VA Newsday

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

For the past month, I’ve been working with a “work buddy”. She helps me stay on track with projects, keeps me focused when I’m not feeling motivated and gives me professional advice. She has become my go-to person for almost every concern I have with work.

Tom’s Planner is a simple online planning app that you can use to create colorful Gantt charts via a drag-and-drop interface. While it doesn’t have the power and functionality of full-featured project management tool like Microsoft Project, it’s much less complex.

Social networking isn’t a life sentence, and it needn’t take up your every waking (or even spare) moment. There are benefits to be gained through being part of social networks that suit you. So why not give social networking another try?

We all have different habits and personalities; for some of us, the usual productivity tips don’t seem to work. It’s entirely possible that doing the opposite of the conventional advice might help actually you to work better. Here are some counterintuitive techniques you can start with:

RoboForm has released a mobile bookmarklet for RoboForm Online, its service that allows you sync passwords between computers. It enables you to automatically fill out usernames and passwords in your phone’s browser, which should mean no more forgetting a little-used password when you’re out and about.

It doesn’t have any of the complex project management features that make heavyweight tools like MS Project so useful, but if all you need to do is plot out a basic, easy-to-understand project plan to share with your team, Tom’s Planner is more than adequate.

What do you do when a client ruins something you’ve created? You can’t protect the assets you develop for a client from the client themselves. You can’t defend the work you did for them when it no longer resembles the actual work you did.

I believe there are valuable lessons that corporations can take from web workers to help their workforces. Many of the struggles that we’ve had will be experienced by corporations over the next few years as more of them adopt flexible working practices.

Having meetings over the phone is something that remote workers do all of the time. However, despite the frequency of these meetings, I see a lot of people who don’t follow basic phone meeting etiquette. Here are a few tips: