My productivity lapses don’t come from Facebook. My problem is a combination of world news sites and Twitter. Using RescueTime, an online time management tool, I’ve named two productivity goals for myself. One goal sets my unproductive time at less than 90 minutes per day. The other sets my highly productive time at greater than five hours per day.
Apple Inc. said Thursday it will let iPhone application developers offer their users the option to buy additional content or features within a free app on its App Store.
App developers said they received an e-mail notice from Apple informing them that the in-app purchase feature was now available for free apps and that it would “simplify your development by creating a single version of your app that uses in App Purchase to unlock additional functionality, eliminating the need to create Lite versions of your app.”
Microsoft Corp. and Nokia Corp., once bitter rivals in the mobile market, formed an alliance to strengthen their positions at a time when other competitors have become far more troublesome.
The deal between the two companies will bring Microsoft’s Office programs and other software to Nokia phones. It is aimed squarely at the professional market that Research In Motion Ltd. targets so successfully with its BlackBerry line of smart phones.
Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)
In business, “online collaboration” suggests complex jobs getting done more efficiently by teams of people wherever they are located. The productivity gains–which are substantial, albeit often hard to measure–have drawn lots of companies into the market. As the market matures, we will see consolidation. And we’re interested in seeing what form this consolidation will take.
The question is not whether the nation is overwhelmed with checking email and RSS feeds, answering calls, exchanging instant messages, surfing the Web, watching YouTube and playing that one game where you try to organize the falling blocks. The question is how much money all of this costs.
Four weeks ago I had 5,250 emails in my inbox. Today? 10.
What’s the difference? I’ve been on lots of airplanes in the past month. Why is that important? Because in airplanes there’s no Internet. Nothing to distract you. I find I can answer about 10x more email in a plane than I can on the ground when the Internet is there to distract me.
That taught me an important lesson.
Want to get something done? Turn off Twitter. Turn off Facebook. Turn off blog comments. Turn off FriendFeed. Turn off Flickr. Turn off YouTube. Turn off Dave Winer’s blog and Huffington Post. Turn off TechMeme.
Turn off the distractions.
In the early days of the Web, going online was heralded as a great way to connect with other people who have had experiences similar to your own. The Web was a place to get answers, advice and community no longer limited by the geographic location of the individuals you connected with.
While all of that remains true today, the ubiquity of the Internet, the ease of publishing and the rise of online advertising has lead to the emergence of new kinds of Web sites: productivity, how-to and advice/Q&A sites that broadcast, scale and monetize that kind of information.
There was a lot of discussion about my previous posts. My point is that the Internet is a stable platform. It’s a utility. It’s evolved to the point where you can count on it and develop applications for it without much fear that it’s going to change.
What confirms my point is that with all the talk of a possible or existing recession, not a single mention is ever made about how increases in productivity from technology will pull us through. That is counter to the recessions of the past 25 years. Whether it was the early ’80s, the ’90s or even the post-bubble, economists and others pointed to technology as a catalyst to productivity that would help pull us out of our economic doldrums.
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