I thought y’all might be interested in this little tool:

http://dot3labs.com/procrastitracker/

it delivers the most detailed time usage statistics of any such tool yet, all automatic. Allows you to tag anything afterwards for per-project stats and such.

Give it a try and let me know what you think! :)

Minor milestone in my household coming soon: my son is starting preschool, meaning I’ll suddenly have more time on my hands. It’s only three mornings a week though; as much as I’d like to hire someone to read to me, it’s not enough time to start anything major. But it is enough that I can’t waste the opportunity. Four hours of quiet, non-Sprout time in the morning is perfect for getting the high-priority stuff out of the way. I need to come up with a game plan so I don’t end up watching SportsCenter and fiddling with iTunes the whole time.

I have my own strategy, of course, but I wanted to ask the wise elders here how I should spend an extra 12 hours a week, and see if we can spot any holes in my plan.  read more »

When I wrote about my method for controlling RSS overload a couple weeks ago, 43 Folders user terceiro left a comment that put me in my place:

You’re feeling stress about your RSS feeds? Talk about self-created problems. The real solution to managing RSS feeds is to stop reading RSS feeds. It’s simple … when a purely optional “convenience” technology is causing stress, it’s time to re-evaluate at a pretty fundamental level.

I read this and thrashed and spluttered like Yosemite Sam for a while before I admitted it: he’s right. It is a self-created problem, and I need to understand what makes me feel the need to consume the equivalent of a Carnegie library every day, instead of just finding a more efficient way to choke it down.  read more »

Besides baseball, coffee, and my music collection, I probably obsess over how I read RSS feeds more than anything. Sometimes it feels like I tinker with the setup more than I actually read the news, but I’m making progress. I won’t claim to be completely satisfied with how or why I try to consume so much information from the internet, but lately I’ve been as content with the process as I can hope.  read more »

I have a lot of trouble keeping track of what I'm supposed to be doing. It's not that I necessarily have trouble prioritizing my tasks or scheduling things - I mean I do, but that's not the main problem.

The main problem is that I've got too many things I really need (want) to do - too many long-term projects with potential - and I'm never exactly sure when they're a few weeks away from a grand payoff and when they're just wasting my time.

I suppose this is a crisis of faith.  read more »

I heart instant messaging, but I heart it too much. If you’re a chat addict like me, you understand the lure. It’s convenient, connecting you to faraway buddies with little cost. It’s safe, releasing you from the worry of looking pretty or sounding sexy. And its deliciously fun. How can you not love video effects, screensharing, and presentation-hosting in Leopard’s iChat?

Despite the benefits, instant messaging can turn you into a mindless chat drone. Too much chatting replaces real interactions and, soon, people turn into pixels.

To bring richer conversations back into your life, here are 7 bad chatting habits to stop right now. I’ve formatted them as a “not-to-do” list:  read more »

Since my days are set to the sleeping patterns of a toddler and the biorhythms of a dog, I have to squeeze my “work,” i.e. writing, interviews, blogging, etc, into naptime and the few hours after the boy goes to bed and before I collapse. I’m pretty good about getting the important, bill-paying stuff done, but unfortunately that means what suffers is Me Time, things like reading books or watching a ballgame on TV without a computer in my lap. When I just spent most of my day stressing out about what I wasn’t getting done because I was at the playground or reading Richard Scarry books 49 consecutive times, I can’t very well justify not doing my stuff when I’m back home and books are put away.

One day this week, the boy was at Grandma’s for the day, so I lined up a ton of things to knock out. Most of my afternoon was going to be spent dealing with some carpenters installing a cabinet in our house, so I also knew I had to get busy in the morning. As any time-constrained person knows, feeling squeezed is the best way to make yourself efficient, and I finished everything I needed to by lunch. Then, lo and behold, the furniture guys called and said they couldn’t make it, so I was faced with a free afternoon.  read more »