How to Reclaim Your Facebook News Feed

As you make more Facebook friends you might find the random noise increases. If anything, many of the recent Facebook changes have made this more of a problem.

It is a strange thing when you might regret making and adding friends!

The worst offenders are the stupid farm, mafia, and so on games and applications that spew random irrelevant rubbish into your news feed. When those appear, nuke them!


What if the rubbish is posted by actual friends and not the games they play?

Worry not, it is possible to silence the worst culprits without banishing them from your Facebook altogether. Some people you want to hear everything about, others you are quite content to go check in on them once in a while – this is a good thing and nothing to be ashamed about!


When an offending message appears, mouse over the right hand side and a “Hide” button should show.

Click the hide button that pops up next and you can then hide that person from your news feed.

Next time that person posts a status update you will have to go to their account to see it.

Obviously doing this might be considered “too little, too late” – best is to block people at the source. While you can not predict who out of your friends will turn bad, at least you can only add people who you know, like and trust!



If you change your mind and you find you are missing finding out about your friend’s high scores or most recent virtual flock, you can always go back to the options and allow those “Bejewelled” status updates back into your feed.


The Hidden Productivity Benefit of Slow Software Tools

As a geek, I thought I would ever say this. But the day has come where I finally found a reason to be happy with slow software!

I know, crazy, right?

When we all want bigger, better, faster, more, to actually be happy something is running slowly seems … well, just wrong.

And I thought the same, until it happened to me.

Or rather, to my email.

This strange realization happened when I moved my email from an assortment of cobbled together solutions, to (mostly) Gmail. Or rather, Google Apps for domains.

Google has put out a cool software tool that allows you to upload your mail.app email up to a Google Apps email account. I took this as an opportunity to unify my ~10 years worth of email into one online, searchable, central database. Google search is very efficient, plus  the tagging and filters will be a real boon.

One weekend of uploading later and I had my email all ready and waiting at my finger tips. Awesome!

Turns out though there is one flaw I hadn’t considered.

Man, is my mail sloooooooooooow.

I mean, really slow.

Why is this happening? What is the cause? Could be because I am forwarding my chrisg.com email to the apps mail. Could be just that Google is a slow service. Maybe it is because their IMAP implementation is poor. Not sure yet.

What I do know is this whole slow mail situation has had a side benefit that I never expected.

When it takes ten minutes to get an email reply, I am less likely to get involved in email chit-chat, and I get more work done!

Previously I would immediately respond to any email that arrived within seconds, and again and again until the natural end of the email thread. I can’t do that now, the response times have been taken out of my hands. When I alt-tab to another application and alt-tab back there are no new messages waiting for me.

OK, yes, I should shut my email off (and that is probably the real situation), but being an email addict, I will take this solution for now.

Thank you slow email!

When Productivity Goes Wrong

I am all for productivity, but not when your productivity impacts your customers, friends and prospects negatively.

Perhaps when productivity systems go bad it needs a new definition, is it still productivity when you get negative results rather than a positive impact?

Either way, I am increasingly seeing people implement systems that are designed to make them more productive, that are putting a distance, poor customer experience, and critical word of mouth between them and their customers.

My first experience of this was when a popular productivity guru asked for my help with the blog he was aiming to set up. I replied a couple of times asking what help this person needed … and got no reply. I felt brushed off so quietly asked a couple of close contacts who were familiar with us both what the game might be.

You know the answer already.

“Oh yeah, he does that. He probably sent a bunch of those emails. And you know he doesn’t respond to most of the email he gets. If he needs you he will be in touch, otherwise forget about it.”

So he asked me for help, but didn’t have the curtesy to acknowledge my reply or even tell me my help was no longer needed.

He saved a couple of minutes from his busy day, I am left with a bad feeling about him and even had discussions with my close contacts about it. Even worse, he does it so much that it has become part of what people expect him to do!

If someone asks me about this person or that person’s products, will I feel inclined to recommend them?

Another case recently was I had signed up for a membership site. In this service the owners personal email is supposedly given out. But when you email it, for any reason, you get the person’s VA. With copy and paste style scripted replies.

Fair enough, use assistants. I applaud that when it gives you more time to give care and attention where it is needed.

But not instead of giving care and attention.

If there is a problem with a credit card, an invoice, you need a password recovery, and so on, those are exactly the type of things you would want to either automate or hand off to an assistant.

But when someone buys your information product and they have questions outside of the “first line support flowchart” then you need to step in with quality responses.

At the same time I joined the aforementioned membership, I also signed up to some courses by a couple of individuals who are hyper productive. If I didn’t know better I would think they were some sort of cyborgs sent from the future, or at the very least taking some serious medication ;)

But you know what? They give you personal attention when it is needed and have systems in place where the personal touch is not required.

Bottom line, what is the point of being productive if it damages your brand? Do not sacrifice long term value for some short term time savings.

Have you experienced anything like this? How do you make sure your productivity benefits you, your business and your customers? Please share in the comments …

PDF2XL is 4 Years Old!

Dear Friends,

This month Cogniview is celebrating the 4th Birthday of PDF2XL – our flagship PDF to Excel conversion product.

It’s not that we always had PDF2XL. You see, Cogniview started as an Enterprise software company that aimed to sell its Enterprise-Level software products to IT departments in large organizations.

We spent a lot of money on flamboyant marketing campaigns, well-dressed sales people and a variety of other time/money wasters.

After 4 years of struggles that resulted in a huge hole in our bank account, we woke up and realized we had to survive. So we turned to our customers who said: Make us a decent PDF to Excel converter – and that was how PDF2XL was born.

Since then, PDF2XL licenses were bought by more than 15,000 companies in a variety of industries all over the globe.

We are thankful to our customers, our employees, our partners and our blog readers who have contributed their time, energy and resources to help Cogniview achieve so many successes.

So, let the party begin!

And what’s a party without party gifts?

First a special Excel Productivity Guide that can help you save even more time when working with Excel.

Click here to Download the Excel Productivity Guide

PLUS…

We would be overjoyed if you would consider leaving PDF2XL a birthday greeting as a comment on this Blog post. The best 10 greetings will entitle their authors with a $15 Amazon Gift Card.

The best part is that the best greeting out of the top 10 will also win a Flip Mino camera!

Amazon Gift Card Camera

So, we invite you to share your thoughts with us by leaving a comment on this post.

And once again – thank you!

Yoav Ezer, CEO
Cogniview Systems 2002

Make Writing Documentation 101% Easier With ScreenSteps

ScreenstepsIn my consulting work and product creation I have to write a LOT of step by step instructions.

When creating these instructions you basically have two choices:

  1. Use a video screen capture tool to make a walk-through, edit the video down, add voice over, convert to a usable video size and format, upload or send to client.
  2. Create a document using screen grabs, annotate with explanatory text, compile into a PDF, send to client or upload

For the first case I use a Mac application called ScreenFlow, while PC users will likely have heard of Camtasia. These work fine for video, where video is warranted and when you have the time and quiet to do this.

The second though becomes a laborious task. It is necessary to do lots of fiddly little activities, and switch between multiple applications.

That is where ScreenSteps comes in. What it does is enable you to be far more productive with the step by step instruction process, either using the built in tools (all the way from capturing images, adding arrows and annotations, through to exporting as PDF), or by integrating with your favorite applications.

You might think that integrating with your existing tools goes counter to what I just said about it removing task switching, but in fact this app does something very cool and forehead-slappingly obvious that I can not believe I did not already have a utility that does it.

What it does is watches your clipboard and any time you add an image to the clipboard it pastes it into the step by step workflow that you are creating. Once you are done you can stop this “recording” and then go through adding instructions and anything else that needs to be clarified. At the end you can export as Word to finish the document editing part, rather than send directly to a finished PDF.

You can even create your own templates to further automate the process.

There is a free trial, after which you need to buy either

I think it is a bargain considering all the time I will save.

See below for an example that I just exported:

Example

Excel Productivity Video

This is the first video from Cogniview’s Excel productivity training.

In my opinion, the approach outlined in this video is the cornerstone of productivity (Whether you are an Excel user or not). I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Part I

Part II

Get More Organized with Evernote

How do you organize the tons of content that you are hit with each day? What do you do with the ideas, notes and to-do items that spring to mind throughout your work?

As a social media fan I have been getting a lot of use out of social bookmarking tools such as Delicious and even StumbleUpon. This has helped me store away web links, and organize them by tagging, but not the actual content.

For storing actual content that I find I have been using an excellent tool from Iterasi which allows you to “notarize” pages and save them online in folders and tagged for later access as if frozen in carbonite.

Evernote is a tool that aims to do both tasks, but in addition does a whole lot more, including text recognition in images – even hand written notes!

So you can record

I only heard about Evernote today from @masontech from DidIGetThingsDone, and I am glad I did.

The very best part, and the item that was most compelling to myself, was the fact that it syncs online, desktop and your iPhone. This means you have access to this content archive and all your notes wherever you are, even from your pocket.

So you can grab a piece of content from an ecommerce store or online review using your browser bookmarklet or plugin, and store it on the Evernote website. Later you can pick that note up while shopping on your iPhone. When you get home you can log into your desktop application and organize everything.

Very cool.

It does not end there. You Get Things Done fans can use Evernote to help you with your GTD productivity processes, as shown in this article. Very cool.

For now I am using a free account but will be upgrading to the premium account as it is only $5 a month which upgrades your capacity, speeds up image processing and removes the advertising.

Do you use Evernote or anything like it? Please let me know in the comments …

Productivity in 140 Characters

Since the beginning of this year I have had a growing desire to make it my mission to be truly productive.

That sentence in itself is a lesson in productivity. Note I did not say I had made it my mission, or actually made progress. I said “growing desire”. This means it is still largely a dream rather than something I have actually achieved :)

The truth is I have made some progress, along with my friend Cindy King who has been helping to keep me on track.

My productivity systems are coming together gradually.

Where I made a break through though was to focus on providing “value”, not “work”. Focusing on effort or work got me into trouble where I nearly burned out (more than once). By making sure I put value first, with reward later, I have been much happier and actually created better results for people.

A subtle difference, and maybe being pedantic, but makes a profound difference to the way I approach things :)

I’ve also discovered it helps to go with what comes natural to you rather than what other folks think you “should” be doing.

Due to some forced offline bouts, speaking engagements and recent trips, I have had a massive email productivity panic and this forced me to sort out my inbox for once and for all. First had to go all the non-essential email lists, either unsubscribed or filtered into folders.

In addition to “nuking the noise” I created two folders called “_action” and “_read” (the underscore puts those at the top of the folder list in my email client).

So now when I check my email I either

  1. Delete
  2. Mark as spam
  3. Move to read – once read they are either deleted or archived in particular folders
  4. Move to action – stuff that needs me to do more than read

Those actions are then part of my to-do list for the day, even if the action is that I need to acknowledge receipt.

I am still working on adding rules, for example I have a folder for lists that is for emails from list that are not noisy but still don’t require me to read as they come in.

Of course I have also bought the famous “GTD” book that everyone bangs on about, but I have yet to read it (too disorganized to find time to read the ultimate organization book!).

So now I am ready to learn from you guys, and here we get to the point of the subject line :) I asked on twitter if you have productivity tips, and I would like to open it up to you too if you have anything to add. Here are the responses so far:

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

Twitter / @chrisgarrett

MacSpeech Dictate Review

MacSpeech Dictate is a voice recognition and dictation system for Apple Macs. While the Windows world has Dragon Dictate, the Macosx world has so far been pretty under served in this kind of software, with all previous efforts not coming up to the standard of Dragon.

Then we hear that MacSpeech had licensed some of the wonderful Dragon technology and had built a native Mac dictation system from the ground up. This I had to try. My aching wrists and my ever-growing to-do list were begging me.

When I first heard about MacSpeech I thought it sounded like my dream of having Star Trek style computer control. As it turns out, while the system is brilliant, and far more advanced than really we should hope for, it is in fact not quite at the point where you can simply talk to the computer and have it understand your every word.

As you can see though in the video, you can talk pretty fast and have it still follow what you’re saying. The problem I have is having to think about everything consciously, including punctuation, and all that good stuff.

You can see and hear me thinking through this article and dictating it and you can see the MacSpeech reaction to everything that I am saying. Most of the awkwardness is coming from me rather than the system.


[Video may not play in email/feed so click through to view]

When you read the instructions it does tell you that you need to train the system and go through a fair bit of work to get the MacSpeech software to understand what you. In fact, in my experience it is training me that is going to be difficult, not training the software.

On receiving the package I went through the setup procedure and within an hour or less I was tweeting and e-mailing using the software. That’s pretty impressive.

My main difficulty of until now has been learning the keyboard controls and forcing myself to keep my hands off the keys. As it says in the manual you should either dictate or type, not try to do both. That is proving to be very difficult indeed!

Is it more efficient than typing? For me right now possibly not, but that is no fault of the software. It’s more about the amount of time I have dedicated to learning the system and a new approach to creating content. That said, I am certainly going to persist with it because I think it will help both my productivity and RSI.

In conclusion, I think the package is an amazing achievement and is only getting better as they release updates. Already I can see it being extremely beneficial in creating first drafts of content very quickly. I just need to buckle down and RTFM :)

How to Make 2009 More Productive by Doing Less

As I am writing to you today on 1st January I thought I would share with you how I plan to make 2009 a more productive year for myself than 2008, and how you can too.

Culling Time Wasters

The first place to look in becoming more productive is where you waste the most time.

My definition of “waste” in this context is activities that do not add much value but take considerable time. Spending time with my family is not a waste of time because we get value from it, while solitary “Tower Defense” web based game playing is likely adding zero value and just eating up precious time.

In the closing months of 2008 I took careful note of where my time was going. I worked out there were several areas I was spending time that could have been made more efficient. Keeping a time diary, even just scratched onto a scrap of paper or scribbled on a whiteboard can help you uncover where your time is going.

I found my biggest time leak was unscheduled interruptions.

For 2009 I will save time with:

Spam and Unwanted Email

Email turns out to be a big part of my day. I don’t want to go the Tim Ferris route; I take pride in answering my own email and having good turnaround times. So rather than outsourcing, autoresponder or support ticket system, I am working on reducing my inbox clutter as much as possible.

A big load on my inbox is newsletters. For many services or products you have to supply an email address, and of course you do not know which will turn out to send you junk and which will be good, so you can’t use a temporary address in case it is the latter. I am taking the advice of my friend Damian who has a catch-all email forwarding set up on one of his domains and signs up to each with a unique email address in the form “list-name@domain.com”. If I get spam to this unique address I will know where it came from.

My email list from address is changing, as is my contact form. I am also moving my family and friends email to a different account so work is split from home. Each source of email will be isolated and easier to prioritize.

Another way I am handling email spam or junk messages is when a newsletter asks for my first name I am using a particular variation of my name, so any messages sent to “Hi _______” will be fitered off to a folder before I even see it, so I can go through them at my leisure, if at all.

Work to Your Rhythm

I have discovered I am most productive for certain tasks at certain points in the day. The problem is I have actually been working against these patterns.

My normal routine was to get up, make coffee, check my email, then work through anything the email demanded, followed by my task list for each day, with phone calls scheduled according to the other parties convenience and taking account the appropriate time zone math. Of course my body and mind were telling me that was a bad way to organize things.

Check your mood, motivation and output when performing certain tasks during the day.

I found between certain hours I could output hundreds of words of writing, while others it was a struggle. At some times I could communicate easily and fluently, while others I wanted to hide from the phone. Logic escaped me at certain times and I just wanted to sleep, whereas at others I could solve problems that seemed impossible hours ago. Telephone calls, as mentioned earlier, saw me working at 2am because the other party was based in a far away time zone. Red Bull and coffee can only go so far.

Just by juggling my schedule I will get far more done.

Your body and mind will tell you when you should do certain things, listen to it!

Got Suggestions?

How can we make our 2009 more productive? Please share your tips, thoughts, experiences, ideas and comments …

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