A Day in the Life

A Day in the Life

People can learn by rote, or being instructed. But those that retain the information the longest are the ones who can apply it to their own perspective. As a teacher the things I found students retained were the things that they could relate to or customize to their own.

The same thing applies out of school. A reader recently contacted me to learn about my typical day so that she could see if anything I did could help her structure her own. Rather than send her an overly-long email, I decided to make it a post with the hopes it might help other people too.
Tips: Highlight Alternate Rows In Excel…By Formula

Tips: Highlight Alternate Rows In Excel…By Formula

I work in IT. As a function of my job, I know a lot of little tips and tricks for many programs. Excel is one of my go-to programs, but I rarely use it for numbers - I generate code and do a lot of data work with it instead.

I recently had a long list of information to print out as reference material. It contained several columns, and I wanted a quick way to follow the information across the printed row without having to use an external guide.
What’s in My Weekly Review And Plan

What’s in My Weekly Review And Plan

In writing, there are two types of people: planners and pantsers. Planners outline everything and have a plan, and pantsers fly by the seat of their pants. Both produce novels; however the pantsers end up having to go back and straighten out all of the little plot issues and character problems after the fact. It's like planning after you've already done the work.

Personal life is also much like this: there are planners and there are pantsers. The difference with life and time, though, is that you can't go back and change what happened in a week if it exploded in your face. I have long thought that planning is the way to make sure that I'm not wasting precious time having to rework and retry things after the fact. Today we will look at both my work and personal weekly review and plan, along with the whys of everything I do.
5 Things My Dog Taught Me About Weight Loss

5 Things My Dog Taught Me About Weight Loss

One of the aspects of deliberate living I have struggled with is getting healthier. For a long time I gave in to the negative habits I fall back on when stressed, namely stress eating and reading as a means of escape. The end result of this, after years of this behavior, is that I am packing extra poundage and I'm not as strong as I once was.

Deliberate living doesn't mean I get the easy choices. I am choosing instead to act in a way that will move me towards health, and that means weight loss. I've learned some lessons along the way, especially from our late dog.
What’s in My Daily Plan and Review

What’s in My Daily Plan and Review

One of my coworkers was recently complaining that she never knew what she had to do during a given day and that her days always seemed to be taken up by things that landed on her desk that day. She had big projects and wasn't making any progress but wasn't sure exactly where her time was going.

A simple daily plan and review can answer all these questions. By learning how to craft a two-step routine, you can know what is coming at you during a day, what you spent your time on, and figure out where to get the time to work on projects.
Why I Keep My Work And Life In Separate Notebooks

Why I Keep My Work And Life In Separate Notebooks

There are a lot of productivity systems out there that insist that you have to keep everything in one place. There is a solid logic behind this stance: one place means you never have to decide where to put things, and you never have to figure out where to look. One life, one system.

But there is another side too. There are just as good reasons to maintain separate systems for work and non-work parts of your life. Today I will go over my reasons for maintaining two separate systems.
What is Done?

What is Done?

How do you know you are done traveling if you don't know where you're going? None of us would start a journey without some destination, or even just an idea of what you want to accomplish. Imagine running errands without any idea of what you needed to do!

Of course it makes sense when I put it like that, but how many of us know what we are trying to accomplish with our projects? Few of us actually stop and think about what Done looks like. We may have a vague idea, but most of us just plunge into the project without considering the end.
line in the sand

The Line in the Sand: Why Work-Life Balance Is An Issue

I was wondering one afternoon why work-life balance has become such an issue in our modern lives. The answer is actually very simple: changes in the way work is done now blurs the lines between work and non-work time.

It's blurring even more as we put the pandemic in the past; but all of our work lives have changed, whether it is working from home or changing jobs due to the pandemic.