What I Use

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.

A Second Hard Drive in My Aspire E 15

Recently I purchased an SSD for my wife’s Thinkpad. It wasn’t a big one, 256 gig, but her laptop is a little slow all around and the bottleneck seems to be mostly in the drive, which I am pretty sure is still old school spinning platters.

Unfortunately, the drive in her laptop is 320 Gb, so I couldn’t straight clone the drives. I could have done some partition size adjustments and made it work but she was already fussing and worrying I was going to lose some of her files so I decided I’d just wait and get a larger one later.

I’d already planned to pick up a second one of these drives to add to my Laptop. The main drive is one of those funky newer styles that’s basically a circuit board, but it has an empty bay for a laptop drive. I stuck the new SSD in and went about using it. Nothing hard here at all.

To my surprise, the drive vanished a week or so later. Thankfully I didn’t stick it in my wife’s laptop, it was apparently bad. Or was it?

Turns out that because the drive is a little on the small size, even for a 2.5″ drive, and there isn’t any mechanism inside the laptop to secure the drive itself, it ended up coming lose and losing it’s connection.

It’s probably not the cleanest fix, but I stripped off a half a sheet of paper and accordion folded it and slipped it in between the drive and the Laptop chassis. This applies pressure to the drive, holding it in place.

I haven’t had any trouble with the drive since. Still it’s kind of a crummy design.