This was a guest blog for Gordie Rogers at Lifestyle Design For You
The smallest thing can change your life. The slightest tilt of an axis can completely change your orbit. Like getting a Gmail account, for example. I was fortunate to get one back in the early days when Gmail was in early beta and you didn’t get several trigabytes of storage but you did get access to Google Docs. Suddenly all my documents and spreadsheets were available from wherever there was a computer – work, my brother-in-law’s house, the local café through a laptop.
You may consider Google to be the evil empire but for millions it opened up what for many has become a major lifestyle change through the growth of cloud computing. Other developers saw what Google had achieved and thought “what else can be transferred from the desktop to the cloud?”
By going online you can now maintain your finances through Mint, share files with colleagues through Dropbox and Sugarsync and collaborate on projects using WizeHive and DeskAway. Flickr allows you to show your photographs to friends and family. You can stream music through Spotify and you can backup your entire online life through Mozy or Cloudberry.
For someone who wants to change their life, the way they work and the way they socialise the problem now is not “how can I use technology to change my life” but deciding which technology or service to use. Not only is there a growing number of great looking and functional packages out there but you have to decide which one has the legs to last the distance. There is no point in looking at some searing supernova of a package if it burns out just as quickly taking your precious data with it!
Cloud computing liberates you from being surgically attached to your desktop PC. Those of a poetic nature can equate it with a bird being freed from a cage and you are only limited as to what you can achieve by your imagination. As far as cloud computing is concerned we are getting close to saying The Answer Is yes – What Is The Question?
I suspect that it is possible for a person to live their life totally online – email, linking your life to others via something like Google Calendar and Tungle, there’s instant messaging for typed conversations, Skype for voice over Internet protocol chats, you can use email shopping so your local supermarket delivers the week’s grocery shop, Facebook for keeping up with friends, Twitter for instant gratification, more in depth participation through online fora … you see where I am going.
So, if you want to redesign your life you need to do a life audit, see what aspects of your personal and professional life has blockages, or areas of dissatisfaction or could do with some sprucing up; map these and put them into categories such as organisation, communication, collaboration, writing, researching, drinking ( that was a joke btw) and then chart where you are and what you want to achieve. The gaps in-between can be filled by the technologies and services that will help you achieve your aims.
If you are in conventional 9-5 employment there are a growing number of factors that give strength to the argument for home or teleworking part of the week. Transport costs, wasted time travelling and, more recently, global warming and the much touted carbon footprint reduction are very valid reasons not to travel to the office five days a week. Also, if more people worked from home a company could instigate a hot desking policy and reduce costs through shrinking the amount of square footage of office space they need. Remote access to corporate servers, Intranets and Extranets is now standard.
If you are self employed or part of a flexible virtual group then things are even easier. You can schedule meetings, web conferences, telephone conferences or whatever by using Tungle which syncs with Google Docs and – cough – Microsoft Outlook and you can work with people who do not have a Tungle account. You can manage projects using DeskAway, Wizehive or 5pm and keep track of what partners or sub contractors are up to. You can use Google or MSN to hold video conferences or there are a number of free or inexpensive web-based video conferencing services out there.
If you want to get yourself organised the excellent Lifehacker site carried a post on the best online Getting Things Done service but you can also check out Vitalist and SimpleGTD.
As you would expect there is a phenomenal amount of self development stuff out there on the net ranging from yoga to drinking your own urine , but you will have to research that yourself as there are some things I am not prepared to investigate on your behalf!
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