My new blog is here

Woho! A Google Ad that was useful to me - GafferTape.com. In Britain, gaffer tape is our version of duct tape. It's stunningly useful. And you can buy it online. 50m for £2.50? Yummy. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

On the topic of the SemWeb, GRDDL is approaching last call. If you are capable of reading W3C standards (it's an acquired taste), go and take a look. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

I've just put together Movies I've Watched, a really simple eRDF design pattern to describe what movies a particular person has watched. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

My lifehacks Permanent link to this item in the archive.

I've been meaning to write this for a while. I've figured out a few useful little lifehacks.

Firstly, I hate to say it but I've been a member of the Moleskine bandwagon for a while. They're actually quite neat. I like the large sized ones, but that's because I write a lot down. The small ones are too small to jot stuff in, so stick with the large ones. Ruled. I'd prefer it if the lines were slightly closer together, but I guess they're just about fine.

In the back pocket, I keep two things - a print out of Paul Graham's Writing Briefly. It can be read and re-read. It also contains an A4 page listing all the things I should have done but haven't. Some people call it a "to-do list". I call it a "oh shit, forgot to do that list". I'm unorganised, which is probably a very good reason against listening to anything I have to say on the topic of lifehacks and productivity.

The to-do list is created by Remember The Milk, a great online productivity tool. What's nice about it is that you can quite easily tag all the things you are working on. And if you use the in-built search engine, you can produce a "Smart List" of all your items. Every day or so, load that up, press "Print" and you've got a to-do list that you can take with you. It also works on mobile devices too. If you are building a web app, making sure you have really good print modes makes it easier to hack them in to your existing system.

Another thing I can't live without is co.mments.com. It's a comment aggregator. You add a little button to your bookmarks bar, and when you are browsing a blog entry that you want to keep track of, you click the co.mments link and it gets added to a page. Whenever a new comment is posted on that blog entry, the page is updated. It has an RSS feed, but it's not really worth bothering with. I just check the page every day or so. I try to bookmark every comment I make using it so that I can continue conversations with people.

When it comes to chomping on ideas, I use everything I can. Outlines, lists, 'mind maps' and free note-taking all work for me. I've got an outliner on my Palm Pilot, which is often useful - and can be exported to OPML fairly easily.

With regard to GTD, I use it, but I'm not religious about it. I'm also far, far from perfect in my use of GTD. From the folks I know who are obsessive about their GTD, I can see the benefits in using it, but I'm lazy and always fall off the bandwagon. In the last academic year, I had my task management really down to a fine art, and despite a few crises, I stuck to it pretty well.

I'm still evolving towards the solution.

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HomeTom MorrisOpiumfield

Last modified: Sunday, August 26, 2007 at 11:39 AM.

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