Lifehacking
Going paperless in 2010 part 2
As I wrote earlier on this blog 2010 will be the year that I am ditching paper media. Unfortunately I have to wait a while for the QUE or the Apple iSlate to be available for purchase later this year. In the meantime I already started my next ‘going paperless’ project.
In the first week of this year I needed a new paper binder for our home administration. Looking at a bookshelf filled with binders for the last 10 years of administration I realized that this doesn’t quite fit with my ‘less paper’-goals for 2010 (duh). And how can I quickly find a document that was filed over a year ago? Okay, I have a sorting system for the docs I put in those binders, but that is kinda mehh. I should be able to search through my docs by tags, just like I search for an old e-mail and find it within a few seconds.
Besides the search problem there is another issue with my current administration. The last 2+ years I receive more and more invoices and other interesting/important documents by e-mail. Also when I buy software, the serial keys are always distributed by e-mail. So my home administration is stored in more than one place, which of course tilts me as a BI consultant.
To improve this situation I had to create some kind of HPW for home administration.
Posted in: Going Paperless, LifehackingEasy Lifehack: Shared calendars
It’s almost 2010 and I still see people manually adding ‘standard’ calendar events to their iCal, Outlook or whatever calendar app they use. For example the yearly (school) holidays, but even more frustrating the numerous matches of their favorite sports team! With the upcoming FIFA World Cup in South Africa I expect to see a lot of this unnecessary data entry work being carried out in the next few months.
Let’s end this now and start using ‘shared calendars’. A shared calendar means that you publish your calendar from your calendar app to the web so others can read (not write to!) your calendar. The best thing is that the calendar ‘receivers’ are able to get all the updates automatically.
To get started with these shared calendars, have a look at iCalShare and MarkThisDate. Choose your calendar, click ‘Add to Calendar’ and pick your calendar app from the list. On my Mac iCal opens and asks me if I want to subscribe to this calendar. According to this article subscribing a calendar to Outlook seems to work in the same way. Nice!
