• Paperless on sale until Sunday!

    Paperless, the new name for ReceiptWallet, is on sale until Sunday (5/17) for $34.95. It has the new branding on it, but it's still my beloved ReceiptWallet! Additional features will be coming and this is a great opportunity for those that haven't already committed to becoming organized to start.

  • Running again

    I've been running on and off for more than a decade. I've used it as a way to relieve stress and by running 2 marathons, proved to myself that I can accomplish physical goals that we're unimaginable to me years ago. After my last marathon, almost 2 years ago, I haven't run very consistently. My son is now 2 and I feel guilty about running as I should be spending time with him. However, I do need time for myself. To that end, about 6 weeks ago (maybe longer), I started running every other day. I've been doing a decent job keeping this up, only missing a few days which I just made up the next day. While I'd like to run 4 days a week consistently, this every other day schedule is working out quite well. My runs are 3-5 miles and take 30-50 minutes (I'm not back down to a 9 minute mile) which is enough to get my heart going, but doesn't take that much time that I feel guilty about knocking off from work early and still get back in time to walk the dog.

    Along with the other changes in my life, I would like to make this a permanent routine as it is going to be the only way I can keep my head from exploding!

  • 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.

  • 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.