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Working smarter, not harder

Work has been the focus of my life for a long time, especially the 5.5 years prior to my new job. Being a self-employed contractor meant that every hour I worked, I got paid. Then when I started ReceiptWallet, I had to not only do my contract work, I had to handle support and development of ReceiptWallet which took up more time.

Last summer I started to re-evaluate my life and started my path towards working less and working smarter. Taking a full time job was my first step. Deciding to sell ReceiptWallet was my next step. Now that my work consists of one day job, it’s time for me to clean up my act and make better use of my time both during the day and after work. A friend of mine sent me a link to a Merlin Mann podcast about blocking off time and “ganging” requests that people make of me. While the podcast may offend some with the language that Merlin uses, it is definitely worth a listen. Most of my work day is spent in a reactionary fashion; instant messaging is part of work and reacting to issues is another part. Luckily, in the last six months, my IT team and I have been able to turn the constant fires into something that is a lot less frequent. However, I still am finding that I need to carve out time to focus on the harder projects. I need to take the incoming requests, log them and get to them later. Ever since I wrote NotifyMail, I’ve interrupt driven. (Curse email…I got addicted way too long ago!)

Most of the people I work with are in the central time zone, so around 3 pm my time, the interruptions pretty much stop. I’m going to try to use the time from 3 to 5 pm as a daily time to focus on the bigger projects that take a lot more concentration. The smaller projects, I can do during the day as they don’t take as much concentration. I’m hoping that I can really stick to this. Already I’ve met my goal of working less (my boss probably doesn’t want to hear that :-)), so I think it is achievable. While I have handled as much work that has been thrown at me in the past, I’m in a different position juggling more. The key to thriving, in my opinion, is to work much smarter and work less. Some people can work all the time, but I found that I’m not really effective after 5-6 pm in terms of my heavy thinking. Believe it or not, I never pulled an all-nighter in college; the closest I came was staying up to 3 or so working on the school paper, but that was monkey work doing page layout.

I’m crossing my fingers that the changes in my life in the past year will help make me a more balanced person. Next up, finding a hobby and actually doing it! LEGO building is fun, but I’m looking for something challenging as well. We’ll see.

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Closing the barn door…

About a month ago, our local Bank of America branch was robbed. My wife called me as she was leaving the area and told me that there were a lot of cop cars at the bank. Since we live in a pretty sleepy part of town, we knew something was up. I turned on my police/fire scanner (I got the scanner several years back to monitor fire communications in case there was another wildfire as the notification system is a bit slow and if I see smoke, I want to know what is going on) and heard that the bank was robbed. Wow, pretty scary. I go in the bank every week without fail.

For the next several weeks, there was an armed guard outside of the bank. I felt much safer (yeah right). I mentioned this to my wife and wondered how long this would last. Well, it didn’t last all that long. While I know that some robbers rob the same bank twice in a short period of time, it is not all that likely. So, the armed guard was a complete waste in my opinion.

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How not to do ecommerce

Years ago when I started with ecommerce, email was an acceptable way to do this including sending credit card information (or at least no one knew better). Today, informed consumers know that email is not the right way to do ecommerce.

I’m ordering new toothbrushes for my son (he was given a “Collis-Curve” toothbrush which is quite effective. If you goto the company’s web site and want to order, you see 3 ways to order: phone, fax, or email. Yes, email! The form on their page is meant to be printed and faxed. To top off the email, it says to submit half of your credit card number in one message and the other half in another message! I almost fell out of my chair when I read this; setting up a secure ordering form isn’t rocket science. Needless to say, I’m not ordering from them.

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EeePC

Several weeks ago, I received an ASUS EeePC 901. I’ve been looking at them for awhile now and finally had an opportunity to play with one. The first thing that happened when I first pulled it out of the box was I cut myself on the box! It was one of those corrugated cardboard boxes that kind of looked like a picket fence. After that unpleasant experience, I was excited to power it up. I was easily able to get it on my WiFi network and began surfing away.

So far, it is performing well. I’m using it to read the morning paper (sometimes) as we now only get our paper on the weekends. It’s a bit sluggish at times, but otherwise it works well. I’ve managed to get a Cisco VPN client working on it as well as a Windows RDC client. I did have some hiccups as I applied all the ASUS updates (I got the Linux version) and effectively ran out of space as it is partitioned with a small system partition. I reinstalled several times just to get things setup the way I wanted; reinstalling was easy because everything is in firmware for reformatting the box.

Are netbooks the wave of the future? They have a ton of potential as more and more services are being moved to the “cloud”. Would I like to see Mac based netbook? Absolutely! I wouldn’t have said that a few years back as I like having just one machine. However, with most of my work being web based these days, my mind has changed. Will Apple do it? I don’t know; I can’t see huge profit margins in a very inexpensive device.

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New job

As some of you that follow my blog have inferred from my posts, I have a new job. I started with alwaysBEthere, Inc. as Director of Technology. alwaysBEthere was a client of mine for several years, and I was offered a full time job. Switching from a contractor (I was a contractor for over 5 1/2 years) to an employee again wasn’t that hard for me. As part of joining the company, I made it a requirement that I be able to work for home, so that part didn’t change. The company is headquartered in Minneapolis with a small office here in San Diego. So while I have the option of going into our office, I only do it now and again; I find that I can get much more work done at home without having to commute.

So what do I do? I don’t have much of a clue on a day to day basis! I handle all kinds of requests ranging from our internal IT to working on projects that could affects customers. Now that I’m six months into it, I feel like I’m finally getting a handle on part of my job.

What will the next six months bring? I don’t know. Do I have any regrets about not being self employed anymore? Not really. I didn’t become self-employed out of choice, but out of necessity (the last company I was with didn’t have any work for me and frankly, I was bored, so we parted on good terms). I stayed a contractor because I was doing well and didn’t think I could find a job with as much flexibility as I had. I like what I’m doing and it presents much different challenges from when I was self-employed. As long as I’m challenged and feel like I’m accomplishing something, I think I’ll be happy.

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Paperless 1.0 Shipped

Mariner Paperless (the new name for ReceiptWallet) 1.0 shipped last week! I’m quite happy to see ReceiptWallet moving forward. While this 1.0 version of Paperless has mostly cosmetic changes, I’m sure that more changes will be coming soon.

There is so much that can be done, I just didn’t have enough time to dedicate to it.

Congratulations, Mariner!

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My wife, the plumber

On Friday, I decided to work on our irrigation system as I had a few more things to finish up since our main plumbing problem of last month. While I was finishing the plumbing, I decided to replace the fill valve for our pool with an electronically controlled, sprinkler valve. I already had an anti-siphon device, so I just needed the valve. The old valve leaked and I had to manually remember to shut it off.

I went to unscrew the old valve and as I was doing it, the valve started turning where it shouldn’t. I then realized that I had a problem. Oh no, another call to a plumber. I called my dad and he said to call my brother-in-law who had tools to do plumbing work. My brother-in-law, Chris, came over and tried to solder a cap in the line. Chris is an attorney, not a plumber, so he did his best. Unfortunately his work didn’t hold and I was all set to call a plumber when my wife, Janessa, said that she wanted to take a crack at it. She does jewelry work and has soldered before. We left her alone and she soldered away. When I came back, she had finished the first joint and then started on the second joint. She finished, when tested it and bingo, it worked!

The only reason I hesitated in letting her take a crack at it in the first place is that she had never worked with plumbing or pipes before. However, soldering is soldering. I shouldn’t have doubted her skills. Janessa might reject her soldering as now I can task her with tricky household maintenance work :-).

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New Math

I’ve gotten a bit fed up with our local paper in that the content is decreasing very rapidly (the quality of the content was always questionable). We decided today that we’d goto Sunday only if it was significantly cheaper. I called and was told that Sunday only was $9/month; we currently pay $11.25/month for every day. I said that I wanted to cancel, so the lady on the phone said that we could get Friday-Sunday for $6/month. Hmmm, so for $3 less per month, we get 2 more days than Sunday alone? I don’t get it, but decided we’ll go for it for awhile.

Our dog will probably be bummed about this as he gets the paper every morning. We’ll just have to throw one out there for him to bring back.

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Lottery

One of the propositions on the upcoming California ballot is about changing how the lottery works and increases advertising for the lottery. I have read the pros and cons of the proposition and no one has mentioned that lotteries are effectively a tax on those can’t afford it. (A friend of mine has called lotteries a tax on those that can’t do math.) In many cases, low income people play the lottery in the hopes that they’ll win. While there is nothing wrong with hoping, the reality is that people will keep playing the lottery despite the odds.

Increasing advertising of the lottery will add a tax burden to low income people. This is probably the best reason I can think of to vote against this proposition; we don’t need increased advertising for the lottery and don’t need to encourage more people to play it. How about some real solutions instead of this hidden tax?