Here from Lifehacker? This week in April 2008 I’ll be writing numerous related posts on topics like productivity on the phone, online purchases that will save you time, and hacks for finishing your projects.  I’d love if you’d check them out by subscribing via RSS or email.  You won’t be disappointed!

So many threads have been rounding up the slimmest and coolest lately that I thought I’d take a stab at what I consider to be an efficient wallet. To me, intelligent use of a wallet is a combination of the following:

• Quick access to the things you need
• Professional appearance (“you’re gonna cover the bill with that worn out thing?”)
• Convenience for it fitting with any outfit or occasion

Let me say right off the bat that I’m a geek, entrepreneur, and efficiency-nut. As such my idea of the intelligent wallet fits within these paradigms. In line with the company whose article inspired this post, I’m going to offer insight through what’s worked for me.

The wallet you use all the time, and storage for the rest of the junk

Being a spendthrift I have one of those frequent shopper cards at every store from my bagel place to my hair salon. As someone who travels a lot for work, I have a frequent-use card for every major hotel and airline. But I don’t hold onto any of them, not really. This leads me to two tricks I’ve picked up.

Tip 1. Store the frequent flier and frequent guest numbers in your cellphone or PDA.

When I show up at the Hilton I click the Find feature on my Samsung Palm phone, enter “Hilton” and ouila, there’s my membership number. Same thing for

Continue reading…

A little while back I wrote about a different approach to an iPod car stereo. I just read a rather informative article in the Post offering a series of suggestions for iPod integration. I should give Apple some more credit–offering integration in 40 percent of 2006 cars is quite a testament to their ubiquity.

The article makes reference to the “gold standard” in iPod connectivity:

A single, tangle-free dashboard jack simultaneously pumps high-quality audio out of the iPod and keeps it juiced up while allowing tracks to be selected directly from the car stereo or controls on the steering wheel. The iPod, itself, can hide in the glove compartment or nestle into a convenient holster on the dashboard.

I am genuinely curious if this is the level of connectivity that is included in that 40 percent, or whether it’s merely a 1/8″ headphone jack to allow plugging any mp3 player into the car stereo. The article suggests going to this Apple page to see the list of cars offering iPod integration. It also points to this Crutchfield tool that narrows the iPod configurations available for your specific vehicle. In a few quick look-ups I had difficulty figuring out exactly what was available. For instance, I was looking at the 2006 Jetta, a car listed on the Apple site as iPod-ready, and it sounded to me like one would need an aftermarket iPod controller installed to offer connectivity. Continue reading…

Running a business is about making decisions. One of the choices I’ve been grappling with is in which areas of my business to increase staff size as our workload increases. Frequently I have to decide which initiatives to focus on in a given week, month, or quarter. In the shower I realized another way to think about my quandary: less cold water.

In my shower I have the most basic sort of faucet handles: one knob for hot and one knob for cold. The more you turn each of them, the more pressure you get of the hot or cold–pretty simple. While I can’t speak from experience, I’m guessing that most people adjust their faucet to a familiar position, make sure the temperature and pressure are all right, and then hop in.

What happens next demonstrates to me that the most intuitive application is not always the best use of the faucets. At this point it’s not usually about the pressure, it’s about getting just the right temperature as fluctuations arise. If it’s too cold the most logical thing is to turn the hot knob to make it hotter. But that’s not always the best approach; after all, turning up the hot means you’re going to run out of hot water sooner than before.

Back to the business scenario, Continue reading…

You never know what it will be that captures the public eye, as pointed out in this Washington Post article about Chris Bliss’ juggling act. A video of Bliss’ juggling caught on through email and blogs, bringing him an insane amount of attention and potential gigs. The only problem was that he was no longer interested in juggling.

Perhaps many of us writers and businessmen are hoping for the one thing that will (favorably) capture the public’s eye and send us to quick fame. Things like the Million Dollar Homepage and the forehead guy have taken on a bizarre media following. However, the question, as addressed in the article, is whether the thing that garners attention is what we want attention for? We don’t want to be pegged forever as one-hit wonders (like a certain actor in Home Alone…).

As such I’m trying to temper my urge to write about every exciting thought that comes to my mind here. One of the articles will one-day spread, but I hope to leave thought-out posts here, rather than techno-rants. I could repeat what’s spreading around, but I’d rather not continue the tradition of the blog-as-echo-chamber effect.

Soon you’ll find some more articles, in particular on personal privacy and email management. In the mean time, I highly recommend 43folders Inbox Zero series and Inside the Marketing Mind’s advice on creating a proposal.

Ever needed an alarm? Wanted a reminder? Hoped to send a message wishing someone well on their big presentation? Here’s a spin on an old idea that involves using SMS and delayed email sending.

There are a number of reasons for time-sensitive reminders/messages, but they’ve always been plagued by two things:

1. The recipient needs a reliable way to receive the reminder
2. The sender of the reminder (even if it’s yourself) needs a way to ensure that they remind the recipient at the appropriate time

I suggest time-delayed SMS. SMS, or text messaging, is built into most cellphones as a quick way to send or receive short messages. One way to send an SMS message is from one cellphone to another. Another method is to send the message through email.

While I don’t know of cellphones that allow you to delay the sending of SMS messages to a specific time, a number of email tools do allow you to schedule messages to send at specific dates and times. Thus if you want to get a reminder to someone (or yourself), you need merely schedule an email that will send a message to their phone at a specific time. Continue reading…

The Washington Post website has been completely down for at least ten minutes of my lunch break:

I guess it happens to the best of us…

Woohoo! Now del.icio.us has private bookmarking available–the one critical feature I pointed out as missing in del.icio.us. Perhaps it’s because ma.gnolia had it all along… (from Lifehacker)

Mark Hurst just wrote an excellent post about people missing the point of software and technology. He brought up an ironic story about the author of a software productivity tool who couldn’t touch-type. In the comments to his post there was mostly agreement, but there was one dissenter (at least so far) who claimed that there were so many other places where he could better use his time to improve his efficiency.

Anyone who is familiar with my business knows its message–that people don’t use the most basic software very well and that they’d gain time more by better using those tools than by investing in upgrades or “productivity” tools. Shortcuts and backroads will get you to work sooner than even the fastest ‘Vette in rush hour…

That being said, I encounter friction every day when I try to change habits. People are comfortable with the way things have always been. Accepting your way to be the wrong way is tough. Changing is no easy task.

The dissenter who couldn’t type is a part of all of us. Continue reading…

I just came across this excellent tutorial about which image format to use under which circumstances (via Lifehacker). I agree with the tutorial’s analysis, but will offer one thing to look out for (discussed further down). I mention this whole topic as it seems to come up on a regular basis with developers, designers, and clients. If I’m lucky they ask in what format I’d like an image. More often they just send me the file either in an obscenely large email attachment or in a format that looks poor even for the web.

The gist of the article is that one should use the JPEG file format for photography (or images where there are LOTS of colors, such as the detail found in video games), and one should use 8-bit PNG for “text, line art, comic-style drawings, [and] general web graphic[s].” Outside of animation, GIFs are less appropriate and use a bigger file size.

The key point of the article, in addition to providing a tutorial, was to debunk the myth that GIFs are the only web friendly format outside of JPEG. Continue reading…

I live off my Outlook reminders. But one of the things that’s always annoyed me is that, when dealing with task reminders, you can dismiss them or open the item to which they refer…but you can’t simply mark a task as completed with the click of a button. Up until now I’ve always opened the item and then changed its status to completed.

Today I just realized that you can right-click on a task reminder and choose to mark it complete without opening the item. It’s really that easy:

1. Right click on a task in your “Reminders” window
2. Select Mark Complete

Enjoy!