Digital TV Signal

Since giving up cable, I have had fun looking at different ways to find show to watch.  From network tv shows, hulu and netflix, I have had good luck watching, for the most part, all of the shows I want to watch. 

Trying to find the optimal television antennae setup has been fun for me.  I have made a home-made antennae, moved it all around the attic, moved it outside onto the roof, and recently purchased an antennae from Lowes. 

This morning I was able to pull a station from St. Louis, which is over 140 miles away.  I do have a booster hooked to the antennae.  I felt more than a little excited pulling this station in.  (I know, more than a little nerdy.)  Pulling in distant signals has become a personal challenge.  Now I am having a good time moving the antennae all over the attic. 

I am interested in anyone's success stories involving pulling in digital signals from distant tv stations.  If you have had success, please comment and explain your set-up. 

It Has To

The last few days, I have worked on a project with my dad moving the shower in my bathroom from one wall to another.  (It's a long story.)  In reality, he did most of the work while I watched/assisted.  Working with dad took me back to when I was younger.

When I was a kid, I often worked side by side by side with my dad.  When we would work on different projects, often I would say that this or that wouldn't work.  Dad's comment was almost always, "It has to." 

I often think of this comment when I am working on something and tempted to give up on something.  Once you decide that giving up is not an option, it is amazing what you can accomplish.

Several times during the last few days, I have said this won't fit or that won't work and Dad said several times, "Son, it has to."  And each time it did.

Mechanical Turk

I'm not sure how they came up with the completely goofy name, but Mechanical Turk is an interesting site.  Basically people post jobs for others and pay small amounts of money for them to be completed.

The jobs are referred to as "hits" and the price that a person is paid ranges from a few dollars to a penny.  Usually the top value hits are things I don't want to do like signing up for a service or visiting and/or commenting on other people's posts or videos and sometimes rating people's posts or videos.

If you go past the top value hits to the hits around 50 cents or less, there are many things that you can do that take very little time and are pretty much painless.  Usually I end up doing surveys.   I have completed some small tasks of analysis of data.  But none of the tasks that I have chosen are hard.

Doing a couple of hits a day, I can usually make enough money to buy a book in Kindle format from Amazon about every month.  (I am really loving Kindle for PC.)

Your earnings are deposited to your Amazon Payments Account.  There payments are easily transferred to your bank account or can be used to purchase Amazon gift certificates.

All in all, not a bad way to pick up some small change that does add up fairly quickly.  I've made over $12 since the beginning of November and that is working on things from the site around 30 minutes semi-daily.  If anyone else has used it or is interested in using it, post and tell me about your experience.

Expanding "Do It Now" to Tasks at Home

I have been wanting to expand my "Do It Now" philosophy to our home.  But I haven't been able to find a way to start.  Today I started working off my list and it just seemed like it wasn't working for me 

As usual, once I go off my list I immediately started stressing.  Something I always do when I make a change to my method of working.  And then I usually see a boost of energy as things seem to start getting done that I haven't been getting done. So I left my list today. 

I looked at things in the house and I saw that I have been working in circles.  I keep cleaning and organizing the same spaces all over again.  Meanwhile, nothing ever gets done.

Today instead of working in the same areas as usual, I began to just work where my mind seemed to take me.  I'm not sure this is the exact "Do It Now" philosophy, but in a way it is.

By working where my mind seemed to take me, I was able to concentrate more on what I was doing.  I seemed to have more of a motivation to do a better job and to actually accomplish something.

I am a little worried as I continue this, that it may turn into a situation where I only do the stuff I want to do and let the stuff that needs to be done go.  But part of me thinks as something needs to be done, the need for doing it will pull me toward it.

For now only time will tell.  I'll keep everyone up to date on my progress.

Julie & Julia

I'm watching Julie and Julia.  As you probably know, the main character Julie is trying to blog about cooking all of Julia Child's recipes in her cookbook in a year.

At one point in the movie, Julie gets her first comment.  She is very excited until she realizes it is from her mother who questions why she is doing this whole thing.

I feel her pain. It is dishearting doing something like this without getting discouraged when there is no one who seems to be interested in what you are doing.

I would like to think that at some point others would join in with comments and conversation about the productivity comments and other things I am writing about and that this blog can contribute something meaningful.

But if nothing comes of this blog, it will still mean something to me.  It will still allow me to explore my own thoughts and ideas.  It still gives me the opportunity to "talk out loud".

So anyway, feel free to make comments, if you would like.  I will happily comment back.

My Life With No Cable or Satellite TV

I became disgusted with the price of cable tv early this year.  We were paying over $100 monthly for a tv/phone/internet package.  Yet we found that we were watching almost all network tv that we could watch over the air for free.

It was then that I decided that I would like to try life with no cable.  My wife wasn't sure about it.  My oldest son thought i was insane.  My youngest was concerned.

Yet after trying a few dry runs, we canceled our cable tv, hooked our tv to digital antennas (later we used a home-made tv antenna), and hooked a computer to our tv through the video output of the computer.

Hulu and a new subscription to Netflix supplied supplemental programming to our network shows.  We also made a decision that if we really wanted to watch something, we would purchase the shows on Amazon.

Nearly a year later, we have discovered the following things:

1. There are some pretty cool shows on Hulu that you might have missed.  We watched "American Gothic", "Murder One", and Alfred Hitchcock shows.

2. Current shows available on Hulu, help when we miss them on broadcast tv.  I didn't watch one episode of "Flash Forward" in its regular time slot. We watched every episode on Hulu.  If we missed "Bones", we simply watched it later in the week, when it was convenient for us.

3. Netflix is completely awesome.  We watched movies at our convenience.  They would show up in our mailbox and we would watch them when we were ready.  Sometimes right away, sometimes several days later.  The streaming option is great.  We tend to watch tv shows this way.  "Jericho" and "Dexter" are shows we probably would not have found if it wasn't for Netflix. 

4. We still created a tv schedule for us that helped keep us on some sense of a normal tv viewing schedule.

5. My wife had to have Top Chef.  At $1.89 on Amazon, it was very inexpensive to watch this show.  (Beats paying more money for shows we never watch.)

All in all, I don't miss cable.  My wife says she misses just scanning the channels and finding something to watch, but for the most part she still thinks it is the right decision.  She is learning to use boxee and fancast.  My oldest son missed cable, but loves Netflix.  (He has since left for college and has his own Netflix account.)  My youngest son doesn't miss it all and has learned he can find most shows he watches on Netflix (though usually not the most current season.)

Bottom line is we save over $50 weekly and still watch any show we would like to watch.  Not bad for a family spending money putting a kid through college.

My History with Organization

Okay, it hasn't been pretty.  My first method was to make piles and piles of stuff and work on them progressing down through the pile.  It actually worked on some level.

I generally worked from the most current work first.  If something was pushed down into the pile, then either someone would demand it be done immediately and I would dig it out and do it now or the need for it to be completed would disappear.

Some things were completed and some were not.  Over time there was a need to do something else.

That's when I discovered David Allen.... completely by accident.  His "Getting Things Done" book looked interesting and i bought it. I read it in two days and immediately began putting things into place from the book.

It changed my life.  Just writing everything down and making a list of all that I had to do, relieved so much stress that I suddenly believed that maybe I could actually handle my position.

Incidentally I had been in my position for over six years before I decided I could handle the position.  I worked with awesome people and although I was horrible with paperwork and tasks, I excelled at other parts of my job.  Now I felt like I had the total package.

Everything was great until I decided to take my paper-based system to a computer-based system.  The computer-based system never worked for me and I was never able to quite get my paper-based system to work.  I changed jobs within my organization and with it came new challenges and more work.

Recently I discovered the autofocus system developed by Mark Forster.  Autofocus worked more off of thinking less about work and just looking for the first task on a list that basically caused stress and working through the list.

This caused an initial burst of productivity.  But after the first week I noticed that I although I was completing tasks, I was adding more tasks to my list than deleting.  My to-do list was growing and my stress level was rising.

Once again, I found a book that looked interesting.  The book is actually loaned to my brother-in-law now, so I cannot list the title.  The book proposed a totally different approach to time management than I had used before.

This book recommended the "Do It Now" principle.  I had a hard time embracing this idea.  After all I have been using lists for several years.  I decided that I had nothing to lose, so I immediately started attacking everything in my office that had was on my desk, piled in a pile, or found its way into my day.  Do it now came first; the list came next.

I found for the first time in a long time that my list was shrinking.  People immediately noticed that things they asked for were getting done.  I suddenly felt energized.

The first thing I noticed is that I wasn't having to rush to work on things that were due immediately.  Because I was doing tasks immediately, I was completing things ahead of deadlines.  And it felt really good.

Once I began to be able to not jump from emergency task to emergency task I was able to look at the tasks I had with deadlines and to use the backwards scheduling method to plan when I was going to work on tasks.

Through combining parts of GTD, Autofocus, Do It Now and a little bit of Covey's 4 Quadrants, I was able to find I had some control over what my work and my life.  And I was not sucking when it came to organizing my tasks and my work environment.

Other people came to take pictures of my desk and to ask me what in the world I had started doing.  People asked to borrow my book.  My boss even seemed to notice that things were different with me.

I won't say everything is perfect.  But it is so much better.

The basic method I utilize is to organize my tasks into Covey's 4 quadrants (Urgent/Important, Urgent/Not Important, Not Urgent/Important, Not Urgent/Not Important).  I find I am mainly working in the Not Urgent areas because the urgent things are for the most part completed.

I select 6-10 things from the list to do. Usually 2 tasks from the Urgent/Important List; 2 tasks from the Urgent/Not Important List; 4 Things from the Not Urgent/Important List, and any remaining items from the Not Urgent/Not Important List.

I pick these items using the autofocus method of working up the list and choosing the first things that seem to stand out and cause stress.  I also list in the Not Urgent/Not Important List an item marked Forward Order Switch.  When I come to this item I select the most important item from the top of the lists.  This helps keep items from being lost in the list and never addressed.

Once I get my list, I start working by addressing anything on my desk or in my mailbox that I can complete in one hour or less.  I do this before I touch anything on my list.  I only check my mailbox once daily and everything is addressed immediately.

Once everything that is addressed on my desk and in my mail, I go to the first item on my list.  Once this is completed, I check my email for the first time.  I select the last 15 items from my email and move to a folder that I have titled "1holding".  I work the emails from the folder, completing anything that can be completed in less than an hour.  I work from the "1holding" folder so that I won't start dealing with other emails that may come into my inbox especially when I start replying to emails.

Once I complete the 15 emails, I again take care of anything that has happened to find its way onto my desk that I can do in less than one hour and then address an item on my list.  Then I repeat the 15 email rule and continue in this loop.  Until I complete the items on my shorter list, I do not add to it.  Once they are completed, I again pick 6-10 things from my full list using the same method as before and continue with my process.

I never check my email first thing in the morning or before i leave in the afternoon.  (I sometimes cheat in the afternoon to see if I have any emails from my boss, but I don't deal with them.  This helps my sanity.)

I also will schedule some items that need extended time to be completed or other items on my daily calendar as a meeting. This helps me to make sure I am addressing the needs of others also.

The 15 emails at a time rule was just a number that I calculated would usually get me through all my emails in a day.  If I reach over 100 emails in my inbox, I begin to find myself twitching.  At that point I raise the numbers of emails I deal with at a time to 20 and I address the 10 newest emails in my inbox and the 10 oldest emails in my inbox.  This usually works for me.

This is the method I use.  It seems to work for me.... at least for now.  I'll keep you up to date as I continue using it.