MOMETEK's Guide: Time management

Showing posts with label Time management. Show all posts

Saturday, March 29, 2014

The 80/20 Principle and how it applies to You

There's a book you should check out: The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less. This goes into detail on how in life we only use 20% of what we have 80% of the time.Well, it's not exactly 20% and 80%. Sometime it's more extreme: 90% of the world's wealth is held by 1% of the population and some people only use 1% of the English language (consisting of four letter words every other syllable) 90% of the time to name a few.

To relate this to the home (keep in mind that the percentages will vary):

You probably use only 20% of your wardrobe, 80% of the time
You use 20% of your kitchen Gadgets 80% of the time
You use most likely 20% of your software 80% of the time

Chances are, only 20% of your time benefits you. If you are trying to start a business, it's likely only 20% of what you do is actually useful. The rest is busy work or, what I like to call "stalling work". Something I have a nasty habit of doing. I'm still trying to break that habit.

If you are looking to streamline your life, the best place to start is reading this book, then applying the principles accordingly. If you can remember to do so, ask if what you are doing really does help you. Go through your stuff, and try to remember the last time you used it. It's likely you only used it a few times soon after you bought it, then stuff it into a drawer/closet to be forgotten about.

It might be an opportunity to make some extra cash. Check out Ebay or Craigslist to sell those unused items.

Friday, February 21, 2014

Wunderlist

wunderlist (Photo credit: Leif (Bryne))

After reading How Can I Turn My Mess of Ideas Into Something Organized and Useful, I decided to give Wunderlist a shot.

Wunderlist is pretty much a task list manager on steroids as it allows you to make endless lists to whatever your heart desires.

If you are like me and have an unstable internet, or you can't be online all the time, it also has a stand-alone app that you can download for Windows or Mac and of course, your Android or IPhone.

This means that you can make a list quickly while you are traveling to the "boonies" where the only choices of internet connection is dial-up speeds or satellite. Believe it or not, there are some areas where your connection speed is just above dial-up, that is if you can get a connection at all and no, there is no cellphone service.

My favorite part is that there is a web clipper. When the add-on is installed on Firefox, you can click on the button in the toolbar and it will add a task to the category of your choice.

There are more features that I haven't tried yet like attaching a file or adding friends to share with as well as some pro features I have yet to look at, but so far, it had proven to be a very handy tool.

Monday, December 27, 2010

Free Stuff–Task Coach

Image by john.schultz via FlickrThis has to be the Ultimate to-do list – especially for those of us who like keeping a to do list. After all, there’s nothing more satisfying then crossing an item off of the list, knowing that it’s done.

Task Coach – Your Friendly Task Manager is a program that allows you to categorize your to do list and use subcategories. Then the tasks themselves can have subtasks. You can also take your email from outlook or Thunderbird and drag it into the Task Coach manager so that if you use email a lot to talk to clients, this is a great way to organize it all.

If you don’t mind it running in the background (not good if you are using a netbook), it also has a reminder feature to remind you when the next task is due. But on slower computers, it's yet another item running in the background. I own a netbook, so I try to keep my running background programs to the minimum.

There are many more features, you can check it out here: http://taskcoach.org/features.html and you can download it for windows here: http://taskcoach.org/download_for_windows.html. Not running windows? No problem. There’s version for Mac OS X, Linux, Iphone, and Ipod touch.