Okay, I use a thousand social networks all the time for no real particular reason.  But Twitter is one I use regularly even though my friend base happens to be quite small at the moment… I’m okay with that.  Anyway, to put it simply Twitter as my main network creates a streamlined work process.  I only have one thing to update regularly.  You could argue that getting rid of all of them would be best, however I know my presence on the web will always exist, why not 0wn 1t?

Anyway…

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, the video HERE is by far the best explanation I can find.

Okay, once again, how is this simplifying?

Well, simplifying can also be seen as gaining control of yourself.  If you’re all over the place, how can you focus on the single task at hand?  Well, Twitter is very… VERY simple and updates everyone I care about!  Why not?

Okay, it’s not that drastic, many of the posts this week have been a little on the easy side.  But stay tuned, up ahead comes the real nasty tasks!

And if you want to follow me on Twitter, Feel Free!

I had read an article a while ago referring to new research in the causes of ADD and ADHD  For the uninitiated, these disorders express an attention deficiency in the person diagnosed with it.  The research pro-ports the origins of ADD and ADHD can be seen as a backlash from our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors.  The theory discusses possible hyper-focus heavily regarded in championing hunting techniques of ancient cultures.  While this may be completely science fiction in actual connection, the vast difference of extremes suggests wonderful allegory.  I would personally put out there the possibility of sociological tendencies towards attention deficit.  I mean, I’m all over the place when it comes to blogging, reading, writing, and the like.  The information overload can get to be too much very quickly.

I propose setting aside an hour every day to meditative techniques.

Isn’t that a long time?

It feels as though I’ve been adding more to my life than taking away with this simplification blog, so how exactly could it help to add more to my schedule?  Well, I don’t believe this is really adding.  At least in my life, there are many times where i blank out from over-work.  I’ll spend half an hour to two hours just mindlessly watching youtube videos, movies, sitting doing nothing.  If I were to spend that time instead actively attempting to hone my focus.

So… How?

The span of knowledge on ‘HOWTO meditate’ is ludicrously large for me to attempt to paraphrase here.  If you’d like a full explanation, after google searches, I found this.  It seems quite useful.  I plan to make a cycle of meditations, focusing on one style each week until I complete the style.

This week

The first week of meditations will be like the following:  Sit in silence in a comfortable position for thirty minutes in the morning, and in the evening.  Inside, I know my brain will protest.  In attempt to subside this, I’ll be focusing on awareness of myself and every part of me - its connection to the rest of existence.  I’ll obviously report back with my findings!

I have an account at Wells Fargo, Home State Bank, and Paypal - a loan through AES, credit cards through Chase, Wells Fargo, and Paypal as well as student loans from Sallie Mae and New Mexico Student Loans.  The amount of debt I have may be inconsequentially high (as with any debt)… but I think it’s more of a distress to have so many accounts.  I mean, do I really need three checking accounts, three credit cards, and three loans? (albeit entertaining group of threes, I don’t believe its necessary).

Starting today, I’m consolidating my finances, working on fiscal responsibility, and streamlining my financial future.

Budgets and The Like

For me, budgets are very difficult to stick to.  Its also difficult checking multiple websites for my finances.  So really quick, here’s the software I use like a checkbook.  Its simple, free, open source, and wonderful!  I love this program, plus it’s cross-platform so I could use it on my mac, a PC, or Linux.

Loans, Credit Cards, and Consolidation

This is simple, I’m consolidating everything together into a single loan.  Today I’m searching through different companies, and the best way to do this.  It looks as though a local bank-backed solution may be best.  I would always recommend this for the customer service!  So New Mexico Student Loans it may be.  I’ll check back with updates at the end of the week!

Savings(es) and Checkings(es)

As of right now, I have a Home State Bank account (for my hometown, if I need to exchange money with any of my family members), a Paypal account (for internet reasons), and a Wells Fargo account (for depositing while I’m in Santa Fe).  This list may seem ultra-long, but each has its own simple task.  Here, sadly, I can’t think of any special way to simplify other than to keep a solid understanding of each purpose… On top of that, I’ll actually be adding another account.  This time, I’ll have a savings account through ING Direct.  I’m doing this for a simple purpose:

As I’ve been suggested, adding 50 dollars to a savings account every paycheck (effectively ‘paying yourself’ before bills), I’ll grow a wonderful account… slowly… but it’ll still grow!

Why ING Direct?  mainly because of this post at Get Rich Slowly, as well as a few others on the site.  From here, my finances will be simple through use of Buddi (my finance software of choice!).  Now its time to pay off that debt and turn it into investments and savings!

If you have any other special Savings and Checking suggestions, feel free to comment. I’d love to hear!

Being human requires outlets, ways of expressing emotion have been explored from the beginning.  Without getting too far into ‘feelings’ I do believe providing outlets for these emotions can be very effective.  I don’t mean holding down a thought or feeling, more providing internal dialogue.  Such as an artist, who expresses this through ‘art’.

SO, I have a cliche’ moleskin notebook.  This fits in any bag and provides a quick little place to write anything from random thoughts to award winning dissertations… well maybe.

So, add a moleskin notebook to my imaginary bag.

If you want to buy one of these, I suggest buying an engraved one here.  I like these because I plan to have very few items, and every piece that expresses itself means so much more.

What?

Yeah, it sounds a little crazy, but hear me out.  If you only carry a few objects with you wherever you go in life, all of these objects express who you are.  I’m attempting to spend time collecting these small objects in a way that expresses me.  So instead of collecting and hording random assorted things, it becomes an expression of you.

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!

Difficulties with work spring up at almost any moment; planning for such seems to only bring it on more heavily. I’ve had jobs end suddenly… without doing anything nefarious mind you. These were legitimate reasons, completely out of my hands. Along those same lines, opportunities appear just as sporadically. So for the first day, I’ve created a master resume, a set of working resumes, a master cover letter, and working cover letters.  This may sound daunting, but I promise it’ll make these occasions easier in the future.

Making a master resume is like investing in a giant column of granite.  You can cut it down, augment it, and otherwise chip it away to fit into any specific job’s specifications.

For the Uninitiated…

A master resume consists of everything you could possibly ever want (or need) to tell any employer in the future. This would include any job over the last ten years, your full gambit of education, awards, and really anything else that could go onto a resume. If you want more information on how to do this, a quick google search can do wonders!  But if you still have questions, leave a comment and I’ll definitely do what I can to help!

Why?

A master resume allows for me to have a viable document for jobs I’ll be applying for in NYC after May.  For instance, I have a Post Production resume, a House Sitting resume, a Film Projecting resume, and of course a Blogging resume.

How Exactly is this simplifying?

Simplicity in a sense can also refer to the ease at which transitions occur.  I’m attempting to cut down the transition time between jobs, plus cut down the stress inherent to such a time.  Plus, keeping a master resume, a few extra copies and cover letters on a thumbdrive would easily fit into a bag.

So chalk that up as the first item going in ‘my bag’ for this trip!

Lets say you now want to make an awesome resume.  There are millions of websites that could help; but for convienance I’ve listed a few of my own hints on how to make a totally-awesome-super-sweet resume.

•  Keep it simple, and down to a single page - as amazing as your career has been, handing someone a three page behemouth is not the way to go.
• Black and white with simple color highlights can do wonders!
• Use white paper… Like not beige, pink, red, off-white or anything else. This is of course unless you’re applying for an eco-warrior type job, then by all means use recycled paper. Otherwise 24lb white paper looks professional without pulling a ligament.
• Be honest.
• Don’t be shy. Your future employer wants to know exactly who you are.
• An objective can be the best moment to show your eloquence, education, and creativity… This is without saying anything about those things, just varying what you write without being passive.  Saying “To obtain a job with you where I can write for a living because I am a good writer” would make me yawn. “To attain a job with you wherein my exuberant writing ability may flourish.” <~ now that I like.

That’s all for today!  If you’re out there looking to hire a new blogger for your staff, please check out my resume! Or, you know - if you need a House Sitter in NYC…  Otherwise, let us move on to tomorrow!