Overview Of Jott

By Matt:

I have referenced Jott before in posts, particularly as an input device in my GTD capture arsenal. It's a handy tool that quickly transcribes voice messages into text, and delivers them to your email or cell phone. Here are the basics:

• Capture Messages: To capture a message simply call the Jott number from your registered cell phone and record a message just like you would a voicemail. Capturing messages this way is most ideal in specific situations, like when you're driving in the car and writing text messages is not a safe option.

• Set Reminders: Once your message is captured you can set a reminder for yourself so that a text message reminder will be sent to your cell phone at a later time. You can remind yourself to pick up milk on the way home tomorrow, to return your library book in two weeks, or even to call your mother for her birthday a year from today!

• Notify Friends: Not only can you send messages to yourself, you can also send the message to any of your contacts you have listed with the Jott service. You can even send messages to groups of contacts, enabling you to remind entire departments, teams, or organizations of important items.  Your contact list can be anyone and everyone (even other apps like Twitter!) so get creative with it.

Getting Started
As with most of our favorite web-apps Jott is a free service requiring only an email address and cell phone number for registration. Literally takes a couple minutes to sign-up and confirm your information. Jon and I are both Jott users and can vouch that Jott does a great job of protecting your information and you will not be the recipient of unwanted spam (email or phone).

Any current Jott users out there? The basics of Jott are pretty cut and dry, but if you're using the service in a creative or unusual way, it would be fun to hear about it in the comments below!

RSS Feeds: Embrace A Low Information Diet

By Matt:

I glanced at the Trends report in my Google Reader a few days ago: 130 feed subscriptions; 1,121 unread items.

I have no intention to read all of these items, and that does not stress me out.

Every few days I glance through outstanding posts in key categories and review a handful of them. I focus on my friend's blogs, blogs that will help me advance personally / professionally, and key blogs for networking purposes. Everything else... "Mark All As Read".

Just do it and be done with it. You can't try to consume everything. Make decisions on the front end about where your priority sources of consumption come from (your subscriptions), and then within those sources pick and choose what you're going to spend the time to read.

In a high information world it is impossible to consume all of the available knowledge. But if you define your priorities and act deliberately when choosing what to read, you take the stress out of information consumption. Sometimes it is best to admit defeat; embrace a low information diet and never again feel the compulsion to read all of your RSS feeds.

Taking Steps Back to Backup Your Work

By Jon:

Backups.  The digital age has never been more redundant than on that particular subject.  Our computing lifestyles are so heavily reliant on our data, and as such I'm more than a little paranoid about it.

This walkthrough explains my home computing setup, which is altogether separate from my corporate life.  At work, everything we use is archived and saved on our network, meaning none of my data actually resides on my local hard drive.  With my personal life and side-work, I have to be more cautious.

With my new MacBook purchase, I'm more nervous than ever about leaving my data floating on one highly portable machine.  At the same time, all my backup devices and methods are fallible and I just plain don't trust them.  I have multiple copies of important items and lots of automation has helped me cut back on time spent getting everything synced.  Let me run down what I use and how I do it.

Backing Up

I have 2 Firewire hard drives, a stack of DVDs, an online archive, and two thumb drives, all of which are setup solely to house important and needed data -- just in case.

I have a work drive where my current projects reside.  Once finished with those projects, I burn a DVD (labeled and catalogued via Excel, of course) and move the project to a NAS network drive.  Once I know I don't need the data anymore, I wipe it from the NAS drive but always keep that DVD back up just in case.  This lets me shift responsibility off me and onto someone else involved in the project, but have the NAS and DVD just in case there's a problem in the near or distant future.

DVDs aren't perfect though, and can go bad over time -- that's why it's important to ensure someone else is dealing with the archival before wiping the NAS drive.

Automation

That's it for project data.  For personal data and my documents, I use thumb drives and a lovely little site called Mozy.  Mozy allows 2gb of free storage online, and even allows you to schedule backups nightly.  

Using Energy Saver in System Preferences, I'm able to wake my computer at 2:45am each night and run the Mozy backup.  This is great because my Mac also likes to run system processes and the like during the night, so it's awake for that as well.

I also keep two thumb drives on hand (one permanently installed in a USB hub and one portable) which I backup to every night.  I made my own app via Automator to select my Documents folder and copy onto each drive, ensuring the data exists in multiple locations.  

I found a neat little iCal trick to automate the Backup app I created.  An iCal event can fire an "alarm," intended to remind you about an upcoming calendar event.  This alarm can be a sound, dock bounce, or -- the key -- opening a file.  I set my iCal to run the Backup app at 3am every morning (during my Energy Saver window).  This works perfectly and ensures that my thumb drives always have up-to-date data on them.

Time Machine

With the MacBook's new Leopard OS, I'm able to use the Time Machine functionality.  As I mentioned, I have an NAS Networked external hard drive, which allows wireless connectivity to the drive anywhere in my home network.  I use this drive as my Time Machine drive, which gives me the freedom to never have to plug it in, but to always have it running in the background.

All in all, I'm totally obsessive about backing up my data, and given how stable my computer is, I should never need to use any of these backups - knock on wood.  Feel free to tear my system apart in the comments or add to it.  Also if you know a good shrink, let me know -- I've clearly got some control issues.

The Corporate Hack Presents Tech May!

Hey there Corporate Hackers,

Starting today, we're going to be bringing you a wide array of topics, tips and apps every day in May!  This month in technology is an exploration of our favorite GTD apps, mobile apps, productivity/corporate apps and many, many more, plus general tricks and tools to help you be a better geek.

We look forward to hearing how you GTD with technology, and hope you enjoy Tech May!

Quick Tip: Share Ideas With Colleagues With Del.icio.us

By Matt:

This great tip was inspired by reader Florian Hollender in response to our recent post "A New Twist On Del.icio.us".

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Today we have two quick and easy ways to share articles, blog posts, and ideas with your co-workers by saving web-pages with del.icio.us:

METHOD 1: Use the 'Links For You' tool built into del.icio.us. Save the target webpage with the tag for:USER, where USER is the profile name of your co-worker. These saved pages will now appear in your co-worker's 'Links For You' page listed on their del.icio.us profile.

METHOD 2: The other option is to save pages with a very specific tag name (that you wouldn't use for anything else). For instance, if you work in Strategic Marketing, tag these items as "strategicmarketing". Next, instruct your colleauges to subscribe to the RSS feed of items tagged as "strategicmarketing" on your del.icio.us profile. This is easily done by directing them to this link:

http://del.icio.us/rss/USER/TAGNAME

• USER is your unique profile name for del.icio.us, and TAGNAME is the specific tag that you defined for your department.

Send us your additional tips on how you're using del.icio.us to increase productivity - we'd love to hear how you're using this great tool!

Quick Tip: Swap Windows In .0013 Seconds

By Matt:

This will likely be remedial for the more seasoned, but for the benefit of the rest we wanted to share this most important of all keyboard shortcuts.

To quickly alternate between open windows on your desktop - like from Outlook to Firefox, or Firefox to Word - train your fingers on this sequence:

Alt + Tab

In Windows this will alternate you between the window you're currently viewing and the last window you had open. I use this all day long, especially when I'm writing emails and need to reference data on an open Excel page or website. Note that holding down the Alt button while pressing Tab repeatedly will allow you to browse through all open programs.

Likewise, Mac users have a similar shortcut they can use to access the most recently viewed window:

Command + Tab

Hope this speeds up your day, or at the very least gives you a quick way to navigate away from your Facebook profile when the need arises.

Laptop Freedom

By Matt:

Yesterday was a glorious day. After four years (!!) of pestering and begging, I was finally given a laptop at work.

For as much as I am a proponent of leave-your-work-at-work, and unplugging your weekends and not becoming all consumed by the job you are only paid to do from 9-5, the laptop can actually be an incredibly freeing thing. I can't tell you how many hours I have spent transcribing notes that could have been typed. I can't tell you how many meetings I've been in where I haven't been able to provide that critical piece of data at the critical time. Or how many catastrophes could have been avoided were I able to log into the network from home. Those days are over.

A desktop computer keeps you anchored at work as well. I live in windowless cube-ville, and I can't begin to describe how drained I feel between the hours of 1-3PM, fighting off the post-lunch crash and suffering under fluorescent lighting. We have a couple conference rooms with windows around the office, not to mention an outdoor courtyard with picnic tables... I fully intend to spend significant time working from these locales in days ahead.

For me, this is a personal post of celebration... here we are in 2008 and I have finally entered the unwired world. But we can't leave this topic without providing a little how-to, therefore, keep your eyes open for a post from Jon in the days to come. For you desktop-bound folks that still remain, he has some excellent tips on how to acquire a laptop using reason and logic. Good stuff that you'll want to check out - to make sure you don't miss it, click here to subscribe to The Corporate Hack!