Entries Tagged 'review' ↓

Another year is winding down, and that means it’s time to take a look back at what we’ve done here at Lifehack over the last 12 months. 2009 was a scary year for a lot of people – corporate layoffs, a shaky global economy, stunningly vicious politics, old wars grinding on and new ones flaring up. In the midst of all this, though, many saw opportunities; with the myth of life-long corporate employment shattered as some of the world’s biggest companies teetered on the brink of collapse, entrepreneurship enjoyed a major resurgence. This rise in self-reliance extends beyond our work life, too – people are embracing a do-it-yourself, person-to-person lifestyle where status and the display of wealth matter much less than authenticity and social interaction.

All of this is reflected in the posts that went up on this site over the last year. What follows is a list of the 90 most popular, most commented on, and most talked-about posts from 2009, and as you can see, in addition to our usual mix of posts about personal productivity, organization, webware, and creativity, a large number of posts about personal finance and self-employment made the top of the list. It’s not surprising that Lifehack’s staff and contributors would write posts that reflect the tenor of the times, nor that such posts would resonate most with our audience.

What emerges from all this is a treasure trove of good advice, ranging from the lofty and idealistic to the immediately practical. We promise to continue to provide quality tips and advice about work, technology, money, and just plain living in the new year and beyond. If you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe to our feed and follow us on Twitter so you don’t miss any of the great posts we have in store for 2010!

Software and Technology

2009 was notable for the maturing of online applications, the explosion of applications for mobile phones, and the mainstreaming of social networking services like Twitter and Facebook. Popular stories at Lifehack covered tips for the use (and not abuse) of social networking services, tips on using your computer effectively and securely, and recommendations for applications online, on your PC, and on your Android phones.

1. Getting Productive with the Webware 100 (Dustin M. Wax)
2. Searching for a Shared Virtual Workspace? (Clemens Rettich)
3. Is Google Ready to Handle Your Business? (Part 1) and (Part 2) (Dustin M. Wax)
4. From Here to Tweeternity: A Practical Guide to Getting Started on Twitter (Dustin M. Wax)
5. Six Ways to Transform your Presentation (Paul Sloane)
6. Managing Your Social Network Addiction (Ibrahim Husain)
7. 8 Keys to Internet Security (Dustin M. Wax)
8. The First 10 Free Apps to Install on a New Windows PC (Dustin M. Wax)
9. 12 Free Android Apps to Help Get Things Done (Part 1) and (Part 2) (Dustin M. Wax)
10. Your Guide to Apps that Eliminate Distractions (Joel Falconer)

Lifestyle: Family, Fitness, and Finance

Money issues were on everyone’s minds this year, and our writers served up plenty of advice about managing both your money and your expectations. Advice about families and parenting was popular this year – or sometimes controversial, like Craig Harper’s poorly understood advice to take ownership of your past and recognize that whoever wronged you in the past, only you can set things right for yourself. And, since today’s worker is all-too-often someone who spends most of her or his day sitting, our writers’ advice on getting some activity into your life was well appreciated.

1. How to Stop Yelling at Your Kids (Erin Kurt)
2. If Your Childhood Sucked – It’s Time to Stop Blaming Your Parents! (Craig Harper)
3. How to Recognize Imminent Danger: 7 Essential Safety Rules (Mary Jaksch)
4. 30 Money Sites to Check Out in 2009 (Thursday Bram)
5. 3 Scary Misconceptions About Money (Joel Falconer)
6. Great Ways to Become Poor and Stay Poor (Paul Sloane)
7. How to Start Running – Without Feeling Like a Failure (Mary Jaksch)
8. Pain and Posture: The Basics (Jamie Nischan)
9. How to Start Running – Without Feeling Like a Failure (Mary Jaksch)
10. A Workout for Geeks (Daryl Furuyama)

Personal Productivity and Creativity

Advice about getting productive makes up the core of Lifehack’s content, so naturally our most popular and most talked about posts this year were just that. From developing the right mindset to promoting creativity to finding inspiration and motivation, we offered tons of advice on getting things done.

1. 12 Lists That Help You Get Things Done (Dustin M. Wax)
2. Procrastination – NOT a Problem! (Francis Wade)
3. 10 Best Productivity Books of 2009 (Dustin M. Wax)
4. 11 Ways to Think Outside the Box (Dustin M. Wax)
5. 8 Ways to Kill Clutter in 5 Minutes (David Pierce)
6. Reaching Your Goals – Dutch Style (Christine Buske)
7. New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work – Here’s Why (Steve Errey)
8. How to Make Decisions Under Pressure (Joel Falconer)
9. Limits and Creativity (Dustin M. Wax)
10. The Daily Grind: A Matter of Momentum (Joel Falconer)
11. 4 Pocket-Sized Tools to Help You Generate Killer Ideas Any Time, Anywhere (Chuck Frey)
12. How to Think What Nobody Else Thinks (Paul Sloane)
13. 9 Lists To Keep Updated, and Keep Handy (David Pierce)
14. 10 Reasons Paper is The Most Flexible Productivity Platform (Joel Falconer)
15. 3 Tips to Improve Memory Quickly (Steve Martile)
16. How to Wake Up and Instantly Achieve Something Everyday (Paul Dickinson)
17. Stripped GTD: 3 Habits That Make You More Productive (David Pierce)
18. Ten Great Ways to Crush Creativity (Paul Sloane)
19. Scoring 100% in Time Management (Francis Wade)
20. 7 Steps For Making a New Year’s Resolution and Keeping It (Annabel Candy)

My incomplete series on getting back on track with a productivity system, “GTD Refresh”, was quite popular but was never completed. The next step for me was supposed to be eliminating my email backlog and adopting an “Inbox Zero” approach, but frankly, email won. This year – I’m going to try again in 2010 and so you may well see more “GTD Refresh posts in the not-too-distant future.

• GTD Refresh, Part 1: Getting My Head Together
• GTD Refresh, Part 2: Contexts and Calendar
• GTD Refresh, Part 3: Projects
• GTD Refresh, Part 4: Getting Sorted
• GTD Refresh, Part 5: Building the Weekly Review Habit
• GTD Refresh, Part 6: Decisiveness

2009 was bookended by two publications with something to offer the would-be personal productivity expert. David Allen’s Making It All Work revisited the core concepts of GTD and expanded on elements that had been weakly developed in his earlier work. You can read my lengthy review here: (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3)

And our most popular series, my “Back to Basics” posts from 2008, were collected, revised, and expanded (with 2 new chapters) in the release of Back to Basics Productivity which will be joined in 2010 by several more ebook releases.

Work and Career

With the economy huddling in on itself this year, even non-entrepreneurs had to learn to be more entrepreneurial. Promotions, raises, or just holding onto your job and pay level, required a demonstration of unusual career intelligence, and our writers offered a heaping portion of it. And for those in our workforce who took the plunge – voluntarily or not – into self-employment, advice on personal branding, small-business promotion, and entrepreneurship were in no short supply.

1. What to Do if You Don’t Get Along with Your Boss (Paul Sloane)
2. Darth Vader’s “Management” Secrets (Art Carden)
3. 21 Entrepreneurship Websites Worth Checking Out
4. 3 Areas You Must Invest in During an Economic Recession (Dan Schawbel)
5. Personal Branding Basics (Dan Schawbel)
6. Seven Great Questions to Ask at a Job Interview (Paul Sloane)
7. Why A Good Web Site Matters To Your Business (Susan Baroncini-Moe)
8. How to do Good AND Make a Profit (Arvind Devalia)
9. 12 Tips for Better Business Writing (Dustin M. Wax)
10. 10 Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Job (Paul Sloane)

Productivity Pr0n

It may seem distracting, even materialistic, to drool over office supplies, but let’s face it: I do it, you do it, and geeks around the world do it. And with good reason, actually: the right tool can (in David Pierce’s words) make all the difference. Moleskine’s were popular as always, but a list of alternative notebooks caught the eye of those put off by the style or cost of the famous pocket notebook. Pens also got a lot of attention – it may seem silly to those who are (or pretend to be) perfectly comfortable with their 12-for-a-dollar stick pens, but there truly is no feeling quite like that of a quality writing instrument gliding over the page. And for funsies, there’s are review of the Prada Link, because gadgets are way cool.

1. 10 Great Moleskine Hacks (Dustin M. Wax)
2. Stationery Pr0n: Japanese Pens and More from JetPens.com (Dustin M. Wax)
3. Why a Great Pen Makes All the Difference (David Pierce)
4. 5 Reasons to Pay Good Money for a Moleskine (Dustin M. Wax)
5. 13 Things to Do with a Moleskine Notebook (Dustin M. Wax)
6. 10 Great Moleskine Hacks (Dustin M. Wax)
7. 9 Places to Always Keep Pen and Paper Handy (David Pierce)
8. 10 Affordable Pens Geeks Love (Dustin M. Wax)
9. 10 Great Notebooks Productive People Love (Dustin M. Wax)
10. The Trend of Productivity Accessories is Here (Leon Ho)

Life Lessons

Finally, the catch-all for what’s left. There are some brilliant people writing on Lifehack – small business experts, marketing gurus, life coaches, creativity specialists, and so on. It stands to reason that not all their advice could be slotted into easy categories. So below you’ll find advice on relating with others, mastering your own weaknesses and giving rein to your strengths, developing a charitable mindset, dealing with hardships, and more.

1. 10 Small Ways to Make the World a Better Place (Dustin M. Wax)
2. Have You Started Planning for a Successful 2010? Here’s How! (Susan Baroncini-Moe)
3. Rethink the Season of Giving (Dustin M. Wax)
4. 7 Ways to Deal with Annoying People and Still Get Things Done (Dustin M. Wax)
5. 12 Personality Types to Avoid to Make 2009 Your Best Year (Craig Harper)
6. Life Lessons of the Dread Pirate Roberts (Dustin M. Wax)
7. Six Great Ways to Vent Your Frustrations (Danielle Marie Crume)
8. How to Stay Motivated and On-Track When You’re Struggling (Susan Baroncini-Moe)
9. Change The Way You See Fear And Change Your Life (Susan Baroncini-Moe)
10. The Five Reasons Why You Are Not Fulfilling Your Potential (Paul Sloane)
11. How to Be Offended (Dustin M. Wax)
12. Improve Your Charitable Giving: Let Not Your Left Hand Know What Your Right Is Doing (Art Carden)
13. 10 Things in Life That Aren’t Fair – and What to Do About Them (Part 1) and (Part 2) (Dustin M. Wax)
14. 7 Steps to Start Lucid Dreaming (Steven Aitchinson)
15. Changing Your Personal Reality (Part 1) and (Part 2) (Craig Harper)
16. Dating, Living, and Being Your Best Self (Dustin M. Wax)
17. Go on a Date with Life and More Ways to Go on a Date with Life (Dustin M. Wax)
18. Being a Man in the 21st Century (Part 1) and (Part 2) (Dustin M. Wax)
19. The Work of Worry (Dustin M. Wax)
20. Your Happiness Plan (Craig Harper)

Were there any other posts here in the last year that helped you or gave you a new perspective on your work, life, or the people around you? Let us know in the comments!

Finally, I want to take a moment to recognize all the staff writers and guest contributors who worked hard to provide our readers with wisdom and insight in 2009. On the staff, there’s Leon Ho (site owner), myself (project manager), and our staff writers Joel Falconer and Thursday Bram, now departed. Our contributors and guests consist of:

Thanks to all of them, and to you, our readers, for making 2009 a great year!

Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

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Outlook is a well-established presence on the business desktop, providing millions with their email, calendar, contacts, and tasks. It’s such an institution, in fact, that when Microsoft radically revamped the Office suite’s interface in 2007, it left Outlook largely unchanged.

Although it’s big and sluggish, there’s no denying that Outlook does what it’s supposed to do. Not quickly or with style, but consistently and effectively nonetheless. The thing is, though, that we have moved beyond just email as our major form of business communication. In the increasingly real-time and social world, a big ol’ email client seems a little… old-fashioned.

Xobni is an attempt to bring Outlook into sync with the socially-networked world. Available in a free and paid “Plus” versions (the paid version offers advanced search capabilities and calendar functions), Xobni adds a new pane to your Outlook window packed with information about the sender of whatever email you’re currently viewing or the contact you’ve selected.

Working with Xobni

The image to the right is what Xobni looks like on my system. I’ve selected one of my own emails from the “Sent Mail” folder and obscured some of my personal information, of course.

At the top is a “business card” view with my phone numbers and email addresses, as well as my title and the company I work for. Below that is a graph of how many emails I’ve sent and received to and from this contact (which is me, which may be why the numbers are odd), but that’s just the default – the five buttons above that chart allow me to select different functions. If I click the orange button, I get actions I can perform relating to the contact – make an appointment or send an email, in this case. The other three buttons open the contact’s LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter profile. (You can pick and choose several social network functions – other options that I did not choose are buttons for Skype and Hoovers company search.)

• LinkedIn gives you their location, current company and title, and number of connections, plus a link to their full profile.
• Facebook gives you your contact’s “Wall” and a link to their profile.
• Twitter gives you your contact’s status updates, plus buttons to view their profile and follow them – you an also post updates through Xobni, though it’s far from a replacement for a full-featured Twitter client.

Basically, the top of the Xobni window is devoted to information about your contact. The next part is about your relationship with that contact.  The “Network” part is the most mysterious to me; according to their website, Xobni analyzes the “From:”, “To:”, and “CC:” fields of incoming emails to determine who among your contacts the sender also has some connection to. For instance, if I have the CEO and the CFO of a company in my address book, and I get an email from the CFO that’s CC’ed to the CEO, Xobni knows that the two are connected.

“Conversations” condenses all my previous exchanges with that contact into threaded discussions. Click on a discussion and you can read the messages in the thread, see who was involved in the conversation, and pull out any files exchanged. (You can also hover the pointer over a discussion and a pop-up will preview the first few messages in the thread.) A slider at the top allows you to move from the first line or two of each message to full messages. Click a message in the thread and the message itself opens in the Xobni bar, with buttons to reply or forward, or to open in an Outlook window.

Finally, “Files Exchanged” is what it sounds like – a list of every attachment the contact has ever sent you or that you’ve sent to them.

At the very top of the Xobni window is the search bar, allowing you to search both contacts and email messages. The results are broken into 5 categories: People (contacts with your search term in their name, company name, email address, etc.), Messages (any email with your search term in it), Files Exchanged (any attachment with your search term in the filename), Appointments (any appointment that includes your search term; this is technically a “Plus” feature – clicking an appointment returned in search in the free version will open an upgrade pitch), and Tasks (again, any task with your search term in it).

Verdict: Is Xobni useful?

Xobni helps uncover a great deal of information, most but not all of which is particularly useful. I can’t imagine what use it would be to know that a particular contact tends to email me in the afternoon more than the morning, but it’s kind of interesting to look at. The social networking features are the most useful part, I think – already I’ve discovered profiles for and added on LinkedIn and Twitter a client that I’ve just started working with.

Much of the usefulness of Xobni is hampered by the fact that, like Outlook itself, it’s fairly slow and resource-intensive. For example, it took nearly a minute hovering my mouse over a discussion with 24 messages in it for the pop-up to populate with message previews! Searching takes significantly longer than Google Desktop’s Outlook plugin – and even longer than searching the whole desktop from the Google Desktop sidebar.

Now, that could have just been my PC – it’s a few years old, with a 2.4 GHz Athlon x64, a gigabyte of memory, and Windows XP with Office 2007. Hardly a speed demon! But a search for “Xobni” on Twitter reveals that I’m hardly alone in finding Xobni too slow. Here’s a sample of messages just from the last couple of hours:

• “all xobni did for me was sloooooow down outlook. didn’t keep it long.”
• “installed xobni… again… we will see if my laptop can handle it this time”
• “I had xobni. it’s heavy, and not really effective or accurate. had many issues with that.”
• “Xobni is a Really good product but occasionally it stalls outlook for a while.”
• “my biggest problem comes when I try to read the conversation between some of my contacts with xobni.”

To be fair, there are positive mentions, too, like this one from an obviously pleased user:

• “I’ve been using Xobni since around Feb. 2009. Kind of hooked on it. “

(Incidentally, the Xobni team is quite active on Twitter; comments about Xobni are often replied to by @xobni within minutes!)

Xobni creates its own index of your email, so it definitely needs a lot of resources. It is possible that it’s not Xobni’s fault that it tends to be slow – perhaps Outlook, as big and ponderous as it is, just isn’t a good platform for third-party applications – but it is Xobni’s problem. While it provides some useful information and functionality, especially related to social networking, none of the information it provides is worth waiting for, especially if I can get the same information quicker just by Googling it.

People with older machines — or lower-end new machines — just aren’t going to get much out of Xobni. If you have a more powerful computer, though, Xobni might well be worthwhile. Fast searching, threaded discussions, and social networking interface all make Xobni a useful product, provided you don’t spend time waiting for it to respond.

Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

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