Category: GTD

more on FastMail, and playing catch-up

I’m still working on migrating from Gmail to FastMail. Since the last time I blogged about this, I’ve migrated nearly all of my online accounts over, and have converted from a trial to a paid subscription.

I have several problem accounts that I haven’t switched over yet, including some that don’t provide any way to change your email address, and some that do, but where it doesn’t seem to work. So I have to write some emails to various support addresses and see what I can do to straighten those ones out.

I’m keeping the inbox of the new account pretty clean. I’ve set up rules to move most incoming messages directly into folders, where I can more easily manage them. I just counted, and I have a little over 50 rules set up so far. (I could probably cut that number down if I got a little clever about it.)

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to catch up on the backlog of stuff in my Gmail “read/review” folder. I file certain newsletters away into that folder automatically, and I’ve let myself fall way behind. Here are a few notes on a few of my favorite newsletters.

I’ve really been enjoying Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations newsletter. He puts it out once a week, usually, and it contains a lot of stuff about his own writing projects, plus little reviews and pointers to other people’s books, comics, and music. I’ve added a bunch of books to my Amazon wish list based on his recommendations.

I’ve been subscribing to TidBITS for a long time. It’s been around for more than 25 years. It’s a weekly newsletter about all things Apple. There are plenty of Apple news blogs, and some of them are very good, but TidBITS is a great resource and has some great in-depth articles that you won’t find anywhere else.

The tor.com newsletter is another one of my favorites. A lot of their articles are fluff, honestly, but they publish one or two new pieces of fiction each week, and some of those are really good.

I also subscribe to several NY Times and New Yorker newsletters, and I pick up a lot of good articles from those. David Allen’s GTD newsletter is pretty good too.

As I work my way through my “read/review” backlog, I save longer articles to Instapaper to read later. Which means that, to some extent, I’m just shifting my backlog from email to Instapaper. But at least I’m separating wheat from chaff and saving only the “good stuff” to Instapaper.

I’m down to about 250 messages left in read/review in Gmail. But the read/review folder in FastMail is starting to fill up now, and will likely hit 100 messages by the end of this week. I think I may need to cut back on the number of NY Times and New Yorker newsletters I’m getting.

Organizer and email follow-up

This is a follow-up to my post about OtherInbox Organizer from a few weeks back. They finally acknowledged that they’d made changes, via an email they sent about a week ago. Their main point was that the service is now much faster. I can’t dispute that; under the old version, emails would generally sit in my inbox for a few minutes before being filed. They were, I assume, running some kind of batch process that could only check once every few minutes. Now, it seems like emails are instantly filed. I’m not familiar with Google’s APIs for accessing Gmail, but I’d guess that they’ve switched to an API that’s more event-driven, where maybe they have a callback that gets called every time a new email comes in. Either that, or they just tossed more computing power at their old process, so it runs more often.

The one big annoyance from the recent change is that they stopped applying the general “OIB” tag to every organized email. (I mentioned this in the previous post.) Well, they fixed that as of last night, so I’m happy about that.

They don’t seem to have made any effort to restore some of the other related functionality, like applying a “receipt” tag to emails that look like receipts, or “shipping notice” to emails that look like shipping notices. But those functions weren’t working real well anyway, and I never really relied on them at all, so that’s fine.

In a nutshell, now that they’ve restored applying the general “OIB” tag, I’m pretty happy with them overall and will likely stick with them for now.

On a related subject, ProtonMail just announced some new features. They still don’t have IMAP/SMTP support, but they’re testing it and will probably roll it out before the end of the year. I’ve been messing around with ProtonMail a bit over the last couple of weeks, including installing their iOS app on my iPhone and iPad. It’s a pretty good app. Sometimes, apps for services like this are an afterthought, farmed out to a third-party developer, and the end result isn’t very good. But ProtonMail’s app is quite nice. Visually, it’s well-designed and looks good on both iPhone and iPad. It works well, and includes support for Touch ID. I haven’t quite talked myself into switching over to ProtonMail, but I like what they’re doing and they’ve made a ton of progress since they launched a few years ago.

Organizing Email (and related privacy issues)

I’ve been using OtherInbox Organizer to keep my Gmail inbox clean since 2011. it’s a service that scans your Gmail inbox and moves commercial email into various folders under a main “OIB” folder, for example “OIB/Shopping” or “OIB/Finance”. It’s a good service and it’s free. I’ve had some concerns with it over the years, partly because of it being free. Obviously, they’re doing something with the data from their users to make money. I don’t necessarily mind that, if they’re just using aggregate data and not telling people which brand of underwear I’m buying or which books I’m reading or anything like that.

I hadn’t given them much thought recently, but, yesterday, some stuff changed, so I did some digging. Part of their service is a daily review email that summarizes all the emails they’ve organized in the past 24 hours. That email has looked the same since I first signed up for an account, but the design on it changed yesterday, along with a couple of other minor things. And, previously, they’ve always applied two labels to each email: the main “OIB” label and the more specific folder label, like “OIB/Shopping”. Now, they’re only applying the specific label and not the general “OIB” one. (Gmail, of course, doesn’t really have folders, just labels, which can be nested to look like folders.) So I was wondering if they’d been acquired recently or if the service had been sold from one company to another.

Surprisingly, I didn’t find much information via Google. I did discover that they’d been acquired by Return Path, but that happened back in 2012. I might have read about that previously, but I don’t remember it. Up until yesterday, Return Path wasn’t mentioned in the summary email, but that changed with the redesign; the copyright notice at the bottom of the email now says Return Path instead of OtherInbox. Nothing about the changes has shown up on either the OtherInbox or Return Path Twitter feeds. And I couldn’t find any recent reviews or news about the service, other than seeing it included in some typical clickbait “top five ways to organize your email” articles, but none of those were that recent either.

Reviewing Return Path’s privacy policy, it sounds like they’re only sharing aggregate and/or anonymized data with their (business) customers, not personally identifiable data, so that’s good. If I was worried about that, I’d probably switch to SaneBox. Their service costs money, so their users are actually their customers; they’re not selling the data at all. But they charge $7 per month for their service, for their low-end accounts. (It goes up to $36 per month for their high-end accounts.)

Or, I could just use Gmail tabs. They were introduced in 2013, after I started using OtherInbox, so I’ve never really tried them. I think I did notice at one point that they only work with the regular Gmail client and don’t affect the view of the inbox through a third-party client like the mail client on iOS. (And I really want to have a clean inbox on iOS, so that could be an issue for me.)

Of course, if I’m worried about privacy, and being the product rather than the customer, I could probably switch from Gmail to a paid email provider also. I’ve considered switching to FastMail in the past. Their standard account is $5 per month, which is pretty reasonable. Combining FastMail and SaneBox would give me an email account with great organizing tools and no obvious privacy issues. (I’m pretty sure SaneBox would work with FastMail.)

For now, though, I’m going to stick with Gmail and OtherInbox Organizer, and just keep an eye on the Organizer product and see if anything weird is going on with it. The recent changes may just be the result of some long overdue maintenance work. Or they could be related to some further changes that could compromise privacy and/or make the service less useful.

New Year’s Day 2017

I’ve gotten into the habit of writing a post on New Year’s Day, reviewing some goals and events from the previous year and thinking about goals for the new year. Last year’s post was pretty long, and took quite a while to write. I’m not sure if this year’s post will be quite as long, but, for reference, it’s now 8:05 am. I’ve got the radio on WQXR, a cup of coffee at my side, and nothing else to do this morning. Let’s see what time it is when I finish!

For reference, here are links to my last three New Years Day posts:

Weight and General Heath
I think I’ve successfully transitioned from losing weight to maintaining my weight. I started 2016 at 150 pounds. I’ve stayed between 145 and 150 all year. I’m currently at 146. I’m still using Lose It to track everything I eat, and I’m staying within my budget most of the time. So I’m feeling pretty good about that.

On the fitness front, I’m not really doing much. Since I got my Apple Watch in April, I’ve been wearing it every day, and doing my best to meet the activity goals. So I’m making some effort, and I have the watch to help me keep track of what I’m doing. I was doing a lot of walking when the weather was nicer, but I haven’t been terribly active this winter.

Medically, I haven’t had any huge problems this past year, except for the migraines I started getting back in May. I got an MRI done on my brain, but it didn’t find anything interesting. I’ve also been getting more general headaches than I used to. I’ve been dealing with a generally higher level of pain and fatigue this past year, overall, but I’m not sure I can point to anything specific enough to be actionable. Maybe I’m just getting old.

And I’ve still got the neck and back pain that I’ve been living with for a few years now. I did buy a new mattress in June, as I’d planned, but it hasn’t helped me at all. In fact, I think I might need to toss it and try again this year, maybe with something different, like a Casper mattress or something similar.

Speaking of which, my sleep quality recently hasn’t been too bad, but also hasn’t been too good. I’ve been quite good about getting to bed (and getting out of bed) at a consistent time. I’m generally in bed around 10pm and awake at 6am, on both weekdays and weekends. I think I’m doing a lot of things right, in terms of the usual advice you see about limiting screen time before bed, keeping regular hours, and so on. I’ve occasionally had bouts of insomnia in the past year, but I’ve been OK lately. Being in an apartment building on a busy street, there’s a lot of stuff that’s out of my control. But I’m trying to do my best given the environmental constraints.

Blogging and Journaling
I’ve done a fair bit of blogging here this past year. Looking at my stats, I apparently wrote 193 posts in 2016, so that’s a lot. I’ve tried to work in some useful posts, in between the self-absorbed ones. As to journaling, 2016 was the last year in a five-year diary I started back in 2012. I didn’t actually write much in it in 2016, so I think I’m going to quit that and just stick with Day One. I did a fair bit of writing in Day One over the last year, so I think that’s working out well.

Professional / Education
I’m still at SHI, and will hit the four-year mark this month. Things are pretty stable there. I’m still mostly doing Dynamics AX work, but I had an opportunity to work on some SharePoint stuff too, which allowed me to write some C# code, which was nice. And I did learn a lot about SharePoint this past year, which might not be exactly what I’d have chosen to learn, if I had a choice, but it was fun and interesting nevertheless.

I signed up for a Pluralsight subscription last month. We’ll see whether or not I get my money’s worth out of it this year. So far, I’ve just been using it to work through some SharePoint stuff. I hope to find time to use it to learn some of the newer .NET stuff this year. I haven’t done anything at all on EdX or Coursera lately, and I probably won’t in 2017, since I’ve got the Pluralsight subscription.

Organization / GTD
I feel like I’m really in the groove on this stuff lately. One of my projects for 2016 was switching all of my bills over to paperless (finally). I’ve done that, and I’ve kept up with downloading the PDFs, paying the bills, filing them away in subfolders, and all that exciting stuff. I blogged about going paperless in December 2015, and it feels like I’ve done what I wanted to do there, and kept up with everything.

I’m using Evernote pretty effectively too, I think. Though, looking at it now, there’s a bunch of stuff in my “inbox” notebook that I should really do something with. None of it is really important, but I should make up my mind about what I should consider a project and what I should just file away in the “someday/maybe” category.

Summary
It’s now 9:30, so I’ve been working on this for about ninety minutes, which seems like long enough. There’s more I could write, but I’m going to hold off. Looking back through this post, I don’t think I’ve set any really ambitious goals for 2017, but I’m fine with that. I think I mostly want to keep doing a good job at work, keep doing whatever I can on my health, and try to be a good friend and a good citizen. I think 2017 is going to be a challenging year, for everybody, and honestly I’m a little afraid of it. But I’m going to do my best.

Evernote Essentials

I just finished rereading Brett Kelly’s Evernote Essentials. I first bought it and read it in 2014. He released an updated version recently, so I thought I’d download it and give it a quick reread. It does have some updates since the last version I read, but nothing that I wasn’t already aware of. If you’re new to Evernote, and want to get up to speed quickly, it’s a good book to read. He’s now selling it in three versions; one is just the book, then there are “plus” and “premium” versions with extra content, including video and audio content. I can’t really imagine needing the extra content, though I’m sure it’s good, if you’re really into Evernote, and don’t mind paying for it.

I’m still getting a lot of use out of Evernote. They’ve updated the Mac and Windows clients recently, with some interesting new features. In the recent past, updates to the desktop software were sometimes more annoying than useful. They’d add non-removable buttons for features I don’t use, like “Work Chat”. But lately, they’ve actually been adding useful features and capabilities, such as the new Cmd-J feature on the Mac.

closer to paperless

I blogged back in December about how I’m taking a few more baby steps towards going paperless. I had switched my Merrill statements over to email, and that’s gone reasonably well. I’m downloading those statements pretty regularly, and I’m also keeping up with the other random statements that were already coming in via email.

One side note: the standard for paperless bills and statements is almost always PDF (which is fine). On my new desktop PC, I’d decided to skip installing Acrobat Reader in favor of Foxit. I thought that was working out OK, but I started having trouble with Foxit crashing randomly, so I had to give up on it and switch back to Acrobat. I’m not that fond of all the bells and whistles that Adobe keeps adding to Acrobat Reader, to try to suck you into their “document cloud” or whatever else they’re pushing at any given time. But at least it doesn’t crash. Maybe I’ll try Sumatra or one of the other third-party PDF readers at some point, but for now I’ll stick with Adobe’s bloatware.

So, where was I? Oh yeah, getting rid of paper. For a number of years, I’ve been paying most of my bills electronically through my bank’s web site. It’s got a reasonably good interface, and has always worked well. Except when I screw up, which I’ve done twice recently. The interface shows an alphabetical list of all the payees you’ve set up, and you just type in the amount you want to pay in a text box next to the payee name. Well, twice recently I’ve accidentally typed into the wrong box, paying a bill for company “A” to company “B” instead. The first time, I caught it in time to cancel the incorrect payment and entered the correct one. But, this month, I paid my cable company instead of my credit card company, and didn’t catch it until the cable bill showed up in the mail with a really big credit on it. So I figured out what I’d done, but maybe a little too late. I paid the credit card bill as soon as I realized what I’d done, but I’m not sure it made it in before the due date, so I might get dinged with a late fee.

So that’s convinced me to try a feature on the bank’s bill payment site that I’ve been ignoring up to now. For several companies, you can request e-bills to be delivered directly via the bank’s web site. So you can just review and pay them right there. I’ve always been a bit leery of this, but it seems like it would be a good way to prevent the problem of accidentally paying the wrong company. And I’ll be able to download the PDF e-bills for multiple companies all through a single web site, instead of a different one for each company.

I signed up for e-bills for my two major credit card accounts. I’ll probably add my other credit card account and my phone bill later, if the first two e-bill setups work out. So pretty soon, I may be down to just one or two paper bills / statements per month, and I can probably get rid of those too.

This is all good, and it will cut down on the amount of useless paper that I have to file away in my file cabinet, then occasionally purge and shred. It’s starting to bother me, though, that I don’t get much mail anymore. So I’m thinking about subscribing to a printed weekly magazine again, like the New Yorker or the Economist, just so I’ll have something showing up in my mailbox regularly. But I know I won’t have time to read either of those. So, maybe TV Guide?

random stuff

I noticed in my “On This Day” sidebar that I’ve written a lot of blog posts on January 20th. I’m not sure why, but I feel like I should keep up the trend and write one today too.

But I have nothing in particular to write about, so I’ll just dump some random stuff out of my head. Which will probably be helpful to me, but maybe not to anyone else.

First, I have a cold, I think. And, whatever it is, it’s been hanging in there since Christmas. I keep thinking it’s just about gone, then it comes back. I’m quite frequently sick at this time of the year, so I shouldn’t really be surprised. All this ridiculously cold weather this week isn’t helping either, and we’re getting ready for a possibly major snowstorm this weekend. I’d really like to take off for a week or three and go to Florida, or San Diego, or anyplace warm, really.

After several months of not touching any novels or non-fiction books, and reading only short form stuff and comics, I’m back on a long-form book kick. I’m currently reading Thunderer by Felix Gilman and First Things First by Stephen Covey. I’m enjoying the Gilman book enough that it’s putting me in the mood to read more stuff like it. Maybe some China Miéville or Paolo Bacigalupi. (I honestly don’t know enough about either of those guys to know if it actually makes sense to group them together with Gilman, but for some reason, I think it does.)

On an unrelated subject, I stumbled across a great article on MacDrifter today about Drafts. I’m using Drafts a lot now, much more than I used to, but I’m still not really using it to its full potential. Of course, I don’t really use my iPhone or iPad for writing much; I stick with a “real” computer for that. But Drafts is great for some stuff, including quickly dumping notes into Evernote. It’s just faster and easier than opening up the Evernote client itself, which is a great app, but kind of slow to start. Drafts opens quickly and lets you start typing right away.

I’ve also noticed that Things for Mac is on sale for $25 right now. I own the iOS version, which I bought a while back when it was on sale, and I tried the Mac version, but I couldn’t talk myself into using it regularly. I might go ahead and pay for the Mac version, and give it another try. I’m keeping track of stuff largely in Evernote these days, but it might be a good idea to use something more structured for some stuff.

Tomorrow will be my three-year anniversary at SHI. I don’t have too much to say about that, other than that it’s been a pretty stable job, without a lot of drama or stress, and I seem to be doing well there, based on my performance reviews. I’m occasionally tempted to shake things up and find something new and interesting, but for now, I’m content with what I’ve got.

Happy New Year 2016

The last couple of years, I’ve been writing year-in-review/goals posts on New Year’s Day, and I’m going to continue with that this year. For reference, here are links to the 2015 and 2014 posts.

Weight & Health
This category is pretty simple, so I’ll start here. I was at 200 pounds on New Year’s Day in 2014, and 165 on 1/1/2015. Today, I’m at 150. I had set a goal at 160, and got there, then everything past that just happened very gradually. I’ve been between 150 and 155 for the last few months, and I’m comfortable with that. So, for 2016, I’m just going to try and maintain my weight, within that range. Using the Lose It app has become enough of a habit now that it would seem weird not to log all my calories and weigh myself (almost) every day, so I’m going to keep doing that.

On the fitness front, I haven’t made much progress, though I’ve kept up with my habit of doing as much walking as I can. I haven’t started doing any other kind of exercise, and any thoughts I had about that were put aside when I had my hernia surgery a few months ago. I think I’ve healed up enough now that I could consider some new exercise ideas, and I might do something about that in 2016, though I’m not sure what.

My neck and back continue to bother me a bit, and I’m still not sure what, if anything, I’m going to do about it. I will likely buy a new mattress in 2016, which should help, since my current mattress is ten years old.

Speaking of mattresses, I’ve started using Sleep Cycle on my iPhone to track my sleep. I’m still not sure if it’s really that helpful, but it’s at least a little better than my old alarm clock, so I’m going to stick with it in 2016. I used to go to bed around 11pm most nights, but I’ve gotten into the habit of going to bed at 10pm lately. I get up at 6am, so that’s giving me eight hours in bed rather than seven, which is probably a bit healthier. And I’ve started setting my alarm on weekends also, so my time in bed is a bit more consistent now, from day to day. I still have trouble sleeping on some nights, and I’m not sure why. I know that afternoon coffee drinking definitely affects me, but I can have trouble sleeping even when I’m not drinking much coffee. So I’m going to keep thinking about this, and see what else I can do to improve my sleep.

Education / Programming
I didn’t do much in this area this year. I did learn a lot about SharePoint development, for a project at work that never really came to fruition. And I spent some time learning Ruby (and Ruby On Rails). I took Michael Uslan’s Rise of Superheroes course on EdX, but didn’t take any programming courses on EdX or Coursera. And I spent some more time on F#, starting a new book, Real World Functional Programming. I haven’t looked at it in a couple of weeks, but I want to pick it back up this month and get through it. Aside from that, I’m not really sure what I want to do in 2016. My day job is still going to be mostly Dynamics AX work, and I don’t have any consulting work coming up. So I’d like to continue with F#, and Ruby, and maybe more iOS development, but I don’t have any concrete projects that I’m working on or particularly interested in right now. So that’s something to think about.

Work
I’ve been at SHI since January 2013, so I’m just coming up on my three-year anniversary. SHI does performance reviews at year-end, so I just had mine recently, and it went well. I’m reasonably content with my day job, and I’ll likely stick with it through 2016. Since I’m only doing Dynamics AX work there, though, I should really try to get involved in some other projects, outside of work. I didn’t do any of that in 2015.

GTD / organization
I did pretty good on this front in 2015. I’ve kept up on my bills and paperwork, for the most part, and have finally switched over my Merrill statements to paperless. (I blogged about this last month.) I’m got things pretty well-organized in OneDrive now, and I’ve making effective use of my Evernote account. I had started consolidating all my personal notes into Evernote back in November 2014, and I’m pretty happy with the way that’s worked out, enough so that I recently paid for another year of Evernote Premium.

Comics and Books
I donated most of my comic book collection to Superheroes for Hospice early last year, and successfully avoided buying them all back. I have been on a bit of a tear with Comixology and Humble Bundle sales recently, but that’s all digital so none of that stuff is cluttering up the apartment the way 25 long boxes of comics did.

For reading, I’d set myself a goal of 50 books in the Goodreads reading challenge for 2015. I came in at 96, so that’s good, but many of those were comic book TPBs, so it’s not as impressive a number as it could be. In fact, I see that the last prose novel I finished was a Dresden Files paperback, in August. So I should probably start reading a new novel soon, just so I don’t forget how to read the darn things. I’ve done a fair bit of non-fiction reading this year too, long form (but not book-length), mostly New Yorker articles that I read either in the printed magazine or that I’d saved in Instapaper. (I kind of wish that Instapaper had a statistics page I could look at to see what I’ve read recently, but if they do, they’ve hidden it well.) And hey, this article on good news from 2015 looks like one I should save and read!

Life-logging, journaling, and blogging
I’m not sure if I’m using the right terms here, but I’ve definitely been doing more and more of this “quantified self” stuff over the last few years. And also more of the “qualitative” stuff via blogging and journaling. It looks like I wrote a little over 100 posts on this blog in 2015. That’s a pretty respectable number, and some of them took a bit of work and thought to put together. Overall, I think blogging has helped me work through problems, set goals, and keep track of them. (And I occasionally write a post that might actually be useful to someone else, though not as often as I’d like.)

Via my iPhone, I’m now tracking everything I eat, my weight, my sleep, and my daily step count, and I’m actually paying attention to all of those things. I’m not sure how much good it’s doing me, except in the weight loss area, where it has definitely made a huge difference over the last few years. So I’m going to keep doing all that in 2016.

In addition to this blog, I’ve also been keeping a five-year journal for the last nine years. (I’m just starting the last year on the second book.) It’s somewhat useful, but there’s not much room to write anything beyond a few lines, and of course it’s old-fashioned paper, so it’s not searchable. I’ll keep up with it this year, but I’m not sure if I’ll start a new one next year.

I bought Day One for iOS about a year ago, when it was on sale for a buck, but didn’t really start using it. I bought the Mac app last month, when it was on sale for $7, and I want to start using it this year, to supplement the stuff that I post publicly on this blog, and the stuff that I scribble in my five-year journal. If using it becomes a habit, I’ll probably drop the five-year journal in 2017. The guys from The Sweet Setup wrote an ebook on Day One that looks interesting. I may pick that up, and see if it gives me any good ideas.

Hardware and Software
I didn’t do too much with major hardware or software purchases in 2015. I didn’t buy a new desktop or laptop computer. I didn’t buy a new iPhone or iPad. I did buy a $35 Kindle Fire, but that’s a pretty minor purchase. My biggest purchase of the year would be the TiVo Bolt, which is working well for me. I replaced a hard drive cable in my MacBook and the speaker in my iPhone, so I could squeeze a bit more life out of those.

I think there’s a good chance I’ll buy an iPhone 6c in 2016, if such a thing is actually released. My iPhone 5s is working fine, except that the battery is clearly on its last legs, so I’m going to need to replace either the battery or the phone before 2016 is over.

I’m almost definitely going to buy a new desktop computer soon. My current machine was purchased in 2010, so it’s about time for a new one. I’d rather just upgrade some parts in it, but it’s old enough that it’s not going to be able to run Windows 10 without replacing the motherboard, and I don’t want to do that. (And I’m not even sure if I can, and don’t want to waste a lot of time trying to figure that out.)

For software, I’m going to keep up my Office 365 subscription. Even though I’m not doing much with Office itself, the subscription is worth it for the OneDrive space. And I’ll keep using a lot of the applications I’ve been using, like Evernote and 1Password.

Summary
Well, this has turned into a long post, much like last year’s one. I started writing this around 10am, and it’s now 11:45, so I should really wrap this up and start thinking about lunch. It’s nice to have nothing important to do on New Year’s Day. It’s been quiet outside on Main Street all morning, and pretty quiet here in my apartment building. I’d like to go out for a walk, but it’s a bit cold out there today. Maybe after lunch it’ll be warm enough for a quick walk around the block.

stumbling my way into a mostly paperless system

I got a bit restless today and did a bunch of housecleaning, both literally and metaphorically.

For a long time, I’ve been trying to work towards going as paperless as I can. I still receive most of my bills and statements on paper, mostly because, in the past, I’ve been really bad about downloading those statements when I get the email notifications about them. I just let the email notifications pile up, then when I finally get around to following up on them, the statements they reference are no longer available.

So, this year, I’ve been trying to train myself to be better about that. I’ve been keeping my Gmail inbox pretty clean, and I’ve been good about marking actionable emails and then following up on them in a timely fashion. Today, I decided to take the plunge and switch my Merrill statements from paper to email. The Merrill statements have gotten out of hand over the last few years. Each month, I get a combined statement that’s 30 to 40 pages long. It’s printed on both sides, but it’s still a heck of a lot of paper. (And it’s mostly useless. But that’s a whole other discussion.) So turning off the paper on that should make a big difference.

My workflow for downloading and organizing statements has gotten a lot better since I switched to storing them in OneDrive. Now, I have the full folder hierarchy on both my Mac and PC, and can download and organize stuff on either machine. That removes a big stumbling block that I used to have; I had to turn on the desktop PC to do any of this stuff. (It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it definitely does get in the way.) And I can even download and store a statement right from my iPhone, though I’ve found that to be a little clumsy.

I also shredded all my 2014 Merrill statements today, and organized the stack of 2015 statements a bit. Now I’m looking forward to shredding the 2015 statements at some point next year, then not having to worry about that ever again.

inbox zero and project review

On this weekend and last weekend, I managed to get a lot of general clean-up stuff done. I’ve got my personal GMail account at inbox zero. (And I got my work mail down to zero too.) I downloaded and reviewed a bunch of financial statements and similar stuff that I’d been putting off for too long. And I got a lot of music-related organization and clean-up done (though my CDs are still not in alphabetical order).

So I’m thinking a bit about projects that I started, but put on hold at some point, and whether or not I should pick them up again, or if I should look for some new stuff to do.

I started learning Ruby (and Ruby on Rails) earlier this year. I read all the way through a good general book on Ruby, and started into a RoR book, but didn’t finish it. I’d kind of like to pick that up again, but I haven’t quite talked myself into it.

I also spent some time this year learning about SharePoint. I made a certain amount of progress with that, and came close to completing a SharePoint project at work, but then priorities shifted, and that project got put on hold, along with a bunch of other SharePoint stuff I was going to do. I’ll probably get back to those projects late this year or early next year.

I haven’t done anything with EdX or Coursera since the Superheroes course, which was really more for fun than a real educational course. So I should probably think about doing some kind of structured course for the fall.

So here I am, on a Sunday night in September, thinking about what I’m going to do with my spare time for the next few months. Hopefully, I can come up with something better than “watch Columbo episodes on Netflix”, which was kind of my summer project, to be honest. (I’m exaggerating. I did a lot of good stuff this summer. But I also watched a lot of Columbo.)