We all know that our working environment affects our productivity, depending on the actual individual this can be quite extreme. For example, I can work at least 20% better and faster if the room I am in is totally clean, I can listen to soothing music, and get some insence going somewhere.

It’s not by chance that CEO-s and other high up managers have so individual looking rooms sometimes. Take a look at the Google HQ, where they embrace different workspaces, they don’t go for the cloned cubicle look. This is because they know that you are in your most productive state when you work in an environment best suited to you. Let me show you a few tips and tricks I use to give myself the boost I need, turn the page to see.

(more…)

I know a lot of people who read a load of productivity blogs, but they aren’t really productive, and organized. They want to be, but they start out with a method they read about, fail with it, and move on to the next. While it is obviously not a good idea to change methods after an initial failure, the real reason for the many long faces I see regarding all the productivity tips out there is not this.

The real reason behind people not being able to force productivity on themselves is much-much deeper. For this I will need to go deep into what I think productivity is and how you can achieve it. Read on to see what I think about the whole issue in general, and how you can learn to be more efficient and productive on your own (am I cutting out my own audience here? Oh well, as long as you become productive!)

(more…)

After two long months of inactivity I think it’s pretty much time to get Hack Your Day going again. Since I don’t have a lot of time for this I am aiming for three distinct types of posts in the future. My primary type will be long reviews of apps. I’m talking the in-depth goodness that sites like Lifehacker and Make Use Of bring you, instead of half length articles I will really go into the nuances and productivity aspect of stuff and how you can use apps in different, out of the box ways.

The second type of article will be the ‘oh and this is a good idea to do’ type of article, stuff about productivity in general, like a new time management solution I found, or a more productive way of reading, etc. These will mostly be shorter, but in some instances I may promote the subject matter to in depth.

The third type will be the short news flash. When a new productivity app comes along I’ll let you guys know as it happens in the form of a one liner, or a simple link to another site’s article. So far I’ve always waited and reviewed before mentioning them. This meant that I was seemingly always late on news, and that I missed out on all the important stuff. Well no more!

In short, I would settle with 3 posts a week instead of two a day, as long as they are of high-high quality. I hope it all goes well, I want to start as fast as I can, I think I can do the first post by Friday, so stay tuned. I will give the site a minor overhaul to accomodate for the changes and to give it a less “all over the place” look, which it still has for some reason.

See you all soon with awesome new productivity posts!

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…