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    Get Your Inbox Under Control (Automatically) with SaneBox

    Full Disclosure: SaneBox is a sponsor of my podcast, but boy do I love this tool.

    Have you ever seen someone’s phone and noticed an email notification badge with a 4 digit number (OR ARE YOU THAT PERSON)? It makes my skin crawl! My inbox serves as a todo list for me, so a lot of email in my inbox gives me agita (a word we Italians use for “stress” or “anxiety”). Even with the way I manage email, I feel like I saw too much. I was distracted by it too much. I wasted too much time. Until I started using SaneBox.

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  • How to Aggressively Guard Your Time and be More Productive

    Tell me if this sounds familiar: you start in on a project. 5 minutes later you get an email. Maybe a phone call comes in (confirming you go the email, of-course). After that you start on the project again. Someone pings you on Slack. You chat with them until you realize you have a meeting in 5 minutes. After the meeting it’s lunch time. You get back and browse around for a bit – you have a meeting in 10 minutes anyway. Then more email. More Slack. More distractions. Suddenly it’s after 5pm, you feel like you did nothing, and you wonder where the day went. Sound familiar? It happens to me too much. That’s why I’ve been aggressively guarding my time. Here’s how.

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    Using the iPad Pro as my Travel Laptop

    Since going out on my own full time, my tech stack has been a bit of a revolving door. In the quest to find the perfect set up I went from a MacBook Pro to a PC / smaller MacBook for travel. Less than a year later and I’m not too happy with that setup. Nothing against the PC, but living in two-thirds Apple land makes having parity between machines very hard (plus, Camtasia, my main video editor, is a hot mess). So when Apple announced the new iPad Pros, I made a decision to go with that and only that as my travel machine.

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    Switching to Windows with my new PC

    Earlier this year I decided that I needed more power in my production machine. The 2017 fully loaded Macbook Pro, much to my dismay, was not cutting it and I wasn’t even doing 4K videos. When faced with the option of dropping $5000+ on a new iMac Pro (which I could not afford to do), or spend half of that on a PC, the decision was pretty easy…I was switching to Windows. Here are my thoughts on the transition so far.

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  • What’s On My Desk, Summer 2018

    Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on my office and making some good improvements to my workspace. I’m 95% to where I want to be, and I figured this is as good a time as any to do a “what’s on my desk” post. I’ve done posts like this before, and want to do them more regularly – so keep an eye out! I’ll do a short Summer 2018 series for my desk, my travel bag, and my recording setup.

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    Fleshing Out My Work Week

    I have a confession: I’m in a bit of a funk. April was not a very productive for me. We were in Disney World for 8 days, and the rest of it, I was either sick or recovering from being sick. Trying to balance the different types of work I do and properly boxing time has also become a problem. Couple that with some distractions at home, and I haven’t felt very productive lately. I want to try going to a coworking space once a week, but I’d have to schedule it on a day where I don’t need my recording setup. So I’ve decided to set my work week with days dedicated to different types of work.

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  • 100 Words 039

    I’ve been a little off since getting back from California. Between all of the summer traveling I did and then getting sick the first week of the semester, I’ve been having trouble focusing and getting things done.

    This weekend, a long weekend, I’m home in Scranton. I’m hoping I can use the extra time to get back on track and caught up on work. My apartment is clean, I have coffee, and if I really need, the Italian Festival is going on right outside my building.

    I have lofty goals for these 3 days but I think I can do it.

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    New Blog on How to be Distraction Free: Uninterrupt.Me

    Over the weekend I happened to be awake and in front of a computer when I came across this tweet from @jenseninman, where she mentioned that she had 2+ hours of uninterrupted time to work on the amazing @CenterCentre project. This got me thinking that it’s been a while since I had some solid time to myself, uninterrupted and distraction free. I also thought that a dedicated blog for how to becoming distraction free seemed like a good idea. When I looked, the (amazing) domain uninterrupt.me was available. What was I supposed to do?

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    Minimalist Task Management with Todo.txt Touch

    Envato’s Android dedicated website, Android.appstorm.com, has published an article I wrote about Gina Trapani’s Todo.txt Touch android app. I cover the major features of the app and some tips on how to use it. Check it out!