How I Increased My Productivity 1000% During My Vacation

During my little week long break from blogging I made a few changes to help boost my moral and increase my productivity at least 1000%. Here they are:

Dumped Google Reader

I completely switched over to a desktop client for OS X called Vienna. While it does some things that tick me off, it is very nice not having to open up Safari or Firefox, goto Google reader, hope it doesn’t randomly delete my feeds (a problem I’ve been having), wait for its damn AJAX calls to go through, reload the page because the AJAX calls failed, and then finally read the new articles. I’ve just been having too many problems with G Reader lately and I got tired of fixing them all the time.

Now the only Google services I care about anymore are Gmail and Feedburner. If their other stuff went offline I really wouldn’t care. Even those two services I could dump in a nanosecond if I had to.

Cleaned Up My Desktop

My main computer is a 3.7ish year old iBook G4 - and it simply isn’t fast. When my desktop has a bunch of icons it really slows down. I have to stop letting it get so crowded… oh well.

Cleaned Out My Keyboard

My keyboards get dirty fairly quickly because I’m always eating near them and my cat is always hopping up on my desk. Needless to say - some keys don’t always work as well as others and I’ve learned that can really throw off your concentration. I’m not sure if there is a proper way to clean them - but usually I’ll just pick up the keyboard and shake it upside down outside or over a trash can.

It’s pretty surprising what can come popping out of those things - once I found a penny - but usually all I find is bunches of my cat’s hair, old chunks of potato chips, and other gross oddities.

Cleaned Off My Desk

Although I did this a few weeks before my vacation - I figured it should be mentioned. My desk was cluttered with papers - some even had important information on them. I cleaned them up and separated them into “save,” “recycle,” “shred,” and “burn” piles. I’ve always tried to be a very secure person - so I burn papers that have things like SSNs on them. Don’t ever shred things like that - burn them. It’s not too difficult to reconstruct shredded documents (even if put through shredders that cut them in a diamond shape), but it is impossible to reconstruct burnt papers. Just a quick safety tip

Stopped Watching TV

Long story short - I haven’t really watched TV in weeks. In fact, I really haven’t watched much TV since I was 13 or so, but even then I would still watch the occasional Simpsons episode. The only things I watch now are financial and political news, weather, Simpsons/Family Guy style shows, and Survivorman/Man Vs Wild. I might only watch it for an hour, and I’ll be doing other things at the same time.

Started Exercising

During the winter I like doing weight lifting - and this winter will be no different. I exercised once during my vacation, helped someone move, and helped someone else push around 50 pound displays for an expo. I really don’t find things like that to be fun - but I do feel much better and more energetic afterwards.

Switched Desktop Wallpaper

Believe it or not simply switching my wallpaper gave me a little boost. I suppose it gets a bit boring looking at the same old thing day after day. I use Mac Desktops for a lot of my wallpaper, but sometimes I just make my own. Ah, and let’s not forget about the lovely bikini wallpaper… just kidding

Got Rid Of Old/Crappy RSS Feeds

For some reason I kept a lot of old and crappy RSS feeds on Google Reader. When I switched to Vienna I got rid of some of those feeds, so now it takes much less time to get interesting news articles and blog posts. Plus I got rid of repetitive feeds - for example I was registered to a lot of tech blogs as well as Digg tech section - which was stupid. Most of the articles that were interesting made it onto Digg - so I removed all of the other blogs. In addition, I was subscribed to Engadget and Gizmodo - which makes no sense at all. They both cover the same things.

Only Check RSS At Night

Before switching to a new reader I was one of those news addicts. I couldn’t get enough of it. Because Vienna has to connect to a bunch of servers when it launches it takes a bit longer to open up than Google Reader, so I only read it once per day, at night usually. It’s amazing how much extra time I have thanks to that.

Posting Less Often

Just in case you haven’t noticed - I’ve finally switched over to a new posting schedule (once every two days instead of every day). Doing so has helped me get other projects done but will also hopefully give me more time for editing and promotion.

Do you have any cool productivity tips to share?

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