Business cards, they work as an introduction.  No matter how paperless I call myself, business introductions smooth more easily with the exchange of cards with basic information.  So today I’m using Moocards.com to create new business cards as one of the few items to go in my bags for NYC.

The Cool Thing about Moocards

More specifically I’ll be ordering minicards from Moo.com with some of my designs on the back.  These cards are smaller than normal business cards, but will definitely catch the eye of the recipient.  If you’re in an artistic field, I recommend them heavily!  You can upload your own designs, use photos from flickr, or choose from lots of pre-designed cards.  These are really cool.

I’ll report back upon receiving my first shipment of moocards!

Fridays have been set aside to talk about things behind the scenes of 0wn1t.net, summarize the past days, and simply give all of you a look into what blogs I’ve been reading this week… But this doesn’t simplify anything, Kris!! <~ Thing is, it is - for me at least. Friday BTC allows for reflection!  So, on with the post!

What I’ve been reading 
(My favorite posts of the week)

• Run Windows Apps Seamlessly Inside Linux (Lifehacker)
• Make Decisions with the Six Thinking Hats Technique (Lifehacker)
• The top 100 Productivity and Lifehack Blogs (College Degree)
• 36 Beautiful Resume Ideas That Work (Job Mom)
• “A Silent Disco…” (hackCollege)
• 32 Hacks for Sticking to Your Budget (Lifehack)
• 10 HARD Ways to Make Your Life Better (Lifehack)
• 5 Amazing Mac Apps for Getting Things Done (Zen Habits)
• How My Net Worth Went from $-40,000 to $285,000 in Five Years (Get Rich Slowly)

Weekly Summary

Day 01: Resumes and Work Opportunities

Wrote a Master Resume.

Day 02: Work Ethic… Like Actually Working

Set 2 hour blocks for work and play!

Day 03: Joe’s Goals and Ben’s Goals are My Goals

Worked with Joe’s Goals to create manageable task lists.

Day 04: Zero Planning a Calendar

Put together an easily updatable calendar including the blocks from Day 02.

Free Talk (Behind the Curtains)

My foray into blogging began about seven years ago with a few personal blogs about my day-to-day experience.  Moving into a more professional sphere, talking about simplification, has proven to be difficult to stay afloat.  As easy as it may sound, it’s quite daunting worrying whether people will find your small island of information.  On top of that, wanting to stay and read it, I mean wow!  I really take my hat off to every acclaimed blogger out there, congratulations!

This weekend marks the first time I’ll be attempting to market outside of Twitter, wish me luck!

A difficult thought I’ve had recently: Can it be possible to get things done without scheduling free time?  I mean, this feels a little counter-intuitive.  I guess you could just set up a schedule to include everything but free time.  This inevitably creates sections of free time in your schedule though.  It seems a little inevitable if you’re scheduling anything at all.  Then there’s the issue of over-scheduling.  Where can there be a middle ground?  Well, something I once heard called zero planning.

Zero Planning: An attempt to schedule blocks of ‘required’ ‘flexible’ and ‘very flexible’ within a calendar.

Sunbird!

For my calendar, I use Sunbird, an open source program that allows for the ability to create multiple calendars.  In here there are multiple calendars grouped by shared tasks.  For instance I have a ‘Screen’ calendar for my day job, an ‘0wn1t’ calendar for this blog, ‘Personal Projects’ calendar for projects and so on.

ZeroPlanned…

In order to create ‘required’ ‘flexible’ and ‘very flexible’ I used a color scheme and attached these separate calendars to colors within their respective scheme.  the ‘Screen’ and ‘Personal’ calendars being the most important and set-in-stone, deserved greyscaled schemes, the ‘0wn1t’ and ‘Education’ calendars are shades of green for their flexibility, and ‘Personal Projects’ fits into a blue, very flexible standpoint.

But what about free time?

The free time I griped about earlier represents much more easily in a ‘zero planned’ calendar.  Any gap between times counts as free time, and any blue area has a high possibility of being free time, and green areas become free time every once in a while.

Basically anywhere there’s color or whitespace, free time exists! 

Setting a goal of ‘two hour blocks’ may seem easy, but if yesterday said anything, I’m pretty sure it’s quite difficult.  Instead of simplifying my day into chunks, it created frustration in trying to remember what I had spent time doing, what I was doing and what I was going to do.  In light of this, I went for a little help from Joe’s Goals.

Each night, I plan to put a check next to each goal if it were completed that day.  This means, 1 check for 2 hours of writing for this blog, 1 check for 2 hours of marketing, et cetra.

This would be helpful in any situation where an attempt towards de-multitasking takes place.  Joe’s goals, in a sense, emulates a reward system on GTD crack.  The system shows your total checks for the day, total checks for a goal overall, and even your longest chain. <~ This last part speaks to me the most.  Creating an unbroken chain of worthy habits (or denying chains of vices) creates a sense of accomplishment.

Keeping it Simple

When first creating my goals, I had a tendency to write in everything I could want, two hours for this, two hours for that, working out, anything.  This created a problem very quickly.  My days were being boiled down to ten two hour blocks.  No, I’m not into polyphasic sleep - nor could I ever do that many tasks each day, every day.  Then came a realization:  Joe’s Goals allows for multiple checks for each goal!  This combined with simply cutting the goals down to the three most important, I came up with a system of ‘work’, ‘personal development’, and ‘pr0n’.

For the uninitiated…

Work refers to this website as well as my day job.  Personal development covers working out, healthy habits, and the like.  While pr0n (l33t for porn) doesn’t refer to pornography by any means.  It simply denotes spending time doing anything I really want to do outside of the other two sections.  i.e. filmmaking.  Until filmmaking becomes my career, it fits in this category.

Final Note: Ben’s Goals

Looking back to when I first ever learned of Joe’s Goals, I found this article on Lifehacker.  From there, I learned of this site. How cool! I suggest checking it out if you want to make extended personal development goals. I’m also adopting his strategy and copying his goals with minor differences, so I’ll be starting the next thirteen weeks with temperence.

Adding Joe’s Goals to my bags!

Aww, work ethic.  I’ve found myself many times lost in a daze of wiki-madness.  I’ve sat down to work only to find heavily wonderful distractions.  I’ve lost sleep from fascinating YouTubery.  This needs to stop, but how?  How about cutting the multi-tasking?  I propose a plan I first heard from this gentleman…

Setup work time to include solid two hour blocks or more, two hours of a single task.

This sounds easy enough, just turn off instant messenger, put on classical music and go.  Or so it may seem.  For someone as sporatic as myself, a more drastic measure has to be put in place. For this I employ the ability to have multiple accounts on this computer.  I created seperate accounts for play, writing, and blog management.  With this in place, each space has its own set of tools.

Play!!

The play workspace includes every piece of software on this mac (yes I use a mac…).  From Celtx, to Twhirl.  From Avid to  After Effects.  Everything sits on my dock waiting to be played with.

Writing

This space includes only the software I need to write: Blogwriting software, Firefox, iTunes and Skitch.

Blog Management

Everything you’d think would go into managing a blog: Dreamweaver, CSSEdit, Firefox, iTunes, and an Office Suite.

SO those workspaces combined with two hour blocks… lets have it a go!