Software

Helping Myself to Ensure Better Productivity

I find as I get older, I am not so great at remembering everything that I really should be doing regularly. Not just necessary things, but things I want to to. I’ve been working out some better systems to push myself to keep up with all of these sort of little tasks.

Microsoft ToDo

Any ToDo list app works here, I use Microsoft ToDo. I used to use Wonderlist, but Microsoft bought them out and it’s essentially folding into MS ToDo. I try to keep my lists somewhat streamlined down so it doesn’t become a cluttered mess. For example…

The Reminders List. All of my regular reminders go here. Every week I get a reminder to take out the trash after work. The same goes for Recycling. I get daily reminders in the morning for taking my vitamin and just before lunch to take my Acid reducer medicine. I get weekly reminders for other regular tasks as well, such as redeeming my Forza Rewards in the game Forza, checking on the free PDF of the week on Drivethrough RPG, and redeeming the free game of the week on the Epic Game Store. I also have Monthly reminders for checking on several auto-withdraw bill payments, or changing the furnace filter. I’ve got an irregular reminder to change out my pajamas every few days because I can never keep track of how many days I have worn the same pajamas.

The Grocery List. It’s called Grocery, but it’s more of a general list of more pressing things todo or purchase. It is often, just groceries though.

General ToDo Lists. I have lists for movies or TV I want to watch, books I want to read, projects, and I might want to do someday in the future.

The Calendar

I have also started using my calendar a lot more aggressively. I have several sub calendars going on different types of events as well. I do keep some reminder style tasks on the calendar instead of the ToDo List app as well. The general difference is that ToDo List reminders are effectively “never ending”, while Calendar Reminders are more ephemeral and have a set period of time. For example, Hasbro was running a contest on their Instagram for ten days, I used the calendar to schedule ten days of reminders.

The calendar has become extra useful during this COVID-19 time as well. A lot of musical acts are doing online shows. And since my plan to go to more concerts clearly isn’t going to go anywhere at this time, I can at least set up events to remind myself when live shows are going on.

I also use it to mark out generic blocks for work events, so I can better keep track of what I might have going on for scheduling other activities like Doctor’s appointments.

Send To Device

Something else I have been trying to push myself on, is taking care of things *now*. Or at least soon. Often I would come across things I want to download, or little projects to set up and try, often while browsing on my phone. This used to end up in one of two things. I would leave the tab open forever on my phone, or I would book mark it and forget about it.

I use Firefox on my phone and my PCs, so the bookmarks all sync, but I still have to remember to check them.

What I have discovered that I’ve been doing more is the “Send to Device” feature. I can take a tab on my phone and send it to either my Laptop or Desktop, instead of book marking it. This way, when I sit down and open up the appropriate device, that tab will show up, and be in my face as a reminder of “Do this NOW”. It’s really helped with actually taking care of some quick tasks that I may find while on my phone, but aren’t convenient to do immediately.

Track All the Things

I am going to keep this short, because it really needs to be it’s own post, but I have started heaving tracking a lot of aspects of what I do with my time. I don’t really DO anything with this data, but it motivates me in two ways.

The tracking itself is a thing that pops up as a reminder of something that needs done. Not having anything to fill in, makes me feel a little guilty about my productivity. It’s sort of an angle of negative self reinforcement.

Two, I like doing it, even if nothing comes of it.

Like I said, I will probably do a separate post, but I have been tracking:

  • TV I watch
  • Movies I watch
  • Music I Listen To
  • Books I’ve read
  • Online Courses I’ve done
  • My Mood, 2x a day
  • How much Duolingo I do each day
  • Fitness (Steps, Push Ups, Sit Ups)
  • How often I shave or get my hair cut
  • General Health Issues
  • Gas Consumption
  • Basically everything

I use several apps for this and some spreadsheets. But more on all that later.

New Year, New Budget

As part of my need to keep my personal spending reasonable, I like to keep a spread sheet budget. Each paycheck I get a set aside amount of money dumped into a separate bank account that I use for personal spending on hobbies and things like eating out and gas for my car. Part of the reason for this is that my wife gets annoyed trying to keep track of a bunch of small purchases, like ebooks and fast food stops. Part of it is to keep my spending somewhat reasonable.

I have a spread sheet I’ve used for a few years now to track what I spend and what categories I spend it in. I’ve used the same sheet for a few years now. It also serves as a way to forecast out my budget, which is really handy as more and more I’ve started just preordering things rather than trying to catch them in stores.

For example, I’ve already got pre orders going out through June of 2020. I keep a page of just these pre orders with approximate dates, where it’s been ordered, and a generic value, usually estimated up. Like all those Black Series figures. I reordered a bunch of them using a coupon over the holidays, so they are all 20% less, but for now it’s easiest just to keep them in the list as is.

These also go in the main sheet with approximate dates, mostly based on expected paycheck. Above is a generic form of the first week, though chances are the Endgame Wave will get pushed back, and at least one of those Hasbro Pulse orders is coming out of a different bank account for other reasons. The point is more to help illustrate how the spreadsheet works.

I’ve pre filled out the deposits, each with a bunch of blank lines in between to add in purchases. I also add in a generic $20 for gas out of each paycheck, though that doesn’t always get spent and occasionally it’s more. It’s a good starter ball park. I also fill in any pre orders on the appropriate dates. Some of the dates are approximate. I know however that, Amiami order usually come at the very end of the month. For the most part, if something happens and I need to cover something, I can pull from the seperate main household budget, but I generally prefer not to. The sheet also does not include a buffer amount that is always in the account. The above sheet suggests a $2.73 balance, but it’s actually higher than that, since the buffer is intended to remain as a buffer.

I also add in reoccuring costs. Website domains and hosting costs, subscriptions for some websites and games, that sort of thing. The idea is that I can be covered for any larger months. For example, in 2019, around the end of August, I had a huge ball of pre orders coming all at once. So I cut back on spending leading up to that time, so I could cover everything.

Lastly, the sheet is also useful for getting an idea on what I spend my money on. For example, in 2019, I spent roughly 54% of my budget on toys. Eating out, Gas, Video Games, and Books were all around 10%. Everything else was smaller. This tracks as a sort of running total, so I can watch it rise and fall over the year if I want.

I do this all in Excel. It’s easy to edit and adjust, and I can easily sync it between my desktop, laptop, and phone with One Drive.

Anyway, If you’d like to take a closer look at the spreadsheet, I’ve worked up a clean version of it which can be found here.

Cleaning up My Password Security

encryption-imageIt seems like there is an increasing amount of hacks and leaks lately.  These also seem to be larger and higher profile targets more and more.  Recently I’ve been seeing stories about Last.fm and Dropbox accounts apparently being compromised as well as a vulnerability in vBulleten, a popular Message Board hosting tool.  For the most part, a lot of these hacks are going to be harmless, for now.  Any website that actually matters is probably (they better be) using salted passwords, making a password dump mostly useless.  Though in Last.fm’s case, apparently 96% of the passwords were decrypted because their encryption algorithm was shoddy.  Still, it seemed like a good time to check over my Password Security.

Beware, those music scrobbles you see might actually be the music taste of some Russian or Chinese hacker!  Seriously though, I don’t really see the point with hacking Last.fm, I’m not entirely sure they even have any sort of financial data.  I imagine the email list is sort of useful for spam accounts.  I suppose there is also the issue of people using the same passwords everywhere.

The good side of these hacks, the lists get put on-line, on hacker sites or TOR sites, and there are several places that take these lists of leaked accounts, dump them in a database and allow you to search to see if your account shows up in a list and for which site, if available.  With all of these recent lists I went through and checked my primary email addresses and found about 20 entries between the two of them that had been compromised.  Most of those were vBulleten Boards that I had signed up for 10 years ago, never posted to, and had forgotten even existed.

I mentioned the problem of using the same password repeatedly.  I’ve got several “layers” I use for how much complexity I put into my passwords.  Financial sites, large buying sites (eBay, Amazon, etc), all get unique passwords.  I just remember those.  The next level, things like Facebook and Twitter, also get unique passwords, but I have some basic algorithms I use to generate them, mentally, so I can remember those as well while keeping them unique.  Sites like the ones that were compromised, tiny one off bulletin boards with little risk to me if they get hacked, I admit, I use the same few passwords on a lot of those.  Especially older ones from ten years ago, before I got serious about my online security.

Ironically, these sites are now possibly my most secure passwords.  Because I used Lastpass to generate the passwords.  Lastpass is a plug in for pretty much every browser.  It remembers your passwords, and syncs them across your Lastpass account.  I’ve used it for years to store and sync passwords, but I never really bothered with the generated passwords feature.  The best practice at the moment, for passwords, are long strings of random characters, lastpass can create these, and then remember them, so you don’t have to.  I don’t know what my new password is for the PPCGeeks message board, but I don’t need to, because when I visit, Lastpass will enter it and log me in.  It’s long and complex.  I mostly avoided this feature before because it pretty much meant I would never be able to log in via mobile since I would have to manually type the password in.  Lastpass now has a mobile solution, but I also just sort of accepted that, I’m never going to visit many of these sites on mobile anyway.

The even better solution, when available, is to use 2 Factor Authorization.  Something you know, a password, something you have, an Authenticator.  Every mobile platform has an authenticator App.  If you happen to be one of the 1% using Windows Phone like me, the Microsoft Authenticator works just like the Google Authenticator when setting it up.  When I want to log into say, Dropbox, I enter my username and password, like normal, and then I am prompted to enter the generated code from my Authenticator.  It doesn’t matter if someone else has my password, because they don’t have the Authenticator, which is randomly generated and can’t be duplicated.  I use this for any site that has it, which is almost all of the “big ones”, Microsoft, Google, Dropbox, etc.  I actually get frustrated when it’s not available, like when my Rockstar Games account got stolen 6 months ago or with Playstation Network, which has had like 3 or 4 hacks now.