I just learned about a great program called Grindstone from Epiforge.

When you start working on a job, you click the name in the list you’ve made up yourself. And start the timer. When you’re done. You stop the timer. At the end of the day, or the week, or any span of time, you can get a report that tracks your time by project, by task or by profile (which I currently can’t quite figure out how to use). You can get a pie chart or a regular report. It’s great! You can print out a time sheet!

And the best thing is if you walk away from your machine, it tracks how long you’ve been idle. And then asks what you were doing for that last period of time. You can set that interval for whatever best suits you. If you were doing something you need to track time for, you can manually add that time. Or you can just click the button that says Grindstone shouldn’t worry about what you were doing.

I’d been doing pretty well using a Google side bar simple timer. Clicking to start and stop and then writing down the numbers in a journal. At the end of the month I look back thru it and tally up the numbers. But Grindstone is way more accurate.

Because the timer only keeps track up to one hour, and because sometimes I get so involved I forget about the time, then I might not know if that was 1 hour and 20 minutes or 2 hours and 20 minutes. Grindstone knows the right answer. And it’s way more accurate!

Oh, and by the way, did I mention it’s FREE!

AND the worst part about grocery shopping, in my opinion, is carrying that stuff up the steps into the house.

Because by that time, you have already touched the stuff FOUR times:

• once from the shelf to the cart,
• once from the cart to the belt,
• once from the belt to the cart again and
• once from the cart to the car.

Yes, you still DO have to touch it to get it out of the bags and away.  But I figure, just ONE fewer time, especially THAT one time,  is at least a 20% saving in energy.

Actually, we’ve had pretty many since then. But I digress.

At the time of that particular party, we were in the middle of doing planning  a lot of projects around the house. We had the list of all those projects posted on the wall in the kitchen.

Here’s a party hint.

Some stuff you can’t clean up before people come over. But if you post a larger than life list, it WILL give people something to talk about. And they’ll focus on your list instead of the half painted walls.

At another party, when the hallway needed paint, I went to the wall paper store and got a bunch of samples. I taped them all over the hall way and asked people to vote on the one they liked best.  Another great conversation starter!

(The hall got painted.)

I sure wish I had a picture of that original list. But I tell you what, everyone who came to the party remembers that list and that the lynch pin task was fix the gutters!

Personally, I never understood why the gutters needed to be replaced before a bedroom was painted, but some how, in the mind of some-other-adult-with-whom-I-live, there was no point in doing anything until that task was completed.

The point is this: sometimes you need more than just a list.

Sometimes you have to figure out which parts of the project come first and then what happens next.

I love a good list. But stuff can get missed if it’s just linear. Or, as in my case, in a notebook on many pages.

However, I just read or at MakeUseOf.com about this cool new online project manager called Gantter.com You don’t have to sign in, or make an account.

The MakeUseOf guys say it’s a  lot like MS Project.  But it’s freakin’ free!  You work on the plan, you save it to your own machine, you upload it when you want to come back to it. You can print it out as a pdf and carry it around with you. OR blow it up really big, post it on the wall in your kitchen and have a party!

It’s surely over kill for figuring out a normal weekly schedule.  But if it’s a complicated week, or a project with many steps, I think it will really rock.

I thought it a bit of an odd fluke til I read over at MakeUseOf.com that THEY also noticed it’s something people search on a lot. So they reviewed an online alarm clock that allows you to pick the song you want to wake to.. and a lot of other stuff. And it’s on your computer so it will even work when you’re traveling—presuming you travel with your computer. (HA! Silly me, of COURSE you travel with your computer! Doesn’t everyone?)

And they this other link to a  great DIY project: World’s Loudest Alarm Clock

Hope you don’t live next door to me!

A friend sent me this info… today… on the day it was posted at Wordsmith.org.

perendinate

PRONUNCIATION:
(puh-REN-di-nayt)

Meaning:

verb tr. : To put off until the day after tomorrow.
verb intr.: To stay at a college for an extended time.

(Personally, I like that the day after tomorrow and being at college too long are somehow related!)

I’d like to think that this is not necessarily a bad thing… the putting off part, not the college part.  If I just don’t get around to something to day for some “whatever” reason, then I feel like a slug.

HOWEVER, if I decide that I can’t do it today, and tomorrow won’t work either, then I can perendinate on purpose. I can give myself a slight break from feeling guilty for putting the thing off and make a real plan to do it the day after.

The trick is to actually pat myself on the back for making the decision and then doing the thing.

We can hope, right?

Tressa Prisbrey saw a structure at Knott’s Berry Farm and decided to try the construction method out for herself.   My own family visited KBF when I was in the 6th grade. and I did not see this! Anyway, Tressa used bottles… hundreds of thousands of bottles and concrete.  According to Reveries:

She collected most of her materials from the local dump, although her hard-drinking husband drained enough beer bottles to create an entire structure made of his empties alone. Her intent was to shame him but apparently this didn’t work.

Check out the rest of her story here.

And then, just for fun, check out the rest of THAT site. I found MORE of those bottle houses here.

Time management and prioritizing are two issues that many of my clients share. I’ve got two tips that might help:

Say I’ve got five things ToDo on my list. Yea, I can pick the most important one… but the others sometimes mush together. Here’s a little application that helps you sort through which of the five things on your list really IS the most important. You list the five things and then choose which one is more important a given “other one.” In the end, it spits out your ordered list. Check it out at the Idea-Sandbox.com

The other idea is about looking with a different perspective at managing your work schedule.

Traditionally, people advise blocking out time each day for the big project. “My prime work time is from 10 am til 2 pm. So I’ll work on the Johnson report today until it’s finished. I’ll worry about the Fredericks report next.” Or you block all the computer jobs together. It’s a very linear way of approaching tasks. And perhaps it works well for very linear people, which, of course, I am not.

I stumbled on this alternative method of arranging my days: Time Striping.

In time striping you look at a week at a time. I started to write an explanation, but it’s already so clear at lifehack.org. So what’s the point? Check it out here.

Genetic, generic… are they really so different?

OK, OK.. I’m sure my DNA string musta snapped someplace and I’ve totally embarrassed my parental units.

And for that I do apologize!

I don’t need a life coach, but your picture shows a really lovely woman! Kudos to your folks’ genetic material.

Hey guys.. that picture? It’s me! It’s not very recent, but I still look pretty much just like that! I had a professional photographer take it because I wanted a good shot for this website and I wanted to control (to the best of my ability) the picture they run with my obituary… And no, I’m not planning on going any time soon. (Check out my article on the value of a good photograph here.)

And by the way, I don’t have “folks.” It’s just me here, doing the coaching and the marketing and everything else that needs to get done around a small business office. I have a lot of experience running a business, and sometimes, when I get in the flow, it seems pretty easy. But if there’s something going on in my business, it’s only because I am doing it.

Thanks for visiting.
Come back soon.

We’ve got huge computer issues in my house. We’re O-soo-cutting-edge here. But our latest upgrade rendered my connection to the network printer just about nonexistent–painfully slow when it worked and sporadic in its choice of what it deemed worthily of ink.

So I decided, as a stop gap, I’d buy the cheapest littlest printer I could find. I could just put it on a table in my office and stop running up and down the steps to see if my print jobs happened. If they ever get the network set up right, then I could ditch the little printer and go back to the mother ship for quality.

I bought a little HP Deskjet F2120 — all-in-one printer, scanner, copier. I paid about $39 for it at Target. There was just one printer cheaper at $29 but that only came with the color ink cartridge and the black cartridge was another $15, so I picked the HP. In fact, I did not know about the all-in-one virtues, or the OCR or the double sided print capabilities. I just wanted little and cheap.

What a surprise! This little baby is F A S T .. much faster, at least in the black and white mode, than the fancy Cannon we run on the house system. I’m not sure how it will last. But as most of what I print is just to read, mark up and then toss, I’m thinking this could be a nice little addition to my office equipment.