Productivity P@wn 23 August 2011

I succumbed to the allure of the new and shiney a few months ago. My excuse was that my dear husband encouraged me, and now that I was back in corporate slave-Dom I needed something portable to keep me organised on the move.

So, I ordered an iPad2. I had to wait for it to arrive, but that gave me time to research all the amazing fabulous apps that I had high hopes would wave the mythical magic wand and get me organized.

I found a lot of great sites with excellent information. And I splashed out a few dollars on a magazine dedicated to iPad2 which was a great way to find out what my new toy would be able to do when it did arrive.

For starters, the clever people at makeuseof.com provide me with oodles of information in my inbox to read offline, and they feature lots of apps, particularly free ones. Then there are the clever lifehacker.com dudes who are not just iDevice aficionados but feature all sorts of great free ideas for life in general, as the name suggests. Their vodcasts (snappy new word meaning video-podcasts) are great entertainment – they taught me about using the humble bulldog clip as a cable management device!

The GTDtimes.com forums are full of wonderful discussions on productivity and that’s where some bright spark wrote the term I used as a title for this entry. I could spend hours reading about how other people do things, instead of actually doing stuff myself, but hey, it beats watching my husband channel surf in the evenings when there’s “57 channels and nothing on” (sang Bruce Springsteen once).

I initially decided to only use free apps, but having found toodledo’s website free service to be an indispensable GTD (getting things done) tool on my Windows notebook, I decided their app looked like a good value purchase to integrate with the website. It’s proven it’s worth. There are lots of others out there that integrate with toodledo though. But as a todo manager, the ability to import a whole page of straight text tasks at once (I exported Outlook data) on the website can’t be beat.

I’m proud to say I am a follower of flylady. I wanted to keep my flying household stuff separate from other to-do items so I invested in the Home Routines app. I love how it tells me how many items I’ve done. (Nobody else notices, but home routines does, lol).

I needed something to allow creation and editing of Micro$0ft word and excel documents so I sprang for DocsToGo. It’s a little odd getting used to but it does the job. Micro$0ft have a free OneNote app but from what I gather it only integrates with the 2010 version of desktop OneNote. As I have 2007 and no need to upgrade they can keep it! Boo.

I downloaded Friendly as a FaceBook interface but it keeps freezing or losing posts and comments and it has a character limit too, so I have given up and use FaceBook in safari for now.

At the time I was looking at apps it looked like Goodreader was the only PDF reader that kept in doc annotations and let you add them as well, so I sprang for that and it has not disappointed me.

So, what free apps am I using on my iPad2? The inbuilt calendar. The inbuilt notepad. The inbuilt FaceTime and Safari. Skype, Evernote, Springpad, Woolworths, Twitter, DropBox, Messenger (for Windows Live Messenger), pcalclite, readitlater, auspost, dragon (free voice to text – by the big$ dictation people!), makeuseof, WordPress, (app for the social book worm site), boxcar (as an rss aggregator), iPad tips and tricks lite, bloomberg, Iconverter, Kj to calories, trip advisor, temp convert, currency plus free, my fitness pal’s calorie counter & diet tracker, Hoyts Movie App, Napuru’s excellent relaxation apps. And that’s just the productivity and lifestyle apps.

Then there are the potential time wasters, like games, recipes, makeup Styling, photography editing … I won’t go into those, as I’m sure anyone reading this will soon be app store surfing with the best of them!

You can’t take a Kindle in the bathtub 1 April 2010

I know these new-fangled e-book readers are a great idea. BUT. Having dropped many a book and magazine in the bubbles (and the bath is one of my favourite places to read) it makes the limitation of electronic reading devices really obvious. Unless those smart people over at otter box hurry up and design a case for them that lets you operate the buttons correctly?

So I spent the last few weeks with my head in books. Real books. I ordered “Organizing Your Day: Time Management Techniques That Will Work for You” by Sandra Felton and Marsha Sims

Sandra Felton & Marsha Sims' "Organizing Your Day" Book

from Emporium, my favourite Aussie online book seller and couldn’t wait for it to arrive. When it did I didn’t leave it alone! I got so much out of that book, so many good ideas and insights into my own character when it comes to procrastination and the reasons why I do that. The three biggest changes that spring to mind that I have put in place after reading this one is finding my most productive time of the day v. my worst and scheduling the important things in the morning when I’m at my best and the more mundane stuff like laundry folding, for the afternoon. Then I drew a giant mind map, which is great but doesn’t go into enough detail for me to schedule stuff so I started a project management file, breaking down the things I am working on into good old babysteps. And then a light bulb moment hit. Telephones. I really really procrastinate about making phone calls because the house phone is usually not in the same room as I am, and I often have to hunt to find where it’s been left (not by myself) or it’s out of battery or I go to fetch it and get sidetracked by the dog or something. Sad but true. And I won’t make business calls on my mobile because of the cost, especially if I’m likely to get caught on hold. So I dragged out the old curly cord one with no fancy stuff on it, just buttons and a receiver and plugged it into the old caller ID box still on my credenza next to the computer. Oh what a great move! It’s next to the mouse, and every time it rings I just have to reach over and grab it and everything I need to take a note or answer someone’s query is right here.

That one got me so excited I ended up in Kikki.K spending some Christmas Money I had left. Lol.

Lissanne Oliver's "Sorted" organizing book

And they had books back in stock. I bought “SORTED! The ultimate guide to organising your life – once and for all” by Lisanne Oliver which has more wonderful ideas than you can poke a stick at. But particularly I like the project for organizing those receipts you have to keep for tax or expense claims or whatnot. Simply glue them on sheets of A4 printer paper!! OMG how simple! Divine!

While in Kikki.K I also purchased “Paper Flow: The Ultimate Guide To Making Paperwork Easy” by MaryAnne Bennie and Brigitte Hinneberg. Paper Flow had me jumping out of the bathtub to grab lined post-it-notes™ and a pencil to start making notes immediately. I was so enthusiastic I wanted to get that system up and running then and there. The beauty of the paper flow system to me is that after a bit of babystepping to adapt your existing systems, it is very simple to maintain when slotted into your daily routines. No brainer obvious things like opening your mail every day and immediately dumping it in the relevant folder (not forgetting that big round one called RUBBISH BIN) so that on the day you schedule to do whatever folder that thing gets DONE. If you don’t “DO IT NOW” and they stress that you should always do things right away if you can, but if you can’t, this system is there to save your bacon. I adapted

Paper Flow Book

my existing desktop step file system to run with “recurring action files” (love that idea) and am in the throes of adapting my suspension file system to suit the author’s brilliant concept of “reference files” which also gives me an excuse to THROW MORE PAPER CLUTTER OUT. I am consolidating several files into one category with an index. Oh I love it.

More as I progress through the Paper Flow 28 Day Challenge (at my own pace, not just 28 days cos they say so. ;p)

And now I’d better get on with what I was procrastinating about by writing this book review blog entry. I have to work on DS1′s computer, it looks like it needs a new hard drive and therefore a reinstall of Windows and all those fiddly drivers. Sigh. Being a boy he wants it fixed NOW.

Of shoes, champagne, makeup and handbags 13 February 2010

Evidence that once I had a brain (or that I knew how to use it!)

I’ve been decluttering and shredding my way through 5 years of taxation records and contracts and all sorts of other evil papery things that were lurking in boxes that I did not even realise I had. I thought I’d been pretty thorough in paper control apart from “a box or two” until I got both kids off to school and had time to open that scary cupboard of mine.

My poor old shredder keeps overheating. At least now I have discovered it actually has “duty cycle 2 mins on 4 mins off” written on the bottom so I know to set my timer for 2 mins of shredding before taking a break so I’m getting through it faster than I was for the entire week preceding today. *shame*

This sort of paper accumulation is the direct result of having kids. A sort of knock on effect. You have a baby, a large proportion of your life then goes to the care and entertainment of said offspring. Necessitating other areas of your life being pushed to the side. Regularly throwing out old papers after their taxation use-by date being one of them.

Bag four of HOW MANY ?

But what has made me smile, and at times cry is the things I’ve found.

Once upon a time I was able to complete my own taxation return, back when I only had to claim self-education expenses and some other simple things, however the bit that really stunned me was that I was able to work out what my Medicare levy was, what my estimated refund would therefore be, and I was 100% correct. My god, I can barely count to 100 these days before something or someone interrupts me and I can’t remember what I was doing.

A copy of payslips with my address in a foreign country written on them. Intrigue!

Some hilarious and beautifully written pieces of TAFE homework. I even wondered if “publicist” would be a possible career choice until I thought it wouldn’t be fun at all because you’d be trying to put a spin on someone else’s evil doing or silly products that you don’t agree with people wasting their money on, LOL.

Photographs from before DH and I were engaged. Tee Hee!

A print out of a very funny e-mail thread between BFFL and myself concerning arrangements to sleep on the floor of my empty flat and go nightclubbing. OH MY GOD I USED TO HAVE A SOCIAL LIFE!!! Oh those were the days! Dressing up!  Outrageous Shoes! Cute Handbags! Makeup! Champagne! I think Loud Music is the only thing I still have these days!

Letters and postcards with exotic stamps from good friends and people who were friends but have been lost in the mists of time. I’ve decided to keep the stamps I’ve cut off and turn them into decoupage on a wooden box. The wooden box will be something to do with writing I think.

But the most amazing thing is that I am now starting to have ideas about a possible business I could start, and what sort of things I need to consider and research before I take the plunge. Wow this is amazing.

And the pink panel of the hexagonal quilt is finished. I’m pinning together what’s probably going to be the last panel! End is in sight!

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring, there goes the timer. Time to start shredding again!

This morning is the day after the next 8 January 2010

Lyric title courtesy of Chicane from “Come Tomorrow” off their Somersault album.

Hello Blog, sorry for the neglect.

Why does WordPress always bleep about with my password and not want to let me in?

I am compelled to blog that I am actually feeling pretty peaceful at the moment. I’m plodding along doing the same old things as always, but more progress is being made on projects and ongoing things like the paper monster. Routines are actually making life simpler. Meditation is helping keep life on an even keel and a fair amount of credit must also go to the stuff that my fabulous naturopath has put me on.

Christmas was a surprise. Dad had to go into hospital on Christmas Eve with a systemic infection resulting from a simple test he had done 3 days prior. He was looking pretty frail and on intravenous anti-biotics for about a week and a half. He wasn’t let out of hospital until after New Year. I drove my Mum up to the hospital on Christmas Day and we were allowed to take Dad home for a few hours to share in the family meal at my house. My dear DH had had this passionate desire to cook a big Christmas Dinner like his family used to have, so I had minimal kitchen duties on the day thankfully. Everything went smoothly, presents were dispensed, too much food eaten and then it was over. Friends and relations visited, and had over to visit. Friends from the UK had to go home early because the pipes burst in their house (hope things weren’t too bad when they got back, we haven’t heard yet). And in the first mail after Christmas I received an exciting surprise parcel from snowy environs – 2 discs full of Chicane, old dance music and live bootlegs. Oh aural bliss!

At some quiet point in the days following Christmas, with DH home on holidays, I was able to make sense of the “thing” that had bred in my “In” tray. I sat down with paper notebook, the shredder, a large outdoor garbage bag, a pad of post-it-notes™, a big black autograph texta, some spare hanging file folders and my new temporary file sorting box – a beer box taped up with packing tape, LOL.

Temporary in-box sorting system

I brainstormed with myself for a few minutes to come up with minimum important categories that i needed for the sorting system. I already have the vertical in tray set up (green plastic box on the left – thanks to Sandra Felton and Marsha Sims) so I needed a folder for stuff to go in there, one for things to go into Evernote, one for Urgent Action items and two for filing – one for “investment” because those have their own files and one for “other”. Receipts, bank statements and bills have their own folders in my desktop pedestal so I put that next to the beer box. It only took about 2 hours and it was done. Three quarters of the stuff in the in tray became garbage/rubbish/trash. Wow.

Another day I sat for an hour and fixed up the actual filing cabinet (new shiny plastic sleeved index printed out sitting in the front of the beer box). Pulled out any irrelevant old files. Made new ones for all the things that had been stuffed into tidy files and shoved into the front of the filing drawer. Then typed an index for the filing system, something that has been urgently needed for the last 12 years *gulp*.  And based on the contents of what had come out of the in tray made some new files for things that need to be kept and should be put away immediately they come in.

So now I have achieved a huge amount of mental peace because I *KNOW* there are no unpaid bills hiding, nothing else urgent that has not been dealt with, and anything that should be in my diary and calendar has made it there. If I need to find anything I now have a chance of doing that within 5 minutes and without disturbing anything. I can’t describe how *GOOD* this feels. Even more amazing is that I managed to get these things done with children home on school holidays. Because I have done a lot of babysteps already towards things, done some decluttering, researched methods of organizing and paper control and decided to make decisions quickly without agonizing about them. I’m looking forward to the day when I have a clean desk and can post a picture of that. (STOP LAUGHING!)

Now if I could just get the Christmas Tree down and packed away, LOL . . .

Progress and Square Eyes 1 October 2009

Today was craft day and I was the host. Our dining table got put to good use with a load of us chatting, knitting and quilting around it while consuming lots of tea, coffee, OJ and chocolate biscuits

I got the green panel finished on my hexagonal quilt. The longest-standing U.F.O. (un-finished-object) in my posession, LOL. The yellow to apricot panel is pinned together. This quilt has been in progress since some time in the late 1980s, I am ashamed to say. And it only got under way again thanks to FLYlady and her UFO month a year or two ago and a challenge from dear Barbara, a fellow FLYbaby on one of my lists/forums. I am hopeful that I might actually get the hexagons sewn together in the next year and then it will be on to “squaring it out” as J puts it, and the yukky parts of quilting. Yukky parts to me being removing the papers and seeing if it falls apart or not! And in case any perfectionist types out there want to point out that the blue panel is wider than the other two, I KNOW. And I will fix it at some point before it all goes together. But this what happens when, as Del Amitri put it in their classic song Stone Cold Sober, “Life Gets In The Way”.

So here is a photo of the progress I’ve made on it so far. Um is that showing?

Hexagonal Quilt Progress

And I am having my energy sapped by computers. Last night I had three going at once needing my attention and then DH suggested perhaps I should download the chess game thingy on his Netbook and I nearly popped my clogs at him! I am just about insane with peering at Google pages and into settings and things, setting up his new big machine and de-junking the old one for the kids. Unfortunately the old one was infested with goodness knows what as well as a rootkit (grrrrrrrrrrrr – now I might consider supporting capital punishment for the nasty people who invent these things) and after 3 days of trying to clean it I decided enough was enough and it was time to reformat and reinstall Windows. But I didn’t realise that with a Notebook you have to also reinstall all the specialised drivers, so I haven’t done that bit yet. I was too tired last night and sleep is more important!

I seem to be suffering a bit of an energy deficit lately and I am doing my utmost to try and get back up to speed but feeling like a snail seems to make it a bit of a cycle of self defeat, LOL. And if I drink more coffee I just get jittery.

Ideas for 2010 17 September 2009

Time is flying. (Actually, I should have been in bed long ago!)

Seriously! Next year will be 2010 and I will have both my kids in full time school. My Babies! I’m wistful at sending my youngest out into the world, but he can’t stay home forever.

I had always planned to go back to work part time when I got both kids into school. My resume / CV is all updated ready to go even! But now that that time is approaching my DH has been seriously telling me he wants me to stay home, that our family is more important. He even suggested I sign up for the school canteen roster! I really don’t know what is behind his thinking. If I could get an IT job that only took me out of the house for two days per week during school hours then I’d be doing it regardless, but such jobs are like Unicorns.

So! What to do with the extra few days per week next year during term time? I might volunteer for the canteen for one day a month, even though it’s  not really my scene (I’d rather volunteer in the library or office but they don’t do that!).

Plan sketched out so far is:

1. Go learn Yoga and practice it;
2. Increase time spent practicing meditation;
3. Walk dog TWICE a day instead of once every kindy day or weekend, LOL;
4. Start doing more exercise other than the walking with dog and school runs, exercise with fit ball and its DVD, get onto the cross trainer;
5. Start a course of study in Information Technology, hopefully I’ll get some RPL or credits for all that study I did back in the 90s, plus on the job experience;
6. Play Wii, just for ME, on the Wii Fit, all those core balance thingies really are fun!
7. Start trying to sell stuff on e-bay casually;
8. Ramp up progress on ripping CDs into iTunes;
9. Start ripping Vinyl into iTunes;
10. Then rip Cassettes into iTunes;
11. Scan old photographs into computer;
12. Seriously put massive effort into decluttering the scary cupboard in my “office” where stuff gets put when it doesn’t have any other home. LOL;
13. Get better systems happening for keeping on top of incoming paperwork and tax records.

Well that is longer than I thought it would be. It does sound like I won’t be bored. I will also have a few excuses to visit my favourite shops like Officeworks, Ikea, Smiggle and Kikki.K.

I was so amazed to read Mimi Smartypants and find she had had a similar case of feelings she calls “the glum”. I gather like when I couldn’t write or couldn’t bring myself to write, everything seemed grey or beige and nothing worth putting into words. I’m glad Mimi is back, witty as ever and she has migrated to a much more comment friendly platform.

I was reading something brilliant the other day which basically said that women spend their younger years trying to do more and more and go faster and faster and then at some point in their 40s they hit a wall, they reach a point where they can go no faster and actually need to start slowing down. Their bodies and minds are so tuned into stress that they just cannot keep juggling work/life/family anymore and this manifests itself in not only physical symptoms, but emotional ones as well. Things like anxiety, insomnia etc etc. Sounded very familiar to me. And do you think I can find the link? I thought I’d snipped it into EverNote but I can’t find it. I’m so mad. This was a topic I really think the world needs to know about. EVERY health professional dealing with women ought to know this. Oh well.

I need to suss out how the blogrolling function works here in WordPress and migrate my long list of blogs and RSS feeds into the widget, or something.

I seriously need some sleep . . .

Purple Creeper creeping over a factory wall in Osborne Park

Every day is like Sunday (yes I like Morrissey) 13 September 2009

It’s been a nice quiet sunny Sunday. Forced out of bed at quarter past 8am by two children and a dog climbing all over us (LOL). Slowly sipping coffee while wondering at the marvels of internet access on small portable devices. FaceBook and Twitter with my toast and vegemite breakfast.

I’m ashamed it took me so long to sort out my wireless snafu. I set up our D-Link wireless modem/router in 2005 between changing nappies, feeding baby and preschooler and general sleep-deprived household mayhem. I had done a lot of reading on wireless network security so I turned off the broadcast of the SSID, put in a sophisticated network key and wrote all the settings and the network key on a piece of paper because I couldn’t find my little “computer notebook” where I should have written that important stuff. Of course the paper got lost. I got DH’s computer running wirelessly, very poorly because it was a 802.11 b card, and then within a couple of weeks the card went on the fritz so he had to go back to using the world’s longest phone cord if he wanted to use the Internet *blush*. So in late 2007 I got my lovely green Dell and without that bit of paper I couldn’t unleash its true portability (DUH). Getting it sorted has been in and out of my mind for a while and for some reason I had thought it would be a major drama, likely to go wrong and cause loss of internet access for a day or so. WRONG! It took about 2 hours and most of that was Googling up the modem manual, reading it and surfing through Q&A’s on Whirlpool.Net and other places. This told me that you should be able to view your router’s settings if you view the admin panel in IE instead of Firefox and ba-da-boom there it was, the blasted network key (wrote it in the little book this time). Changed the security to a different sort of WPA-PSK (switched from HEX to String) and changed the channel from 6 to a less common channel. See we got a neighbour change a few weeks ago, and obviously it’s them with the BigPond router (fancy not even changing your router name from the default!) that was drowning out the signal from mine. Thanks to Whirlpool I discovered a tip about channel congestion causing bad signal strength. So now I have 75% signal strength out in the living room, all our devices are now Wi-Fi enabled and we are all happy as puppys with new toys. Why couldn’t I have done this 18 months ago? Hah!

Hello world! 12 September 2009

I have been itching to get back into blogging for months. I blogged heavily for about five years and then life got busy, the stress and resulting illnesses seemed to dry up my creativity and the inspiration and passion just vaporised. I locked it last year when I realised that although I love everything I had written, there are a lot of entries that I no longer want to share with the world at large. I am toying with the idea of migrating the old blog holus bolus over here and locking the entries I want to lock. Then again, there is the issue of how long would it take to do that, how hard is it going to be … Will I get around to it? Hmmm.

I took a leaf out of FLYlady‘s book and decided to “do it now”. So yesterday I researched blog providers and software, asked on Twitter and FaceBook for bloggers opinions and then today decided to sign up here for WordPress. I have decided that I can blog for 15 minutes. So I’ll write for 15 minutes, not obsess about editing and just post.

This is going to be positive stuff in my life, projects I want to do and progress on them, goals as I think of them, lists and social commentary. Funny but no negativity. No whining, whinging or people bashing. LOL.

One of the things I love is flowers. We were in Bali on a holiday earlier this year and I took lots of photos of all the gorgeous tropical flora. This is an opportunity for me to share these things with the world!

Perfect Tropical Gardenia