Organizing Your Digital Life

You can view the slides here. Overall, this was well received by participants, although it was way too fast with too much jargon for those who still are struggling with things like blog. Lots of requests for smaller pieces, slower pace, and hands on so it was a great jumping off place for more workshops.

 

Maria H. Anderson, Math Faculty at Muskegon Community College goes over the tools she uses to keep chaos down.  
Take Aways
E-mail  (gmail)

• Clean inbox each morning.  Sorts first, then responds.   Very few folders so search works quickly.   She has only Happy (for things that cheer her up); her institution; her PHD emails; Read later; Respond; Watch later and temporary folders like Workshop. She said her "read later" and Watch later are no-guilt folders, things she doesn't want to delete but doesn't have time for. 
• Has all her e-mail consolidated from the various places and pulled into gmail where she reads it there.   I doubt ours allows it.  
• Has her calendar send her a weekly schedule so all she does is print it.   Like an electronic admin assistant.
• Ideally, all e-mail either get deleted, archived or responded to.  Search instead of folders.
• Move all the existing stuff into an e-mail DMZ and start fresh.

Bookmarks

• Since bookmarks are for websites, bookmark them on a website
• Google Bookmarks (not really shared), Delicious, Diigo
• Anyplace, anytime

Learning

• Quote: Use the internet as an extension of your brain.  File cabinet plus personal assistant plus learning diary
• Mindmaps - mindomo.com    her personal mindmap for this workshop http://tinyurl.com/9kd35u
• Wikis
• Blog (stores notes of what you learned)

Other stuff

• Jing -record self doing a non-routine task for playback next time need to do it.
• RSS
• Twitter-keeping track as she worked on her PHD, some of her students use it to keep track of how much time they are spending on their homework.  In a sense, keeping oneself accountable.   It isn't necessarily about who reads it but she made friends along the way as people became interested and started encouraging her.  Hash tag use
• A.nnotate - Note-taking and allows tagging of passages so she can sort by tag or by document.  Searchable.
• Course shells - for cooperative work, not just courses.
• 5pm - for to-do lists and projects
• Google docs
• Quote:  If you aren't careful, you can spend your whole life checking to see what's happening in your life.
• Digsby - combining many communications into one tool, e-mail, IM, and social networks like facebook
• Dual monitors is the way to go (I definitely agree!)
• Google calendars, being able to control which are public and which aren't
• RescueTime - for those that lose track of how much time they spend on things.  Automatically tracks which web sites & applications are used