You’re going to finish that report.  You’re going to book that restaurant early.  You’re going to clear out the mountain of papers under the hall table.

You’re going to conquer the world.

If you can just get organized and actually take action.

If you can just get organized, you could get everything done in the time that you have today.

Recently I came across this great piece of software.  It’s a cross between a task manager, timer, and project manager.  I used it for a few days, and I can honestly report that it gave me laser focus, and supercharged my productivity.

This tool is based on the concept of time boxing – in other words, blocking off a specific amount of time in which to complete a task.

It’s called The Action Machine.  I love the fact that it runs on both Windows and Mac, and has a dashboard that tells it like it is at a glance.

My only complaint is that it’s a touch resource heavy on Mac (or at least it was on Leopard – seems to run fine with Lion).

If you, like me, feel that GTD stops short of actually getting it done, while doing a great job of figuring what needs to get done, this is the missing piece in the puzzle.

Click here to find out more about the Action Machine.

Remember when vacation forms were on paper? What? Yours are still on paper?

Remember when everything had to be filled it in triplicate, and cross signed by half the country?

In offices everywhere there’s always that one guy that must have the document printed.  So he can feel it.  Touch it.  Eyeball the signature. Then file it – never to be seen again.

The last barrier to being paperless was the fact a signature is needed.  A proper signature.  Not an email confirmation.  A signature.  On the document.

Enter digital signatures and electronic signatures.

What’s the difference between digital and electronic signatures?

A digital signature is based on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).  It involves cryptography that guarantees authenticity of the signatory, data integrity, and most important, non-repudiation, ie, it’s binding.

Digital signatures can be complex to implement, as you need a Certificate Authority, some way of enrolling the users, and tooling to manage issuing and revoking the keys.

An electronic signature, on the other hand, is a representation of the manual signature.   It could be a digitized image of a handwritten signature, perhaps a thumbprint or a voiceprint, or some kind of symbol that uniquely identifies the signatory.

Electronic signatures are easier to manage, but can also be subject to forgery, and in many cases, are not legally binding.

The best of both worlds

There is a new breed of tools that offer the convenience of electronic signatures with the security and authenticity of digital signatures.

Through these tools, you grab your document that needs to be signed, upload it to the tool, type the email addresses of the signatories.

Then you sit back and chill.

The software takes your PDF, sends it securely to each signatory in turn (you can even see the progress of workflow!).

The signatory receives an email with simple point and click instructions, he/she signs the document using their mouse (or fancy pen on their even fancier iPad), clicks submit and they’re done.

Imagine being able to send an invoice or contract to your customer, and they can sign it from their iPad or iPhone …

When all relevant signatures are collected, the document is locked, and archived into your account.  Of course, you can download a copy for your records.  It is, after all, legally binding.

RightSignature is one of the key players in this market.  Featured on ReadWriteWeb and The Wall Street Journal, it has a nice interface that’s fast and responsive.

Plus the iPad and iPhone apps that support it are free.

The free trial takes about 20 seconds to sign up for, and gives you 5 documents to send for one or multiple signature.

Magic.

So if you’re contractor trying to get a change order approved by your client, or must have that pesky NDA signed before you can close the sale, this could really do wonders for your productivity and approval cycles.

Check out your free trial here.  I dare you to not giggle at signing your name with a mouse!

You have latest and greatest of technology gadgets to get you as productive as possible.  You are connected up to the hilt with 3G,

personal hotspot or good old wifi.  There’s only one thing that still chains you to a building: power.

If it weren’t for that tiny little detail, you could do all your work sitting in the park, at the beach, and frankly, anywhere except your actual physical workspace.

Forget work and productivity.  Think about watching home movies or listening to TED.com talks on your iPhone, iPad or Galaxy Tab.  You know that you will need to think about where to plug in after a few hours.  Not cool when you’re right in the middle of your beach party / birthday picnic / camping trip.

Now there’s a cool, environment-friendly solution.

Best Portable Solar Chargers?

There are literally hundreds of solar chargers out there, ranging from small, pocket sized ones that use a mixture of internal battery and solar power, to the notebook-sized Apple Juicz Solar Panel when packed, but producing a massive 27 W of solar power – enough to charge your Macbook in 8-12 hours!

What do you look for in a portable solar charger?

• Since it’s portable, it’s a good idea that it be of reasonable size so it can fit into your backpack or your latest Luis Vuitton tote.

• A good portable solar charger  should be sturdy as well, to withstand being folded and packed away quickly.

• There must be enough power output to charge up your device(s).  Ideally, it would be great if you can charge anduse your gadget at the same time.

The sCharger-5 from SunTactics

Introduced last year from the California based company (I love their name!), this nifty little device is impressive:

• It’s almost as efficient in charging as plugging into the wall into proper power. 
• You can use your gadget while it’s charging.  This is a major plus.
• This portable solar charger will let you run even completely dead devices using just its internal mechanics and the sun’s energy.
• There’s no internal battery that can leak, break or wear out.
• Non-toxic, clean and as green as you can get.
• It folds into a neat package so the entire portable solar charger can fit into a small CD wallet, perfect for any elegant handbag.
• Water and weather resistant, making it a very useful portable solar charger for those picnics on the beach or at the park.
• You can use standard USB chargers to connect to your devices it and it outputs 5 Watts.
• Suitable for iPhone, Blackberry, iPod, Android phones

The sCharter-5 is one of the best selling portable solar charters, with an average customer rating of 5 stars:

Fits into a CD wallet

Many a headhunter or a client looking for services will begin their search on LinkedIn.  Your own profile on LinkedIn then is your best marketing tool to ensure that you appear in the right search results.

On the other hand, if you use LinkedIn as a source of leads or referrals, it’s important that your profile reflect the right message when said leads or referrals click through to your page.

Check out these tips for building a great LinkedIn profile to represent your own personal brand:

Create a compelling headline

This is the line that appears immediately below your name.  This is the first thing someone will see about you, including search results and recommendations to connect.   Most tend to leave it as their current title.  However, if your current job title is no

t how you wish to make the first impression, use that headline to summarize your own personal brand.  It’s a powerful tool, so use it.

To edit your headline, go to Edit Profile, and click on Edit next to your name.

List every job

When you start to build a profile, it’s easy to leave it at the last two or three roles.  Do take the time to fill in as many of your previous roles as possible.  Remember that searches look through all your jobs.  A particular skill or project you have tackled 4 jobs ago might be exactly what a potential employer or client is looking for.

Yes, it’s time consuming, but investing in writing up each role, and highlighting achievements could make the difference in making the shortlist or not.

Create a personal URL

When you first create an account, the URL assigned to your profile is a random collection of characters.  Personalize it to have your name, so that the URL reads http://www.linkedin.com/yourname, or http://uk.linkedin.com/youname.

To edit your public profile URL, scroll to the bottom of your Edit Profile window, and click Edit.  On the page that appears, work on the right hand sidebar to choose what to show on your public profile, and towards the bottom you will find Your Public Profile URL.  If you’re not happy with the URL, click on Customize, and change it accordingly.

With technology changing at breakneck speed, it is not unusual to be have a laptop (or a collection) hanging around, collecting dust.  You know that familiar pang of guilt you get everytime you walk by it, especially when you recall what you spent on the thing?  Well, here’s a few ways to squeeze a bit more out of that so-last-year laptop:

1. Fancy Photo Frame

Even the oldest of laptops has a decent amount of hard disk space.  Copy your favourite photos onto it, set the screensaver to rotate through your pictures, and voila, you have yourself a live picture frame.

2.  Use is as a media / file server

Set up sharing and security on your aging laptop so everyone on your home network can access it, and use to dump files you want to hold on to, but don’t necessarily need all the time.  Great examples are songs, home movies, and scanned copies of your kids’ artwork.

3. Dedicated Videophone Corner

Dress up your old laptop and  equip it with a pair of headphones and a camera (if not already built-in), and make it your dedicated Skype or other video communication station.  This will get around the moans and groans to get your teens to surrender “their” computer so you can use it to call the grandparents.

4. Kitchen Digital Library

Since it’s practically ready for the scrap heap, keeping your old laptop in the kitchen shouldn’t cause you pain.  Find a nice corner for it in your kitchen, load up your recipes, pictures of interesting dishes, and photos of flourishing vegetables and herbs.  You now have instantly accessible recipes, and a lovely screensaver that shows you beautiful images of food.

There’s nothing stopping you combining the photo frame with the media server, or the media server with the dedicated videophone corner.  Experiment, and please feel free to share in the comments other ways of getting more mileage out of old laptops.

Yes, you can busy, really busy in any one of the following activities:

• re-arranging your to-do list
• re-arranging your desk
• preparing for de-cluttering
• reading about getting productive
• etc

All of these activities feel valuable – however, they actually don’t have a valuable outcome – except for may be re-arranging your desk.  At least you will able to get some of the work you are trying to get done.

Here is where mind maps come in.  They help you focus on the why of your activities.  By capturing the ultimate goal in the centre, and building participating activities around it, you will be able to better visualize and focus on the what.

1. Break down big projects into manageable tasks

Projects can be anything from updating your resume, to moving house and everything in between.  In Dave Allen’s definition, a project is anything that contains more than one task.  That’s a bit extreme for me, but I think we can all agree that a project is a significant piece of work, usually consisting of multiple tasks.

Break down your project into multiple tasks and subtasks.  Using a mind map’s easy to create nodes and sub-nodes, you can basically brain-dump directly into the mind map.  Once all down, feel free to move tasks and deliverables around into the hierarchy that makes most sense for you, and voila – your project is now in a manageable format that you can tackle one leaf, one branch at a time – all the while working inexorably to the parent node.

2. Visualize dependencies

Many project tasks have dependencies on other tasks.  For example, it makes little sense to design the curtains before you’ve figured out whether you’re building a house or an office block.  Some other things can be done in parallel, such as marinading the chicken while preparing a salad.  For those of us who’ve likely neither build a structure or marinaded chicken, we can certainly understand the concept of not  putting the cart before the horse.

In a mind map, you can easily draw dependencies amongst nodes independent of their hierarchy – ie, things don’t have become subtasks to other things in order to capture a dependency, or any other kind of relationship for that matter.

3. Track the different areas of your life

This is my favourite reason for using a mind map.  As brilliantly illustrated by Stephen Covey in his Seven Habits series, we all play different roles in our lives.  For me, they include, in no particular order, Mother, Wife, Head Geek, Friend, Writer, Coach, Diva, Author … ok, the last two are still on my wish list, but you get the picture.

Make each one of your important roles a key node, and add all your goals and dreams for each role.  Flesh them out, until the outermost nodes represent a list of actions you can take today.  Very powerful stuff.

4. Capture weekly and daily load

One special type of mind map can be made for the more schedule-obsessed amongst us.  Create a mind map for each week, with branches for each day.  Add your tasks, commitments, appointments etc to each day.  At the end of each day, pause a moment to take in the snapshot of your “a-week-in-my-life”.

Pause.

Now cross off items you’ve completed, and try to distribute the ones you didn’t even think about, much less get to start, to other days in the week.  Vow to be more sensible in your estimates and try harder the next day.

Jokes aside, it’s incredibly sobering to eye-ball your week at a glance.  It would be even more useful if you colour code (or use icons) each node to indicate work, home, fun, etc so you can see what tends to get done and what you are consistently ignoring from week to week.

5. Brainstorm Away

The most traditional of reasons for using a mind map, use it to brainstorm an idea, a project, an article … anything, really.  Literally a way to capture your stream of consciousness, create nodes and connections as they occur to you.

No need to organize them at first – just stick them onto the branch where they make most sense to you.  Later, as you look through, you can create links between nodes, add icons, colour and other ways of enhancing your brainstorming session mind map.

Once you are done, you can even export to a Word document in outline format – very handy for budding writers and seasoned authors alike.

I first head of mind maps over 10 years ago, and remember marvelling at what a great concept they represented.  It is only in the last couple of years I’ve started to use them in my day-to-day life for different things.  I use them on paper, on my laptop, iPhone … everywhere, actually.  Here’s where you can find mind map software for free:

• Freemind – open source.  Will run on anything that runs Java
• Mindnode – Mac, iPhone. Free and paid versions available
• Mindmeister – Hosted, iPhone, Android clients.  Free and paid versions available

How do you use mind maps?

Here are a few little things you can do to save clicks / keystrokes in every day tasks:

1. Windows Explorer:Add a location to Favourites

You will notice that the left pane of the file explorer window has some folders listed under Favourites.  You can add your own location to that list for folders that you use often.

Simply navigate to it as usual until it shows up on the the right panel, right click on Favourites on the left panel, and select “Add Current Location To Favourites”.

2. Windows Explorer: Toggle Folder Views

Depending on what I’m working on, I use different folder views.  For example, when I’m working with site images, I like the large icon view; when working with code, I prefer the details view so I can see last modification dates.

You can quickly toggle between the different modes by holding down the Ctrl key and scrolling with the mouse wheel.

Another fun toggling thing to do (warning: dizzy tip ahead) is to hold down the Win and Tab keys at same time.  It will whizz through all your open windows.  Not recommended after a large meal.

3. Magnifier

Many browsers and some programs support Ctrl and +/- to increase / decrease zoom level. Windows 7 has a built-in magnifier that you can use on anything that is currently on the screen.

To activate the magnifier, use Win key and +/-.  When the zoomer first loads, it defaults to 200%.  You can easily customize that.  Use Win and Esc to stop it running.

If you often do presentations of anything with a relatively small print, such as Excel sheets or code, the magnifier feature is great for zooming in on a column or portion of the screen.  Or use it instead of getting up to get your reading glasses.

4. Task Bar: Mouse Gesture

You must known by know that mousing over an icon in the task bar brings up small previews of all windows open in that program, and clicking on the icon bring us the jump list in a vertical format.

You can also use a mouse gesture, ie., a touch gesture, except you gesture using the mouse.  Holding down the left button and slightly flicking upwards, the jump list appears.  Geeky cool

5. Use Sticky Notes

Sticky Notes are great.  They can hang out on your desktop, annoying reminders of all the great things you decided to do.

You can find Sticky Notes under Programs from the Start Menu.  You can change their colour, move them around at will, and add new notes directly from an exiting one by just clicking the + in top left.

I like the cute font and ice-cream colours – they make my desktop look like a fun, happening collage.  Until I actually read the content.

So there you have it – five of my favourite tricks to use when I’m slaving over a hot keyboard and a dizzy mouse.

Enter Gmail filters.

These filters are analogous to rules on other email systems, and are really easy to set up.  To the right of the search box, right after Search Web and Search Mail, you will find a small link that reads ‘Create A Filter’.  Click on the link to start creating a filter.

Step 1: Select Emails

Fill in one or more of the boxes to decide which emails to filter: From, To, Subject, Has The Words, Doesn’t Have The Words, and even Has Attachment.

In the From and To you can use actual email addresses or just names.  In the Subject and Words boxes, you can enter words in either upper or lower case, and the search will pick them up anyway.

Step 2: Test Selection

To make sure you’ve selected the right emails, click on Test Search.  Hopefully, the filter rules will have picked up exactly the ones you were targeting.  Once you are satisfied with the result, click on Next Step

Step 3: Decide What To Do

You now have a choice.  Trash the emails, archive them (Skip Inbox), label them (my usual choice), or even (gasp!) forward them to another unfortunate mailbox.

Note that you can also have a combination.  I find a good set to be Skip Inbox and Apply Label.  For example, I select all my newsletters from Tech Republic, choose Skip Inbox, and Apply Label, choosing “Tech Reading” from the drop-down list (note: you have to create label the first time).  This way, they don’t clutter my Inbox, and I can find them easily for reading when I have time.

Step 4: Create The Filter

Click on Create The Filter to complete the work.  You can optionally check the “Apply Filter to Conversations Below”, which will immediately apply it to your Inbox.

Repeat steps 1 to 4 for each category of email.  Some examples of my filters:

• Tech Reading for all my geeky newsletters and feeds
• Local Info for stuff from local media such as TimeOut Dubai, ExpatWoman, Arabian Business etc.
• Network Nag for Twitter, Facebook et al

You will likely tweak and revisit a few of the filters as time goes on, and before you know it, you will have a beautifully clean Inbox, where only “real” email lives.

I love timers.  Something about knowing there is a finite number of minutes left appeals to my fickle inner child.  So, what can you do with a timer?

Fight procrastination: The procrastinators 10+2 hack from 43 Folders recommends setting your timer on a 10 + 2 round.  You work for 10 minutes, goof off for 2 minutes.

Boost productivity: Set the timer for a 15 or 30 minutes to focus on a task and commit to it completely till the timer goes off.  You’re only committing for 15 minutes.  Totally doable.  This also works a treat if you set it for 5 minutes to get kids to put away their toys or generally pick up their play area.

Interval training: Many exercise protocols are based around intervals.  One of the most effective is tabata, where you practically kill yourself in 30 second spurts followed by 10 seconds of rest.

My timer mashup: set timer for rounds of 30 + 2.  Work for 30 minutes, exercise for 2.  I use “exercise” in a very loose sense here.   It doesn’t really matter what kind of exercise you do, as long as you move.  If you work at a desk / computer for a living, taking these breaks is great for your eyes, your neck, and making you realize you just spent the last 30 minutes on Twitter.  You can then spend 2 minutes repenting by doing jumping jacks.

I use sweatshop as my timer.  It’s a freebie I found here – Windows only unfortunately.

Do you use a timer?