Latest in productivity tips

We introduced MakeUseOf readers to ifttt in September of last year. Since then, I've made a few posts regarding the web service. Those two articles introduce 18 one-click "recipes" that can supercharge your Internet experience. As ifttt continues to grow, users are contributing new and more useful ideas. Thanks to this web service, anyone and everyone can automate and simplify their most routine tasks, absolutely free.
Keep Reading »

Did you know, that the Internet can also make you alarmingly unproductive? It's true! It may be hard to believe, but constant access to all the world's information - from the average flight velocity of an African swallow to what the girl you had a crush on in college is doing right at this moment - causes some people to get less work done instead of more.
Keep Reading »

Procrastination is a malady that pervades students and workers in all corners of the world and it infects amateurs and professionals alike. As a writer, I suffer from procrastination on a daily basis. Some people call it "writer’s block". If you can find a way to quell your desire to procrastinate, then you’ll drive towards success. If not, you’ll never get anything done.
Keep Reading »

If you really wish to pay more attention to the todo list on your homescreen so you can eventually follow up with and cross off items off your task list, you might find the Attention Grabber Note Widget quite a welcome addition to your collection of Android apps. What makes this note app stand out from the sea of note apps?
Keep Reading »

Writing is tough. As a writer, I know how much of a struggle it can be. Blank pages are terrifying. New assignments even more so. Procrastination is an activity I know all too well. Yet ironically enough, there has been plenty of material written about the difficulty that exists in writing. I guess it’s easier to write about our troubles than it is to actually face them head on.
Keep Reading »

Working from home might seem like a great idea, but I don’t see it. After more than a year of working from various places of residence I’m thoroughly sick of mixing business with pleasure. Home is where I go to relax, to escape work - and that’s the way I like it. When the lines between downtime and work-time become blurred, home starts to feel a bit like a rabbit hole.
Keep Reading »

PopClip is a small utility for OS X from PilotMoon that gives you an iOS-like multifunctional popup menu when highlighting text, described as a faster, easier way to work with text on your Mac. Having used it for a week now, it seems like a natural extension of OS X and really makes certain tasks [...]
Keep Reading »

You never get your eyes back. They're sort of like your teeth. Once they go bad, there's really no natural recovery. You can eat carrots all day long, but if you're staring directly at your monitor for hours each day it won't really matter. EyeLeo strives to make sure that we keep our eyes healthy
Keep Reading »

Pinterest is an online pinboard which allows you to share images by ‘pining’ them to your profile. I am sure you will while away a few hours playing around creating pretty image boards or pinboards. I did too, but then I also realized that Pinterest can also be used like a vision board for personal development and productivity. Here are a few ideas.
Keep Reading »

The Internet has been awash with hype about Clear since it was first announced and demoed by developers, Realmac Software. The app finally hit the App Store last week and is already proving itself a worthy competitor to the hordes of other list-making apps available for the iPhone. It’s cheap, simple and very easy to use but is Clear worth a dollar when a pen and paper has served us so well in the past?
Keep Reading »

If you spend a considerable amount of time working at your computer with no Corporate Big Brother to monitor what you're doing, you may find yourself spending a bit more time than you should be tweeting, Facebooking, and procrastinating your day away. While there's nothing wrong with good old leisure activities, the adage "time is money" means a lot if you’re reading mentions on Twitter instead of dealing with a work-related project deadline.
Keep Reading »

Mouse gestures are specific movements that are recognized by software and translated into quick actions on the screen. Mouse gestures can be used to perform quick actions, like forward and backward browsing or opening a program among others. We have taken you through quite a few mouse gesture tools. Let’s take a look at another lightweight one here.
Keep Reading »

Back in 2010, I wrote about a well designed task management, cross-platform application called Wunderlist. It does what you can do in any spreadsheet, paper notebook, or other task managers, but it's much better to look at and access over the Internet and your iOS devices. Since its first application release, the developers, Wunderkinder, have been beta-testing a much more enhanced version of their program, called Wunderkit.
Keep Reading »

Do you think the web is fast? What if I told you that you could make your Internet even faster (as far as productivity is concerned), without having to get a faster Internet connection? It already exists and is waiting for you to use it. What's this magic potion I'm talking about? A Chrome extension, based on a very popular Firefox extension that hasn't been getting a lot of love here at MakeUseOf.
Keep Reading »

For many of us who work in the cloud, we’ve come to rely on our favourite services quite heavily. We also sometimes love and trust them perhaps a little more than we should at times, leaving ourselves open to losing everything we have built with the service so far. So I put a bit of thought into the best ways to back up RTM tasks so they’ll always be protected and available.
Keep Reading »