Increase Productivity and Reduce Stress! Version 1.1, updated 03/25/2020 Being productive is never as simple as putting items on a calendar or to do list and checking them off. Most of us struggle with too much to do, too little time, and only a vague idea of how to plan each day so we can achieve the best results with the least stress. If that sounds like you (and especially if you’ve tried a bunch of productivity systems and found them lacking), Jeff Porten’s expert guidance may be just what you need. As a professional technology consultant and an early adopter of both hardware and software, Jeff has tried nearly every productivity management system out there, and experimented with dozens of implementation styles. He brings his decades of experience to this book, helping you create a customized strategy that’s ideal for your needs, and—crucially—avoid common mistakes. Whether you’re a productivity junkie or someone who has struggled for years with a cobbled-together, informal task-management system, this book will help you get a much better grip on your personal and business time. In this book, you’ll: • Review the principles of successful planning—whether for immediate projects or for long-term and someday goals. • Understand your natural working style and preferences, including comfortable habits that may not be productive but that you don’t want to change, and create a more effective workflow that fits you. • Discover the best ways to think about projects, tasks, events, due dates, flags, contexts, and more. • Choose a task-management app that’s appropriate for your needs, no matter what devices and operating systems you use, and that integrates with your calendar, reminders, notes, and the apps you use to actually do things. • Develop a step-by-step process for tracking all your events and tasks and ensuring that everything happens in the right order. • Transition from an old system to your new system without worrying that anything will fall through the cracks. • Learn exactly how to keep track of all the things you need to remember throughout the day. • Improve your time-estimation skills when planning how long future tasks and projects will take. • Solve the problem of “10-minute tasks” that become all-day projects because they have a dozen things you discover you need to do first. • Get better at managing other people (and their expectations of you). • Review how well your productivity system has worked over time, using feedback loops and suggested best practices to continually improve your workflow. • Fail successfully! If something goes wrong—from a derailing large project to a life-changing crisis—learn how to recover gracefully and improve your system the next time around. • Know when and how to make changes to meet any new needs you have, and to ensure that what you do every Tuesday at 2 PM contributes to your overarching goals and most important roles in life. Although many of the examples in the book refer to Mac productivity tools, the advice is platform-neutral. The book contains tips applicable to any combination of operating systems, and a companion webpage provides additional details on apps running on Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and the web.

"I well recall a conversation with an executive I hoped to interview about her astonishing productivity. I began our call with an assurance that I would not take much of her time. She laughed. 'Oh, I have all the time in the world,' she said." Most of us feel constantly behind, unsure how to escape feeling oppressed by busyness. Laura Vanderkam, unlike other time-management gurus, believes that in order to get more done, we must first feel like we have all the time in the world. Think about it: why haven't you trained for that 5K or read War and Peace? Probably because you feel beaten down by all the time you don't seem to have. In this book, Vanderkam reveals the seven counterintuitive principles the most time-free people have adopted. She teaches mindset shifts to help you feel calm on the busiest days and tools to help you get more done without feeling overwhelmed. You'll meet people such as... ♦ An elementary school principal who figured out how to spend more time mentoring teachers, and less time supervising the cafeteria ♦ An executive who builds lots of meeting-free space into his calendar, despite managing teams across multiple continents ♦ A CEO who does focused work in a Waffle House early in the morning, so he can keep an open door and a relaxed mindset all day ♦ An artist who overcame a creative block, and reached new heights of productivity, by being more gentle with herself, rather than more demanding The strategies in this book can help if your life feels out of control, but they can also help if you want to take your career, your relationships, and your personal happiness to the next level. Vanderkam has packed this book with insights from busy yet relaxed professionals, including "time makeovers" of people who are learning how to use these tools. Off the Clock can inspire the rest of us to create lives that are not only productive, but enjoyable in the moment.

From the bestselling author of Shred The Take-Control Diet aims to make you the expert on your body. Dr. Ian Smith delivers the final word on dieting for the fad-weary reader who wants the truth about permanent weight loss. The Take-Control Diet explains the real science of how your body manages energy, why crash diets and trendy programs sabotage your chances of success, and how you can get off the yo-yo ride forever. Dr. Smith offers a diet and exercise program that allows you to eat without feeling deprived, or adopting an entirely specialized diet, and that helps you use both anaerobic and aerobic exercise for maximum weight loss results. He explains how to calculate your own individual food-and-exercise equation in order to lose the ideal amount of weight per week. The Take-Control Diet equips you with the facts so that you can approach your health and fitness goals psychologically fortified for the task. Understanding common myths about dieting will give you the knowledge you need to resolve your weight issues for good. Did you know that, contrary to the recommendations of many popular diets, eating too much protein could seriously damage your health? That it is impossible to convert fat to muscle? That starving yourself slows your metabolism and causes your body to store energy as fat? That no foods appreciably increase your metabolism? That chronic, yo-yo dieting makes weight loss increasingly difficult? Dr. Smith explains the causes of overweight, the health concerns of dieting, how metabolism and genetics factor in to weight control, and what you can do to work with, rather than against, your body’s processes. Many diets dictate a program that might work—if it works at all—only as long as you can adhere to radical and unnatural habits. The Take-Control Diet, instead, equips you to design your own eating and exercise plan—one that accommodates your preferences, your daily routine, and your particular weight loss hurdles. Losing weight will not only help you look your best but also reduce your risk of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer—in addition to improving your overall energy level and ability to fight illness. Dr. Smith offers a plan, based on extensive research and his personal work with patients, that respects your intelligence and empowers you to win the battle with overweight. The Take-Control Diet is one hundred percent free of unrealistic promises, poor science, and far-fetched gimmicks—and one hundred percent yours for life.

Discover Preview’s hidden features for editing images and manipulating PDFs! Version 1.3, updated May 24, 2023 Apple's Preview app is bundled with every Mac and yet many Mac users have only a shallow understanding of what it's capable of. Mac experts Adam Engst and Josh Centers have plumbed Preview's depths to create a cheerful, colorful book that explains dozens of techniques for importing, viewing, editing, and converting images in Preview. It also puts you in control of reading, annotating, manipulating, and encrypting PDFs.n Packed with real-world examples and tips, the book teaches you how to bring files into Preview from a camera, iOS or iPadOS device, or scanner (or just from the Finder). Once you discover Preview's surprisingly capable collection of image-editing tools, you'll soon be editing imported photos by tweaking the exposure, color saturation, sharpness, and more. You can even mark up your images with circles, arrows, and text, plus numerous other shapes. In the second part of the book, Adam and Josh focus on PDFs in Preview, describing how to configure Preview to make reading PDFs as fluid as possible. Since so many paper forms now come in PDF, the book shows you how to fill out PDF-based forms, complete with quick insertion of your digital signature. Those who read digital textbooks or who collaborate on documents will learn to annotate PDFs with highlights, notes, and bookmarks. You'll even learn how to create PDFs from a scanner, the clipboard, and the Print dialog. Finally, Adam and Josh cover various ways protect your PDFs, including encrypting them, restricting permissions, and redacting portions of them. Preview is a veritable Swiss Army Knife. Don't miss out on the many ways it can make your life easier, including these capabilities: • Import photos from your iPhone or iPad. • Scan paper-based documents and images. • Add a scanned page to an existing PDF. • Take a screenshot that includes the pointer. • Open hundreds of images in a single window. • Trash unwanted images with a keystroke. • Duplicate, rename, and move images without leaving Preview. • Play a manually arranged slideshow of images or PDF pages. • Resize and change the resolution of images. • Crop out undesirable content. • Identify people, landmarks, and objects in images. • Mark up screenshots with shapes and text labels. • Magnify a portion of an image with a loupe. • Add text captions and speech bubbles to photos. • Tweak the white point and black point in photos. • Make photos sepia or black-and-white. • Edit a photo while comparing it to its original version. • Export to any of numerous formats, including HEIC. • Put thumbnails, table of contents, notes, or bookmarks in your sidebar. • View search results by rank or page order. • Copy text and images from a PDF, and copy text from any image. • Highlight text just like you would in a college textbook. • Add notes to highlighted text and as freestanding objects. • Review notes in the sidebar or Annotations inspector. • Create bookmarks to pages you want to revisit quickly. • Annotate a PDF with customizable shapes and arrows. • Fill in PDF forms, whether or not they’re interactive. • Create and insert a digital version of your signature into PDF forms. • Add, remove, and rearrange pages in a PDF. • Rotate PDF pages that were scanned at the wrong orientation. • Encrypt PDFs so they can’t be opened without a password. • Set restrictions on who can perform various actions on a PDF document. • Redact sensitive information from a PDF.

Snappsy the alligator is having a normal day when a pesky narrator steps in to spice up the story. Is Snappsy reading a book ... or is he making CRAFTY plans? Is Snappsy on his way to the grocery store ... or is he PROWLING the forest for defenseless birds and fuzzy bunnies? Is Snappsy innocently shopping for a party ... or is he OBSESSED with snack foods that start with the letter P? What's the truth? Snappsy the Alligator (Did Not Ask to Be in This Book) is an irreverent look at storytelling, friendship, and creative differences, perfect for fans of Mo Willems.

Create and organize writing projects with ease using Scrivener 3! Version 1.1.1, updated June 4, 2021 Compose a masterpiece with Literature & Latte's Scrivener. Whether you're writing science fiction, a historical novel, or a zombie travelogue, learn how Scrivener's powerful tools can take your work to the next level. Kirk McElhearn shows you how to collect notes, organize your work, arrange and rearrange sections, and more. Covers Mac, Windows, and iOS/iPadOS versions! Scrivener is a powerful tool for managing long-form writing projects—like novels and screenplays—and Take Control of Scrivener 3 gives you all the details you need to know to harness its potential. In this book, best-selling author Kirk McElhearn walks you through setting up, organizing, writing, formatting, revising, and compiling a Scrivener project, whether you’re working on a Mac, a Windows PC, or in iOS/iPadOS. Using this extensive guide, you’ll be able to: • Meet Scrivener: Learn about the Scrivener philosophy and its basic layout • Start your project: Pick a template and add existing materials to your project • Brainstorm and organize: Discover three different ways to work with your material using the Binder, Corkboard, and Outliner. • Set up your writing environment and avoid distractions: Choose default fonts and colors, opt for Script Mode if you’re writing a script or screenplay, and simplify your workspace by hiding interface elements or by using Composition Mode or Full Screen Mode. • Make the most of key features: Learn how to work with styles; use annotations and comments; add footnotes and endnotes; view more than one file at once; use collections to view selected items from the Binder; store bookmarks and project notes; and share and synchronize your project with others. • Go further with Scrivener: Get the details on special features like Scrivenings View (write in sections, but view as a single document) and Snapshots (allows you to make and view periodic backups of your text). • Revise and edit your work: Learn how to find and replace text, and work with revisions. • Use Scrivener in iOS and iPadOS: Sync your projects to iOS/iPadOS and work on an iPhone or iPad. • Print and export: Understand the process of preparing your project to be printed, and what’s involved in compiling it so that it can be exported in a different format. Kirk also highlights the many changes to Scrivener since the last version (see the What's New section below), including updates to the interface, styles, outlining and metadata capabilities, and improved searching and writing features. In addition, he explains brand-new features in Scrivener 3, including Bookmarks (lets you store references to other sections of your project), Linguistic Focus (Mac only—highlights specific elements such as dialog, adverbs, or adjectives), Section types (such as Chapter Text and Scene), and Copyholders (allows you to view three or four documents at once).

"Great teams are comprised of ordinary people that are empowered and inspired. They are empowered to solve hard problems in ways their customers love yet work for their business. They are inspired with ideas and techniques for quickly evaluating those ideas to discover solutions that work: they are valuable, usable, feasible and viable. This book is about the idea and reality of "achieving extraordinary results from ordinary people". Empowered is the companion to Inspired. It addresses the other half of the problem of building tech products?how to get the absolute best work from your product teams. However, the book's message applies much more broadly than just to product teams. Inspired was aimed at product managers. Empowered is aimed at all levels of technology-powered organizations: founders and CEO's, leaders of product, technology and design, and the countless product managers, product designers and engineers that comprise the teams. This book will not just inspire companies to empower their employees but will teach them how. This book will help readers achieve the benefits of truly empowered teams"--