productivity posts

LeechBlock is one of the cornerstones of my online life; it is an add-on that lets me set up a list of "time-wasting" websites and forces me to stop using them after some time has elapsed. It's one of the main add-ons that's keeping me on Firefox (rather than Chrome or Opera, which I really do like).

StayFocused tries to bring a very similar feature set to Chrome. I looked at this extension a couple of months ago, and a second look this morning shows that, with many new features added, the developer has been hard at work.

In addition to specifying which sites to block, you can now configure active days and hours (meaning, when to apply the blocking), blocked sites, and allowed sites (for white-list functionality). There's also a "nuclear option" for blocking access to all but the white list (or all including the white list, which would render your browser useless), and there's a "require challenge" option that forces you to type in a random string before you can change the options.

If any of these seem familiar to you, that's because StayFocused seems to have taken a page right out of LeechBlock's book. LeechBlock has all of these features and many more. For example, LeechBlock lets you configure five different blocking sets and control the length of the string. With LeechBlock, I can configure it to let me access my time-wasting websites for "5 minutes every hour."

Don't get me wrong, StayFocused is taking steps in the right direction. If you're serious about blocking distracting websites, though, it doesn't come close to the versatility and simplicity that LeechBlock offers. Also, I wish that StayFocused would give a bit of credit where credit is due; I could find no mention of LeechBlock in the FAQ or elsewhere.

It seems like applications for quickly sharing screenshots are all the rage these days; first we get Gyazo, then we get extra sharing options with Screenpresso, and now we get dead-simple sharing again with SPGrab.

SPGrab is slightly more powerful than Gyazo in that it lets you configure your own hotkeys and also select whether you want to capture the entire screen or just a section.

By default, it instantly uploads the images to its own FTP servers and copies the path to your clipboard. You can configure your own FTP server if that makes you feel more comfortable, though.

One thing that really bugs me about these two applications is that there is no way to remove an image from the server once it's up there, and there's no clear privacy policy. What if I just took a screenshot, and then I notice that it includes some sensitive information that I wish I had blurred out? I know it's my bad, but at least give me an option to remove it from the server somehow.

Still, if you're in a rush to share some images of your screen, both Gyazo and SPGrab are fairly painless, if minimalistic, solutions.

Free stuff inside! Read on for details.

I love applications that let me figure out where my time went; I was supposed to be so productive today! How come all that remains of the day is just images of LOLCats burning my retinas?

SnapLogger is a program which helps answer questions such as this in the most graphical way possible: it records periodic screenshots (every 30 seconds, by default) and then lets you "play back" your workday to see what have you been doing at any given instant.

You can also filter the log by program, to view your activity in just one application. And it also lets you export the so-called SnapLog as a video file; this can be useful for a completely different purpose -- creating stop-motion videos showing how you draw a time-consuming creation in Photoshop, or otherwise compressing a long workday into a showcase which is only a few minutes long.

SnapLogger is currently featured in Giveaway of The Day, so if you hurry you might be able to snag yourself a free copy of this normally $19.90 application.

Tab Utilities is not for minimalists. I can only imagine how much thought had to go into organizing the myriad options the add-on offers into a somewhat sensible Options dialog. Even so, going through all of the options the add-on provides took me several minutes.

This add-on has it all. You name it -- it can do it. Protect tabs? Check. Faviconize? Sure. Locking and freezing too, but that's just the beginning. You can configure what happens when you left-click on a tab, right-click, middle-click, control-click, alt-click ... I think you get the point.

You can style unread tabs, read tabs, locked tabs, etc. You can control the orders in which tabs open. Honestly, I could not find a single tab-related operation I could think of, that I could not perform using this add-on.

So once more, if you're a minimalist, this add-on is not for you. Stick with Tabberwocky. But if you like having every conceivable option at your disposal, Tab Utilities is where it's at.

I only wish they would add one more option ... a way to "chain" operations, so I could protect a tab and faviconize it in one fell swoop.

FollowUpThen, one of my favorite productivity tools, has been updated this morning with some new goodies! The most useful new feature (for me, at least) is that I can now see any pending follow-ups by sending a blank email to pending@followupthen.com, and I can also cancel them right from the email itself (as you can see above).

They also added a couple of new scheduling formats, such as day of the week or date specific reminders (for example, tuesday@followupthen.com or mar24@followupthen.com) and short-term reminders (15minutes@followupthen.com). I'm not quite sure what the short-term ones are useful for, but I will probably end up using the other ones quite a bit.

The emails are still clean of any trace of advertising. My sole concern with the service is that I cannot host it locally -- so, I still need to trust them with my emails. I know they have a nice TOS and privacy policy, and they seem like reputable people. However, breaches do happen, and security (by definition) can never be perfect. Having a local FollowUpThen could be very handy. It's too bad that nothing of the sort exists.

Or does it, dear readers?

Nirvana is a new to-do app, aimed mainly at GTD fanatics. If you love contexts, ticklers, "next actions" and various other GTD buzzwords, you'll feel right at home with Nirvana.

The system is currently in invite-only beta, but they were kind enough to send me an invite so that I could review it. After the fold, you can see a fairly extensive screenshot tour that gives a pretty good idea of what you can expect.

I must say that I'm not much of a GTD fan myself, so I wasn't swept off my feet. Still, the application feels well made. It's one of those very Web 2.0 apps that is nearly over-the-top. It ends up feeling quite slick and enjoyable to use, though.

To see the rest of the tour, continue reading after the fold.

There is always at least two ways of doing something on a Windows PC. If you've learnt by doing, rather than from a book, you probably only know one way. Watch your mother use a word processor one day -- I bet she uses File > Save rather than hitting Ctrl+S. What about you? Do you know your shortcuts?

Keyboard shortcuts are by far and away the best way to a) speed up your work flow and b) prevent RSI. The single worst thing you can do, as far as your wrist and elbow is concerned, is move your hand to the mouse. The best thing you can do is read this list of shortcuts and be amazed at what you can do with just a couple of keystrokes.

I've sorted these lifefinger-savers into three categories: life-changing, really neat and kinda cool. Some of you will already know most of them, but you won't know all of them. You owe it to yourself to read the first block -- but try and keep going until the end!

Scanner lets you visualize disk space usage using a futuristic-looking, color-coded pie chart. Having tested it, I must say it does not come close in usefulness (or even visual appeal, but that's subjective) to WinDirStat, which is my go-to for this type of thing.

Pros:

• Once scanning is done, navigation is very snappy.
• It looks nice!
• Easily remove unwanted files using the context menu (right-click > "Remove" or "Recycle").
• It's free -- actually, open-source.
• No installation needed -- perfectly portable, and small.

Cons:

• The window is not very large, and cannot be resized.
• It feels somewhat dated. Maybe that's because it's written in Delphi, or the UI toolkit it's using, I'm not sure.
• I find the interface less than intuitive, but that's just me. This kind of pie chart makes it difficult for me to drill in and out of my filesystem and maintain a clear mental image of what's where.
• When you run it, it immediately starts scanning your entire system, which is a time-consuming operation. What if I just want to scan a single drive?
• The name is not Google-friendly. Googling "Scanner disk space" does work, though.

Bottom line:

The concept is interesting, and might work using a more modern UI toolkit. Kudos on making it free and OSS. I would give it 6 out of 10, and stick to WinDirStat.

I have a thing for full-screen editors. I also have a thing for Markdown syntax. I wanted to start writing some of my texts using Markdown in a text editor. Amazingly enough, I was not able to find a Win32 command-line implementation of Markdown.

Well, WriteMonkey saved the day. That's just one of the features of this utterly incredible full-screen editor. It's got everything I need for writing, and none of the extras; I get real-time word-count (which does not count HTML tags), I can write Markdown and copy it as HTML to the clipboard (sure, I can export the file too, but copying is so much more useful for me). It's got lots of other neat tricks too, such as automatically looking up words in Google, Dictionary.com or any other resource you configure.

The looks are very configurable, too. It doesn't insist on being full-screen -- you can hit Escape and use it as a regular window. You can easily change the text size (of course), but also the width of the text, its alignment, font, color, and page background color (can't use an image for the background, but it's not an option I would use anyway).

The only option I wish they'd add is simple syntax highlighting. I know this goes directly against the whole minimalistic vibe... I just mean highlighting for URLs and bold words, for example.

And the only thing which doesn't work right is the spell-checker... It's too simple to be useful. For example, it doesn't understand URLs in Markdown syntax, so it marks them as errors. Same goes for bold syntax in Markdown, which is done with asterisks. So I can't really spell check with it, which is a shame.

It's a lean application, too. After trying to use jEdit for my needs, this thing is as light as a feather, and super-fast. Don't get me wrong -- I love jEdit, but it's for coding, not for writing. For text, WriteMonkey sure hits the spot. Fantastic.

I am very impressed with To -> done. Web 2.0 is not easy to get right; I see so many Web apps that either oversimplify or go overboard with visual flair or needless AJAX. Also, "todo lists" are a dime a dozen these days. It's an extremely competitive market, starting with the big boys like Google Tasks and Remember The Milk, and going all the way to the smaller (but still excellent) guys like Todoist.

So how do you stand out? Well, how about removing the "list" aspect of the "todo list?" That's basically what To -> done does. It fits a very specific use, but it's so good at what it does, it's almost art. The workflow is simple: (1) Feed the application with "stuff you need to get done," along with a rough estimate of the time needed for each task. (2) Tell it, "I have an hour (or 15 minutes, etc), give me something to do."

To -> done will then spit one of your tasks at you, and tell you to get to it. You can then come back and mark it as done or incomplete. Once you do that, you go back to the screen where you can specify new tasks, or ask for one.

I only just covered this bad boy in last week's Firefox Friday -- and now there's a Chrome version! RescueTime advertises itself as a 'Productivity Meter' but really it's just a cool way of seeing how you spend your time on the Internet.

All you have to do is install the extension and it'll do the rest. At any time you can click the menu button to see a quick breakdown of how distracted you are as well as how productive you are compared to other RescueTime users. If you visit sites like Facebook or Flickr, your distractedness rises; stick to work-related stuff and you're 'safe'. Talking of 'safe', no login is required to use this extension -- you are anonymous (for all intents and purposes)!

The proof is in the pudding, though: after a few hours or days, check out 'Detailed Stats'. Prepare to be shocked, awed, amazed and disgusted by the damning but beautiful graphs. The amount of data that the RescueTime team and its users have collated, and thus the accuracy of the reports, is quite stunning.

(Incidentally, if you're a manager of some kind, there's a 'pro' version which you could no doubt use to improve the efficiency of your team...)

Rescue Time: Chrome Extension / Firefox add-on

Virtual desktops have long been one of those things that Linux has held over Windows (and Mac too, until recently). They're one of those things that you can't quite see the point of -- until you use them. You're then left wondering how you ever lived without them: alt-tab is for chumps! Why minimize windows when you can minimize your DESKTOP?

Enter Dexpot, undoubtedly the best virtual desktop solution for Windows. Virtual desktops always felt a little clunky to me, but with the new Windows 7 plugin SevenDex (it ships with Dexpot), you now have Superbar thumbnail Aero Peek access to your virtual desktops (of which you can have up to 20, but the default of 4 is quite enough for my needs).

The sheer number of options can be a little overwhelming, but they are all neatly organized in a way that best befits this German-engineered tool. You can setup shortcuts (but the defaults of Alt-1, Alt-2, etc. are about as fast and convenient as shortcuts get), move windows between desktops, peruse a catalogue of desktops (to see what you've got running) -- and you can even create 'rules', which seem to interact with new apps/windows in strange ways (I haven't worked it out yet).

It's free to download for personal use, but I imagine the biggest gains are to be made by professional designers and developers. Still, it might be nice to keep all of your 'nefarious' apps open on one virtual desktop, and all your 'safe' apps on another... and just switch between!

[via Freeware Genius]

The first thing you should know about AwayFind is that it's still in closed beta. That's important to know, because I think many of you would probably like to try it right now. It's a partial solution to one of the most irritating office problems: email overload. Like every tool, email can be used in a good or a bad way. Most of the stuff we get is distracting junk, but some emails are actually important. AwayFind tries to set itself up as a middleman of sorts, and let you know about important emails only.

You define a set of filters by FROM addresses. As soon as an important email comes in, AwayFind lets you know about it via a myriad of ways: SMS, phone call, IM, Twitter, etc. This way you can work without constantly checking email. It can also auto-forward a copy of the email to other parties. However, the auto-forward feature seems potentially embarrassing. I'm not sure if I would use it.

You can ask for a demo account while it's in closed beta, and they have a cute little intro video which I've embedded right after the jump.

Yes, you too can now be that kind of hero; the type usually associated with guitars. Perhaps you lack the manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination, or maybe you just don't like playing the same damn songs for months on end. Maybe, like the Microsoft Office Labs team, you don't think guitar/drum/DJ heroics should be reserved for the home! That's right, you can now be a frickin' office hero.

The Ribbon UI, which made its debut in Office 2007, has been rather controversial. After some 20 years of File, Edit, Format, The Ribbon throws you for a loop. The Ribbon is meant to provide easier, faster access to contextual commands -- let's face it, manipulating the old 'standard' toolbar to find the right commands was pretty painful -- it just takes a little getting used to. Enter Ribbon Hero, 'a game designed to help boost your Office skills and knowledge'. By turning Office into a game -- by accruing points and competing with your friends -- you can quickly learn how to use The Ribbon.

It's a novel idea, and by no means a bad one. The game itself installs easily, and the implementation (press the button on the ribbon to get started) is smooth. You can either take part in explicit 'challenges' to earn points, or simply gather points by going about your every-day work. After playing around with it for half an hour, it's not surprising to find out that a professional game designer worked with the Microsoft Office Labs team to make RIbbon Hero.

Oh... did I mention that you can use Facebook Connect to battle your friends to the paraphrased, bulleted DEATH?