JoeBailey.ORG

As a consultant I often find it a hassle to carry around my laptop. Not only did it add extra time and baggage to every trip, it also added risk. For example, when working out in the gym, I was concerned someone would take it, or it would get wet in the rain. After a lot of thought… but a lot of delay, I looked into a way to keep my laptop at home when I could work on someone else’s computer or while on vacation.

After some online checking, I found most companies would charge for this service. Then I found LogMeIn which is FREE if you do not use all of the functions. Granted, when I say not all functions, you can’t copy back and forth easily. But, I’m able to log onto my computer, check and send email, write documents, etc. I’ve been using it for over a year. Not bad.

www.logmein.com

At least once a week for the past couple of months, I’ll work while listening to one of 2 Randy Pausch lectures found on his home page found here: http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/. Also, for those of you who have not heard of Randy Pausch, he’s a professor diagnosed with cancer and these speeches are messages to his family and children on how to live life. If you have an hour, it is well worth your time… What would you do if you knew your days were numbered? Would you sit around and watch tv? Guess what, all of our days our numbered.

Anyway, getting back on topic…

One phrase stuck with me I didn’t catch the first time. He mentioned making phone calls while riding his bike for an hour would not take away from his family time. All of a sudden it dawned on me, he was accomplishing two things at once. Ok, it sounds obvious. But, as a father, I try to stay in shape, but in order to do so, I’ve been away from the family while working out, and not accomplishing anything else at the same time. For weeks now, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to spend time with family and work out, AND accomplish something else at the same time. Let’s face it, when working out (I love running) you don’t accomplish anything else.

After time, I figured out a way to do both. My solution was to give the kids a bath and have a circuit training workout while they played in the bath.

Here are some ideas to consider when trying to maximize your workout time:

• Give your kids a bath and workout while they play
• Listen to some educational audio while you lift, run, etc.
• Make phone calls while working out. This may be best on a bike or running since it allows for working out for extended amount of time. If you were lifting weights or doing a circuit workout, it may ruin your workout.
• Run while your kids ride their bike with you.
• Just walk with your family.
• Work in the yard with your family. It’s amazing how much kids love working and helping out. Learning with the attention is a huge accomplishment.
• Let your kids workout with you!

If you have some ideas to share, please do so!

It’s been 3 days since I stopped watching television, well almost. I found myself sneaking down after working at night for about an hour’s worth of tv. It satisfied my cravings, and I’ve found that it’s actually pretty easy. Overall though, I’m saving a ton of time and accomplishing a lot. Each night I watch less and less tv.

Tips:

• Reward yourself by working at night. Have a beer, do something fun while working, realize what you’ve accomplished
• Look at your tasks and realize how quickly they’re going away
• Realize that because you’re working, you’re eliminating stress that would otherwise occur when you did something the last minute
• Notice that the tasks you accomplish while watching tv go quicker than you thought.

If you want some inspiration, read a couple of these definitions. They tend to sound a little familiar.

• Procrastination - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrastination - Find some reasons behind procrastination.
• Time management- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management - Is it really time management that’s lacking or is it also task management?
• Parkinson’s Law - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_law - Managing tasks may eliminate the ability to always have more work. Something that dawned on me was that I will always have tasks, might as well tackle them now and have fresh tasks than worry about the ones I have.

  Best!
  

After finding out how much television I was watching (10-15 hours a week), I had to break the habit. Even though I knew it was a bad habit, I would fight it every night. I found myself struggling with the idea of relaxing to tv or working. Working again after a full day just didn’t sound like fun. In addition to watching tv, I picked up the habit of snacking on foods. So, this was a double edged habit. Once I broke the tv habit, the snacking habit disappeared as well. Not sure how much weight I’ll lose because of it.

How did I break the habit? Well, I had to distance myself from the tv. I chose a room in the house without a television and created a mini office. This is day 2 in my “man pit,” and I must say, I’m starting to enjoy it. It’s perfectly quiet and I have nothing else to do in this room but work. So, I found tv abstinence to be the best policy.

Other techniques I’ve heard of, good and bad:
-Put the tv’s away. This I found almost impossible with a family. A lot of push back there.
-Turn the tv’s off and read a book. This was actually actually a lot easier than I thought. Now, the kids like to sit down and read a book.
-Fake that the cable is out. I tried this, it doesn’t go over well with the family. I ended up becoming the roadblock or issue in fixing the tv.

Best

The average person watches 20-26 hours of tv a week. It’s a staggering number. So, avoid television. If you would spend just half of that time working on something else you would be that much further along in your goals.

So, if you live to were to do this for 40 years, you would have spent 4.8 years watching television. Imagine taking back 4.8 years of your life. What would you have accomplished or done?

Does this sound familiar? You are sitting at your desk working, you have an idea, you research it on the internet. Wow, you think, I found some great information, this gives me another idea. Since this is such a good idea, you think…. I’ll research this other idea and then, before you know it, 30 minutes have passed. Geez, in 30 minutes, I could have finished my work. Well, it happens to all of us. I call this Business ADD.

So, how do you solve business ADD, well the good thing is, you don’t need to see the doctor. An excellent solution to solve this is to do one thing, write it or type it. Since your idea is a great, you don’t want to forget it. So, track it. Personally, my solution involves using Franklin Covey’s time management quadrant and Outlook.

Here’s how it works. Open up Outlook Tasks. Every time you get a great idea or thought, type it into your task list, and get back to work. Set a time of day, let’s say before lunch or before you go home, take a look at the list. Next, go through the list one at a time, if you still think the task is worthwhile, keep it, otherwise delete it. By just doing that, you’ll save yourself at least 30 minutes a day.

Now, if you are getting advanced, there’s another trick. Using Outlook Tasks, create a category for eac of Covey’s 4 quadrants (Important|Urgent, Important|Not Urgent, Not Important|Urgent, Not Important, Not Urgent). Next time you go through your list of tasks, place the task into one of these categories. Now, sort your tasks on category and take a look. You will be amazed at what ideas/tasks are not important at all. Try this for a day, you’ll notice the difference in how much you can accomplish if you stick to the important items.

It’s been over a month now and I can’t find this blog on the search engines. Here’s one possible clue. This evening, I spent some time trying to find out why my site doesn’t have any meta tags. In doing so, I carefully walked through every setting in the options, and I may have found the answer to my search engine problem in the Privacy Options section. For some strange reason, my privacy options were set to block search engines.

So, if you’re curious as to why you can’t find yourself on the internet, you may want to check this out.

1. Log into your administrator account.
2. Click on the Options tab.
3. Click on the Privacy tab (sub navigation for Options)
4. Make sure the radio button labeled, “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers” is checked.
5. If not, make sure the box is checked and click on the Update Options button.

In summary, this will change some of the settings in the hidden HTML code.

This is essentially the first month. Believe it or not, I’m actually making money already. It’s amazing.

Here are the results:
Google Adsense: $3.91 - $96.09 away from my first check from Google. Google requires you to reach $100 before they send you anything.
JoesWebShack Ads: $4.66

My dad is my biggest fan. Not too long ago, he sent me a link to the Randy Pausch lecture which can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but watched it anyway. Since then, I have definitely reanalyzed my life and made it much easier. In fact, for about a week straight, every day, I would just let the lecture run in the background as I worked.

Here’s what I learned. Life is short, make it easy on yourself. But, of course this is more difficult than it seemed. But, I started following what he’s discussed and it’s made a lot of changes. Here are the steps that affected me the most:

1. Follow Covey’s 7 habits of highly successful people
2. Plan out my day, week, month, etc and stick to it. This was much harder than originally anticipated.
3. Analyze my day every evening and see how I can improve upon it.
4. Keep moving forward.
5. Analyze my time. Too much of my day was spent jumping around from task to task. Since then, I’ve been able to reduce the amount of time spent on each activity and eliminate those unnecessary ones.
6. Be proactive.
7. What would you do to help your family if you knew you were going to die soon? How come I’m not doing it now?
8. Ask why? I can accomplish anything or any task, why just tackle the simple ones with quick gratification. And, is this task, thing, really what I should do?
9. Focus. I found it much to easy to start on a tangent while working with the internet 2 milliseconds away.
10. Clean out my inbox every day. This is tricky. But, essentially, I’ll check my email 2-3 times per day. Answer or respond to any email, then categorize/file my emails into the respective areas. For example, I work on a lot of projects. I’ll file my emails in that project. Then, allocate time to each project. This allows me to clean my inbox, establish time for each project, and keep all of the information together.

Listen to it, think about it. You can’t lose anything, but a couple minutes of your time.

How did it go? Installation worked like a charm. Make sure to read the readme file that comes with the zip. Follow the instructions carefully. Also, once I ran the plugin to build the map for the first time, it took a while, and timed out. I had to hit the back button to reload the page to see possible solutions. The following link will take you directly there.
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2006/04/07/google-sitemaps-faq-sitemap-issues-errors-and-problems/#P28_gen_memtime

Here’s what it states:
The last run didn’t finish or I just get a white screen
It could be that your server is not configured to run memory-heavy scripts like a sitemap generator.
-Try to increase the memory limit on the sitemap options page (start by “4M” and raise the value if it doesn’t help).
-Try to increase the time limit on the sitemap options page (start by “20″ and raise the value if it doesn’t help).
-If it’s still not working you may not have the permission to change these settings so you need to ask your hoster to raise the limit

I chose the first and easiest option which was to increase the memory on the sitemap options and it worked! To do this, go back to the Options page for the site generator for example: http://www.joebailey.org/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=sitemap.php
Once there, look in the section, Advanced Options and type in 4M (like the example text given) in the second option labeled “Try to increase the memory limit to. ” Then scroll all the way down to the bottom (CTRL+End can get you there quickly) and hit the update button. That’s it!

If anyone is looking for a good ftp program, I use filezilla which is free. You can find filezilla here: http://filezilla-project.org/
Installation Link: http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/