Archives for April 2010

King of the Disorganized

I hereby crown myself as the King of the Disorganized.  As such, I feel it is only right that I am able to collect taxes from my subjects.  I’d rather not send around tax collectors (because I would then have to feed them), so please remit your taxes in a timely fashion.

Seriously.  I’ve even read a few books on the subject, but I remain just as disorganized as I’ve always been.  David Allen’s “Getting Things Done“?  Read that.  Great book.  Brilliantly organized fellow.  But, concepts are only so good as their implementation.  And my implementation sucks.  Gotta work on that, but creating the habits necessary is proving nearly impossible.  Well, at this point, I would say that they are proving impossible.  Not nearly, full on impossible.

My worst area is my email.  Which is especially bad considering that I prefer doing everything possible by email.  Business stuff?  By email.  9-5 job stuff? By email.  Email.  Email. Email.  And about every 2-3 weeks, I stroll through my backlog of an inbox (or inboxes as it were) and find at least 4 or 5 emails that required action that have had no action taken.  One of these days, it’s going to cost me much more than a late task.

So, that is going to be my goal over the next week or so.  I’m going to take control of my email inbox.  I’m going to create folders galore to sort and file.  And I’m going to have a follow up folder that I will check regularly.  And it will not all fall apart by the end of the month.  I hope.

Now, back to the taxes thing.  Instead of gold coins and bullion, I’d like you to submit your taxes in the form of tips and tricks that you use to keep your email in order.  And while your at it, how bout a few that you use to integrate that with your task list.

Turning Off the Internet Today

Today, if you haven’t noticed, is April 1, 2010. And April 1 is commonly known as April Fools’ Day. Which generally means that every blogger, internet company, and social network is going to play some sort of prank on you. In fact, as I write this late on the night of March 31, there have already been several such pranks that have come across my feed reader.

I don’t really like being taken for a fool.  Sure, it’s all in good fun, but I just don’t like it.  Some of the pranks are really quite original and somewhat clever, but you can’t distinguish the real from the prank when it’s in black and white 12 point type.  Much like you need a 🙂 to delineate a joke in a online chat, you have to be able to pick the pranks from the real.  And because it’s not often marked so well, I chose to ignore anything that comes out on April 1.  So, for today, I’m turning off the internet.  At least to being taken seriously.