At work, thousands of acronyms are mentioned, like they had an important meaning. And most of the time the meaning of the acronym is meaningless.
I've come up with a few acronyms, some good and some bad. Many acronyms may have lost their meaning like IBM where the acronym is more meaningful than the original term, (International Business Machines).
Sometimes acronyms obscure meaning KFC - Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Some of the acronyms I've come up with help me but probably confuse my readers.
One thing I hate is when someone at work gives a PPT (PowerPoint) presentation and doesn't define the acronym they've used.
Acronyms can be used as a mnemonic device like the word HOMES representing the Great Lakes in the United States.
Back to ASSCURL which is a funny word maybe it means twerking, but this is a memory device to help remember the 7 categories of persuasion which was created by Robert Cialdini.
The categories are: Authority Social Proof Scarcity Commitment or consistency Unity Reciprocity Liking
So when you need to persuade like when:
getting a job
writing a resume
getting others at work to do things for you
getting your friend and family to do stuff
finding a date
writing an ad
selling a product or service
writing a book
getting a promotion
changing a person's mind
To learn more about ASSCURL see
Some of my favorite acronyms that I created:
FUD WUD UG WUG - iF yoUDo What yoU've Done, yoUGet What yoU've Got
I get the following error message while trying to run some code I've developed. I just made some changes to this subroutine so odds are that it's missing.
The first thing I do is check if other macros are working. I have one that inserts a blank cell and shifts all the other cells down within the active column. I try it and it works.
I did move the macro from ThisWorkbook to a module so it can be called by other routines.
I press Alt+F11 and search for the string in the error message "book.on"
and then try the function again. It fails with the same message. I check the change I made and see that I did it wrong and fix it. Another test and the the fix works.
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.
The first column is the highest priority stuff to get to
The second column is the next level priority
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:
Useless stuff that I didn't need to look at
Information that I may need in the future
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.
