“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They are huge and abstract. […]
Above? Left Justified? Right Justified? Luke Wroblewski gave an excellent talk called “Design Patterns” at SXSW. A highlight was when Luke presented the results of user interface research into the advantages of various form label alignments. I’ve condensed the slides from Luke’s talk down to just the ones on form labels because that information holds up […]
Discovery is the act of finding information. There are two types of discovery, active and passive. Active discovery is seeking out a solution to a specific problem you are having. For example, if you were launching a website, google searching a good hosting company is active discovery. Passive discovery is following sources that you trust to report […]
Lingos.cc is a new web-based translation site that myself and my business partner, Ian McIntosh, are launching. This screenshot of the homepage should sum up the functionality: You enter text on the homepage and click translate. A real live native spanish speaker translates the text in under 24 hours. Then you receive the completed translation via email. Automation […]
I was tempted to add MenuMeters to the “VPZtms Compendium of Tools” post because if I’d added it (and Growl), the list would have included all the applications that I am always running on my machine. I refrained because technically they have nothing to do with information management. But I still wanted to write something […]
Flash intros aren’t looked highly upon in the web design community and with good reason. Web surfers have notoriously short attention spans, so you don’t want to make them sit through a movie to get into your site. With that said, I’ve never been able the shake the feeling that Flash intros did in fact provide […]
All of the tools I listed in the “Compendium of Tools” section are either free, have a free version, or come built-in to OS X (excluding TextPander, which was just recently made a paid product). This tendency towards free software is a side-effect of the way I select tools. Definition of Good Software When selecting software tools, […]
This is a quick introduction to the software tools that the VPZtms uses. The tools are divided into the categories that I outlined in the “Introduction to Information Management” section. All of these tools satisfy my requirements of being simple, flexible, and easy to use. Discovery NetNewsWire - I’ve already written 2053 words about RSS, so I’ll refrain […]
I chose the term “time management” for the title of this series because that’s the term that has been popularized recently by David Allen, 43 Folders and the like. But my system covers more than just managing to-dos, so I am going to introduce a new term, “Information Management,” to describe it. The goal of […]
There are three (closely-related) reasons that incorporating a new tool into your time management system often fails: It is too complicated It is too inflexible It is too hard Too Complicated A tool is too complicated when it does too many extra things that you don’t need. For example, the much heralded Kinkless GTD is too complicated for me because it […]