Category — College Productivity

Found this great article over on Tumblr of all places. Hits on about every point I have thought about recently when it comes to grad school.

A little bit of powerpoint fun for those of us in need of humor.

I am extremely fond of using Twitter to network with others in my potential field and in the job place. I recommend for any grad school student to setup a personal blog over on WordPress.com as well as setting up a twitter account.

Create a strong blog, and utilize twitter to share in the conversations already present about the topics you are passionate about.

Find people who are interested in the topics you are passionate about by utilizing Twitters built in search technology.

Here is a list of my top used Web Apps.

Remember the Milk might just be the tool that will keep you on track. And to make things even easier, Remember the Milk also integrates nicely with Google Calendar, so you can manage everything in one place.

Meebo is my most used web app mostly because its a bad habit to flip open a window using Meebo instead of a desktop application. I can have all my messages in one place rather than utilizing various services.

Google Docs is by far the most powerful document creation tools online it makes for easy collaboration in work groups and teams in various classes. This is by far my most used tool for sharing information online.

Grade Guru is a great application that i just started using to share notes, and find out information that I happen to miss in class.

Over at Lifehacker they have a great list of things that will increase your productivity and I think much of this can be applied to Grad School and information overload. Sometimes you need tips to increase your productivity.

Walk around. Anywhere will do. You can walk around your office. Visit a floor you haven’t been to before. Or maybe you have time to go around the block or visit that park down the street. It’s all about looking for something positive you have never seen. Taking time to smell the roses may be just a cliché, but those roses could be anything. A restaurant you’ve never seen. A friend’s cubicle. Some kids playing ball. Life is going on in the world around you. You just need to notice.
Set an alarm and work on just one thing for that period of time. Maybe it’s just 5, 10 or 20 minutes. Maybe it’s two minutes. But at the end of the time, you will notice what’s it’s like to experience real focus. And if you complete the task, you have something to anchor your day around. You’ve gotten at least one thing really done.
Open up a best-selling business book to a random page and read for five minutes. Let you mind apply whatever your reading to whatever you are working on. There is bound to be inspiration for a great idea or a new way of doing things.
Contact someone you admire. If the internet has done anything, it has flattened the world and enabled us to contact people we respect in many different areas—your business, entertainment, politics or writing. Like an author? Find their web site and drop them an email. Make a list of all the people you want to meet someday and see how many of them you can find on the web. You’d be surprised how many respond.
Send postcards to two friends you know you live out-of-state. It will make you appreciate where you live more than ever.

Chrome is a browser from Google that really has helped me as I work online and go to school. It is so much faster than any other browser that I have ever used that I get a lot more done.Each browser window runs as a separate process so nothing gets all messed up when one website crashes. I still remember the days when entire sites would cause my computer to crash. Can we say Windows ME. Agh, what horrible memories.Google Chrome is the real deal that feels like a serious browser option.

Mozy is a great FREE tool. When you are in school backing up all your notes, podcasts, and study guides is hugely key. Most of the time I just toss the file into Gmail but that doesnt always work.Mozy has some great plans that allow you to backup your entire computer so you no longer have to worry about losing any data at all.

“The nice thing about Mozy is that they offer a free subscription for anything less than 2GB of storage, so you can try them out and not have to pay anything for it. I knew right away that I would need to backup more than that so I went with the $5/mo. unlimited plan right from the start (I had about 30GB that I needed to backup – lots of photos). Practically speaking, unlimited is actually limited by your connection and the time it takes to complete – so yes, it’s unlimited, but the practical limit really depends on your internet connection’s upload speed.“

A lot of people dont watch television like I do. I love TV. I love music. I want to watch my show s and listen to my music anywhere I can access my laptop. I however attend Grad School so I dont have the change to pay for this type of service.Luckily one of my buddies introduced me to Orb.

Orb is a tool that turns your Main PC into a digital media hub that you can use to access files on the go. Including TV,Document,Music. All of which can increase your productivy as you need to catch that latest tv show while you work on your term papers.

i love it when Universities put videos online to encourage potential students to attend and also to encorage students who are already there. Here is a great example video.

If you are looking to pick up some free education in order to improve your mind skills. Look no further than the online education databases massive collection of 100 free podcasts from some of the leading universities in the nation.

This video is a great help to those who are exploring how to process more information in less time. RSS Feeds are the way to just that on the web.

You might also check out Lifehackers Guide To RSS and Google Reader as well. One of the core technologies behind the Web 2.0 “revolution” is RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Most websites that are updated with any sort of regularity have feeds of at least their headlines, and usually of full articles. Some sites also have secondary feeds listing their comments, videos, links, and other updates as well.

Because RSS is so common these days, keeping up with the rush of information that shapes our lives has become pretty easy (”really simple”, even). Instead of jumping from one site to another, you can keep track of all the content of the sites you visit regularly in one central place.