Hacking Your Passions

I have picked up a few neat tricks over the last year and a half, now that I’m at least occasionally a business traveller. Ways to fold clothes in on themselves so as to maximize space, minimize wrinkles, and get a week’s worth of gear in carry-ons for airplane travel (so as to not have to check luggage in). The somewhat inexplicable and potentially frustrating inverse relationship that seems to exist between the speed/cost of high speed internet access at a hotel and the cost of the room per night (cheap hotels almost always have better and free access, and seem more likely to have wi-fi).

Reading through this list of forty additional tips, I’m seeing a few that could come in handy in the future, like…

Buy something from a local store. Want to blend in? Try making a purchase from a local grocery store. The local bag will make you look more like a native and is much less likely to be stolen than an expensive purse or day pack.

Split up cash and credit cards. When traveling, alone or otherwise, it’s always a good idea to keep at least some of your money and credit cards separate. This way, if you do lose one set you’ll have another to fall back on and your trip won’t be disrupted as heavily.

Keep your hotel’s phone number and address on you. You don’t want to end up stranded in a foreign country with no way to get back to your hotel. Keep your hotel’s business card with you so you can show it to the cab driver if you don’t speak the language and have the number handy so you can call if you need to.

I hadn’t really thought about it in exactly these terms before, but when I came across this article on how to back up your life, I figured it would be worthwhile to review it and see if there are any gaps I need to plug in order to feel like I’ve got a good back-up plan myself.

Career - I’m feeling pretty good here. I have a great career going at my current employer, and I’ve always been a jack-of-all-trades sort of person, so if the job I’m in comes into jeopardy I’m comfortable that my skills can cross over into lots of different opportunities. I update my resume about once every six months, though nowadays it’s just so it’s not so ominous when I need to do it, plus it is fun to see what resume builders have happened in the last few months that need adding. And I have a solid enough nest egg if “something unforeseen happens”.

Finance - I’ve been putting away for retirement at the almost absurd-seeming age of 22 (especially considering what a moron I otherwise was, relatively, at 22).My wife and I are in eternal live-below-your-means mode, and I don’t think it’s in us to ever really change that way of life.

Your Personal Records - honestly, the biggest issue in all of this might be the backing up of information. I’m not a hoarder of things, but I am a hoarder of bits, of information, so it’s always a struggle to keep up.

Question: did this article miss anything important we should be thinking of “backing up” in our lives.

This nice, well thought out tool by David Seah to determine and visually represent the worth of accomplishing a particular goal versus the others on your list, so as to prioritize time more effectively. I’ve created similar tools in Excel for my personal use, and certainly his criteria don’t work very well for the things I care about tracking, but the concept, idea, and execution is really nicely put together, and I love the way the points are tracked.

Lifehack.org holds within its grasp the penultimate blog post on how to make the most of to do lists - how to write them, how to make them work, how to keep doing them and make it a habit. I’ll be spending some time digging through this entry.

Also, for those who joke about people who spend so much time doing lists instead of just doing the things on them - an hour spent planning saves ten in execution. It’s not just about making sure you remember everything, it’s prioritizing and making sure nothing is missed, and that you aren’t spending an hour now doing something when in half an hour something is due that would only take fifteen minutes. Or as a coworker once put it, it’s about putting out the fire that’s closest to burning you.

I have a little LLC I formed a few years ago to make sure I kept my business separate from everything else, financially and legally speaking.  I was glad that a wise friend walked me through that process, many of the pitfalls that are easily avoided IF you know about them. This article regarding Accounting 101 for Freelancers and the importance of a corporate veil is nice to see out there - hopefully it will help a few folks dodge a few bullets.

The author of this post on finding the perfect weekly planner has some criteria I wouldn’t necessarily have in a search for my own ideal tool. But the post did make me consider what my own needs might be, and how to go about meeting them.

What I use right now has some ups and some downs. I currently organize my life with a Franklin Covey leather-bound organizer, and what I love LOVE about it is it handles all aspects of my life. My friends at work (especially those in their early to mid twenties) think I’m nuts for copying my meetings from Outlook to my organizer via pencil, but work is just one aspect of my reality and any tool I use for avoiding ball-dropping has to handle home, school, work… life! Outlook at work does not.

What I do find somewhat lacking in the current organization setup is its system for prioritizing things. I don’t know what the solution is, but I need to be able to see categories within categories when it comes to my tasks, and I need to know if task A is going to take me an hour longer than task B and plan accordingly. Going on guts/instinct is not sufficient for the left-brain, OCD part of me.

So, I keep visiting the Franklin Covey store looking for magic to happen. What I should do is spend some time thinking about what needs aren’t met by their current product line, hand them that list, and then pester them incessently until they acquiesce to my requests.

A while back I mentioned a separate blog I was keeping to organize my thoughts and efforts as I work on the book I am writing, Harness Your Passions (working title). Recently, this article on sparking your creativity through creating lists of 100 prompted me to start another blog (because that’s what I do lately - start blogs). On the newest blog, my goal is to create http://100lists.blogspot.com/, in an effort to brainstorm and keep the creativity flowing as I nurture the part of my brain responsible for wanting to take on this whole book writing thing.

43 Folders recently posted about something I’ve noticed (and been a bit disturbed by) several times in recent years. As we dump into our Blackberries or laptops all of our knowledge of phone numbers, birthdays, and other important information about our friends, family, and colleagues, we’re losing our ability to recall that information without relying on whatever technology we stuck it all in.

I run into more and more people that not only don’t know the phone numbers of people they are veryclose to, they sometimes have to look to remind themselves of their own phone number! In fact, I worked at a place recently for over a year without ever memorizing my number there.

So my question is: is this a problem? It is certainly an interesting new issue as we rely on technology more and more for remembering this sort of thing, but I’m not sure it’s that big of a thing to worry about. We have to remember so much other information to do our work nowadays, since there’s just so much more information to know, that I think maybe we’re just being more efficient about how we’re utilizing our gray matter. What do you think?