Dragos Roua – Brilliantly Better
The Personal Development Blog
From the category archives:
You have clients, deadlines and tons of work to do. You have to deliver results and stay on top of your lists. You have to be productive. Otherwise you’re out of the game. And being out of the game is not fun.
I had an online business for more than 10 years and I pretty much [...]
{ 5 comments }
Assess – Decide – Do is a simple life management framework. Despite its somehow pompous acronym, ADD is overwhelmingly simple, so simple that you may even overlook it. Every ADD cycle is based only on 3 fundamental activities: assess, decide and do. And since we’re going to talk about ADD and programming, we can borrow [...]
{ 2 comments }
I love my wordpress theme, I really do. In case you haven’t noticed so far, this is thesis, one of the best commercial themes for wordpress. I don’t like it only for the crisp appearance and nice layout, you can get that nowadays from any decent free wordpress theme. What I like it for is [...]
{ 18 comments }
Although a little too simple for my taste, Do It (formerly known as “To Do”) is one of the “oldies but goldies” around the Mac software community. Yes, I know, I am being mean, after all, “Do It” is only one or two years old – the author blog haven’t been updated since last year, [...]
{ 1 comment }
Google Toolbar is a great browsing extension. I use it since its only benefit was to show you the page rank of the page you visited. And it was a great tool. But things have changed and now Google Toolbar is making important steps toward a more socialized approach of the new web.
One of these [...]
{ 4 comments }
I guess we all know the buzz on Yahoo Pipes. It’s a brand new service from Yahoo that basically offers you a visual interface for fetching, combining, programming and publishing various pieces of the Internet, most of all based on remote services, like RSS or SOAP.
What you can actually do with it? Well, you [...]
{ 4 comments }
My last try to write about something related to OS’s was somehow a flamer on digg. Myabe I haven’t stated enough during the article that I was only interested in listening to opinions from the guys that actually switched from one OS to another, and that I didn’t try make any comparison between those two OS’s. So, if I would like to talk about something far more inflamable thant that, meaning paid model development vs open source model development, I thought I’d better put up first a
Disclaimer
This article represents my personal opinions only and is not endorsed by any company or foundation. Also, my intentions is, foremost, to just express my ideas about the values that each model could have, and not to accuse, adhere to or specifically endorse any of them.
Wow, it’s cool to be relaxed, so let’s start our little walk on the park of the personal and software development.
First of all, yest, it’s an odd pair: personal and software development. But I told you from the beginning: you wouldn’t find usual stuff here. Not because usual is not good, but because new connections and standpoints can always shed some new light and reveal new thinking paths on any topic you can imagine.
{ 1 comment }
Suppose you are in the middle of something, reading a post on a blog, or writing a fine article in your editor of choice, or even writing some code for your ground breaking web 2.0 application. And ka-boum: you have an idea! Something so interesting, so juicy and fun to think about crosses your mind, than you feel you can’t live anymore until you actually write down that piece of thought. Somewhere, somehow. So there you go:
1. leave your current activity/application
2. open Finder (or some other program menu containing an outliner application shortcut, for instance)
3. open that outliner application
4. open a new file in it
5. start writing the marvelous idea
6. hit save as menu item
7. chose location and save
8. close the outliner application
9. return to your current activity/application
But here’s how it would look like, if you would use Quicksilver:
1. type CTRL + spacebar to invoke Quicksilver window (while having the current activity/application still in front of you)
2. type “.” and start writing your marvelous idea
3. hit TAB and type “cre..” meaning the first letters of your “Create file” action of Quicksilver, and then enter (this really counts like a single action)
4. chose location and save
5. hit escape to hide Quicksilver window
Huh! We are four steps shorter than the original approach. That counts for less physical work, and less time, almost half, right? Nice, isn’t it? But that’s not the only advantage: you actually remain in the flow, while your thoughts are free to fly. Isn’t that really nice?
So, how we actually do that?
{ 3 comments }
You know all those strange albums on Flickr or those psychedelic movies on YouTube when a guy took pictures of himself for a year, each day? Or for two or three? Each day, another picture of himself? Well, although in the beginning the idea seemed a little creepy to me, I soon started to see, well, some benefits… Needles to say that, in a more adventurous state then ever, and with little forseen reward, I started my own “A Photo Every Day” project. Just for fun, if you want. Or just to see how often I need to shave. Or just to test my iSight’s capabilities. If that little ting could do a photo every day it worth every penny, right?
But in less than five days, after being warned daily by a plethora of reminders that I put on my desktop (and in my GTD system, of course), I saw that I spent around 2 minutes for each photo. Start Photo Booth, take the pictures, start iPhoto, import that photo, rename that foto… The funny thing with these projects are the big numbers behind them. For a week, 2 minutes every day counts as what, 10 minutes? But for 365 days, that will bring us 730 minutes, or at least 12 hours. Hmmm, maybe I could use those hours in a more clever way? And still have that project running?
{ 4 comments }
I want to jot down some stuff about the tools I use to get things done. This would be very sketchy at the beginning, and I’ll try to add more as I go along…
As I already said, I was a Linux guy for about 10 years and I just turned to Mac several months ago. [...]
{ 0 comments }
