Following my earlier post on the subject, I’ve put together a quick summary presentation.
I hope it will be useful to some of you!
Following my earlier post on the subject, I’ve put together a quick summary presentation.
I hope it will be useful to some of you!
I have a lot of things to do, for various people, at various times. If you’re anything like me, you find this rather stressful and much of your time is wasted by simply trying to work out what to do next.
This blog post will describe some of the ways I’ve used tools available online to dramatically reduce my stress levels and make sure that I never lose track of what I’m meant to be doing.
This is what you’ll need, and also what I use – of course, other tools exist.
Much of how I use my task list is influenced by this great post over on the Remember the Milk blog, and I’ve made my own tweaks.
Here are the main points:
not tag:depends
” and call it “Next Actions” to give a summary of your next tasks.tag:depends
” and call it “Review – Pending tasks” to give you an overview of tasks which you can’t do yet.(NOT addedWithin:"1 week") AND due:never
” and call it “Review – Stale tasks” to help you keep track of any loose ends.I also find it helpful to create a smart list called “Today” (“dueWithin:"1 day of today" or dueBefore:now
“) to list stuff that has to be done today, or that you want to do today. Before I go to bed at night I go through my tasks an assign myself stuff to do for the coming day.
The nice thing about this is I start the day with a ready made plan of action to work through, and unlike the default RTM “Today” overview view this task also shows overdue items which have rolled over from the previous day.
Google calendar can be used natively or through their (ever increasingly sophisticated) web interface. How you use the calendar should be fairly obvious, but setting it up to use natively or on a smart phone is less so.
Essentially, you want to find the ical link for the calendar you’re using (available under calendar settings) and then link to it on each device.
Done right, this means you can view and add events to your calendar from any device and have it synchronise automatically across them.
This ubiquitousness is important, and it allows you to capture the task’s pertinent information (when, where and set reminders in time to get there) as soon as you find out about an event – meaning you only need to remember the task once, and you will never again double book yourself!
A lot of the automation is dependant on your tasks and what you need to get done, but here are some ideas:
So in summary, by capturing information straight away and automating as much as we can we never need to lose track of the disparate threads of our lives. The goal of all this being to reduce everything down to a system, one that requires as little thought as possible from you.
Have a stress free day!
Image from the film “Memento”.
I suppose it shouldn’t come as any surprise that a government goes back on its word once they get to power, but it nonetheless disappoints to discover that LibCons have resurrected Labour’s batshit insane Intercept Modernisation Programme.
Now called the Communications Capabilities Development Programme and containing a few superficial tweaks (namely dispensing with a centralised database), it is still the same impractical authoritarian mass surveillance nightmare that Labour tried to push through before they were rightfully ousted at the last election – hopefully never to return.
As with IMP, the CCCP CCDP plans to record details of phone calls, text messages, location, emails, IMs and social network activity.
As with IMP the content of messages isn’t to be recorded – just when, where, from and to whom. I suspect this concession was down to data processing limitations more than anything else, but as I’ve remarked on before this actually makes it a whole lot worse as it introduces the very easy to fall victim of guilt by association fallacy.
Consider the following situations:
Without context, both these situations would likely flag me up as a person of interest.
Content or no, the deluge of irrelevant data this sort of mass surveillance would produce must surely make it harder to spot the anything that is important. The signal to noise ratio must be particularly poor.
Blanket surveillance such as this sacrifices much and gains little, lets the government go on “fishing expeditions” and will do very little to protect us from terrorists (if you accept the government’s assertion that the barbarians are at the gate, which personally I doubt very much).
Historically of course the biggest threat to life and liberty a population has faced has nearly always been posed by their own government.