Lifestyle Soup

Do you wake up in the middle of the night asking yourself, “Did I forget to pay <company> ?” Thanks to some past financial mistakes, I have some credit card debt I balance among a number of cards to keep my credit score up.

However, along with a number of credit cards comes a number of bills every month. I have over 10 companies I send money to every month and that can get overwhelming. Thankfully I found an answer, and no, it wasn’t bankruptcy.

I initially tried using billpay at my bank, but they only let you schedule specific amounts of money every month, they don’t let you pay based on what’s actually due. Then I found PayTrust, a service by Intuit, the company behind QuickBooks, and costs $12.95 per month. Now, I must admit I’m not the biggest fan of their Mac software, but the site is pretty functional.

I change my address on all my bills to PayTrust and they notify me when a statement arrives. They scan it and store it on their servers, so I can check my statement from home, or across seas.

They have an ability to set rules on how much to pay, and when. I have most of my bills set to pay the minimum payment as soon as the bill arrives. All in all, it’s a very handy service, though a little clunky at times. I don’t even think about my bills anymore. Not my credit card statements, and not the landscaper who comes to mow my lawn.

One might ask why I don’t just set up auto-pay with the card companies themselves. Well, for one, only about 50% of the companies I deal with have auto-pay functionality. The rest require you to log in to pay. Secondly, I like being able to have all my bills in one place, and not get any financial documents in my mail.

Have you automated your bills? Tried PayTrust? Have any better suggestions? Drop me a line in the comments with your feedback.

(Image by genewolf)

Popularity: 69% [?]

Posted by ray on July 2, 2008 | No Comments

Recently on a plane flight, I was talking to a gentleman who was sitting next to me, and he mentioned an idea worth sharing. He said his friend’s household was constantly busy; everybody had different schedules, and didn’t have a lot of time to cook food.

One day they tried batching their food preparation. Every weekend they spend a few hours in the kitchen cooking a week or more worth of food for the whole household. Once cooked, they pull out their vacuum sealer and create individually sealed meals. Both the main dish and the sides are individually sealed with one multi-segment bag. In effect they are creating healthy boil-in-the-bag TV dinners.

After a busy day, they come home, go to their freezer, pull out a meal and throw it in a pot of boiling water. After the food is heated, they cut open the bag, put it on a plate and eat up.

Time saved? Many hours every week. Try it yourself and see if it works for you. Drop a line in the comments if you try it, or if you have done this yourself.

(Image by iboy_daniel)

Popularity: 71% [?]

Posted by ray on July 1, 2008 | No Comments

Poor sleep can leave you feeling unmotivated and unproductive. Your creativity suffers, your work suffers, and you suffer. But there are a number of things you can do to make sure you get the best sleep possible. Some of the ideas presented here are not particularly fun, as they involve major lifestyle changess, but they do work.

1. Use your bedroom for only two things, sleep and sex.
Train yourself to get sleepy when in your bedroom. If you consistently use your bedroom for only for sleep, you will find that similar to Pavlov’s dogs, you will come to associate that room with a place of rest, not entertainment. You might also want to consider blackout shades if your room doesn’t get dark since melatonin doesn’t build up unless it’s dark.

2. Get on a regular schedule
If anybody seems to have something against being on a regular schedule, it’s me. I’m a hypocrite for even mentioning this, but here we go. The best way to actually sleep well at night feel awake during the day is to sleep and wake up at the same time every day. Our bodies (when properly functioning) are on a 24 hour clock, which means our bodies operate at their best when we do what they want — normal schedules for eating and sleeping. Try getting on a regular schedule for two weeks and you will feel more alert, without a doubt.

3. Keep a notepad by your bed
If there is one thing that fuels insomnia for me it is an over-active mind. Thankfully there is a cure for it, usually. Usually it’s something you need to do in the morning or a problem you don’t know how to solve. Either way, write it down as soon as it enters into your mind. Your goal should be to assure yourself that nothing will be forgotten (it’s been written down) and that you have have expressed your worries. After getting all the things in my head written out, it’s like I just took a sedative. Try it, it might just work for you too.

4. Watch what you eat and drink
Eating or drinking too close before bedtime can disrupt good sleep. Drinking alcohol might make you tired, but it doesn’t let you get deep sleep, consequently leaving you feeling tired in the morning. Stop drinking at least three hours before you sleep.
Similarly, eating heavy meals before sleep can keep you from deep sleep as well. If you must eat before bed, eat light. Consider foods like turkey, milk, honey, tuna and egg whites which contain tryptophan which promotes sleepiness.

5. Read a book
Shut off that computer and TV. If you feel the need to entertain yourself, read a book. Books have a much higher calming effect than electronic media due to the fact that it’s static.

Try a few of the tips listed and you should be on your way to better sleep and happier, more productive days. I hope these tips were helpful. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any other tips you’d like to share!

(Image by chris_gin)

Popularity: 70% [?]

Posted by ray on July 1, 2008 | No Comments

Popularity: 72% [?]

Posted by ray on June 30, 2008 | No Comments

One of the hardest lessons I have learned in business is that when you try to be helpful by bending your own rules and giving your customer extra privileges you spoil them, and they they will expect those privileges indefinitely. Here are 4 steps to convert even the best customer into a life sucking monster. They are lessons I have learned the hard way and would not wish on anybody. They are lessons I still feel the repercussions of to this day.

Give them a discount

I have made this mistake way too many times. When you give somebody a discount, it’s like giving them a small slice of your soul. They believe they deserve it. From the customer perspective, you have bent on one of your policies which means you probably have more policies you will bend on, which leads naturally to think that you should …

Give them special free support

If you run a business that gives free support for a product, like web hosting in my case, that is one thing. It is when the customer will then ask for you to give support that is above and beyond the established support you have promised them. In the case of web hosting, they might call up and not only ask you for help logging in, but for you to install a new piece of software on their website, configure it and customize it, all for free because they already pay you good money. In other words, a customer will try to make you into their own free consultant because they think you owe it to them. It’s very tempting to show them how nice a person you are, but that leads us to our third problem, you risk not having firm boundaries.

Don’t set boundaries

Boundaries might just be the most important idea in business. If you don’t set clear cut boundaries, it can actually be a real disservice to the customer because they honestly don’t know where you stand. Maybe one day you go above and beyond the call of duty, but another day they ask for help again and you feel imposed on.

We can apply Parkinson’s law here and realize that if you do not set boundaries, your client will continue to ask for more favors because they think it’s okay, since you don’t seem to mind. Then when you are completely disgusted at the customer and start finding yourself bitter about how the relationship has gone south, you feel like the customer is needy, and they think you are acting horribly unprofessional.

Promise before you’re ready

One of the biggest issues I have had in the past has been promising things prior to them being ready. Promising new features to software, promising a new product, etc. The real problem here is not what I promised, but when I made it. I would make the promise and realize later on that I couldn’t live up to the promise.

I would suggest that you not make promises until you are nearly ready to follow through on that promise. I know what you might be thinking, “but usually when I make promises it’s because I’ve got somebody yelling at me.” In that case, make very conservative promises. When you don’t fulfill promises, it’s just one more thing your customer can hold over your head.

Early on in my business, I had a customer who said he refused to pay until we added a promised feature to his website. The customer went out of business (for other reasons) before we got around to adding the feature and we never saw another penny from him. Seems foolish to give such a deal, right? Well, we were sure we would have the feature added within a month, and the boundaries were already busted wide open. Boy did we learn our lesson there. I think I can still feel the pain down below.

It is extremely important to set expectations with your customers very early on and not to stray from them. If you do stray, you will not only hurt yourself in the long run, but you will hurt your client because they will get mixed signals from you. Special care must be exercised not to go down any of these steps, because it’s nearly impossible to return. Ultimately, you need to be consistent and only make promises you are positive you can keep.

You have a choice here, win-win, or win-lose with you the loser. It’s never the other way.

(Image by upsand)

Popularity: 91% [?]

Posted by ray on February 12, 2008 | 2 Comments

Image by riddian

A few years ago I read a great article about the power of muscle memory. Unfortunately I can’t remember the source, but it made me start brainstorming how I could make maximum use of muscle memory when using my computer. I’m sure that I’m not the first person to come to these conclusions, but what I came up with really improved my productivity. I must mention though, the technique I mention below applies to the Mac. I’m sure a resourceful Windows user could find a comparable application to provide the techniques I’m going to talk about.

Muscle Memory

Muscle memory, in a nutshell, is our ability to do tasks without consciously thinking about it. Walking involves muscle memory. We don’t have to think about every step we take. Brushing our teeth involves muscle memory. Try brushing your teeth with your other hand one of these days. If you’re not used to it, it’s very awkward because you have to think about every movement involved.

Muscle memory is our brain’s way of offloading tasks that normally distract our conscious thought into our subconscious instead. If a person couldn’t develop muscle memory, they couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time because they would lose track of what move to make next. We most likely couldn’t even walk to begin with.

Modern Computing Ignores Our Greatest Asset

I would argue that modern graphical interfaces are antithetical to our natural way of interacting with the world in regards to how we control them. Sure, in a visual sense GUIs are great. But if muscle memory is such an integral part of our lives, why don’t we make better use of this crucial human characteristic in modern computing as well? What really kills me is when I see people operate their computers and tell me they don’t use hot keys. They will use their mouse for every single thing they want to do. When I watch some of my friends work, I see them spending 3 seconds with every task switch while they select the application they want to use. This applies doubly to somebody like me who writes software and develops websites, with the constant switching between applications.

Application Hot Keys Are The Missing Ingredient

I downloaded a shareware app that allowed me to map hot keys to an action. The first thing I did was create a convention for my hot keys. They are as follows:

• OPTION-CMD for Applications
• SHIFT-OPTION-CMD for Folders
• SHIFT-CTRL-CMD for iChat buddies

I set up an initial set of hot keys for my most commonly used applications. Here are the hot keys I defined:

• OPTION-CMD-A for Address Book
• OPTION-CMD-3 for iTunes (3 as in mp3)
• OPTION-CMD-C for iCal
• OPTION-CMD-return for Terminal
• OPTION-CMD-Z for TextMate
• OPTION-CMD-M for Mail
• OPTION-CMD-W for Safari

Then I created a couple for folders:

• SHIFT-OPTION-CMD-tilde for my home directory
• SHIFT-OPTION-CMD-A for Applications folder
• SHIFT-OPTION-CMD-D for my Downloads folder

I created a simple Applescript that would either open a window for an iChat buddy or bring it to the foreground if it was already open. Here’s an example of my iChat hotkeys:

• SHIFT-CTRL-CMD-C for Cory
• SHIFT-CTRL-CMD-A for Anthony

Just to be clear, with every hot key I have mentioned, if the application, chat window or folder is already open, it simply brings it to the foreground. If it’s not open, it opens it. Either way, by pressing one of the hot keys, I can be sure that I get what I want: the window I requested.

Using Quicksilver To Create Hot Keys

About a year ago, I found Quicksilver and started using it for my hot keys via triggers. Here’s how I did it:

1. Install Quicksilver.
2. Go to the preferences in Quicksilver by activating Quicksilver (OPTION-space) and pressing CMD-, (comma)

   

3. In the preferences, click on the Triggers tab.

   

4. Click the plus icon to add a new Hot Key.

   

5. Select the application you’d like a assign a hotkey to.

   

6. Click on the right column where it says “None”



7. A drawer will open and show prompt you to set the key. Simply press the key combination you want to use. In my case, I used CMD-OPTION-A. Make sure not to use a hotkey that Mac OS X or another application already uses.

   

8. Close the window because you’ve added your hotkey. Now try it out anywhere. It should work perfectly.

   

I have used this setup for about three years and have had absolutely amazing results. Gone is the clunky way of switching apps; I have managed to tap into the power of muscle memory! I have found that I’ll simply think “I want Mail” and there it is, because I’ve developed such a habit of using the hot keys to activate it that I’ve stopped thinking about the act of actually getting to the application.

Now when I use somebody else’s computer it’s painful to not have my hot keys, and watching others work without them is painful to watch as they stumble around with their mouse to do everything. I get what I want INSTANTLY because I use hot keys for every possible thing. I will describe some of the other more interesting uses I have found for hot keys in the future if people are interested.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Posted by ray on February 11, 2008 | No Comments