VA Newsday

When I began freelancing full time I decided to try social media on the basis that it might help me to promote my services. Now that I’ve been freelancing full-time for a year, I decided to revisit my predominantly ad hoc approach to social media.

The lives of journalists online are increasingly hectic and frenzied, according to a somewhat sensationalistic piece in the New York Times. But the underlying phenomenon the Times is describing seems far more universal than that: it is the increasingly “real time” nature of all our lives.

As more demands are placed on you, tasks that once seemed extremely important become trivial. You have one hundred things to do and a limited amount of time to do them in. So the question becomes, what do you give up?

If you read Scott’s recent Moving to Mac series, you’ll know that transitioning to Mac from Windows is not as tricky as some might fear. However, there is one area that can cause a lot of pain, and that’s moving email between Outlook and Mail.

I’ve been surprised at how difficult it is to let go of my paper. As I move more and more of my paper to a digital format I keep finding myself hesitating when I get ready to shred a document. We are trained so very well to keep our paper records. Has

Taking its cues from the hugely popular MacHeist bundle of Mac apps, AppSumo presents time-limited offers on collections of hand-picked premium web apps. The current bundle, which is available for another 11 days, includes six-month subscriptions to BatchBook, MailChimp and Formstack and a $120 voucher for Freshbooks.

Do you want to be more productive? Maybe you do, but I’m sure you don’t want to feel stressed, overwhelmed, or unhappy – which happens to many super-productive people.

I own every major Twitter client for the iPhone, and many for the iPad. Some were free, but most were bought and paid for. They each have their merits and I’ve used them all variously at one time or another, though some more than others. But no more.

Evernote is my dumping ground for research ideas, quick notes, and web pages I’ve come across on the Internet and want to save for future reading. When Evernote announced its new Trunk service on Wednesday, I was immediately skeptical and derisive.

In this two-part post, I’m going to talk about managing “busy-ness,” or what Timothy Ferriss describes in “The 4-Hour Workweek” as “working for work’s sake.” As your business grows and your workload increases, it becomes more and more important to manage “busy-ness.”

Brett Kelly has written a book called Evernote Essentials. If you’ve been considering using Evernote, this is the guide you’ll want to makes you are getting the most out of it. The PDF is well illustrated and covers a lot of the details that you probably won’t discover on your own. It took me about

As Google has infiltrated many of our online activities — mail, calendaring, search history, blogging and even YouTube viewing — it asks us to use a single Google Account. But finally, the company is testing allowing users to use multiple accounts within the same browser.

People are using the Internet to connect to information, but more importantly, to connect with people. And yet many people seem confused and overwhelmed about the right way to connect through social media channels. Here are 10 ways to really connect with others through social media:

There comes a point in your business when you reach a Catch-22 situation. Your workload is maxed out, you want to continue growing, but you’re at a difficult point where you can’t quite afford help, but you can’t survive and grow successfully without it.

Are you the kind of person who has to have the latest versions of hardware and software? If so, don’t bother to read on; for the rest of us, it’s worth considering if and when to move to a new version.

As part of its effort to branch beyond equipment, Alcatel-Lucent is taking a page from Cisco’s playbook and eying the collaboration market. The telecommunications gear maker today introduced an app for customers of its Office Communication Solution that can link iPhones with an office phone system.

Self-handicapping is finding excuses and obstacles that explain why we’re not responsible for our mistakes, failures, or poor performance. Most of us start experiencing it as students, but the habit also tends to stay with us even when we turn into capable professionals.

PrintWhatYouLike is a free bookmarklet that lets you select regions of any web page and format them to make them suitable for printing. By removing the content you’re not interested in before hitting the print button, you’ll save paper, ink and time.

The prevailing Twitter wisdom is that we should avoid tweeting about ourselves too much, and post information in which others are interested. But about those “others,” those people who watch your tweets crank past, ticker-like, each day: How do you know what’s of interest to them?

If you need a throwaway email address — perhaps you’d like to sign up for an online service without providing your real email address because you’re concerned about spam — look no further than tempalias. It’s a simple service that generates a temporary email address.

I’ve been working on several big projects in recent months, and after the whirlwind started settling down, I realized how important it was to take time off. How can we ensure that we get enough time away from our work before burning ourselves out?

If you’re looking for free stock imagery (perhaps to use in a blog post or in some marketing material), you might like to check out Veezzle. It’s a free search engine that trawls through the myriad free microstock sites looking for images.

The near-ubiquitous access to collaborative communities, social networks and communications tools that my iPhone apps provide is actually improving my ability to network more frequently with my friends, fans, followers and contacts. Here’s a handy list of community and communications iPhone apps to help you network.

Going paperless is now a realistic option to making your work life more friendly on the planet. From web-based faxing, to replacing all mail with email, to toting around your own coffee mug, the benefits of eliminating paper can preserve natural resources and save you money.

Now that Google’s free telephone forwarding, screening and voicemail service Google Voice is open to anyone in the U.S., web workers are finding many creative ways to use it. Google Voice has an extensive list of features; here’re a few ideas on how to use them:

Google Reader’s native mobile interface is OK, but it isn’t optimal for downloading items to read offline. So I was interested to try FeedsAnywhere, a new service that promised to improve Google Reader’s own mobile experience. Since it’s HTML-based, it works on lots of mobile devices.

You can now create a link to any file or directory in your Dropbox account. People following the link will be taken to a page that allows them to view your shared files in their browser, and the links are ready-shortened; perfect for sharing via Twitter.

Google’s been busy rolling out changes to Docs recently. One really useful new feature is the option of OCR (optical character recognition) to the file upload process, which will attempt to convert the text contained in image files and PDFs into editable Google Docs.

Our culture celebrates workaholism. We hear stories of people who “burn the mid-night oil” at the office, or about individuals who never take vacations. Working a lot doesn’t mean you deserve a gold star or a raise.

Aaron Stannard has written an interesting and very candid post about his recent experience of doing what many developers dream of: taking an unpaid, month-long leave of absence from his regular job to try and create his own web-based startup company.

I just finished one of several big projects I’ve been working on lately. It was probably one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done, and several times throughout the project, I could easily see why most of us don’t take on big challenges at all.