Tag: Life Hacks

How ironic Is it that an email called:

[IVT News] Managing email overload

has sat unread in my inbox for 4 days because I\’m too busy to read it?

with thanks to Jonathan and the guys at IVT from what I assume will be a great newsletter article, when I get time to read it…

I\’ve been trying over the last 12 months or so to make the productivity of my life better in small ways using a system called GTD by the David Allen Company. I\’ve learnt lots about how I think, how I store stuff in my head and various other places and how to control some of those things.

One of the things Merlin Mann (a great GTD evangelist) promotes is something called Inbox-Zero where you get your inbox to empty at the end of each day, clean and ready to face the next day. I\’ve been trying. I\’ve been succeeding at some level too, because now my inbox averages 20-40 messages instead of the previous 100-150. I can actually feel my stress level increase when it gets over 50.

The other day while listening to TWIT, I hear Merlin say that inbox-20 was okay! I feel so much better about myself. I\’m not a failure after all. 🙂

Current Items in my inbox: 17
Desk Status: messy! oh well….

Cary, one of the contractors at work, gave me a wonderful idea for getting better rest.

Rather than having a task to do of going to sleep: &quot::Aarrgh, it’s 11:30, I need to get to sleep now, I’ve got to be up in 7 hours&quot::.

You just go to bed for a rest, and let it happen. If you sleep, you sleep, if you just shut your eyes and rest, so be it.

Think about it, if you have a Saturday afternoon rest, you rarely have trouble getting to sleep. Why? No time line. (and possibly a big roast lunch…)

I’ll give it a try over the next few weeks.

One of the things that has worked for me over the years is having a whiteboard marker in the shower. I admit I have a tendancy towards longish showers, but I can honestly say I get some great ideas while I’m in the shower. So rather than lose those ideas, I find it preferable to jot them down on the shower screen with a whiteboard marker, continue on with my thoughts and then collect the ideas later. Of course the simple act of writing something down commits it much better to memory as well.

Life Hacks is a new subsection I’ve created to store and share all those little things that I come across that make my life that tiny bit better.

see http://www.lifehack.org/ and http://www.43folders.com/