Go through each item on your checklist and ask these questions:

• Can I automate this?
• Can I outsource this?

Take a step back and look at the entire checklist and ask: Can I create a system or process to simplify (including outsourcing the entire checklist)?

Here are a few example scenarios:

Let’s say you have a checklist of all the items you take to the gym. There may be toiletries needed each time. Instead of transferring them from your bathroom every trip, buy travel sized versions and keep them ready to go in your gym bag.

Instead of having your Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Google+ feeds push all updates to you in real-time, schedule all of your untimely alerts to be checked once or twice a day (achieve this easily by having the alerts emailed to a particular account and stored in a folder/tag — if you use Gmail, create a filter so these never show up in your inbox).

What are your favorite automation tools and outsourcing services?

“Talk to other programmers; read other programs. This is more important than any book or training course.”

The first major difference that struck me is the prioritized backlog that is central to agile vs. the list of next actions split by context that is key to GTD. In trying to follow the non-prioritization ethos of GTD, I always have this feeling in the back of my mind that perhaps I’m working on the wrong thing at a given time. My work around has been using due dates and flags within Omnifocus. Specifically, due dates are for items that have some consequence if I fail to deliver on that date and flags are action items I’d like to complete that day.

Here are some initial thoughts of how to apply concepts from both GTD and Agile within the framework of the GTD weekly review in order to achieve some level of prioritization.

1. Start with your list of projects and stack rank them in order of priority.
2. Make sure every project has a clear next action defined along with a context.
3. When you are ready to work, considering your context, check your calendar, check items with a due date and then grab the top most item from stack.

I believe Omnifocus respects the ordering of your projects, so now, when you look at a particular context it should display the next most important item at the top.

The main difference between this method and what I currently do is the ordering of the projects within Omnifocus. One challenge with this method is that grouping projects by folder (in Omnifocus) may no longer be feasible. In that case, I would have one folder to archive all projects I’m not going to work on during the next week and the rest of the projects would be stack ranked outside of that folder. Perhaps using a tagging method could help organize the projects without of folders. I’m not sure yet how this would effect planning at the project level since I like to be able to drill down to a particular project’s folder and work with the sub-projects within.

Are you using Agile or GTD in your own personal productivity system? Do you combine personal with business? Have you merged ideas to create your own custom solution?

So you want to be a blogger? You want to quit your wonderful 9-5 job and work from home, make your own hours, come and go as you please and just hopefully enjoy your life and freedom a bit more. I got news for you; it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s certainly not easy, and it’s not going to be something that just happens overnight. If you want to do this full time, don’t quit your day job as you most likely won’t get rich from blogging.

I’ve been doing this for several years now for my own sites and other sites. Sadly, over the years, I’ve developed bad habits, and most likely you will too. It is human nature after all; we get into habits of doing things, or not doing things as the case may be.

When you first start out blogging you’ll do it because you think you enjoy it, notice I said ‘think’ there. When you start out you’ll have the best intentions, you’ll want to do it every day, or multiple times per day. You’ll update your blog all the time, but after a while you won’t do it as often. Or not, you might be one of the few that succeeds.

If you really want to be a blogger, professionally, when you start there are a few things to keep in mind. These aren’t in any real order though; just thoughts tossed together more or less as I think of things.

In the beginning the most important thing is the topic of your blog. I don’t think I can stress that enough, it’s the most important part of your blog, and it’s actually a part of you essentially. The topic should be something that you are not only passionate about but it should be something that you know very well. It should be half passion and half knowledge really. The topic should be what you enjoy; it should be what you know about. If you look around pretty much every topic out there is taken so you’ll need to do something to make yours different than the others. You’ll need to be unique and certainly differentiate yourself from others out there. A lot of what I do is product reviews, so my topic is sort of hard to be different really; tech itself is a very broad subject. Part of the topic should also be the name of your blog; it’s hard these days to find a domain name as most all are taken, not by people using them but by squatters who just hold onto names hoping to sell them at a profit. You can get lucky though sometimes and find the name you want.

The next thing you’ll want to do is come up with a design for your blog. Depending on your knowledge this can be hard and rather tricky. I personally learned as I went because I wanted to do things myself, but you could hire someone to help you. Chances are you’ll use WordPress, it’s the most common blogging platform out there and it’s easy to learn and use. The easiest thing to do is find a free template then modify it to your needs like changing colors and the basic design. The problem there is you’ll have watch for copyright info. Many people put out free templates but with the caveat that you can only modify it so much, like leaving in certain links back to the creator. That’s the cheapest way to do things, you can get templates inexpensively though and modify them how you want to and not worry much about copyrights and links, but template can also be rather expensive to license. If you’re just starting out you most likely aren’t making much money so free is the way to go in the beginning. One other thing about free templates is that most likely there are already hundreds if not thousands of other sites out there using that template so you’ll be spending a lot of time making it your own. If you have the extra cash though you could pay someone to design a site to your specifications but that can get very costly and you’ll have to find someone who knows what they’re doing. Finding someone to help you though can be tricky, it’s the internet and finding someone who’s actually trustworthy can be an issue. The best thing to do is find a reputable service or even find someone you know to help you. If it’s someone you know though, don’t expect a discount, especially if it’s a family member. Just because you know them doesn’t mean you’ll get a discount and it doesn’t mean they’re available for you 24/7. Knowing computers as I do people think they can call me all the time and have me do stuff for them and not pay me, then they’ll actually get mad at me because I don’t have the time to do something for them which I’m not getting paid for. So look around and see what people are charging for the service and expect to pay close to that.

If you’re doing it yourself remember the colors should match, they should flow and go together. Make sure to pay attention to the contrast between the text and the background. There’s nothing worse than visiting a site and finding it just hard to read. Speaking of text, watch your fonts, don’t use all sorts of different fonts, pick one or two or even three and stick with them. Maybe use one font for your titles and then another for the rest of the text, and then maybe another font for sidebars, but that’s about it.

On the topic of writing make sure every post has a good title, not just some generic thing. Try and make sure it relates to your post and that it’s interesting. People will read the tile and right there decide whether or not to keep reading the rest of the post. Following the title you need a nice strong introduction or opening paragraph, here you’ll hook your reader in and make them want to read more. Then the closing paragraph could be a summary of everything you said, it all depends on the subject matter of your blog. Make sure you ask questions in your posts, you want people to contribute or participate and interact with you. You might just learn something from the comments you receive.

Another tip is images and resizing them. I learned quickly that you shouldn’t use the full sized images your camera takes in your blog. We all like to look at pictures on blogs but if you use the original pictures they can be megabytes in size and your site will have to load each of them and it will slow the site down considerably in some cases. Resize the pictures before you upload them to your blog, don’t let the HTML do it for you as it’s still loading the original pictures and resizing them taking time and resources. If you’re doing a lot of pictures take them at full size and resize them down. You can always downsize pictures but when you try and upsize them it usually never works.

The next thing you’ll want to think about is hosting for your site. If you’re first starting out you’ll want to go inexpensive. You can upgrade your hosting as your site grows, there’s no real reason to jump in and pay for a full dedicated, uber-powerful server if you’re not getting any visitors, it just makes no sense to essentially waste the money on hosting you’re not using. The other school of thought is to do that though, so it all depends on your cash flow and your thoughts on it.

Working from home can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing. Sure it’s great to wake up and grab your coffee and sit around in your pajamas while at your desk, but you may have a tendency to sleep in which in some cases doesn’t matter much really. I’ve got kids so normally I’m up to take them to school early in the morning, unless they’re off then I sleep in as well. There’s also the possibility of getting too comfortable, and even going so far as taking a nap in the middle of the day. Time management is something that people who work from home have the greatest problem with, that and I think second would be distractions. You’re on the internet you’ll most likely be browsing searching for things, watching some interesting video, and time will just pass, you’ll be sitting there and a couple hours will just go by. The best thing to do is make yourself a schedule, just like you would if you were working a 9-5 job. Blogging though, isn’t really a 9-5 job, I’ve come to learn that it’s something you do all the time really, and so doing a schedule can be hard. You could though make a schedule for certain things, or set time limits for yourself. Time limits for work but also for your own enjoyment time. Expect to work all the time really, well depending what your subject is anyway.

You’re in this to make money most likely right? Making money online is a tricky thing; sure you can sign up for all the ad services like Adsense or Infrolinks and/or dozens of others out there but without traffic you won’t make any money. The old adage that you need to spend money to make money is very true on the internet, you need to advertise. Just like any real business you’ll need to set a budget for yourself. When you first start out you’ll be spending more than you’re taking in, but it’s like that with any business so there’s no surprises there. I can’t tell you how to advertise, there are plenty of options out there, but I can tell you to use a reputable service. On the internet if it sounds too good to be true then it is. Someone offering you hundreds of thousands of hits for ten or fifteen dollars is most likely a scam. Sure you’ll get the hits but they’re not worth anything really. It’s not ‘real’ traffic most likely.

There’s plenty more I could say I’m sure, but this is just the basics.

Are you a blogger? What are some of your tips for time management? Do you like working from home? Have you come up with a system that works for you?

This is a guest post from Kristofer Brozio at TestFreaks.com, a gadget review site. TestFreaks is the world’s largest review comparison site with over 10 million reviews and 30 sites worldwide. We help 6 million consumers every month find better product information at our TestFreaks sites.

Now, I have found an even easier way to do this via my feed reader (which is currently NetNewsWire on Mac OSX and Reeder on the iPhone). Simply, use the following magical URL in your feed reader and enjoy:

https://mail.google.com/a/[your domain name]/feed/atom/unread

Note that you will need to authenticate your feed using your Google Apps username and login, where the username is your full email address.

1. Login to Facebook
2. Click http://www.facebook.com/username
3. Click the “Set a username” link
4. Choose the page that you wish to set a vanity URL for from the drop down (you must be an administrator of that page)
5. Type in the name you want and click the “Check Availability” button
6. If the name is available, you’ll get a pop-up asking for you to confirm, read it over and confirm if you ready
7. ??
8. Profit

1. Login to your administration panel: www.yourdomain.com/administrator
2. Click on the Category Manager and add a new category
3. Place your code in the description field
4. Go to the Menu Manager and add an item
5. Choose Articles->Category->Category Blog Layout
6. Fill in the Title and then under Parameters (Basic) select the category you created in steps 2 and 3

Joomla will now display the custom HTML you placed in the description field without changing the code.

Follow these simple steps to reach email bliss (or at least a slight tingling sensation):

1. You check your email and note that you did not see that email at the current moment and indeed you have disrupted your flow.
2. Click the “create a filter” link up at the top and then fill out the filter criteria. Usually I just use the From or To field because when filtering by keywords you may mistakenly filter emails that are indeed important.
3. Use “Skip the Inbox” if it is an email you would like to see at some point of your choosing or use the “Delete It” filter to remove it from your life forever.
4. Once a day or at some other frequency of your choosing type label:unread into the GMail search box to see all the emails that did not disrupt your flow, bask in your own glory and then process them at your leisure.

The value of this method lies in how aggressively you filter. After practicing this method for several months, I hardly ever see a non-important email in my Inbox (this is especially useful when checking email on the iPhone) … and when I do … filter time!

Initial Setup

1. Determine which keywords you want to monitor. A good start would be your company name, the names of competitors and industry keywords.
2. Setup a Google Alert for the terms determined in step 1 with these settings:
   • Comprehensive
   • as-it-happens
   • up to 50 results
3. Create a filter in your email program for the email googlealerts-noreply@google.com to push the alerts to a designated folder.
4. Setup Google Feed Reader or your RSS reader of choice
   • Go to http://alp-uckan.net/free/monitorthis/
   • In the search box use the terms determined in step 1 and click “make monitor.opml”
   • Follow the instructions under “Usage:”
5. Use UserNameCheck.com and KnowEm.com to make sure you have control of your brand name across various networks.

The next step is to determine a review procedure.

Daily or at least Bi-Weekly

• Check email for Google alerts (the folder you created in step 3)
• Check your Feed Reader

Weekly

Note: Remove the []‘s below and replace with your specific information.

• Review Overall Internet Buzz: http://whostalkin.com/search?q=[your terms]
• Review Google Search: http://www.google.com/search?q=[your terms]
• Review Incoming Links: Type or paste “link:[yourdomain.com] -site:[yourdomain.com]” into a Google search bar (without the quotes)

How are you managing your online reputation?

RecipeMatcher.com

When you have run out of money and are faced with near bare shelves and refrigerator, this web site is a life saver. Type in the ingredients you have on hand into the RecipeMatcher box and this web site will find recipes for you to prepare. If there are no recipes that match the ingredients you have, RecipeMatcher will show you recipes that come close with a list of what ingredients you are missing. Optionally you can select a cuisine such as Italian, Romantic, Diabetic, etc … and also what the primary ingredient should be.

It is free to become a member, and upon doing so you are allowed to submit your own recipes and make friends. You also get a simple profile with basic information. This site’s charm is in it’s simplicity. But if you find the amount of recipes lacking there is …

AllRecipes.com

This highly trafficked site has a ton of recipes. To help navigate the huge collection of recipes, they are categorized and searchable. They have two sections that are setup specifically for those on a budget you will want to check out: Cooking on a Budget and Cooking on a Budget Fall Edition. If quick and easy is what you need, check out this category.

Similar to RecipeMatcher.com, AllRecipes.com has a recipe search function that is based on what ingredients you have on hand. But they take it a step further by also allowing you to specify what ingredients you don’t want.

StillTasty.com

So you scraped up some money and purchased a few ingredients beyond the traditional student food staple of Ramen Noodles. StillTasty.com will help you maximize that investment and hopefully keep you from inadvertently poisoning yourself. Just type in the name of the food and and you will find out how long the food will stay safe and tasty as well as the best way to store the food.

It’s also worthwhile to check out the Your Questions Answered section, where you will find age old wisdom such as the answer to: Is is OK to put hot food directly into the fridge? Keep in mind that these answers will not likely sway your parents from their old habits, but you can still take comfort in the knowledge of your own correctness.

If All Else Fails … Ask Reddit

10 months ago a Redditer asks: “I am a student, and I’m moving into an apartment. I have some cooking ability, but I am beginning to notice I don’t have that many recipes. So reddit, what are your favorite meals to cook?” and then a thread of 450 comments followed. Enjoy!

What are some of your favorite easy, low cost recipes? Do you have any great resources for low cost recipes?