Simplicity Redux

I want to do a lot of things

I am not getting any (or many) of them done

I am getting distracted by far too much!

It is a simple fact of my life that I need to simplify in order to achieve my goals. I have taken a step back and begun to look at all the stuff around me that is causing distraction. I have divided things into digital and physical for ease and the first area to come under the spotlight is digital.

There is so much stuff that is cluttering up my digital productivity. This includes hardware, software and websites. Being an early adopter in most areas and in particular software and websites, I quickly clutter up the gigabytes, locally and in the cloud. Time to change.

So a plan of action:

  • Remove all plugins from Firefox
  • Add any plugins I may actually use
  • Decide what software I actually use, discard the rest
    • I have far too much that I think I may use, or that is used as one part of a process and could be skipped
  • Decide what websites are worth using and set up any auto posting that is needed
    • Web 2.0 is fun, but I only regularly use a few
    • Use ping to cross post
    • Delete accounts from any sites I don’t use
  • Organise my feed reader
    • Choose a time to access this and only access at that time – good posts will wait there
  • Organise and strip down my bookmarks
    • Far too many here that I never use, and they just clutter and drain mental energy

There will probably be a lot more I need to do. The hardware issue is tied into what software and websites I use so I need to sort those out first, and looking at the list above that may take some time. But item one is already done, and guess what, firefox is once again a quick and pleasant browser.

Bookmark and Share

Firefox tell Flock to Flock Off?

Now this is an interesting piece of news. Flock is a browser that uses Firefox as the underlying code. What Flock adds is lots of social networking bits and pieces on top of the browser platform, such as the ability to post to blogs and to do things with your pictures via Flickr and Photobucket. I have been using it on and off, the main reason for not using it is that it is still very much beta software, although the version I currently have is very stable and works a treat – therefore using it is becoming more frequent.

However, the guys at Mozilla, who put Firefox together seem to be wanting to create their own version of Flock. I have a couple of questions/ points relating to this.

  1. Why create a new ‘browser’ when the functionality can be obtained by using plug-ins. This is the best thing about Firefox, if you want some added functionality simply find the plug-in that offers it, there are plenty out there
  2. The same question should, and has, been levelled at Flock
  3. The market is getting crowded
  4. Is the winner from all of this diversity IE7?

For more info, and better tech info and understanding take the following link.

http://mashable.com/2007/04/03/mozilla-labs-the-coop/

Bookmark and Share