Mickey Mellen
This is the ninth in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series. You probably already use online banking, online bill pay, and maybe even mobile banking on your phone. I’m going to show you a few other neat tools that you might not know about that can help you get your finances in better shape. Mint – www.mint.com Mint is a very popular financial tracking site. You add all of your accounts to it, and it’ll keep track of where your money goes. They’ve got some great budgeting tools, and lots of nice charts and graphs to help explain everything. They also have an iPhone app so you can keep an eye on your finances on the go. Here’s a quick look at how to get started with Mint: Credit Karma – www.creditkarma.com You hear all of the commercials for FreeCreditReport.com, but it’s not free. However, […]
Read MoreThis is the seventh in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series. Without a doubt, task management is one area of my life that has improved the most in 2009. I always thought I had a decent system, but then David Allen came and rocked my world. Back in 2001, David wrote a book called “Getting Things Done“, which I finally read late last year. The book offers a great system to build into your life to stay organized and be as efficient as possible. If you haven’t read the book yet, I highly recommend it. Whether or not you decide to use a system like that, there are some great tools available online to help you organize your task list. As you’ve probably guessed by now, my priorities when choosing a system included having one that was web-based so that I could access it from […]
Read MoreThis is the fifth in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series. Out of the 10 parts of this series, keeping photos organized is the one I’ve traditionally been the worst at doing. My wife takes a ton of pictures every time we go on a trip (park, zoo, vacation, etc). It’s wonderful, but we’ve built up a massive pile of pictures over the years. Last time I checked we had about 40GB in various places! My first priority is to make sure they’re secure. If her computer crashes, will we lose the photos? With that in mind, I keep a copy of her photos on an external hard drive and third copy in a folder on my computer. She posts her favorites to her Facebook account to share with friends and family and it works pretty well. However, with all of the great photo-sharing systems […]
Read MoreThis is the fourth in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series. If you’re like most people, you have files on your computer everywhere. Programs, spreadsheets, documents, presentations, logos, ebooks, pdfs, and a variety of other stuff. Even if you have it well-organized, you probably have two big problems: You can’t access it away from home. Right now, you try to remember to put the important files on your thumb drive, but often forget. It’s not backed up very well. I used to keep a copy of my files on an external hard drive as a backup. Sometimes… There are two tools I’m going to show you today that will help solve both of those problems very easily. Google Docs and DropBox. :: Google Docs Google Docs is Google’s online version of Microsoft Office. All of your files live on their servers, and you edit them […]
Read MoreThis is the third in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series. Calendars are one of the areas that most people seem to have pretty well under control. Your inbox might be a mess, your task list consists of 27 post-it notes, and you have no idea where the photos from last year’s vacation ended up, but your calendar is up to date. Even with that in mind, there are almost certainly ways to streamline your process. As with most things, I’ll be recommending a free solution that Google provides — Google Calendar. Living completely online, it has many of the same benefits as Gmail, such as not tying you to a particular computer and saving you from the worry of “what if my computer crashes?”. It offers a few other advantages as well: Shared Calendars: Our family has four calendars, one for each of us. […]
Read MoreThis is the first in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series. Email is becoming an overwhelming problem for a lot of people. Many clients I visit have thousands of emails in their inbox, and getting a grip on it seems completely hopeless. There are two things that you can do to help tame your inbox: Change your methods and change your tools. :: Change your methods We’ll start with how to change your methods. Many of you may be tied into specific tools (email at work, for example), but anyone can tweak their methods. The biggest thing you can do is treat your inbox the way it was intended — for INcoming messages. Don’t store them there. Let them come in, deal with them, and move on. So how do you do that? Stop “checking” your email – “process” it instead. When you read an […]
Read More- « Previous
- 1
- …
- 20
- 21
- 22
