I first read about insighta.com in one of Gretchen Rubin’s posts on Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain.
Towards the bottom of the posting (great sketches by the way Gretchen) she mentions the site insighta.com which I duly surfed off to investigate.
The site appeared to be a social site devoted to personal development topics. You could link in your blog postings for other members to vote on. If you got enough votes you’d get the article posted on insighta.com’s front page.
It seemed cool so I thought I’d give it a try. That was back in mid-April so I thought I’d check out how things were going after a month. I was most surprised to find the site replaced with a photography site.
Does anyone know what has happened to the personal development insighta.com?
My good lady wife was often cajoling me to, “Get rid of the clutter” and for a long time I didn’t really heed her advice. Until, that is, I decided I was going to de-clutter my home desk.
My desk at home serves as both my home office and my personal PC space. It was cluttered! As well as all the PC equipment on the desk I had:
- Code print outs from work
- Reference books
- Non-work related books
- Music CDs
- Software CDs
- Ornaments
You get the picture? One day I realized how crowded I was feeling. Not only could I not find the stuff I wanted; but the stuff I didn’t want kept falling on the floor. It was time to get organized.
The next time I sat down at my desk it was a joy to open my laptop. My wife commented afterwards that I’d looked more at ease and more confident as I started work that morning. I felt much more in control and on-top of things. I could expand my horizons by not being overwhelmed by irrelevant stuff.
Whilst Ive been writing these posts the last couple of weeks I’ve also been surfing around reading blogs by fellow travelers in the 21st century. Some of these blog sites I’ve found to be absolutely over loaded with all manner of:
- Google Adsense advertisements
- Feedburner subscription links
- Other advertisements (frequently blinking fast enough to induce a fit)
- Pictures of recent readers
So much stuff, in fact, that it becomes difficult to determine the true purpose of the blog as the real stuff, the content, gets swamped by all the extraneous material.
I think a blog is a an expression of the person. Why not de-clutter your blog and let the person shine through?
One of the recurring themes of this blogs is going to be about productivity tools. What I find useful and why and what I don’t use and why. For me productivity is part tool and part method – tools are great but you’ve gotta know how to use them!
So what’s in the tool box this week? One of my favorites is Google Reader. I’ve tried a few feed readers over the last couple of years including:
OK, not a huge list, I’ll give you that. However none of these readers have inspired me enough to persist with feed reading like Google Reader has.
What do I like about it? One of its big pluses is that it’s right there in my browser – no need to launch another application. Also its simplicity of design and execution have made it very user friendly (to this user at any rate).
So that’s my number one tool for the moment and using it I’m discovering a huge amount about productivity, happiness and getting things done. If you think Google Reader sucks or if you have a strong leaning in another direction then share your preferences here.
This posting is about 2 weeks overdue; but as I didn’t have a blog 2 weeks ago you’ll have to excuse the lateness of this report. However I’m posting it because it was the ShareIT event arranged by Damien Mulley that inspired me to start this blog.
The ShareIT day at UCC was aimed at people interested in starting a business in the IT industry; but really the presentations could apply to virtually any start-up. You can find full details of the presenters and their material on Damien’s site so I’ll not repeat that here. However I will say that one of the points that most of the presenters put across was the importance of blogging to increase your (my) presence on the web. So here we are!
There’s to be another ShareIT day in Dublin on Saturday 28th April. Like the Cork date the day will be free of charge (don’t make me out to be a liar here Damien) and will be fantastic value to anyone with even half an notion that they might want to set up a business for themselves.
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