As mentioned before, I’ve been looking a bit at “GTD mentality” (GTD means “Getting Things Done”, basically it’s about ways to be more efficient) lately, and even though I was already effective and doing many of the actions I found recommended, I decided to try a few more. This basically means I’m currently trying out a few different online apps to help de-clutter my mind. Besides starting to note more in my calendar, I’m trying out Remember The Milk (RTM) and Vitalist as task management systems, while also easily integrating them in my Google Calendar to see deadlines for current tasks.

RTM is a system I see as focused on todo lists, more than a complete task management. I enjoy being able to tag each task without having to define the tag before, the integration with other tools (GMail, Google Calendar) is good and simple, which is also the case when adding tasks to the predefined categories. That is, the addition of tasks is simple, but I find it a bit lacking when wanting to specify more about a task I added - when moving my mouse over the list I find that I’m suddenly on another task, instead of simply highlighting the latest task and let me edit date and tags, write notes, share the task, specify a url etc - in other words, the basics. A big plus for RTM is that it’s a free service. I’ve used RTM for work tasks, where most projects have a similar theme, meaning it’s easy to simply keep them in the work tasks and separate by using tags.

Vitalist let’s you specify your own projects and sub-project, ticklers, tasks for “some day”, add new tasks by Jott (speech to text service, seems only to be working in US though) besides giving the possibility to show your tasks in your online calendar, although with the downside of not being able to edit or add tasks through the calendar (at least not as far as I’ve seen, using Google Calendar). As a side note, I’ve been using Vitalist for my home tasks, having multiple projects which are not similar - here I can differ between various projects and contexts, besides the handy multi-level project interface.

The verdict between those two system is relatively equal, leading me to give 3/5 as a rating for each of the services. I will probably try one or two others soon, such as Toodledo, Ta-da List or Todoist, although I’m taking the Todoist warning seriously: “High usage of Todoist may result in an organized life”. All the five mentioned systems seem to have good integration with other online app’s which help you getting things done, such as online calendars, email and other, and in true “Web 2.0″ spirit, of course most have an API if you want to do something in your own way, for example by mashing them all up together with the calendar of your choice, an email system (or a few) and of course put it all together with a good context interpreter (”if you are going to do this, maybe you should remember to do that other thing first”) - we all know from ProgrammableWeb’s 600 API:s that the possibilities are vast, and few categories are missing…

While on the subject of being productive and efficient, three of my favorite blogs often have articles on the subject, with lifehack.org’s “50 Simple Ways To Stay Productive“, Zen Habits “10 steps to becoming an email ninja” and Lifehacker’s “Newsreader showdown” as examples from this and last week. I find reading articles from those three blogs a nice start of the day, and would recommend subscribing to anyone.

Lately, I’ve been enjoying my mornings with reading ‘lifehacking blogs’, such as the popular Lifehacker, lifehack.org and Zen Habits, which give short and tips and tricks for living your life to the fullest. I can recommend reading about for example ‘How not to Multi-task‘, ‘Live the life of a Champion‘ and how to ‘Clean your home in 19 minutes‘. It seems like they have tips for anything in your offline life, and often also for getting more productive online.

Some of the best tips I’ve found in there are to find goals for your life to help motivating the changes you need, never bring work to home, but work on creating your future, and get rid of things that clutter your life. So find or remember your goals now, and find the way to practice them, and use them to create or do something productive you can show - if you don’t have any ideas of what to do in the area there’s always sites online you can look at to help you with simply getting ideas or to brainstorm by yourself or in groups, there’s tools for everything.. You can find tips for that in other posts on this blog, or at the Lifehacking blogs I linked to at the start of this.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about improving my Spanish, so when I stumbled upon the site SpanishSense, which contains lessons with voice dialogs, podcasts and help material I became pretty excited. One thing I really like about the site is how they allow you to embed lessons in your own site, to spread the word and build a community where everyone can help eachother in the learning process. According to the site, they also have Chinese lessons, but I’ll wait with looking into that for now - after all, it’s easy getting those new languages confused with the five I already know (six if you count beginner spanish that I didn’t practice for 2-3 years). You can try one of the SpanishSense lessons (introductions) by using the player I put in this post…

Another thing I did to find ways of improving my Spanish was to add a tab called Spanish to my iGoogle page - which of course gave quite a few widgets to use, including a dictionary, Babelfish and news in Spanish.

In other news, I’m looking around at a lot of Web 2.0 sites lately, getting some invites here and there (often found through Mashable), getting updated on new web API:s through ProgrammableWeb while in the process of starting one new site and one new blog. Meanwhile I’ve learned more about Google maps API (including the AJAX version), tiny mce (there must be ways of doing it better, but since it’s popular I guess they’re on to something), Community Server (I’m not very impressed), Dapper, Yahoo! pipes, Google trends and some add-ons for Firefox and Thunderbird. Next is to learn some more about the Google Mashup Editor and perhaps OpenKapow for the site I’m creating. Together with Dapper and Yahoo! Pipes I believe those tools can make wonders…

Something I’m thinking about now is how to set up a good travel section for this site. While working with development for a travel search engine where I’m now adding search for other travel related items to accompany the flight search already available, my interest for traveling has increased even further compared to before, also leading to insight in accommodation sites and finding out a little about what’s happening behind the scenes. Of course, I can’t share any of this knowledge here because of contracts and NDA’s, but can at least recommend what I come across and am impressed by. For example, I’d like to recommend having a look at Hip Hotels for some nice views before a trip, or if you feel like backpacking there’s usually some hostel with available beds through HostelBookers - or maybe you want to do some lifechanging travel, for example by volunteering in a third world country?

While on the road I usually bring the laptop, and there’s often available net either at or close to the hotel so I can use Skype which is of course connected as my home phone with SkypeIn and SkypeOut. This is actually what I also use at home, instead of getting a regular phone after moving to Denmark I simply decided to go with Skype, and can have a phone number in any country no matter where in the world I am at the moment. Now there’s even software to help if you want a temporary number - where Numbr sends any calls to the temporary number onward to your normal phone.

[Some of the links in this post are affiliate links where I earn a small percentage on sales - if you’re curious about the products but don’t want to support my blogging, the url’s are www.Skype.com, www.HostelBookers.com and www.i-to-i.com]