As you hopefully noticed when you came here to look at this post, we’ve changed the look of Geekspodcast a little bit. This layout was just very clean and caught my eye. It definitely looked like something we’d use.
Also, we updated the “About Us” section, now titled “The Geeks”. This gives you a bit more info on what makes us who we are and what you can expect to read from us. Enjoy, and send all happy feedback to Nicole@geekspodcast.com. Complaints can go to Joshua@geekspodcast.com. 
When we first started we had a couple of decent desks in our office from which to post, rant, and make poor-resolution videos, but after a while we realized it was time to SYNERGIZE! MAXIMIZE EFFICIENCY! SHIFT PARADIGMS! Alright, that’s a bit much, but we did decide as we’ve spent more and more time huddled around our Macs, searching the web and churning out new content that maybe we should invest some time and effort into making that space better. It’s ALSO why we’ve been on a bit of a hiatus the past week or so and sneakily backposting our updates again. So if you’d like to see some before, during, and after shots, check out the gallery below!
This time with good reason! Nicole and I are busy painting the office and re-arranging our workspaces and getting rid of a bunch of junk. However, I’ll be posting an update this week that shows the finished product and whatnot so bear with us while we try to finish things up!
Todo lists are a staple of personal and professional productivity. They keep us abreast of what tasks we have to perform in any given day or week and give us a plan of attack for our daily lives. However, there are many, many ToDo applications out there to choose from. I’ve seen some really great applications for managing responsibilities and I’ve seen some bad ones. But I’ve also found that if you spend too much time trying to find the perfect productivity, it can become a kind of drain that hilariously, hinders productivity!
One of the hallmarks of any geek is to find more efficient ways to accomplish tasks, but in our age of slickly styled, feature-rich productivity applications, it can become easy to get so caught up in figuring out what works for us that the search itself can steal away minutes, hours, or even days in finding what works best.
Now I’m not advocating you give up on keeping a ToDo. There are some great apps our there to be sure (Evernote, Things, and Remember The Milk come to mind). However, it’s important that if you’re going to explore the merits of some of these that you set limits for yourself. Say 20 minutes a day to try a new app, explore its feature set, and decide on whether it fits your schedule/lifestyle. Then give it a trial run and see if stands up to your demanding schedule. Try to give each one at least a week before writing it off and moving on to the next.
I’m as guilty as anyone else of this and kind of had a moment of realization this week while I was debating what I should use to track what I’m working on. Then it just kind of hit me that the important thing is that you don’t allow your quest for productivity become an outlet for you to avoid doing the things that you’d like to put off. It’d be like skipping work for a week solely to mull over a new car purchase to get you there.
We’re officially about three weeks into January 2010, and right about now is the time most of us (or maybe just me?) begin to struggle with keeping our New Years’ Resolutions. It’s pretty easy to let yourself slack on a newly formed lifestyle change, but hopefully my advice will motivate you a bit. Here are six points I’ve realized these last few weeks that have been keeping me going…
Albeit a temporary one, dependent on a couple of things; your feeback for starters. What do you all think of the new design? It’s a new layout that definitely has a brighter look and feel to it which I feel is more reflective of Nicole and I. It’s also dependent on what Nicole thinks of it as I haven’t exactly told her that I changed things around a bit yet. Finally, it’s up to the team of highly intelligent genomic scientists performing these, shall we say, intrusive experiments on my person and whether they think a switch to bright colors will skew the data of their hard work. Dear God, is that a cattle prod? AAAAAAGH!
I love to write. Even when I’m not blogging it’s rare that I don’t write something every day be it short stories or quick blurbs or ideas for future posts. However, as much as I love blogging, I also have the attention span of a goldfish and can be distracted by everything from browsing the web to movies or emails. As I began writing more and more for this site, I started making a conscious effort to eliminate some of those distractions and in my oh-so-beloved list format I shall now share at least some of what I use to keep the writing going without succumbing to reading Wikipedia for six hours.
Recently Nicole and I have been re-thinking our workspace in the office and how we can make it more approachable. It’s not that we don’t love what we do, but at the same time there are a few nagging things about our desks that passively deter us from actually working on the site in favor of, oh I dunno, spending 6 hours playing Borderlands. As we were in the midst of re-thinking how to arrange papers, mail, our computers, laptops, gadgets, and other things that litter our workspace, I came across a great article over at Lifehacker that details 10 Ergonomic Upgrades for Your WorkSpace. It’s got some pretty neat tips and I’d highly recommend checking out and pretty much Lifehacker in general!
via Lifehacker
Having kept this site loaded with at least some form of update nearly daily, I decided it would be good to post a bit about things you can do to keep your site alive with fresh content. Writing or producing for the web should be fun. I’m not saying you’ll never have your off days or times when other priorities in your life might keep you from the keyboard, quite the contrary. There are plenty of caveats to producing something new. You might find yourself stuck in a rut with bloggers-block or have too many other demands on your time to focus on producing new content. Whatever your current vice is, here are 5 tips I put together to help you keep your head up and keep creating.