Category Archives: Productivity

Goals For March ’09

Posted on by
Reply

So this is something that I was inspired to do by Erik Kastner over at his blog Meta|ateM. He did it last month and was fairly succesful and it also goes along with something that I have thought about and possible written about, providing people public knowledge of what your goals are so they can hold you accountable. So here is my list for March.

Get a working prototype of my Main project finished.

This might not get done but I’m really hoping that I can as I spent the past month working on the algorithm and design of the system. I think I can get the base down in 2 weeks but some of the higher functioning algorithms will take a bit longer but I have to build a working test body before I get to them.

15 posts

I know I was lacking last month, in fact this is the first post in over 2 weeks. I’ll be finishing a bunch of posts I’ve been working on and should be able to hit 15 fairly easily.

Find a new car

This is new as I just totalled my car an hour ago, at the time of writing. I was planning on looking more towards the end of the month but looks like that clock was stepped up a bit.

Build up my chipstack on Full-Tilt

Lately, I’ve been playing more often I haven’t reached a point where I’m able to sacrifice money from my daily life so I just play  for fun and intellectual challenge. Right now, I’m at 3,000 and I want to reach 10,000 by the end of the month.

I’ll update you guys on how I did at the end of the month. Oh and for those of you that subscribe and visit the site I’m wondering if the new design is more pleasing to you?

Killing Time Sinks

Posted on by
Reply

Just over a week ago, I started playing World of Warcraft(again) and I was have a great time getting back into the game.  Unfortunately, for you guys it completely knocked out my time for blogging and also some of my other things that I enjoy. My estimate for in-game time is over 40 hours for the week, that’s a full time job, what the hell could I have been thinking. So I’m going to write down a list of ways to seek and remove time sinks.

Do a Weekly Analysis for 1-2 Weeks

You don’t have to over thorough with you tracking, but every couple of hours write down what your doing. If you do something that could take a few hours write before you start and when you end, including the time for each. At the end of the week, compile all that information and look for stuff that appears rather excessive and see if you can cut it out; for me excessive would be anything above 6-8 hours for the week. Obviously, you can’t cut sleep, dining, or commuting out completely, but it is possible to cut back.

How to Cut Back

If say reading too much(though I don’t think that’s possible), you could cut the number of books available to you so that you read them more slowly and cherish them, or maybe it’s a social activity, you can cut your funding so that you have to stay home. Find a way to either make the time have more value, rather than desaturate it with over use, or put a flow valve on it so that you can constrict it. If it’s possible you could also just go cold turkey and cut it completely, this was my choice in canceling my subscription and removing the software from my system.

Find Something Productive to Fill the Time

This is the big one anytime you try to stop a habit, you need a distraction to prevent you from going back to your old ways.  You need something that you find interesting and will add value to your life. Here are a few, some that I plan on using

  • Blogging( I know I already am, I want to do it more frequently)
  • Freelancing
  • Programming
  • Reading
  • Focused Topical Learning
  • Get A Job
  • Head Back to School

Blogs, Books, and Tools For Money Management

Posted on by
Reply

The majority of what I’ve learned about managing my finances I have learned in the past few months. I’m going to list some of the major sources that I have used and are solid sources of personal finance information. So I’ll list some blogs that are good for this, some of my favorite books on the subject, and some sites that can help you manage it.

Blogs -

Get Rich Slowly – This is the best blog on personal finance that I have found. J.D. goes over so many different topics and various projects  that this is one of the biggest repositories for personal finance tips, tricks, and information.

Wise Bread – This blog is written by multiple people so there isn’t the same connection as with J.D. The topics can range widely from the writer’s experience and the quality is sometimes lacking. Good information it’s Lifehacker for finance.

Books -

The Richest Man in Babylon – This book is astoundingly in how simple it is too understand and it’s approach of using a story to achieve an osmotic effect with it’s information and your mind. It teaches multiple lessons in how to handle your finances while also having an underpinning in humility. A great read and also a classic from the 1920′s

Rich Dad, Poor Dad – This isn’t necessarily dedicated towards personal finance so much as street wise thinking on finance. This book isn’t to be taken literally but it does off plenty of good advice for business, and investing outside of the stock market. It makes it on the list because of these facts.

Hackers and Painters – I recommend this book not in it’s entirety, but for one essay that is contained within. You can read this essay entitled “How to Make Wealth” at Paul Graham’s website. A much different approach than what we have been ingrained with.

Tools -

Mint - My personal web tool to help chart my monetary flow. I find it fitting for my lifestyle in that it is simple, it easily connects, and implements multiple security measures. Pluses, SMS, nice tagging feature, allows you to break down bills into their subsequent parts, and handles almost any form of monetary trade, from checking, credit cards, and savings to stocks and loans.

Wesabe – This in the personal finance blogging arena comes out on top. It has community support, allows your to set goals, and update manually to keep it balanced. * I had issues with it miscalculating my credit card and telling me I had $245 on the black rather than $70 in the red so it was screwing the debit/credit balance of by $300 .

Geezeo – Another community connected online management tool. This comes out on top in the user happiness it seems. As far as I can tell, it lets you do what the other two do but it seems to be a more complete package haven’t actually used this but I may look into it.

Spreadsheets – Nothing like handling all the pertinent details yourself. Though this isn’t as easy as the others and will take some time out of your day I would at least recommend knowing how to do this either by hand or using software such as Excel, Quicken, Google Spreadsheets, etc.

Motivation Through Over-Extension (A Pragmatic Approach At Decision Making)

Posted on by
Reply

I find that I’m either completely open or completely self repressed, complete bipolar personality. If I crack the door to possibility and opportunity, slightly ajar to the point of all or nothing. I’m going to follow through even if it effects something else I’m doing in a negative way. So, recently I developed a way for me to find a middle path that gives me some flexibility in what I do.

I make a decision early on that is an over-extension of what I’m capable of doing at this time. However, I allow myself time to achieve this over-extended goal with any problems that may arise(not so good for large short-term goals).

“Once I made a decision, I never thought about it again”~Harry Truman

I follow Truman’s outlook very pragmatically. I make the decision, but I allow my self to make shorter term goals as I advance toward the larger goal. This provides a less stressful approach to completing a task that doesn’t have a rigidly defined deadline.

One large thing that this could help with would be a Bucket List. Your not going to go running out and have all of these things planned to happen; you just want them to happen and along the way you find ways to make them happen. It is perfect example of pragmatic decision making is that you can still change the order of the smaller goals to slowly overcome the larger goal of things to do before you die, or some age limit.

My Personal Productivity Suite

Posted on by
Reply

Someone on Twitter, several weeks ago, asked me how I manage close to a dozen social profiles and life. I didn’t really have a proper answer at that time, however. So, I’ve been trying to figure out how I manage to be as efficient as I am, and it comes down to several good apps and just some simple real world note taking.

Browser

The #1 productivity tool I have is Firefox. It trumps the rest of the browsers in usability, speed, and security. I have issues with the other three, IE is slow and not quite secure, Safari is pretty much Firefox without any real way to improve it’s productivity, and Flock seemed way to cluttered for regular use. I use a clean filing system on my bookmark toolbar to make it easier to get the sites I want when I want them.Then I also use several add-ons that also reduce the time I spend completing tasks. The 3 that I use most often are:

Feed Sidebar, provides your feeds anytime you want without having to visit another site. I find it better than Google Reader as it provides same pre-content viewing when you click the link and opens it when you double-click. It has a multitude of options that allow you to set how often it updates, how long the list remains, and how you want to have the pages opened. The only thing is that your feeds don’t exist in the cloud.

CoolPreviews, formerly CoolIris Previews, an add-on that displays a little mouse-over button that provides a preview of the page on the other side of a link. Think Snapshots without the automation and annoyance of interruption.

Firebug, this one’s going to help web developers and designers out a bit. It provides debugging for your web pages, quick viewing of how a technique someone has on their page that you would like, and also provides some nifty tricks for scraping media.

One more thing to add, not an add-on per say, but Ubiquity is a nifty tool so far. We’ll see if it gets better.

Microblogging and IM.

I use Twhirl for staying up on Twitter and if I need to I can cross post something to Pownce. Very productive tool as I can catch up on close to 200 peoples tweets for a period of 4 hours in a matter of 10-15 minutes.

For my IM client I use Trillian, it allows me to incorporate all my accounts into a single interface and provides me with alerts when I receive an Email so I can respond relatively quick. The cloud variant of this is Meebo but doesn’t provide the email updates, but still a nice piece of browser based software.

Notes, Writing, and Schedule

Notes depending on what the content is. If the note’s just something simple and I’m at my desk I’ll just scribble it down on an index card very simple and old school. If it’s something a bit bigger like a chunk of info off the web I just quick copy it to MS OneNote and clean it up later. I occasionally use Evernote but, it hasn’t become a necessity as I usually am on my own computer.

Writing, I use Onenote because If I need to post something to the web i can just drag it out of the window and drop it. Makes the copy and paste an inefficient process.

For a schedule, I use an old school calendar and just write my info in real quick.

Desktop

I use Vista, honestly not that bad but, I have 1 icon on my desktop, Recycle Bin all the programs and folders I use are stored in the quicklaunch. Quicklaunch means I don’t have to leave my browser window to open up Photoshop, Trillian, ITunes, Secondary Browsers, or my editors.

P.S. This is just what I do to stay productive I don’t know how much or even if any of this advice would help you.