As the outcry over Google Buzz's privacy has shown us, it's smart to explore settings in Gmail, along with other places you're sharing data with the search giant.

In my years in college and in the work force, I haven’t heard many people say that they enjoy paperwork. Sometimes it’s time consuming, rather boring and potentially messy.

EchoSign is a product designed to help eliminate physical paper trails. Keeping track of several different documents from the same transaction can be frustrating, especially if you want to work in a paperless environment. For those that prefer to keep the paper trail organized in computer files instead of physical files, EchoSign would be a great help.

(In this series of posts, we are examining ways to better manage our time.)

The Order of Tasks

There is a survival simulation where you are trapped in a cave.  There is a single ladder going to the surface that can only hold one person at a time.  There are two other individuals with you.  One is younger than you and can climb faster.  The other is older than you and can climb slower.  Your job is to  decide the order that people should leave the cave–oh I forgot to mention there is water rising and if you don’t do it in the correct order, someone will drown.

It is much easier to buy exercise equipment than to use it to get into shape.  I’m taking advantage of that right now by creating a home gym of used equipment for about 1/3rd the cost of new. Exercise equipment isn’t the only thing that is easier to buy than to really use.

Brett Kelly has a post on four ways to create a 25 hour day. And they don’t involve doing any weird things with lights or living in a cave.

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Throughout the past few years, open source applications have been rapidly increasing in popularity. Venerable products such as Firefox, Thunderbird and Linux are widely used by the public, and Firefox, especially, has become a success. A group of developers called OSAF (Open Source Applications Foundation) has created a personal information management product called Chandler. Chandler is based on some of the principles of GTD, much like OmniFocus. However, Chandler also shares some characteristics with Evernote, such as the fact that both products have a web version and desktop version that sync with each other, providing automatic back-up.

Evernote gives whole new meaning to the word “synchronized.” This software uses technology to help users organize various types of information from several different sources into one, central, web-based location. The product also allows users to clip web pages and archive them for later reference, store screen shots, photos and text notes, all within a customizable storage system. Evernote will also organize things for you by the date a note or other document was created.