I have to add something to last week’s post. In addition to all of the traditional school supplies, there is another organizing item which is featured and on sale these days as school supplies. Stores are carrying plastic drawer units for those going away to college. Many of these are nice sized 3 drawer chests - inexpensive and even stackable (or at least they stack them for sale in the stores). From personal experience I know that one has to be careful not to fill them with heavy items, but if you need an inexpensive chest of drawers for your organizing, now is a good time to buy one.
I am in an embroidery group - I have probably mentioned this before. I do most of its computer work - the monthly newsletter and the annual yearbook (list of upcoming year’s programs and info about the group) included. The yearbook used to be very fancy - with ads from local craft stores and such - but as the group got smaller, the yearbook got simpler. Husband redesigned it for a for us a few years ago, and then I would update the information each year. I also took over the newsletter. When most of the members had email addresses, it became an email, with printed copies of it mailed to those without email addresses. Now all have email addresses.
It was suggested towards the end of our last year (year is September to June) that need a fancier newsletter, one attached to the email, instead of just an email. I had been thinking so also and did up a prototype for the board meeting. The other 3 board members liked what I did and few suggestions for change were made. After the others left, the president suggested we redo the yearbook also - I had not been prepared for that. She had a number of changes.
Since the board meeting at the end of June, in and around everything else I have had to do, I have been working on the revised yearbook - it should have been in the mail late July, early August. She and I have emailed each other and talked on the phone. I have sent her pages of it in assorted fonts. Finally it was all worked out and I finished it - yesterday. This is to be printed up and mailed out - by me. Today we went to Staples. (Yes, I am giving the name of where all that follows happened. In the past we used OfficeMax, but just before last year’s was printed, the local OfficeMax stores closed - OfficeDepot closed here - twice - years ago.) I had a cover page to be printed on a color paper and 5 additional pages, which are double sided, to be printed, black print, no color. When we used to OfficeMax, the employees were nice and helpful - what color would you like, how is this one, etc. Today the employee did not even bother to show me the color pages when I asked for green for the color. The most done was did I want dark green, no, I want pastel green. Then she asked when we wanted it. I asked if we could wait - as we did at OfficeMax and did last year at Staples. Sure - but then the price was extra $20 or so. I asked when there would no extra fee - pickup tomorrow. So, okay, we will shlep back tomorrow and take more time doing all this. We went home.
When we arrived at home and went to our computers to work (perhaps 15, 20 minutes at most) husband found two emails from Staples - we had not given them an email address, not been told or asked for emails and did not want any - one was a copy of the charges for the order, the other was telling us - that the order was done and we could pick it up at any time! So basically, I got immediate service at no extra cost, but now I was home and would have to go back to get it! We did not waste time going back and will go back tomorrow while we are out to pick it up and it will be mailed on Friday. I was more annoyed with them. We were finishing dinner and the telephone rang. The answering machine answered (always on here to save time dealing with the spam calls - which almost all of calls are). It was someone from, yes, Staples. I picked it up. I was told that the order was ready and I had not picked it up. I told him that I was told it would be ready tomorrow. He was upset that I was not coming and I was told that I could still come for 20 minutes and pick it up. I told him that he must be kidding and we would come tomorrow. And the price on the charges for the order is 9 cents more a page than I paid at OfficeMax - even more for the color pages.
So we are wasting time on a trip back, when the order was done immediately, I wasted time with the phone call, and we wasted paper printing out the emails - as they say that they are required to pick up the order - something I can’t believe!
In addition to all the work put into the yearbook, I have been working on redoing the newsletter. Today it is just about finished. Husband helped me get the old header from years ago when it was a mailed newsletter, into the newly designed email one. I emailed it to myself to see what happens and all I need is the president’s column and any info from board members - I send them an email 2 weeks before the meeting and the newsletter goes out a week before the meeting.
So I have managed to actually get work done! Yippee. I also managed to finish the embroidery course I was working on from the group. Now husband has to finish it for me.
I managed yesterday, to finish the yearbook with enough time left before dinner to go through a folder of old papers - the sort of papers one tears out or otherwise keeps to do something about - this craft store sounds interesting, the card from this restaurant sounds like it would save us money, I need to write a letter about this, etc. Most was tossed. A few were kept. My todo folder actually fits into the stacking letter tray that it belongs in. (I have a stack of these on my desk - one each for us, our business, my accounting practice, our reenactment unit, my embroidery group, my todo folder, my “waiting to hear folder” and “club membership lists”, and one for items to be filed. There is also a top one which has standing holders for papers, envelopes, empty folders and such.
So all in all I feel, finally, as if I have completed things. Yet, so much more to do. As I sit here writing, I am waiting for my cell phone timer to ring, so I will know to change the laundry loads - wet to dryer, new one in the washer. Without the cell phone timer, I would forget and the first load would not make it to the dryer until bedtime at least.
THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -
When something seems like it is too big a project - take a section of it and start. Just as page by page I finished rewriting the yearbook and the newsletter, you will eventually see the project done - perhaps with time left to do something else small.
Showing posts with label computer time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computer time. Show all posts
Thursday, August 17, 2017
Thursday, May 26, 2016
Organizing your computer data to protect it - backing up
Lately in the news there have been reports of computers being “hijacked” and people being told that they had to pay a ransom to get the use of their computers back and if one pays, one may or may not actually get their computer use back. The amount asked can vary from a few hundred to over ten thousand dollars depending on whose computer it is and who has hijacked it.
There has also been - as I am sure you know - those who will send a virus, worm, or other malware to others’ computers.
In all of the above cases having a good, up to date firewall, virus protection, and malware software is important. Also one should be careful about emails and who they are from. Never open an attachment in an email if you do not know the person or if you do not know that the email is validly from the person you know. I have on a number of occasions received an email from someone or other, people well known to me and who I correspond with by email, and the subject line seems odd. I don’t open the email, but instead send an email to the person asking if the email is really from them. Often it is not and the person has had their account hacked - I then delete the email UNOPENED. I hate to cast aspersions, but in most cases, requests from Linkedin, saying that someone has invited you to join are dangerous and not from the person - delete them UNOPENED! You can contact the person separately to double check if you want, but there is a good chance it not from the person. All of these steps will help protect your computer from being hacked, as well as from viruses, worms and other malware.
Something which is very important to do is to back up your computer - often. If this is done it will help restore your computer if something does happen to it. I back up my data after each session of working on the computer (if I work on the computer in the afternoon I back it up and then if I come back in the evening and work again, I back the data up again). I also back up my data once a week and then once a month I back it up to keep it “offsite”. On a different date once a month I also back up the entire computer - or in my case - all 3 computers.
I keep almost all of my data off the computer on USB thumb drives (also called stick drives and other similar names) and use them for most of my back ups. They are rather inexpensive. (I will just call them drives to save time and space in this post.) I know about “the cloud”, but prefer not to put my information out in same, another place for it to be hacked so I use the drives. The ones I use vary from 4 to 16 gigabits, with some smaller ones, which used to be used for backing up and have been replaced with bigger newer ones, being used for things such as the drive on which I keep my copy of my blog posts, temporary use, or moving info from one computer to another if it is easier than sending it through the central drive on our router.
I have a drive for my data - I organize it into folders. It holds my letters and other such, my financial information, my spreadsheets, and so on of regular data. My calender data has to be on the computer, so it is not on the drive. I also have a variety of other drives for different data purposes - one for each business client (I take the drive to the client when I work and use it in my business laptop and on my desktop at home, this way the data on it is always the correct data to use), one for my current project of scanning in instructions and warranties, one for information I need in our RV when we are traveling, etc.
I also use the drives for backups. I have an A and B drive for daily backups of the data drive, calender, and clients. I use the A one and next time the B one, and then the A one again. This way the most data I can lose is the just completed session of work (or fun).
This worked well until I had a problem. There was a problem with the computer and the data and by the time I realized it, I had overwritten the backups several time and had to go back and redo my work. So, I came up with the idea of a weekly backup. This is another drive. I have 6 folders for my data, 6 folders for my calender and 3 folders for my clients (I generally only work once a month on each client’s info). I back up one week to each of the folders and then go back and over write them. So the folders on this drive read, for example - Backup, 0408 Backup, 0415 Backup, 0422 Backup, 0429 Backup, 0506 Backup - and the one without a date would have been backed up on 05/13 and I will change the name on it when I go to backup again to include that date and the 0408 will have the date removed and become the backup to be written over. The other folders are similarly named for their various purposes. If I find that problem has been continued - I have 6 weeks of backups to go back to for reference.
Once a month I copy the data drive, calender, and other data I need to be sure of, to another set of 2 drives for offsite storage. Sounds complicated? I used to send one of the drives to work with my husband and he would bring the old one back - off site - away from our house. When he stopped going out to work I was stumped. Then I had the idea to keep the offsite drive in our safe deposit box and I go there once a month and take the last one and leave the newest updated one in the box. Simple to do and if (God forbid) something happened to my house there is a backup. These drives also have a copy of my last archive disk - more about that later.
For all of the above backups I use a freeware program called Syncback.
When I do this I also burn two DVD disks (I use a rewritable disks) of the data on the offsite drive as DVDs are more stable than the USB thumb drives - just in case. One DVD is available at home for me to use. The second DVD goes into my emergency “grab it folder” just in case there is a disaster coming so I have a quick way to grab information to take with me. (I will talk about this folder some other time.)
I also have an external hard drive and once a month - in the middle of the month - I back up my computers to it. (Desktop, work laptop, and kitchen laptop) This will allow the restoration of the entire computer if needed. I recently had to get a larger one, and I now back up to the new hard drive monthly and the old hard drive quarterly - just in case. I use a commercial program for the backups to these drives. I keep a few years of the backups on these drives.
This is a lot of backups - daily, weekly, monthly, and computer monthly, and there are other unusual ones but it allays my fear of losing data. Early in our use of home computers we had an electric surge on our Commodore 128 and we lost the hard drive and all the data on it - this is why I keep as little data as possible on the hard drive and back it all up - a lot. We also disconnect our computers when they are not in use - we have them plugged into surge protector boxes which are plugged into regular multiplug boxes and we unplug the surge protectors from the multiplug boxes so the computers and peripherals are not plugged in when not in use for protection.
Now, the archive. One accumulates a lot of data over the years and decades. Too much data in every day use can make the data cumbersome. I have another USB thumb drive that use as an archive. Each year I move last year’s data to the archive drive and add it to the data there. I do this about a month or so into the year, as I like to do the bank reconciliations on the December statements and post interest (such as it is these days) received, so it is usually done in late January or early February. Sometimes I will do a second update to the archive of business items related to the prior year, later in the year. When I transfer these files to the archive I back up the archive to, yes, 2 DVD disks, which are kept in the same places as the monthly offsite DVD drives. I also will copy the updated archive to the off site drives - (first the one I have in the house waiting to go to the vault, and then when I bring the one in the vault home, I copy the new archive to it also).
I delete everything which has been copied to the archive drive from my assorted data drives. I then do a backup of everything to one of the daily backup drives. I then format the OTHER one of the daily backup drives and back up the data drive, etc to it, so it no longer has what has been transferred to the archive drive - just the current data. I then format the FIRST daily backup drive and run the backup. This way each of them has a clean version of the backup and the items moved to the archive drive is no longer on the daily backup drives.
I am sure by now your brain is swimming. I use my computers for work as well as personal and I don’t want to chance a client being audited and not having everything I need, nor do I want to look for a letter I wrote to a craft show about our doing the show, and then the following year be missing the information I need for the new show. Also, well, in case you have not figured it out, I am a bit crazy and don’t want to lose any information. I have had times when I make a mistake doing something on the computer and as I try to fix it I get into more and more of a problem. I know that I can always pull out the last backup and replace the what I have messed up and start over.
The important thing is to make sure you backup your data and your computer on a regular basis. This way if anything happens to your computer or your data, you have not lost the work you have done, the photos of your children etc.
I just remembered - I have tried in the past to backup my email and it has not worked as it is too cumbersome - I will try again to do this, but in the meantime I leave my email in my account and on my computer so it is in two places.
There has also been - as I am sure you know - those who will send a virus, worm, or other malware to others’ computers.
In all of the above cases having a good, up to date firewall, virus protection, and malware software is important. Also one should be careful about emails and who they are from. Never open an attachment in an email if you do not know the person or if you do not know that the email is validly from the person you know. I have on a number of occasions received an email from someone or other, people well known to me and who I correspond with by email, and the subject line seems odd. I don’t open the email, but instead send an email to the person asking if the email is really from them. Often it is not and the person has had their account hacked - I then delete the email UNOPENED. I hate to cast aspersions, but in most cases, requests from Linkedin, saying that someone has invited you to join are dangerous and not from the person - delete them UNOPENED! You can contact the person separately to double check if you want, but there is a good chance it not from the person. All of these steps will help protect your computer from being hacked, as well as from viruses, worms and other malware.
Something which is very important to do is to back up your computer - often. If this is done it will help restore your computer if something does happen to it. I back up my data after each session of working on the computer (if I work on the computer in the afternoon I back it up and then if I come back in the evening and work again, I back the data up again). I also back up my data once a week and then once a month I back it up to keep it “offsite”. On a different date once a month I also back up the entire computer - or in my case - all 3 computers.
I keep almost all of my data off the computer on USB thumb drives (also called stick drives and other similar names) and use them for most of my back ups. They are rather inexpensive. (I will just call them drives to save time and space in this post.) I know about “the cloud”, but prefer not to put my information out in same, another place for it to be hacked so I use the drives. The ones I use vary from 4 to 16 gigabits, with some smaller ones, which used to be used for backing up and have been replaced with bigger newer ones, being used for things such as the drive on which I keep my copy of my blog posts, temporary use, or moving info from one computer to another if it is easier than sending it through the central drive on our router.
I have a drive for my data - I organize it into folders. It holds my letters and other such, my financial information, my spreadsheets, and so on of regular data. My calender data has to be on the computer, so it is not on the drive. I also have a variety of other drives for different data purposes - one for each business client (I take the drive to the client when I work and use it in my business laptop and on my desktop at home, this way the data on it is always the correct data to use), one for my current project of scanning in instructions and warranties, one for information I need in our RV when we are traveling, etc.
I also use the drives for backups. I have an A and B drive for daily backups of the data drive, calender, and clients. I use the A one and next time the B one, and then the A one again. This way the most data I can lose is the just completed session of work (or fun).
This worked well until I had a problem. There was a problem with the computer and the data and by the time I realized it, I had overwritten the backups several time and had to go back and redo my work. So, I came up with the idea of a weekly backup. This is another drive. I have 6 folders for my data, 6 folders for my calender and 3 folders for my clients (I generally only work once a month on each client’s info). I back up one week to each of the folders and then go back and over write them. So the folders on this drive read, for example - Backup, 0408 Backup, 0415 Backup, 0422 Backup, 0429 Backup, 0506 Backup - and the one without a date would have been backed up on 05/13 and I will change the name on it when I go to backup again to include that date and the 0408 will have the date removed and become the backup to be written over. The other folders are similarly named for their various purposes. If I find that problem has been continued - I have 6 weeks of backups to go back to for reference.
Once a month I copy the data drive, calender, and other data I need to be sure of, to another set of 2 drives for offsite storage. Sounds complicated? I used to send one of the drives to work with my husband and he would bring the old one back - off site - away from our house. When he stopped going out to work I was stumped. Then I had the idea to keep the offsite drive in our safe deposit box and I go there once a month and take the last one and leave the newest updated one in the box. Simple to do and if (God forbid) something happened to my house there is a backup. These drives also have a copy of my last archive disk - more about that later.
For all of the above backups I use a freeware program called Syncback.
When I do this I also burn two DVD disks (I use a rewritable disks) of the data on the offsite drive as DVDs are more stable than the USB thumb drives - just in case. One DVD is available at home for me to use. The second DVD goes into my emergency “grab it folder” just in case there is a disaster coming so I have a quick way to grab information to take with me. (I will talk about this folder some other time.)
I also have an external hard drive and once a month - in the middle of the month - I back up my computers to it. (Desktop, work laptop, and kitchen laptop) This will allow the restoration of the entire computer if needed. I recently had to get a larger one, and I now back up to the new hard drive monthly and the old hard drive quarterly - just in case. I use a commercial program for the backups to these drives. I keep a few years of the backups on these drives.
This is a lot of backups - daily, weekly, monthly, and computer monthly, and there are other unusual ones but it allays my fear of losing data. Early in our use of home computers we had an electric surge on our Commodore 128 and we lost the hard drive and all the data on it - this is why I keep as little data as possible on the hard drive and back it all up - a lot. We also disconnect our computers when they are not in use - we have them plugged into surge protector boxes which are plugged into regular multiplug boxes and we unplug the surge protectors from the multiplug boxes so the computers and peripherals are not plugged in when not in use for protection.
Now, the archive. One accumulates a lot of data over the years and decades. Too much data in every day use can make the data cumbersome. I have another USB thumb drive that use as an archive. Each year I move last year’s data to the archive drive and add it to the data there. I do this about a month or so into the year, as I like to do the bank reconciliations on the December statements and post interest (such as it is these days) received, so it is usually done in late January or early February. Sometimes I will do a second update to the archive of business items related to the prior year, later in the year. When I transfer these files to the archive I back up the archive to, yes, 2 DVD disks, which are kept in the same places as the monthly offsite DVD drives. I also will copy the updated archive to the off site drives - (first the one I have in the house waiting to go to the vault, and then when I bring the one in the vault home, I copy the new archive to it also).
I delete everything which has been copied to the archive drive from my assorted data drives. I then do a backup of everything to one of the daily backup drives. I then format the OTHER one of the daily backup drives and back up the data drive, etc to it, so it no longer has what has been transferred to the archive drive - just the current data. I then format the FIRST daily backup drive and run the backup. This way each of them has a clean version of the backup and the items moved to the archive drive is no longer on the daily backup drives.
I am sure by now your brain is swimming. I use my computers for work as well as personal and I don’t want to chance a client being audited and not having everything I need, nor do I want to look for a letter I wrote to a craft show about our doing the show, and then the following year be missing the information I need for the new show. Also, well, in case you have not figured it out, I am a bit crazy and don’t want to lose any information. I have had times when I make a mistake doing something on the computer and as I try to fix it I get into more and more of a problem. I know that I can always pull out the last backup and replace the what I have messed up and start over.
The important thing is to make sure you backup your data and your computer on a regular basis. This way if anything happens to your computer or your data, you have not lost the work you have done, the photos of your children etc.
I just remembered - I have tried in the past to backup my email and it has not worked as it is too cumbersome - I will try again to do this, but in the meantime I leave my email in my account and on my computer so it is in two places.
Thursday, November 5, 2015
MANAGING MY TIME
While I can judge time fairly well when I am attentive to time passing, I tend to lose track of time when involved in something, as well as being a procrastinator. (Are you?) I have figured out ways to deal with this over the years.
I check my email once a day in the late afternoon. The exception to this rule is when I am expecting an email and it is not there or if I send out an email - new or as a reply - and expect an answer. I have several email accounts. Most of them start with my initials and then have something special to the reason for the account. I have a main account for my family and my accounting clients and my friends. I have one for each organization I belong to. I have one that I use for accounting for the various government notices I need to get. (Have I mentioned that I am an accountant, but not a CPA?) I have one that I use for my husband so we can send each other things. I have one for the crafts business my husband and I have. I also have one that is without one of my initials which can confuse people by sound, so I use this one if I have to give my email by telephone so there is no confusion. I also have an email for my online groups and such and one which I give to and contact stores and such with to keep same from my other email. Separately, as they are not technically my emails - I have one for a client who does not use a computer and has things which need to be done online that I do for her, and one each for 2 organizations I am involved in for the organizations themselves which I check for the group. Yes, that is a lot of emails. I use a software program which will check all of them at once. Any junk mail is deleted at once when I check my email. If I am traveling I will check email by going to the website of my email provider and I will only check the ones I need to check . Similarly using this system, if I have limited time I can just check the relevant email addresses and save time or just recheck the email addresses I am looking for an email from. So email time is fairly limited and organized.
I don’t have Facebook (which I have almost no presence on) or yahoo groups or other social media emailed to me. I go to the sites at my chosen times and check the sites then. This way I don’t find the entire afternoon was used up following something when I should have been doing something else. I like cartoons, for example, and read several strips online. I go Monday night and read the strips at their websites rather than receiving them daily which would waste needed time. Of course sometimes Monday is Tuesday if something is happening on Monday and I don’t have time or sometimes they continue into Tuesday, occasionally even Wednesday, if I run slow on reading them. But I choose the time I will spend online on all of this and when I will spend that time so that I do not lose my focus to do other things.
When I am working at tasks, such as my afternoons working on the computer, I often forget to check the time - yes, it is right in front of me on the computer, but I still forget. I also forget to do little things like make needed phone calls, take out chopped turkey to defrost for dinner as well as stuff I don’t want to do - the laundry, the garbage, etc. I use my computer and my cell phone to help me with this. I have a calendar program which syncs with my cell phone (more or less, but I will wax ecstatic over my software and how I juggle things to make it sync in some later post). I set reminders to remind me when it is time to do something. I have a reminder which goes off at 6:45 pm to remind me to start getting ready to shut down and go make dinner. I then back up what I have been working on and my calendar and sync my calendar with my cell, at least in theory. In real life, I usually reset the alarm for 7pm and then possibly even 7:15 pm. I have an alarm set to go off weekly on the day we usually have burgers for dinner to remind me to defrost the meat for same. I have a weekly reminder to do the laundry, one to take the garbage out, one to change the towels, one to change the bedding, etc. No, I don’t have alarms go off for everything just things which are time sensitive during the day. Something like “Laundry” it is enough it is listed for the day as I will see it and remember. One of my reminders, set for daily, is “Check blogsite” to see if any of you have left me comments which need to be moderated and, hopefully, posted (I really would like some more of these - feel free to comment), as well as one to remind me to post. Does everything get done because it is scheduled to be done - of course not. Sometimes it is done on a different day, sometimes I just delete the reminder as I have a reason for not doing whatever it is which is scheduled.
It is not a perfect system, but it helps remind me of what I have to do and prod me to do it. What do you do to keep on schedule and stop procrastinating?
I check my email once a day in the late afternoon. The exception to this rule is when I am expecting an email and it is not there or if I send out an email - new or as a reply - and expect an answer. I have several email accounts. Most of them start with my initials and then have something special to the reason for the account. I have a main account for my family and my accounting clients and my friends. I have one for each organization I belong to. I have one that I use for accounting for the various government notices I need to get. (Have I mentioned that I am an accountant, but not a CPA?) I have one that I use for my husband so we can send each other things. I have one for the crafts business my husband and I have. I also have one that is without one of my initials which can confuse people by sound, so I use this one if I have to give my email by telephone so there is no confusion. I also have an email for my online groups and such and one which I give to and contact stores and such with to keep same from my other email. Separately, as they are not technically my emails - I have one for a client who does not use a computer and has things which need to be done online that I do for her, and one each for 2 organizations I am involved in for the organizations themselves which I check for the group. Yes, that is a lot of emails. I use a software program which will check all of them at once. Any junk mail is deleted at once when I check my email. If I am traveling I will check email by going to the website of my email provider and I will only check the ones I need to check . Similarly using this system, if I have limited time I can just check the relevant email addresses and save time or just recheck the email addresses I am looking for an email from. So email time is fairly limited and organized.
I don’t have Facebook (which I have almost no presence on) or yahoo groups or other social media emailed to me. I go to the sites at my chosen times and check the sites then. This way I don’t find the entire afternoon was used up following something when I should have been doing something else. I like cartoons, for example, and read several strips online. I go Monday night and read the strips at their websites rather than receiving them daily which would waste needed time. Of course sometimes Monday is Tuesday if something is happening on Monday and I don’t have time or sometimes they continue into Tuesday, occasionally even Wednesday, if I run slow on reading them. But I choose the time I will spend online on all of this and when I will spend that time so that I do not lose my focus to do other things.
When I am working at tasks, such as my afternoons working on the computer, I often forget to check the time - yes, it is right in front of me on the computer, but I still forget. I also forget to do little things like make needed phone calls, take out chopped turkey to defrost for dinner as well as stuff I don’t want to do - the laundry, the garbage, etc. I use my computer and my cell phone to help me with this. I have a calendar program which syncs with my cell phone (more or less, but I will wax ecstatic over my software and how I juggle things to make it sync in some later post). I set reminders to remind me when it is time to do something. I have a reminder which goes off at 6:45 pm to remind me to start getting ready to shut down and go make dinner. I then back up what I have been working on and my calendar and sync my calendar with my cell, at least in theory. In real life, I usually reset the alarm for 7pm and then possibly even 7:15 pm. I have an alarm set to go off weekly on the day we usually have burgers for dinner to remind me to defrost the meat for same. I have a weekly reminder to do the laundry, one to take the garbage out, one to change the towels, one to change the bedding, etc. No, I don’t have alarms go off for everything just things which are time sensitive during the day. Something like “Laundry” it is enough it is listed for the day as I will see it and remember. One of my reminders, set for daily, is “Check blogsite” to see if any of you have left me comments which need to be moderated and, hopefully, posted (I really would like some more of these - feel free to comment), as well as one to remind me to post. Does everything get done because it is scheduled to be done - of course not. Sometimes it is done on a different day, sometimes I just delete the reminder as I have a reason for not doing whatever it is which is scheduled.
It is not a perfect system, but it helps remind me of what I have to do and prod me to do it. What do you do to keep on schedule and stop procrastinating?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)