The Brazen Careerist blog today takes a step beyond declaring email bankruptcy to declare GTD bankruptcy. Writer Penelope Trunk says a computer failure on an un-backed up computer – was the last straw for her.
“I was also adhering to the GTD holy grail of the empty inbox. But the empty in box, I confess, made me crazy. I found myself deleting emails in the name of that cause, and not because I had actually dealt with them. Also, I was filling in my Outlook calendar religiously, by moving emails directly into my schedule. But I was not looking at my calendar religiously. So I often missed meetings.”
Post-computer crash, she didn’t pick up where she’d left off:
“I think my situation was like inadvertently declaring GTD bankruptcy, and it was marvelous. I slept well. I opened up a gmail account, and I had an empty email box all the time – maybe because I also had no record of email addresses, so my outbound mail slowed down significantly.”
I hate the idea of losing my documents, my contacts and my emails. I couldn’t be as blase as she seems to be about her lost data. I can understand her being happy to leave GTD behind if it wasn’t working for her though. I’m of the view that if a system doesn’t work for you, you shouldn’t force it. Unless it makes sense and solves the problems you need solved, why would you stick with it?
Forget email bankruptcy; try Getting Things Done bankruptcy [Brazen Careerist]
The Make Use of blog has an article today entitled 10 Free Microsoft Apps That Don’t Suck. The list includes the forthcoming Windows Live online Office suite, the Windows Live safety scanner, the search tool Tafiti (which runs on Silverlight).
I have to admit there were a couple of apps mentioned which I haven’t tried and may be worth a look, including Win XP Powertoys, FolderShare and the SysInternals Suite.
So have you tried any of the apps on this list? What do you reckon – worth trying?
10 Free Microsoft Apps That Don’t Suck [Makeuseof.com]
In response to the recent wildfires in Southern California, Wired’s How To Wiki details how to protect your home and family in the event of a wildfire, from what precautions you should take before a fire to what you should do in the event of one. Keep in mind that—according to the post—strong winds and heat like we’ve seen in Southern California can tear through almost any security measure you take, but following a few of these precautions could still give you and your loved ones the time you’d need to get a safe distance from the flames before they hit your home.
Protect Your House and Family in Case of a Wildfire [Wired]Windows only: Freeware application AutoSizer automatically resizes and moves application windows to specific, user-defined sizes and screen locations as soon as they’re opened. That means that if you’ve got a widescreen monitor with the perfect window layout that packs every last pixel with useful information, you can save each window size and location with AutoSizer and restore the perfect layout automatically, day after day, as soon as you launch the applications. Alternately, if you’d prefer an application to open maximised or minimised, AutoSizer can take care of that, too. AutoSizer is freeware, Windows only. For similar but manual takes on screen real estate maximisation, check out Sizer and WinSplit Revolution.
AutoSizer [via CyberNet]It goes without saying that stress levels skyrocket when you go into crunch mode to get last-minute work done before a big deadline, but a lot of us still think we do our best work under pressure. According to the IGDA web site, though, if you’re putting in overtime beyond your basic 40 hours for an extended period of time, it’s unlikely you’re getting all that much more done. Workers can maintain productivity more or less indefinitely at 40 hours per five-day workweek. When working longer hours, productivity begins to decline. Somewhere between four days and two months, the gains from additional hours of work are negated by the decline in hourly productivity. In extreme cases (within a day or two, as soon as workers stop getting at least 7-8 hours of sleep per night), the degradation can be abrupt.
While it’s no surprise that stress levels go on the rise during crunch time, keep in mind that the extra hours may not actually be getting you that much more work done—and if you can avoid extended overtime, you probably should.
In any case, we know that there are lots of you out there pulling well over 40 per week, so we’re curious:
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Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work: 6 Lessons [IGDA via Dumb Little Man]The free, open source scripting language AutoHotkey may not be one of the most powerful or popular programming languages on the planet, but that’s okay—it’s not just made for programmers. That’s because AutoHotkey is well within the grasp of regular folks like you or me—people who have a fair understanding of computers and are willing to learn just a little to make major strides in productivity. Today I’ll show you how to use AutoHotkey to turn almost any action into a keyboard shortcut.
Windows only: Love Vi and want it and all its settings with you on every Windows PC you use? Grab a copy of GVim Portable, a self-contained, thumb drive-friendly version of the GVim (GUI Vi Improved) text editor, which includes with a configurable .vimrc and GVimPortable.ini that customises and contains all your preferred settings. Reader Mike sent in a screengrab of his GVim Portable setup sportin’ a bitstream font (pictured above.) GVim Portable is a free download for Windows only. Thanks, Mike! GVim Portable Home Page [Sourceforge]
Linux only: Tired of seeing your songs show up as “01.mp3″ in your music player? It’s due to bad metadata tags on your music files, a frequent side effect of music sharing services and hasty CD rips. Former editor Rick Broida showed us how to tame our music libraries into shape with Windows programs, but Linux users have a nice option as well. Desktop utility Ex Falso fixes MP3, Ogg Vorbis and other files manually or based on filenames, and includes a feature to quickly set track numbers. Ex Falso is a free download available in many Linux repositories (search for the package exfalso), requires the GStreamer 0.10, PyGTK, GTK+ 2.8, Mutagen 1.9, and Python 2.4 packages, and is also available as a source download.
Ex Falso / Quod Libet [via FOSSwire]Do too many of your magazines make a circular route from the mailbox to the recycling bin without being opened? New website Brijit aims to help you decide what’s worth paging through all those ads to read. The site’s paid staffers create 100-word abstracts from the articles inside more than 50 popular (and mostly high-minded) magazines and rate them on a 0-3 scale from “not a priority” to “exceptional, a must-read.” Grabbing the magazine-specific RSS feeds could help you make the most out of those hardly-read holiday subscriptions, but I’m hoping feeds tied to specific searches show up in the future.
Brijit [via Washington Post]
