Sweet gift

I received a sweet gift yesterday: The Mountain Three Wolf Moon Short Sleeve Tee.  If you haven't read about this bad boy, you should here.  Anyways, as my brother pointed out, this puts me in a long line of real-world studs who sport the shirt as well:

12/8/09: line of the day

The best and humblest words of the day come from a legless man named Dodge:

 I would have committed suicide if it weren't for Jesus.

Efficiency Strategies

Activity Categories
My brother and I were recently talking, and he shared with me his belief that most things he does in a day can be fit into three categories:

• Energy Drain: these are things that he doesn't enjoy and has to force himself to do as they run him down.
  
• Neutral: these are hard work and he enjoys them, but they don't run him down.
• Booster: these are "Sharpen the Saw" things. These make him feel good inside.

Efficiency Strategies
As expected, the problem is that often all one wants to do is the Booster and Neutral activities, but never the Drain activities. One can waste tons of time avoiding the Drain activities. As a result we discussed the following efficiency strategies:

• Throw out the chaff - Basically, is there anything you can get rid of? Getting rid of things in the Energy Drain category is more valuable than the Neutural, which is more valuable than the Booster. But when it comes to time, you can gain no matter which category you can cut out from.
• Eat your veggies before your dessert - If you're like me, you can eat and enjoy dessert anytime (e.g., beginning of the meal, end of the meal, in lieu of the meal). Veggies aren't the same way. They're my least favorite part. I'm not going to love them at any point in the meal, but I will love them less (i.e., they will be an even bigger let down) if I eat them after dessert.
• Break drains into smaller drains - As compared to having one big block of time for the drain work (which could be so demoralizing that you waste time avoiding it), consider breaking the drain into smaller parts. I find doing three 30 minutes sets of drain work easier to stomach than 1 90 minute set.
• Work more efficiently - If there's a way to get 25% done in the same amount of time, score!
• Steel plate should be the norm; gold plate when necessary - Said another way, balance incredible with good enough. It's not possible to do everything incredibly well. Not only that, not everything needs to be done incredibly well. It certainly requires good and pure judgement, but being able to know when good enough will suffice is important.
• Remove distractions - Many studies have shown that we as humans are not near as effective when we constantly switch between tasks. We aren't like a computer processor that switches between multiple programs per second. Removing distractions so one can focus is key.

Efficiency Strategies Applied
Application for the principles above:

• Is there anything in your list of activities above that you can get rid of (favoring drain to booster)?
• Is it possible to get the drains out of the way before the neutrals or the boosters? Can you do the neutrals before the boosters? If you have a lot of homework, it's easier to get energized and do the booster items at 10pm then it is to do the drainers. While it stinks to not give your best and most alert hours to what you enjoy most, it is a survival technique.
• Do you see anyway to break up your drains? For example, If you have 60 minutes of of reading to do, can you do 20 minutes before school, 20 minutes before tennis, and 20 minutes when you get home?
• Do you have any ideas on how you can work more efficiently? A couple of example ideas: could you print your Spanish vocab and put it in a protective sleeve hung up in the shower and/or the bathroom? Could you record your Spanish vocabulary and listen to it in the car, or as you walk to class from the parking lot?
• Do you find yourself doing more than you need to? For example: while it's nice to type up a lab on the computer, is it necessary, and more importantly, does it save you time compared to hand writing it?
• What distracts you? Phone calls? IM? Web browsing? If you can't control your distractions, it's ok to remove yourself from them. For example, if the computer is a distraction while reading, read somewhere where there is no computer. In the business world, some companies advocate that for certain hours or days, employees quit out of their email program to not be distracted.

"I don't pray for money"

A friend here who is always stretching to get by each month told me, "I don't pray for money. I pray that my family would be safe and that I can put food on the table by having a paying job." I've met others in a survival mentality who try to game life and try to get as much as they can as quickly and easily as possible. My friend's understanding of work,and the thankfulness with which he receives it is refreshing.

Stuff About Food

The subject of food has come across my path recently. There's been discussions with my Dad while helping with some small projects for Chuckanut Bay Foods. When hiking Chirripo, the hostel owners shared a lot with me about NAFTA's effects on Costa Rica and Mexico's food production. Amazon's blog had a recent interview with the directors of the new documentary Food, Inc. I suspect this isn't coincidence. What has piqued my interest is realizing that it is a justice issue and that real lives are affected by it. There are the GREEN reasons too, but environmental reasons aren't as engaging as people reasons for me. We'll see what comes of this.

Contributing to what someone finds when they Google your name

I recently read articles on Google's blog on contributing what someone finds when they Google your name. Your can read the entries here and here. The summary though is to create a Google profile.

Evernote

My number one software recommendation right now is Evernote. As stated on their website:

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere. Did we mention that it's free?

My use case is that through my day I read a lots of various information that is useful but not directly applicable. Evernote helps me capture and organize that information for a later date. Have you ever seen something online and thought "wow, that's cool" or "that will be useful to remember", but then haven't none what to do? Bookmarking helps, but there are deficiencies with that (e.g., you can't easily search the content of bookmarks, bookmarks are usually local to one computer, the content of the bookmark could change by the time you go back to). In addition, not all information is gathered online. There are emails received, or books and articles that are read. Capturing the useful info from those sources are important to.

How do you get information into Evernote?

Getting information into Evernote is easy as there are many ways:

• Download the software application (for Mac or Windows) and use one of the shortcuts to create a new note and store the info.
• Install one of the browser plugins that will allow you to select text, hit a button, and have the info imported into Evernote.
• Download the iPhone/Blackberry app for entering info or taking pictures that get put into your Evernote account.
• Send test/pictures to your Evernote provided email address. These emails will automatically show up in your account.
• When you print, choose the "Evernote" printer, and instead of getting sent to a physical printer, it will show up in your Evernote account as a PDF.

What you can do once the information is in Evernote?

• My favorite thing is that you can apply tags to information. You can say that this note concerns "church", "money", and "prayer" for example. Tagging is way better than traditional heirarchal folder structures because it more flexible.
• All images that are stored in Evernote have optical character recognition (OCR) applied so that you can search the text within the image. I think this feature is huge for people with portable cameras of decent quality (e.g., iPhone users). This means you can take a photo of a menu, some hand written notes, or a whiteboard, and then be able to search for the content within it.

What else is awesome about Evernote?

• As stated above, Evernote is free. In the free version you see a tiny ad in the bottom-left hand corner for things like Skype or backup solutions. They are what I would call reputable ads. The free version also limits you to putting 40MB of information into Evernote per month. If you're primarily putting in text (which is my case), that's more than enough. If you're putting lots of images, you could hit this barrier, but then there is the premum service for $5 or $45 per year that removes all these restrictions.
• Evernote is cross platform. It works on Mac, Windows, iPhone, Blackberry, and any web browser. As much as I love my Mac, I always try to have flexibility.
• Evernote syncs between any computer/device that you have configured. This is absolutely huge for me. This means I can put information into Evernote on my work computer and come home to find it on our personal computer. In addition, Evernote has a web-interface that one can use to put information in or get information out from any computer. I just used this functionality heavily when planning a surprise weekend for Kara to celebrate our anniversary. Things would come to me while I was at work, and so I would quickly enter them into my "3rd Year Anniversary" note in Evernote, and they would be there as soon as I logged into my account at home.
• Evernote is not just sombody's cool software project. It's part of a larger mission by the company to help with staying organized and being productive. Evernote is the primary tool they help do that. Reading Evernote's blog reveals all kinds of helpful hints.

I'm 99% certain that Evernote can help you in one way another, and that it's flexible enough to work within your environment. Let me know if you have any questions or need any help.