Categories
Google+ Productivity Technology

How Old Are My Google Contacts?

It may be a sign of old age but, I’m struggling more and more to remember how old people are. I have addressed this by having a review of my Google contact data and making sure, where I know someone’s birthday I have recorded it there.

This has the added advantage of creating a Google calendar showing me their birthdays.

I have now created a script which scans my contacts to find their birthdays, does some arithmetic to work out their age and store this in a custom field. I have set up a trigger to run this once a week.

Here is the script that I created:

Categories
AutoHotkey Microsoft Office Productivity Technology Work

Productivity – Stay OUT of Outlook

As you will have read in various other places it is not productive to stay “in” Outlook and constantly respond to all the incoming e-mail.
It’s much better to go into your e-mail when it suits YOU – process your e-mail for a set period of time and then get back to some “real” work.
I had looked at various ways to implement this but it turns out that this is simple to implement using AutoHotkey (AHK).

Categories
Me Productivity Technology This Site

Feedly Mobile App For Android Has Tag Support

The latest update to the Feedly application for Android has just added support for tags.

Previously; when I have found something “interesting” in Feedly, I have had to mark it as “Save For Later” and then when I’m next on my laptop or Chromebook, I convert my saved later articles to have the tag “BlogThis”.

Now; as soon as I find something I wish to share I can immediately tag the article “BlogThis” and the wheels will immediately start turning. I have an IFTT recipe which will  scan Feedly for articles tagged with “BlogThis” and will then push them onto my blog www.RossGoodman.com. From there, there I then push the content from my blog onto Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Expect to see more “real time” updates in the future!

Categories
Me Misc

Backup Required

The excellent site www.Feedly.com has been suffering under a DDoS attack for the last few days. I thought I had my backup regime pretty well under control but it’s only now that I can’t access feedly that I realise it’s the only place where my current reading list is stored!

This is what prompted yesterdays post concerning my podcast list – just in case there was ever a problem with that.

Once feedly comes back I’ll be backing up my OPML file so that I can access the list of sites that I review on a daily basis.

It’s a sad state of affairs that I can’t remember my favourite sites and I don’t even bother to bookmark them any more.

Categories
Misc Productivity Ross

My podcast playlist

Just in case anyone is interested – here is my current podcast contents. If you want to recommend any of your favourites to me – let me know in the comments below.

Categories
Microsoft Office Productivity Technology

Create an Outlook Appointment from a Mail

Although there is the functionality within Outlook where you can drag an email message and drop it on the calendar menu to automatically create an appointment – it copies many of the attributes of the email but it does not copy the mail sender & recipients to the appointment.

The following macro will allow you to do this:

Categories
Misc

Free Money

Sounds too good to be true – usually a warning sign – in this case it IS true. I have been using Quidco since 2006 and am almost at Entrepreneur level (have earned £500 cash back).

The basic premise is, you shop online as normal except you visit Quidco first, this sets up an affiliate link and the cashback comes to you rather than the advertiser. In return Quidco keeps the first £5 of the cashback so if you don’t use it it doesn’t cost you anything.

To try and push me across into the next level I’m offering a referral bonus, if you click on the image below, join and have earned £5 cashback this link will give you an additional £5!

I love Quidco

Categories
Microsoft Office Productivity

Outlook Calendar To Excel

I need to produce a weekly report detailing what work I have carried out. I diligently record this in my Outlook calendar. My weekly report needs to be submitted in Microsoft Excel.

The following macro will pull the entries for the last seven days from my calendar and store it in Excel format.

Categories
Facebook Google+ Productivity Technology Twitter

Review a random Google Contact every day

I have all of my contacts loaded into Google Contacts but the problem is, I’m never convinced that they are up to date or even sure if I should still have the person’s contact details listed.

To address this I created the following script which will send me an email every day with a randomly selected contact.

I can then review the contact’s details, compare it with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and then either update their contact details or send them an e-mail to catch up with them.

Categories
This Site Wordpress

FragMentions

I have now implemented Fragmentions as described by Kevin Marks’ post here : http://www.kevinmarks.com/fragmentions.html

I have done this by using the WordPress plugin WP Fragmention as can be found here : http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-fragmention/

This means that you can now link to any textual content on any of my pages – try it and let me know what you think in the comments.