5 Productive Habits to Start Your Day | Jill Duffy. Part of being organized is creating habits that help us get the most out of every day. When we rely on habits rather than deliberate actions that require conscious effort, we free up our brains for more important stuff. Morning is an ideal time for the habits that can lead to a high productivity day. Here are five things you can do early in the day, every day, to get more done. 1. Track Your Sleep After you wake up, while sleep is still fresh on your mind, check how much you slept the night before. If you wear a fitness tracker or smartwatch that has a sleep-tracking function, look at your data.
If not, estimate it based on the time you went to bed. People need sufficient sleep to be able to focus and be their most productive. If you're not getting enough sleep, how can you fix it? 2. Set a quick-access view in your phone that shows your daily calendar or to-do list. 3. As you review your calendar and to-do list, be aware of what exactly you're asking yourself to do to today. 4. 5.
Dictater Adds Controls to Your Mac's Text To Speech Function. Your Mac can read any text, but there are a few notable shortcomings. You can’t pause or fast-forward what’s being read, for example – stopping is basically your only option. You also can’t follow along, or get an idea of how much longer the text is. In this state, Apple’s built-in text to speech engine is a feature without an interface. Dictater is a simple Mac program that fixes that.
This app uses the built-in text-to-speech functionality but offers additional controls. For non-Mac users, there are websites that offer text to speech functionality, and Windows and Linux users should also check out eSpeak. Text To Speech in Just Two Clicks Once you’ve downloaded the app, starting Dictater is simple: just highlight the text you’d like to hear, then bring up the context menu. Just like that, your computer will start reading the text for you. These controls are pretty obvious: you can pause, for example, or skip forward by a sentence or by paragraphs. And that’s Dictater! Lot’s of things. 7 Time Management Lessons I Learned from Mountain Climbing. William Blake once wrote, “Great things are done when men and mountains meet.” Climbing mountains can teach you a lot about life, but no area more so than time management. Time is precious. Everyone’s day has 24 hours.
No more and no less. So how you tackle those 24 hours can make the difference between a wasted day, or a day you can be proud of. How you manage your time from the first moment you get up in the morning, to the last moment when you go to bed at night, is a lot like mountain climbing. Let me share some of those with you, and you won’t even need to climb a single mountain to apply them to your own life! 1. Many times, mountains are a bit of an optical illusion. It’s an amateur mountain climber’s mistake — ignoring the elevation lines on the map. My wife (at the time, my girlfriend) and I learned this lesson the hard way when we planned an overnight camping trip at the top of a mountain in Western Massachusetts. The “Long Way” in Time Management This is the wrong approach. 2. How to Use Evernote as a Bullet Journal. There is no shortage of calendar and to-do apps out there. All of them are competing for your attention on every platform imaginable.
More likely than not, no one app or service is ever going to be perfect for you, unless you design your own productivity system. How to Be Productive When Productivity Apps Don't Work for You How to Be Productive When Productivity Apps Don't Work for You You should noticed that the past few years have been about an obsession with productivity. But what if productivity apps don't do it for you? Then what do you do? Read More With the use of a digital notebook like Evernote, a journaling system called the Bullet Journal, and no coding experience whatsoever, you can create a completely tailored organization system for yourself. What is the Bullet Journal? To create a bullet journal all you need is a plain notebook and a pen.
The advantage to using this system, rather than a store-bought planner or an online or mobile app is that you have complete control. How to Use Excel: 12 Techniques for Power Users. Excel is great, but trying to figure it out how to use Excel on your own can get you only so far because it isn’t intuitive. But if you use the techniques and tips in this tutorial, you’ll be able to get your work done faster and without a lot of stress.
Learn how to apply Excel formulas, calculations, filtering, data manipulation, workflow efficiencies, and more. Here are a dozen Excel techniques and features you need to know. Before you begin, go ahead and download the free Excel file worksheet. Every formula must start with an equal sign. And where do you write a formula? Example: add the values of B2, B3 and B4 and put the total in B6 In B6, enter this formula: Then press Enter to get the result. Subtraction, multiplication, division and exponents work the same way. If you want to do a calculation that’s a little more involved than a simple formula, insert a function into your formula. The syntax of all functions is: Example: Find the total and the average of a column of numbers.
How to Use Optical Illusions to Be a Better Digital Artist. Reality can't be painted; it's impossible. However, our brains are easy to fool—if something shows certain features of the real thing, we see it as the real thing. We aren't usually aware of this, until we come across pictures presenting optical illusions. Only then do we feel fooled, but the truth is we are being fooled all the time. This isn't a cube.
You can see a cube in many views, but this isn't one of them. Drawing and painting are the art of illusion. So, what can we learn from optical illusions? To help us survive, our brain must be very efficient at what it does. This mechanism is the reason why drawing is so easy, at its most basic level. When you have a word on the tip of your tongue, you are not able to say it aloud, but if you read it, you'll know it's what you meant. To avoid fruitless work, use the autocomplete function of your brain. You can apply this mechanism to the whole process of drawing an object: start from general lines, and then go towards more specific ones. Arno's Tech Tools. An overview of the tech tools I use for teaching and research in philosophy.
Disclaimer: I do not think that the tech tools I use are the best for the job, nor that the way I use them is best for everyone (not even that it is best for me). It is not my job to study software use, and, like most people, I often stick to old ways of doing or to the first way of doing I stumbled upon, just because I lack the motivation, time, energy, or money to try other ways. I occasionally drop random notes about the tech tools I use on Arno's tech blog. Check it out, you may find it useful!
Under construction: Added information about TaskPaper (16 January 2016) Replaced outdated information about my reference manager (14 January 2016) Added a short note on the sudden death of Circus Ponies Notebook (13 January 2016) Added a short note on RSS feeds (18 December 2014) Removed outdated information on the iOS text editors I use (16 December 2014). Hardware Microsoft Word Sources of information See also: Bookends.
Academic workflows on a Mac | for productive and enjoyable scholarship | Page 3. Optimizing Your Workflow. How to Create Your Own Productivity System. So far in this series on productivity, we've looked at a diverse range of productivity systems and techniques. Here's a quick recap: The Eisenhower Matrix helps you prioritize tasks on your to-do list based on their urgency and importance.The Pomodoro Technique teaches you to focus on the task at hand by chunking your day in 5 to 25 minute sections.Getting into a state of flow allows you to find your best energy, so you're naturally productive. Our aim in introducing you to all these productivity methods wasn't that you should use all of them. Implementing all of them would be a full-time job in itself! Also, it would probably drive you crazy. Rather, we hope you'll try the techniques that appeal to you or that tackle the specific productivity issues you face. As you find what works for you, you'll develop your own productivity system.
Think of it this way: if you're an artist, it's helpful to know a wide range of art styles and techniques to draw on as you develop your own style.
Areas of focus.