Computers can be either an enormous productivity tool or an enormous time-waster. It all depends on how you use them, and how disciplined you are with them. I carry my laptop (almost) everywhere, which means I can be ultra-productive or waste a lot of time, depending on how I approach it.
I’d like us all to move more toward the productive side of things, and I try to find software that helps me accomplish this.
“Mind-mapping” is a way of graphically representing projects and topics you are thinking about or working on. This is a technique you may be familiar with if you have read the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. Allen suggests using this technique to capture ideas while brainstorming. I have found that this technique is also very useful for keeping track of tasks. There are several software programs for mind-mapping. The one that I use, Freemind, is free and it happens to be excellent. It has a lot of features and many of them are accessible via keyboard commands. This makes using the program fast and easy. I always have this program open on my computer so I can see what I should be working on and update things as I think of them. Below is a screenshot of some of the projects that I am keeping track of. (all of the categories can be expanded to reveal much more detail)
Have you noticed that computers and most software applications become more and more complex, not simpler? I look at my computer screen and there are dozens of little things to click on and things that seem to try and distract me from doing real “work” all the time. I find myself writing something, an email, an article, a blog post and before I know it, I am not writing anymore. I’m fixing the spelling of all the words that were underlined with that wavy little red line, changing the font, and making sure that my bullet points have the coolest looking bullet point icon next to them. I used Microsoft Word to write everything, and there were just so many distractions. Sometimes I think it was easier back in the days of DOS, just some plain text on a black screen.
Then, one day, my life changed dramatically. A friend of mine emailed me a link to this program called Dark Room with the explanation “You’re going to love this”. He was right. It is a text editor that goes full screen, and it is just the text and no distractions. No icons to click, no little red lines underlining nearly every word you type, no mouse pointer, nothing. Actually, there was a scroll bar on the side but I disabled it, and then the text didn’t fit the whole screen, but I changed that too. I have been using it for a little over a week, and I use it for everything. If I am writing an email or a blog post, I find that the job gets done much quicker and I stay more focused. Sometimes, the best advance in productivity is actually not an advance in the traditional sense. It is going back to the basics of keeping things as simple as possible with the least distractions. If you have a Mac, this is actually based on a Mac OS X program called WriteRoom. Check out the screenshot below, it is simply elegant.
Both of these tools have allowed me to increase my productivity and turn my computer into more of an indispensable tool and less of a mindless distraction. Try these out, and you may find they are useful for you also.
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Tags: Productivity, software