Patrick Rhone – Page 182

Remainders 03.28.2008

Another round of the ious items that have caught my eye while traversing the deep caverns and the the twisting rivers that we collectively refer to as “The Internet”:

* My current favorite little pocket notebooks, Field Notes, have themselves a whole new redesigned website. They even have a nice little call out to my friend Ryan’s review. Check these things out if you have never heard of them. I know I have mentioned them before. Really good stuff.

* My friend Brad Blackman at Mysterious Flame reminds us all to do the right thing by keeping your Inbox the Inbox. Mark it clearly for you and the whole world to see if you need some help.

* I can’t say enough good things about this review at Lifehack.org of David Allen’s “Weekly Review” Audiobook. As a matter of fact, It might be too good. The review is so comprehensive in covering the main topics and ideas expressed in the Audiobook itself, you may not even need it after reading the review. There is a metric ton of goodness here for any of you GTDers out there. A must read… There, have I said enough good things yet?

* Speaking of “The David“, did you catch the wonderful three part interview with him over at Web Worker Daily? No? Clear a little time and work your way through it. Time well spent.

* I can seem to go a month without posting something about the 37 Signals guys but, hey, it is not my fault. Tell them to stop being so damn cool. Take some of the workspace experiments they are trying out amongst themselves. Four day workweeks are standard, paying for peoples hobbies and passions, liberal discretionary spending policies. Every business, especially the small ones, should take serious note of this. Happy, less stressed, content employes mean more productivity – not less.

* Need a little more focus from your meeting participants? Go topless. No, really, it is not what you think.

In Defense of Fiddling

Some one sentence thoughts in defense of fiddling with your system…

I often find that switching things up a bit, to a new task/productivity application or cool new paper product, often brings the “interstingness” in my productivity system back to life for me and gives a whole new spark to my productivity.

In other words, I am so excited by the shinny new car that I tend to drive a little faster, turn up the radio and sing along with a joy an exuberance I have long since lost.

While the basics of the system (capture, review, do) never really change, and neither do some of the tools that just plain work for me, I like changing things up a bit for freshness.

Don’t get me wrong, there are certainly people who are more interested in searching for the “perfect productivity system” then in actually implementing and sticking with one.

There are also people who think that the perfect piece of software or someone else’s methods will solve all of their productivity problems like the holy grail.

I am not defending this behavior.

What I am defending is people who have a system in place who regularly change out the tools they may use to implement that system just to try out new things and keep it all fresh.

It is all about developing a system you trust after all, if you have that then the tools should be fairly interchangeable.

Dropping the Science on Dropbox

I have been an active user (and mostly a fan) of Apple’s iDisk feature. It is probably the main reason I have kept my .Mac membership for so long. With the recent increases in storage there I thought I would never even look in any other direction. That being said, along with the recent storage increase has come even more flakiness. Sometimes, my iDisk will go for days with a “failure to sync” and then, mysteriously, just start working again. After trying everything possible to fix this, it still remains and has become something I just have accepted as “part of doing business” with .Mac because, well, I know I am not alone in my troubles.

Dropbox is a new file synchronization service that has just entered into private beta, and boy is it exciting. It takes all of the features of of other similar services (Box.net, FolderShare, and the aforementioned .Mac iDisk feature) and does them better, faster and more elegantly. I have been happily using it for a couple of weeks now and, dare I say, I am about a few days away from disconnecting my iDisk and never looking back.

In my mind, here are the ways that Dropbox beats iDisk:

* Syncing is faster. Way faster. As in “I can’t believe it synced the files that fast. I better open the file to make sure” faster. This is due, in part, to the fact that once a file is synchronized, and you then make changes to that file, only the changes are then synced. It is also due to the fact that the underlying technology is not Apple’s slow-as-dirt implementation of WebDav.

* It keeps a copy of any and all changes to your documents and files. Make a change that you wish you had not? Delete a file or folder by accident? No problem. Just log into the web interface and revert to a previous version – any pervious version. Or if it was a deletion, undelete it. That change will then sync to your machines. Awesome!

* You can login to the web interface and have access to your files from any machine. Therefore, if you are not on your machine and need to retrieve a file and have synced it with Dropbox, you can do so using a web browser. You can also upload new files via the web interface and those will then sync to the machines you have interfaced with Dropbox.

* You can also share any folder in your Dropbox with others, even if they do not have Dropbox. Simply enter the e-mail address of the person you wish to share with and they will get an e-mail with a link to that folder, granting them the access you have per the permissions you have given them.

To get an even better idea of Dropbox, they have a video demo up on their site that is worth checking out. As stated, this is still in beta and there are many more features coming down the pipe. The beta is closed right now but keep this service on your radar screen and sign up for an invite if any of this stuff may be even remotely useful to you.