Open Thinkering

Menu

Tag: system

Productivity via Moleskine notebook indexing.

Moleskine Notebook - cover

Moleskine Notebook - page numbers

Moleskine Notebook - index

Hat tip to Nick Dennis for this one (who I believe got it from Tim Ferriss’ book/blog). Here’s how to do it:

  1. Number the pages of your notebook 1, 1,5, 2, 2.5, etc.
  2. Add an index to the back of the notebook (brief summary of each page range)
  3. Colour-code however you see fit

This solves, at a stroke, the problem of having to hunt through pages and pages of hand-written notes and scrawls to find what you’re looking for!

Genius.

Productivity: don’t break the chain!

Whilst looking for something entirely different, I came across this post on Lifehacker about advice given by Jerry Seinfeld to an aspiring comic:

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

“Don’t break the chain,” he said again for emphasis.

I’ve realised that this is, in effect, what I’ve been doing with Joe’s Goals:

But now I’ve got a new ally. Lifehacker recommends the Don’t Break The Chain Google Chrome extension – complete with relevant judgements:

Priceless. 😀

The new blog order.

(image CC BY-NC Jeremy Brooks)

So here’s the plan. To make blogging every day sustainable, I need a system. Here’s what I’m thinking:

  • Monday Motivation – hints, ideas and tips about productivity, motivational quotes and the like.
  • Tuesday Tech. – an update on edtech stuff and related musings.
  • Wednesday Wisdom – a mashup of Creative Commons-licensed photos and quotations from Balthasar Gracián’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom.
  • Thursday Thesis – parts of, or ideas, related to my Ed.D. thesis.
  • Friday Fun – some end-of-the-working-week light heartedness, fun and random stuff.
  • Saturday Stats – an opportunity for me to post things related to visualization and infographics.
  • Sunday Scientia – the new name for Things I Learned This Week (‘Scientia’ is Latin for ‘knowledge’)

Thoughts? It may mean I need to change the categories around a bit… 🙂

css.php