Computers work best with structured data. Everything Buckets discourage the use of structured data by providing a convenient place to commingle “structureless” data like RTF and PDF documents. Rather than forcing the user to figure out the rhyme and reason of their data (for example, by putting receipts in a financial management application and addresses in an address book), Everything Buckets cry: “throw it all in here! Search it! Maybe I’ll corrupt my proprietary database, but maybe I won’t and you’ll have the joy of sifting through a mire of RTF documents. Doesn’t that sound great?” This proposition should not sound great. If you think you’re going to save time in the long run by throwing your data into a big bucket now, then sifting through it later, you are mistaken. There are better ways.

I’m happy to introduce a guest post from Doug Ireton, who’s written a fantastic guide to Getting Things Done with RTM. Doug is a Sr. Platform Engineer on the Windows Server team at Nordstrom, a luxury clothing retailer based in Seattle, Washington. He is an avid Remember The Milk user, and after almost a year has finally stopped fiddling with his RTM setup (mostly). Using RTM for work and personal tasks and projects, he has achieved Inbox Zero (at least at work…). He lives in a small Craftsman-style house in Seattle with his wife and two kids. Thanks for sharing your insights, Doug!

In this episode of The ProductiveLinux Podcast, we talk about a couple cool ways to integrate RTM (the online todo list manager) with your desktop. Then, we highlight just a few of my favorite apps to use at the command line.

Put all of your club cards onto just one card.

If you run a business, finding an efficient system for managing invoices is critical for sustaining a positive cash flow. Here's how you can create an easy invoicing solution using OpenOffice.org Writer and Calc.

Use ThinkingRock as your trusted software to organise your life according to GTD - the stress-free productivity methodology described in the international best selling book by David Allen. ThinkingRock community version is free, open-source and multi-platform (Linux, Mac OSX, MS Windows, ...). It is NOT web-based.

Here is an excerpt from an article about Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University: Through more than three decades of systematic research, [Carol Dweck] has been figuring out answers to why some people achieve their potential while equally talented others don’t—why some become Muhammad Ali and others Mike Tyson. The key, she found, isn’t ability; it’s whether you look at ability as something inherent that needs to be demonstrated or as something that can be developed. To anyone who is into personal growth and self-improvement, this seems obvious. But clearly, it is not obvious to everybody: look at the this diagram by Nigel Holmes representing the two types of mindsets and I’ll sure you’ll recognize the attitudes of many people you know.

With Giver, you can share files between desktops on your network with absolutely no configuration necessary. Other Giver clients are automatically discovered using Avahi.

LifeHacker's list of the best productivity apps currently available for Android.