Ken Hemenway writes about life-style automation in a new O’Reilly article Failing Miserably, If Not Inventively. Definitely interesting.
I’ve been thinking a lot about streamlining my daily routine for better efficiency… some thoughts.
- I spent a couple hours earlier this week automating my billing. It’s still a little bubble-gum sticky, but it *does* export my hours directly from iCal to our in-house hour tracking system and generate and send out a weekly status report directly. In general, that should save me about 5/min of utter frustration every single day for the rest of the time I’m working at my current position
- Most of these things aren’t that hard to do, but it just requires getting around to it. There are a couple things over the course of my day that probably could still be streamlined:
- Email reading
- Web-reading
- Blogging/Link-logging
- While some of this can be gotten around technically: better blogrolling/feed-reader, better mail-list archiving, better blogging tools, a lot of it is also behaviorial and will take a concerted effort to fix. While I’m now averaging only about 1 piece of spam every day or two now (CRM114 is still training, I expect this to improve), I still check my email way too often. I definitely have an info-consumption problem; I’ve been weening myself off bit by bit…
- Lists are definitely good. What I’ve realized is that because I have way too many projects going on, the best thing to do is to create a linear checklist so that anytime I’m twiddling my thumbs I don’t need to make a decision on what to do, just do it. This is something else can be improved with technology; ie, being able to automatically change priority based on due-date/milestone markers, etc.