08.27.07
Housecleaning
Did some changes to my personal workflow this morning; nothing that would affect the site at all, not yet anyway, but just felt like getting my organization-geek on. Most of this entry is going to be about individual stuff, so if you’re expecting games and anime, this one might be worth skipping.
I freely admit that I often carry way too much stuff in my pockets; this has always been something of a concern for me, as I tend to like having all my stuff with me in the event of a random crisis that would somehow be alleviated by the use of my (devoid of credits) Splash Lagoon arcade card from Erie. In light of this, I found a slimmer wallet/money clip and have put that to use. I still have too much stuff in that, but fewer ‘just in case’ items. Actually, the biggest waster of space in the wallet now is the game and anime list, or rather it would have been if I had not just now decided to store that in the backpack. Now the only thing in my pockets at any given time are my mini-wallet and my voice recorder. I may go back to carrying a cheap pen once in a while, too, but for now that’s all I need at a moment’s notice. I’m kind of getting ahead of myself… I’ll detail the physical organizations soon enough. Maybe in a few days.
The biggest non-physical reorganization came through my Google Reader setup. I’ve been big on using RSS for a while now, and with GReader things just seem to click. The problem, then, becomes content; I tend to get way too upset by, well, most of the ‘front-page’ stories on Digg. I mentioned back in February that I was reading Digg and Slashdot through RSS only, and for a while that worked pretty well. I dumped Digg from my feed list during the whole HD-DVD key ‘revolt’, but put it back a few weeks after the crapflood had ended. Problem is, though, the front page stories are getting increasingly bad. Not because of the politics involved– I honestly could not give two craps about the election right now, nor do I particularly care about (insert conspiracy theory XYZ here, preferably blaming the current administration). I want tech news. So, I pulled the frontpage feed off and replaced it with the Apple and gaming feeds. Those seem to be quite adequate for my purposes.
I also added a few other prominent tech blogs to the feed conglomerate; specifically Engadget and Macworld. Moreover, though, I’ve decided to actually call attention to the stories that I read and find interesting. It’s not pretty right now, and it’s still in its infancy, but as I mark stories they’ll show up there. I’m tinkering with ways of embedding the feed here in the journal front page. (Also: forgive any weirdness with dating; GReader orders shared items in the sequence in which they were shared, not the order in which they were posted by their component blogs.)
I have most definitely fallen off the GTD wagon in the past few months. This disappoints me, as I had been so gung-ho about it when I first started out. However, that’s a situation I intend to rectify very soon. I need some time and resources to start the cleanup process, but I am going to go back to the basics, back to “desktop zero” and “inbox zero”. Moreover, that also means I need to break my bad habit of checking mail upon waking. It waited for eight hours, it can wait until I get into the office and have had sufficient caffeine to deal with whatever it is I need to deal with. GTD isn’t just about doing things, it’s about knowing when to do them and when not to do them. I really need to learn that lesson.
Finally, in order to save time when I get some of this stuff taken care of (specifically, the GTD stuff via software like iGTD, which now allows manual sorting finally), I’m thinking about getting a printer. I’d resisted getting one for quite some time because I didn’t want to have to deal with crap like paper and toner and all that, but having the printer at home means I can do all that wonderful GTD stuff in an automatic way without having to manually rewrite everything, and I won’t be dependent on an office printer or Kinko’s if I need to print something quickly.
Organization can be fun and easy if done right. And to be honest, I truly do enjoy getting my stuff in order. Anything that cuts down on distractions– like, say, the kind that meant I started this entry an hour and a half ago– is always good. In any event, I’ll catch you tomorrow– hopefully with some more in-depth impressions on Luminous Arc.