Smartlife

Twitter is the service that asks “What are you doing?” and gives you 140 characters to answer. These mini-messages can be sent by web or SMS and act as high-tech haiku — if haiku was Japanese for “people who can’t spell tell you what they just ate, but not why you should care.” With endless uninteresting updates, it may seem to be an engine of anti-productivity, sent here by industrious aliens to weaken our social structure before invasion. But efficient people do use it. Barack Obama, for example, famously twittered throughout his campaign. And I think we can both agree that he has a lot more work to do than you and I combined.

The other week I posted a review of Pageonce, and recommended that you sign up and use it. If that post didn’t prompt you to hand over your Internet keys to Pageonce just yet, perhaps you need a little more information. And I’m here to supply. As part of my original research into Pageonce, I took a look under the hood so to speak to understand how it integrates with various Internet account providers and how it secures your personal information.

The glut of information that we face on a daily basis actually impairs, not improves, our productivity. Believe it or not (and I do), the average person spends 150 hours each year looking for lost information. What do we spend most of our time trying to track down? Passwords! But that’s not the only time killer introduced by the WorldWideInterWeb. If we want to manage our eBay, Amazon, Verizon, Facebook, Southwest, Bank of America, ING Direct, and XYZ accounts, we have to log in to each and every site — one by one.