I’ve done a bunch of reading about personal productivity in the last year or so with my primary source of inspiration being David Allen’s, Getting Things Done. I’ve been working with getting tasks out of my head and onto paper for over a year and have recently been going back to four pieces of information gleened from Merlin Mann’s 43folders.com blog.

Anatomy of a to do:

• it’s a physical action
• it can be accomplished in one sitting
• it supports valuable progress towards a recognizable goal
• I am the most appropriate person for the task

Keeping these in mind as I work on my various contextual pages of notes has been really helpful. You can read more at Merlin’s article Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part 1.

Parallels is starting to really become a brilliant solution to running Windows on a Mac with little sacrifice, in fact it is becoming a ‘best of both worlds’ solution. This is great because we are finding Mac hardware to be both fast and reliable (and repair is easy).

The newly released Parallels Beta v.3036 has some great features, including windows apps intermingling with mac apps on screen and Parallels access to your BootCamp partition. And a heck of a lot more. Warning, it is a fresh new beta and there are bugs!

Also, the Parallels Transporter program is bundled. This very savvy program allows you to put an agent on a PC and convert the entire thing into a Parallels Virtual Machine that you can then run on your Mac.

Links: Review at GIGO (thorough), Review at AWLN

Ubuntu is a geek-favorite Linux distribution (I dual boot at home and know Elph has at least one machine running it), so it’s natural that we’ve been running it in the office. When we upgraded to Exchange 2003, I set out to find an Exchange client for Ubuntu. (more…)