Daily Journal March 22, 2016

Excel To-do List

Today I got a lot done at work.

And why?

I have a great tool to help me.

It works on a pretty simple principle. It answers the question "What should I do now?"  

Now as I get distracted it also answers the question "What should I be working on?"

In addition, it time-boxes the task so I can use Parkinson's Law to set a limit on time I spend on it.

The basic idea is to capture things I have to do into 3 columns of a spreadsheet. 

1. The first column is the highest priority stuff to get to
2. The second column is the next level priority
3. The third column is the backlog of stuff I need to get to

The I randomly select a task to do from the 1st column. The spreadsheet selects it and I start to work on it. I can select 15, 30 or 60 minutes to work on the task or skip it if I want.

When the task is selected it shows me in a form what I'm working on with the elapsed time. When I finish the task I use the Strike-through font (Ctrl+5). .  

I'm sure that doesn't make sense so I'll have to put a video together showing the power of this tool.

Caption Monitoring

One thing I'm working on is better time tracking. I was wondering how much time I spend in Outlook so I developed some Excel VBA code to monitor the Active window and track the amount of time I'm in Outlook.  I think this could be useful for detecting time other software is being used. After developing it I'm not sure that it's that useful as there is a process that I take when I get emails. There are 3 types of emails:

1. Useless stuff that I didn't need to look at
2. Information that I may need in the future
3. Some request that I need to answer

Now the 3rd item can take me from minutes to days depending on what the request is. So knowing that I was in Outlook gives me some information but it doesn't track well the issue that I'm working on. I would be nice to be able to track information related to the request that came in.

Ernie Belittles me

My friend Ernie at work belittles me because I told him about my list of  > 100 things I'm focusing on. He's a Buddhist and to him it's the opposite of focused.  "You can't do that!" But maybe I can and maybe it's exactly what I want to do. I can explore new things and put to rest tasks that I don't want to do and figure what to work on. I got the idea from +james altucher who says to be working on 20 ideas because you don't know which one will get traction. Then he minimizes my video on how to transcribe a podcast with shortcut keys.

Left out again

Not sure why I wasn't included in a meeting this morning. My boss invited everyone on the team but forgot to invite me. WTF. He realized it an then invited me after the meeting was in progress for 10 minutes.

Interesting Titles

I was at Barnes and Noble and they had a number of interesting titles. I bought War of Art

• The Art of Thinking Clearly
• This Book will make you Smarter
• Idiots Guide to unlocking Creativity
• Wired to Create
• The Art of Creative Thinking
• Why we Snap
• One Simple Idea

Voice Recognition to Transcribe a Podcast

I tried to use the Windows and the Google software to transcribe a podcast but it doesn't work. I think it's still quicker and better to just type it. The software could barely understand any words. The only thing that worked partially was playing the podcast to headphones and repeating what the guests were saying. I'm going to try a test for a fixed time say 10 minutes and see which has better results.

Yesterday I posted a video on how to transcribe a podcast using short cut keys. The main keys to use are:

Key	Action
Alt+Tab	Switch Window
Alt+Shift+Tab	Switch Window
Space	Play/Pause YouTube video toggle
Left Arrow	Back video 5 seconds on YouTube
Right Arrow	Forward video 5 seconds on YouTube
Ctrl+PgDn	Next tab in Chrome
Ctrl+PgUp	Prev tab in Chrome

Nice Guitar

While napping yesterday I awake to the following video on PBS of Paint it Black.