Some Useful Management Tools
to Organize the Chaos of Life

READ NYTimes.com. Register at http://www.nytimes.com/regi

Breaking News Alerts from NYTimes.com at  http://www.nytimes.com/regi  NYTimes.com editors will send you Breaking News Alerts when, in their judgment, significant and important news breaks anywhere around the globe. Order this up while you are registering. 


Double click in NYTimes.com: A handy tool when reading stories in NYTimes.com: Whenever you read a word, term, or historical reference you do not understand or are not sure about, double click on the word and a window will pop up with the meaning or explanation. 


RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.

Here is an informational article from Poynter about RSS feeds: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=32&aid=78383


Google Reader at http://www.google.com/reader/view/  is a Web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline. It was released by Google on October 7, 2005 through Google Labs. You can subscribe to feeds using either Google Reader's search function, or by entering in the exact URL of the RSS or Atom feed. New posts from your feeds are then shown on the left-hand side of the screen. You can then order that list by date or relevance. Items can also be organized with labels, as well as being able to create Starred Items for easy access.


Google Books: Search the full text of books to find ones that interest you and learn where to buy or borrow them. Book Search works just like web search. You can find full texts of books that are out of copyright. But you can also find limited or snippet views of books. This helps in your research because you know before you go to the library that a particular book has the kind of material in it you are looking for. Often, there is enough info in the limited view that you don't even have to go to the library. See the following example of a full-text book available to you: The Profession of Journalism


InternetArchive: This is another place to find full-text books only. http://www.archive.org/index.php


Google Alerts at http://www.google.com/alerts may be your best bet for keeping up with what's happening in the world as well as on the Internet. This is a free service in which the Google search engine will search the Web several times a day send you e-mail about topics that interest you. These can set when these arrive from daily to weekly. You enter the search terms in which you are interested and the e-mail address to which you want the alerts sent. Then you tell Google to search for news, Web sites, blogs or groups that contain that topic. You can stop the alerts about a specific topic by clicking on the 'delete alert' at the bottom of your alert e-mails To learn more about Google alerts, go to http://www.google.com/alerts/faq.html


Gmail at http://mail.google.com/mail: Gmail is Google's free webmail service. It comes with built-in Google search technology and over 2,600 megabytes of storage (and growing every day). You can keep all your important messages, files and pictures forever, use search to quickly and easily find anything you're looking for, and make sense of it all with a new way of viewing messages as part of conversations.


News Aggregators: This is a Web site that offers an overview of what's happening on the Web on a single page. Examples include Popurls at http://www.popurls.com. This Web page scans other major Web sites and puts ''teasers'' about what's happening on these sites on lists that you can scan. For example, Popurls lists headlines from such sites as digg.com, del.icio.us, reddit.com, newsvine.com, news.yahoo.com, netscape.com, wired.com and many more.


Google Docs & Spreadsheets, also known as Google Docs, at http://docs.google.com/ is a Web-based word processor and spreadsheet application. With it, you can create and edit documents and spreadsheets online while collaborating in real-time with other users. Each document and spreadsheet is given a unique url that you can access from any computer.


Wikipedia at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page offers a number of management tools, including:


Online Calendars:


Customized Start (Home) Pages: You can be productive the moment your web browser comes up on your computer, especially if you make it your startpage. You can create a home page with all the information you want and need by using one of the following services.

  • Netvibes - Generally considered to be the first successful, independent startpage.
  • Pageflakes 
  • iGoogle - If you have a Google account, then the iGoogle is part of the package 
  • My Yahoo

File Storage Services: Upload and story your files online.

  • Box.net - You can sign up for free and get a gig of space. Additional storage costs. 
  • MediaMax


Eight Ways for Searching the Dark Web – Beyond Google!

Posted July 3, 2007 to http://www.askreamaor.com/search-engines/8-ways-for-searching-the-dark-web-beyond-google/

 

Google this, Google that, Google something else. But there’s a lot more to the web than Google, and in fact Google only shows you a tiny bit of what’s going on. You’ve heard of the “deep web” or “dark web” - the part not normally indexed by Google, and maybe even not by Yahoo, MSN, or Ask. Well, here’s a little list presenting a few “rabbit holes” into that vast, uncharted territory!

 

  • Dogpile - In the first place, you can check the Big Four (Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask) search engines all at once with Dogpile. Since other search engines use the indexes from one of these four, chances are if you cannot find it here and you are sure it exists, it is “dark” to the web.
  • Clusty - Clusty is a more comprehensive search, finding those deep, dark crevasses that other search engines pass over. I’d nominate Clusty for “the dark-web Google” Of course, the more inclusive you make a search engine, the more spam sites it will pick up, so you might have to wade through a lot of garbage.
  • USA Library of Congress - Good for finding research materials for scholarly interests.
  • Nelson Search - If you’re looking for a journalistic piece, you can’t beat the self-proclaimed search engine for journalists. If there was a news story on it, it’s here.
  • Intute - Well, if the bots don’t do a good enough job of weeding out the spam sites, how about giving the humans a go? Intute is the only search engine which uses only web pages quality-checked by human researchers - guaranteeing that you’ll never get a spam hit!
  • AltaVista - What better way to search the dark web than use a dark search engine? AltaVista died in popularity when Google came out, but it’s still kicking, and it returns hits similar to Clusty.
  • Wayback Machine - Maybe the page you’re looking for no longer exists? that’s OK, the Wayback Machine should have an index of it. The only snag here is, you have to give it an exact URL. Once you have that URL, you can find the entire history for the domain - sometimes through several owners!
  • Bloglines - A search engine just for finding blogs. Anything that’s a blog is here, and these days the web is mostly blogs anyway!

Note that the whole thing behind the dark web is that it is mostly made of sites that are one of (a) spam sites rejected for quality (b) personal home pages, bulletin board archives, and other stuff not generally of interest to the public (c) academia, which lives in its own world (d) government, which lives in its own world (e) criminal and underground sites that aren’t in too great a hurry to be found!



The following list posted to John Wesley's self-improvement blog pickthebrain http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/grow-the-action-habit/ is succinct and makes a lot of sense for everyone, but especially for students and those starting out in the profession.

7 Ways to Grow the Action Habit

By John Wesley

People at the top of every profession share one quality — they get things done. This ability supercedes intelligence, talent, and connections in determining the size of your salary and the speed of your advancement.

Despite the simplicity of this concept there is a perpetual shortage of people who excel at getting results. The action habit — the habit of putting ideas into action now — is essential to getting things done. Here are 7 ways you can grow the action habit:

1. Don’t wait until conditions are perfect - If you’re waiting to start until conditions are perfect, you probably never will. There will always be something that isn’t quite right. Either the timing is off, the market is down, or there’s too much competition. In the real world there is no perfect time to start. You have to take action and deal with problems as they arise. The best time to start was last year. The second best time is right now.


2. Be a doer - Practice doing things rather than thinking about them. Do you want to start exercising? Do you have a great idea to pitch your boss? Do it today. The longer an idea sits in your head without being acted on, the weaker it becomes. After a few days the details gets hazy. After a week it’s forgotten completely. By becoming a doer you’ll get more done and stimulate new ideas in the process.

3. Remember that ideas alone don’t bring success - Ideas are important, but they’re only valuable after they’ve been implemented. One average idea that’s been put into action is more valuable than a dozen brilliant ideas that you’re saving for “some other day” or the “right opportunity”. If you have an idea the you really believe in, do something about it. Unless you take action it will never go anywhere.

4. Use action to cure fear - Have you ever noticed that the most difficult part of public speaking is waiting for your turn to speak? Even professional speakers and actors experience pre-performance anxiety. Once they get started the fear disappears. Action is the best cure for fear. The most difficult time to take action is the very first time. After the ball is rolling, you’ll build confidence and things will keep getting easier. Kill fear by taking action and build on that confidence.


5. Start your creative engine mechanically - One of the biggest misconceptions about creative work is that it can only be done when inspiration strikes. If you wait for inspiration to slap you in the face, your work sessions will be few and far between. Instead of waiting, start your creative motor mechanically. If you need to write something, force yourself to sit down and write. Put pen to paper. Brainstorm. Doodle. By moving your hands you’ll stimulate the flow of ideas and inspire yourself.

6. Think in terms of now - Focus on what you can do in the present moment. Don’t worry about what you should have done last week or what you might be able to do tomorrow. The only time you can affect is the present. If you speculate too much about the past or the future you won’t get anything done. Tomorrow or next week frequently turns into never. As Ben Franklin said, “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.”


7. Get down to business immediately - It’s common practice for people to socialize and make small talk at the beginning of meetings. The same is true for individual workers. How often do you check email or RSS feeds before doing any real work? These distractions will cost you serious time if you don’t bypass them and get down to business immediately. By becoming someone who gets to the point you’ll be more productive and people will look to you as a leader.

It takes courage to take action without instructions from the person in charge. Perhaps that’s why initiative is a rare quality that’s coveted by managers and executives everywhere. Seize the initiative. Be a crusader. When you have a good idea, start implementing it without being told. Once people see you’re serious about getting things done they’ll want to join in. The people at the top don’t have anyone telling them what to do. If you want to join them, you should get used to acting independently.