10 Tips For More Productive Learning

If you are in a learning situation you’ll have your own way of doing things. You take notes, and read them back later. You do your weekly assignments. Is there anything you could improve to this? Could you be more proactive? The following 10 tips for more productive learning might give you some new ideas on how to be a more productive student. Read more

My Favorite OS X add-ons: Quicksilver

Last but certainly not least in my short series of favorite OS X add-ons: Quicksilver by Blacktree. Quicksilver is a perfect example of a piece of software that I use all the time without paying attention to it. The only times I notice it is when it doesn’t work the way I want (which doesn’t happen a lot). I wrote an article about Quicksilver before which describes why I love it so much: How Quicksilver Streamlined my Computing Experience.

Quicksilver can’t be described in a few sentences. It can do so many things for you. It can launch applications, open bookmarked websites, move files around on your harddisk, append text to documents, look up words in the dictionary, and much more. If you don’t use it yet, definitely consider giving it a try. Using it might seem awkward in the beginning, but give it a week, and it might become an essential add-on to your system too Read more

Follow Me on Twitter!

I waited for a long time, as I just didn’t understand why I would use it. But from now on you can follow Streamlined Mind on Twitter. Let’s see it as an experiment. I don’t know what it will bring me and if I’ll enjoy using it for a long time. We’ll see. In the meantime, become my twitter friend and we’ll talk!

How to Use the iPhone as a Planner

In June I asked the question: Will the New iPhone 3G be a Good Planner?. I didn’t have an iPhone myself back then, as it wasn’t available where I live. Since august I’ve been using one though, so this is a good moment to get back to that question and see how the iPhone holds up to the expectations I had back then. A lot of people visited this website because they searched for “iPhone planner” in Google, so I guess there’s quite some interest in such thing.

To my knowledge there is no application that can do everything you need to create a waterproof planning system. But can you make your iPhone a good planner by combining a few applications? This was one of the main reasons why I bought an iPhone in the first place. I was using a Moleskine weekly planner at the time to hold my appointments and to-do lists. I used iCal mainly for setting reminders. I played around with different GTD applications, but they Read more

My Favorite OS X add-ons: 1Password

1Password by Agile Web Solutions definitely streamlines the way I use my Mac. It’s a bit different then the other add-ons I recommended so far, as it’s an actual application and the others were just extensions to the OS X user interface, although it greatly integrates with all browsers on the Mac, and you don’t have to keep the application running all the time to make use of it’s functionality.

Every time you enter a password on a website a small window pops up asking you whether or not you want 1Password to save the password. There is one master password which protects your list of passwords, hence the name of the application. In your browser there’s a little button which gives access to 1Passwords functionality. When you return to a website you press this button, select ‘restore form’ from the menu and 1Password will log you in automatically. You don’t even have to push the submit button. Read more

Use the Unschedule to Overcome Procrastination

“Keep starting. Finishing will take care of itself.”       - Neil Fiore

Procrastination is a problem for many of us. There is a lot of work on our plate, but something is keeping us from starting. Maybe it’s the fear of failure, of being judged by others, maybe it’s perfectionism and criticizing ourselves too much. The work we have to do seems so overwhelming we rather look for something else to do to forget about it. The feeling we “have to” do things doesn’t make it easier.

The Now Habit, a book by Neil Fiore, provides helpful tools to overcome procrastination, and enjoying leisure time without feeling guilty about not doing anything. One of those tools is the “unschedule”. What is the unschedule and how can we use it to overcome procrastination? Read more

My Favorite OS X add-ons: TextExpander

Did you ever have to type the same word or phrase over and over again? I think we all do sometimes; your name under an email, a piece of code or even a whole email message in reply to a frequently asked question. TextExpander, by Smile on my Mac is a great add-on which will help you whenever you’re in a situation like that, and belongs to my group of favorite OS X add-ons because it’s so easy to use and fits in the system perfectly.

TextExpander resides in the System Preferences. You can create ‘Snippets’ in which you define what string of characters should be replaced by what. So for instance I can tell it to write “Thank you very much for your kind email” whenever I type “tthanks”. It also writes the date or the time when I type “ddate” or “ttime”, respectively. Read more

Software Review: VoodooPad

We’ve discussed some different ways of taking notes before, here and here. When you’re taking notes in a digital form, using the right software to keep them together is very important. One application that is particularly suitable for this is VoodooPad by Flying Meat. Here’s a review.

You can use VoodooPad for taking notes, brainstorming and jotting down your ideas, but how does it work? For people familiar with wikis on the internet (click for a definition on Wikipedia), VoodooPad will have a very familiar interface: you write down some text and create links which automatically point to new, blank pages. So actually you’re creating a web consisting of different pages, linked to each other. Read more