Two Very Cool Things

While I'm uploading photos for a more substantial post, I thought I would mention a couple of other things:

• I realize that not all of my readers read the same blogs that I do, so I figure it's worth mentioning freerice.com. Basically you can be quizzed and learn new vocabulary while proceeds from ad revenue are used to purchase rice to be distributed by the United Nations World Food Program. It is addictive.
• I decided today that there just had to be a way to feed one's e-mail from a listserv into an RSS feed. RSS feeds are the single most (if the not the only) efficient way for me to consume information these days. It turned out that Lifehacker wrote about this back in July, probably while I was in Boston. All you have to do is create a filter to forward the listserv posts to somestring@mailbucket.com and then the RSS feed URL will be mailbucket.com/somestring.xml where somestring is any identifier that isn't already in use by someone else. You can just go to the link and subscribe to it with the aggregator of your choice. It's that easy. The possibilities are seemingly limitless.
  

Remember the Milk

Thanks to a couple of articles on Lifehacker about why it's better to keep a to-do list using pen and paper, I read about a new (to me) productivity / to-do list web application called Remember the Milk. Aside from having a cute name, it meets a lot of the requirements that I've been looking for in such an application. You can access it from the web application, your Google Personalized Homepage or Netvibes page, or from a mobile phone. It has tons of features, but one of my favorites is fairly mundane but rare from what I've seen: you can have repeating entries. I, for example, water my orchid plants once a week and I would like to be reminded rather than relying on a memory that only seems to kick in right as I'm getting into bed. Remember the Milk can do that for me, even to the point of sending my phone a text message.

Now if only it could actually water them.

A Venti Must Be The True Key To Productivity

Today I went to a talk given by Merlin Mann, from 43folders. This was part of the Duke Web Communicators Group lecture series. If you haven't checked it out, 43folders is a productivity blog for what Mann refers to as "knowledge workers" or people who process information rather than producing a tangible product. He stressed the importance of examining our lives to make sure that we're spending our time on what we really care about. I know from personal experience it's so easy to spend an entire evening looking at random stuff on the web, which contributes nothing to what I would like to accomplish or learn and isn't necessarily more enjoyable. At the same time, he said that it is horribly sad to get to the point that one avoids new information, so one must choose wisely. He, of course, said all this and much more with clarity and while repeatedly making us all laugh.

So, one of the things he said was practically mandatory was to remove everything from our e-mail inboxes and as each new piece of e-mail comes in, either archive it or tag it as requiring a response. Everything requiring an action should be added to a task list of some kind. I've been struggling with dealing with e-mail ever since I can remember, so I decided to give it a try. I just archived 6767 messages in my gmail account. As many of you know all too well, I've always had the hardest time remembering to reply to e-mail once it's no longer visible in my inbox. Now I can label messages as RESPOND, archive them and never think about them again either, but at least I will have labeled them appropriately. As always, it's the thought that counts. I'm trying the equivalent of this at work, too, where it's slightly more important that I don't forget to deal with things.

I also noticed that he was drinking the largest size of Starbuck's coffee (venti) and I'm betting it wasn't decaf.