Productivity Tips: 5 Tips for Avoiding a Reading Backlog

Many people let their reading material build up into a backlog. You may collect piles of mail and other papers or folders full of website bookmarks. Over time, it feels like your reading backlog is a black hole that things never come out of.

Here are 5 tips to help you avoid a reading backlog or take control of one you already have, whether online or offline:

PK Tip: Locating Related Keywords with Related Mode

When you select a keyword in Personal Knowbase's Index Window, you may get a long list of articles associated with that keyword. To shrink your Titles list, it's useful to know which keywords to select to make the list more manageable.

You can reduce the Index column from listing all keywords in your data file to only listing the keywords that are related to your current articles list. This shows you the keywords related to the keyword(s) that you've already selected by being shared by at least one article. This makes it easy to see which keywords will help further pare down your Titles list.

Computer Basics: Tips for Preparing to Upgrade Your Computer

When it's time to upgrade your PC, don't get caught unprepared. Whether your old computer died and you need to start over, or if you just want to update your hardware or OS (operating system) version, setting up a new computer can be painful.

These tips will help you set up your new machine while saving as much information as possible from your old setup. If possible, do these tasks before losing access to your old computer.

PK Tip: Dragging Keywords to Locate Related Articles

In Personal Knowbase, the usual way to locate an article related to a topic of interest is to "select" a keyword for that topic. For example, to see all your articles related to fish, you move the keyword fish from the Index column to the Selected column in the Index Window.

But if you already located an article on your topic, you can quickly locate related articles by dragging keywords from the article instead of from the full keyword Index. This is especially useful as your keyword Index list grows larger and more difficult to browse.

Productivity Tips: 5 Office Organizing Tips

We may spend most of our time in a virtual workspace online, but we still need a physical workspace to use to access the virtual. We have mail and papers and other office supplies to organize.

Here are 5 tips for making your work area more functional, especially if you don't have much extra room:

PK Tip: Removing Hypertext Links

In Personal Knowbase, you may end up with unwanted hypertext links in your article text. For example, if you copy text from a web page in a browser, PK will preserve any hypertext links on the web page when you paste it into an article. Similarly, if you import to an article from an html file with links, PK will preserve the links from the file. Or perhaps you have some old links that you simply don't want anymore.

Types of Passwords in Personal Knowbase

Personal Knowbase can help you keep your data private using password protection. Privacy may be important for many reasons, including if you are using the software for financial or customer data, contacts or sensitive family information, or for a diary or journal.

PK provides two options for password protecting your notes:

Why Keep a Journal

Are you thinking of starting a journal, but aren't sure if you would benefit from the time spent? People keep journals and diaries for many reasons. Yes, you need to set aside some time for making entries, but overall, most find that it's time well spent.

You may decide to use an elegant blank book, or a cheap spiral notebook, or dedicated journaling software, or simply a text file on your computer. The process and benefits are basically the same in any format.

PK Tip: Automatically Updating Article Dates

When you create a new article in Personal Knowbase, the article date is set to the current date. By default, this date isn't updated unless you manually change it. If you want the article dates to update automatically every time you make a change to the article, you can do this with the File Properties command.

To set this option for the currently open file:

Computer Basics: Tips for Preparing to Re-install Software

Various circumstances can force you to re-install the software on your PC. Perhaps a program had a problem such as its corrupted settings, and you need to uninstall and re-install it.

Or you may need to re-install all of your software. Maybe your computer crashed and is irrevocable. Maybe you bought a new computer to replace an obsolete one. Either way, you now face the challenge of moving all your old software to a new machine.

These tips will help you prepare for the inevitability of re-installing your software: