Your Organizing Coach

Password Hints

I have 170 passwords in my Palm. Some are written in directly, the ones I use for sites where I don't care about security, like reading the New York Times online. Others I use so often I have them in my head. But there too are many secure passwords for me to remember and those are listed with hints only.

Mine your past to create easy-to-remember passwords with letters and numbers. It's important not to use current information that you might possibly have recorded elsewhere, or that would just be easy for someone to guess. Also, current information that seems memorable now might not stand the test of time. For the letters part, I typically use:

• Names of former teachers
• Names of streets I used to live on
• Names of neighborhoods I used to live in
• Names of my childhood friends' pets

For the numbers part, try:

• Four digit birth dates of friends and relatives (provided these aren't recorded with the person's name in your datebook)
• Previous street addresses, mine and friends'
• Parts of old phone numbers, mine and friends' (I actually remember the phone number of my best friend from first grade)

So the hints look like this: "Second grade teacher, Dan's birthday" or "North Beach Street, Lynn's phone (last 4 digits)." Easy to use for you, hard to crack for anyone else. Try it!

Voicemail, Improved

Two big reasons I love email:

• I can send a quick reply or request or, more likely, a whole slew of them. Not that I have anything against conversations, but sometimes I really need to get through a list of to do's and email is the quickest way to dispatch them.
• I can send email on my own schedule. I don't need to worry about interrupting or, worse, waking someone up. I send emails when it's convenient for me and the addressee responds likewise.

The fly in this ointment is that some of my correspondents really prefer voicemail. But, calling someone means that they might answer and I'll actually have to talk to them! Yikes!

Besides the above-mentioned reasons, there are other times when I just don't want to talk. I'm not in a good mood, or I'm concentrating on something else or I'm just not feeling very verbal. Now I have a solution; a fabulous service called Pinger.

I knew there was a way to send a message directly to voicemail with my phone service provider, but only to fellow subscribers. So I looked on the web, knowing there must be something like it that would work no matter who I was calling. And I found Pinger. Bingo.

Pinger provides a way to call someone's voicemail directly, meaning you don't even have to wait for the ring, much less listen to someone's outgoing message (save those precious mobile minutes!). It can be used to send voicemail to a group of people, but it works fine for individual calls too. And you're not limited to a few sentences as you are with text messaging.

When you sign up with them, you give them your cell phone number, then enter names and numbers for those you want to ping. Then you call into the Pinger number, say the name of the person you want to ping and record your message. Easy peasy. An email confirmation of your message is sent, and you also get an email when your message is picked up.

I'm very happy with this service. And, it's free! Check out Pinger today!

Less Information = Fewer Decisions to Make

I've written many times about decision making (here and on my previous blog, which I wrote between March and October of 2006) and how to make it easier and less time consuming. Today I discovered a new way, which is just having fewer decisions to make.

I wrote the other day about Timothy Ferriss's "low information diet." Another of his posts is about a man who followed the Bible literally for a year and found, among other things, that life was easier because decision making was simpler.

His decisions were now all based on what the Bible said (a minimal information diet). If the Bible said yes, he said yes. If the Bible said no, he said no. You don't have to simplify quite so far, but you can see how it works. The less input you have, the fewer variables there are.

This works best if you realize up front that you will never have all the information you need to make the "perfect" decision anyway. Your access will be limited by time or other logistics. So, why not limit information yourself, with criteria you choose?

I've noticed that people get far too involved in collecting information, ostensibly for the purpose of making decisions, but actually because they get hooked on it. Sort of like following link after link on the Internet. It's hard not to fall down that information rabbit hole.

Try thinking of it as a real diet. For a real diet to be successful, you have to focus on what you're eating and the exercises you're doing. If you focus on what you can't eat, you're more likely to fail. When the diet is over, the chocolate cake will still be there. Same with information. You're really not going to miss anything important (see point #3).

The Low Information Diet

I've been reading Timothy Ferriss's blog, specifically his entries about the "low information diet." This is a powerful concept. It refers to not reading the newspaper, spending less time on email and the web and generally limiting the information that comes into your life. Here's a great example of why you don't need to follow the news, from Ferriss's interview with Drew Curtis of Fark.com:

Ferriss: If you had to limit your information intake to less than 30 minutes a day (excluding email), what would you consume/read/watch?

Curtis: Nothing. I’d wait until my friends asked me “did you see that?” and then say “no, why do you ask?” and see if their response is interesting. You can always catch up later. Oftentimes when news breaks it’s hours or days before anyone knows what actually happened. Wait until next week for the summary if it’s that important.

Why is this good? In your personal life, you free up more time to do the things you want to do. At work, you stop being interrupted by questions and requests all the time because a) you don't answer your email fast enough and b) people start to realize you didn't read the article in question so you don't know the answer anyway.

Vacation Thinking

I just got back from vacation.  I stayed with a friend part of the time but mostly I lived out of my rental car. I had the right clothes, plenty to drink (I was in the desert), great music to keep me company and money for whatever needs came up (such as a new camera battery. Dang!). I felt free and ready for anything, even though I hardly had any things.

Even if you have lots of clutter at home or are just "well supplied," you've probably had that experience. You don't even miss what's on your desk, not to mention what's at the back of the closet, right? I know, vacation isn't real life. But what if it were?

"Vacation thinking" is being more in the present (because you only have a week). It's carrying just enough stuff with you to meet your needs, but no more (because you're busy having fun and not worrying about stuff). It's about enjoying what you went there for (because you can't do the things that are happening somewhere else at some other time).

I'm not saying start living out of a suitcase. Just try putting less energy into shuffling stuff around and making lists and worrying about time and more energy into now. The more you do this streamlining, the better you'll get at identifying what you do need to get by and what's really meaningful to you. Bon voyage!

Goals vs. Tasks

You need both goals and tasks, and they're easy to confuse. A big reason that people don't get things on their to do list done isn't that they procrastinate, but that the list entries aren't really do-able.

Does your to do list look like this?

• Design the book
• Increase sales this month
• Find an accountant

These are actually all goals, not tasks. A goal is reached via a series of tasks. Once you identify a goal you need to figure out what the first thing to do is. Do that, then figure out the next thing. And so on.

Here's a real to do list based on the list above:

• Narrow color schemes down to 2 choices and create palettes
• Contact top three clients this week and remind them of the new products
• Ask Maya and Rob if they can recommend an accountant

Notice that to do's are much more specific. They are active, they have deadlines and they involve particular people. As soon as they're done, they're replaced by the next logical step, for example, schedule a meeting to present the color schemes, or follow up the client calls with mailed brochures.

If something is languishing on your list for weeks on end, it might be a goal. To find out, just ask yourself, well, how do I design the book?  You know the answer already; you just need to put that on the list instead.

Tips for Taming Distractions at Work

I often hear from people that they come in to the office early in the morning or on weekends just to get some work done in peace. They don't particularly like doing it, but they do like the quiet and the lack of interruptions from phone, email and coworkers.

Lifehacker yesterday ran a post about "guerilla tactics" people use to get some distraction-free time at work. This was a favorite:

"A couple colleagues of mine and I schedule fake meetings so we can sit and get an hours work done. If it's just the three of us, it's quiet and easy because we know why we're there."

Over at 43Folders, there were several good ideas for managing emails and meetings, such as "filter any email that contains the string “to unsubscribe.” Although many of these certainly will be valuable (sign-ups, Google lists), that string means there’s a good chance they’re also bulk messages that are being generated automatically. And some folks want to only see those sorts of emails, again, once or twice a day — and only when they have extra time"

Email in this category is being referred to these days as bacn. It's not as bad as spam but it significantly clogs inboxes.