There are times when I really, really hate the auto-sleep feature on my computers. Because having a machine lock itself when I am monitoring something is a major pain in the patootie. So I came up with a way to keep the machine awake and unlocked.

I’m not sure how many people have this problem. I find that it is an issue for me both at home and at work. Here are the scenarios:

• Home: I was trying to copy files from my old laptop to my new. But the old laptop would go to sleep after 30 minutes, and the copy would stall.
• Work: I was running something on my desktop machine while working on my laptop. The desktop machine would lock itself after 3 minutes, meaning I had to put my password in each time I wanted to check on the progress.

Autolocking and Sleep are Good

I understand why it is good to let my home laptop go to sleep after 30 minutes. It doesn’t need to be turned on all the time, and heaven knows I would never shut it off.

I understand why my client auto-locks machines after 3 minutes of inactivity. There is less chance of someone unauthorized finding an unlocked machine and working at it.

But given that I am doing something active at home, and literally sitting next to the machine at work, these restrictions are frustrating.

So I Made A Solution

I’m a programmer, and since these problems are on computers, it was easy to make a solution.

It’s a PowerShell script, and it simply simulates a key press every 60 seconds. The script runs for 10 hours.

Here is the code:

param($minutes = 600)

$myshell = New-Object -com "Wscript.Shell"

for ($i = 0; $i -lt $minutes; $i++) {
	Start-Sleep -Seconds 60
	$myshell.sendkeys("{F13}")
}

Explanation

The first line sets the number of minutes that the script will execute. In this case 10 hours (600 minutes)

Every 60 seconds, the script will send the F13 key to the computer. You may be asking “what is the F13 key?” It doesn’t exist. But the computer doesn’t know that. ?

Using the Script

To use the script:

1. Copy the above code into a new Notepad document.
2. Save the file with a PS1 extension. I called mine KeepLive.ps1
3. Right-click on the saved file and choose “Run with PowerShell”

Disclaimers

Of course, only use this if it is eligible to be used under your company’s policies. Always understand code that you run from the Internet. I cannot confirm that this script can make Microsoft teams think you are at your desk and available. Use this script at your own risk. I and my blog cannot be held responsible for the use of the script.

I looked into switching from my paper habit tracker to apps in October. After evaluating three of them for a few weeks, I have finally made my habit tracker choice.

Except there are two that “won.”

My Usage

I have two sets of habits that I wanted to track. The first is my daily morning routine. My morning routine keeps me on track and allows me to carve out time for activities I feel are necessary to a serene and balanced day.

The second set of “habits” was to track when I work on my projects. There are long-term projects, like learning German and learning percussion, both of which require daily practice. There are also projects that come from my yearly goals as well as those that pop up in the course of my life. These contain things like writing my fiction book (yearly goal) to repotting all of the indoor plants (pop up project).

My Findings From The Trial

I wanted a habit tracker that would track both positive habits as well as help me eliminate negative habits. It had to have an easy to use interface and allow me to see streaks.

I evaluated three apps: Habit Tracker, Habitica and HabitKit.

Habitica: Nope.

I honestly thought, going in, that this would be the clear winner. Gamifying sounds fun, and it could do the positive and negative.

I found that the interface was slow to respond, and once I had selected something, there was no possibility for an “undo”. Since I had clicked on something multiple times because the app wasn’t responsive, I ended up having a day where it looked like it took my medications 5 times.

As cute as this was, I didn’t see the point of the app. I’m not going to take my character and go on quests. That is one more distraction in my life I don’t need.

So Habitica is on the shelf.

Habit Tracker: Win #1

I really liked the way that I can set up units in this application. It allows me to do partial completion, like putting in the number of steps I did take, even if it didn’t reach my goal.

I also really liked the completion wheel that shows me how I am doing on a rolling seven-day basis – right at the top of the entry screen. And the overall stats both in calendar form and by habit is a big plus. It also allows habits to be skipped without affecting the streaks.

The price is amazing – they offer an outright purchase in addition to the yearly subscription. The outright purchase is only $5.99.

This app is what I will be using to track my morning routine. It gives me all the visibility that my paper circle tracker did, both with tracking by habit and by day.

Atomic Habits – HabitKit: Win #2

Habit Kit shows me the habits by blocking out a box on a grid. It shows more than one month at a time on the grid, so you can see your streaks.

I like the way that I can see the habits broken out by habit – tracking streaks is the main focus of this.

With the paid app, you can see advanced statistics, both by individual habit as well as overall.

This app also offered an outright purchase as well as the subscription model. The lifetime price is $14.99 – still very reasonable for an app.

This app is what I will be using to track my project work. It gives me an overview of what I have neglected in one place.

Daily Update

One of the things that made me look at apps versus my paper tracking is that I check my phone right before bed, and updating the apps is going to be easier than hauling out the bullet journal, turning on the light, and updating it.

Switching to apps is going to give me an easy way to track how I am doing with both habits and project work.

Do you know how well you do on actually completing the things you consider habits? Do you use a habit tracker? I’m a big believer in tracking habits so that I have the hard-and-fast numbers to show me, eliminating my mind’s bias in how well I do.

As I started a new bullet journal this month, I took a look at how I was planning and tracking – and what was and wasn’t working. One of my main sticking points was how I track habits and the work I do on projects. I wasn’t updating the bullet journal before I went to bed, and so I ended up having to try and recall days worth of progress. Relying on my memory is even worse than believing I completed all my habits without proof, so I knew I needed to change things up.

My Old Tracker

I had two separate trackers in my bullet journal for each month. One was for my morning routine habits, and the other for tracking how often I worked on projects and long-term goals.

The morning routine I put into a circular tracker that showed me along tracks of the circle how I was doing on that habit, but then as the day moving toward the center, how I was doing on the day. (Example below)

For the project tracker, I wanted to be able to see if I was neglecting projects for weeks on end, and so I chose a grid tracker. I’ve tried one like shown below, but it had morphed into day number across the top and the project down the side.

Neither one of these was working because I wasn’t keeping up with updating it on a daily basis.

Using An App?

My daughter, a recent convert to bullet journaling, was telling me that she moved some of her habits into an app. She told me that the one she really wanted she couldn’t get on her phone (Android) but that I should check it out.

I wondered if switching to an app would make it easier to track habits and projects, so I decided to experiment.

Habit Tracker Apps I Tried

Disclaimer: I just want to point out that I have an iPhone, so I looked at iOS apps only. My goal was to find something that worked for me, rather than to present a broad look at a bunch of apps.

I wanted an app that was going to do the following:

• Track streaks so I could see where I was having issues
• Be easy to navigate
• Be reasonably priced: I prefer paying once to paying on a subscription model, but any cost has to be reasonable for the value received
• Some way to track those habits I am trying to break as well as those I am trying to establish.

I downloaded and installed all these apps and took each out for a spin. The app was either removed immediately, or evaluated for a few weeks.

Fabulous

This app is very scientific and reminds me of the Noom diet app with coaching and lessons. It makes challenges for you. I found it impossible to get past the constant upgrade screen to get a good look at what it does. I’m not interested in how to build, I just want to track. Verdict: removed.

Focus Habit

This seemed like a gamified habit tracker? But I couldn’t figure out how to use it out of the box. Verdict: removed.

Habit Rabbit

This is a gamified habit tracker that allows you to clothe and house a rabbit. It is adorable. But there is no negative habits and no pause. The tutorial was sparse and I found the interface confusing. Verdict: removed.

Habit Tracker

Habit Tracker allows for negative habits as well as partial completion. It has lots of units for tracking the habits, instead of the usual yes/no. For instance, you can have a habit of 10000 steps and it will give you credit for doing 8000. It also gives you a choice to be notified of habits, and a vacation/pause mode. Verdict: try for a few weeks.

Habitica

Another gamified habit tracker, this one is along the lines of D&D. It’s got cute little pixel graphics and rewards for completing your habits. Verdict: try for a few weeks.

HabitKit

This app is designed to show streaks, very much like I did manually in the bullet journal. It was easy to use, but there was no way to track negative habits. The Pro version unlocks the graphs. Verdict: try for a few weeks.

(Not Boring) Habits

This has a really nice interface and has reminders. It is also science-backed but doesn’t spoon feed it. I liked the promise that it wouldn’t nag me. The problem of this for me is that all of the habits were on different screens, and I had a really tough time figuring out how to navigate the app. Verdict: removed.

NoteCircle

This was the app my daughter wanted me to look at. It is more of a task manager and calendar with the ability to split out routines. For routines, it jumps back and forth between routines and tasks – a very tedious process. Streaks are a paid feature. No negative habits. Verdict: removed.

Sparkle: Self-Care Checklist

This app’s title said what I wanted. But it also included the need to ask how I felt with the habits. Honestly I don’t need to analyze my emotional state with flossing. It just need to be done. There were week rolling streaks, but no way to see progress longer than that. Verdict: removed.

Streaking: Streak Your Habits

This is a social media platform for habit building and sharing, working either alone or with a team. You can see what others are doing. It shows streaks by day/week/month. It allows you to put your habits in folders. I’m not interested in doing this process with other people. Verdict: removed.

After looking at the apps, I was left with three to evaluate: Habitica, Habit Kit and Habit Tracker. I will publish my results in a few weeks.

I’ve been using a Bullet Journal – in the original, minimalistic sense, for about 5 years. I’ve experimented and adjusted, but I’ve never really written about my experiments. I made some big changes this month, and I thought I would share them.

New Notebook

For all the time I have done Bullet Journaling, I have used the recommended LEUCHTTURM1917 notebook*. It was the first notebook I ever used with good quality paper, and I loved the dot format, which allowed me to create my own forms and pages without having to draw over anything already on the page.

But the notebook has been too small to take a full year, and too big to do a half year. Not to mention it is expensive – $25 a shot – and if you get the official Bullet Journal version, the price jumps.

I started a new notebook in February. I was out of pages in September. I wanted something that was going to last for all of 2024 as well as the last quarter of 2023.

I did some research and found a better value* in a notebook, with more pages, and thicker paper from Gosirim. 320 pages to the other notebook’s 251. 100 gsm paper to the other’s 80 gsm. And the Gosirim has numbered pages, which a lot of the dot notebooks do not have.

It also has an elastic pen loop. which the Leuchtturm did not have.

I’m very happy with this purchase, and while the cover isn’t the color shown on Amazon, I am OK with it.

Monthly Page Changes

For the past two notebooks (so about 1.5 years?) I have a four page spread at the beginning of the month. The first page is a running one-line summary of the day, as suggested in the bullet journal instructions. The second was a tracker of daily habits. The third is a tracker of sleep, mood and (sometimes) weather. And the fourth was a grid in which I tracked which projects I worked on.

I realized that I never updated the daily habits or project trackers regularly. I go three to seven days and then try to remember. The sleep isn’t as big of a problem because the data is tracked in an app already, and I transcribe it so I can see patterns.

I decided to do away with the daily habits and project tracker – and move them to habit tracker apps.

I am more likely to update an app before bed than I am the notebook, for the simple reason that I added the habit trackers to the same screen as my other nighttime apps: Calm, Fitbit and my alarm clock.

Month Markers

I wanted a quicker way to find where a month started in the notebook without having to look at the index.

I decided that a tiny piece of washi tape folded over the edge of the page where the month starts would work best. I can see it from the edge of the book, and quickly move to that month.

The washi tape I am using is 1/4” and I got it from the Dollar Store. It serves the purpose.

Future Log Change

The instructions for the bullet journal have you divide four pages up, three sections per each page, and give one section to each month in the year.

This has always been hard for me. I have a lot of things happen in March – namely my husband’s entire family has birthdays that month.

I decided to make the future log more flexible. I modeled it after the Alistair method of task tracking, having one page for each 6 month span, and then columns in which to mark which month each event was in. The closest I could find on the web to this is the following: (I’m not putting my own on the web because it contains too much PII)

From https://bujoing.com/bullet-journal-future-log/

More Planning

Because of the lack of space in the old notebooks, I was always hesitant to make collections pages. I am putting forth more of an effort to write things down in this new notebook.

I have a page for books recommendations, a page for tracking charitable giving, a log for my contact with the Veteran’s Administration, and a list for tracking which episode of a TV series I will watch next.

For my week off from work this month I have made a list of things I would like to tackle at home.

Wrap Up

I am very excited about the changes I have made for the new notebook. The quality of the notebook and paper are such that I feel good writing in it every single time I put pent to paper. Moving the habits and projects to apps mean I don’t have pages to set up that I won’t use. My future log is more flexible, and I am doing more planning. It’s a good setup.

Microsoft Excel, which is a spreadsheet meant for crunching numbers, may be the tool of accountants. But I rely on it heavily to help me with text. I generate text using Excel in order to feed data cleanly into systems.

It occurred to me that people might get some benefit from learning how to do this, so here is my method:

The Data

Usually when I am assembling chunks of text, the data has come to me with bits of it in columns, and I may have to add in other text. Since I don’t want to geek out on you here, I’ll use an example with putting together addresses.

Let’s say we have a spreadsheet with 6 columns: First Name, Last Name, Address, City, State and ZIP. We want to transform those into three columns: Name, Address, CityStateZIP. Here is what the data would look like to start with:

Basic Text Formulas and Operators

There are a few things you need to know about working with text. Here is the summary:

All formulas start with “=”. The equals sign tells Excel it is going to do a “calculation”, even if it is on text.

Reference cells by their location. Excel has columns that are labeled with letters and rows that are labeled with numbers. To reference a particular cell (or “box”), use the column letter followed by the row number.

Know that Excel uses Relative Referencing by default. Excel formulas reference things relative to the position from where you are. So if you are in column G, row 2 and you reference column A, row 1, Excel sees this as “go to the left of where I am 5 columns and up 1 row”. Be careful with this, or it can lead to unexpected results.

All text that doesn’t change goes in double quotes. If you want to add something that doesn’t change into a text string, you put it in double quotes (“). For example, if you wanted the text to start out saying “The Grand High Exalted Muckity Muck”, the formula would be

="The Grand High Exalted Muckity Muck".

Concatenate with &. To put two chunks of text together in Excel, you need to use concatenation, which is the ampersand (&). The plus sign (+) is for adding numbers.

Example: to put John and Doe together, without a space in between, it would become

="John" & "Doe"

Trim off the spaces. Nothing can throw off putting text together than extra spaces. Trim off the extra spaces in your text by using TRIM(). If you wanted to format the name in the example above, the formula would become as follows. This translates to “trim the spaces off either end of the text in cell A2, then add a blank space, then add the text of B2, which has also had the spaces removed from both ends.

=TRIM(A2) & " " & TRIM(B2)

Pad ZIP codes with 0s. ZI{codes can be a bear. They are numbers that are treated as text, but sometimes Excel doesn’t see them that way. You can fix this with some padding. We use the REPT function to generate a string of zeroes, then add the ZIP code to the right of this, and take the rightmost five characters. (It sounds more complicated than it is).

=RIGHT(REPT("0",5) & F2,5)

You can add new lines to the text. If you need the text to appear on multiple lines (say for address labels) you can do that by inserting a CHR(10).

=C2 & CHR(10) & D2

Extend the formula with copying. To get the formula where you need it to be, copy the cell with your original formula into the cells that need it.

The Results

Below you can see the formulas and the results:

Since I released my video on my OneNote work planning system, I have gotten questions about how to personalize the notebook. This video is about how to save time and effort by using templates to customize a OneNote notebook.

I love the idea of a reusable notebook. I love the RocketBook companion app as well. But not so much the RocketBook products. So I came up with some RocketBook hacks.

Not having to lug around multiple or bulky notebooks is a big plus. And then the thought that I can throw away pages without having to rip them out is a big plus – I like to doodle while in meetings to main my focus.

The RocketBook Notebook

The RocketBook* is one of the leading names in the reusable notebook space. They have an edge in the free app (iOS, Android) that allows you to capture the notebook pages and send them directly to destinations by coloring in one of the icons at the bottom of the page. They also can capture a larger area and send them directly to the same choice of your destinations.

The Concept

The way that RocketBook* notebooks work is they have a specially treated surface (it’s actually plastic paper, but that is another story for another time) on which you write with a special pen.

The pen is a Frixion pen*. The ink is erasable by the application of heat. So the “eraser” on the pen creates friction, which heats up and erases the ink. The ink is also water solvable, and when used with the plastic surface, you can erase a little or a lot in one go. (As a side note, you can use Frixion pens on paper too, and the ink erases.)

RocketBook isn’t the only one that makes use of this plastic paper, and Frixion pens are widely available.

The Software

I cannot say enough good things about this software. Yes, it’s a camera software, but with way more. With 7 customizable destinations, you can send it directly to many services like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneNote, Trello and Slack. You can also send it to up to 6 email addresses.

You have the ability to allow for tags and changing subject lines, sending as a picture, pdf or as a bundle of pdf pages together.

I have 6 of the 7 destinations set up: my personal Google drive, my email at the client site, Trello, my personal OneNote, my personal email and Remember The Milk via email.

The software can capture either a page or a larger area. The notebook uses a special footer on the bottom of every page to determine the page dimensions as well as the destination. For capturing a larger area, you can buy “beacons*”, four orange triangles to place at the corner of the space to be captured. The software can then use the triangles to define the rectangle to be captured.

Wow. That’s Expensive. And Invisible!

When I first started experimenting with the reusable notebook, I took a look at the prices on the RocketBook notebooks, and absolutely refused to pay that sort of price for something that was an experiment. I bought a cheaper notebook that had four different types of guides on it – ruled pages, graph paper, blank pages and dotted grid.

Unfortunately, this notebook doesn’t work out of the box with RocketBook app because it doesn’t have the special footers. However, you can download printable pages that do work with the RocketBook app, right off their website. Using the reusable notebook, I was able to play with the concept, and using the free pages, I was able to play with the app. This seemed promising.

I was ready to commit. I ended up buying a RocketBook notebook and was very disappointed to find that there were far fewer pages (18 in the RocketBook versus 32 in my knockoff). Yes, you may point out, you don’t need pages when you can reuse them, but the pages in the RocketBook brand notebook wouldn’t have carried me through a single design session at work. Also, the printed guides on the pages were so light as to be invisible unless I am working under a bright light. So I couldn’t see the dots, much less the special footer.

I also wanted to start capturing our design sessions at work. While we normally did them on white boards, sometimes there were parts of the boards or paper we needed to exclude. I looked at the Rocket beacons, and I was not going to pay over $10 for four pieces of orange plastic.

Hacking the Beacons

I started looking for alternatives to the RocketBook branded stuff. I wondered what I could do to substitute for the orange plastic.

I realized it wasn’t about size, because you could stand back as far or close as you wanted to capture the area.

It wasn’t about the material or other physical characteristics of the beacons, because they were photographed.

It must be the color and shape. So what else can produce an orange right triangle?

Sticky notes, that’s what. I took a 4 3×3 bright orange sticky notes* and cut them on the diagonal. I placed them at the corners of a white board, and voila! Replacement beacons.

These work just as well and are much, much cheaper. Plus I don’t have to worry about losing them. I just keep a few unaltered sticky notes on the inside covers of all of my notebooks (erasable or not).

Hacking the Notebook Send Bar

I was buoyed by my success and wondered if there was a way for me to hack the notebook.

The row of icons on the bottom of the Rocket pages serve two purposes: they guide the camera as to the size and position of the page, and they allow you to choose where the picture will be going by coloring in one or more of the icons corresponding to your pre-configured destinations.

The printable free pages from the RocketBook site also have this bar, but much more readable. The send bar is proportional to the size of the page. I took a screen snap of the picture on my computer to play with.

I would have to resize the bar to fit the size of my off brand notebook. I could print one, but I had to make sure that the proportions worked.

So this is where the simple math came in.

If the RocketBook page is 8.5” wide, and the bar is centered on the page, it became a simple game of equivalent fractions.

Size: The rocket page is 8.5” wide. My knockoff is 6.75” wide. Using Paint.Net, I scaled the graphic down to 6.75 and then printed it.

Position: The bar needs to be centered. I had to make sure that the piece of paper I printed it on was as wide as my new notebook page and the pictures centered.

The icons: Since the bar would be printed on paper, I wanted to have a way to select the icon without destroying the paper bar. I found these 1/4” dot stickers* that can be put on and removed from the paper.

I formatted the bar, put it into a document and printed it. After cutting it to the correct dimensions, I was able to use it with the app, just like the RocketBook brand notebook.

Extending the Notebook Hack

After having success with the moveable printable paper bar, I realized I didn’t have to use it just with my Rocket knockoff notebook. I could use it with any size notebook, even paper ones or electronic/tablet notebooks, just by having that correctly sized beacon in place.

So using the same principles for sizing above, I created one for my Bullet Journal and one for my iPad.

The End Result

Coming up with these hacks has allowed me to capture my work into electronic form very quickly.

Last week our team did a design session on whiteboards. At the end, instead of taking pictures and sending them around as JPGs by mailing it to my personal account, then to my client account (because of security restrictions around the mailing of pictures), I used my sticky beacons and sent them directly to my work account as a PDF. This then went straight out to the team with a simple forward. I also added the PDF to my meeting notes.

Last month I was brainstorming new product ideas in my reusable notebook, using both the blank pages for a mind map, the dot pages for brainstorm sessions and the lined pages for a task list. These were bundled quickly into a pdf and sent to my Google Drive.

Finding ways to use the Rocket technology with non-Rocket products has made the whole thing much more flexible.

I had to recently switch from paper to electronic notes for work due to the need to do fast searches. Searching through five notebooks that were haphazardly backlinked was almost impossible. I made the switch to OneNote, and have worked hard to get a simple but workable system. This is a tour of how I use OneNote for work.

I love to read. Unfortunately, I’m not really good at remembering what I have already read. This has led to more than one occasion where I checked out the same book twice – or even worse – bought it more than once.

In order to keep a handle on things, I use a book journal. It’s been a simple spreadsheet up until now, but I find that a spreadsheet is only good at simple details. I wanted to be able to save a summary of the book – and why I did (or didn’t) like it.

I looked around for something suitable, but everything was far too complicated with dozens of pages and categories. So I made my own.

My book journal is now available in my shop. It’s a printable PDF (A5 size), but it was designed to be used with GoodNotes or Noteability, with links going between the index summary and the book detail pages.

You can get more details at the product page.

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