Helpful: How podcasts changed my life

If your daily commute is about an hour each way, that adds up to 600 hours per year of passive time that could be used for entertainment or education. Since podcast subscriptions were first enabled in iTunes in 2005, I have tried to use my squadron of iPods/iPhones and that commute time to educate myself in a variety of subjects. 

I have used podcasts to learn about politics, new music, foreign languages, business management, technology, design, and sports. Making this a routine has expanded my education in a variety of subjects, all while using a block of time that I might otherwise waste.

Here are the podcasts that are on my iPhone right now. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, I recommend listening to podcasts and audiobooks at double speed - it helps you get through more content while still being understandable. Most people put a lot of "ums" and pauses in their speech that melt away at double speed. Try it out. 

With your iPod or music device of choice plugged into your computer, be sure to set up iTunes to add the latest 3 episodes of your podcast to your mp3 player, so it will be up-to-date. Automation is a big help, if you want to make commute-time learning a habit. 

Search in iTunes for any of these favorites and subscribe today!

Music

• KEXP Live Performances
• NPR All Songs Considered
• NPR Live Concerts
• GROOVELECTRIC
• PODRUNNER: Workout Music
• Latin Alternative

Business

• Achieving Predictable Success
• Career Tools
• HBR Ideacast
• Manager Tools
• 37Signals Podcast
• NPR Planet Money

Productivity and Creativity

• David Allen Company
• Back to Work
• 43 Folders
• The Accidental Creative
• Get-it-Done Guy's Quick and Dirty Tips

Technology

• The Big Web Show
• Build and Analyze
• Hypercritical
• MacBreak Weekly
• The Pipeline
• The Talk Show

SmartyPants Time

• This American Life
• TEDTalks
• NPR On the Media
• President's Weekly Radio Address

Comedy and Entertainment

• You Look Nice Today
• The Nerdist
• Onion Radio News
• The Sound of Young America
• MaxFunCon

Sports

• Golf Tips
• ESPNsoccernet

Helpful: Twitter

Since Josh has sent folks over here with a post about Twitter, I figured I'd share how I use Twitter as a communications professional. I currently work for the United Methodist Church and will soon be starting a job at Cellit, a digital marketing company in Chicago.

1. Post links that my followers find interesting and/or helpful
2. Link to great things that my followers are doing (they LOVE this)
3. Post official comments from leadership (since no one seems to check their email anymore)
4. Point followers to other leaders in the industry who might have inspirational/educational things to say
5. Give a little personality to our brand – I did this by making our Twitter icon a picture of Methodism founder John Wesley wearing an iPod

You can find me on Twitter at @mattkuzma. Good luck!

On the other hand...

I also am tempted to jump in to Evernote again. This article by Ezra Klein explains it all.

That turns Evernote from something I might search if I remember into something I'll search constantly without even trying. And that means I'm much likelier to be routinely confronted with old insights and facts that I might have forgotten. In that world, I don't need to rely on my memory of what I've read so much as the judgments I made when I was doing the reading. And I trust those a lot more.

Helpful: Workflowy

I like to outline and make lists. I read lots of business and self-help books. I aim to improve my skills and advance my career.

Problem: I forget all the stuff I read, lose my lists and get all my training materials trapped in a huge folder of crap.

Enter workflowy. Web-based outliner that works just an outline program should. Auto-saved, easy to export and save elsewhere. This should help me complete my Big Database of Knowledge I've been working on. Free to sign up, hopefully there will be paid features eventually (like Dropbox sync perhaps?) so it can survive.

Interesting: Changes in how I use the internet

Posts using Blogger:
2004-2008: 971
2009: 33

Posts to Twitter (synced with Facebook):
2004-2008: 0
2009: 1005

I&H: The 61

I love new music, but I am impatient when it comes to sifting through the crummy tracks to find the jems. Luckily, the magical computer interwebs arrive again to save the day. thesixtyone.com lets you (or everyone else) do the sifting, then the songs with the most votes get bumped up the list, so you can tell which songs are more likely to be good.

Combine it with emusic.com or another download service and you've got yourself some great free/cheap music action. Thank you Internet!

Helpful: Amazon Wish Lists

It's easy to set up, easy to share, and who knows, maybe **COUGH COUGH** your friends and beloved family **COUGH COUGH** will get you some good stuff this year. Not that you weren't thankful for last year's gifts, of course.

Helpful: Backup your data

We have about 50 GB of music, movies, etc. in our iTunes catalog. That's hundreds of CDs from high school and college, hundreds of downloaded albums, podcasts, speeches, and videos of our cat. We had them all stored on an external hard drive, which we bought about 4 years ago.

Last Monday, the external hard drive crashed. It's worthless, and the data is irretrievable from the drive.

But there's a happy ending to this story.

A month ago after reading a series on Lifehacker, Cindy and I talked about our backup situation, and I signed us up for Mozy, an online backup service that charges $55/yr. for unlimited storage. Once I signed up, I selected the music drive and copied all of the files to the Mozy server. It took two weeks for the full backup, but once it was done, it automatically updated the backup whenever we added new music or files.

After the crash, I bought a new drive, selected the music files on Mozy, and started to upload them back to the new drive. It will take two weeks for the full transfer, but that is a short time to wait considering the vast amount of music on the line.

Important data must be in at least two places to be safe, and preferably, one of those places should not be in your house. Whether you have Mac or PC, Mozy is a great solution.

Helpful: KEXP Song of the Day Podcast

I subscribe to a lot of podcaster tunes on my iPoddamajig, but one stood out today on the KEXP Song of the Day -- "People Get Ready" by The Frames. That's the band that's in that new movie Once.

One free .mp3 every day, and they're almost always good. Not a bad deal. Click the link above or you can find it on iTunes.

Happy Blog Birthday

Three years of this blog. May we all have another year being interesting and helpful. There are far worse things to be.