After spending hours searching the web for a review of the top 3 online invoicing platforms we have finally decided to write our own review based on our usage of Freshbooks, Harvest and Blinksale over the past 3 years. We used Blinksale our first year but eventually outgrew it and switched to Freshbooks which we used for around 1 year before discovering Harvest. As a result of our experience we feel we are adequately qualified to comment on the merits and downfalls of each web based invoicing application. Hopefully this will be a helpful tool for people trying to figure out which one they should use.

A lot of the plans share the same features (unlimited clients, invoices, projects etc.) and are quite similarly matched. I won’t cover the minor differences and instead will focus on what each does well and what it does not.

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After a year and a half of running Mac OS X Leopard things have become extraordinarily slow on my MacBook Pro. After googling how to speed up Mac OS X Leopard I have decided to write my own brief tutorial on a handful of things you can do to effectively increase the performance of OS X. This is meant as a programmer’s quick reference guide so if you are not technically savvy you may want to google “performance tune mac os x” for more verbose explanations. (more…)

Have you ever needed to email someone – a stranger, asking them for a favor? How can one compose email such that they will be read and responded to? How do we effectively email someone who gets a lot of email?

Whether personal or business, the ability to compose efficient and effective email is super useful – both in terms of productivity and responsiveness.

We’re all busy, and we’ve all received long, ambiguous and rambling email. Ironically, most of us have also been guilty of writing such verbose email while requesting for someone else’s time.

Source: 15 Tips for Writing Effective Email

In a study last year, Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email (bit.ly/email2). So people who check their email every five minutes waste 81/2hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.

Source: smh.com.au/nwes/biztech

This is a stunning statistic and I can definitely see the effect that rampant email checking can have in the workplace. In our dynamic office environment I’ve been trying to keep to checking email to 3-4 times per day. I find that once in the morning, once after lunch, and once closer to the end of the day really helps keep my focus task oriented. Apparently it also saves me 8.5 hours a week just in refocusing time according to this. One of the biggest reasons I’ve ran with this approach to checking email is that it also allows me to get through email in a very rapid way by batching writing emails together at one time. Just a few bits of food for thought.

If you are a big Mozilla Firefox fan (like we are) then you might be interested in this short list (heh) of 85 Firefox shortcuts for the PC and for the Mac.

Taking a browse through LifeHacker today I caught this post on making Powerpoint slides less boring through the use of photographing stickies. Just one more way you can bring a unique style to those important presentations. I thought the idea was great.