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kicking ideas around

Tagged: windows

How to track "Waiting For" responses in Gmail

productivity / technology

How to track “Waiting For” responses in Gmail

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every email request you sent was efficiently carried out before the due date? In a perfect world you wouldn’t need to track these hand-offs. Sometimes life happens and tasks get overlooked. Unless you track these hand-offs, you can guarantee some of them will fall into an abyss. If you care about the outcome, tracking these “waiting fors” is a must. Even if you don’t use Gmail, these concepts translate to most email applications. The Getting Things Done method advocates using a Waiting For list to track any responses or items you are waiting on others...

Parkes radio telescope at dawn

productivity / technology

All you need to know about saved searches in Evernote

My previous post described how you can use Evernote shortcuts to quickly access saved searches. I neglected to explain how to create a saved search though. Today I’ll run through all you need to know about saved searches. And since I’ve kept you hanging, I’ll throw in a couple of bonus search tips too. Evernote’s powerful search tools find text in notes and attachments, and can even recognise text in photos. You can also save your searches for faster access the next time you need them. This is handy for searches you repeatedly use, and for recalling complex search expressions....

How to open your most useful Evernote content with one click

productivity / technology

How to open your most useful Evernote content with one click

Though my Evernote account stores thousands of notes, there are a handful that I refer to repeatedly. Shortcuts are the fastest way I’ve found to zoom between these frequently accessed notes, notebooks, tags and searches. You can recall items from your Shortcut list with one click or keystroke — even complex search commands. Shortcuts also synchronize to your mobile devices so you can use them where ever you are. Here’s a few examples from my Evernote database: @Inbox links to my default notebook. I jump to this view often, so it’s at the top of my Shortcuts list. Weekly review...

Nic McPhee via flickr cc

productivity / technology

One simple approach to instantly improve your writing

Everybody writes. Whether it’s an email to a friend, your resume, a sales proposal, website copy or the next best-selling book, readers expect clear and error free writing. The problem is that it’s really hard to proofread your own work. Your brain sees what you meant to write, not what’s actually on the page. I wish I’d known about this easily overlooked tool years ago. It’s been a huge help in finding errors in my blog posts, books and other important documents that were invisible to me before. Text to speech is a simple way to find and fix typos,...

MacBook keyboard

technology

Mac convert tip #3: Dealing with missing keys

Something isn’t quite right about the Mac keyboard. My PC keyboard has a useful block of keys above the cursor keys which aren’t present on my MacBook Air. I frequently used these keys for editing and navigation. Fortunately, these commands are still accessible on the Mac with some additional finger gymnastics. Navigation Function Windows Mac Move one word left Ctrl+← option+← Move one word right Ctrl+→ option+→ Move to beginning of current line Home command+← Move to end of current line End command+→ Page up Page Up fn+↑ Page down Page Down fn+↓ Move to beginning of document Ctrl+Home command+↑...

Frustrated with a Mac

productivity / technology

How to switch from Windows to Mac without the frustration

Try this quick experiment. Grab a pen and paper and sign your name with your non-dominant hand. How did it feel? Awkward? Slow? Messy? It probably required conscious effort that isn’t needed when using your preferred hand. That’s how I felt for the first six weeks when I switched to a Mac after using Windows for more than twenty years. On more than one occasion I’d wondered if I’d made a big mistake. The frustration of adapting to a new operating system can be reduced by configuring your Mac to work more like Windows. The biggest challenge for me was...