As those corny guys say, “that’s free money!” Give it a try if you haven’t already. Let me repeat that: Writing out my plans in detail sometimes saves me an hour or two of unnecessary work or procrastination in the course of a work day. Writing out my plans in detail sometimes saves me an hour or two of unnecessary work or just plain old procrastination, in the course of a work day. I really like the paper and the way Staedtler Triplus Fineliner pens feel on it. I’m mostly using Miquelrius notebooks for tracking my daily work plans and my exercise routines. Traffic to my portfolio pales in comparison, and I’m climbing much higher in search results than I was even a year ago. I did not think I would use this business blog very much, but it has become a cornerstone of my web presence. I have a couple of other blogs that are basically dormant, but I’m keeping them where they are because I know I’ll use them later. And like I said, you will see more rewards from it the more you do it. If you haven’t yet, you should set up some digital real estate of your own and jump into the fray, because helping people solve their problems and learn useful new things is worth your time. My business coach tells me that when I say “blog,” a lot of people are going to think “sharing photos of your cats” but no, that’s not what I’m talking about. I know that sounds about as exciting as high-fiber cereal so let me lay it out for you here: Blogging will bring you more of the stuff you write about. My work blog (here) and my personal blog have both been getting a workout ever since I realized that blogging is a really beneficial and healthy outlet. For now she’s using Google Drive but you know-we all know-that Google will just keep making big, awkward changes to Drive and all of its other tools, slowly wrecking them for normal people. My wife shared some photos with her brother and suddenly her storage was gone and we were looking at buying a paid account just for her and…it felt more like a pain than a fun tool. I can see myself looking for an alternative though, since there doesn’t seem to be a way to buy more storage incrementally. Sharing stuff with clients and friends is really easy with Dropbox, of course. Thanks to Dropbox I was able to fix a client’s website from my iPod while I was on vacation. Now I use it as a quasi-backup service and a way of ensuring access to important files when I’m on the go. In the past I was using Dropbox to share files on an as-needed basis with friends and family. This has been extremely convenient for me. (including the period at the end) All the matches come up and I can usually find what I’m looking for within seconds. When I want to search them (say, from my Mac), I hop into the terminal and type grep -r “search term”. Speaking of which, Zim and Tomboy files are auto-saved to my Dropbox as collections of plain text files. I can’t use them on my Mac but I use nvAlt on the Mac most of the time anyway. Zim and Tomboy are both Linux-only apps, last I checked. Zim is more like a structured notebook for the desktop. I like the way Dokuwiki is basically a website to which I can control access and create namespaces (special sections) as needed. The one I use most is Dokuwiki, followed by Zim, followed by Tomboy). I wrote this blog post with Textile, so when I click “Save,” all the headings, links, etc. I can write in Markdown, Textile, or ASCIIDoc, using full formatting if I need to. Geeky advantages abound, too: I can pick from any one of a million plain text editors to write whatever I need to write. I already have a ton of junk open in Photoshop so I’ll keep my RAM for that, thanks. I usually open a Word document and immediately save it to plain text, just to save me the trouble of having another memory-hogging word processor document open. Windows Paint bitmap file? Sure, send it over.) (Clients can send me anything they want because they’re clients. When friends send me Word documents full of basic information, they better be using advanced features to manage that information or I’ll just roll my geeky eyes and convert the thing to plain text. This year I will write hundreds of thousands of words in plain text files. Since then I’ve been using plain text and it’s so much better. I used to (like 15 years ago) use MS Word for writing things. I can’t blab enough about how plain text has saved my life. Here are the work tools that I’m excited to use in new ways as I start off 2014!
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