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Posts Tagged ‘Productivity’

Greplin: potential solver of a huge problem?

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I’m not Stephen Fry. Nor Ashton Kutcher.

What I mean is that I don’t have enough followers on Twitter for each of them to realise that I can’t keep up with them all. At the time of writing this post, I’ve 3,615 Twitter followers – 3,465 more than Dunbar’s number. In other words, people expect me to be able to remember my conversations with them when I can’t even remember who they are.

This is potentially embarrassing within the increasingly business-focused world I’m operating. I need a quick way to find out if I’ve spoken/tweeted/emailed/shared a doc with someone very quickly.

Enter Greplin. When I read about it on TechCrunch yesterday, it was a bit of a eureka moment:

It’s a personal search engine for all that data you keep locked away in the cloud. If you’ve used desktop search like spotlight, you’ll get Greplin right away. It’s like spotlight for your cloud data.

After you use it for the first time you’ll understand that you’ll never not use it again. And there are nice touches like showing real time results as you type. And Greplin only uses OAuth and other APIs for authorization, so they never see your third party site credentials.

I’ve signed up and added the services (GMail, Twitter, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Google Calendar, Google Docs) that I want Greplin to index. If it’s as good as it look in the video below, I may just drop the $45/year required to ‘go Pro’ and unlock indexing of Evernote and email attachments…

In terms of user outcomes, this is awesome. It provides ‘just-in-time’ data to allow you to make decisions, have meaningful conversations, and (perhaps most importantly) prevent social awkwardness. :-D

Posted: September 2nd, 2010
Categories: Productivity, Technology
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Things I Learned This Week – #35

Offline this week I learned how dead the world of Higher education is over the summer, that there was a reason I was heavily discouraged to take GCSE Art, and that trying to run after a takeaway curry the night before is a non-starter… :-p
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Let me tell you what I think ‘this’ is.

Last week I wrote a post entitled What’s this? which included the following diagram:

Answers from the comments:

  • DEPTh
  • A planned presentation
  • Apple
  • Nirvana
  • A 21st century educator
  • The future
  • dougbelshaw.com/blog
  • Trust
  • Innovation

Good answers all. :-)

My answer? The user experience. User outcomes*

Think about it.

It’s what designers, teachers, productivity gurus and technology enthusiasts all strive to improve. And it’s what Kathy Sierra used to blog about. I think it’s time to take up that mantle. :-p

*Thanks to Neil Adam for the pointer!

Posted: August 27th, 2010
Categories: Education, Productivity, Technology, design
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Innovation, productivity and frames of reference

A lot of people get stuck in the trap of trying to create something that is really innovative, something that doesn’t exist in the world today. But the truth is that an innovation that is really supercreative, that has resonance and power plus the ability to do extremely well in the marketplace, is already part of a clear set of products that already exists. In other words, they have a clear context, but there’s something novel about the way that an innovation is being thought about that really shifts the paradigm.

(DeVito, A. (2006) ‘Constantly Experiment’ in Winsor, J. (ed.) Spark: be more innovative through co-creation, p.162-3)

I’m reading the Spark at the moment, a book sent to me by Online MBA after ‘winning’ a competition (I commented on their blog). Spark is a great read with contributions from people who work at extremely innovative organisations such as Oakley, Nike and Herman Miller.

My belief that innovation thrives upon a bedrock of standardisation has been reinforced through the stories and experiences shared in the book. In other words, people have to have time freed up so they can kick ass. That comes through increased productivity, through streamlining – and to a great extent, automating – the mundane, the procedural and the administrative.

As a tangent, I’ve decided that the final version of #uppingyourgame is going to be subtitled ‘a personal guide to productivity’. Positive feedback from non-educators has convinced me that the ideas it contains are more widely applicable! :-D

Posted: August 23rd, 2010
Categories: Productivity
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Things I Learned This Week – #34

This week I learned that seagulls are carnivorous (I saw one eating a pigeon), that trying to escape via a nettle-strewn path when playing ‘capture the flag’ is foolish, and that this season is going to be pretty much the same as the last for Sunderland…
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Things I Learned This Week – #33

Offline this week I learned not to go and see films on the basis of who’s in them, not to sit next to large cheese plants at doctors surgeries, and that listening to audiobooks before bed almost guarantees some form of lucid dreaming. :-p
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Google Apps Marketplace: apps worth installing

I’m currently sorting out Google Apps Education Edition for internal communication and collaboration at work. Things have changed a bit since I set it up at the Academy last year: there’s a new admin interface and (most importantly) Google Apps Marketplace, amongst other things.

Google Apps Marketplace allows third-parties to integrate their products and services – usually by single sign-on – with Google Apps. Some are paid-for, some free and all have separate terms and conditions to the core Google Apps offering.

I’ve been through all of the third-party products and services currently available (August 2010) and created a Google Doc of those that meet the following criteria:

1. Free (not just free trial)
2. Education or productivity-focused

The document (embedded below) is editable by anyone with the link. Please do have a look and make any additions/alterations if you can! :-)

Posted: August 10th, 2010
Categories: Education, Productivity, Technology
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Productivity: don’t break the chain!

Whilst looking for something entirely different, I came across this post on Lifehacker about advice given by Jerry Seinfeld to an aspiring comic:

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

“Don’t break the chain,” he said again for emphasis.

I’ve realised that this is, in effect, what I’ve been doing with Joe’s Goals:

But now I’ve got a new ally. Lifehacker recommends the Don’t Break The Chain Google Chrome extension – complete with relevant judgements:

Priceless. :-D

Posted: August 9th, 2010
Categories: Productivity
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Things I Learned This Week – #32

Offline this week I learned that games-based learning is the future for my son, Ben (he loves Big Brain Academy on the Wii!), that nothing beats a whiteboard and coloured pens for mindmaps, and that there are, apparently, spouse-imposed laws about what you can and can’t do in en-suites between certain hours of the day… :-p (more…)

Write lots? Buy this.

I don’t like paying for software.

I don’t like using other people’s methods for doing stuff.

I don’t like storing files offline.

But I’ve made an exception. I’ve just bought Scrivener after using it for less than 24 hours. And that’s despite it having a 30 (non-consecutive) day trial. It’s going to revolutionise my writing of longer texts – like that Ed.D. thesis I’m almost half-way through…

So give it a try. But make sure you watch the introductory video first so you can do it some justice. :-)

Posted: August 7th, 2010
Categories: Productivity, Technology
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