While I was living in Maryland, maybe sixteen years ago, we had a couple really nasty ice storms one year. As in, a long overnight session of freezing rain that coated anything it landed on with a two-inch layer of ice, followed by several inches of snow, the another half-inch ice crust on top. I [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Productivity category.
“Set Up a UPS for Crash-Free Shutdowns During Power Outages”
I was a little shocked (pun not intended) to see this article on LifeHacker. Doesn’t everybody know about Uninterruptible Power Supplies already? Then reality asserted itself, as I remembered that to most people, computers are just magic boxes. When I was running a desktop system, the UPS was a must-have item. Now that I’ve only [...]
“Keep Your Computer Active Sans Software with a Watch”
The hardest thing about time is doing it. — Lord Corwin of Amber This is a ridiculously low-tech solution to the high-tech problem of keeping your computer from going to sleep while it’s working on something for you. The incongruity somehow appeals to me.
“The Many Reasons We Procrastinate, Including the Multiple Selves”
I found this to be an interesting article, but the essay that it links to fascinates me. Partly for the content, but even more for the erroneous thoughts it contains. For example: [...] procrastinators know all too well the allures of the salient present, and they want to resist them. They just don’t. That’s not [...]
“Watch a Demonstration of the World’s Fastest Shoelace Knot”
I haven’t had a chance to use this myself yet, but it looks intriguing. Maybe enough to convince me to abandon my Velcro-fastened shoes, even if they are efficient.
Claws E-Mail Client
I switched to Thunderbird for my e-mail and RSS a few years ago, because it was cross-platform, open-source (so I didn’t have to worry about the company abandoning it if/when they decided they weren’t making enough money with it), and worked with GPG so I could still have my secure e-mail. I have never been [...]
“How to Rebuild Your Attention Span and Focus”
This is generally an excellent article, but I have to take exception with one of its assertions: I’ve been using a second monitor for nearly ten years, thinking that vast amounts of space were key to productivity. The second monitor myth has been around for quite some time. Yet the only actual scientific study I [...]
“Keep Going. Concentrate on Something Useful.”
The text I quoted above got me thinking. As many of my readers know, I’ve been working on an extremely difficult programming problem for the last seven years. Many really smart people have attempted to solve it before me, and so far, none have succeeded; many others, equally intelligent, believe that it simply can’t be [...]
“How to Start Using Procedure Checklists for Flawless Task Execution”
I stand behind this idea 100%. I’ve been using checklists for certain procedures (like software releases) for a number of years now, ever since I discovered that I was forgetting to do one or two things in each release. They were small things, but they made those releases look less professional. I just wish that [...]