Is multitasking a poke on productivity?

Posted on September 18, 2010 by IdeaMonster

This is not actually about apple mobile devices at all. Sure they didn’t have any multitasking for a long time and now they have a pretty limited one (so it won’t drain battery). No, that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about multi-tasking on a computer. And as a broad term to multi-task can be quite a few things like writing an essay while listening to some mp3’s or stuff like that.

Do we multi-task?

The main problem here is whether we really need to multitask to get the job done. What comes to mind here is an example of doing a presentation or some paper and switching to a web browser to find data and references. But this is actually a limited multi-tasking since you switch from one app to the other to transfer information between them.

What else comes to mind? Well when designing it’s often necessary to be on sites like istockphoto or sxc to search for design elements. And listening to music helps sometimes too.

So what’s wrong ?

The main thing wrong with multitasking is social networking. Being either facebook or chats / IM’s that can take a lot of the attention away from the job that needs to be done. It can take a lot of time when a friend sends some funny link or someone engages in an important conversation. And thus productivity suffers. This of course is pretty obvious, but without the ability to multitask (like on an iPad a while ago) it’d be impossible to do anything BUT the job. And sure we can turn off the IM’s and facebook, but we usually don’t. Why? Because we can have them running in the background, so we do it.

Not many people have enough self control to really focus on one task anymore. We work on our computers with the tv on in the same room. Or work and talk on skype. Or work and switch to chat.
Sure the modern age has enforced people to do more with their time and do everything quickly, but there needs to be a limit or our productivity will suffer greatly.

So probably the best idea is to have partial multi-tasking (that won’t happen) or have a lot of self control if you don’t want to spend too many extra hours on a project.

What do you think? Do you “multi-task like crazy” ? Or do you somehow moderate yourself ?

I get things done (on a Mac)

Posted on March 9, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Free Mac OS X to-do apps

Sure there are plenty of ways to organize your work. There’s sticky notes, there’s trying to memorize everything. There’s writing on the sides in notebooks. And there are dashboard sticky notes that can be quite useful. But all of those ways are confusing and not so organized. Sure we do creative work so we’re all a bit artistic and we don’t follow the organized routines. But at some point you’ll notice, especially when you’re doing web designs or any kind of paid designs that keeping tracks of what you have to do is important. So here’s a quick list of applications that are free, work on a Mac and are a good way to organize your things.

igtd

iGTD

My favorite out of the bunch is iGDT, unfortunately it has been discontinued since the author works on a similar but paid app for another company now. But it still is available for download if you search the web for it. The best thing about is is how advanced it is. First of all it syncs with iCal and with ToDo lists in your mail app. So you have the info in a couple of places. Second of all you can use a context view of your to-do, or view them by projects. The icon in your dock has a badge with how many things you have left to do (green) and another, red badge for things you have to do for today. Try it out, it’s really worth it, even if there’s not gonna be a new version. You can download it here

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Working hard

Posted on January 30, 2010 by IdeaMonster

I’ve been extremely busy lately, doing a couple of projects at once and I realized a pretty good way (aside from the treadmill I use to “take a break”) is to open up all the projects, however different from each other they might be, and work on each for a couple of minutes, adding touches and changing the overall user-perspective. It really can help you look at your new business layout (no people in suits please!!) in a totally new way.
We reached 10,000 views on our iPad parody recently, and currently we’re working on the next “visual” thing that will be available really, really soon (probably on monday).
There are some new authors around here, so keep the RSS feeds handy, since each one is an expert in his field, and we can all learn a lot from that collaboration.