input their real life drawings, and HP isn’t such a small brand. Oh well, the good news is, there is a fix, just head on over to HP’s page and download and install the small fix and you will be happily scanning in no time at all!

I’m a huge fan of any information organization method, and wireframing and prototyping are two fields I am very interested in, both as a hobby, and prfessionaly in web design. A good wireframing tool (which may well be pen and paper) can save you so much time in the long run, a simple sketch could see you having a calm breakfest and lunchtime nap near product launch instead of 3 nights up in a row.

If you think you know them all, OmniGraffle, Visio, Axure, think again, Wireframes Magazine will show you so many apps, so many techniques, you will have a hard time selecting a method for yourself. What I love about the site is that they not only show apps, but great paper-based techniques and case studies of how others wireframe, so you can steal some valuable methods off other people.

On top of everything else the site’s minimalistic design is pretty cool, and the mechanism by which pressing Ctr will show you a list of posts on the left is also impressive (although might be a bit obtrusive). In any case, this is an awesome site with great tips for productivity and design, go check it out now!

If you’re itching to get your hands on the new Office suite, or you just like trying out new apps, you can give the new office package from Microsoft a thorough try by going to the Office site.

You can get some more info and take a look at the extremely bad quality screenshots at your discretion, but who really cares, just download and go, have fun!

I recently ran into a problem where I couldn’t access my Google Apps email. This has happened a fair number of times compared to Google in the last year or so (2-3), so I thought it’s their problem again, but in some cases, this may not be true. I use custom URL-s for my emails, so I would use mail.hackyourday.com for this domain, but it’s still hosted at Google.

Since I really wanted to check my email this time, I though that maybe it works with the normal address, which would be http://mail.google.com/a/hackyourday.com. Sure enough, it worked like that, so the problem is either at my host, or with Google’s redirection, I don’t know, but the point is, if you use custom Google Apps URL-s to access you mail service, you might want to try checking the non-custom one if yours is down, the fault may not be at Google.