09.12.07
Posted in Artificial Priorities at 2:24 pm by Bryan
Yesterday was a milestone for me. Not because it was the 6th anniversary of the 9/11 attack. No, yesterday marked one month since I gave up caffeine. I had a Coke Zero Cherry the morning of Saturday, August 11th. Since then I have had maybe five cans of pop and all were caffeine free.
During the last month I have been drinking a lot of water. I have a 32 ounce lexan bottle that I finish between two and four times a day. A lot of the time it’s just straight water but some times I throw a sugar free drink packet in it. It’s been surprisingly easy since the first week to just avoid the caffeine. Occasionally I want a Coke, but it’s not a strong urge and it quickly passes.
Part of eliminating artificial priorities is to help create new prioirites. One of my big prioirites now is my health. It’s been an interesting experience since I was drinking two diet cokes nearly every day just to get through the day. Now I don’t feel nearly as tired. It’s weird to think that I am less tired without caffeine than I was with caffeine. Now that I can say that this bad habit has been broken for the better, I am going to try to make another change for the better.
My next habit will be related to me loosing weight. I am trying to decide which behavior to change first. I eat too much sugar, between candy, and other junk with sugar I just take in too much sugar. Related to this I also eat too many carbs. I am thinking of cutting back on either or both.
I also need to get more exercise and in the last month I have been trying to increase my walking. I have a pedometer that I use to monitor my activity. It’s been hit and miss but I haven’t been focusing on it. I have also been upping my general activity level by helping Bonnie with the household chores since she is back in school.
I want to pick my next improvement point by the end of the week.
Part of eliminating artificial priorities is to help create new prioirites. One of my big prioirites now is my health.
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07.24.07
Posted in GTD at 1:23 pm by Bryan
I’m getting things done. Yep, actually accomplishing things.
In the last few weeks I have accomplished the following around the house:
- Replace crappy bushes in the front yard with new lavender bushes
- Installed a new motion sensor light on the back porch
- Fixed the back faucet after two years of putting off fixing my last “repair”
- Cut more dead wood off a poplar in the side yard including a 5 ft piece of trunk
I fell pretty good about all this because I have bee putting some of these things off for a long time. I also feel good because some of these projects were started and finished in a short time. We have a bad habit of buying the supplies for a project and never starting it. Then there is stuff around the house, taking up space, that shouldn’t be there.
I have many more projects to do and will be getting more of them done soon. Woohoo!
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06.12.07
Posted in Artificial Priorities at 11:07 am by Bryan
I have been taking the bus most days for the last year. Occasionally I drive to work, like on Fridays when Victor has soccer practice or if I have to come in early (3am) on occasion. However, commuting by bus is just taking too much of my precious family time.
Since Bonnie’s classes ended I have been driving to work every day and it’s gone pretty well. I have worked hard to modify my driving habits to maximize the miles I squeeze out of each gallon. Making fuel economy a priority over performance/fun has allowed me increase my mileage from around 30 MPG to around 40 MPG. This saves me 33% a week on gas compared to normal driving.
Commuter time has been a big factor for me. The 80 minute morning commute on the bus is no more than 45 minutes of drive time. My 100 minute afternoon commute on the bus is under 60 minutes of drive time. Thats over 40% less time commuting for an hour and a quarter more with my family.
There are certainly some benefits to riding the bus. One is all that time I had to read the paper, magazines or books. I also don’t have the stress of driving in traffic with all the jerks and morons. And, of course there is less pollution.
On the other hand, the cost difference has been less of a factor than you would think. The monthly cost of bus fare is only a small amount less than the cost of insurance and gas for a car with $3+ a gallon gas. When the price was down in the low $2 range it was actually slightly more expensive to take the bus. Also, there is much more flexibility with my schedule when driving. I can go in earlier and leave earlier or bank a few early days to take short day later in the week. Finally, I can make stops on the way home to save a trip out later.
In the end I came to the conclusion that the extra family time is the greater priority. So, last weekend I bought a used car to commute to work.
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05.29.07
Posted in Hipster PDA at 11:00 am by Bryan
It’s been over a month since I started to experiment with the Hipster PDA and I have had mixed results.
The first thing I did was read up a little on how to use the Hipster PDA. Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders has some info on this. He also has a Wiki on the Hipster that is useful.
The first thing I did was download the D*I*Y Planner templates in .PDF format and see if my printer could handle printing on a note card. The answer was yes. My Canon Pixma MP450 handled printing on a note card with .12″ borders just fine. The only problem with my printer was with the ink bleeding into the cheap note cards I got at Sam’s Club at 1,000 for less than $5.00. This issues was fixed when Bonnie got an HP Color LaserJet 2605dn. It can print with small margins and handles the cards as well as the Canon but with no bleeding ink.
While the D*I*Y Planner templates were nice for some things I have trouble writing that small. As a result I decided to design my own Excel templates so that I could print custom pages that I could update as needed. I am using the D*I*Y cover sheet and year calendar but have created my own ‘week a card’ schedule calendar and my own todo lists. I will post the files here when I get a chance.
I have found the Hipster PDA to be useful because it is much lower maintenance. I never worry about dropping it, loosing it, or having to recharge it. This morning I dropped it on the stairs and it bounced and flipped down a few stairs. I had no heart palpitations, no gasp of horror. I just picked it up and thought, “Score one for the Hipster.”
The HotSync functionality of the Hipster PDA is not as good as on my Palm. I occasionally have to take the time to type up new weekly calendars and update todo lists, then print them out. Also, my one of my issues with my Palm was handwriting recognition. Graffiti 2 was just driving me buggy. While the Hipster PDA will accept ANY input, I can’t always read my scribbling. This is clearly a user issue.
I am still refining my usage of the Hipster PDA at this point but overall it’s going well.
My pro/con list for now goes this way:
Pro:
- Inexpensive
- Not as fragile as a PDA
- Infinitely flexible templates
- Great handwriting recognition
Con:
- Reduced data capacity
- Increased maintenance required (no HotSync)
- I can’t read my handwriting
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05.23.07
Posted in Artificial Priorities, Hipster PDA at 11:56 am by Bryan
Well, it’s been a long an torrid affair. But, after eight years my love affair with Palm, both the OS and the hardware, is over.
Last night I sold my TX to a friend and ended my eight year journey with PDAs.
It really came after a month of using my Hipster PDA. I have only used my TX for my password keeper and games in that time. Then my friend mentioned his interest in a Palm TE or Palm TX and I saw the opportunity to give him a deal and make a clean break.
You can read my “Dear Palm” letter at the Daily Gadget.
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05.17.07
Posted in Artificial Priorities, Hipster PDA at 9:21 am by Bryan
It turns out that my attempts to tame my TV viewing are being aided by the networks. I just read that Jericho, a new favorite of mine has been cancelled. Close to home a favorite of Bonnie, my wife, has been cancelled. Finally, Thank God You’re Here, a funny show we all liked has been cancelled.
My new TiVo is getting bored because I nearly doubled the capacity when I replaced it’s ailing hard drive, and then all my shows are ending for the season or getting cancelled.
NOTE: I have been using my Hipster PDA for a few weeks now. I am working on a post about how it’s going.
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05.02.07
Posted in Artificial Priorities at 10:06 am by Bryan
Well, after taming the TiVo things have gone well. We don’t watch nearly as much TV and don’t feel compelled to watch TV. Some nights I haven’t even turned it on at all. While I want to reduce my TV viewing, I don’t want to eliminate it completely. I still think TiVo is the best way to control my reduced list of shows I still watch. However the TiVo has been acting up for a few months and every indication is that the drive is going bad.
So I will be performing a brain transplant. The new 70 hour, 80GB hard drive will double my capacity. While it’s not as necessary to double my space, it’s the smallest drive they make these days, and how can more space be bad? The trick is I have to clear off any shows on my TiVo before the operation because they can’t be transferred. We only have about 5 hours left on it but being the middle of the week it’s hard to clear it out completely before our shows start recording. As a result it looks like I will have to wait until the weekend as there is nothing recording between Friday night and Sunday night. Plenty of time to clear the drive and operate.
When It’s done I will have to re-build my season pass list. I have all my settings recorded on a notepad in preparation.
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04.27.07
Posted in Artificial Priorities, Hipster PDA, GTD at 1:15 pm by Bryan
I have been reading Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders blog and I am thinking of trying out his Hipster PDA. That’s right, I am considering trading my super geeky Palm TX in for a stack of note cards. I know, it’s pretty extreme for a geek like me to go from high-tech to no-tech.
I guess it’s just an admission that my current system isn’t working and I need to try something else. I feel like the technology of the Palm is getting in the way of me using it. I reached a frustration point several months ago with graffiti 2. It’s just making me crazy.
Also, I just am not using my Palm TX as for much these days other than the standard PIM functions and as a password keeper. I can replace the PIM functionality with the note cards. I’m not so sure what I will do with the passwords such.
I have been a big proponent for the last eight years of the PDA and now I may be abandoning it. Of course I still want a MacBook…. 
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04.20.07
Posted in Artificial Priorities at 10:44 am by Bryan
After getting my TiVo in order I decided to tackle something else that was wasting too much of my time, email. I love Gmail because I never have to worry about running out of space. I typically only have about 13% of my allotted space full. I get dozens of emails a day and sort them by a list of labels I have created to keep my mail organized. The problem is that I found I was sorting these emails into folders and never getting to them.
This wouldn’t be a problem but my compulsive nature caused me to be bothered by the unread emails in all those lists. I didn’t have time to read the emails so I would go into the folder and mark all unread as read. This cleared the unread status of the emails. In re-evaluating how I use my time I had to ask, why am I sorting dozens of emails a day and then not reading them? It was busywork that never really provided me any benefit.
I wasn’t reading the New York Times so why archive the emails? I wasn’t going on vacation so why did I need all those travel deal offers fromExpedia, Travelocity and Orbitz to name a few? I had signed up for so many mailing lists for some reason or another. Some were a result of entering an online contest, others were newsletters I thought I might want to read. But, I never read any of them.
To eliminate all this digital junk mail that I wasn’t even reading I started to unsubscribe from every email I got but would have just archived without reading. Over the last three weeks I haveunsubscribed from nearly 50 emails that come with frequencies from a couple of times a week to once a month. Now I don’t feel the compulsion to work with all these emails so much.
It doesn’t’ seem like a big thing but probably saves me an hour a week or more. That’s one more hour I can spend doing something I actually want to do in stead of wasting that time.
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04.10.07
Posted in Artificial Priorities at 12:21 pm by Bryan
In the last week I have revisited the Season Pass list on my TiVo and I have made even deeper cuts into the list of shows it records. I made the decision to remove ‘Stargate Atlantis’ and ‘Doctor Who’ before they can come back on. This will prevent me from being drawn back into those shows. Bonnie and I also decided that if we were two weeks behind on the new FX series ‘The Riches’ we probably aren’t that into it either. That’s three more shows gone.
I also did some housecleaning. Our season pass for ‘Galapagos’ on The National Geographic Channel was over so I deleted it. Finally, I deleted the season pass for ‘Planet Earth’ on The Discovery Channel because it will be out on DVD in a few weeks and I can watch it that way instead.
So in the end my TiVo, which originally had nearly 40 season passes now has only 24. My Now Playing list is also pretty sparse because of this trimming and isn’t likely to fill up for weeks. I will only be watching the shows I really want to watch and my “inertial viewing” of shows just because they are on is ended.
The next step is to get control of my Gmail.
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