Simplify

As a result of my clumsiness, I cut myself while cleaning a knife. It being a holiday weekend, I went to Urgent Care and was informed it would be at least a 2 hour wait. After half an hour of waiting, my hand had stopped bleeding, but I had not yet seen a triage nurse. It was 1:30pm, and due to my Saturday morning laziness had not yet eaten. Instead of sitting famished in the waiting room, I asked the woman behind the counter if I would lose my spot if I went and grabbed lunch and then came back. I explained to her that I hadn’t eaten anything yet and that I’d make a quick trip of it. She agreed to save my spot for me. It’s amazing what people will do for you when you are friendly to someone having a hectic day.

I enjoyed a nice lunch around the corner at the Peninsula Creamery. Upon returning to the Urgent Care they saw me immediately, stitched me up and I was on my way. It was far better than sitting miserable in the waiting room the entire time. The only bummer is I nicked a tendon and have to see a hand surgeon on Tuesday. Be careful with knives. Happy New Year!

There are dozens of task management applications out there. But the ones I’ve tried in the past have all forced me to change the way I like to work and as a result I try them for a few weeks and then give up. It’s too hard to change my behavior to fit the arbitrary design of an application.

This all changed about 8 months ago when I started using OmniFocus. This little app by OmniGroup supports my current way of working so well, that these days I’d be absolutely lost without it. It’s quite simple, I keep a list of projects and tasks for each project. When entering a task, I add a context (ie. work, home, online, errands, etc) and due date. The app allows me to view my tasks by project or by context. So when I’m planning out projects I use project view. When I’m ready to do work, I switch to context view and look at the things I can get done based on my context.

For example, each morning before leaving home, I see what I need to do for that day. At home, I use it to keep track of such mundane things as trash day, when to scoop the litter box and when to review my produce delivery.

At work, I use it for everything. I have tasks set up to remind me to send out weekly update emails, to prepare for scheduled meetings, what the next steps are on various projects, etc. When someone asks me to do something, I immediately add a task for it and get back to whatever I was working on before the interuption. I can also send emails from Mail.app to OmniFocus, which is a tremendous help in managing my inbox.

I’ve even started to use it to get me into the habit of doing fun stuff. I’ve set up tasks to remind me to contact friends I haven’t seen in a long time and have them repeat so that I don’t go too long without reconnecting. I have projects for dream vacations with tasks that get me one step closer to making them realities. I even have a couple of inspirational projects like one to motivate me to become a better hockey player, with tasks like working out and eating healthier.

What this has done, is allowed me to focus on the task at hand instead of worrying about all the little things that I don’t want to forget. OmniFocus remembers everything for me, leaving me to live my life.

Some times the hardest thing is knowing when to slow down. These past two weeks at work were hectic. We were trying to close out our Q4 goals, prepare for a board meeting, wrap up our 2008 planning, wrap up our product development for the year and on top of all that I had a new employee start. I had more meetings than I could possibly attend, not to mention more work than could possibly be done. Most of the time, when I’m in this situation, I take a step back and look at what I absolutely must do, prioritize around those, and ignore the rest. It’s the only way I keep my sanity. But this time, nothing could be cut from the list. So my only option was to put my nose to the grind stone and crank through the work.

As the week came to a close and things started to wrap up at work, I started to feel more overwhelmed instead of relieved. It took me a little while to figure out why. I had a flight scheduled for Friday afternoon to fly home for the holidays. This left me no down time between my crazy work week and the beginning of my holiday festivities. I knew this was a recipe for disaster.

Instead of battling holiday travelers, the discomforts of sleeping in other people’s homes and the chaos of large family holidays, I decided to delay my trip for a couple of days to allow myself some much needed down time. I moved my flight to Monday morning, giving me 2 days of rest. 24 hours in, I’m feeling excited for the holidays instead of dread. Sometimes knowing when to slow down is all you need.

I’ve been banking with an online institution for the past 7 years. When I hear stories about people standing in line at the bank or see someone writing a check at a grocery store, I shake my head and wonder why it is that more people haven’t simplified their banking solutions. For those of you who haven’t experienced online banking, here are a few reasons to check it out.

1. No fees and better interest rates.

The best reason to bank online is simply money. Here’s the way banks work. They take your money along with everyone else’s and reinvest it. To be clear they make money from your money. Most banks charge you for this privilege. You are paying banks to borrow your money. It doesn’t make any sense. Banks should be paying you to borrow your money. In fact, some do. I’ve banked with three online banks over the past 7 years. I’ve never paid a bank fee. Never. Plus I’ve received 4-6% interest on all of my money.

2. Free bill pay.

Traditional banks offer online bill pay nowadays. But most of them charge for it. All three online banks I’ve worked with have offered bill pay for free. This is by far the most time-saving offering of an online bank. I can setup my rent to be paid on the 27th of every month and never think about it again. In less than five minutes I can pay my utility and credit card bills. And the best part is, I can do it any time of day and i don’t need stamps.

3. Easy deposits.

One of the biggest barriers for people when thinking about an online bank is how to make deposits. In a day and age when most people make deposits through ATMs, what could be more convenient? How about not leaving your house? I mail in deposits in postage paid envelopes sent to me by my bank. Again, I don’t have to rely on bank hours or need to know where my local ATM is. Instead, I just stick the checks in the mail and the bank takes care of the rest.

Online banking is both a time-saver and a money-saver. If you haven’t tried it out, I highly recommend it.

While I love real world bookstores, I also love the convenience of buying from Amazon. I can spend countless hours browsing books via the “Customers who bought this also bought …” feature. It’s addictive and time consuming.   

In the past, if I wanted a book, I would add it to my cart and keep browsing until I had $25 worth of books to trigger the free shipping. I realize I wasn’t really saving money by doing this - in fact, I was doing exactly what Amazon wanted me to do by purchasing more - but I rationalized it by thinking I’d rather spend my money on more books rather than just shipping. What I didn’t account for was the time I was wasting. Every time I wanted to buy a book, I’d spend another 1/2 hour to an hour browsing other books until I crossed the $25 threshold.  At that rate, I might as well go to a real world bookstore and buy the one book I was originally looking for.  

Thankfully, Amazon introduced Amazon Prime and solved this problem for me.  I pay $80 a year for free 2 day shipping.  My average purchase price has dropped from over $25 a purchase to about $10 a purchase and instead of spending an hour on Amazon each time I think of a book I want,  search for it, click on the 2 day 1-Click option and go away. I spent less on books and I save time.   

The only problem I see with this new system is the wastefulness of shipping one book at a time. If only Amazon offered a feature where they added an option to wait until I had some number of books in my queue before they shipped them. Of course, then I’d have to reconcile my “I want it now” urge with my desire to be friendly to the environment.  

Over the past year, I’ve switched from doing my grocery shopping in stores to having my groceries delivered. It saves both time and hassle. Here in the Bay Area, I use the following services for my groceries.

West Side Organics

I get fresh, locally grown, organic produce delivered to my house every friday. I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables and am more or less living by this service. Unlike other produce delivery services, this one allows you to customize your delivery order up to 24 hours in advance. Their web site is easy to use, the produce is always delicious and they even throw in recipes with every delivery. As an added bonus, you don’t have to be home for the delivery. They pack your produce to survive a day on your door step until you get home from work.

Safeway

I use Safeway delivery for the rest of my groceries. My order rarely changes and Safeway’s site allows me to quickly browse and buy from my last order. It means I can get my grocery shopping done in about 10 minutes. Only drawback is you have to be home for delivery. But they do offer 2 hour delivery windows which is much better than the standard 4+ hour delivery windows.

In Tackling the News Feed Monster, I mentioned that I was looking for a news feed reader that would allow me to only subscribe to specific categories of a blog. I just watched the demo for Fav.or.it and it’s possilbe their Slices feature may do the trick. I requested access to the beta. As soon as I can try it out, I’ll post the results here.

The following two changes have made me far more productive both at work and when working on personal projects on the computer. They allow me to concentrate on what I am doing by limiting the number of interruptions throughout the day.

Check Email Once a Day

I saw an interview with Tm Ferris (author of the Four Hour Work Week) where he suggested that people only check their email once per day. I’m not quite there yet. But I now check my email based on the clock not based on how many unread messages I have. In fact, I don’t leave my email client open anymore. I open it to read and respond to email at 11am and at 4pm and then I leave it closed the rest of the time.

This seemed scary at first, but in reality it’s very liberating.

Set IM status as Away

I love IM. I love being able to ping a friend throughout the work day instead of trying to remember to mention it later on. I’m okay if they can’t respond, after all they are at work. But it’s less formal than an email and I know they’ll read it eventually.

Unfortunately, not everyone has this view of IM. Many expect an instant reply. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come back to my computer to see messages like the following:

11:01am hey, I have a question for you
11:02am are you there?
11:03am hello?

To properly set expectations, I’ve switched my status to “Away” at all times. This does two things: 1) for the people who don’t realize that work takes precedence over IMs it sets the expectation that I am not going to respond immediately and 2) for those people who are looking for an immediate answer that they could probably get elsewhere, they tend to look elsewhere instead of bugging me. Most of my friends know that I’ll get back to them eventually, so I’m not missing out on too much good stuff by setting an Away message. Instead, it’s there waiting for me when I get a free minute.