Tag: IFTTT

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to make a to do list, but how much harder it is to actually finish it? Prioritization makes a huge difference when it comes to actually completing that task list. The trick is to be as ruthless as you can stand.

This post originally appeared on the Zapier blog.

Be ruthless with your task list until you only have one task to focus on right now, so you can’t help but get to work. At least, that’s what it usually takes for me to get stuck in!

Prioritization is really hard, because it’s mostly about saying no. I’ve ordered these methods of prioritization to ease you in, with the most ruthless ones at the end. Let’s dive in.

Analyze Your Task List

Let’s start by looking for any tasks that can be dumped completely. Delegation is a perfect way to quickly cut down your task list—is there anything you’re waiting on others for? Get it off your list. Put it somewhere you won’t forget it, like a follow-up list or a shared project, but getting it off your normal to do list will relieve the pressure of seeing it there all the time.

Next, take all of the tasks that do apply to you and put them where they belong in this priority matrix from Steven Covey:

Anything that’s due soon (or overdue) counts as urgent. As for what’s truly important and what’s more of a "nice to do" task is up to you, but try to be as honest as you can. Anything that’s setting you up for long-term success could be counted as important, such as relationship building, personal health or growth activities or preventive maintenance.

This tool is particularly helpful for those times when you’re drowning under a million things to do, as it helps you to visualize what’s really important and what can wait. Once you’ve laid out your tasks, aim to get through the urgent and important tasks so you’re not butting up against deadlines. Then you can focus on the most productive quadrant: important but not urgent. These are the tasks that are easy to put off, but provide lots of value when they do get done.

And whatever you do, avoid the busy work and time wasters that land in the not urgent and not important quadrant as much as you can.

Make a List for Today

Now that you can more clearly see what needs doing straight away, make a to do list for today only. Ignore everything else you could be doing (until you’re ready to plan tomorrow’s list).

I like to include any calendar events on my "Today" list, so I see an overview of my entire day and set my expectations accordingly. This also stops me from planning too many tasks on days I’m in meetings for hours.

A good rule of thumb when planning out your day is to underestimate how much you can get done and overestimate how long each task will take. No doubt you’ve got plenty of things to be going on with if you check everything off your list for today, which is a much better feeling that always moving unfinished tasks over to tomorrow.

Use MITs

MIT stands for "Most Important Tasks." I often advocate for using MITs, because they’ve really helped me to write more realistic to do lists. It’s a process of choosing just a few (usually three) tasks to get done per day.

When using MITs, your to do list would have 1-3 of these and anything else listed would become bonus, "nice to do if you have the time" tasks. You only work on bonus tasks if all your MITs are done, and if all you get through are your MITs, you’ve still had a successful day.

It’s very simple: your MIT is the task you most want or need to get done today. – Leo Babauta, Zen Habits

Pick a Single Focus

We’re getting into ruthless territory now. When you’re really struggling to get anything done, you may need to try this method, even temporarily.

When you look at your task list or your MITs for today, pick a single thing to focus on. It could be one big task you really want to get done, or it could be a theme that relates to several of your tasks, like "increase sales." Choosing a single task or idea to focus on can be a good way to remind yourself to stay on track whenever you find yourself getting distracted.

Google Chrome extensions like Momentum and Limitless are great for these reminders, as they show you what your focus is for today each time you open a new browser tab.

Find Your 20 Percent Task

You’ve probably heard of this idea before, known as the Pareto principle: you tend to get 80% of your results from 20% of your work. You can easily outsource some of the 80% that’s not getting you great results, but what’s really tricky is working out what that 20% is that brings in the results. Once you do, you can apply the ultimate ruthless prioritization to your workday: make finishing your 20% work your priority—and your benchmark for a productive day.

The best way I’ve found to identify my 20% work is this simple exercise: first, ask yourself what you’d work on if you could only do three things today. Be ruthless; only pick three. Next, cut that down to two. And finally, just one. If you absolutely had to stop working after doing just one task, which would you do?

It’s a really tough question to answer, since we all have so many things to get through each day, but I’ve found it’s a good way to realize which of your tasks provides the biggest value when it’s finished. For me, writing a new blog post would almost always be my 20% work, since I get returns from writing in various ways—future SEO traffic, social shares and inbound traffic, more visibility for my personal brand and the site I’m writing for, and so on.

I use a combination of these methods depending on how much work I have to get through, how much I’m struggling to get started and what kind of prioritization I need help with. As you practice being ruthless with your to do list, you’ll find it gets easier and you’ll be able to pick the right method at the right time. And hopefully you’ll find that ruthless prioritization can actually be quite liberating!

How to Ruthlessly Prioritize Your Task List to Get More Done | Zapier Blog

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Belle is a co-founder of Exist, a personal analytics platform to help you track and understand your life. She is a writer at Crew and was previously Buffer’s first Content Crafter and Head of Content at Attendly.

Image by Thinglass (Shutterstock). Priority matrix courtesy US Geological Survey. Additional photos by Eric Gelinas, Garry Knight (Flickr).

via Lifehacker
How to Ruthlessly Prioritize Your Task List to Get More Done

Before heading out for a night on the town, guys might want to make sure they have their dance moves down. A recent study showed women rated these particular dance moves higher than others.

The study—conducted by Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK, and published in Biology Letters—found that women rated male dancers higher when they performed large, variable movements of their head, neck, and torso. Male dancers were also considered "good" dancers if they displayed fast bending and twisting of the right knee. Study lead Nick Neave, from the School of Life Sciences at Northumbria University, used motion-capture technology to record different males dancing in different ways. To avoid bias, when the females were asked to identify which dancers showed strong dancing ability, they only saw the plain grey avatars you can see in the above video from Business Insider’s YouTube channel. Neave explains:

In humans, dance is a set of intentional, rhythmic, culturally influenced, non-verbal body movements that are considered to be an important aspect of sexuality and courtship attraction… Dancing ability, particularly that of men, may serve as a signal of male mate quality in terms of physical strength, prenatal androgenization and symmetry, and thus affect women’s perceptions of men’s attractiveness.

Case in point: Patrick Swayze in "Dirty Dancing." Of course, there’s absolutely no guarantee that a guy swinging his head around and twisting his right knee will make him more attractive, but the rhythmic use of these types of moves could help a guy with two left feet seem much more skilled. So guys, if you plan on cutting up a rug this weekend, consider adding a few of these moves into your repertoire.

Male dance moves that catch a woman’s eye | The Journal Biology Letters via Useful Science

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Scientists Discover the Ideal Dance Moves for Men

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RIPS – Static Source Code Analysis For PHP Vulnerabilities

The technology industry is rife with buzzwords. The packaging of a computer or computer hardware is crowded with technical terms and badges. One of the more prominent ones is 64-bit. So, it begs the question, what exactly does 64-bit mean? What does it imply? And, most importantly, what does it mean for you? This article serves as both a technical and practical explanation about nature of 64-bit computing. What is 64-bit Computing? Information in computers is normally represented in bits, a binary sequence (what’s binary?) of ones and zeros. The more bits you have, the more information you can represent….

Read the full article: What Is 64-bit Computing?

via MakeUseOf
What Is 64-bit Computing?

I can’t imagine any other industry in which so much change happens so quickly. If you stop paying attention for a week, it can feel like you’ve not been listening for a year. There’s so much to learn. Falling behind is easy, too. We might be in the middle of a major project, so we put off learning about this newfangled thing called Sass or Node.js or even quickly experimenting with the new Bootstrap or Foundation that everyone is raving about.

Before we know it, we have these elephants of missing knowledge wandering around our minds, reminding us of what we should know and do but haven’t found the time for. Even just looking at beautiful work and seeing what new technique we could use ourselves can seem like too big a task when we’re swamped with projects. So, we tell ourselves we’ll come back to it later. But later never shows up. The guilt definitely does, but not that elusive deadline of later.

The post Be A Better Designer By Eating An Elephant appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

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Be A Better Designer By Eating An Elephant

Yosemite’s here today and as seems to always be the case with Apple’s new operating systems, it comes with a handful of annoyances alongside its new features. Don’t worry though, most of the common annoyances can get fixed up with a few clicks.

If you’re making the leap over Mavericks, be sure to check out our guide for fixing some of Mavericks’ annoyances, they’re still applicable here.

Customize Spotlight’s Search

Spotlight got a huge overhaul in Yosemite. Now, on top of searching files, you can also search for stuff online. This is super handy for most of us, but it’s easy to see where the extended search results could become a bit annoying. Thankfully, you can customize your results in Spotlight. Just open up System Preferences and select Spotlight. Here, you can uncheck any boxes you don’t want showing up in search results. You can also grab and drag them to change the order they’re shown.

Bring Back the List View in iTunes 12

iTunes 12 got some changes this time around too. Unfortunately, it looks like we’re all stuck with the new interface and can’t bring back the old sidebar, but you can at least get the list view back. When you’re on the "My Music" tab, click the drop down on the right and change it to "Songs." This’ll sort everything in the classic list format. You can also click the "Playlists" tab to get part of the sidebar back, although it doesn’t include all the same info as it used to.

Similarly annoying, iTunes no longer has a update podcasts button. Instead, you have to highlight all of them, right-click, and select refresh.

Fix a Slow Notification Center

Notification Center is all new in Yosemite, and now includes widgets—just like on iOS. This is great, unless you happen to be on an older Mac. In that case, Notification Center might be a bit too slow to actually use. Thankfully, you can edit the widgets in Notification Center so they’re not such CPU hogs. Just pop open Notification Center, click the "Edit" button, and click the red symbols next to widgets to remove them. We found that deleting everything that relies on location (like weather) helped speed up the Notification Center quite nicely.

Reduce the Transparency

Alongside its new features, Yosemite has a new look, which includes a ton of transparency in windows. For some, this can be annoying. You can disable the transparency in System Preferences > Accessibility > Display. Just click the "Reduce Transparency" check box.

Get the Bookmarks Bar Back in Safari

Safari does away with the traditional bookmarks bar in favor of a sidebar. To get it back, select View > Show Favorites Bar. You can also get the tab bar and the status bar back here if you want them.

Turn Off Phone Calls but Keep Handoff’s Other Features

The new features in Handoff are awesome, but not everyone wants to receive their phone calls on their Mac. If you’re the type to always have your phone with you, this tends to mean you’ll hear ringing in multiple places at once. You can turn off the phone calls while still keeping the rest of the Handoff features though. Open up FaceTime and select FaceTime > Preferences. Uncheck the box marked "iPhone Cellular Calls."

Fix Poor Graphics Performance by Disabling Dashboard

If you’re experiencing some poor graphics performance, some users have reported that turning Dashboard off helps. To give it a try to see if helps you, head into System Preferences > Mission Control and change the Dashboard setting to "Off."

via Gizmodo
How to Fix OS X Yosemite’s Biggest Annoyances

Most people tend to be fans of leaving notes on the fridge, but I find that my singular desire for food normally results in skipping straight past the post-its and on to nourishments. That’s why I think that these whiteboard light-switches might be an excellent idea.

The principle is broadly the same as putting notes on the fridge — leave reminders on an everyday object that you have to interact with, and you’re more likely to read them. But the light-switch idea lets you leave notes all over the house, so that you don’t forget to do something when you leave the room. Plus, the small space forces economy, to an extent: no long lists of overdue chores, just simple two-line reminders.

I’m not quite sure if or why this needs to be its own separate Kickstarter (won’t dry-erase markers work on most plastic lightswitches anyway?), but for the decently low price of $12 (or $75 for a pack of seven), you can have your very own Switch Port™. Just remember not to Sharpie it, or you’ll end up trying to take out the trash every single night. [Kickstarter]

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A Light Switch Whiteboard Is A Clever Post-It Alternative

You can upgrade to OS X Yosemite from the App Store, but that isn’t ideal for installing on multiple Macs, doing a clean install, or building a Hackintosh. Here’s how to burn Yosemite to a USB drive instead.

As with all OS X upgrades, once you run the installer on your system, it disappears from your Applications folder. You can get it back by holding down the option key while clicking on the purchases tab to re-download the file or restore the installer from a Time Machine backup, but to save you some time, it’s best to do this disc burning before you update your Mac to Yosemite.

The Easy Option: DiskMaker X

The easiest way to burn Yosemite onto a disk is through a free app called DiskMaker X.

1. Download the Yosemite installer and DiskMaker X, if you haven’t already. (At the time of this writing, you’ll have to download the Beta version for DiskMaker X for it to work with Yosemite).
2. Insert an 8GB (or larger) flash drive. If you have any important data on the drive, back it up now, since this process will completely erase it.
3. Start up DiskMaker X, choose Yosemite from the list of options, and it’ll handle the rest for you.

When its done, you can insert that drive into any Mac and launch the installer by holding Option when you boot the computer. Besides installing Yosemite, this drive will have a couple handy utilities on it, like Disk Utility and Time Machine recovery.

The DIY Option: Terminal

If you don’t want to download another app to do it for you (or DiskMaker X doesn’t work for some reason), you can burn it yourself with no extra software with a simple terminal command. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Download the Yosemite installer, if you haven’t already.
2. Insert an 8GB (or larger) flash drive, and give it a name. For this tutorial, we’ve named it Yosemite. Make sure the drive is formatted OS X Extended (Journaled). If not, hop into Disk Utility and format it so it is. If you have any important data on the drive, back it up now, since this process will completely erase it.
3. Open up the Terminal, either through spotlight or by double-clicking on it in /Applications/Utilities.
4. Type (or copy and paste) the following command into your Terminal window (replacing Yosemite with the name of your drive) and press Enter:
   

   sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ http://ift.tt/1w9MckT --volume /Volumes/Yosemite --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app --nointeraction

5. Type in your password when prompted and press Enter.
6. Let the command work its magic. Don’t interrupt it until you see the final line that says Done before it returns you to the prompt. This could take as long as a half hour, so be patient!

When its done, you can insert that drive into any Mac and launch the installer by holding Option when you boot the computer. Besides installing Yosemite, this drive will have a couple handy utilities on it, like Disk Utility and Time Machine recovery.

This is the fastest and easiest way to create a Yosemite installer, though there are a few other methods. Check out this Macworld article for other options if the above doesn’t work for you.

via Lifehacker
How to Burn OS X Yosemite to a USB Flash Drive

Setting up lots of Macs? Want an offline installer? Here’s how to roll your own.
via Ars Technica
How to make your own bootable OS X 10.10 Yosemite USB install drive

Hundreds of millions of people use Gmail but only a small subset of them dig deeper into the advanced features that are available in their inbox, such as filters. Setting up new rules for incoming can seem like an onerous task that doesn’t justify the effort put in, but here are seven filters that are easy to create and which can make a big difference to your email flow.

1. Prioritize emails from people you know

You might not use Google+ for your social networking needs but it can help you sort the wheat from the chaff inside your inbox. Enter is:circle or circle:"name of circle" in the Gmail search box to identify messages from people you’ve specifically added to your Google+ circles (or one circle in particular). Use the drop-down dialog to create a filter from the search and prioritize these messages by marking them as important. Alternatively, you could set up a particular circle in Google+ for the sole purpose of filtering messages and then apply a particular action to any emails coming from those contacts.

2. Filter out emails from other accounts

If you’re using Gmail to consolidate messages from other email accounts then you can easily direct these emails away from your main inbox. In the Gmail search box, enter to:myotheremail@domain.com to pick up messages sent to your secondary address. Open up the drop-down dialog and create a filter from the search, then choose to mark these messages as read as they come in. You can also opt to shift the emails to Gmail’s Updates tab and mark them as unimportant as well, depending on the type of emails the account gets. The messages will sit under the Updates tab ready to be reviewed at your leisure.

3. Demote group emails

The group email can be the bane of your inbox, depending on how your office, family or soccer club operates. If you use the cc:me OR bcc:me query in the Gmail search field and then use the drop-down dialog to create a filter from it, you can deal with the messages that aren’t set directly to you as you see fit. You can move them to the Updates category, mark them as unimportant, mark them as read or consign them straight to the archive without touching the inbox at all. To limit the focus to a specific domain (such as work) use from:*@domain.com (cc:me OR bcc:me) as the search query instead.

4. Archive messages but keep them unread

A clean and empty inbox is often seen as the ultimate goal of our digital age, but it’s not actually that difficult to achieve: Just set up a filter that means all of your messages skip your inbox. A less drastic approach is to have some messages skip your inbox rather than all of them. Set up filters that assigns specific emails to specific labels (e.g. social media, newsletters, emails from work colleagues), set them to skip the inbox, but keep them unread. You can then catch up on these labels when you have time to get around to them, but by keeping them unread you won’t lose track of where they’ve gone.

5. Spot mailing lists and newsletters

Entering unsubscribe in the Gmail search box is a well-known way of identifying messages that are from mailing lists or newsletters, as long as your family and friends aren’t prone to using the word in their day-to-day conversations. A more effective method is to use the label:^unsub search, as this uses the hidden smart label that Google automatically assigns to emails you can unsubscribe from (and is less likely to trap messages from your contacts as well). Open up the drop-down dialog box underneath the search field and you can banish these emails from the inbox, star them for reference, or whatever else you like.

6. Star important social media messages

If you have notifications from Facebook, Twitter and other social sites pouring into your inbox then Gmail automatically filters them into the Social tab. Whether or not you’re using the default tabs layout for your inbox, the Social category is applied to these messages. Use the search term category:social friend's name to run a search for posts, tweets and messages from anyone important in your life. If you open up the drop-down dialog beneath the search box, create a filter from the search and choose to apply a star, you won’t miss these messages in the flood of incoming social media notifications.

7. Label all of your incoming files and photos

You’re going to have to tweak this one a little bit so that it fits your exact needs, but there are many situations where it’s useful to affix a label to a message that has a particular type of attachment with it. For example, you could use the filter query has:attachment filename:(doc OR docx OR xls OR xlsx) to label all out-of-hours work messages with attached documents or spreadsheets (use the domain filter at the start if you need to); alternatively, you might want to try running has:attachment filename:(jpg OR jpeg OR gif OR png) to flag up all of the photos coming into your Gmail account and give them a relevant label.

[Header image: Alexander Ryabintsev / Shutterstock.com]

via Gizmodo
7 Gmail Filters to Make Email Less of a Chore