life: September 2006 Archives

Alex and I spent Saturday evening and yesterday at "The Lake", my mom's place in Indiana. I had a good time but I missed most of the party on Saturday because I had to work 'til 5 and it takes roughly 2 hours to drive there after I got home. My mom had a "Chili Party" and they watched the Ohio State game. Well it was mostly an OSU party, but there are a few Michigan, Wisconsin, and Notre Dame fans around the place so it was really just a football party.

By the time Alex and I got there, most everybody was pretty blitzed, Saturday was a still a blast though. I don't think I've laughed so hard in my life as my mom and Doug were talking about this "true redneck" they met at the bar the night before. Oh my gosh, was that hilarious, especially Doug's impressions...

My mom, despite the fact that she couldn't remember much of the night before, promised to wake up and make us breakfast/brunch, and by golly she did! She was thrilled because not only could Alex and I make it but so did my brother and my sister with her son. It's not too often she can get all of us up at The Lake at once.

What I found the most amusing, though, was the presentation of my belated birthday presents on Sunday morning. My mom usually gets me an item of OSU clothing...this year she went on a shopping spree. My new OSU clothing consisted of a nice long sleeved t-shirt, a sweatshirt, some lounge around pants (which I did desparately need), a hat, and a sweatshirt. My brother then presented me with his gift which was a nice OSU zippered sweatshirt/jacket type thing. Now keeping in mind I live in Ann Arbor, much of my OSU clothing does not get worn in public around here. I usually end up taking it to The Lake when I visit, like this weekend, in addition to the new clothes I got I also brought an OSU sweatshirt of my own, and a long sleeved t-shirt that I got as a previous birthday present.

Yesterday I was decked out in my new clothing most of the day...good thing it was chilly outside because I had on about 7 layers of Ohio State. I spent most of the day outside by the fire...that's probably why my nose is stuffy and my cough is getting worse, but it was worth it :)

I wasn't ready for it to be Fall yet, but now I think I'm ready!

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

I finally finished this book today. I guess according to my All Consuming account, I started it six weeks ago...that sounds about right. It seems like I have about a million books going on right now and this one got buried on my desk until today. I know this isn't a new book but we got a brand new copy at the library and I decided to finally read it. It was a bit of a life changing book for me, not complete life changing, but I have seen enough progress with the advice in this book to know that it absolutely works.

When I first got the book I devoted an entire weekend to going through my crap to start the organization process. Well, six weeks later most of what I started then is still in place! I started an inbox not just for stuff at home, but I've applied the same principles to work and school things. My email situation has improved tremendously. I went from having over 400 messages in my inbox, about half of them unread to currently 23 and only 3 unread. I've also managed to get the amount of junk mail and paper crap hanging around my apartment in various places to reside mostly in one organized mail section of the apartment. This has helped keep the sanity in our home...we can actually eat at our dining table now!!!

I do recommend this book to anybody who needs a little help and motivation in organizing your life, not just paper clutter (if you're like me), but all the little projects you need to get done. It changes the way you think about what you have to do and you end up being surprised at how much time you really do have to get things done (it's probably more than you think!)

Of course I love GTD tools and hacks, here's a few things that have helped me:

GMail of course, but there's a couple of things you can add to GMail to make life and email easier:

GMail + Firefox + Greasemonkey Extension + GMail Saved Searches Script

This awesome Greasemonkey script adds "virtual folders" to the sidebar of your GMail. This script has helped me organize my email so much that if I'm checking my email on a computer where I don't have it installed, my mail will start to pile up because I only read what's important. When I finally do sit down to take care of the email, it only takes me a matter of minutes to get back down to zero unread again.

I also have a very specific way of attending to my GMail through labels, I do take the time to set up filters to auto label most everything that comes in my inbox. I've found that initially taking the time to do this has saved me a lot of hassle down the road...I do have a lot of labels on my GMail though...for me it's worth it.

There is also a GTD script for GMail, I have it installed but I know I haven't used it to its full advantage. I already had a decent system going with the Saved Searches script to it might be a little too much for me, but maybe helpful for other people.

My other new favorite tool is Hiveminder. For a to do list, this one rocks! I've used a lot of pretty decent ones too, but what I love about Hiveminder is the ability to review and hide tasks (it is built on GTD principles). I usually find that when I start having a mental block of what I should be doing next, going through a using Hiveminder in addition to applying some of the strategies in GTD actually puts me back on track again.

I use Google Calendar now, but another great calendar is 30Boxes. It was hard switching from 30Boxes, but Google Calendar is cool and it integrates right with GMail.

Online tools are nice, but the best thing I did for myself was really just create a space more condusive to getting things done. My clutter is actually minized to a few small piles of manageble things. I utlize the file cabinet I have sitting next to my desk (after I cleaned it out and created file folders for projects), and I put everything where it needs to go now...that is once I actually made sure everything I wanted to keep had a home! I even created a To Go System where all of my work and school projects would also stay organized. Six weeks is a long time for me to keep up any system, so it has worked!

Technorati : 30boxes, all consuming, david allen, firefox, getting things done, gmail saved searches, google calendar, greasemonkey, gtd, hiveminder, virtual folders

I realized today that I haven't been posting much in my blog...not unusual for me, but I have been pretty busy these last few weeks. I think once school settles in for me then I'll be back to business as usual.

So this is what I'm up to these days:

1. Work...when I'm not there I'm thinking about it. I just had my performance evaluation and I'm all hyped up on that. I got some great feedback on projects that we were considering doing or want to do and I've really been letting those things settle in my brain.

2. School...I have class today, my first class was last week. I'm taking Access to Information this semester which is really just the intro reference class. I had a small library visit project last week which will eventually lead up to a more major project at the end of the semester. This last project will require me to spend a lot of time observing the reference desk at two libraries...this will consume a lot of my precious free time. Today I'm meeting with my advisor to square away the rest of my classes at WSU...I'm pretty excited because I think I'm going to enjoy most of these classes. Next class project though is the encyclopedia assignment...which requires me to compare a variety of online and print encyclopedias. I think I'll be going to UMich's library on Thursday to complete this one.

3. Orchestra...the work I'm doing with the orchestra right now is actually frustrating me some and I wish not to speak about it at this time.

4. My Computer...I took it in on Thursday to see what was up. After they ran the diagnostics they found that the sound card is shot. By the way, the people at the computer place I went to were super nice! I like these guys a lot. Anyway, my computer is still not fixed, I decided on getting an external sound card (cost of replacement reasons mostly) and when they went to order it they said that it was on back order at all the major vendors they use...even the internet places had them on back order. I suggested that maybe everybody who owns my computer needs new sound cards about now :) Anyway, I have my computer back and they'll let me know when a new sound cars comes in...in the meantime I have to use Alex's computer if I need to watch any videos for school or anything like that. The guy at the computer place did fix some 600 registry errors on my computer though and he also mentioned that there is a power management issue with it but everything else is working excellently. The registry and power management errors don't surprise me much though. I try to take care of my computer the best I can but I have to admit it's mostly because I know I'm rough on it. My good friend jokes about my computer because it's huge...he calls it my "space heater" (can't complain it keeps my coffee warm in the morning), but the reason I went with this computer was because I tend to run a lot of memory intensive programs all at once. It's a good computer though, minus a few software issues I have with HP, I'm not dissatisfied with it. If I were to get a new computer I wouldn't mind a smaller, more portable one, but to be honest with you I think it would be hard for me to trade in the power of the one I have now.

That's all for now I suppose. I've been keeping a list of things I wanted to post about but I don't know when I'll be able to get to these. I haven't been reading my feeds much these days either, there's too much in my head and I don't really want to put any more in there right now.