Mac Basics Everyone Should Know

At a recent class I attended I happened to be counting the computers around the classroom. Of eleven computers in the classroom, eleven of them were Macbooks. The numbers don’t lie, a growing number of people are switching to Macs, especially among the younger generation. With all these converts, it’s a perfect time to make sure that everyone knows how to get the most out of their Macs, new or otherwise.

Even before I switched from the world of PC’s there were two functions so important to me that I ran third party apps just to get that functionality. Macs have built-in software that takes care of both problems. And frankly I now find it hard to compute without these two options. The first is the ability to launch programs and search from the keyboard. On a Mac the ability to do this is provided by a program called Spotlight that it is built into Leopard and succeeding versions of OS X. To launch Spotlight just hit CMD + Space, type in your search and away you go. It’s a huge timesaver.

The second computer essential is virtual desktop ability, provided on Macs by Spaces. You can set up Spaces to allow you to have a number of different desktops that you can select from when you’re working on multiple projects and don’t want things to get cluttered up on one screen.

To change settings on things like your Spaces, you should look at System Preferences, which is basically the Mac equivalent of the Windows control panel. Most of the settings you need to change will be right here.

A big freebie that very few people are aware of is the Mac program called iSync. It allows you to use your Mac’s bluetooth wireless capability to synchronize with a variety of devices. I use it to sync my address book with my Motorola Razr, which is not even close to a smartphone. If you have a smart phone there are even more things you can do like syncing a calendar and things of that nature. I’m quite happy with just being able to use iSync to make sure that I always have my phone contacts backed up on my computer in case I lose my phone or it completely dies some day.

One last thing that can be really puzzling when you first switch especially if you go to a Macbook, is the fact that there are no Home and End keys. If you want to get the same functionality you have on a PC, just use the FN key plus the right and left arrows to navigate backwards and forewards along a line of text.

Any other Mac tips that I’m forgetting? Share your thoughts in the comments.

 

How To Be Productive. All You Have To Do Is Focus

People all over are complaining about their ability to focus and get a lot of things done quickly. What if I told you that the solution to this problem is really very simple? All you have to do to increase your productivity is get rid of the myriad distractions modern technology provides us with. Of course actually making this strategy work requires a bit of self-discipline, and therein lies the rub.

In this age of digital communication, we surround ourselves with all kinds of distractions. Most of them have a useful purpose, but only if used correctly. When our short-term goals are to think or write having a lot of distractions at hand is more harmful than helpful. If you get rid of all the non-essentials when you’re really busy, you’ll be more focused and productive. Even more importantly, you’ll save time and make your day a lot shorter.

For me, going into productive mode means setting my IM status to  invisible, logging off of Facebook and closing Twitterific. That’s enough for some projects, but especially for students, sometimes the best strategy is to leave the computer behind entirely. Just focus on your offline research and do the online stuff later. Don’t forget the power of location either. If you don’t have to be at a specific desk, find a place where you are really comfortable, relaxed and free from interruption.

The precise details of the strategy you implement to escape distraction are up to you, but the important thing is to be disciplined. The very reason that Twitter, IM and Facebook are such big distractions is that we enjoy the time we spend on them. Giving them up requires a bit of effort, but it’s an effort that will pay big dividends in things accomplished and time saved.

Perhaps even more important than the time you will save, your extra productivity will make you feel good about yourself. You won’t have the nagging feeling that you’re wasting time. Instead you’ll feel proud of your new-found self discipline and all the things it helped you to accomplish.

What are your favorite ways to escape distraction and increase your productivity?

 

Mac Tip: Hide Holiday Music With Automator

Now that the holidays are over, most of us are ready to be done with holiday music for a while. The problem is that sometimes our digital music collections have a mind of their own and start playing holiday music even in the middle of July. CNET’s Donald Bell suggests several ways to make sure you don’t have this problem, including storing all of your holiday music on a special flash drive. But if you don’t want to go to all the trouble and expense of his methods, there is a simpler way for those of you who use iTunes on a Mac. It’s easy to setup, doesn’t require any additional materials or software, and works year after year without any user intervention.

1. Make a Smart Playlist
Create a new smart playlist from the iTunes File menu and set it to contain all of your holiday music. You can make this as simple or complicated as you want by using different rules. If you haven’t carefully organized all of your music by genre, just set several rules including genre searches for “Christmas” and “Holiday” and even the word “Christmas” within the song or album title fields. Then set the playlist to include tracks that match any of your rules. As an added bonus you now have all your Christmas music in a single playlist for all of your holiday parties.

2. Make An Automator Workflow
Open up Automator on your Mac and create a new workflow. Add the action “Get Specified iTunes Items”, and select your new holiday music smart playlist. Your second action should be “Set Options of iTunes Songs”. After adding this, select the option “skip when shuffling”. Then save your workflow.

(If you’ve never used Automator, this site is full of examples and explanations.)

3. Make an iCal Plug-in

Use the File menu in Automator and select “save as . . . plug-in for iCal”. iCal will then open and automatically create an event that runs your new workflow. All you have to do is make sure the event is set for the appropriate date after the end of the holidays and make sure it’s scheduled to repeat yearly.

4. Add Your Music For Next Winter
Modify your workflow so that it sets your playlist to be included in shuffle. Then save this plug-in and schedule an event that will add your music back to your library before the holidays begin.

Pretty simple huh? If you get your hands a little dirty up-front you’ll never have to worry about a surprise Christmas song out of season again. Unless of course you like Christmas music enough that you enjoy listening to it year round. In that case, this project is definitely not for you.

Note that this tip works for Mac users. If any Windows users have ideas on how to accomplish this in Windows, mention them in the comments.

 

Take Advantage of Gmail’s Auto-Complete Feature To Remember Complicated Addresses

Today Lifehacker featured a story suggesting that you set up a system of Gmail filters to forward email to hard-to-remember addresses like your Flickr upload address. There’s nothing wrong with the Lifehacker/Digital Inspiration method, except that it’s too complicated.

As long as I can remember, Gmail and most desktop mail clients feature auto-complete features in their address fields so that you can type the name of the contact rather than having to remember their email address.

If you don’t want to get your hands dirty with Gmail filters, just come up with memorable and descriptive names for your email contacts. That way all you have to do is type in “Remember The Milk” and the address should pop up for you. It’s just as effective as the filter method, and much simpler.

 

Working Quickly: Use Firefox Bookmark Keywords to Save Time

I purchased my first Mac recently and the switch opened up new doors for me because there are many software options that aren’t available for PC. Apple’s default web-browser Safari recently became available for Windows as well, but I didn’t bother to try it out until I switched to OS X. Safari is an interesting browser, and far better than Internet Explorer, but it falls far behind Mozilla Firefox 3 in my opinion.

One important reason I installed Firefox on my Mac is the ability to easily add powerful add-ons that increase browser functionality. A less obvious Firefox feature that I started missing immediately while I was using Safari was the ability to add keywords to bookmarks.

By taking a little extra time to designate your most used bookmarks by a memorable keyword, you can easily pare down the time it takes to open web pages. For some web sites I use frequently, like Gmail and Facebook I use keywords that are only two letters long. I can type “gm” in the address bar, hit enter, and the full address for my gmail inbox is filled in. It’s a huge time-saver.

To add keywords to your own bookmarks in Firefox open the bookmark organizer. With Windows you can right click on a bookmark, select properties, and then enter the desired value in the keyword field. With OS X select the bookmark and then click the arrow next to “more” at the bottom of the organizer window.

Put in a little time up front and you can start launching your favorite web pages with three key strokes.

 

Keep Your Writing Formal: It May Help You Get Hired

Millenials are a hyper-connected generation. We use Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and dozens of other social networks. We email, IM and text everyone. Although we use video sites like Youtube, talk on our cell phones, or share photos on Facebook or Flickr, a lot of our communication is textual. You would think that with all this everyday experience, we would have learned what is appropriate for different situations, but apparently we haven’t.

The Wall Street Journal ran a story on inappropriate text-based communication this week and it really caught my attention just because I didn’t know that this was such a big problem.

The way you communicate can keep you from getting hired.

We millenials are so used to communicating quickly from a variety of mediums including mobile devices that make typing quickly difficult that we throw in all kinds of shorthand to make life easier for ourselves, and we even use emoticons to help express our feelings or let others know when we’re making a joke. These practices are perfectly acceptable in our daily communication with our peers and close friends, but in the business world, many, if not most, view digital shorthand as unacceptable.

At the core, a lot of our millennial communication devices seem informal, lazy, and to some, even childish. These perceptions are fairly accurate, because digital shorthand stems from a desire to communicate quickly and with a minimum of effort.

It may not be necessary to abandon “txt-speak” completely, and if you have younger co-workers, it may even help you to communicate quickly and effectively. But it can be a big turn-off for most of your senior co-workers, customers, and people thinking about hiring you.

As a brief example, I recently received an introductory message from someone on Facebook. I hadn’t met the person before, but I immediately formed a positive impression just because the message was properly capitalized, punctuated, and divided into paragraphs. I’m not averse to occasionally skipping caps myself, but even in the Facebook world, where that type of writing style is very common, taking a little extra time to make sure that your writing looks and sounds professional can make a big difference.

The key to good professional communication is something hammered into me by my English Composition teachers in college: Know your audience. If you’re writing to someone you know well and have a good relationship with, you may know from experience that they don’t mind if you toss in a few acronyms, shorthand words, or even a smiley or two. But if you don’t know the person very well and want to make a good impression, you’re better off taking the time to write a formal and professional looking note.

 

Solve PC Problems and Lots of Others By Making a Fresh Start

Sometimes the best solution to our overwhelming problems is to just take a break and start again later. The same thing goes for our PC’s. For a while you can just reboot the computer and you’re good to go, but eventually it gets beyond that. It’s time to reinstall Windows.

If you’re at all like me, and you’ve never done that before, it sounds a little frightening. I used to be worried about somehow getting lost in DOS, a place where I had never been, and destroying the computer for good. Fortunately, the process of reinstalling the operating system isn’t really as scary as we novices might think. It’s actually just like installing a really big program and the worst thing we have to worry about is losing some of the files on the hard drive. With a little caution, even that can be avoided.

I prefer to totally start over, reformat the hard drive partition, and then go from there. That destroys whatever data is on the hard drive, so before getting that far, it’s very important to thoroughly back-up whatever files you want to keep. Saving the whole My Documents folder is a bit of a no-brainer. It’s the first data I’d think about. I just move it over onto an external hard drive. But to be thorough, it’s important to dig a bit deeper and think about things like browser bookmarks, Outlook emails and addresses, any program data that you need to keep. Also double check that you have the license keys for Microsoft Office, Anti-Virus, and any other paid programs you have installed. The key to this process is being thorough. I suggest working your way through the Start menu looking at all the programs you have installed and making sure you have everything you need to get the essentials working again after your OS reinstall is complete.

Starting the installation process is as simple as putting your Windows CD or DVD in and following the instructions. From there on in, while the process isn’t exactly snappy, it’s not very difficult. Finish up with Windows and then move your data back and install your more important programs. I usually install the rest of my programs over the next couple days when I suddenly remember that I need them.

Reinstalling Windows is not without hassles. It can be time consuming, and it can also take a bit of time to get your system customized to your tastes again. But when the computer is really getting bogged down, it can do wonders for your speed and your mental health. Watching the Microsoft logo all morning will give you a little variety, and your computer will gain new life and speed you didn’t remember it had.

 

Use Jott to Turn Your Phone Into an RSS Reader

For those of us who don’t have an iPhone or Blackberry,  being on the road means that we’re away from our internet connection and the vital stream of information that it provides us. That’s always a great excuse to unplug and battle our internet addiction. But if you don’t want to be unplugged, the web app Jott has just started rolling out a new service that allows you to have your RSS feeds read to you over the phone.

You just add the RSS feeds you want to your Jott account and then you’re all set. When you’re on the road all you have to do is call the Jott phone number and say “Jott Feeds”. Then you tell it which feed you want and it starts reading the latest feed items to you. You can navigate and skip feeds by pressing “3″ to go to the next feed item, and “1″ to return to the previous one. It’s still very new, but it’s another great reason to sign up for Jott if you haven’t already. I’m still wondering out if there’s a convenient way to import and syncronize my Google Reader feeds with Jott.

If you haven’t heard about Jott before, it’s a voice recognition tool for your mobile phone. You can use it to keep track of tasks and make notes while you’re on the road. With Jott you can use your voice to dictate emails or even post to Twitter!

 

Stop Fearing Failure and Make the Most of It

First things first: A big thanks goes to Stephanie Bowyer for getting me thinking about this again.

I’m a perfectionist. I hate the thought of failure and I’m willing to work quite hard to avoid it. Succeeding has many benefits of course, but I started thinking that I’m missing out a little bit by avoiding failure like a plague. It’s not always a bad thing. It has the ability to teach us things that we never would have learned except by going through the school of hard knocks.

One of the biggest problems I’ve had with failure is that, like I said, I’m a perfectionist. I hate to fail, and I’m afraid of failing. Now I don’t think I’m alone in being afraid of failure, it’s a weakness that many of us need to work on. During the past semester I started discovering that it’s very beneficial to stop fearing academic failure in particular.

Finals can be a nerve-wracking time for students. They used to be for me, until I decided to stop worrying about them because I realized worrying wasn’t doing any good. You might as well relax about finals because the results aren’t going to be any better when you’re stressed out. In fact, they’ll probably turn out worse if you’re sweating it, and not just because it’s hard to hold a pencil with sweaty hands.

When finals came around this year, I had essays to submit in every single class. I wanted them all to be perfect too. But perfection wasn’t an option because I just didn’t have the time. So I submitted what I very well knew were not perfect papers, but I didn’t keep worrying about it, because once they were submitted, there was nothing I could do to change the outcome anyway.

The most important way to defeat failure is to learn how to cope with it. Stop fearing it and you’ve already taken care of one of the biggest problems with failure. If you don’t feel failure, all you have to do is pick up the pieces and start learning. Maybe by failing you’ll learn something that you never would have learned otherwise.

What valuable failures have you experienced and what have they taught you?

 

Buck The Trend and Go Analog: Three Reasons To Use Paper To Track Your Tasks

These days productivity and technology seem to be overlapping. If you want to be productive or hip, you have to use the latest technology. While using technology can be very effective, there’s also a lot to be said for going back to the basics. To enlighten us on this topic, we have a guest post from blogger Torbjørn Rive.

Taking a break from technology can not only add to your productivity, but I believe it can make you feel human again. There is Microsoft Outlook, Google calendar, and other applications for alerts, timing, and lists – but for me, lists on paper win out in terms of the “to dos”. Furthermore, making use of old printed emails and other one sided docs extends the life of paper – something I tend to do merely for ethical reasons. I love the rationality of paperless, but it gets to a point when things are just better on paper

Paper Offers:

1. Better Visualization: My handwriting and squiggles are a comforting sight. When I highlight, cross, circle, and arrow – it’s all me, and it’s more visual. Taping up actual calendar-page months besides my desks works really well for me in the visualization category, which leads me to my next point…

2. Versatility: When I make lists in digital format there is still a certain missing trust, I get the double-check syndrome and can even lose precious time. Digital is sendable, readable, editable, and will travel… but paper can go in your back pocket, and paper never fails (as long as you have someone’s back to write up against), and it never runs out of batteries or has ‘no signal’.

3. The break from tech: There is something about using longhand that actually makes me feel original, bucking the trend of how tech tools are marketed to make me feel. When I’m remaking my three-day ‘to do’ list I literally turn off my computer screen. If I don’t, I may end up checking my email again and never actually get my future tasks on paper. How many times have you opened your browser to get somewhere for work related information and found yourself on Facebook, YouTube, or checking your weekly blog stats? Sitting away from your computer for as much work as possible can solve productivity problems. I use our office boardroom for editing, project management and organizing, and for making phone calls that matter…and all I need is paper and pen.

In this digital age, I take comfort in one of the last handwritten things I experience on a daily basis: my to-do list. All else is lost to the keyboard and mouse. If making the move to paper is too radical for you, try going with a mixed-media solution, one medium pointing to the other. We cannot deny that the tech rules in many cases, but you may find an actual freedom in choosing paper over plastic.

Check out Torbjørn’s blog Variable Interest where he blogs about land, forests and environmental issues.