Carolyn Elefant of MyShingle and I were recently speaking, and she mentioned her love of mind mapping as well.  In fact, she put one together for starting a law firm! I took a look, and she used the same tool I did, MindMeister, to put together a stunning, easy-to-read, and informative summary of how to hang your own shingle.

View the “Starting a Law Firm” mind map at MindMeister.  The image below shows just a couple of nodes on this comprehensive map!

For the SaaSy consumer, the Stack Overflow people created Web Applications Stack Exchange, a terrific public forum for learning the ins and outs of cloud-based tools for law offices. From Joel’s introductory post:

Want to know how to export mail from Gmail? Or delete your Facebook account? Or send giant files via email?

Well, the new Web Applications Stack Exchange is for you.

The cool thing about this forum is that it will be populated by the Stack Overflow crowd, a lot of the same people who are writing the applications you use (like yours truly). It doesn’t get much hipper and deeper, tech-wise, than this group of peeps.

We’ve even rolled together an inexpensive and highly efficient alternative to an expensive office PBX system. Phone.com allows us to have support and sales queues and office extensions, which we route to Skype In numbers.

But – Mood Messages. Worst feature in any of the software I normally use. Finally, after years of having my attention tugged by meaningless Skype “You Have a Message” type notifications, I Bing’d how to do it and here’s how to end the misery:

Go to Preferences->Advanced. Unclick “Enable Mood Message Chat.” Voilá. That’s one small step for man, one giant victory in the constant battle against machine-induced attention deficit disorder!

Pomodoro is Italian for tomato. The guy who invented it lives in Italy and had a wind-up tomato timer in his kitchen. The idea is simple: you wind up the timer for 25 minutes and work on only one thing. The timer rings, and you reward yourself with a little break and get ready for the next Pomodoro.

A month or so into practicing the Pomodoro Technique, I’m finding it has definitely helped me avoid getting side-tracked, especially in the area of interruptions.

I have a friend who’s a litigator at a big law firm down here in South Florida. He’s constantly working nights and weekends, because he’s finishing work that gets interrupted during the day. When I told him about the Pomodoro Technique, he said it would be impossible to implement in his situation.

In the case of a judge calling, sure, I can understand that. But in a more typical case, can the interruptor wait less that 1/2 hour for a response? What would happen if, during the course of your day, someone came into your office while you were working and you asked them, “can I get back to you in x minutes?”

On average, x is 12.5 minutes, with a minimum value of 1 and a max value of 25. Even in matters considered urgent, people can usually wait a handful of minutes.

According to the rules of the tomato, when someone interrupts you, there are specific rules:

1) Inform the interruptor you can’t talk right now.
2) Negotiate a time to get back to them.
3) Call them, and be true to your word, so that the next time they interrupt you they can believe you when you say you’ll get back to them.

Then, record the nature of the interruption on your daily To-Do sheet. Add a dash (-), which will allow you to track the interruptions you’ve avoided.

And by the way, guess what happens if you switch gears? You’ve lost your pomodoro. You don’t get to count it for the day. It’s null and void.

In my case, I tell people: “I’m in the middle of a tomato.” And that’s enough – they know I will get back to them in a handful of minutes.

You can visit the project’s homepage here, or take the shortcut and download a cheat sheet here.

Like the Getting Things Done personal organizational system, The Pomodoro Technique is popular in technology circles but I haven’t seen a wide discussion of it in Legal. And even though I’m a dedicated David Allen fanboy and wrote a weeklong series on Legal GTD, I have to admit that GTD is hard to master whereas Pomodoro is simple, simple, simple. It doesn’t really require reading a whole darn book or going to a seminar.

You can visit the project’s homepage here, or take the shortcut and download a cheat sheet here.

Pomodoro is Italian for tomato. The guy who invented it lives in Italy and had a wind-up tomato timer in his kitchen. The idea is simple: you wind up the timer for 25 minutes and work on only one thing. The timer rings, and you reward yourself with a little break and get ready for the next Pomodoro.

Here are the basics:

1. Choose a task to be accomplished
2. Set the timer to 25 minutes
3. Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings, then put a check on your sheet of paper
4. Take a short break (3-5 minutes is OK)
5. Every 4 Pomodoros take a longer break (15-30 minutes).

I’m currently testing out the system and will be writing a series of posts about my experiences.  So, please, follow along and take part in the discussion!

Note:  for you gung-ho tinkerers like me who are going to start this immediately, watch out, some of the Pomodoro timers for the iPhone will suck down your battery faster than you can say “Droid”.

I couldn’t believe it.  I wasn’t able to install Apple’s mammoth iPad SDK on my two-year old MacBook Pro because I was out of hard drive space.  Luckily, some genius named “eriban” wrote a donation-only program called GrandPerspective.

GrandPerspective employs a heat map, an amazing visual tool I first experienced in the financial industry to show volume, market cap, industry, and movement of stocks in a market.  Eriban applies it to the files and folders on your hard drive to identify what’s taking up the most space.

For example, here’s a scan of my hard disk:

The larger the rectangle, the larger the file.  As you can see, I have some mammoth stuff going on.  The entire left side of the heat map, representing over 50% of my drive space, is taken up by VMWare Fusion Virtual Machines.

Using this heatmap, I was quickly able to identify the files and folders that were hogging my disk space and eliminate them.  For one of the virtual machines, I disposed of old snapshots I didn’t need any more.  Some of the other large boxes were large downloads or applications I haven’t touched in months.  ¡Adios!

In one hour, I freed up over 60 GB of space on my hard drive.  Thanks so much, Grand Perspective.

Bookmark Manager crashed Chrome the first time I used it, but that’s another story.

In any case, this development renders my previous post irrelevant. And now Chrome sits alone at the top of the heap. Chrome, I dub thee default browser!

For those of you on the Social Media train, how often do you find that your priorities fall victim to your Tweets and status updates?

Be honest with yourself.  If you’re not careful, entire days get sucked away.

Here are four tips to engage in the online party without letting your life slip away.

1. Prioritize BLT:  Blogging, LinkedIn, and Twitter

Prioritize the social media venues you use.  Most lawyers and other professionals should prioritize, in the following order, Blogging (posting and commenting), LinkedIn, and Twitter. Some people use Facebook for work, though I tend to keep my personal profile among friends (our company page is a different story).  ListServes and YouTube are also extremely powerful.  But the first thee should be at the top of most people’s lists.

2.  Use Tools to Help You

Free tools exist to help you manage multiple social media accounts and schedule posts.  Scheduling Tweets in advance is a productivity-saver. As much as Social Media is about dialog and responding to people, it does help if you can identify times of the day where most people are plugged-in. You may not always be online at peak times. HootSuite, my favorite tool, allows you to schedule Tweets and manage multiple accounts, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others.

3.  Block Off Time & Turn Off Notifications

Try limiting your Social Media time to über-productive 30 minute chunks. If you can do 1/2 hour in the morning and another in the afternoon or at night, you should be able to take the pulse of the online dialog & schedule tweets and blog posts in the future to maintain a constant presence.  Don’t allow yourself to be notified by filtering or turning off emails. And do yourself a major favor to your family life and driving safety by killing text notifications.

4.  Keep Perspective and Give Yourself a Break

Don’t beat yourself up and cut yourself a little slack.  Keep in mind that some of the people with huge online presences spend all day on social media because that’s their job. It’s like the bodies you see in fitness magazines or on actors.  Of course you won’t achieve those abs because those people spend all day sculpting their six-packs.

We’re interested to hear from you.  How are you managing your social media without letting it take control of your life?

Typing on an iPhone is a frustrating endeavor at best, so why would anyone want an app like this? The beauty, as I see it at least, is the ability to capture ideas while you’re on the go.

UPDATE: BlogWriter crashed the first time I attempted to publish this post. After I relaunched the app, the post went through.

I use it on a Mac, which has some curious limitations.  As much as I want Chrome to maintain its status as my default browser, there’s no way to organize  your bookmarks like you can in Safari or Firefox, or even the redheaded step child of browsers, IE on Windows.

Windows users don’t have to worry about this Chrome quirk, which means hopefully one day soon, the long held dream of Mac Chrome users to organize their bookmarks will finally materialize.

Until then, you can follow this hackiest of hacky hacks to keep your bookmarks organized:

1.  Delete your Chrome bookmarks by going to User->Library->Application Support->Google->Chrome and deleting the “Bookmarks” file.

2.  Organize your bookmarks the way you want in Safari and import them into Chrome under File->Import Bookmarks and Settings.

Not pretty, I know.  But at least you can use Chrome and keep your bookmarks the way you like them.