Jon Arnold

By Jon: Recently I became incredibly frustrated because I'm using multiple computers and a cell phone to stay in sync with my life. However, those devices weren't syncing with each other, leaving me forced to check in on multiple machines and lose productivity. I found a solution with Plaxo. Signup for a free account and you'll be offered a plethora of feeds and apps to sync with. Plaxo will manage and merge your various and sundry contact lists into one manageable (and easily sync-able) list. Here's a quick list of some of the contact accounts Plaxo works with:

• Google Apps (Calendar and Gmail)
• Microsoft Outlook
• Apple's Mail.app
• Yahoo!
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Windows Mail /Windows Live (Hotmail)
• Windows Mobile
• LinkedIn

For mail syncing, you'll need to download and launch the Plaxo app, which will live sync your contacts and calendar. This is amazing -- I can literally add a calendar item on my PC, and moments later my Mac alerts me (via Growl) that I've got a new calendar item from Plaxo. It is blazing fast. When working with contacts, Plaxo is also amazing. I receive a weekly digest from Plaxo which shows me what my contacts have been up to. Often, I'll see a new Plaxo contact in the list, letting me know that one of my friends has joined Plaxo. How cool is that? Gone are the days of inviting a friend to a new app and then waiting to connect with them. Plaxo is smart enough to know that I already know an individual and connect us right away.

by Jon: My cell phone is always on my person.  It's always in my hand, in my pocket, on my desk or in my bag, just a moment away from being in use.  This is a blessing and a curse, mostly because anyone and everyone has easy access to me 24/7.  However, the amazing apps of the internet have slowly been translating themselves to the mobile realm.   While the "m." world is incredible, there's a number of amazing applications that don't require your phone to have WAP/Web access.  You can access a myriad of valuable tools by sending a simple SMS message. Let me give you a quick overview of all the apps that reside in my Contacts folder: Email While this seems basic, it's important to know that any email address can be easily accessed via text message: just find the @ sign on your phone and off you go!  This will be important for several of the tips listed below. Blogger It's possible to craft a simple blog post using text or photo and upload it to your Blogger account in one text.  Simply visit Blogger's mobile site, go.blogger.com to set yours up.  From then on out, just send your posts to go@blogger.com and you'll be moblogging. Flickr Visit your account settings on Flickr and access the email section.  You can setup a one-click upload option by creating a unique Flickr email address.  From there, simply add the email address to your Contacts list and any photo you create can be uploaded (and tagged) right from your phone. PayPal

By Jon:Backups.  The digital age has never been more redundant than on that particular subject.  Our computing lifestyles are so heavily reliant on our data, and as such I'm more than a little paranoid about it. This walkthrough explains my home computing setup, which is altogether separate from my corporate life.  At work, everything we use is archived and saved on our network, meaning none of my data actually resides on my local hard drive.  With my personal life and side-work, I have to be more cautious. With my new MacBook purchase, I'm more nervous than ever about leaving my data floating on one highly portable machine.  At the same time, all my backup devices and methods are fallible and I just plain don't trust them.  I have multiple copies of important items and lots of automation has helped me cut back on time spent getting everything synced.  Let me run down what I use and how I do it. Backing Up I have 2 Firewire hard drives, a stack of DVDs, an online archive, and two thumb drives, all of which are setup solely to house important and needed data -- just in case. I have a work drive where my current projects reside.  Once finished with those projects, I burn a DVD (labeled and catalogued via Excel, of course) and move the project to a NAS network drive.  Once I know I don't need the data anymore, I wipe it from the NAS drive but always keep that DVD back up just in case.  This lets me shift responsibility off me and onto someone else involved in the project, but have the NAS and DVD just in case there's a problem in the near or distant future.

By Jon:10 AM, Tuesday morning. Your weekly staff meeting has just begun. Everyone's gathered around a conference table with their own little camps set up; you've got cups of coffee, bottles of water, huge notebooks, pens and pencils, pads of paper, and document after document, strewn all over the table.As your team lumbers through the agenda, the table becomes more chaotic and cluttered; a sales report is passed around, a new marketing campaign is presented and suddenly the table's drowning in 8 1/2" by 11"s.After the meeting, you return to your note-filled desk and write down a couple sticky notes and slap them on your phone. You file the documents from the meeting in a hanging file rack on your desk which bulges from the weight of a month's worth of documents. After following up on your phone notes, you spend thirty minutes updating the documents in your three-ring binder, just in case you need any updated data or decks. In your next meeting you spread all this info around the conference table, confusing those around you but allowing yourself easy access to anything you need at one glance....this is TOTALLY ridiculous behavior. I'd only accept this if a company held a "topless" meeting policy, forbidding laptops and Blackberry's from being used during meetings. Come to think of it, I don't accept that. That's a horrible policy. Laptops and Blackberry are not the problem; behavior is the problem. If people could effectively multi-task and use their laptop to bring insightful information to the meeting, then so be it. If they can't, stop holding meetings.