Categories
life

Not Enough Time? Try These Tools

 

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.
- Charles Caleb Colton

 

 

 

With blocks on your schedule filling up, it’s easy to overlook the nuggets of time that, with proper management, allow you to recapture the value of your day.

The first question to ask is how do you want to be productive?  Try mind-mapping your thoughts in order to answer this question.

Mind Mapping – a mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea (from Wikipedia)

FreeMind – premier free mind-mapping software written in Java

MindMeister – online mind-mapping tool with real-time collaboration and mobile apps

Further discussion of the uses of mind-mapping available here

How will you keep track of the results of your efforts?  Create a searchable notebook.

Searchable Notebook – whether it be a personal wiki or an emailed note to self, having a central place for your notes can boost your time management

Wikihost – a collection of public and private wikis to publish content, share thoughts and find people with similar interests.

Evernote – save your ideas, things you like, things you hear, and things you see, available as a mobile app

Further discussion about personal wikis here

Spend a lot of time commuting?  Use a portable mp3 player to listen and learn.

Podcasts/Audiobooks – make use of your time by learning and reading.

Open University – iTunes provides search for free lectures via podcast at Open University

Librivox – LibriVox is a volunteer-driven provider of audiobooks from works in the public domain

A list of sources of free audiobooks may be found here

What tools do you use to get better value from your time?  Or do you have enough already?

Categories
job leadership

Growing out of Crisis Mode

A term I hear often at work is “fire drill.” Priorities get elevated until there’s a problem and suddenly all eyes focus on it, scurrying for a solution. This surplus of effort detracts from other priorities, allowing them to inflate and erupt in a chain reaction of multi-stress. Not fun, and not efficient. Much of the energy is wasted in commotion which would be better spent re-engaging with the larger picture.

How do we go about de-escalating a fire drill?  First, stop escalating.  Keep control of the urge to move the issue up the chain of command.  Think it through with co-workers on your management level.  Second, relax, breathe, and step away for a brief amount of time.  Write through the problem if it helps.  Sometimes a simple break can give your mind the rest it needs to reset.  Finally, consider a re-do rather than patching up what’s already there.  A whole new version may seem like overkill, but piecemeal edits may gloss over the underlying glitch that created the problem in the first place.

Do you want to leave crisis mode behind?  Or can a crisis improve your overall results?

Categories
job life

Being a Survivor of Change: Does it Get Better?

What does change feel like to you? A trickle? A stream? A firehose? Is there a degree of change that is easy for everybody to deal with, beyond which it becomes a hassle, then a crisis?

When I graduated with my Bachelor’s back in 2002, I had never experienced real change. I was not prepared for that in-between transition that feels exactly like failure. For a student with debt and no job, the years of hard work in school seemed like a waste.

I lived through that transition with the support of my family and went on to find my first full time job. Years later, I changed careers and found work as a software engineer. All in all, it took me nine years to become a professional with a definite career path.

This transition would have been smoother if I had anticipated change and seen it as a normal fact of life. Then again, is it possible to understand that without going through it first? What do you think?

Categories
content strategy

Popping kernels: how long does good writing take?

 

In the age of print, lengthy articles gave readers the feeling that they got their money’s worth.  Writing was planting a seed that bore fruit, but only after investing a certain amount of time, emphasizing quality over quantity.

140 characters revolutionized the idea that content has to be lengthy.  If print is fruit from a seed, short real-time content is popcorn from kernels.  This style does not have to be at the cost of quality, but takes the philosophy that if you put that much out there, some of it is bound to be good.

Categories
content strategy

Fishing for a sunburn: the guaranteed outcomes of taking action

How satisfying is it when you set out to accomplish something, strive for it and get it, all in a nicely packaged crescendo to climax?  For most of us living in the real world, these sorts of single-play successes are not the norm.  Instead, we have to work at it with patience and persistence, and the payoff may not come with a rest, but with a call to more work.

I went on my first deep sea fishing trip yesterday and spent eight hours on the water.  That’s eight hours of casting out, reeling in.  We didn’t come back with a fish, but guess what I did come back with?   A nice red sunburn with white raccoon eyes where I had sunglasses on.  Yes, I should have put on sunblock, I even had it with me.

A fisherman will tell you that sometimes you come back with a fish, sometimes you don’t, that’s why it’s called “fishing” not “catching.”  A blogger will tell you sometimes you hit linkback gold, sometimes not.  On the other hand, take a moment to think through the guaranteed outcomes of your work.  Will you build up experience, wisdom, a work philosophy and ethic?  As a blogger, every post you write is another post you can point to for an employer or as a writing sample.  We don’t all need to reach a huge audience or instigate global change.  Those are the “nice-to-haves.”

How do you make use of the incidental, guaranteed outcomes of your work?  Or does reaching a certain goal makes it worthwhile?

Categories
Uncategorized

Cherry Equity – can it work for Content?

When I started running daily back in August 0f 2009, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up the habit.  I had tried running regularly before, but over time I would get lazy.  As a solution, I created an incentive system that kept me from petering out.

I called it Cherry Equity, and how it worked was if I ran twice in a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, I would earn two cherries the following morning.  Actual cherries,  a big bag of them.  If I did really well, I would earn an extra bonus cherry.  On the other hand, if I skipped an afternoon run, I would only get one cherry the following morning, and if I skipped a morning run, I would lose out on the whole reward.  The key to success was the fear of losing out on cumulative rewards.  If I had one cherry after every run, it wouldn’t have been as big a deal to lose the reward after one or the other.  On the other hand, losing out on a reward I had already earned was a drag.

Having come a year and a half of no longer needing cherries to keep up the habit of running, I find I would love to apply the system to writing content.  I am very sporadic when it comes to writing, but with a cumulative incentive system, it could work.  The question is what kind of incentive works well for writing, flavored pens?  I need a real content strategy, and writing twice daily could work but it will hinge on having a real reason to do it.  What’s your reason?

Categories
Uncategorized

Upgrading Android via CyanogenMod

In the midst of upgrading my G1 Android phone using CyanogenMod.  I found a helpful tutorial video that made the upgrading process much friendlier on Lifehacker at http://lifehacker.com/5339901/get-root-access-in-android-with-one-click .  It is still showing the TMobile G1 splash screen but it hasn’t died yet ..

A little over one year later, I am looking into buying a Nexus One.  Total I’ve only spent $354 in prepaid minutes since I bought this phone, so I am happy going without a contract.

Categories
Uncategorized

You have the mike

I originally attempted to write this as a comment on the New York Observer’s article on 140 Conf but my comment was repeatedly marked as spam as well as my email to the site administrator. Oh well to that.

Picture being at Jeff’s conference at one of the sessions, take Jack Dorsey’s (founder and CEO of Twitter). Jack speaks into the microphone and it expands the reach of his voice from fifteen feet to one hundred feet.

Now take Jack’s microphone and give it the power to record what he says and play it back for anyone to hear for the life of the microphone. Not good enough? Jack, say something to your friend in St. Louis, or to one in Los Angeles or London. Better yet, this microphone is two-way, so Jack’s friend in London can answer him either as a private whisper, or as an equally public broadcast, able to be heard by both friends in LA and St. Louis. How much will Jeff Pulver pay Jack to use that microphone at his conference?

Turns out this microphone is free to use and available to everyone and anyone. What a guy Jack …

When Jeff talks about the State of Now, he’s talking about the movement away from the archives such as the library or the expert and into the age of the device, that broadcasts both ways instantly and globally.

Go ahead. Speak into the mike. Anyone?

Categories
social media writing

140 Conf: or How Twitter is helping me get the most out of a Twitter Conference

I’m attending 140 Characters Conference on July 16-17 where I will learn about the State of Now with 139 other participating characters plus attendees, credentialed media, bloggers, and Jeff Pulver the lead organizer himself.

My strategy to maximize my experience is to do the research ahead of time. Namely, to make excellent use of that ever-so-useful page titled The Characters. But who wants to spend time clicking on all of those icons?

Enter Firefox add-ons. Sneak Peek and Who Is This Person are making my research much more efficient, and accordingly that much more likely to remain in my memory where it might do some good 😉

Sneak Peek creates a hover box over a link with a snippet of the linked page according to three regular expressions defined by the user, as described in this tutorial. I created a “Sneak Peek script” by using the Sneak Peek menu item under Tools after the add-on was installed. My script shows the latest twitter updates of any person on the 140 Characters Conference Page when their icon or twitter url is hovered over.

Here is the Sneak Peek script (all are required fields):
Name: 140 Characters – twitter
Author: Sara Streeter
Author URL: http://www.sarastreeter.com
Site Pattern: ^http://www\.140conf\.com.*
Link Pattern: ^http://twitter.com/\w+
Peek Pattern: < ol class="statuses" id="timeline" >[^]*?< /ol >

(Hint: don’t insert spaces into the peek pattern ol tags like I did above – WordPress was interpreting the html tags as styling for this post)

Screenshot for Sneak Peek for twitter urls
Screenshot for Sneak Peek for twitter urls

Who Is This Person I found to be a nice supplement to the Twitter previews. This add-on requires no tweaking and allows you to highlight any name and right click, which will give you an option of “Who is this person” with an arrow down to several methods of checking up on a person (Google, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn are most useful to me).

Screenshot of Who Is This Person Firefox Add-on
Screenshot of Who Is This Person Firefox Add-on

There is another Firefox extension LinkedIn Companion which seems to be more of a bookmarking tool, not as applicable to this situation but still useful.

So far, looking through the character bios and tweets, I am amazed at the influence and depth of experience reflected in the attendee list. If each person is summed as a single character, I would say that is of the same genre as the oriental calligraphic character, in which a single collection of strokes conveys a concise and poetic concept, complete unto itself.

Categories
geek

Adventures in Slipstreaming

I had the chance to get fairly geeky back in mid February with the purchase of a new copy of Adobe Creative Suite 4. The issue was that this product was not compatible with the operating system on my Dell Vostro 1500 laptop which comes with Vista Home Basic out of the box. My options were either to downgrade to Windows XP or upgrade to Windows Vista Business. I chose the former and that’s when the ‘fun’ began …

I have a student account that lets me download certain software for free, so I used it to grab a copy of Windows XP. I loaded it on my laptop and found that it just booted from Vista rather than install XP. Keep in mind I have tried to backup my computer before with Macrium Reflect but never figured it out successfully. Faced with the dilemma of apparently not being able to install XP with Vista still on there, I went for broke and started installing XP in the C drive, overwriting the current installation.

The first issue I ran into was the SATA Drivers on my laptop – XP predates this type of hard disk driver so it doesn’t install correctly when it runs into them. I found a solution through googling on my functioning XP desktop. If you press F2 quickly as the computer boots up, it puts the computer into BIOS mode, which is a level lower than the operating system and works even when there is no operating system. If you arrow down you’ll see the option for Drivers and SATA. Hit enter and it lets you change the option from ATA to AHCI. This is compatible with XP.

I went along and got the installation page that looks like Windows XP. That’s when I ran into the i386/asms Access Denied error. This was as far as I got. From here on out it was one denial after another.

I tried to slipstream my Windows Installation CD – this means inserting the drivers that XP needs into the installation itself so it can run the computer. I followed a guide I found online – http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/. No matter how I tried, either Windows wouldn’t recognize the CD as a proper XP boot CD or it would get back to the same asms Access Denied error.

In the end, I accepted defeat and started contacting my geeky friends. It just so happened that one of them has access to Vista Business DVDs for free at his work, so I got out of having to pay the $200 or so for the OS, plus I got back full use of the laptop. Unfortunately, the data on my laptop was lost and I had to reinstall absolutely everything.

Here’s what I learned

  1. Slipstreaming=customizing an installation CD, usually by inserting necessary drivers

  2. $OEM$ is a folder that needs to include the license for Windows XP. The dollar signs mean it will be copied over to the new computer automatically. You can find a more complete guide to these folders at http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/web/18/

  3. There is a folder structure basic to Windows installations that also contains identifiers for the installation. All these components must be included for it to work.

    4. XP folder structure

Here’s what I did wrong

  1. Overwrote my operating system AND my data
    • I should have done something, anything, to back up my data. Luckily for me I have FTP access to both of my live websites so I was able to get a working copy from there, plus I have a repository for one of them. Still.
    • All my music and pictures were erased because they were stored in the Windows My Documents folders.
    • I have since learned that Macrium Reflect allows you to create a Linux boot CD from a restore point, which would have come in really handy had I not been able to obtain a Vista Business DVD, and it might have saved my data. Restore point=good
    • I should not have wiped Vista at the start. If I had not had another computer to google with and find solutions, I wouldn’t have even had the option to troubleshoot the issue. Lesson being NEVER do this to a primary or g*d forbid a work computer. Check out comment #8 on this forum post for an idea of the process the way it should be done.

  2. Took my chances muddling about with the command line and WOULD’VE tried to figure out the registry key if I could have created a restore point for that.
    • This would have been WAY too advanced in the sense that the only thing wrong with my laptop at this point was there was no operating system. If I had messed up the registry keys that would have been bad.
    • There’s only so much you can do to solve a problem the hard way before you should give up and go with the easy way (in my case, giving up on XP and going with the Vista Business DVD). I know I am the type that wants to figure everything out and learn which is good to a point, but when nine hours go by and you still hit the brick wall, that would be time to stop learning and fix the thing.

  3. I should have read ALL the requirements of Adobe CS4.

I realized after the fact that Adobe CS4 also requires a 1.8 gHz processor at least. My laptop has a 1.4 processor. So in the end I still couldn’t install the software on my laptop and it went on my desktop. This would be the part where I go “doh!”