This is my second post in a series on my favourite smart phone apps.

Here’s one for folks who are seriously pressed for time (aren’t we all?) but who are still trying to keep up with non-fiction reading. Blinkist provides access to 15-minute summaries of books on a range of topics, including leadership, politics, marketing, parenting, nutrition, technology, psychology and so forth.

The summaries are prepared by Blinkist’s team of experts – they refer to themselves as “life librarians” – who read about 1000 books per year and distil each book into its key insights.

I tested it out on …

While smart phones are an increasingly big part of most lawyers’ practices, many lawyers only use their phones for email, text and calls. But there’s so much more you can do! This is the first post in a series on my favourite apps.

I am continually collecting receipts and Genius Scan is a great app for scanning them on the go. Using the camera on your phone, you can scan a single document or a series of documents. Then crop the scanned image or make other edits, including changing the page order. Finally, save the scanned document(s) as a PDF, …

Cloud.

You’ve heard the term, perhaps wondered what it really meant and maybe even worried about it. ‘The cloud’ is just a marketing term that means the internet. So, if you see the term ‘cloud storage’, it means ‘store your documents on the internet’.

There are many benefits to using the cloud properly. If you pick the right providers, it will be easier to keep, manage and restore backups. You can also seriously expand your office – if you’re careful, you can have access to all your most important files anywhere you have an internet connection. And perhaps most helpful, …

A few years ago, I stopped using paper notes when giving presentations. Instead, I began using my iPad for speaking notes. It seemed easier (and less distracting) to scroll through a single page than flipping through paper notes.

While any note-taking app could serve this purpose, I noticed that the Pages app includes a Presenter Mode option. (This app is automatically included on all Apple devices. So, these instructions would also work with an iPhone.) Once in the Pages app, you can find the Presenter Mode by clicking on the ellipsis in the top-right corner. Presenter Mode turns your speaking …

As a solo entrepreneur, I need to automate numerous tasks. Zapier – an online tool which enables you to build connections (or “zaps”) between two apps – makes the automation process super easy.

For example, if you wanted to automatically add your blog posts to your Twitter account, you would select WordPress and Twitter. Zapier then walks you through easy step-by-step instructions on how to connect the two apps. If you only want certain posts to appear in your Twitter feed, you can add a filter that only adds posts tagged with a certain category or written by a specified …

A few months ago, I was trying to find an article on AI that I had remembered tweeting. So, I started scrolling through my list of tweets. Even though I am not the most prolific tweeter, it was soon apparent that this was a futile approach. But searching “AI” wasn’t particularly helpful either.

Then I noticed that after you enter a search on Twitter, on the left hand-side of the results page, there are search filters and an Advanced Search option. For example, you can filter any search to focus on tweets from People you follow or Near you.…

Today’s tip is to consider whether reminders or message previews on any of your devices could compromise client confidentiality.

Between calendar reminders and email/text previews that appear while you’re working–or that pop up on your phone’s lock screen even when you’re not using it–much has been written about how notifications are constantly interrupting our workflow and concentration.

But what about the potential for client communication to be unwittingly displayed when you aren’t expecting it? It’s worth thinking twice about whether any pop-up notifications could be revealing private information.

If you can’t figure out how control these settings on your device …

You may or may not have noticed that there is a question mark on the top right-hand corner of your Outlook mail application. If you have noticed, chances are you have never clicked on it, assuming that it would bring up a list of unhelpful FAQs or, even worse, the old “Clippy” office assistant.

A few weeks ago, I was having a trouble with Outlook, and out of desperation I clicked on that question mark. I was pleasantly surprised by the results. I opened up a chat box with a help team at Microsoft. They asked me a series of …

Here’s a handy browser extension to add to your toolbox: FireShot, an add-on that captures entire webpage screenshots – even scrollable areas.

Install FireShot in just a few seconds, then screenshot any website just by clicking the “S” icon in the top right corner of your browser and selecting an option:

Once you click an option, there will be a short pause, and a new tab will open up, allowing you to work with your screenshot: edit, save to various formats, add text annotations, share, copy to clickboard, print, etc.

The first time I saved an image, I was …

Is there a podcast or YouTube channel you’d like to keep track of or display using RSS? Determining the RSS feeds for videos and podcasts can be tricky. Here are a couple of tips on how to find the RSS feeds for YouTube channels and playlists, and podcasts on iTunes or Soundcloud.

To determine the RSS feed for a  YouTube channel:

1. View the page source for the YouTube channel (right click on the page and click “view page source”
2. Do a search for the text “channelID” and copy the value next to it. It will look something like this: UCqoH4oSIEttrjmasHPBx5Ug