Habit Hack
Habithack: Sandy
I recently stumbled upon a great service called Sandy. Sandy is your own personal assistant, without the need to actually pay her. The system is fairly simple, send an email to Sandy (you’ll get the address to send it to when you sign up) and say something like “Remember Mags can’t eat tomatoes” or “Remember that Del is a newb” and she’ll remember it for you. At the end of the week, she’ll send you a list of things you told her to remember. You can also use the remind feature (I love this) where you say something like “Remind me tomorrow at 8:00 to watch reaper” or “Remind me a week from now to tell Cheryl I lost” and she’ll tell you 15 minutes before the time of the reminder through email or sms.
The service is pretty neat, though not sure how useful it truly is. It’s fun to think you’re telling somebody to remember stuff, but for the most part it’s just as easy to set up a reminder to yourself about stuff like this. It’s still totally fun none the less and makes you feel important though, I’m just waiting for the ‘bring me coffee’ function.
HabitHack: Remember, Remember…
My memory is pretty bad when it comes to remembering anything of real values. Sure I might be able to recite pi to the 20th place (ok, that’s a lie) but remembering my family’s birthdays is out of the question. That’s why we have to give ourselves reminders. Today (even though I’m not sure what day it actually is) we’re going to talk about ways to create effective reminders.
The say ‘If you build it, they will come’. Well I think that ‘If you write it, it will get done’. You can think about something as much as you want, but if you can actually touch the task you’re less likely to forget it.
Post-it Notes: I love these little things, I have over 2000 over them in my apartment right now, I buy them in bulk. Whenever I have a task that I know I can’t do right now and have to leave the house to do, I write it on a post-it note. This method works great with prepants, because chances are high that you’re going to put your hand in your pocket at least once tomorrow.
Whiteboards: These are pretty great too. I have one right now with a calendar, corking board and just open whiteboard space on it that I picked up at Wal-Mart and it’s fantastic. Write down numbers I have to call, things I have to do when I get up, or just jot down random ideas for blog posts on it. This also helps if it’s close to the door so you can look on the way out to see if there is anything you had to bring but forgot. It’s just another way to stay organized (and is fun to draw on when you’re bored).
For those of us that are techs, we can use email reminders to send ourselves emails before the date. There a lot of services that do this, but it’s also done by Google Calendar, which I recommend. You just have to select the ’send email X time before event’ option when adding it to the calendar.
If you just want to make a ToDo list, I recommend Remember The Milk. It’s very simple, just sign up and add in what you have to do for each day, what type of list (home/work/school) it is and check it off as it gets done. This is a good site because it can be synced with your cellphone, which is pretty cool.
Messages in Time: This one is a little bit harder to do, but I’ve seen it done and it worked for her. She left a phrase ‘bad wolf’ throughout time in order to remind her of something that she had to do in the future. She did this by naming companies, having people tell the story of ‘the big bad wolf’ and even having it spray painted on the TARDIS, Though it absolutely worked and ended up saving the world, I’d recommend only using this if the post-it notes don’t work.
Those are my recommendations for remembering things, what do you do to remember to do stuff?
Habithack: Prepants
Do you ever find yourself rushing in the morning to get everything ready on the way out the door? Maybe this has become part of your daily routine? Well stop it! The phrase “always be ready in advance” is pretty worn out and often really hard to do, but a good pair of pants only gets better with wear. This is why you have to learn to ‘prepants’.
Prepants (even though I don’t think it’s a real word) is a real simple concept: Get your pants ready in advance. If you followed my advice of ditching the wallet, you should only have a few things to take with you, so pick out a pair of pants and put all the stuff in it for the next morning. If needed, even put the pants on and do a mock-morning. This is a great method and will shave time off your morning (which means you don’t have to get up as early!). Your mom used to pick out your clothes the night before and wasn’t life easier as a kid? Maybe she was on to something there. 
Tomorrow: Super-awesome-amazing ways to remember stuff!
Habithack: Lose your wallet
Just as the title says, you have to lose your wallet. This doesn’t mean throw it off a bridge (just yet) but you have to stop carrying it around. Do you realize how much useless items are in your wallet? I’m sure you don’t. Most people have a card for everything, pictures of everybody they’ve ever met, random ticket stubs and god knows what else. Do you really need to be carrying around a card telling people you’re FBI (Female Body Inspector)? I’ll let you know the answer is no.
Before you go out think about what you know you need, not what you ‘might need’. That will be the big time saver here. I find that the main needs are: Photo ID, Secondary ID/medicare, Debit card, Credit card, cash. For such a small list you surely don’t need to carry around a huge wallet that makes your ass look big.
If you find yourself unable to get rid of all your photos, just get rid of most of them. Wallets usually have that plastic booklet that people put pictures and cards in, start taking just that with you if you must. But in retrospect you don’t need to carry around a lot of pictures, the chances of you ending up on an island by yourself with only your memories is slim.
Once you have yourself cut down, now you can throw your wallet off a bridge. Remember to try and hit the guy in the sailboat for me! 
Tomorrow’s post: Prepants!
Habithack: Email Filters
Everyday people gets tons and tons of emails (at least I do) and for the most part they were all going into my inbox, which would pile up pretty fast. With filters though, you can easily organize your email as it comes in and decide when you want to read what email when, if at all.
First, have a look at this easy to read chart I drew up and find out Do you need to use Email Filters?
Filters are fairly easy to set up if you’re using Mozilla Thunderbird (it’s not rocket science in other clients either, but we’re going to be focusing on Thunderbird today). The first thing you want to decide is how you want to separate your email. I have my personal email separated like this:
- Family (pretty self explanatory)
- NewLet (Newsletters)
- Confirm (Confirmation, private message notifications, ect)
- Junk (spam)
Though these are very simplistic, it keeps my inbox fairly clean and allows me to see if something new is in, or just old stuff coming up again.
Now, the How To:
- Firstly, create the folders you want to have them put into (File->New->Folder. Put in in ‘Inbox on email@address.com’).
- Once you have all your folders created, it’s time to create the filters. Go to Tools->Message Filters.
- Make sure the email address you want to use the filters is selected (if you have more than one email in the client) then click the ‘New’ button. At the top, enter a name for this filter, we’re going to use ‘Family’ for this example.
- The next step is to decide how it’s going to filter them there by selecting the variables from the drop down menus, we’re going to select ‘From’ and ‘is’ since we’re adding family. Now enter their email address in the text box on that line and click the ‘+’ button.
- On the bottom half of the screen select ‘Move message to’, then click the 2nd drop down box and find your folder named ‘Family’, select and click the ‘+’ button. Click OK. Now all email from that address you entered will go directly into the desired folder.
You’ve added one and it wasn’t too hard right? Well you can continue doing that. It may seem like a lot of work right now, but it will save you time and hassle down the road when your inbox has over 3000 emails in it when you come back from vacation. I find it useful too if you use the ‘body’ and ‘contains’ as well most of the time, more than email addresses. This is simply because I get a lot of ‘buy Viagra’ and ‘replica watches cheap!’, so adding the words and making them go to spam is easier than adding all of the dummy emails they use.
Not all Habithacks are tech-based (we’re not machines after all), tomorrow we’ll be covering Wallets and why you’re better off without them.
Habithack: Communication
I’m going to start with one of the biggest time savers first, communication. To be more precise tacking email. Not a week goes by that I don’t hear a conversation including the line “Which email did you send it to because I didn’t get it”. If you take the extra time to set it up, it won’t matter. The two biggest problems with email are having multiple addresses and having no filters (or bad filters) set up, so lets tackle the first of those two issues today.
The best thing to do for those who use more than one email address is to get a client. Some people like to use Microsoft outlook or Outlook Express, I recommend Mozilla Thunderbird because it’s clean, functional and easy to add extensions to if needed. For those of you that use a shared computer the client still requires the use of a password, so put your minds at ease, nobody is reading your email.
When setting up an email address in a client, the main components you need to know are user name, password, pop3 address and SMTP address. These aren’t hard to get, the user name and passwords ar the same you would be using for checking your email in a browser. For addresses they’re usually just something like “mail.website.com”, and can most often be found under one of the options tabs of mail settings. For some larger, free services however such as Hotmail and Gmail, they use longer addresses. I recommend checking out the webmail extension to simplify setting them up if they’re you’re service of choice.
Once you have your first email address set up, you’re more than half way done. When you have that working go to File->New->Account and put all the into in again. Now both email accounts will have all the emails coming into the same spot: You’ve just cut your loading, logging and waiting time in half. If you want to add another email account, you’ll cut it down even more. I recommend to add all of your emails to a client, it will save you lots of time.
The reason that I recommended Thunderbird is because it can add extensions and themes really easily, and these are what puts this client on the top of the list. You can see all the extensions and themes on the add-on site. Here are some useful ones that I’ve found useful:
MinimizeToTray: Allows you to minimize the Thunderbird window to the system tray and alerts you when a new email comes in.
FoxyTunes: Allows you to control your music player from within your mail client. Also available for Firefox.
Crossover X theme: Nice Macish theme. And blue
Another quick Thunderbird tip: You can use Thunderbird Portable to install your client on a flash drive. Works with all the same functions and no need to be strapped down to one computer. Great for home and work.
Tomorrow’s topic is Email filters: have the client organize all of your mail for you as it comes in!
Habithack: Intro
When people think of me, I’m sure “wow, he really has it together” isn’t the first thing they think. But contrary to first impressions, when I do something I think I do it pretty well.
Most of what I do in life is simple, when something gets too complicated I usually end up breaking it into pieces and attacking things in parts and it works. Starting Monday I’m going to share some simple tips of how I save time and get things done by stripping it down and putting it back together how it should have been built, so stay tuned.