It’s that time of year when those of us that strive to do better resolve to make changes in our lives for the coming year. For some, it’s to exercise more or to eat less, for others it’s to post to a blog more often or to keep a journal of some sort. For most of us, though, the one commonality is that sometime in February or maybe March if we’re lucky, our resolve to keep our resolution seems to dissolve and we find ourselves falling back on our old ways.

Instead of doing the same old thing this year, allow me to suggest a resolution that you can make, and better yet, keep, with relative ease, yet, in spite of the ease in keeping this resolution, it is one that can make a very real difference to a place near and dear to all of us; our planet.

The resolution is to go paperless (or at least to cut down on paper as much as possible). Going paperless has never been easier and just in time for this New Year’s Resolution I have a couple of great resources that can make keep your resolve that much easier.

The first is a new service called “The Read Green Initiative” and it not only makes it easier to go paperless, you even get a free digital magazine subscription just for trying it out.  If there are more magazines you want to read, you can subscribe to their electronic versions for a small fee.  The service is powered by Zinio, the world’s largest publishers of digital editions of many of the post popular magazines as well as a vast selection of other publications.

By taking the Read Green Initiative for a spin you not only get a free magazine but you’ll reduce your carbon footprint, save trees, reduce waste that goes to the landfill and even cut down on toxic chemicals that can find their way into groundwater or even the ocean.  It’s a seriously cool thing to do - even if you don’t want to resolve to go paperless in 2009.

A second service that has captured my heart is Catalog Choice.  If you’re like me the sheer volume of waste that clutters your mailbox on a weekly basis makes you feel physically ill.  More than ninety percent of it goes from box straight to recycling bin with neary a glance at the printed pages.  It should be a crime for companies to waste resources in this way.

Catalog Choice’s mission is to put an end to this practice.  They do this by giving you much more control over what lists you are subscribed to and thus what catalogs and other mailers actually find their way to your front door.

The service is free to use and is good for the merchants (they save money by not sending catalogs to people that don’t want them), the environment (for obvious reasons) and for you (save time and headaches by getting less junk mail).  Plus you’ll feel good about yourself knowing that you’re doing one more small thing to help protect the environment.

Personally, I think these services are great and we should all be doing this and even more to help reduce global warming and keep the earth healthy.  If you’ve got additional tips that can help us go paperless or be green in other ways, please leave them in the comments.  Happy New Year!

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Receipts.  If you’re like me they are one of the banes of your existence.  Especially receipts accumulated while traveling.  You know the ones I mean.  Functionally they are the equivalent of actual hard currency since they can be submitted for expense reimbursement.  The problem is that getting those receipts organized, scanned and submitted is one of the biggest pains in the butt there is for a busy person.

Of course the GTD approach to dealing with receipts is to have a designated place to collect them - most likely an envelop with a label indicating its purpose in life.  Said envelope then goes into the “To Office” traveling folder which, once you return from a trip, must be processed.

Processing receipts is a time consuming task.  Especially after a long trip - or worse, if you’ve procrastinated and thus haven’t dealt with your receipts for more than one trip and  have a couple big piles of the nasty crinkled bits of paper.

Well, if you’re in that position I don’t have any solution other than a recommendation to schedule some time to get them organized.  However, I do have a tip that could help you avoid this problem in the future.

Qipit. Developed by RealEyes3D, a visual intelligence company, Qipit turns your cell phone into a multi purpose office machine.  In short, Qipit imbues your mobile with the ability to scan documents, copy things and even capture the contents of a white board instead of having to transcribe it by hand.

In addition, Qipit also stores the items you capture so that you have a secure online repository for everything you scan making it easy to access your stored documents from anywhere with a working web connection.

Particularly when traveling this can make your life a lot easier.  For example, with the above mentioned receipts all you have to do is lay them out on a flat surface, center them in the viewfinder of your mobile phone’s camera, click off a photo and email it from your phone to “copy@qipit.com”.  Within a few moments the scanned, corrected image will appear in your Qipit account.  From there it can be faxed, emailed, published to a blog or other site or simply stored until later.

Qipit is fairly amazing - not only because it makes tasks like the one above fast and nearly painless but also because of how it handles images.  For example, I just shot a receipt with my Nokia N96 - this is a five megapixel camera phone.  Check out the image:

Now look at what Qipit did with this same receipt:

in addition to making it easy to orient the item correctly, it also cleaned up the shadows in the foreground and the background and corrected the contrast making it much easier to read.  Qipit also dramatically reduced the size of the file so that it could be emailed quickly and easily, even in a bandwidth constrained environment.

Another way that Qipit can make your life easier - especially on the road - is when you have to sign and fax something.  I just love these requests.  Not the least because I no longer own a fax machine and I can’t stand shelling out like $5 per page to send a fax from a hotel.  (Doesn’t anyone use E-Signatures these days?)

Luckily Qipit solves this problem too.  Just sign the document that you need to return then take a photo of it with your camera phone.  Email it to “copy@qipit.com” and then log on to your Qipit account.  From there you can specify if the document should be published, emailed. or for those dinosaurs still living the the Web .5 world, you can fax them the document.  One more headache averted.

Like most of our best-loved applications, Qipit is free and offers a generous amount of storage for your scanned images.  And, as easy as Qipit makes it to get your receipts scanned while on the road no you have no excuse for not getting them cleaned up in two minute slots while you’re traveling. See, I told you I could solve that problem for you, didn’t I?

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Editor’s Note:  Yolanda Otero, an HR Compliance Coordinator from AmerisourceBergen in Orlando Florida was kind enough to write in to GTDtimes to share a tip about how she implements GTD complete with an image showing her system in action.  This is great!  Yolanda, thanks so much from GTDtimes for making this information more broadly available.

To other GTDtimes readers, if you’ve got a unique method of implementing GTD that helps you stay in “Master and Commander” mode, by all means send it to us: submissions at GTDtimes dot com.

From Yolanda

I been doing the GTD for the last 6 months and this has changed my day completely in a way that I’m more proactive, organized, and I have full control of work time due to the way that I manage my time through the GTD process.

This is an idea that I want to share with you all.  I do a lot of projects and it was not easy to keep track of every step that a project has as a different task.  What I do now is to write down all the steps in the body of the task and as I go to each task I mark the preceeding one “DONE”.   I change the subject, I type the new step # and change the due date and or category. Any thing new I’ll add it to the body and that way I keep track of the complete project in one task.

I shared this with the management team GTD meeting in our Division in Orlando and they like it. Hope you like it too, thanks.

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Do phone trees and IVR systems drive you nuts? Fonolo’s “Deep Dialing” is the perfect antidote, letting you dive into a corporate phone system and get right to the person you need to speak to. Be one of the first 100 readers of GTD Times to request a free password, and experience Fonolo now before it gets discovered by the whole world!

I reviewed Fonolo for GTDtimes a few months back and think it is one of those time saving discoveries that you’re going to absolutely love.  Don’t miss your chance to try this cool application ahead of the crowd.

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Every day it seems we spend more and more of our time in front of a computer screen.  Whether it’s a monitor on a desk or a tiny hand held display on our phones, computers are such an essential part of our day to day lives that for most of us they are almost as indispensable as oxygen.  Given that so much of our time is spent in front of these machines, it behooves us to learn as many ways as we can to do our computer aided tasks as quickly and efficiently as possible.  Or, as David Allen said upon learning  that he’d been awarded the “Golden Slacker Award”, “the laziest people come up with the coolest ideas.”

With this in mind it occurred to me that we could create what could possibly be the ultimate list of online time-savers ever compiled.  Basically what I was thinking was that each of us has probably discovered at least a couple online resources that we now find indispensable to our daily routine and what I am hoping is that with all of your help we can catalog these into a truly exhaustive list that can then become its own page on this site and serve as a truly exceptional reference for GTD’ers and Lifehackers of all stripes.

To keep the list focused I thought I would establish a couple of criteria to narrow recommendations down a little bit.  Thus, for inclusion in this list, the application must result in an actual time-savings of some type- whether by virtue of reducing keystrokes, condensing multiple tasks into one task (or at least fewer tasks) ,  by eliminating the need to do extensive navigation with a mouse, by automating complex actions or by virtue of eliminating the need to navigate to a site to obtain a query result from said site.  Second, the time-saver in question must be free and generally available. (No closed betas allowed although open betas are fine).  Third (and this one should go without saying but I’ll say it anyway) these time-savers must work on a Mac or PC or Linux machine, a PDA, a mobile phone or a tablet computer.

Please provide your time saver in the comments and what I will do is regularly update the list by moving the time savers up to the body of the post.  If/when we get a number of time savers sufficient to justify creating a unique page for the list  I’ll create such a page and provide a list of credits to those individuals that have taken the time to help us expand this list.

I’ll start with a couple of my favorites.  Incidentally, contributing a time-saver is more than just saying “I like xyz”.  We need the application, the URL, what it does and why you like it. If if is a particularly complicated time saver an example would be helpful too.

Here we go:

1.     YubNub <http://yubnub.org>

This is my all time favorite time saver and one that I probably use a hundred times a day.  Primarily because it is incredibly versatile and is actually thousands of unique time savers rolled up into one slick Ruby on Rails application.  In essence YubNub is a command line for the web.  What it does is allow you to harness the power of thousands of different web servers to do specific tasks by using the URL bar of your browser (or a widget or a stand alone application) as a command line.

What can you do with YubNub?  Almost anything you can think of.  The limits are your memory and/or your imagination.  Some examples:  (after opening a new tab (or clearing the contents in the URL bar in an existing tab) I could enter: g David Allen GTD.  The results? This command would yield a Google search for the terms David Allen and GTD.  The savings?  Instead of first going to Google and waiting for the page to load and then typing these terms into Google I did this with one keystroke.  Okay, maybe that’s not that spectacular but what about this?  ebay Green Laser.  This would give you the results of an eBay query for green lasers; again, saving the navigation first to eBay.  Still not impressed?  How about this one?  gimyim Chewbacca. This little query would result in a split screen that contains image search results for Chewy in both Google Images and Yahoo Images (this one usually wows even the most jaded LifeHacking experts cause they’ve never seen split screen queries using two different search engines at the same time).

There are literally thousands of YubNub commands; everything from reverse number lookups to langauge translations to code checking, to site-specific searches.  Need to search TechCrunch for something?  Just type “TC” and your search string (leave out the quotes) and YubNub will find the terms assuming they actually appeared in the popular blog.  Plus if you want a command that you can’t find you can make your own.  The “create” command allows you to build your own YubNub command instantly.

I am constantly amazed by the power and versatility of this online time-saver, it never fails when I try something that simply seems intuitive and it does exactly what I thought it might.  What, for instance, do you suppose the “gmap” command plus a location would yield?  From my own experience at least, YubNub is hands down the most powerful, useful and utterly indispensable application I use.  I don’t think I could live without it.

2.      Fluid <http://fluidapp.com/>

Attention:  For Mac Users Only!  Are you a tabbed-browsing junkie?  Do you regularly use web applications like Gmail, Google Docs or WordPress?  Have you ever had your browser crash costing  you hours of work as a result?  Then Fluid is for you.  This application allows you to create site specific browsers.  In other words, Fluid allows you to create a browser that acts like a stand alone application.  Each one runs as a stand alone Cocoa app meaning that if your browser crashes it doesn’t touch what your doing in your SSB’s that you created with Fluid.

Fluid even lets you create a Dock icon to launch each specific SSB . Fluid can also be converted to a MenuExtra SSB (sits in the Title Bar at the top of the screen) and in spite of running in a separate instantiation of Cocoa each SSB still retains the full functionality of the parent browser (bookmarks, spell check, etc.)

I love fluid for using web applications like Gmail.  I don’t lose my work nearly so often and when I’ve got forty tabs open I don’t have to hunt for the ones I use most often.  If you’ve got a Mac I highly recommend you try Fluid  unless you’ve got nothing to lose! (get it?)

Okay, so that’s a start, now it’s your turn.  Please send in your favorite Time saving web applications and together we can compile a page that equals thousands of saved hours for everyone!

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Corporate Travel =  Sound of Piggy Bank Breaking

If you shudder when you pull up to the gas pump these days, or swallow hard before you tear open your utility bill every month image how your company’s controller must feel.  If you’re in a start-up or any small business and especially if you’re not cash-flow positive yet these times of soaring energy costs and economic uncertainty border on the downright terrifying.  Under such circumstances even the most financially stable enterprises are taking a hard look at expenses and trying to determine areas in which costs can be cut without reducing the quality of service or their future business prospects.

One area that is coming under the budget-crunch knife at nearly every company on the planet is travel.  Right now just about every aspect of travel has increased in price.  Airfares are skyrocketing and the new ancillary charges - since when did it become reasonable to charge passengers $50 for bringing along a single checked bag? What’s next?  Charging for inflight air?  Or perhaps pay toilets?  One thing is certain, flying is not only a hassle it’s also expensive.  From your CFO’s perspective anything that can help you avoid the cost and headache of another flight - and especially one overseas with the sinking dollar effectively doubling that cost - is going to be worthy of serious consideration.

Buy the Ticket, Ride the Ride…

The flip side to this is that some meetings really require that both parties see one another.  Sure, conference bridges are good and shared desktops like GoToMeeting are useful for certain things but sometimes you really need to look someone in the eye in order to move things ahead.  Traditionally that meant hopping on a plane and that usually meant at least a thousand bucks drawn down on the company coffers (and  lot more if more than one exec needed to travel or if the trip required crossing a continent or an ocean).  That’s a lot of expense for one short meeting. And until recently there was nothing that could be done about this but bite the bullet and break out the plastic.

[Read more →]

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Frank Tomizuka has just posted a great tutorial on how to make your very own hipster PDA over at Instructables - the world’s largest “How To” website.  For those of you that have never heard of a Hipster PDA, Merlin Mann introduced the idea over at 43Folders way back in September of 2004.  If you’d like a decidedly lower tech solution instead of a high tech device this may be just what you’re looking for…

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Late last week I had the opportunity to interview Shai Berger, the CEO and Founder of a new company called Fonolo (Phone-Oh-Low) that I think you’re going to like as much as I do.  Fonolo solves a problem that we all have, is something that is almost universally hated and which we all thought, up until now, was an evil that simply must be endured.  The endless misery dished out at the hands of IVR systems all over the planet.

For those of you that haven’t heard the term IVR,  it’s an acronym for Interactive Voice Response - in other words it’s one of those pesky systems that answers your calls when you call just about any large company.  Usually you’re greeted with the statement, “please listen carefully as our menu options have changed…” or else (and especially if you’re calling from California) “If your language preference is English, please press one now. Si su preferencia de la lengua es español, ahora presione por favor dos.”
What follows is a list of options and the buttons you need to press in order to navigate to the place in their system where you can actually accomplish the task you had called to do in the first place.

Any adult in the modern world has spent countless frustrating hours, usually enhanced by some mind numbing muzak or even worse a promotional jingle on a repeating loop while attempting to get the help or service you needed when placing the call.  I don’t know what the total time lost to US workers each year is while we struggle through these IVRs but I’m certain the time loss would run into the hundreds of millions if not more.  But hey, there’s some good news.  Especially if you loathe IVR systems as much as I do then I think  Fonolo is going to be your new best friend.

The way it works is actually quite simple.  Instead of calling the company and entering IVR purgatory, you go to Fonolo and find the company in their index (they are adding new companies all the time - in fact, this is one of their competitive insulators, the number of IVR systems that they have already identified and mapped).  When you locate the company you want, you are presented with a visual map of the IVR system.

Simply scan down the map (an example of such a map is on the right) until you see the location where you need to go and click the button on that location.  Fonolo will now place a call, do the navigating and waiting for you and then ring your phone once it has reached the location in the IVR system that you had previously specified. No more grinding your teeth while listening to endless menus and muzak, no more wasted time when you could have been doing something more interesting or productive either.

The only thing that is going to be frustrating now is the wait while Fonolo indexes the millions of IVR systems that popluate our world.  You see, while the concept is simple and the UI is intuitive, the process behind the scenes is incredibly difficult.  Imagine the work required to identify each segment of every IVR, program a computer to enter the correct tones at the correct time and then to know when it has arrived at the desired location so it can call you.

Plus there’s the added burden for Fonolo of keeping current as companies modify their IVR systems as they grow and change.  This is an absolutely massive undertaking - not one for the faint of heart CEO that is for certain.

There are lots of ways that Fonolo can make money - most of which don’t include charging the end user - although don’t be surprised if Fonolo rolls out with some carriers and then those carriers promote the service in some white labeled format and charge you for the privilege of using something that the company is currently giving away for free.

I really like this concept.  It’s original, useful, well thought out and absolutely something that I will use myself.  It’s also the sort of thing that reminds me why I like writing about applications.  Even though there are so many companies creating software right now, there are still a ton of new and/or better ways of doing things that are just waiting for an enterprising individual with a vision and the desire to see it through.

Fonolo is just such a company - one you should definitely add to  your list of time saving tools that you have to check out.

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