I was just asked to moderate a panel at an upcoming conference on Time Management. I also get asked all the time how I get so much stuff done. Let’s look at just one aspect of getting things done and that is capturing your ideas. I am a big fan of David Allen’s book Getting Things …
9 Tips for Managing a Virtual Team
I have an office with my name on the door just like my father used to have. My office is 2,700 miles from my house or the length of the longest non-stop flight in the continental United States. With that kind of commute, you might understand why I am only working from that office one …
The Building that Almost Killed a Company
Accomplishment I remember how proud we were the day we moved into our new offices. I walked around with Peter the CEO of Talk City and there was a sense of accomplishment. The tallest building in the Pruneyard is visible for miles and was, we were told, the tallest building between San Francisco and Los …
TypeIt4Me – Don't Waste Time Typing Things Twice
I get asked all the time how I can get so many things done. One of my favorite tools to help get things done is a text macro program on the Mac called TypeIt4Me. Everyone who sits in front of a computer for extended periods of time or who answers a number of emails should …
Increase WordPress Website Speed for Free (using .htaccess and robots.txt)
I run this websites and a few others, including my more popular Amateur Traveler website on a bluehost.com account. I started to run into problems with performance as my site started to push past 2000 page views a day, especially when I would get bursts of traffic from sites like StumbleUpon. I started to get …
Organized is the not the same as Productive
I had a number of things that I needed to get done today. I had 2-3 podcasts to produce and a few blog posts I wanted to write. It was not my intention that this be a lazy Saturday. But while I still lay in bed I had the overwhelming desire to re-organize the apps …
Improve Your Writing – Tell A Story
I had a non-profit pitch a story for the Amateur Traveler recently and in the process of getting that story ready for publication, I think there is a valuable lesson. What the author had missed was the chance to make the story personable and therefore more memorable. The first version of the story about volunteer …
The Internet Is Like Your TV – Explaining the Internet to My Father
My father is 84 years old and grew up, for obvious reasons, without computers and the internet. So I sometimes get requests from him that I can’t accomplish because he does not understand how the internet works. My father will ask me to change something on the Yahoo mail site (I setup his browser to …
For the Want of a Salesman
As an engineer by training I have had a love / hate relationship with sales people. “Why can’t they just sell the product we have instead of some product we don’t yet have” was a constant lament. Don’t get me wrong, my father was a salesman and was, in fact, the top salesman for his …
Running a Community is like Throwing a Party
Running an online community is like throwing a party. That’s what Jenna Woodul LiveWorld’s Chief Community Officer told me sometime in the 1990s. I have always liked the analogy. I attended my first meeting of a particular meetup group recently. I arrived with my artichoke dip and entered into a house full of strangers. I …