Everybody thinks that there is one piece of productivity advice that is going to magically help them to stay focused. That this one thing, once adopted, will transform their work day into the model of efficiency. Here at Cloud Coach, I specialize in helping people get out from under the crushing blow of their email inboxes by setting up automated systems for dealing with email. I also do a lot of work with business clients on […]

Here’s the scenario: you started a blog about year ago using the free service, blogger. You’ve posted weekly for a year, gotten great comments from your readers, and are really starting to get the hang of it. The only problem? Everyone’s telling you that you need to switch to WordPress. I’ve worked with surprising number of clients in this exact situation. Whether or not they switch to WordPress is entirely dependent on their needs. If you […]

Ah, passwords. I’ve written about you before, but since that time so much has happened. Specifically, big companies like Google, Facebook and now Apple, have started offering 2-step authentication. What is 2-step authentication, anyway? You may hear it referred to as two factor authentication, verification, etc, but it’s all pretty similar. The basic idea is that in addition to your password, you have to type in a randomly generated number– usually by an app on […]

I visited my grandmother a few weekends ago. While I was in Scottsdale, I helped her with a variety of technology things that needed fixing. Perhaps you are the defacto tech support person for a friend or relative, and can relate. One of the toughest things about working with her has been that she does not retain the things that you show her.  I liken it to my experience going to Hebrew school growing up. […]

I, like many, am constantly searching for the perfect blend of to-do list meets productivity system, meets time management. I’m happy to report that I’ve finally concocted a system that works. Here’s the recipe for my personal productivity cocktail: That’s SelfControl… the application I’ve given up on the idea that my paultry lizard-brain can resist the temptations of the internet whilst trying to get meaningful work done. So now I do the equivalent of chaining myself […]

I was reading Sarah’s excellent blog post about finding your own way through mailing list freebies, and I got to thinking: This is something I help people with… a lot.  For some reason, the mechanics of how everything flows together– from collecting an email address to sending the free giveaway– escapes most of us. Today, I’m going to share the way that I recommend handling email freebies. I’ll be using Aweber as my example, but the technique […]

The fact that Gmail has an amazing search function isn’t always the best thing. Sometimes this amazing search can get downright annoying. Here’s the problem. One of the original unique things about Gmail was that you had this Archive button. When you archived a message, it was whisked out of your inbox but would still be somewhere. That way it would show up in search results. Gmail’s motto was “never delete another email”.  To a […]

I considered calling this post Google Giveth and Google Taketh Away. On December 7th, 2012, Google Apps Free users around the world received the following “Google Apps customer notice”: What? Google Apps isn’t free anymore!? To be honest, I was pretty pissed. Google Apps Free was really only useful for tiny businesses (up to 7 employees), because that’s maximum number of accounts you could have. My hunch is that most free users only had one or […]