Adobe Air has quickly become a favorite of mine, and has quite some hype surrounding it, and for a good reason. Possibly for the first time in internet history it brings together the internet and the desktop in a usable, easy, productive and very stylish way. There have been, and are, other projects on the horizon like Prism and Bubbles, but Air provides the best interaction between your desktop and online world. Say hello to some of my current favorite Air Apps, all of which further your productivity in one way or another.

Doomi

The very sexually named Doomi is actually quite misinterpreted if looking at its name alone. It is a very simple, unobtrusive and easy to use to-do list enabling you to take down tasks on the fly, very quickly. My favorite thing about this Abobe Air app is that by default all you see is a bar showing you your to-do items, completed items and number of reminders at the top, and a text area for inputing a task. Just jot and press enter, that’s all. When you need it press the arrow to see the list, and expand further to see old items.

You won’t be getting Remember The Milk style complexity and depth, but it does beat anything else I’ve used in the area of just taking down thoughts. Just today I was in the middle of writing a post and it occured to me that I deleted my contact widget on the blog and I wanted to remember to put it back. I didn’t want to fire up any complex lists, and Doomi proved to be great help. Just jot and continue working. I would recommend this for the management of your daily tasks, very simple, yet very effective.

One weakness I want to point out is that Doomi is not minimizable to the notification bar. Sometimes I have quite a load of applications running and I don’t need the clutter on my tray. If you have a hotkey assigned to launch it, or something similar you can just close and reopen it all the time, the loading time is virtually non existent.

Klok

Klok is a time tracker for Adobe Air and a perfect example of the complexity you can achieve with Air. At first the applications all seem very limited, compared to Outlook for example, or Remember The Milk as I just mentioned. Klok is very different, with a beautifully designed interface and loads of features it can truly be used like a desktop application.

You will be surprised to know that Klok actually operates with one function. Create all your projects inside it, and afterwards all you need to do is double click and select “work on”. Klok will then track the time you are working on the project and log it. Really that’s all there is to it, and that’s all there should be to it, the purpose of the app is to give you reports to help your productivity, not to bog you down with unnecessary actions.

It gives you great reporting options like the week view, which is like a reverse calendar generated from what you’ve done. There is a summary report available, weekly reports and monthly reports, and if you take a few minutes to review these sometimes you can gain a whole lot of time, or see where you have time left.

I haven’t been using Klok for long, but there are two annoyances I found. The worst one, again, was not being able to minimize it, which is a bigger pain here, since closing the app means stopping time tracking. There is a minimize option available, but this only folds most of the window and only shows the status. The second, minor fault, was the estimation of time spent on a project. Since many of my projects are ongoing, it would be nice if these was a weekly or daily amount as opposed to an all time one.

WebKut

This application, aptly named WebKut is designed to take screenshots of webpages. Again, a very specific use, but highly helpful. You type the URL you want to take the snapshot of and when it loads you can choose between full screen capture mode, the whole page capture mode (this is one I see rarely) and selection capture mode.

You can choose between four image extensions, output directory and file naming, and that’s all there is to it, and that’s all I need. I am going to list quite a twofeatures I would like to see, but don’t take me wrong, this is a great tool, it just has more potential in it which is not available yet. First of all, it would be nice if it could automatically load the page active in my Firefox browser, since that’s what I screen capture most. Also, it would be nice if I could select an area and move it around, as opposed to auto capturing what I select instantly.

If you take screenshots regularly this is a great tool because it lets you visualize your selection very well, and is also available without firing up Photoshop or Gimp. Oh also, the tagline on the page “Let’s cut the web! Take away its best parts” is just awesome!

Twhirl

As you can see from my sidebar I am starting to Twitter actively and Twhirl is my perfect desktop companion for that. It gives you all the options, replying, twittering, deleting, managing friends, followers and so on. Since I am new to Twitter I don’t yet know how much advanced tech you might need, but for the average user it will definitely be very cool.

No need to log in or use your browser, just fire up Twhirl and start writing. You also get plenty of options, and a surprisingly large list of themes to choose from, you will definitely find one that matches your OS or taste. I think Twhirl is the best example of what Adobe Air tries to achieve, interaction between your online self and your desktop.

Snippely

If you’re a web designer, or are dabbling in some code Snippely is a great tool for organizing snippets of code you use regularly. Of course you can also use it to record text snippets of any type, like a specific email reply you need to use for 2 days, ideas and so on.

You can create groups of snippets, like a group for CSS, for PHP, or for one specific site for example. You can then add snippets of code, or plain text. What I love about Snippely is that it is very easy to organize yourself in this manner because it is presented very intuitively and in an easy to access way.

The only problem with it is that on the other hand it is not easy to use, at least at first. You will be clicking around for quite some time, since the interface usage is not very well done. Just a quick tutorial, click on the bottom right to create a group, and then a snippet for the group. Then name the snippet and add code. You can set the type of code by clicking on the default “plain text” with the right mouse button and setting appropriately.

Overall, this is a very good application, but is in need of some usage rethinking. A menu bar, or a more intuitive double click interface would be awesome, and maybe a way to share would be great too!

If you take the internet out of context and forget about all the obvious productivity advantages it has given us, like email, skype and so on, it’s still not anywhere near to being as much of a time saver in productivity as it could be. Let me explain.

Take a look at the average internet user for example. He loads up gmail, sends and email, browses for an attachment, sends it. Then he logs in to his blog, writes an article, fires up GIMP and makes an image for the post. He simultaneously logs on to Twitter, to let the world know he’s writing a blog post, and so on and so forth. Much of our time is wasted on switching between apps, and overall, using too many application to accomplish our goals.

Services and technologies spreading like wildfire on the net are constantly changing this, and making us more productive. For once I’m not talking about Remember the Milk, or even Gmail, but the applications that serve to bring these all together.

Prism, Adobe Air, Google Desktop and a whole host of other applications are working together to serve us a dish which we can eat all at once, not bit by bit. Using Adobe Air you can use the much quicker interface of your desktop to control applications like Twitter, Chat clients, and almost any other web service. Using Prism you can integrate services into your desktop better, and Google desktop search brings together various web services with the power of Google Search on the web and on your desktop.

In my opinion this is all just the beginning. Prism in reality doesn’t give us a huge productivity boost, it’s just more convenient and browser independent. Adobe air is a better example, since this way we can customize better to our tastes and use our desktops speedier environment. The future lies in these technologies though, imagine an Adobe Air like software for bloggers, joining Wordpress, Splashup, Flickr, Twitter and News sites. It would be an online suite of the tools I use for blogging saving content online and on my hard drive as well. It could automatically create databases for me with post contents, titles, categories, pics used and so on. It could also automatically post to Twitter, notify me of comments and so on.

As you can see there is a great deal more that can be done, but I think what I described above is technologically very possible. What remains perhaps is an easy way to connect all these services, so users with minimal amount of programming knowledge can custom-tie apps together, to serve their own productivity.

A quick update for all of you on the new commenting system and Hack Your Day in general. I have implemented Open ID registration for the blog, so you are now free to use your Open ID. If you don’t know what it is, take a look at OpenID.net where you can find all the info needed.

Just so even this post digs into productivity a bit, I’ll quickly tell you that you might have long had an Open ID and not even know it. If you use Blogger, Flickr, Yahoo, Wordpress.com, Technorati, AOL, LiveDoor, Orange, SmugMug, or Vox, you can already use you identities there to sign up and use any service that is Open ID enabled. To get started you need to use your profile page URL usually, take a look at the list of Open ID URL’s you can use.

Your username will be that horrible long URL though, so please take a moment to put down a nickname in your profile, which can be found by clicking on the profile link to the top right of the Wordpress admin panel when you log in. You can also add any other info you want, I would appreciate an email address, but in no way is this necessary.

Happy hacking, productivity and organization to you, I hope you all join the community and get it going. There seem to be all sorts of extras coming your way if you do…

I have been doing the blog for so long I couldn’t remember If I’ve ever done a post on RocketDock. I had a feeling that I didn’t, but I haven’t even mentioned it, oh the horror of it all! If you haven’t heard of it, RocketDock puts a little Mac-like dock on your Windows desktop and enables you to extensively customize everything from visuals to icons, to size and hover behavior and so on.

I actually had quite a problem naming this post, since it could easily have been “put folder contents on the desktop productively and stylishly” because I’m going to show you a way to use OS-X style stacks with RocketDock that makes navigating some folder’s files very easy.

I have a drafts folder for example where my drafts reside, but the contents change daily, and any single file will be gone in a maximum of 2-3 days. I needed to put the folder contents on the dock, not just the files, so I had a look at the addons page and found the Stacks Docklet, which I will be using to show you a great way to get to your files.

Once you download the zip file, extract it, and put the whole extracted folder in the “Docklets” directory in the RocketDock folder. Right click on the actual dock and go to add item and stack docklet. You will see a downward pointing arrow appear and all you need to do is right click and choose icon settings. You can specify which folder to use, and even which icon. You can also choose between the normal stack mode, like in OS X, and also a grid mode, which uses a box to show your item.

Let me give you one more productivity tip for RocketDock. Here is a screenshot of my desktop, and you will see that in my actual configuration, the icons are very small. The reason is that I keep them on top all the time, and even with a window running they are not in the way. Take a look at this Firefox screenshot and you’ll see what I mean. I am also using MyColors with one of the free themes, and IconPackager for my cursor scheme. This lets you access all the icons and files in your dock all the time, without having to minimize stuff, saving you a lot of navigation time.

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I’m an avid believer in the saying that “too much of anything can be bad”. I probably just made that up, but it’s true nevertheless. I have found though in my own experience that over-organizing may be a suitable action plan for some people.

The organizational curve

I think the against arguments are fairly obvious. Organization works like economies of scale. Up to a point the more you do, the exponentially more you benefit. After a while you benefit more, but the gradient is not as steep as it was (economically speaking, the marginal worth of your extra organizational input is declining). After a critical point, more organization brings you less benefit. So the moral of the story is, that by organizing yourself a whole lot takes away precious time you could spend actually doing something.

External factors

What the above model doesn’t, and can’t generally take into account is the fact that there are loads of other inputs in the equation. Your mood, your feelings, the weather, the music you’re listening to, everything. Generally I found that over organization helps people who tend to be disorganized not because they don’t know how to be organized, its just that they loose interest and/or, don’t like to keep to-do lists refreshed and ready for action.

I’m typically one of these people. While I have awesome thoughts about management and organization, I rarely take my own advice because I find that I hate doing regular stuff. Well, I found my answer in doing something even more regular strangely enough. I am now doing gross over organization of my work.

For example, I do a lot of blog writing, both for myself and others. I also do articles, ebooks, the occasional rewrite and so on. From the beginning of May every single piece I release is filed away. It is formatted in word to a specific format, same scheme, same everything. They all contain links to the published version if any, and all files are categorized, titled, tagged with Vista’s interface. In addition I am also entering all the details into a database, which contains a load of info about each item.

Why this works

On the surface it may seem like I am a tardy person because of this, and on the surface, I have to say this is true. The driving force behind this though is that I feel I am organized only if every single detail of everything is organized, not just my to-do list. What I have created is the total and complete organization of my blog life, which takes up about 80% of my time, so at least this part is now under control. This “sitting on top of the mound” feeling helps me continue organizing and working happily.

In addition, I have a very up-to-date database of everything I have done, and it fills me with joy to see that I’ve written 20 published blog entries in 5 days. I can also see how much this will pay off in terms of hard currency, which is of course another impetus.

In the end I am organizing way too much. This extra effort tones down my short term productivity, but in the mid to long run, I am definitely doing better. I hesitate to suggest this to everyone, but if you’re struggling to stay on top, why not give it a try?

Apart from blogging I actually used to do (and am starting again) to do a fair bit of freelance writing. There a lot of things you can do for yourself that enables you to work better, get better work and to organize yourself better. Let me share some tips I’ve accumulated to make your job easier.

Find work

I used to rely solely on one site to get work and that is Elance. Since then I am doing a lot of guest blogging, which I attained through relations with other bloggers, but even if you’re new to blogging you could apply, many blogs are searching for good writers. If you do want to become a guest writer I really suggest not pushing the envelope. If you’re an all round nice guy and offer to write a guest post or two for them (without mentioning employment or money) they will probably take you on anyway if they need the writers and you do a good job. I suggest being polite friendly and sincerely helpful.

Elance is a great site for finding many types of work, not just writing. There are web design projects, administrative projects, legal work and a whole lot more. Application is simple, although you will have to pay for a subscription later on. The basic one for writing is around $9 and I can vouch for this site, they are not ripping you off. In addition to the $9 you will have to pay a fee which is based on your earnings, so that’s “just” a deduction. Anyways, it’s a great site, if you’re thinking of signing up and giving it a try, I would be grateful if you could send me your email address and I could refer you, it would mean $50 for me after each $1000 you earn (or spend on someone else’s services).

Organization will be a key feature for finding good work on elance, since with a solid and well managed portfolio you are much more likely to find work than someone who has a messed up one, or none at all.

Organization and productivity

I have about 4-5 projects running simultaneously and I could manage it without organization, but I have a few good reasons to spend the extra time. I use a database to follow my projects right down to the actual stuff I write. My database goes along with folders which contain all the articles, blog posts, e-books I have ever written. This allows me to quickly find anything for a past client, or to construct the best possible portfolio for prospective clients to view.

The work database contains tables for projects, clients and so on, but I also have a table named “items”, which contains all the detail for each project. A typical entry (say a blog post I wrote for someone) )will contain the ID of the item, the project it belongs to, the date it was written, the date it was published, an attachment that leads to an Office document of the text in question and a hyperlink which leads to the post itself. If you’re just using an Excel sheet that’s fine too, in this case you might want to add the client name and email too, in my database this is in a separate table.

My folder structure contains folders named after projects (not clients). I have many repeating projects (like guest blogging), in this case I advise sub folders with month names. In my database the project entry for my gHacks guest blogging is “gHacks blog posts May” for example and the folder structure is “gHacks” -> “May”. I then create doc files for all the separate posts. Nothing fancy, they just contain the title, the body of the post and the URL. This is helpful for me because I can search through the whole body of my life’s work very easily, but I can also send any one of them to clients, and they can also navigate to the post itself.

I manage these files using Vista because it gives me the advantage of tagging and categorizing doc files. I usually use the following categories: “Project name”, “Type of text”, “Project type”. For gHacks posts this would translate into: “gHacks”, “blog post”, “work”. I distinguish between blog posts for my own sites, which are not work, they are categorized as “blog”. This ads a level of complexity to it, but I want to be able to separate work which other people pay me for, since an error there means a dent in my reputation.

I use tags to describe the contents of individual posts, but I need to explain my method a bit further. I use two levels of depth here. For posts which are similar to the content found on Hack Your Day my level of tagging is much deeper. I would tag with “Remember the Milk” and “Tomboy” for example. I am writing a few posts on auto parts right now, but that is outside my normal writing field, so I just label all of them as “automotive”. My reason for this is that I want to use tags mainly to build custom portfolios. So if I see a job that pays $10.000 for auto articles I just zip those up and send. For productivity and geek oriented posts I do want to sort sometimes to find stuff by tag, so I need the extra level of detail.

Creating an image

A good tip for freelancers is to create an image. Create a color scheme, a specific design that becomes your staple, something that can be found anywhere in your work. It doesn’t matter if you can’t design a logo, or have no Photoshop skills at all, this can be as simple as using the same font regularly, always using green as the title and always underlining the last paragraph so it can be followed by a resource box. The point here is to create something by which you and your work can easily e recognized.

This comes in handy because it both looks good, and once people will get to know you, they will associate you with your style. People might not remember your name, but they might remember the awesome writer they once worked with with the green color scheme.

Here are a few things you can work on that could all be customized to the same look:

• Email design (headers, footers)
• Returned article/assignment formating
• A creative tagline
• Company logo
• Website for yourself
• Profiles on other sites
• Business card (vCard too)

Remember to customize many things which are not assignment or task specific. The reason is that many clients prefer a specific format which will most likely not allow for your customizations.

Manners and work moral

Always, always, always be nice. This is a universal rule, and I don’t just mean this when you start earning $100 a month and you rely on people to give you work. Being nice will pay off hugely in the long run, and you will get a lot of unexpected job offers or job prospects in the future.

I have had countless cases where I did a good job and the same client offered me other stuff too. If my quality is good but I’m a horrible person, this wouldn’t really happen. Also, try not to assume the worst, if a person doesn’t send an email response to you for a week, he may be sick, or have other things on his mind, just be patient.

Productivity as a freelancer

Overall, the moral of the story is that in my opinion there are four factors that go into being a good and successful freelancer. Number one is quality, which rules all. I also mean punctuality and other traits which add to the quality of specific jobs. Number two is manners, and disposition, which can get you more work than you think, and can get you out of pretty bad situations too. Number three is organization and management which will make your life much easier and help you create your portfolio and stay on top of things. Number four is image which is not a requirement for people who want to earn a few bucks on the side, but if you want to boost your income, it’s an easy and smart thing to try. Good luck freelancing!