Doing A Media Fast

Doing A Media Fast

How much time per day do you spend consuming media? I'm talking about news, magazines, social media and websites. Has it increased with the pandemic? Is it doing you good? Or is it making you anxious and depressed?

A media fast can help us break the cycle that news has over us. At a time when we need to be focusing on personal circumstances, keeping up with the media can distract us, or even worse, derail us completely and offer us an unhealthy escape.
Evernote: Managing Someday Tasks

Evernote: Managing Someday Tasks

Most people have moments when they see something and think, "I'd like to do that someday." If you're not going to forget about it, that means you either have to do it right now or write it down somewhere so you won't forget. David Allen, in Getting Things Done, recommended having a Someday/Maybe list, where all of these ideas reside.

The problem with any sort of list is that if you keep stuffing things into it, without removing items in turn, it becomes a giant slush pile of un-acted-upon ideas.

As an IT data professional, I can tell you that a system where you only put things in, without the ability or inclination to take it out again, is a failure. If you can't or won't get data out of a system, why put it in at all? It's wasted effort/time/money.

So the ginormous list of things you might want to do, unless you regularly pull things out, is worthless.
Evernote: My Maintenance Routine

Evernote: My Maintenance Routine

Even though Evernote has some serious disadvantages , it is still my chosen note software. Today I wanted to show you how I use Evernote so that things are manageable.

When I first started using Evernote seriously, I researched the best practices. Why re-invent the wheel, after all? The best practice at the time was to have a few notebooks and then use tags to classify everything. This didn't work for me, because I couldn't find what I was looking for most of the time, and a single breakdown in tagging caused information to get lost. I also found that I couldn't efficiently clean out old unneeded information, and that just made everything worse.

Now I have multiple notebooks. If something gets mis-tagged, or lacks a tag, I can still look through the notebook to find it. Plus having multiple notebooks allows me to selectively sync to my tablet for offline use, and it makes cleaning out outdated information much easier.

In order to make Evernote run as smoothly as possibly, I use a three-phase technique.
Evernote: Love, Hate and Usage

Evernote: Love, Hate and Usage

Have you ever bookmarked a website, to return later and find that it is gone? Or wished that you could make notes on a website and save it? These are the primary reasons to use a notebook application like Evernote instead of a bookmark manager.

I used a bookmark manager as my primary source of keeping track of useful information on the interwebs for years. But after realizing that many of my bookmarks pointed to sites that were no longer there, and the inability to access information without the internet made me reconsider how I was storing things. Enter Evernote. Evernote is a notebook tool that is available as desktop, web and mobile, allowing me to get to my notes no matter where I am.

Today I will talk about Evernote, its ups, downs and foibles, and how I use it.
Procrastinating Is Different Than Incubating

Procrastinating Is Different Than Incubating

Sometimes ideas need time to incubate. We may need to work out details, methods, or even the feasibility of the idea itself.

To the outside person, this can look like procrastination.

But in fact, incubation and procrastination are very different.

How are they different? Here are five ways that procrastinating is different than incubating.
Building Margin Into Your Life

Building Margin Into Your Life

Do you ever have a stretch of time where you are so busy it feels like you can't even pause to catch your breath? If so, you need to look at building margin into your life. Such a pace is impossible to maintain in the long run, and can lead us to both burnout and poor performance on the tasks we are trying to get done.

I can get frantically busy. These days it is generally only for a day or two at a time, but there have been times when that busyness stretched into weeks. It's so busy that you don't even have time to consider what you need to do next. You just pick up the next thing and keep going. Sometimes these stretches are caused by over-scheduling, or an inability to say no, or forgetting that I can ask for help; but they all have the same result: exhaustion, burnout and frustration. The really ironic part is that I do it to myself, because I know that scheduling in margin will prevent it.
Getting Back Time: Empowering Independence

Getting Back Time: Empowering Independence

One of the things that can suck up a lot of our time is doing things for others. This is particularly apparent if you have kids that still live at home. If you can empower others' independence, you can get a lot of time back for yourself.

Through various family circumstances I was placed in charge of running a household at the age of 14. While I would never wish my particular circumstances on anyone else, the sense of being independent - and more competent than my peers at "adulting" - never left me. I have tried to give my daughter the same competency, although with a guiding hand rather than the sink-or-swim method I experienced. Yes, she started young, but her knowledge gives her independence and responsibility - and gives me time.

Podcast Episode 17: Stop Distractions with External Limiters

I can go down a rabbit hole of distraction faster than a rabbit. To keep myself on track, I took a trick I learned as a parent - using external tools to enforce limits. Today's show is about the various limiters I use to keep myself away from distraction.   How To Set Up iOS Screen Time Limiter http://lauraearnest.com/freebies/screen-time-primer/ Support me at Patreon: You can find all the…