Organize Your Home Office Day

Today is Organize Your Home Office Day, which falls on the second Tuesday in March every year. Whether you're a self-employed contractor, run a home-based business, work at home regularly for your day job, or use a home office for your personal business, you need to keep it organized to use your time efficiently.

Here are some ways that Personal Knowbase can help you get your home office organized:

Basic Principles of All Time Management

Are you having trouble getting started on time management? Feeling overwhelmed? You know you need to get organized to take control of your time. But when you feel swamped, you don't have time to research the best way to manage your time.

Here's a concise summary of the basics of all time management programs to help you clarify how to stop squandering your time and to leverage it to focus on what matters for your life path.

PK Tip: Running a Faster Find

Personal Knowbase's Find command (from the Edit menu) takes longer as the number (and length) of articles grows. The software does a straight string search for Find, so the search time is a function of the amount of text searched. Here are some tips for speeding up your Find operations.

Personal Knowbase Helps with Your New Year's Resolutions

Many people start each New Year with resolutions to make changes in their lives. What are your resolutions for 2022?

Here are 10 resolutions that Personal Knowbase can help you with:

Computer Basics: Determining What Software Reads a Data File

Do you have a data file that you can't read? Occasionally, you may run across a file that you don't know what software program created it. Perhaps you found an old unknown file on your hard drive or you inherited the file from another user who left your company or passed away. To access the data, you need to do some detective work to figure out what software can read it.

Here are some tips for finding out which program can read your unknown file.

PK Tip: Checking for Unassigned Keywords

Over time, you will inevitably discover that you have keywords in your Personal Knowbase data file that are not assigned to any articles. Perhaps you've deleted the articles that they were originally assigned to. Or you created keywords you intended to use, but your needs changed.

Of course, there are valid reasons to keep some unassigned keywords. There may be keywords you aren't currently using, but may need again in the future. Or you may want to keep complete sets of keywords for fixed groups like months or days of the week. Or you may want a keyword for each member of your club, even if no articles yet pertain to some members.

Information Overload Awareness Day

Today, October 19, is Information Overload Awareness Day 2021. These days, we have more information flowing into our lives than at any former time in history. The Internet has accelerated the flow of information exponentially.

“Information overload has become a well-known problem: pieces of knowledge pile up too fast for people to sort and make sense of them.” ~ K. Eric Drexler

PK Tip: Assigning a Keyword to Multiple Articles

Do you need to add a keyword to a group of articles? You don't need to open each article and add the keyword separately to each one. You can assign a keyword to multiple articles at once in Personal Knowbase's Index Window by dragging it.

Getting Started Using Personal Knowbase for Miscellaneous Notes

A common purpose for starting to use Personal Knowbase is to take control of all the miscellaneous information that passes through our lives. Collected observations and ideas. Captured thoughts and conversations. They accumulate on bits of paper on our desk, in our drawers, or in boxes of 3x5 index cards. Or they may be scattered around your hard drive in emails and small text files in multiple software formats.

Many notes are not associated with a person or a date, so storing them in contact management software doesn't make sense. But we know they may be useful later, if only we can find them when we need them.

Productivity Tip: Checklists for Recurring Tasks

For tasks that you do regularly, write up outlines of the steps required. This is especially important for tasks that you don't do regularly enough to remember the exact steps every time you do it. It's so easy to miss a step when you do something repeatedly.