1. Humankind annually produces such a quantity of information that can be filled by 500 thousand Library of Congress of the United States Library of Congress (the largest book world, it has 29 million books and other print materials, 58 million manuscripts, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, 2.7 million audio and video). This is currently an information explosion and he who does not learn how to work effectively with the information risked seriously affected by the blast.
2. Learn new interesting. The interest - is something that improves the quality of life, life improves tone and desire for perfection.
3. Learn new skills and receive necessary to conform to the constantly changing realities of the world. This increases the survival rights.
4. New knowledge and skills increase your self-esteem.
5. Your knowledge and skills increase your value in the eyes of others.
6. Your high value in the eyes of others inevitably transformed into tangible benefits for you.
7. Good working knowledge of information contribute to the preservation of your mental and physical health.

Good service!!!

For the past few columns I've been discussing Getting Things Done, a terrific book on increasing personal productivity by David Allen.

David's key principle is to get planned tasks out of your head and into some kind of organized system and therefore free your subconscious from worrying and remembering things to do. Unlike gimmicky productivity solutions, David doesn't care what system you use: it can be paper or electronics. The specifics aren't important: what's important is that it's convenient so you'll use it, and that you are using some kind of system.

I liked David's ideas and as I thought about my own life structure, I pondered what kind of system would work best for me. Working from home I don't travel as much as most people, but I do get out occasionally and thus I wanted my system to be portable. I also knew my system would have to be electronic, since my handwriting's unreadable and I'm comfortable with software. I thought about a PDA but PDAs are limited and I don't want to have to carry one around all the time. Also, for extensive editing, a computer's far superior to a tiny handheld.

Of course this summer I've gotten hooked on my Apple iphone: it's similar to a PDA, though lacking many PDA features, but because it's a phone I tend to always have it with me. The problem was, how could I edit lists on the iphone?

If you're familiar with the iphone, you probably know that one of its most severe limitations is that it doesn't support any kind of document editing or creation beyond its built-in Notes application and email. There are some websites that offer document editing features, but those require Internet access and tend to be slow.

The iphone's Notes application has no Mac counterpart (yet) and thus Notes are not synced to your computer, meaning that I'd only be able to view and edits lists on the iphone. More serious, people report that Notes are not backed up on your computer when you sync, so if you ever had a problem with your iphone and had to restore the software, you'd lose those Notes. For my critical need, that's not acceptable.

What I wanted was some kind of system that would let me edit my lists on either device and have them automatically sync.

Now other than websites, the only tool that auto-syncs on the iphone is IMAP mail. IMAP mail is cool: you can check the same account on your computer and on the iphone and changes on one device (read, moved, or deleted messages, for instance) are immediately reflected in the other.

The problem is that Apple's mail program won't let you edit existing messages. You can create a new To-Do list but once it's saved and closed, it's no longer editable. What good's a list you can't modify?

Then I remembered something interesting. There is one circumstance in which the iphone's Mail app will let you edit emails: messages in the Drafts folder are still editable.

So I gave this a try. I created a new IMAP email account via my web host. I then enabled access to this email account on my iphone and in Apple Mail on my desktop Mac.

Then I created some "To Do" lists as Draft messages. When I checked on my iphone, these messages showed up!

I can edit these lists on my iphone, though the interface for doing so isn't the most intuitive. For instance, there is no "Save" button on the iphone. An email message has Cancel and Send buttons instead. So after making changes to a Draft message, I have to click the message's Cancel button. That generates a Save/Don't Save dialog box. I then click Save to preserve the changes.

Since the email account is an IMAP account, changes to any of the messages are stored on the mail server so I'm free to edit the "To Do" lists on either the iphone or my desktop Mac (or any web browser via my mail account's web access). This is exactly what I wanted. Now I can check and modify my task lists either on the iphone or at my desktop Mac. The lists themselves are merely plain text, which is ideal.

I've been using this system for several weeks now and so far it works well. However, there are some disadvantages and cautions.

The biggest drawback is that email support requires Internet access, meaning that working with your lists can be problematic if you're out of cell range or on an airplane. You can read the lists without Internet access (apparently the iphone does cache the messages), but the lists may not be the most current if you haven't consolidated the lists recently. Unfortunately, you cannot make changes to your lists: while the iphone will offer you the "Save" button nothing is saved. Your changes vanish.

Generally this isn't a problem if you're careful and plan ahead, but you could run into an issue where consolidation between the IMAP server and the iphone have gotten out of sync. For instance, I once ended up with two copies of the same message in my Drafts folder. I have never been able to duplicate this again, but I think I had the message open for editing on my iMac and then modified it on the iphone: in effect editing it simultaneously on two different devices.

Another issue is that consolidation can take a few minutes, depending on the extent of the changes and your Internet connection speed. Via a poor Edge connection it can take a while or even fail. But if you plan ahead this isn't a problem.

For instance, say I've just made a bunch of changes and additions to my lists on my iMac. Before I leave the house, I'll browse my "GTD" account on my iphone, forcing it to download the latest versions of my lists. This is at home via WiFi and takes just a few seconds. Later, when I'm out and about and using Edge, the consolidation is quick because I've already got the latest version. This will also ensure that if I'm out of Internet range I at least have the latest versions cached and can read my lists without Internet access.

It is nice to note that the iphone shows you the date and time you last refreshed the Drafts folder (the last time it consolidated with the server) and the date/time of the most recent change to each message. It's good to keep an eye on both these, because it could be a disaster to have a list missing changes you think you made.

Now this is potentially just an interim solution. Mac OS X Leopard apparently includes some "To Do" list functionality and many are speculating that once Leopard is out Apple will uPDAte the iphone to support To Do lists (I hear Notes are also supported in Leopard). This would make sense, since Outlook on the PC supports both lists and notes, but Apple's waiting to add that iphone functionality for when the Mac also supports it.

But in the meantime, this is a pretty cool way to handle your GTD lists. It's fast, syncs automatically between computers and handheld, is available via iphone or any web browser (assuming your IMAP email account has web access), and is simple plain text.

While I've been vacationing the past week and haven't had a chance to really incorporate GTD into my life fully yet, my early tests show this is an excellent system and really love having my tasks available on my iphone for easy modification whenever I think of something I need to do.

by Marc Zeedar (macopinion@designwrite.com)

Introduction

The Web is replacing the TV as the #1 time-thief in our lives. And, unlike the TV, the Web cannot be shared with friends; nor does it respect the boundaries of work. Thus you spend more time 'working' and less time socialising. This ramps up stress for everyone; but particularly affects those who charge by the hour (and thus actually lose money to procrastination, in addition to less free time).

Thus we wrote MeeTimer, a Firefox extension that uses a two-pronged attack to curb your (misplaced) time online. First it makes you aware, explicitly showing you which activities and sites are taking up most of your time... you will be surprised! Second, it actively deters you from using a site, in case your willpower is not up to the task!

A core design principle is to 'advise' you, rather than 'force' you. This is because there are plenty of times where you legitimately need to bend the rules - e.g. to check some new resource for work - and thus you waste time (not to mention become frustrated) fighting against tools that try to block the Web. MeeTimer does not fight, it guides.

Using MeeTimer

Before reading further, please make sure you have installed MeeTimer and familiarised yourself with the Help; which gives you a functional overview and tips on getting started.

The Basic Idea

MeeTimer logs the duration you spend on each visit to a site. You group sites into activities - 'procrastination', 'work', 'communication', etc. - to give a higher level view of time consumption (that is also faster to interpret).
The system is heavily focused on the 'working week'; as seeing what % of your week you could save is perhaps the most significant stat to change your actions.

Getting the Most from MeeTimer

Shock Yourself

Periodically run your mouse over the MeeTimer icon in Firefox's tray to see the tooltip. In particular, observe the working-week figures to see how many hours - and what percentage of the week - has been lost to unnecessary websites. Scary isn't it? That's the amount of time you might as well not been at work - i.e. the amount of time you could be at home (or if you're independent, the number of hours you could have been making more money).
If you become numb to this, load up the Stats and check the figures for the last month!

Understanding just how much time is disappearing is key to actually acting upon it. No deterrent-based system will work if you actually want to get round it; it has to be your choice.

Isolate 'Work Time'

Some sites are legitimate for your work, but unfortunately, these are especially bad. Why? Because the odd visit to a work related site is something your mind uses against you, It's okay, not all your Internet use has been bad - you were doing work stuff. It doesn't matter that it was one useful site for every ten time wasters; you've justified yourself. The statistics loose their personal impact.
You can isolate work sites by adding them to the 'Work' group, thus easily seeing the contrast between work-time and less-productive-time.

Only Activate MeeTimer When You Should Be Working

For the same reason as above - not deceiving yourself - you should Suspend MeeTimer when you know you're kicking back. Otherwise, the clock will continue to roll, and when you see the figures you will tell yourself ah, but some of that was legitimate leisure surfing. Good examples of Suspended surfing are food and coffee breaks; weekends; etc.

Use the 'Black Out' Warning Deterrent Sparingly

Think of this as a final measure. Used for only the most serious of your procrastination sites. That way, when you see it, it still has the impact to make you think twice. If you use it all the time; it becomes far too habitual to click past it.
Using the Options, you can restrict which Groups will be inhibited by the Black Out.

Keep it Active over Long Periods

Even if you do not like any other part of the functionality; you might like to keep logging. Using the Options, you can completely remove MeeTimer from everyday view; and using some nifty Firefox technology, there is no noticeable performance impact to using MeeTimer.

In the future, you can periodically review stats; and in later releases you will be able to do much more interesting visualisations of the accumulated data.

Article source and MeeTimer software