It’s great being a New Zealander – we all believe in getting stuck in, and not being afraid to get our hands dirty. Having graduated beyond the simple projects – replacing cupboard handles, making new shelves in the hot water cupboard – I turned to the Internet in my quest for ever more challenging projects to do at home. I found a great site – Instructables! (www.instructables.com)

Instructables is a great community driven site that has no end of weekend (and longer) projects for the Kiwi DIY-er. Information on how do to create anything from making foldaway bike racks for your garage to design plans for building a massive backyard barbeque (just want I want to do at home) can be had for free, complete with step by step illustrated instructions (in most cases). And because it’s community driven, you’re free to share your latest self-build success and help others with your own DIY prowess. The only caveat is, because it is largely US based, you will need to do some imperial to metric conversions for measurements – but for a quick tip – you can google this (try it – google ’6 ft to m’).

It doesn’t stop here, of course – this is the web, after all. There’s dozens of DIY and improvement sites sites on the web – ranging from car repair (autorepair.about.com) to improving, organising and optimising your life (www.lifehacker.com). With the power of the internet, there’s no excuse for you not to carry on the Kiwi spirit with a little DIY!

With the new year under way, and with most people now settling back into work, school or uni, you may be thinking to yourself ‘how can I avoid the mess of to-do lists and cluttered inboxes that I had at the end of last year?’ You may even be dealing with the organisational fallout of last year right now!

Well, in the world of the Catholic geek, there are a number of tools and websites that can help you change your personal productivity system and make this year a more organised and less stressful one.

For starters, check out LifeHacker. This site is full of hundreds of fantastic tips on how you can make your personal and/or work life a little bit easier. This site has everything – from reviews of free downloads to make your internet browser better, to tips for DIY wedding planning, to tips on how to stay awake at work or school! LifeHacker is a brilliant site for anyone wanting to tweak the way they work.

For those looking to totally re-engineer their way of getting things done, there is the GTD philosophy – which stands for Getting Things Done! Thought up by David Allen and supported by a community of thousands of other websites, GTD is based on the principle that having things written down in a system that you trust will stop you thinking about them all the time. It also gets you to break down big projects into a series of ‘next actions’, and teaches you how to keep your inboxes – be they electronic or paper-based – clear and clean. You can get David’s book from your local library, or check out Wikipedia for some more information.

So, instead of the same old resolutions, why not resolve to improve your productivity this year?