CT Biz Blogs

Steve Rubel wrote a few days ago in Micro Persuasion, about how he works — the applications he uses, how he organizes his work, and what he does throughout the day. He even created a Technorati tag for it, so that anyone interested can track the discussion as people chime in.

I already wrote a little about my day, but not much about what tools I use when I work at the computer. And I spend a lot of time at the computer — 10 - 12 hours a day!

I tend to keep it simple; I don’t like to have too many applications open at once. One reason is that I get too easily confused, but also, because some of the applications I use take a lot of computer resources, and opening too many other applications really slows things down. For example, Visio, a flowcharting tool by Microsoft, is a resource hog, at least on my system. Outlook, also. Combine the two and you can forget about anything else. Likewise with Dreamweaver, a web authoring tool.

When I have a jillion things to try and do in one day, I tend to keep open a Notepad file, where I put a to-do list. I do keep a good list in my Palm T3, but again, when I have some big apps open, even Palm Desktop slows things down. Notepad is better. If I have anything left over at the end of the day, then I open up the Palm Desktop, create the tasks, and sync to my T3.

In good “Getting Things Done” fashion, I not only write down what I’m doing or need to do, but I also put down what I’m waiting for. This helps me remember to nudge people if they haven’t gotten back to me.

Yesterday I felt very scattered and couldn’t settle down until I started working through that little notepad list. I find that just quickly jotting down the actions and outcomes helped keep me sane as I jump from one task to another, and through constant interruptions.

When I blog, I tend to just open the blog posting interface, and start typing — no off-line editor for me. That’s only because I haven’t found one that has all of the features I like. I sometimes use Zoundry, but it doesn’t have a spell-checker!

With all the time I spend at the computer, the real tool I need is a better chair and some device to help me keep my shoulders from hunching over. If I don’t get better about remembering to keep my shoulders back, I’m going to end up as a human comma!

Technorati : How I work