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 […]
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 […]
The Scope of my System The characteristics of your work setup define which features your time management system needs and which tools are available to you. My time management system is defined by the following characteristics: I work from home, off of one computer. This means: I don’t need contexts I use all desktop software and no web software. Because the […]
It’s been Field-Tested Five years ago the company I worked for asked me to start using a Franklin-Covey Planner. Like many others, I found that using a time management system helped me get more stuff done. It has been five years since that first Franklin Planner and I have experimented with many different tools and systems since […]
Bruce Tognazzini, Tog for short, is a well-known user-interface expert and was Apple employee #66. He is the author of a 3 part article comparing the speed of completing tasks with the mouse vs. the keyboard: part 1, part 2, and part 3. To summarize the articles: after testing subjects by having them complete the same […]
Introduction Before RSS I followed 5 websites. CNN, 43 Folders, Wired, and a couple of others that rotated with my interests. Then I started using an RSS feed reader and now I follow over 80 websites via their RSS feeds. That’s an increase of 16X or 1600%. How often do we hear about increases of 1600%? That […]