First, I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year! 2009 was a great year for us, and we hope 2010 will bring the even more success. Ringing in the New Year usually means watching the ball drop, food & drinks, and of course making New Year’s resolutions.

Recently, while reading one of our favorite blogs (the GTD Times, by David Allen) we came across an article that inspired us to take stock with a year end thought exercise. In the GTD Times article, Year End Completions, David Allen goes over a few questions that anyone can ask themselves about how their 2009 went and what they would like to see of themselves in 2010. Here the questions from the exercise and we thought we’d turn it into a community based survey -

Completing and remembering 2009

What was your biggest triumph in 2009?
What was the smartest decision you made in 2009?
What one word best sums up and describes your 2009 experience?
What was the greatest lesson you learned in 2009?
What was the most loving service you performed in 2009?

Creating the new year

What would you like to be your biggest triumph in 2010?
What advice would you like to give yourself in 2010?
What is the major effort you are planning to improve your financial results in 2010?
What would you be most happy about completing in 2010?
What major indulgence are you willing to experience in 2010?
What would you most like to change about yourself in 2010?

We love the idea of making goals for yourself and taking a look back at what you’ve accomplished. So, inspired by David Allen, we took it one step further. We had two fun ideas that we thought would bring a little community entertainment, and self reflection to your day.

Share and be Inspired

We want to know what your New Year’s Resolutions are and share them with the world. Take the survey below or use the link http://surveygizmo.2010-New-Years-Resolutions.sgizmo.com/

You can see everyone’s results here: Click Here to see results

Use it Inside Your Company

What if you want to make your own New Year’s Resolution survey and send it out to just your colleagues, company or friends?

Well we’ve created a template inside of SurveyGizmo anyone can use called “New Year’s Resolutions”. You can find it by clicking on Start with a Pre-Made survey and then under the “Other” category.

Tell us what you think by leaving us some comment love!

As fun is a relative term, we’ll try to vary the types of posts we do, to make sure there’s fun for everyone! On that note, if you have suggestions about what we should write about, you can pop over to this survey and let us know your ideas. This first post is of the Stuff We Like variety, which is for products or services that SurveyGizmo employees find fun and useful.

Today, we’ll be highlighting TextExpander by SmileOnMyMac.

And we’ll tell you what: we really love TextExpander.

In short, TextExpander saves us hours of typing. The software allows us to assign shortcuts to text that is written frequently, such as a long signature, frequently typed URLs, and frequently used CSS and HTML. So, instead of typing the whole signature, or copying and pasting it from a text file, I just type “SIG”, and TextExpander fills it in for me. This time-saving product increases efficiency, thus increasing our happy-vibes.

Just check out my usage stats:

9.72 hours is more than a regular workday! And I haven’t used it for a month yet. Stats like these are the reason we love TextExpander so much!







Two Tips for Successful Snippets:

• Modify the case of your shortcuts to reduce conflict with commonly typed words. So, instead of sig, which would interfere with the word signature, I make it SIG.
• Use commas or periods at the beginning of your snippets–this reduces most conflicts!

More Cool Features:

• TextExpander syncs with MobileMe.
• You can create snippets from selections, or from text copied into your clipboard.
• Text’s not all: it supports Rich Text, including photos and formatted text, Shell Scripts, and AppleScripts.
• There’s TextExpander for iPhone and iPod touch, goodie! You can download that here.
• For iPhone and iPod touch app integrates with cool apps like Tweetie and WriteRoom. See the full list of mobile apps that integrate here.
• They have pre-created HTML and CSS snippet groups for your coding convenience.

You can download a free trial of TextExpander, and buy the full version for a measley $29.95. TextExpander pays for itself when time equals money!

If you are not familiar with GTD we highly recommend you take a look into it (GTD Times is a good place to get started). SurveyGizmo’s a big advocate of GTD techniques internally — they help us build you better products!