I try to exercise daily, or every other day and can’t stress how much this has helped me emotionally (as well as physically, obviously). Lifehacker had a wonderful post about pushups a while back, and I believe it would be wonderful to include this in my daily routine, as well as create a daily, simple routine. For this, I’ve employed youtube, to search for pushup, ‘ab’ and other workout videos. I suggest the same!
Another quick tip attached to an hour or so of labour. Yesterday I received three credit card offers through the mail. Twas quite bothersome indeed as I realized the amount of wasted paper (snail mail) and wasted time (e-mail) have been spent on bulk mail and e-mail.
So I’m spending the day opting out of every mail service and e-mail service I do not fervently care about. Trying to keep a tidy inbox, you know!
Any suggestions are always greatly appreciated!
Saturdays may be lazidasical here at 0wn 1t, with the week devoted to more heavy handed simplification techniques. With this being said saturday, I propose a simple idea!
Drink Water!
Yeah, super simple. Instead of drinking beverages brimming in refined sugar and High Fructose Corn Syrup. I will insert a slight rant here though. <rant> Bottle water is frivolous.</rant> My plan from here on out can be described very simply; drink eight glasses of water a day and whenever I crave other beverages, you know… like Crystal Pepsi or Pepsi Blue or maybe some of that mad C2!
My apologies, however being a day behind, I’m attempting to catch up with two short posts about big topics I’ll muse more over on this week’s ‘Behind the Scenes’ post. Anyway, what would you need to go Paperless? I’m looking into how I will in fact do this, but I’d love to hear from you! Today I just have that I plan to…
Go Paperless!
It’s that simple! Who’s with me! We can save the earth while simplifying down to a paperless living situation. I’ll keep you all updated on how this goes. A lot happened this week, and residual effects have been occuring from the past few weeks of all of this. Check back soon!
Okay, I sadly do not really have the time to update ten social network profiles. This blog is all about simplification, so why so many profiles? Well, today I argue against using these to their fullest… Yes, it’s always good to maximize at any times possible, but seriously - how much poking does it take to make a difference.
So for today, I propose ceasing major updates to Facebook, Myspace, Last.FM, Spock, and any other stray profiles I happen to have lying around. On top of this, stripping these profiles of any unneeded information, simplifying them as much as possible.
Any thoughts?
I personally have many books with me at the moment. You could say this is a holdover from recently graduating from college, but I say its hording. Seriously though I have about fifteen books in a stack of ‘to read’ and about thirty in the ‘read’ pile. This doesn’t include the boxes of books I have stored in other places. So, I need to cut down.
Why not sell, give away, or ‘lose’ any book you’ve already read?
This is a simple post for today, but I plan to sell any book I have read recently (on ebay). Each one that doesn’t sell will be given away BookCrossing style. If you don’t know what Book Crossing is, check this out. Really, I’d rather ‘release’ books this way, but I need to fund the bookcrossing effort (buy nice tags) so I’ll be selling the books at first till I make around seventy dollars, then the rest will be freed! What do you do with your read books? I’m interested to know what people do with books they may want for reference in the future, like Plato’s Republic, or computer manuals.
This is of course till I get a Kindle… Any kind souls out there?
Any self-respecting twenty two year old blogger will probably tell you, my morning routine consists of Twitter, Google Reader, and Thunderbird instead of Shower, Shave, and Brush Teeth. While the first three are very important (to me), the second three should really take precedence. So once again I go to RememberTheMilk.com.
From now on I’ll have a morning ToDo list that’ll consist of everything I need to accomplish before settling down to work.
How do you make a list like that?
This is a very good question… I don’t exactly know. I suggest creating a simple list that consists of general tasks (and of course writing in your calendar a block of two hours devoted to ‘morning routines’). My list will be the following:
Pretty easy. After these tasks, then I’ll just move on into my daily tasks. This type of thing isn’t for everyone, but I’m beginning to believe grounding yourself in the physical world needs to take place before delving into online-social work… The more you can do outside the better!
Bills; Every month I pay rent, utilities, electricity, internet, credit cards & loans, and myself. I’ve never gone about and optimized how I pay these things. Half of them deliver through the mail, others through e-mail, and the last don’t deliver any bills whatsoever. Having just graduated from college, I moving around sporadically… I’ve missed payments out of sheer confusion! So, I’m proposing a three step process:
First: Switching all bills to electronic systems, ‘e-bills’, e-mail billing, electronic billing, et cetra.
Second: Pay every bill on the first of the month.
Third: Setup a digital reminder system to remind me to pay ALL the bills.
Paperless…
As someone attempting to erase my carbon footprint, every aspect of ‘paperless’ness (is that a word?) is a step in the right direction. Most (if not all) financial institutions offer the ability for paperless bills, so why not? Not only does this help the environment, it raises awareness of upcoming bills. Most people I know check their physical ’snail’ mail once every few days, while their Gmail-Thunderbird-Outlook-Crackberry reminds them instantaneously with every little piece of digital paraphanalia arriving at their digital doorstep. It just works out better this way.
Counterintuitive Payments
My first thought towards paying my bills relays the minute interest gained paying the last day of a given grace period. In effect I pay one on the first, one on the sixth, one on the fifteenth, and so on. This gets seriously confusing, and I’ve missed more than I wish to admit. In this case, I plan to instead pay everything on the first of the month. It’s easier, and although that pays some early, the sheer simplicity of paying out everything at the first of the month helps ease my over-tasked schedule.
Since that’s not easy enough:
I also include step three, this is very important. Looking back, I’ve already instilled ten different simplification techniques, as the number grows higher, it becomes more difficult to track. Why track this myself? By setting digital reminders, the internet can remind me when bills need to be paid.
For this I set up an account at Remember The Milk, created a ‘bills’ list, and inserted a reminder for every bill, the amount that’s due, and the URL to where I can pay it. (I’ve included step by step pictures on how to do this after the break)
On top of this, most institutions make it possible to auto-pay! For every auto-payment, my reminder consists only of updating Buddi (my super-cool-multi-platform-open-source-finance-software)
Of course I’m always open for opinions from everyone out there. Any tips on bills?
My webspace provider did some really unhappy stuff yesterday, I’ll be recouped by tomorrow, you’ll see these posts then, I promise!!
Today’s post will be very short due to my overly packed day. For all of those reading, I still have something to do simplification wise! I call it Zeroplanning, although I can’t take credit for it. Recently I told one of my friends I was making this blog and asked her for ideas. Her first was by far the best idea I’ve heard (or come up with really). Its what I call Zeroplanning.
Instead of blocking my day into sections of tasks, blocking it into sections of categories, surrounding any multitude of tasks.
Zeroplanning is basically turning a ‘I-need-to-get-this-and-this-done’ day into a ‘I-need-time-for-work-and-play’ day. It may sound little, but this totally changed how I plan everything out. Instead of devoting two hours to writing for this site, and two hours to broadcasting it - I spend four hours doing site related things. You know?
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