Smartlife

One of the founding Smartlife principles is that you should never have to do anything twice — the computer should be able to do it for you. The Internet has extended this awesome idea, brilliantly declaring that nobody should do anything a second time. By engaging crowdsourcing, thousands of everyday tasks have been taken online, from your personal party checklist to building bits of your business.

Familiarizing yourself with these resources takes a small-time investment but the payback is incredible. Never again do you need to start with a blank…

Google has greatly expanded beyond its core search engine to offer a wide range of free online services. Easily one of the most popular of these is Gmail, the ubiquitous web-based email client that comes with loads of storage and the ability to handle multiple email accounts.

As powerful as Gmail may be on its own, the “crazy experimental stuff” being doctored up through Gmail Labs can greatly expand on this functionality and help to improve your productivity. This applies not only to the work setting, but also when it…

The very first message on the Internet was “Lo.” The second was a list of 10,000 lawyer jokes. The first was an attempt to “Login” to a system that would help mankind be more productive than ever before. The second was the opposite, and consisted of jokes that would be booed off the stage at a Christmas cracker convention MC’ed by Carlos Mencia. You know that because you got it, too: it’s circled the Earth enough times to reverse the planet’s rotation, had more forwards than the entire NBA, and even now no-one has ever actually read the whole thing.

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.

A few months ago, I wrote a post on document reuse and explained how it can boost your document creation efficiency by 40%, on average. This post provides you a list of my top five document sharing sites where you can find reusable docs of all kinds — invoice templates, study cards, business plan samples, venture capital pitch templates, project management plan templates, graduation announcement templates, balance sheet spreadsheet templates, tournament bracket templates, and so on. There are a lot of so-called “document sharing” sites out there, but not all of them allow you to manipulate the elements (content, structure, style, and rendering) of existing documents fully. The sites that I have listed below do give you full document control, so you don’t have to waste your time re-creating what’s already been created.

Believe it or not, I wrote this post in about 20 minutes — from draft to final edit — using my newly installed voice recognition software program, Dragon NaturallySpeaking Standard 9. I must admit, I’m extremely impressed with how fast, intuitive, and accurate it is.

Initially, I balked at the idea of purchasing it. I’d read many reviews over the years about the immaturity of speech recognition technology, and I was certain Dragon 9 was like those $19.99 appliances that you purchase at three o’clock in the morning when you can’t sleep: seemingly crucial, but in the end, cheap and utterly useless.