5 Easy Tools for Managing Your Life
5 Easy Tools for Managing Your Life
- Google Calendar – I have fallen in love with Google Calendar. I love the way it looks, the way it works. I currently keep a calendar for all the aspects of my life: home/family stuff, Polka Dot Plum stuff, Funky Playground stuff, and upcoming blog posts. I also love the way that it interacts with all my other Google tools, like Tasks….
- Google Tasks – Google Tasks is a To Do list manager, which is directly linked to my Gmail and my Google Calendar. When I add something to my tasks list, and give it a due date, it’s automatically added to my Google Calendar. How’s that for awesome?
- Hootsuite – Hootsuite is totally invaluable to me. I love being part of the conversation on Twitter, but my day job always prevents me from being around at the best times. With Hootsuite, I am able to schedule my popular “Question of the Day” to post in the afternoon when everyone is hanging around Twitter, and then I can come back to it and participate when I get home from school. How cool is that? I can start the conversation without even being home!
- Evernote – I’ve written about Evernote before, but I am using it a little bit differently now. Now, I create a note for each project I am working on. Then I am able to pull all the information I need into that note, like a color swatch, or information from an email. I use it as a mini project manager, when I can see all I need to know about each of the projects I have going on at one time.
- Legal Pads – I live on Legal Pads…I keep one with me at pretty much all times. They are filled with tons of random stuff…doodles, sketches, to do lists, school plans….anything really. They are my best way of getting stuff in writing on the run. Then, when I can sit down again, I can start inputing into my different online tools.
3 Links You Need to Check Out Now
I don’t know about you, but I am always looking for ways to speed things up in my life. Especially now, as I get ready to go back to teaching full time, I am always looking for new ways to make what I do faster and easier. In the spirit of faster and easier, I have to links I wanted to share with you today.
How to Make Photoshop Faster on Slower Computers – I often scare people when I tell them that I run everything on my laptop, including PS and Vista with only 2GB of memory. I’m not going to lie…it’s slow sometimes. Upgrading my memory isn’t really an option right now, so this article about how to speed up Photoshop was greatly appreciated. I can tell you this – I made the changes in the article yesterday, and saw a notable difference in how PS was running last night. It’s worth checking out.
12 Tutorials for Getting Started with Adobe Illustrator – The folks over at Mashable put this article out, and I am excited for the list of beginner tutorials for Illustrator. I have had Illustrator for some time now, but never really took the time to learn the ins and outs of it…I just learned the easiest way to get done what I needed to do. I look forward to digging into these tutorials when I get a little bit of free time…whenever that may be.
The Facebook Places Privacy Settings You Need to Know – Last week, I wrote about checking your FB page for privacy settings and such. Well since then, Facebook has released their “Places” feature. Places is basically foursquare. You can check in places, and post it to your update. Not only that, but friends can check you in, even if you don’t want to be. Nothing says “take my stuff” more than a status update telling people you aren’t home. Check out these settings, in addition to the ones I listed in my previous article. You’ll be thankful you did.
Read More5 Tools for Creating Digital Scrapbooking Wishlists
If you’re anything like me, you don’t always shop for stuff when it first comes out, and then you inevitably forget about the items you wanted and never purchase them. That was how I shopped for a long time – if I didn’t get it right at release, I didn’t get it at all. Lately, I’ve really begun to appreciate the benefits of creating a wishlist – a list of products I want, but can’t buy right now. By creating a wishlist, I am able to keep track of what I want for times when I have a bit more money, or when a sale is going on. Also, it gives me time to think about products that I may be on the fence about…sometimes, I go back to my cart and don’t want them anymore. There are a few different ways to create a wishlist. Here are five of the most popular.
- Kaboodle – Many digiscrappers use Kaboodle to keep track of their wishlists. With Kaboodle, you can add products from any site to your list simply by clicking a button you install. Items are saved to your list with a description. You can create different lists for different types of products, and you can share your lists with others (perfect at birthday or holiday time!). Kaboodle also is connected with Facebook, where you can sign in with your Facebook account and connect the two.
- Evernote – I mentioned Evernote a few weeks back in THIS POST about tools to make your life easier. With Evernote, you can clip pieces of the web, and add them to your Evernote files. Using Evernote for wishlisting is great if you are already using it for other purposes. You are able to clip the products you want, as well as organize the notes so you can see them all at once. However, if you are new to Evernote, it may not be the place to start keeping your wishlists.
- Amazon Wishlist Button – I was surprised to learn about Amazon Wishlist Button, mainly because it’s a universal wishlist button which allows you to wishlist items from any online store, not just Amazon. Getting started with the wishlist button is easy enough, you just need to have an amazon account set up, be signed in, and drag the button into your toolbar. When you want to add something to your wishlist, you click the button. This is a great option for keeping all of your wishlisted items together, however, it doesn’t have the ability to share lists like Kaboodle does.
- Specific Store Wishlists – At this point, the majority of digital scrapbooking stores offer their own wishlist option. Usually, when you are looking at a product, you are given the option to click the “add to wishlist” button, and the item is added automatically to your wishlist. The advantage to using this method is that it keeps everything “in house,” there’s no third party site keeping the wishlist. This is great if you regularly shop at a few stores. If you don’t regularly shop at a store, a wishlist there may easily be forgotten, so an option where you can keep items from multiple shops may be better suited for you.
- MS Notepad/MS Word/Paper – According to many, the best way to keep track of items you want to purchase is to keep the list yourself. That may be on paper kept by your computer, or in a Notepad or Word document that you create specifically for this purpose. This method is great if you don’t want to deal with using an outside source to create your wishlists, but if you’re like me, you’re likely to lose the list or delete on accident.
So, what’s your method for keeping your digiscrap wishlists? Vote in the poll below and let me know!
Loading ...If I haven’t listed your method, or you want to tell me why you picked what you did, let’s get talking in the comments!
The Time Management Series: Three Tools To Make Life Easier
I am constantly looking for ways to improve my time management, the way in which I do things. One would laugh at how many “systems” I have tried, how many tools and applications I have tried. Today, I want to share with you the three tools that have made my life easier.
- Remember the Milk – Remember the Milk has been around since August 2004, and I have tried it a couple of times now. Recently, I am working with it in connection with my new Droid phone. Also exciting is RTM’s integration with Gmail and Google Calendar. Since I use these daily, RTM is fitting into my workflow for now.
- Evernote – Evernote is like an online notebook. With Evernote, you can make notes, save pictures, even save web clippings. I have used Evernote a few times, and really love the ability to save things directly from the web. For me, it’s worked especially well for inspiration pieces that I find while surfing the web. Evernote also has the ability to sort, organize, and search your notes.
- To —>Done – To —>Done is a new one to me, but I was immediately intrigued by the uniqueness of the idea. With To —>Done, you enter the tasks you have to do, along with the amount of time you think it will take you to complete the task. Then, when you have some time to get something done, you tell To —>Done how much time you have, and it will give you a task from your list that fits the amount of time you have. This is a great idea for people like me who are super indecisive and have trouble figuring out what task to do first.
Those are three tools I am using now? What tools are you using? What would you add to the list? Let me know in the comments below!
The Time Management Series: Oh, I Know a Shortcut
If you are like me, you work with Photoshop a lot. One way I have learned to save myself a few extra minutes while I am working is to really put some Photoshop shortcuts to use. I will admit, I don’t use all of them, and I really don’t have any need for some of them. The ones I do use, however, make working with either layouts or designs easier and a quicker process. I went into my bookmarks, and came up with these five resources for you to explore, in hopes that you’ll find some shortcuts to use on your own.
- 18 Exceptionally Useful Photoshop Shortcuts
- 28 More Exceptionally Useful Photoshop Shortcuts (the follow up to the previous article)
- Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet
- Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts Tips & Resources (this tutorial shows you how to change the shortcuts to better fit your work flow)
- The Daily Digi: Scrap Faster and Easier
I hope that these resources will help you find ways to make your Photoshop work flow quicker and easier. I’ll tell you…my favorite keyboard shortcuts are these:
- Using ALT+BACKSPACE to fill a selection with the foreground color
- Using SHIFT while dragging something onto a canvas to automatically center it.
What are your favorite shortcuts? Let me know in the comments!
What Do You Think?
Over the past three weeks, I have introduced a few new features here at the Sir Scrapalot Designs blog. New installments of these features will be coming within the next week or so. I am interested in hearing which of these features you have enjoyed so far. Please take a minute and vote in the poll below and let me know what your favorite new features have been.
What New Features Have You Most Enjoyed?
- Scrapping {You}niversity (64%, 9 Votes)
- Trend Watch (43%, 6 Votes)
- Scrap Along With Sir Scrapalot (29%, 4 Votes)
- Twitter Tips (14%, 2 Votes)
Total Voters: 14
Loading ...Have other ideas for new features here at the Sir Scrapalot Designs blog? Let me know in the comments, or follow me @SirScrapalot and let me know on Twitter!
Find Us Online
