So the inquiry that I embarked on was “If there was truly One Decision that would lead you to a life of more “productivity” what would that be?” I have my own answer and I invite your responses to this question. I will tell you what my thoughts are about this but one person’s answer does not necessarily make it someone else’s.

I really wanted this solution because I wouldn’t need to do anything but this one thing consistently and the course of action to take would be simply be just one. Now I said it would be simple but that doesn’t mean easy. What I came up with could almost seem like 2 things but indulge me when I describe it as one. The idea is to do one more thing a day or week to be productive without abandoning all your previous productivity “bricks.” I call them bricks because like an inverted pyramid you would have a single one on the bottom and each level higher you would add more “bricks” without taking any away. I initially thought it should be one a day but I think a weekly period for each new productivity habit gives it time to become a part of your daily routine.

I will be taking this on and sharing my experiences on this blog because there is no time like the present to start something and making a declaration in front of a blogging audience is a curious motivator. I think my first one thing to do is put my portable devices to charge before I go to sleep. I have always had the cute idea of making a digital bed for them to cement the idea that they need the kind of sleep that “recharges” their batteries. I can’t tell you how many times I have been in the position of needing a fully charged device and the anxiety that is caused when my portable devices are running low. I think the first thing I’ll also do to reinforce this is set a nightly alarm  regarding this practice.

Finally, let me know your thoughts. It can be anything big or small that you decide to take on. It may actually be the learning experience you come away with that could be the most valuable outcome out of all of this.

Work Log

Today, I will be writing about how to create a work log on your computer. This innovation stemmed largely from frustration at being able to find what I wanted out there. Yes, I did check Lifehacker as well and loved Instant Boss but not its inability to simply log tasks so I created my own hack. This is a combination of Solway’s Task Scheduler (Free) and a couple of batch Scripts. In a nutshell, an email pops up with To, Subject and body information pre-filled every 10 minutes along with an inspiring wav file. I chose one from the matrix. Why log inside an email? Simple – an email serves as your time stamp and remote storage for all your work logs. You can then review your information pretty easily by date and time.

Solway has the very nice option of being about to launch what you want every 10 minutes (chose what intervals work for you) which I love almost as much as much as it being free. I wrote a batch script to launch windows sound recorder to play the wav I want and also a command line to pop up an outlook email. Solway Task Scheduler takes care of the timing. The sound file provides the kind of feedback that says “Hey, you!” you’ve got to do something. If you have an itching for verbal abuse you can have a field day finding lots of threatening dialogue from your favorite gangster filcks that threaten you to log your work . Here is an example of the batch script I use which is easy to create in notepad. I used a separate .vbs file to launch the sound file.

If you would like more details on this let me know suffice it to say this works very nicely and keeps me on track at work. It also saves me from waiting for developers to respond to my feature request. Creating this myself gives me a sense of accomplishment both from having figured out how to do it and also the accomplishment of hopefully having it mentioned on Lifehacker which is priceless.

P.S. If you are wondering what my inspirational quote is, here it is.

Trinity: Neo, no one has ever done this before.
Neo: That’s why it’s going to work.