Thursday, August 30, 2012

Free iPad Apps for School




This is a highly-rated, free task manager app which will keep you organized
through task lists that you can share, add deadlines to, prioritize, and personalize.




Record your lecture notes with this free voice recognition
application powered by Dragon Naturally Speaking. You can
instantly see your text, and even dictate status messages
directly to Facebook and Twitter.




Take and organize all of your notes and sync them across all
of your computers and devices with Evernote.
Share notes with Facebook and Twitter friends.




Store and share all your files in the cloud with the Dropbox iPad
app. Upload photos, docs, videos, and other file types for
convenient online access wherever you are.
Dropbox will sync your files with all your devices.




Search the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary through text or
voice search. This excellent app also includes an integrated thesaurus.




Wake up on time for your classes with this free alarm clock app.
Also includes current weather info.




This amazing, free app offers over 3,200 educational videos on
nearly every topic. Subjects include K-12 math, science topics
such as biology, chemistry, and physics, and the humanities
with playlists on finance and history.




Access and rent over 90% of all textbooks through
CourseSmart’s eTextbooks for iPad. Add notes to your books,
skim thumbnails or full pages, and scan for tables, graphs, and charts.




This handy free app will help you keep track of all your
courses, tasks, and homework. Take video notes, audio
notes, photo notes.


Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Ways to Get Email Under Control

The average person gets more than one hundred emails per day. The bad news is it’s not getting better.

The number of emails you receive will continue to grow every year. So what, if anything, can you do to get a grip on this email avalanche? Start with these five tips.

1. Set a Time Limit

According to a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, people spent 28% of their time writing, reading, and answering email. Most of it is unproductive because email is reactive by nature. The inherent gamification of clearing your inbox provides a brief feeling of accomplishment. But unless you’re doing customer support, your job description probably doesn’t include “respond to every email.”

Answering email is just one part of work. That’s why you should determine how much time you want to spend in your inbox on a given day, and don’t exceed it. One suggestion is to dedicate 15-minute blocks every two hours to staying on top of email without letting it take over your day.

2. Know Your Etiquette

If you haven’t read the Email Charter, you are probably pissing off a lot of people. The average time it takes to respond to an email is greater than the time it took to create it. So every hour you spend writing emails is double for your recipients. The Email Charter lists ten specific tips everyone should follow to avoid this collective downward spiral. The core underlying principle of the Charter is “respect recipient’s time.”

3. Prioritize

Most email clients and web mail UI’s give each email the same amount of real estate on the screen. Flags, stars, and other prioritization signals help, but it’s hard for our brain to discriminate. This creates a tendency to give each email the same amount of attention upfront.

In reality, not all emails are created equal. Some need to be read and responded to right away. Others should be archived or deleted in bulk. Keep in mind that in a few years you’ll get even more email than you do now. Since there will still be only twenty four hours in a day, the bar for emails that deserve your full attention will need to be higher.

4. Don’t Signup for Junk

This is an easy one. When signing up for a new web service, opt out of “updates.” When given an option to get a real time, daily, or weekly summary of any kind, choose the least frequent option. Also, stop signing up for newsletters you’re never going to read.

However, be careful when unsubscribing or marking emails as spam. Unsubscribing is only as reliable as the sender’s integrity. You may also be exposing yourself as a real person to a spammer, who will sell your address to someone else. On the other hand, marking a legitimate email you subscribed to as spam is bad karma. It could impact the sender’s standing with email services.

5. Don’t Open Mail Twice

The key principle is to never open the same email twice. As you open each email, you give yourself only five options: delete/archive, delegate, respond (if you can do it in under two minutes), defer, or do. This process keeps you from wasting time by re-reading the same information.

Although many suggest that email should be reinvented, it’s not going to happen any time soon. According to Andrew McAffee, whatever solution replaces email would have to be not just better than email, but ten times better. He argues that people are typically so averse to change that they overvalue current solutions by three times and undervalue proposed substitutes by three times.

But even if email is replaced by another communication protocol that replacement will continue to be ruled by the same principle of scarcity of time. That’s why overcoming the bad behaviors that are created by email overload are key.