Productivity Advice for Bono
September 4, 2007
Evaluating your activity in terms of the return on investment of your time and effort is a great strategy for getting more done.
Have you ever got some random song stuck in your head? I have. The other day I was walking through the supper market, and heard that U2 song “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”. It actually got me thinking about a conversation I once had with a friend.
A while back I was chatting with that friend about his work, and a realization he had just made. He was telling me that he’d recently slipped a bit in terms of organization by letting his desk get messy.
What You and Pavlov’s Dog Should Not Have in Common.
September 4, 2007
You remember good old Dr. Pavlov don’t you? He was the scientist who conditioned his dog to salivate every time the dog heard a bell ring.
Dr. Pavlov achieved that by ringing a bell every time he feed the dog. In so doing, he conditioned the pooch to associate food with the ringing of the bell. After a while, he could get the dog to salivate just by ringing the bell.
Thus proving two important things: First, creatures can be conditioned through association … and Second, Dr. Pavlov had entirely too much time on his hands (but who am I to judge).
So let’s get real for a moment, and I think some of you may know where I’m going with this. A hundred years from now, will future scientists marvel at how silly we’ve become when we “salivate” ever time our email notification alerts us to new message? I sure hope not.
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Nice Going Einstein!
September 4, 2007
It’s said that one day a colleague of the famous scientist Dr. Albert Einstein asked him for his phone number. The colleague became perplexed when he watched Einstein grab a phone book to look it up. Baffled, the colleague asked, “You don’t know your own phone number?” Einstein replied, “Of course not! … Why would I remember anything I can look up?”
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Monkey See, Monkey Doo!
September 4, 2007
If you’re like most folks, you’re what I call a “visual prioritizor”. Visual prioritizors leave things out as reminders to prompt them to take some kind of action.
For example, you might leave a letter on the table next to the door to remind you to mail it the next time you leave the house.
Or maybe you leave a post-it note on your computer monitor or phone to remind you to make an important call as soon as you get into the office. Perhaps you leave messages in your email inbox (remarked as unread of course) as reminders to follow-up when you check email.
If these examples ring true, then you’re probably a visual prioritizor.
It’s actually quite natural to try prioritizing things by keeping them “in your face”. But there are serious draw backs to this method.
First, it can become visually overwhelming very quickly. For instance, if you have ten different post-it notes around your monitor and 16 emails flagged in your in box, that starts making you feel busy, and can stress you out.
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Peace of Mind for Just 14 Cents a Day!
September 3, 2007
That’s certainly the cheapest peace of mind I’ve ever purchased. If you’re like me, you live a little bit more of your life online every day. I can honestly say, I spend more time using my computer than watching TV, or doing most other things for that matter (Geek alert!). I bank, invest, and make most of my purchases online … I even do my grocery shopping online (www.safeway.com rocks!). Gee, I truly have become a 21st century digital boy!
Two years ago I purchased a 500 gig external hard drive to back up all the information on my computer. Unfortunately, ten months latter it crashed!. I then found out, it would cost about $1,000 to “try” to recover the data – ouch! Since it was just a back up, I decided to skip the process all together.
It did however, put me on a hunt for another way to safely, and securely back up the data on my machine. Enter Carbonite! www.carbonite.com
Once loaded on your computer, carbonite will continually back up all the data on your machine. If you need to recover a file, simply access it from the “Carbonite Backup Drive” located in the “my computer” section of your PC.
