Photography: firewarrior

If only every dream came true, every deadline was met and every goal achieved. In practice, it just doesn’t work that way. Plans are often left half-finished, goals never seem to get closer and as for deadlines… well, if a life really was on the line, they’d never get broken. Fortunately for all of us, a life never is.

There are all sorts of ways to increase the chances that you’ll make your deadlines and your goals, and that’s the way it should be. What works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another. Here are 42 different ways. Pick the ones that work for you:

1. Get Things Done
Not our cup of tea (for all these reasons) but David Allen’s GTD system works for some people. If you’re one of them, we think you’re strange… but there’s nothing wrong with that.

2. The Printable CEO
David Seah’s Printable CEO system turns work into a game that gives scores for completing tasks. It’s easier than GTD and a lot more fun.

3. Procrastinate
Work has a habit of expanding to fill the time available. Wait until there’s less time and you might just find that you’re getting more done.

4. Delegate
You don’t have to do everything yourself. Another way to make sure that you do what you need to is to call in help. It’s not as scary as it sounds.

5. Assassinate your Irrelevant Goals
There are important goals and there are goals you can live without achieving. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Just don’t do them.

6. Separate the Soft Deadlines from the Hard Deadlines
There are deadlines that absolutely have to be met, and there are deadlines that you probably should meet. Know where you can compromise and when you have to sacrifice.

7. Plan the Future
For some people spontaneity works. For others, each step has to be laid out long in advance. Know whether you need to just get on with it — or get on with just thinking about it.

8. Don’t Procrastinate
Yes, yes… we said you should procrastinate. But we also said different methods work for different people. Procrastination can create the stress that gets things done but if it means things never get done for you, you need to think again — or rather stop thinking and do it.

9. Work a 4-Hour Week
Timothy Ferriss swears you can achieve everything you want working just four hours a week by doing what you want now. For most of us, working four hours a week is a goal in itself.

10. Drop the Self-Help Books
Reading books like Timothy Ferriss’ and David Allen’s are often replacements for taking action. Unless your goal is to read lots of books, you might be better off tossing the volumes and doing what you need to do.

11. Check your Goals
There’s a difference between a goal and a dream. You have to know your goals before you can achieve them but you also have to know which goals are achievable.

12. Know Why you’re Doing It
Divorce courts are filled with couples who just drifted into marriage and offices are filled with employees going through the motions without knowing — or caring — why they’re doing it. Look at the big picture and you might feel more inclined to reach it.

13. Focus on the Reward
That big picture is likely to include the benefits of reaching your goal. Some people find the benefits — whether that’s financial freedom, a bigger house or just a sense of achievement — a more powerful motivator than the achievement itself.

14. Correctly Estimate the Time you Need…
One reason that deadlines get missed is very simple: the work takes longer than you expect. Get the timing right and you’ll have a better chance of getting the work done in time.

15. …Then Take off 10 Percent
And another reason is that you’ve given it too much time. If you’re one of those people who works best under stress, then once you’ve decided how much time you need, reduce it. The fear will keep you focused.

16. Share your Goals
Peer pressure can be a powerful motivator too. Tell your friends what you plan to do and if you don’t stay on track, you’ll have to admit your failure when they ask how you’re doing. Shame works too.

17. Keep your Goals Positive
Goals can be negative (“I’m going to kick this stinking job!”) or they can be positive (“I’m going to be my own boss…”). Positive goals tend to be easier to reach than negative ones.

18. Break your Goals into Milestone-Sized Chunks
When a goal takes a long time to achieve, it’s hard to stay enthusiastic throughout the journey. Aiming to write a novel one chapter at a time or achieve 100 sales before thinking of your 1000th can keep you moving forward a little at a time.

19. Take it One Day at a Time
Or a day at a time. You can think of each day as a container that you have to fill with valuable completed tasks. Each day then becomes a new challenge and each completed challenge moves you one step closer to your ultimate goal.

20. Build a Routine
The best way to use this approach is to create a daily routine. When completing steps towards your goals becomes a thing of habit, you can’t help but reach them.

21. Build your Day Around your Most Important Task
Each day though is going to include a number of mini-tasks and sometimes you’ll find that some of them don’t get done. Make sure that time for the most important task is set in stone and build the rest of the day around it.

22. Do Tasks that Make a Difference
You might find that it helps too to occasionally complete tasks that make a real difference. A software programmer, for example, might have a lot of coding too but being able to complete sections of the program and play with it while he works can help to keep him motivated.

23. Do a Variety of Tasks
And when you’re doing a lot of tasks to reach your final goal, try to mix up the activity. Boredom is a pretty effective deadline- and goal-killer.

24. Use Post-it Notes
Yes, they’re old fashioned and you’ll probably need to get a bigger computer screen if you want to see what you’re doing, but writing what you have to do and sticking them where you can’t miss them can be a good way of keeping what you need to do on your mind.

25. Get Physical… with your Reward Symbols
Step into a top salesman’s office and you can expect see an overworked telephone and an expensive suit. But don’t be surprised if you also spot a toy Ferrari or mini Lamborghini on the desk. Salespeople often use physical symbols to motivate them to reach their sales goals. It might work for you too.

26. Make it Matter
Toy cars are nice… if you’re in sales. A better way to get motivated though is to have a goal whose results matter. It’s good to be rich; it’s better to be a philanthropist.

27. Get Organized
It sounds so fundamental and yet so many people don’t do it. Their desks are a mess, their papers are in chaos and their goals… well, they know they put them somewhere. Put everything in its place and it will be easier to find what you need — and what you need to do.

28. Get Busy
Nothing kills achievement faster than lethargy. Get in the habit of taking action and you’ll find that the momentum alone can take you far.

29. Get the Equipment you Need
That old saw about the right tools for the right job might have been written for carpenters but it applies to everyone. Whether you’re building a website, writing a screenplay or creating a new version of the Web, take the risk — invest in the right tools.

30. Get the Friends you Need
All your friends should be supportive when you tell them what you’re planning to do, but some of your friends should be able to help you too. They can supply information, expertise and even a lending hand. And if they can’t, ask if they can supply friends who can.

31. Network Upwards
One method that people have find helpful when it comes to achieving their goals is to hang out with people who have already achieved theirs. When you really have to justify your position, you will.

32. Join Groups
Support groups aren’t just for people trying to ditch the bottle or steer clear of the roulette wheel. They can also be good for anyone engaged in a long-term project or hoping to reach a different goal. There are plenty of writers’ groups and artists’ studios. If a group doesn’t exist for your field, maybe you should start one.

33. Build a Team
You could even go so far as to build a team to help you reach your goal. No one said you have to reach your goal alone.

34. Do the Research
Yes, it’s all part of basic preparation and no less important for all that. Careful research doesn’t just give you the right information though. It can also give you new ideas as you discover tools and details you would never have thought of.

35. Know What you Need to Know
“Research” can often be a euphemism for procrastination. Effective research starts before you head to the library or open the browser. It begins by knowing what you need to know and keeping your search well-focused.

36. Understand the Sacrifice
Gaining something often means giving something up. That could be a job you hate, but it could also be money or time with the family. Knowing what you have to sacrifice to achieve your goals is part of the preparation?

37. Enjoy the Process
Part of that sacrifice may be coping with the difficulty of actually doing what it takes to reach your goal. Creating a top-selling computer game might be fun; writing the code that governs the physics engine could be as exciting as counting matchsticks. If you can find a way to make the actual creation process enjoyable, you’ll make your goal-getting fun.

38. Ask your Boss What it Will Take
Not all achievements are up to you. If your goal is to move up within your company, make sure you know exactly what that will take. Ask the person who makes the decisions — and set yourself deadlines to meet those demands.

39. Be Nice — you’ll Get Help
Getting where you want to go and rushing to get what you want done in time can mean shoving competitors out of the way and thinking of number one first. There’s nothing wrong with that. But you can — and should — do it with a smile. At some point, you will need help. You’ll be more likely to get it if people like you.

40. Know When to Give up
No, we’re not being defeatist. The path to a goal isn’t always straight. Sometimes you can get lost and find yourself facing a dead-end. The important thing then is to know how to recognize it and turn around before you burn up your energy for nothing.

41. Know What to Do Next
All of these methods should help you to reach the goal that’s foremost in your mind. But things never stop there. Know what you want to do next and you’ll understand that achieving that goal is just one small step forward.

42. Do What Works for you
And finally, you can untangle these contradictory systems — and everyone else’s — by picking and choosing the approaches that work for you. Or better still, create your own.

Now there’s a goal…

There’s a problem with owning stylish gadgets… everyone wants one. With Apple selling iPods of every kind by the truckload, that iconic white front and silver back can now be seen everywhere from high school playgrounds to the highlands of Tibet.

Some Apple fans then have taken a brave step. They’ve customized their covers to create a whole new look that makes their music player stand out from the crowd. This is what they’ve done and what others are offering to do for them too.

Xexoo’s Golden iPods

For the music lover who has everything but taste, Xexoo will replace your iPod cover with 18 carat gold and even embed 700 small diamonds into the front. If you’re not into diamonds, you can just go for the gold or ask for a customized version, perhaps with rubies, sapphires and a hint of polonium if you’ve got the contacts.

Oddly, most of the examples show pimped Shuffles. Did they think their customers couldn’t afford the 60GB versions?

Xexoo’s site doesn’t quote the price of their pimping, but if you have to ask….

DIY Goldplating

Of course, if you want to save cash but still look like you have more money than a rap star and slightly less sense, you could just do the pimping yourself.

This iBling was created by Daz and submitted to Pimpyaplayer.com, a tongue-in-cheek site that explains how to destroy Jonathan Ive’s fine work. The picture’s are pitifully small but the text will make you laugh.

Scott Lawrence’s iPod Arcade

Scott Lawrence seems to spend an awful lot of time breaking into all sorts of gadgets to make them do clever things that they were never designed to do. One of those is installing Linux onto his iPod, then running MAME, which emulates arcade games like Pacman.

And just to make the point, he then built a little arcade cabinet to fit it in.

The Bulletproof iPod

After a Japanese iPod owner saw his machine crushed on the Japanese metro, he took precautions with his next model… and armor-plated it. This version weighs in at 446 grams and comes with a 5mm aluminum A5052 shell that could apparently stop a 0.22 bullet.

Useful if people really don’t like the bass leaking from your earphones.

Gelaskins Give Designer Wrapping

Making an armor-plated iPod is hard work. It’s much easier to buy a print from Gelaskins. They offer a wide and very impressive range of vinyl prints designed to stick to your iPod. The prints available range from fifties comic book art to Escher sketches and Impressionist paintings.

They’re all very cool and you can even buy a matching cover for your phone or laptop.

Etch Your Sketch

Gelaskin lets you peel and stick to pimp your iPod. Etchstar takes a more permanent approach. They treat the iPod’s silver back as a palette for their etchings. You can choose from their range of designs or upload your own. (Artists can even contribute their own sketches and get a — pretty mean — 10 percent royalty whenever their designs are chosen).

Not surprisingly, considering the way they’re made, the designs look very tattoo-y, but they can still be a lot of fun and include topics ranging from film and television to colleges and cartoons.

Of course, you could always just buy your iPod from one of Apple’s stores and order an engraved message. Just be sure not to choose any of the messages that Apple doesn’t like…

They’re irritating, they’re unavoidable and they’re in your inbox. Last year, spam made up 96 percent of all emails sent. According to The Economist, 70 percent of those messages were for sexual enhancers, 10 percent for counterfeit goods and 6 percent for software.

Most of that gets caught in spam filters and deleted without being read, but just occasionally, spammers produce a message that’s actually worth receiving. We searched around and pulled out these gems of mass marketing.

Classic Lit Spam
With spam filters wise to key terms and able to identify random strings of words, spammers started padding their ads with excerpts from classic — or rather, copyright-expired — literature to beat the algorithms. Books press-ganged into the cause of large organs and over-pumped stocks have included “Robinson Crusoe,” “The Three Musketeers” and “Pride and Prejudice.”

But we like this excerpt best from “The Master Key” by Frank L. Baum, author of “The Wizard of Oz” that we found here.

Your name! he demanded, sharply Robert Billings Joslyn, United States of America! Your business, Monsieur Joslyn! Rob drew the Record from his pocket and placed it upon the tableThis, sir, said he, is an electrical device that records all important events discontinue Orange stad, and then mail stop 1.200 B, followed by A rub a I wish to call your attention to a scene enacted in Paris last evening which may have an effect upon the future history of your country He opened the lid, placed the Record so that the President could see clearly, and then watched the changing expressions upon the great man’s face; first indifference, then interest, the next moment eagerness and amazement MON DIEU! he gasped; the Orleanists! Rob nodded Yes; they’ve worked up a rather pretty plot, haven’t they? The President did not reply

Phishing for Aliens
Not all spam messages are intended to sell, of course. Some hope to part suckers from their cash by offering them the opportunity to take a share of some illicit loot. Most of these “419 Scams” (named after the law in Nigeria, where most of these scams originate) are pretty dull affairs spinning a tale of trapped inheritances and blocked bribes. But this message, found here, is just out of that world altogether.

From: Frank Young <xxxxx@xxxxxx.com>
To: xxxxx@xxxxxx.com
Subject: Time travelers PLEASE HELP!!!!!!
Date: 10 Jan 2002 20:43:53 +0100

If you are a time traveler or alien disguised as human and or have the technology to travel physically through time I need your help!

My life has been severely tampered with and cursed!!

I have suffered tremendously and am now dying!

I need to be able to:

Travel back in time.

Rewind my life including my age back to 4.

Be able to remember what I know now so that I can prevent my life from being tampered with again after I go back.

I am in very great danger and need this immediately!

I am aware that there are many types of time travel, and that humans do not do well through certain types.

I need as close to temporal reversion as possible, as safely as possible. To be able to rewind the hands of time in such a way that the universe of now will cease to exist.

I know that there are some very powerful people out there with alien or government equipment capable of doing just that.

If you can help me I will pay for your teleport or trip down here, Along with hotel stay, food and all expenses. I will pay top dollar for the equipment. Proof must be provided.

Also if you are one of the very few beings with the ability to edit the universe PLEASE REPLY!!!

Only if you have this technology and can help me please send me a (SEPARATE) email to:

xxxxxx@aol.com

Please do not reply if your an evil alien!

Thanks

Spam Cartoons
One way that spammers try to beat the filters is by embedding their message as an image. The response of email clients was to stop images downloading without the recipient’s authorization. Usually, that’s a good thing, not just because it saves us from that piece of spam but also because it stops the spammers realizing that the address is live and sending us more.

Sometimes though, not downloading the spam picture can deprive of us of a naughty pleasure. This is just one of a series of crude — but funny — spam images found here.

Promises, Promises
Spammers clearly think the rest of us are stupid — or at least stupid enough to believe their promise that a bunch of herbs can turn us into male porn stars. Some promises though are just too good to be believed… like this one:

Looking for something new and innovative??

Visit http://xxxxxx.com enter your details for extensive information (your info is never sold or distributed)

It is possible that there are people dumb enough to believe that their personal details and email address will be stored safely by a spammer… but is that spammer likely to find them at Facebook’s Harvard Business School group where this message was posted?

Unique Comment Spam
It’s not just inboxes and forums that get walloped by spam though. Comments on blogs are also tempting targets for spammers who usually simply insert a link to their site. Sometimes though, the spammer will try to hide the link behind a block of text — and just sometimes, that text is worth reading, like this one, found here:

I am a keen mountain-biker, and was the proud owner of a fairly expensive mountain bike. My bike was fitted with ‘V’ brakes, which are extremely effective, though prone to squealing. My dear brother decided to have a ride on my bike one day, while I was out. He noticed the squealing as he cycled down the hill we live on, towards the invariably busy crossroads at the bottom. Being a helpful sort, he headed back home and proceeded to pour a generous amount of 3-in-1 oil onto the brakes, before once more setting off down the hill. The oil worked! The only reported squealing came from my brother, as he slammed into the side of a moving VW Beetle. To this day he sports an impressive scar running from his eye socket to just past his ear.

Have you found any good spam (and we mean ‘good’ spam)? Share it here.

It sounds either horribly confusing or wonderfully psychedelic. Synesthesia is the ability to hear in color, taste words or imagine numbers as shapes.

The condition comes in a variety of different forms, with the most common linking numbers or days of the week with a color. “Tuesday” might be red, for example; “3” could always look green. Other synesthetes might associate low musical notes with dark colors and higher notes with light tones, or they might taste chocolate every time someone says “table.”

The condition could affect as many as one person in 23 — more if the level of synesthesia is scaled rather than a condition that someone either has or doesn’t.

Interestingly, synesthesia has also been linked to creativity. Synesthetes, it’s believed, may be better able to create associations that can lead to harmonious musical composition or clever wordplay.

So can synesthesia improve your creativity, even if your only experience of the condition is seeing Mondays as black and the figures in your bank account as red?

Here are nine ways to use synesthesia to boost your creative thinking.

1. Mindmap
If we are all synesthetic to some degree, then mindmapping might be a way to release your synesthetic potential. You can create your map on paper or electronically (Mindjet provides a free trial of its mindmapping software) but the idea should always be to use different colors and let the map form its own shape.

Both the colors and the shapes might enable your mind to form associations, sparking new ideas and creating original thoughts.

2. Listen to music
Mindmapping can be tricky, especially if you’ve never done it before. Listening to music is very easy. Many people associate musical tones with color, and composers aim to create images with their music. Relaxing to music then — especially instrumental music — should set those associations flowing.

3. Play with numbers
Number form synesthetes automatically arrange streams of numbers in shapes. One to 12, for example, might appear as a clock face while 20 to 30 could form an arc stretching from right to left. Programmers struggling with algorithms then might find it helps to break away from the restrictions of code lines and arrange the figures they have on a piece of paper. The empty spaces might suggest their own missing numbers.

4. Mix sounds with icons
If sound and color can be associated, and if we know that people “see” low notes as dark and high notes as light, then designers might want to bear those links in mind when choosing the click sound for a colored icon. Synesthesia might help them to create designs with less user dissonance and a closer match between vision and sound.

5. Match text with shapes
In one of the most compelling synesthesia experiments, test subjects consistently associated the word “kika” with a sharp-pointed shape and the word “bouba”with a rounded shape. That was true of non-synesthetes too.

Again, designers could use that knowledge to ensure that the design they created matched the sound of the text on the page. A page with plenty of hard sounds when read aloud, for example (a synesthetic metaphor), might have sharp corners while a page with softer sounds could use rounded edges.

6. Look at a color sheet
In the most common form of synesthesia, numbers or letters are each associated with a different color. It’s possible then that the opposite is true and that colors bring particular numbers and letters to mind. If that’s the case then glancing at a color chart — even the font color options in a word processor — might steer your subconscious towards the start of the next word in an idea or number in a chain as it focuses on a color that appeals. At the very least, it might help you to understand whether your mood is dark or bright — and even affect it.

7. Trust your instinct
The value of synesthesia is in its unusual free associations. So let those associations come. Even if your own level of synesthesia is very low, it’s possible that much of what we call “instinct” is derived at least in part from the associations we make naturally when we look at a word or hear a tune. Instead of dismissing those associations, try to identify them, trust them… and use them.

8. Show what you feel
One way to use them is to depict them in art. Synesthetic painters have tried to portray what they see when they hear music, and composers have attempted to reflect colors in sounds. Whether you’re writing, painting or composing, synesthesia — or an imitation of it — can add a whole new sense to your work.

9. Fake it!
Clearly, all of these ideas are going to be much easier if you actually are synesthetic. If you’re not though, you can pretend you are. There’s no shortage of research material on synesthesia explaining exactly how synesthetes perceive the world. Even if you can’t taste words or hear colors, you can still use that knowledge to cook up a tasty poem or compose a Technicolor tune.

What is it about Facebook that brings out the crazy in people? If they’re not leaving strange videos on Fun Walls, adding apps that would barely thrill a three-year old or making friends with people they’ll never meet and never want to meet just to make sure they don’t look like the schoolyard nerd no one loved, they’re creating and joining groups with the weirdest names.

Here are seven of the strangest groups we found on Facebook:

Physics Doesn’t Exist, It’s All Gnomes

Photography: B_Tal
This group is worth seeing just to read the (long) intro page. According to the group’s 23,347 members

“all the main physics principles can be explained away by the existence of tiny gnomes.”

So heat is gnomes rubbing each other; kettles boil when gnomes fart in the water; and computers are tiny gnomes who sit at desks inside your machine. But you knew that last one didn’t you?

Join the gnome fun here.

Kids Who Hid in Dep’t Store Clothing Racks while their Mom Was Shopping

Clothes… quick, hide!

The fact that with 157,114 members this is the one of the most popular groups on Facebook tells us two things: that hiding in clothes racks is a popular activity for children; and that people on Facebook will join anything.

It also tells us that spammers will strike anywhere too. The admin had to shut down the group’s Wall because she got fed up deleting links to porn sites and because “the t-shirts being posted really had nothing to do with the group.”

She’s right, of course. T-shirts make rotten hiding places. Hide yourself here.

I Yell At Inanimate Objects

Sometimes, they yell back. Photography: what what

With just 12,274 members, you can’t help but feel this group hasn’t reached its potential. Just about every Windows user must have experienced that Nirvana moment that comes from yelling at the pop-up informing them that the program “has encountered a serious problem” and inviting them to become an unpaid member of Microsoft’s QA team.

Discussion topics in this group include the most satisfying noise to make when yelling and the strangest object members have yelled at (entries include a matador statue and cheese.)

Give this group a shout here.

If You Don’t Start Walking Faster, I Am Going To Hit You With My Backpack
Facebook started as a site for college students… and sometimes it looks like it stayed that way. This group, with just over 3,600 members, lets students who get stuck behind slow walkers rant against snail-like classmates, moving texters and other people who get in their way. It also lets them threaten slowpokes with a backpack beating.

Fortunately, the site does have advice that people can use to speed up their stroll. These include staying on the side of the sidewalk, learning to talk and walk at the same time and not blinding people with umbrellas as they pass. Or, as the organizers put it:

“The next time that happens, I swear to God I’ll put on my ski mask, hit you with my backpack, and put that umbrella where no umbrella should rightfully go.”

People who aren’t students though can skip the backpack and the brollies and head straight to the violence by joining I Secretly Want To Punch Slow Walking People In The Back Of The Head. With 701,887 members, you’ll have much more company.

You can join this group here but be quick.

Shoe Phone Appreciation Society
Who needs an iPhone when your shoe can do just as much and doesn’t make you break your contract with your current service provider? Okay, it can’t do just as much, but unlike the Jesus phone, the shoe phone does keep your foot warm, doesn’t need charging and it comes with a spare. Reception isn’t great but according to the group’s blurb, it looks just good enough to prevent the user having to talk to people they meet in the street:

“grab your shoephone and you can pretend to be deep in conversation, thus avoiding the pleasant small talk of someone you can’t stand!”

Give this group a call here.

I Think Patterns On Scantrons Are Suspicious
A group that’s really for teaching assistants and the students who feed them. It has a few neat pics of scantron patterns that turned up after tests (although it could certainly do with more), including one odd example of someone who only chose C… and scored 0/100. It was true/false test. It takes real talent to draw a complete blank with 50/50 answers.

Interestingly, patterns on scantrons might actually be a good thing. One discussion post recounted this frightening story:

“i had a teacher that would actually make pictures out of the answers, so you could always see if you had it correct by making sure that it looked like a picture, i dont think she realized that we all knew this hahaha”

Just who’s training these teachers?

Check out the exam patterns here.

We Look So Sexy In Our Labcoats, We Need Safety Goggles… For Protection.

So sexy…

Part of the appeal of Facebook is the opportunity for like-minded people to find each other… and leave little messages. It’s unlikely that people who think lab coats are sexy would meet any other way — especially people who record the growth of the group by declaring when it’s reached the Z number of Fermium. And yet 7,852 agree that lab coats are as stylish as capes and make their wearers look like academics. Right down to the ink stain on the pocket.

People who think it’s the science not the white coat that gets the heart racing can join any number of other groups from We’re scientists AND we’re sexy to SeXy BiOmEdIcAl ScIeNtIsTs.

But if you want to join this one, pull on your lab outfit and click here.

What happens if you email some of the top web 2.0 web sites for customer service?

Who will answer first and who has the best support?

We emailed 10 different major internet websites with idiotic questions. This usually took the form of registering on the website, and then submitting a support request to ask how to register. (Yes, most of the time it was required you register before opening a ticket.) We didn’t cut anyone any slack; we threw low blows wherever we could. We even submitted questions to the wrong tech support groups wherever needed.

So, the results from WORST (longest response time) to BEST( shortest response time):

7. Facebook

Facebook comes in dead last with a response time of a whopping 1,406 minutes.

But we aren’t all complaints. Their response was far from the cookie-cutter responses customer support teams love to send out. The technician, who signs the name Lauren, spoke in clear English and was very helpful to point out that we already had a Facebook account. Thanks, Lauren.

6. CafePress

If you needed help in ordering a shirt or two, CafePress may lag just a little more than your liking. We got a response in 651 minutes (although like Facebook, it was a genuine response).

5. Amazon.com

Amazon came in at 457 minutes, as we got a response from Deepanchakaravarthy C. (Yes that is an actual name.) Although we did get a relevant response, it was a little too cookie-cutter for our liking. It was indeed helpful, however. It seemed more like a copy and paste job than the previously reviewed companies, but perhaps that is the price you pay for fast support.

4. ITunes

iTunes came in at a respectable 162 minutes. They had a very helpful response, gave a few links, and even emailed us back a day later to ensure that we solved our problem. As far as quality assurance goes, iTunes has this down well. Although, this shouldn’t be surprising; we had to search their website long and hard to find any contact information.

3. Ebay

Perhaps one of the most helpful emails we received was from eBay. And, most likely, we weren’t the only ones who asked how to register since we got the full textbook-quality tutorial on how to do so. We really couldn’t go wrong with Reggie K.’s instructions — our thanks goes out to him. What’s more impressive is that the response time came in at 118 minutes. Not bad at all.

2. vBulletin

VBulletin has some of the fastest response times on the internet. Just take a look at their homepage if you ever want proof. They even broadcast their average response time for all to see. We were impressed to see a human-made response in 16 minutes flat. And the best part is that this is usually considered a long wait on vBulletin’s terms. If you ever need to run a forum and want good support, look no further.

And the winner is ….

1. myspace

Say it isn’t so! How could one of the largest social communities on the website (which, consequently, is hated by many) have the fastest response time? We pondered this too. But coming in at 6 long minutes, we got a legit response. It seemed like a copy and paste job, but it was relevant nonetheless. This may be a fluke, perhaps, but there is no doubting the results.

Wait! Where are the other Three???

Although we would love to wait a few weeks and let you know where they stand, the remaining three web entities have yet to email us back. A full 10 days later, and we haven’t heard a single thing. So who’s part of the club? The answer may surprise you.

Yahoo, Google, and 37 Signals Tie for Worst

Life isn’t easy being a global super giant. (We’re looking at you, Google.) And we can let it slide that you can’t answer every question that passes by you within 10 days. And while we’re being generous, we’ll let Yahoo! slide as well.

But, 37signals? Yes, they are indeed a large and extensive company, but 10 days warrants an answer.

In the end, it all comes down to how bad you want support. If you’re itching for a response, you’ll generally get a quicker one by phone than by email.

And if you ever want to shoot the breeze with Google, Yahoo, or 37signals over email, prepare to do most of the talking.

Say it softly. Whisper it to your friends. David Allen’s Getting Things Done is NOT the best way to get things done.

It’s dull, it’s difficult, it’s about as satisfying as an air sandwich. And it doesn’t work.

Here are 26 reasons why you should NOT use GTD.

1. You have to read the book
The first reason is the best. To do GTD, you have to actually read the book. That’s about as much fun as hitting yourself over the head with a brick, and slightly less enlightening. It might be just 250-odd pages but it’s so badly written you’ll have to read each page three times to understand it.

2. It’s not practical
It’s hard to believe that anyone actually follows GTD to the letter. Okay, some people probably do, but lots also adjust it, tweak it and make all sorts of changes to make it actually work. If you’re going to invest that much effort into a productivity system, you may as well create your own.

3. It feels like a cult
If GTD feels like a cult, it might be because David Allen is a minister in a church called the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. The church believes that its founder, Roger Hinkins (who later changed his name to Sri John-Roger), is a Mystical Traveler who has previously appeared as Jesus, St. Francis and Abraham Lincoln. He’s the “J-R” Allen acknowledges at the beginning of the book.

4. There’s no conflict between writing and thinking
One of the big “benefits” that the book is supposed to deliver is that by writing everything down, you no longer have to think about them. But ideas and thoughts can be in two places at once. It is possible to put everything that you need to do to complete a task in your “bucket”… and still find that you’re thinking about it.

5. There’s an advantage in thinking about what you have to do
And that’s probably a good thing. What Allen dismisses as the “monkey on your shoulder” nagging you to do things is also reminding you that something needs to be done… and prompting you to figure out how to do it. Dwelling on things might be annoying but it can also prompt solutions.

6. There’s no limit to what you can write down
The first phase of the GTD workflow is to collect representations of “all the things incomplete in your world.” But where do you draw the line? And if you leave something out — such as your dream of building a company that will buy and asset-strip Microsoft — does that mean you’re giving up on it?

7. Incubation is the same as procrastination
Allen’s response to the previous reason would probably be that you write down everything and file the things that are unlikely to happen under Incubation > Someday/Maybe. In other words, you put them off.

8. “Waiting for” is procrastination
Putting something in a list called “waiting for” isn’t a way of getting things done; it’s a way of doing something later… or putting it off.

9. Deferment is the same as procrastination
“It’s likely that most of the next actions you determine for things in ‘in’ will be yours to do and will take longer than two minutes to complete,” says Allen.

Those things should be deferred, he continues. In other words, you should put those off too.

10. Delegation is procrastination
One alternative to GTD’s procrastination deferment is delegation, which sounds like a tempting way to shift responsibility… and another way to procrastinate. That’s especially true when you know the person you should delegate to is going to throw it back at you eventually anyway.

11. What if the person you delegate to isn’t using GTD?
And what if the person you delegate to hasn’t discovered the wonders of GTD? Your task will sit in their head, causing mental anguish and confusion, and never get done. What will you have achieved then?

12. Sometimes procrastination works
Again, if GTD fails to stop procrastination, maybe that’s a good thing. Important things usually give way to urgent things eventually anyway, and putting them off while keeping them in your head often means that when you do come to do them, you’ll know exactly what to do. No thanks to GTD though.

13. Trust your instinct and experience, not David Allen
If you’ve got so much on your plate that you’re struggling to keep up, there’s usually a good reason: people know that you get things done, so they give you more to do. It might be a bit of a struggle, and you might not realize you’re doing it, but it does mean that you are sorting out your work and getting through it.

14. GTD doesn’t leave room for spontaneity and creativity
It’s hard to be spontaneous and creative when you have to write down absolutely everything you were thinking of doing long before you actually get down to doing it. What if you just feel like going to a museum? Do you have to create a file first or can you go and put the tickets in the folder retroactively?

15. The world contains enough jargon
David Allen’s books contain more jargon than the average Silicon Valley café. What most people would call a “to-do” list, he calls a “next action” list. Instead of “reminders,” we have “tickler files.” Instead of “ongoing projects” we have “open loops.” And instead of English, we have something that sounds very clever but actually ranges from common sense to nonsense.

16. Just because you can do something in two minutes doesn’t mean you should
One of the tenets of GTD is that if something can be done within two minutes, it should be done now. It could be tempting then to scratch something off your list and squeeze an email into the 120 seconds David Allen allots to it. Procrastinating — and thinking about it — might produce a better missive.

17. Just because you can do something in two minutes doesn’t mean you should do it now
There are lots of things you can do in two minutes. You can boil the kettle; feed the cat; clean the keyboard. But just because something can be done quickly doesn’t mean you should do it right away. You can clean your keyboard at any time. Deadlines need to be met now.

18. David Allen can’t count to two
In fact though, the two-minute rule is flexible. According to David Allen:

“Two minutes is in fact just a guideline… you can extend the cutoff for each item to five or ten minutes.”

So which tasks should we do first?

19. There are too many GTD apps
Priacta has a list of 74 GTD-related programs ranging in price from free to $300. That’s not a good thing. It’s a sign that using GTD requires lots of help.

20. You’ll get more done with a routine
The best way to get things done is to get in the habit of doing bits of them every day until the task is completed. With GTD, you’ll just get in the habit of doing GTD.

21. You should never pay attention to anyone who tells you to brainstorm
“Brainstorming” is another piece of jargon that’s popular with self-help gurus. In English, it means “I don’t know what to tell you, so you go away and think about it for yourself.” If an author tells you to brainstorm, he should buy your book.

22. Panic focuses the mind
We’ve already pointed out that most people naturally prioritize their work by waiting till the important stuff becomes urgent, then panicking and getting on with it. If GTD works, then you’ll lose the focus that panic can bring. And if it doesn’t, why do it?

23. GTD replaces doing with planning
GTD is such a complex system that instead of thinking about what you should be doing, you’re going to be thinking about planning what you should be doing. How is that better?

24. GTD isn’t for everyone
It’s hard to believe that a system as complex and detailed as GTD is going to appeal to more than the small minority of people who like flowcharts, filing cabinets and carefully maintained inboxes. If that’s you, great. But then again…

25. GTD is only for people who don’t need it
If you are the sort of person who likes flowcharts and organized inboxes then it’s unlikely that you need an organizational system. You know how to organize things.

26. It’s really, really anal
Really, it is. If you’ve got lots to do, start with the most urgent and get on with it. Making lists, sublists and 43 folders is just far too pernickety. People will laugh at you. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Vanessa Pike-Russell

Most of the people on Flickr are a friendly sort. They’re helpful and chatty, and they usually have something nice to say about your pictures.

Most of them.

Like anywhere though, you do get the odd creep sneaking in.

Here are six true stories that should make you just a little bit scared next time you’re uploading your vacation pictures to Flickr.

Stalked by Fetishists!
Flickr has a block option that lets members stop strange people from contacting them. What it doesn’t have is a way to stop those strange people from signing up with a different username and doing it all over again.

And some of those people really are strange.

Kriegerinhummel, for example, complained in April 2007 that someone was leaving “disturbing ‘foot fetish/sexually suggestive’ comments” on her pictures and Flickrmailing her seven times a day. He wanted to be a friend, apparently.

Kiwi_Kirsch had a similar experience, but this time with a neck fetishist of all things.

Flickr, it seems, can’t block users at the IP level in case it cuts out lots of other users (on a college computer, for example). Instead, the site recommends restricting comments to friends and hitting the Report Abuse button each time it happens.

It’s not much of a solution but it is a pretty good warning against leaving too much personal information on your Flickr page.

Dead Cats Sent Through Flickr
Blocking did work for TestyCatLady in April 2007. Known for her love of cats — and for showing plenty of pictures of them in her Flickr stream — she wasn’t too pleased when someone started to send her group, Crazy Cat People, their pictures of moggies… in various stages of rigor mortis.

She deleted the dead cat lover’s images and banned them.

Staff’s response? Don’t mention the sender’s name in the Help forums but do hit the Report Abuse button.

Hacked by Spammers
TestyCatLady was lucky. It didn’t take much to drive away her creepy pest. Lisa Kettel though was left with a real fight after some horrible hacker broke into her Flickr page, placed an offensive picture then used her Flickrmail to spam other members asking for pictures of naked women.

Lisa and the hacker then battled for control of her pro account, a struggle that only ended after the hacker had deleted her photos, testimonials and contacts.

The suspicion was that he might have been using a Trojan to log Lisa’s keystrokes and track her password changes.

Spammed by Spammers
When loupiote (Old Skool) found a long list of similar, bland comments on his photos, posted by people with names like “a5pegDe64qo” and “af8da17Xmn,” he knew what was coming.

It wasn’t long before those random strings of Yahoo! usernames weren’t just telling him what great shots he’d taken. They were also recommending that he visit a certain website where presumably he could buy cheap meds, play poker or become more of a man.

The people at Flickr were pretty quick at wiping out the first set of spam messages but struggled to clear them from the comments on loupiote (Old Skool)’s sets rather than on the images themselves, and because the tests didn’t contain URLs, they kept slipping under Flickr’s filters. The messages continued to show in the Recent Activity list… and they kept coming in, filling loupiote (Old Skool)’s comment space faster than he could block or report them.

Flickr’s response?

“Each new wave teaches us something and we calibrate our proactive and reactive responses. Your patience is appreciated while we adapt to this latest wave. We hate spam as much as you do.”

Not as unpleasant as pictures of dead cats but still very annoying.

She’s Copying Me!
We’ve all heard the story of the freaky roommate who starts dressing like you, talking like you, tries to muscle in on your friends and generally freaks you out.

Kristi Bogel had that experience on Flickr.

Each time she posted a new photo, someone she knew would post an image that looked almost exactly the same.

After the fourth time her photos sparked something that was more like imitation than inspiration, she asked other Flickr members what she could do. Responses ranged from nothing through Report Abuse to “put up pictures of her boyfriend and her house.”

It could just have been a bit of a teenage tiff, but definitely not the sort of person you want to rent an apartment with.

Pedophiles on Flickr
Perhaps the scariest creeps of all on Flickr though are the people who post no photos or profile details but who have a long list of favorites… all of them featuring children.

It’s a complaint that crops up with disturbing regularity in the Flickr help forum. Citykitty, for example, describes how one user added her as a contact, only to find that his favorites consisted of a long list of images containing young boys. Flickr icon, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, had a similar complaint after finding someone had marked photos of her children as favorites… and that all his favorites were pictures of children.

Flickr responded my extending the power of the “ignore” feature to prevent blocked users from adding users’ images as faves.

Of course, none of this means that Flickr isn’t a good place to hang out and show off what you’ve been pointing your camera or your iPhone at. But it does mean you have to be just a bit careful if you don’t want to be stalked, hacked, harassed or creeped out.

mugley

With just about every hosting service now promising 99 percent uptime, you’ve just got to wonder what happens during the other 1 percent.

Here are some of the freakiest things that have brought down web hosts.

How Moving Vehicles can obliterate your Website
Rackspace is a very popular company specializing in datacenter operation. They host some of the most popular websites on the internet. They offer the famous 100% uptime guarantee, which has attracted website giants such as Motorola, 37 Signals, and Laughing Squid. Rackspace was even voted as one of the most reliable hosts- year after year.

What Rackspace can’t stop is the force of a moving truck power-driving into a transformer. As the transformer blew, so did the electricity. Rackspace was apparently caught at a bad time, as the back-up generators were lacking the proper cooling needed to sustain power. The back-up generators were eventually pulled offline, and a slew of websites came down with them.

Web hosts can protect against denial of service attacks, hacking attempts, and common security vulnerabilities- but they just can’t compare to the force of a moving truck.

Mother Nature Rears her Ugly Head
A truck isn’t that bad. If we were determined enough, we could surround our datacenter and necessary utilities with a 30 foot wall of cement. We would still be vulnerable to the fierce force of Mother Nature, who took out the ServerBeach datacenter in Virginia.

In this case, a power outage caused the ServerBeach datacenter to go into generator mode- much like Rackspace. And also like Rackspace, ServerBeach had problems with getting their air conditioning units online. As the temperatures quickly rose in the datacenter, the entire supply of servers had to be immediately shut down to save everything.

The utility company did manage to bring electricity back online- which led us all to question: do any of the air conditioning units in datacenters actually work?

Things Tend to Catch Fire

It probably wasn’t possible mentioning web hosting nightmares without also mentioning Dreamhost. Dreamhost is rather famous for multiple outages, covering a broad spectrum of reasons. What’s more exciting than a good campfire in the datacenter?

Apparently when generators catch fire, websites start to go down. And not just a few- a good number of customers suddenly realized maybe a fire-prone datacenter isn’t the best kind to invest in. Dreamhost didn’t get any slack- negative customer feedback flooded their blog as the story was unfolding.

Who can blame them? It seems if datacenters aren’t catching fire these days, they are getting attacked by trucks or lightning storms.

A Look to the Future
If you haven’t heard, Japan is investigating alternative placement of datacenters. Their best idea yet: abandoned coal mines. Apparently placing a datacenter in an abandoned coal mine is estimated to save millions in electricity costs annually.

We’re all a fan of saving electricity- and even a fan of keeping datacenters away from truck drivers. But we aren’t so keen on the idea of what’s next. Think about it; the next time your website goes down could be because of a coal mine collapse. Or even perhaps a bit of underground pollution clogged the ventilation system in the server room- either way it sounds like recovery time will be a little longer than normal.

Who’s Safe?
No one is safe from being exterminated from the internet. If major corporations can fall to the vehicle accident, thunderstorm, fire, mine collapse- you name it- then you won’t fare any better. Your best bet? Follow Google’s example and invest in as many datacenter locations as needed- after all, how many coincidences can happen across multiple locations spanning the entire world?

And even then, we are all subject to the occasional conspiracy.