Do you know how well you do on actually completing the things you consider habits? 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.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes I get complacent. I don't want to do the work to evaluate my habits, routines, processes, and tools simply because I've done the work before. As a result, I often am stuck with things that don't work, until some external force causes me to re-evaluate where I am.I realized this was an over-arching theme in my life recently after one of my tools did just that - forced me to re-evaluate. And it's caused some churn in my life, all of which has made things better.
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One of the things people constantly ask me is what tools I use. It’s like they expect I have some magic set of tools that makes productivity easy for me.Nope. I use some easily accessible tools, and most of them are free.So today I will talk about my favorite tools.
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A friend of mine called from the road and asked me for the phone number for my mechanic. She had a breakdown, and even though I had given her the number when she told me about her concerns weeks before, she had lost it and never made the appointment. She writes down phone numbers in various places, and never has them with her when she needs them.If you have a central place to keep your important phone numbers that is always with you, you will never face this situation. And if you enter important phone numbers - before you need them - you'll be even further ahead of the game.
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I am aware that you can re-purpose things to serve functions the designer never intended. For example, in college I never owned a tool set. If I had to hang up a picture, I would use a high-heeled shoe to do the pounding.Not only can the right tool make the job go faster, but finding places where your productivity is pinched can help you pinpoint where you need to find better tools.
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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…
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Even though Evernote has some serious disadvantages , 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…
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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…
