I have a couple of watches that I wore regularly before getting my current smartwatch. The battery in one of them has gone dead and the other uses solar power. So, I keep it out where it can get some light. Feeling a bit nostalgic, I decided to wear it yesterday. That meant giving up my "fitness" tracking for the day.... and all of the reminders that go with it.
I found that I was able to do more deep thinking / concentrating work. The vibrating watch alerts weren't there. Besides, the fitness tracking, I did miss the awareness of having received a text message. Overall, I felt like it was a good change up.
Today, when I went back to the smartwatch, I went into my app settings and dialed back notifications on the apps that I felt were the most egregious interruptors. Overall, this made for a better day today.
What tech experiments can you do in your life?
Showing posts with label productivity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label productivity. Show all posts
Sony Flip 15 upgrade
I have a SONY Flip 15 convertible tablet (SVF15N17CXB) that I use primarily for contract work that requires a PC. It is a very nice machine with an i7, 8G of RAM and switching discrete/integrated graphics adapter. When I purchased it in early 2014 the two things it was lacking were an SSD and an active stylus. I quickly remedied the lack of stylus. It did come with a 1 TB hybrid fusion drive which I reasoned I would evaluate while SSDs continue to evolve. I used this configuration for the better part of a year. I noticed that most often observed slowness came back to I/O bound processes – the hard drive light was flickering a lot and the performance tab in task manager confirmed it. So, with the last minute renewal of tax credits on business asset purchases I decided to upgrade the machine.
I had originally picked out a Samsung 840 EVO at 512G. Since then the 850 line up was introduced. Based on my observed hard drive usage I decided to go with the faster, but slimmer (in capacity) 850 PRO in 256G.
I figured if I am going to go through the work of opening the machine up, I would upgrade the RAM at the same time. I went with 16GB of Crucial Ballistix that is also faster than the stock RAM. Since, the hard drive I’m pulling out is a 1TB drive I picked up a USB 3.0 enclosure with UASP support so I can use it as an external drive.
Upgrading the Flip 15 is not for the faint of heart. It is ultrabookish in form factor. What that means is no easy access panels. You get lots of screws with some of them hidden under rubber feet and a cover you have to pry off. I found the tear down in this video very useful. My tip is to start prying the cover off by the power connector. Continue loosening the cover all the way around. Slide the cover off by moving it away from the head phones connector.
In the picture above you can see the new memory in place in the lower middle of the picture. The SSD is under the silver and gold colored ribbons in the lower right of the picture. I did not utilize some of the existing foil/plastic shielding that was on the original case. It appeared that it was primarily there as an insulator between exposed components on the HDD circuit board and the rest of the machine. The SSD has no exposed parts. It an all plastic case. I did reuse the adhesive wrapper/shield on the bottom portion of the drive as it is also used to secure the drive cable connector.
Since installation of the new parts, the machines performance is much snappier. Windows 8.1 Pro launches in ~4 seconds from a cold boot. Development environments start up much faster. Overall, much less time is spent waiting on the machine.
Work when others are not
I read an interesting blog post from the Time Management Ninja where he talks about getting things done at the office during the last week of the year.
However, it wasn’t quite what I expected when I had seen the title (same as this blog post). For me, working when others are not is typically about quiet time at home or on the road working on personal or academic pursuits. To get this quiet time I typically “work when others are not” by getting up earlier than the rest of the house or staying up later.
While you can stay up later to work on things, I have found that past a certain time it just doesn’t matter. The mind fogs and the body starts forcing shutdown routines to run!
The approach that requires more discipline but I find is ultimately the better choice is to go to bed earlier and get up earlier. You awake refreshed, with clear head and a quiet house. Here are some tips to help you get that time in the morning:
- Figure out how many hours of sleep you need and how many hours you want for yourself before you have to leave for work or school in the morning. Set your go to bed time accordingly.
- Set an alarmed reminder for 30 minutes before your go to bed time. Start your shutdown routine.
- Use the alarm on your phone as your alarm clock and have it set to the minimum volume necessary. Set it up to not beep through the night for email or social network alerts.
- Shower the night before (but not at the last minute which wakes you back up)
- Lay out your clothes the night before. You may need to get dressed in the bathroom or other location so you don’t wake up others in the house.
- Have your workspace ready to go. Leave yourself a note of what you are going to work on. Have a bottle of water and perhaps a light snack there too.
- Pack your lunch the night before.
- If you are going to check email or your favorite sites, set a timer so you don’t blow all your quiet time on that.
I hope you find this information useful and are able to enjoy a more calm morning and enjoy some more sunrises!
The Big Yes, Focus and Squirrels
Lately, the notions of "having a bigger yes that permits you to say to no to other things" and "focused intensity" have been on my mind.
The Bigger Yes
The basic idea here is that you have some compelling big thing that you are saying yes to in your life. This permits you to say no to other things. An example would be that students will choose to say no to some activities because they are saying yes to their education.
Focused Intensity
There is the notion of living a life in balance. There is another of focused intensity. Mastery and the exceptional are more often associated with focused intensity than balance in all things.
I was doing some research on focused intensity and came across this blog post:
http://mistakemaker.com/2009/11/23/momentum-lessons-from-a-spray-bottle-and-a-4-year-old/ With an interesting formula/idea from Dave Ramsey. And in a round about way led me here: http://lci.typepad.com/leaders_resourcing_leader/2010/01/my-entry-2.html
I took/thought about the formula in the first and noted that dividing by time (over time) was totally incorrect. The last post is better. However, it still seemed a bit off to me. So, I revised the equation as a summation and added a target set of goals for focused intensity. I don't think the result is momentum. To me the result would be the achievement of a goal.
The Squirrel Diverter
Once upon a time I read about an idea to create a specific to you web page and set that as your start page. The basic notion is to redirect yourself away from the squirrel that had grabbed your attention. Here is Merlin Mann's page: http://www.merlinmann.com/rightnow/
With out too much effort you can create your own default web page. If you host it on your website and use Chrome with Google Sync it can be your default page everywhere! Or simply save it as an HTML file on your machine and default to it.
The Result
So, thinking about the focused intensity formula, my big yes and the squirrel diverter, I created my own default page. I used html so that I could list the most important goals and easily update them. The end result can be seen here:
I would encourage you to think about your big YES and create your own focus intensifying start page.
Programmer Productivity Tools
I’ve been reading Neal Ford’s The Productive Programmer. It’s a good read so far. I’ve picked up a few tools that have already been helping. Pick up the book for the details on the reasoning behind having/using these utilities.
Virtual Desktop Manager VirtuaWin this lets you have multiple virtual desktops. I’m using one for communication apps, one for development, one for research and one for miscellaneous stuff.
Clipboard Manager Tool Ditto. So far, I’m not very fond of the UI but I like the way it works. Let’s you work with a clip board stack across all of your apps. I used it to clip all of the URLs for this article and then paste them in appropriately.
Clipboard Manager that is a Windows Gadget. Lots of background choices. It’s a Windows Gadget so it’s always visible. However, I’m not liking the way it works. I’ll probably drop it. Just thought I’d give it a whirl and thought gadget lovers might go for it.
Cygwin for bash, *nix-ish utilities, vim, Emacs, wget, curl, etc. Keep around the downloaded executable. It’s really a loader and not an installer per se. You’ll also have a download folder that accompanies the loader. So, you may want to pre-plan where you’re going to keep that before you run the loader.
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