Doing A Media Fast
How much time per day do you spend consuming media? I'm talking about news, magazines, social media and websites. Has it increased with the pandemic? Is it doing you good? Or is it making you anxious and depressed? A media fast can help us break the cycle that news has over us. At a time when we need to be focusing on personal circumstances, keeping up with the media can distract us, or even worse, derail us completely and offer us an unhealthy escape.
Evernote: Managing Someday Tasks
Most people have moments when they see something and think, "I'd like to do that someday." If you're not going to forget about it, that means you either have to do it right now or write it down somewhere so you won't forget. David Allen, in Getting Things Done, recommended having a Someday/Maybe list, where all of these ideas reside. The problem with any sort of list is that if you keep stuffing things into it, without removing items in turn, it becomes a giant slush pile of un-acted-upon ideas. As an IT data professional, I can tell you that a system where you only put things in, without the ability or inclination to take it out again, is a failure. If you can't or won't get data out of a system, why put it in at all? It's wasted effort/time/money. So the ginormous list of things…
Evernote: My Maintenance Routine
Even though Evernote has some serious disadvantages (see Evernote: Love, Hate, and Usage), it is still my chosen note software. Today I wanted to show you how I use Evernote so that things are manageable. When I first started using Evernote seriously, I researched the best practices. Why re-invent the wheel, after all? The best practice at the time was to have a few notebooks and then use tags to classify everything. This didn't work for me, because I couldn't find what I was looking for most of the time, and a single breakdown in tagging caused information to get lost. I also found that I couldn't efficiently clean out old unneeded information, and that just made everything worse. Now I have multiple notebooks. If something gets mis-tagged, or lacks a tag, I can still look through the notebook to find it. Plus having multiple notebooks allows…
Podcast Episode 19: Dealing with Burnout
Once again I am struggling with burnout. I looked through my archives to see how I dealt with this in the past. And I thought I would pull together the information on burnout in one place.
Evernote: Love, Hate and Usage
Have you ever bookmarked a website, to return later and find that it is gone? Or wished that you could make notes on a website and save it? These are the primary reasons to use a notebook application like Evernote instead of a bookmark manager. I used a bookmark manager as my primary source of keeping track of useful information on the interwebs for years. But after realizing that many of my bookmarks pointed to sites that were no longer there, and the inability to access information without the internet made me reconsider how I was storing things. Enter Evernote. Evernote is a notebook tool that is available as desktop, web and mobile, allowing me to get to my notes no matter where I am. Today I will talk about Evernote, its ups, downs and foibles, and how I use it.
Procrastinating Is Different Than Incubating
Sometimes ideas need time to incubate. We may need to work out details, methods, or even the feasibility of the idea itself. To the outside person, this can look like procrastination. But in fact, incubation and procrastination are very different. How are they different? Here are five ways that procrastinating is different than incubating.
Podcast Episode 18 – 10 Things You May Not Know About Me
If you are not a long-time reader of my blog, or only know me through the podcast, you probably don't know much about me. Today I give you 10 things you probably didn't know about me so that you can learn about where I come from, both literally and metaphorically.
Building Margin Into Your Life
Do you ever have a stretch of time where you are so busy it feels like you can't even pause to catch your breath? If so, you need to look at building margin into your life. Such a pace is impossible to maintain in the long run, and can lead us to both burnout and poor performance on the tasks we are trying to get done. I can get frantically busy. These days it is generally only for a day or two at a time, but there have been times when that busyness stretched into weeks. It's so busy that you don't even have time to consider what you need to do next. You just pick up the next thing and keep going. Sometimes these stretches are caused by over-scheduling, or an inability to say no, or forgetting that I can ask for help; but they all…
