What are your most effective strategies for managing your time and helping your colleagues and employees to manage theirs? If this is something you haven't really thought about in terms of revising your work tactics for improved efficiency, it might just be because you don't have a reliable way to track the time devoted to various tasks and projects on given days. After all, variables like unexpected calls, meetings, minor emergencies, and other distractions make it difficult to gauge how much time a particular task takes up. Why fixate on watching a clock when a nice piece of freeware like Grindstone will do it for your workplace?
Read the rest of this blog post

How do you get your days off to productive start? Getting up when we aim to instead of hitting the Snooze button five times is usually a good beginning, but the temptation to grab another ten minutes of rest can be strong when work or personal responsibilities have us stretched particularly thin. What's worse is that those additional Z's often don't make us feel that more rested, even when we get them by accidentally disabling our alarm clocks and oversleeping (it's okay, we all do it), because that piercing sound jolts us awake unnaturally. Funny how a free mobile app like Alarm Clock Xtreme beat the conventional nightstand clocks to a solution for this.
Read the rest of this blog post

How often is the quality of a photo you take on your mobile beneath your expectations? Granted, mobile cameras have come a long way in the just a few years since they were a coveted novelty, but all too often yours may fail to capture the level of detail for which you'd hoped. There may also be times when you find yourself wishing you had some of the same effects and enhancement capabilities available on a PC-based photo editing program. Well, with PicsArt Photo Studio you have exactly this in the palm of your hand. Don't worry, you don't have to be a Los Angeles website design company to afford this. It is indeed for Free Friday.
Read the rest of this blog post

How savvy is your Windows troubleshooting? While its PC's are certainly efficient, long-lasting, and user-friendly, they are vulnerable to viruses, crashes, and freezes which, as I'm sure many of you have experienced firsthand, tend to occur at the most inopportune times. Also, solving severe issues often involves reformatting and reinstalling your hard drive, and being forced to purge your computer of all your files. If you want a great tool for intercepting common PC issues before they snowball and sabotage your work or creative pursuits, look into the Windows Repair Tool (WRT) offered through Tweaking.com
Read the rest of this blog post

How do you convey an idea when words don't quite get the point across? You might use one or more of the handy doodling or illustration apps we've highlighted in previous blog posts, or you might turn to a convenient and obvious resource: Google Images. The issue with the latter solution is that many of the images that come up are not within the public domain, nor is Creative Commons license an option. This can be quite a nuisance if you are unable to generate your own images or pay to use copyrighted ones but you need visual aid in a pinch, unless you have CCFinder.
Read the rest of this blog post