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Common sense

The Time Management Waltz

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So the back is feeling a little better, though we’re told by the physical therapist and Young Dr. Kildare that it will never be 100 percent again.

The most obvious immediate cause of this predicament is my habit of spending hour after uninterrupted hour in front of the computer.

Yesterday, for example, I woke up at 12:30 a.m. Couldn’t get back to sleep. Finally gave up a little after 1:00, got out of bed, and sat down in front of the computer. Graded 14 student papers. Wrote a blog post. Answered e-mails.

Fell back into bed after dawn, around 5:30 or 6 a.m. Couldn’t get back to sleep. Rousted out of bed by Gerardo, shortly followed by M’hijito, who dropped off his sick dog to preclude a gigantic floor mess at his house.

After all that dust settled, parked myself in front of the computer again. Edited a lengthy article by an ESL writer. Read a broad and random selection of news and play-nooz stories online. Commented on fellow bloggers’ sites. Fielded e-mail. Responded to student queries and plaints. And on and on and on and on… Shipped off the edited copy to the anthology editor about 8 p.m.

This

has

got

to

stop.

So later in the evening another activity that occupied time in front of the computer monitor was an analysis of just how much time I do spend and how much I should spend sitting in front of the computer monitor.

It occurred to me that, with the help of a cheap kitchen timer, I should be able to establish some limits on the amount of time per day that I spend sitting in a back-demolishing desk chair. Set the thing for 30 minutes or an hour and when it goes off, get up and do something else for a while. Or — outlandish idea — just stop working!

Thinking about this some more, it struck me that I tend to work at random, plowing through whatever pile is on the desk in an attempt to get through it all as fast as possible. So on some days, I’m doing things that don’t really need to be done that day — they could be put off. This habit tends to keep me sitting in front of the computer for unnecessarily long stretches.

Because I have several enterprises going at once — teaching, blogging, making jewelry, writing the proposed books that never get finished because there are so damn many other things to do — there’s always something that either needs to be done right now or could be done right now. And that creates the illusion that everything must be addressed right this minute.

Not, of course, so…

I took it into my head to list the things I typically do in a day, strictly limiting them to the smallest number of minutes or hours I estimated it would take to do them. This, I figured, would allow me to get a grip, simply by setting a timer for the designated period per task and then stopping and moving on to the next task each time the timer bleats.

The bare minimum number of hours needed to accomplish all I do in a typical day came to slightly over eight.

Holy sh!t. No wonder I spend my entire life in front of a computer.

Finally, it crossed the feeble mind that one could, at the start of any given day, decide what will be the dominant task of the day. Knowing that x or y will be emphasized that day, one could then schedule enough computer time for that job and, if desired, for one or two other jobs. And then, knowing what amounts of time should be scheduled for the given computerized projects of the day, one could limit that time.

The result, with any luck, would be fewer hours spent at the desk and more hours devoted to getting a life.

This thought appears to be on the right track. I created a spreadsheet showing what would happen if one spent x number of hours on one task and y and z hours on other things. The assumption here is that eight hours is the absolute maximum I wish to spend in pursuit of profit. The number of hours slated for each specific activity appear as negative figures, so they will subtract from the 8 hours allotted per day using the ∑ button.

ComputerEscape3

Here, the hours per task are subtracted from eight hours budgeted per day. The “Remaining hours” row shows the time that could be used getting up out of the bone-crushing chair or devoted to tasks that don’t get done during the time allotted to the scenarios posited in the top row (i.e., spending more hours than usual blogging, or more hours on editing).

The first column, “On Average,” represents the number of hours I typically spend on any given task — assuming nothing out of the ordinary is going on. So, if on a typical day I spent only the typical number of hours on those activities, they would occupy about eight hours.

As a practical matter, they’d occupy a lot more than that, because few of these activities limit themselves naturally to the periods shown in column 2. That’s because I tend to work on something until I’m done, rather than stopping after a reasonable time.

The bottom row shows the number of hours each scenario would have me working.

Let’s say I follow this scheme to allocate time. If I spend three hours on blogging, one or more other tasks will have to be cut back or go away altogether — as we see in column 3, to provide three hours for blogging and still keep the workload at 8 or fewer hours, I’d do no editing, no other writing, and no jewelry-making. Teaching time would be limited to one hour. And so on.

Some of these task allocations would free up a significant amount of time. Others…not so much. On a day when I did a lot of blogging and then tried to complete one four-foot-long beaded lariat, I’d end up spending 9 hours (at least!) with my nose on the grindstone. As a practical matter, this would add up to much more than that, because it’s not easy to stop when you’re on a roll. The kitchen timer went off about five minutes ago, and I haven’t stopped typing…

In theory, I should get up right now and vacuum the floors. But wouldn’t it be good if this post went live before the day ends on the East Coast? To make that happen, I have to sit here and FINISH the damn thing!

But a few helpful guidelines do present themselves from this exercise.

• Get a timer and set it for one-hour periods. Once an hour, get out of the chair and spend 15 minutes moving around the house or yard.

• Editing and serious writing really take it out of you, and each requires large chunks of uninterrupted time. Do not try to do these on the same day. (I don’t put blogging in the “serious” category because it doesn’t require a lot of formally cited and documented research, nor, like writing fiction, does it require you to transport yourself mentally into a detailed imaginary world and enter the minds of fully conceived imaginary characters.)

• The jewelry-making is ditzy and demanding. One needs to focus on that for a lengthy period, too. Don’t try to do it on the same day as editing or real writing.

• Occasionally, the work of teaching is also somewhat demanding and tiring. Do not try to combine a lengthy stretch of course prep or grading with a lengthy stretch of editing or serious writing.

• Don’t assume the budgeted time must be consumed by the assigned tasks. If the work is done, stop. Spend the rest of the day socializing, exercising, cleaning, gardening, playing with the dog, or loafing.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Well. Let’s see if mindfully following this scheme works…

The Identity Thief at the Doorstep

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So I’m wending my way to physical therapy through the neighborhood when I stop at the stop sign at the corner of Picturesque Lane and North Feeder Street. The garage for the house at on the southeast corner of Picturesque and North Feeder flanks the living quarters, so that there’s no windows on the west side.

The homeowners leave their big plastic garbage bin and their big plastic recycling bin in the front yard on that side of the property, out of their sight and mind…but not out of anyone else’s.

A garbage scavenger — putatively — had dropped his bicycle on its side, along with the wire crate he’d fashioned into a bike “trailer” for carrying salable junk. He was going through the recycling barrel…and he wasn’t look for tin cans.

The blue barrel was chuckablock full of loose papers. As I paused at the intersection, I could see that he was leafing through pages, looking at them closely. Obviously, he was searching not for metal he could sell but for data he could sell.

shredder_F’r cryin’ out loud, folks!  Don’t toss intact personal and financial papers in the trash! Grind them up! Dumpster diving is a major source of riches for identity thieves.

A shredder just isn’t that expensive. It sure costs less than an identity theft, which can haunt you for years.

 

Evernote and the Enterprising Hacker: When Dinosaurhood Isn’t Such a Bad Thing…

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ApatosaurusNice little flap going on over the Evernote hack: 50 million customers asked to reset passwords.

Evernote is a cool program, and if you used it to its fullest, a hacker could do a lot of damage. It allows you to save notes on every topic the human mind can conceive, nab e-mail pages, synch your stuff between computers, and share said stuff to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and your email. And, evidently, to share stuff with the occasional hacker.

iphonesThe Evernote app is installed on my iPad. But between the nuisance factor of having to haul a machine around everywhere you go and the never-ending learning curve — I grow more averse to climbing learning curves as I age — I’ve hardly used it…just put a few grocery notes in there, and that’s about it.

Minimal use notwithstanding, the latest flap spurred me to change the password, even though I haven’t even looked at the program in months. This required me to dig out the coded hard-copy list of passwords, hidden under stacks of debris in the office, and then try to figure out which dummy e-mail account I used to deflect the nuisance messages one expects to get from outfits that demand an e-mail address, go to another list to find and decode the password for that, get into G-mail to click on the link Evernote sent to that account, then jump through the hoops to change the password. And then click “deactivate account.” ’Bye!

I find trying to type on the iPad to be exceptionally nuisancey. My fingertips apparently don’t generate whatever static electric charge is needed to make the iPad register my presence, and so I have to tap over and over and over or else dig out the stylus thing to make it work; then you have to keep shifting keyboard “views,” as it were, to get numbers and punctuation. Who on earth has time for that? Translate that time-consumption to a broad note-taking & communication program and…well. 🙄

Soon after I’d installed the Evernote app, it dawned on me that a notepad and a pencil magneted to the fridge are a lot faster and a lot easier and one heckuva lot more convenient than poking messages, character by character, into an iPad. And it’s a heckuva lot easier to tear a shopping list off the notepad and stick it in your pocket than it is to haul a tiny computer to the grocery store and fiddle with an app to see what you need to buy this week.

At least, it is for a dinosaur.

And if somebody steals your scrap of paper, at least the thief doesn’t have the secret codes to half-a-dozen other applications, some of them a great deal more private than a grocery list.

Images:
Funny in her callow youth: Public domain.
Original iPhone 8GB, iPhone 3GS 16GB and iPhone Purple 800 32GB: Yutaka Tsutano. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

You Get What You Pay For

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Have you seen Mrs. Accountability’s latest post, the one contemplating the glories (or not) of Fiverr? It’s pretty interesting.

She’d mentioned that site over the phone a while back, shortly after the episode with the friend of the “who needs enemies” variety. So naturally, I shot right over there to see what it’s about.

What you find when you arrive at Fiverr is a list of offers of services and small products for five bucks a pop. Some of these (like graphic design) actually could command a decent rate, and some (like images a computer program can toss off in 10 seconds) ought not to. Based in Israel, Fiverr is an international enterprise, and presumably many of its vendors are living in countries where $5 will buy a week’s worth of food.

A similar program (presumably owned by the same outfit, given the identical site design) is called “Twenty Fiverr”; people who think they’re worth more offer the same kind of services and products for twenty-five bucks instead of five. Here’s a guy, for example, who promises to provide seven “quality” articles in less than 24 hours, using a program that generates pap-filled, verbose, redundancy-laced, and vacuous squibs, and he’ll do it for a bargain $25.

I have a lot of beefs with this model.

First, as a self-employed skilled worker who has nothing to sell but skill, experience, and time, I highly resent being undercut by people who are willing to work, it seems, for little more than an ego trip. This is something that for years has kept rates down for writers and for graphic artists, especially those who do business within the publishing industry. Publishers know that some people who can construct a basic article will do it for less than minimum wage — some will do it for nothing — just for the joy of seeing their names in print. The result usually has to be completely rewritten, but that’s what the assistant or associate editor is for. At both of the magazines where I worked full-time, a large part of my job entailed sitting down at a computer and, starting at Word 1, rewriting articles by freelance “writers” from beginning to end.

Many magazines have two or three contract pay scales. Unemployed or moonlighting journalists who actually do know how to research and construct a competent article are paid a living wage. Everyone else gets crumbs. Some publishers simply will not pay a living wage to anyone, because they know plenty of amateurs will do the job (or something like the job) for next to nothing.

It’s the intellectual equivalent of off-shoring. In the case of Fiverr and Twenty Fiverr, it probably is literal off-shoring, too. As an individual buyer of services and products, my sense is that those of us who resent corporate off-shoring of American jobs have no business doing the same to American contract workers. Buy American. And pay something more than slave wages, if you expect to see your country’s standard of living remain above the Third World level.

When one person does a job, even a poor job, for less than fair pay, that person drives down pay for five, ten, or twenty other people for whom work is a living, not a hobby. In my book, that’s wrong.

Second, you really do get what you pay for.

Let’s take a look at the “high quality” article that squib-generator built, using a set of key words relating to weight loss. Here’s its  lead:

Weight loss is a confusing topic. There are so many different people and articles telling you so many different things, it can be quite difficult to wrap your head around them all. This article will aim to lay down the essential and necessary basics of weight loss in hopes to clear the fog that surround it.

Does that make you want to keep reading, as a lead should? It makes me want to run away…but let’s stand our ground and take a hard look at the thing.

“Weight  loss is a confusing topic.” No, it’s not. Weight loss is a process, not a topic. In any event, as statements go this one adds nothing. Right off, we know we’re dealing with a writer who is either a moron or an amateur. Or, in this case, a machine. Even machines can beat around the bush.

“So many different people…so many different things.” Nice use of redundancy to pad space! Is it likely that a person would say “many identical people telling you many identical things”? If the inserting opposite term creates an absurdity, then the adjective in question — “different,” in this instance — is probably  redundant. Here, it is redundant to the power of two.

“Difficult to wrap your head around them…” I should say so, unless your head is made of Silly Putty.  Our electronic author first coins a cliché and then turns it into a grotesque image. Note that it injects another cliché (“to clear the fog”) in the following sentence.

Cliché is the least of the next sentence’s offenses, though. First, instead of telling us anything significant or intriguing, the electronic author vows to try to give us a few fundamental pointers on the mind-numbing topic of weight loss, with no promise — only “hopes” — that whatever follows will enlighten us. This kind of pap a lead does not make. Then it ends with a faulty idiom (“in hopes to clear”: a native speaker would write “in hopes of clearing”) and a grammatical error (“the fog that surround”: subject-verb agreement).

Come to think of it, the entire article is replete with grammatical, punctuation, logical, and idiomatic errors:

• “Easier” used as an adverb (Electro-author meant “more easily”).
• “Change subtle habits that will increase the amount of walking one has to do”: if the habits increase the amount of walking you do, why would you want to change them? Possibly Electro-author meant “develop” or “build”?
• No comma after “but” used as an introductory word (some people think it’s bad form to use a conjunction to begin a sentence, but that rule doesn’t apply much in journalistic writing).
• Lettuce that’s “more green”…heeeee!

Writing style is, to put it kindly, nonexistent:

• Neither the second nor the third section shows any sign of paragraph transition.
• Verb mood jumps from declarative to imperative in paragraph 5, for no discernible reason.
• Complex ideas are touched upon and sometimes given a cursory example, then dropped with no clue to how the advice might be interpreted or used.
• The final paragraph regurgitates the first one, adding nothing except another hilariously grotesque image: “too many hands in the soup.” Careful not to choke on those knucklebones!

At Twenty Fiverr you get seven such “quality” articles for $25…not a bad price, to make yourself look like a moron to whomever reads one of the things.

My momma always used to say that you get what you pay for. But it wasn’t until I moved into the first house I bought by my little self, as a single woman, that I truly came to appreciate that old saw.

The house had washer and dryer connections, and it must be said that one of the chores I hated most in life was schlepping my laundry to a coin-op laundromat. First order of business was to install a new washer and dryer.

Being the naturally submissive type, though, and hooked up with a very dominant gentleman, I allowed myself to be persuaded to buy a low-end Monkey Ward washer and dryer. The two machines looked good at the outset: extra large, nothing fancy but evidently serviceable.

The dryer lasted about a year. Soon as it went off warranty, it crapped right out. Annoyed (and by then wise to the fact that boyfriend was pushing me into doing things I knew better than to do), I had to go buy a new one at Sears.

The second model was far from top of the line — it was a mid-range Kenmore, well liked by Consumer Reports. Twenty years later, it’s still out there in the garage running well. From the day I tossed the first load of wet laundry into it, the thing worked better than the Monkey Ward cheapo ever did, and it still works.

By purchasing a piece of junk first, I caused myself to pay significantly more than it would have cost to have just ponied up a reasonable price for a reasonably good product in the first place!

If I’d replaced the junk with another cut-rate product, I’d probably be on my fifth or sixth dryer by now, to the tune of four or five times what a single decent appliance cost.

The personal finance message? Bully for you if you can get a generous  mark-down on a good product that started out at a fair price. The blade cuts two ways: paying a lot more doesn’t always buy a lot better quality. Paying a fair price — not the lowest though not necessarily the highest, either — is likely to get you services that do the job well and products that work and hold up over time.

 

 

The NRA Slips Its Collective Trolley…and other mind-numbing stuff

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OMG, the entire freaking organization must have lost every marble its members had in their heads! Have you heard the NRA’s hilarious proposal? Let’s post armed guards in very school across the land!

Dudes and dudettes! Have you ever really talked to a minimum-wage security guard? REALLY? Do you seriously think we’re all going to trust our kiddies to one poor little underpaid, usually undereducated, often less than richly endowed with IQ points freaking hired security guard? With a pistol? SERIOUSLY?

Best argument in favor of home-schooling I’ve heard today.

Well, you know, I am the child of a gun nut myself, and I’ll say I was mighty happy to have the old man’s Ruger in hand when a sh!thead accused of kidnapping and assault was 30 seconds from getting inside my house. But that notwithstanding, I’m not nutty enough to imagine our liberties demand that every civilian have access to semiautomatic weapons. Bring a stop, once and for all, to selling combat weapons and their knockoffs. Require background checks for wannabe gun buyers. Make it a felony to leave a gun within reach of your kids. But keep Big Brother’s hands off responsible Americans’ pistols, shotguns, and ordinary rifles.

Back to daily life, such as it is: Spent the whole week working like a horse. Nothing like “retiring” from a job to keep you busy, eh? This week Tina and I have done two books, in one way or another. A  bunch of edits and a mystifying list of efforts at references came in from one client, whose project I’ve neglected shamelessly as other demands have impinged. Just as that landed on my desk, an old client called: would I index 360 pages of amazingly arcane scholarship?

Well, sure, for the fee they agreed to pay. Foisted the reference search onto Tina, who spent a good eight hours straightening that out. I knew she was actually spending that much time on it, because DropBox signals whenever somebody changes or updates files. Every time she hit “save” or altered a file, a little tab with some announcement popped up on my computer. Figuring out and adding new copy on my end, plus coordinating the rectified references with the in-text citations took a good four hours on my end. Meanwhile I had to start on the index.

This has been — always is, every year (the thing is an annual) — one of those projects that grows huger the more you work on it. Spent most of the week building that. Wonder if anyone else has been doing anything more interesting?

TB explains why on concrete layers will build a “crack” into a slab: to prevent real cracks later on!

Donna Freedman, who’s flyin’ around again, stays at her dad’s house and gets to deal with a plumbing problem…one that gives her an hours-long workout!

Money Beagle has some good advice for enjoying the Christmas season.

At Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, Crystal has already started to agonize about a health insurance decision that needs to be made by February.

Nicole&Maggie at Grumpy Rumblings ruminate(s) about crazy (and not) friends.

At My Journey to Millions, Evan talks about reasons for life insurance that might be attractive to retirees.

Planting Our Pennies describes the hassles entailed in living in an “older (1980s!!) home in Florida. Thanks goodness I live where it never rains!

At Brip-Blap, Steve suggests several ways to get free money.

Abigail at I Pick Up Pennies describes one of those brushes with entropy that seem to visit us all now and again.

Mrs. Accountability suspects extreme couponing is actually a form of hoarding.

Speaking of entropy, it’s coming on to the middle of the night, and this old bat needs to go to bed.

(P.S. Well…that was weird. After I hit “post” WordPress somehow deleted almost all the paragraph breaks in this thing. It looked fine in Preview!)

 

 

Telephone Predators on the Elderly

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Yech! A particularly creepy telemarketing sleaze just called. When I picked up the phone, a live human spoke, not an infuriating robo-marketer recording. He sounded like an older man — just my age, lots of common with me, right?

Right away he started in on a pitch for some sort of “emergency call” system. He was peddling those gadgets you wear around your neck that are supposed to summon help when you fall or have a stroke over your fried eggs or whatever. He didn’t get far enough to tell me exactly what gadgets or how overpriced they were, because before he could draw a breath I was telling him my number is on the National Do-Not-Call list, he should be ashamed of himself for harassing old ladies with nuisance phone calls, and he ought to get himself an honest job. He was protesting that he had an “honest job” as I hung up on him.

Honest job, my ass.

If your parents are getting on in years, or if you yourself are elderly, you should be keeping an eye out for scammers who call old people on the phone.

It was clear this guy knew my age and he probably knew I live alone. His MO was to scare me, and if I had been just a little less cagey, he would’ve had an easy time of it.

Last week I did fall, in the middle of the night, and I did hurt myself. I hit my head going down and smacked my knee so hard it was awhile before I could get to my feet.

And yes. This is exactly the kind of thing that scares the bedoodles out of me. No one pays the slightest bit of attention to whether I come or go. I could lay on the floor with a broken hip until I died of thirst, and no one would notice.

Fortunately, I’m clever enough to have put three of the house’s five land-line phones in places that can be reached from the floor. And yes again: that’s why I have a land line: so I can have an extension in every room. A cell phone allows for one, maybe two phones, at an elevated price, and with just two of them, neither is likely to be sitting someplace where I could reach it if I were on the floor and hurt.

I dragged myself to the nightstand and pulled down the phone. Called my son. It was midnight. He didn’t answer.

About to dial 9-1-1, I realized that emergency workers couldn’t get in through the special hardened locks I’d put on the security doors after the late, great garage invasion, and since I’d had to smash the secret key hidey-hole with a hammer the last time I needed to raid the key stash, there are no keys to the house hidden outside. Soooo…it wasn’t going to do much good to call the rescue squad, unless I really, really wanted to have one of those expensive new low-E windows busted in.

Eventually I managed to get up off the floor. But not knowing what effect a whack on the head was likely to have on an old bat, I limped out front, stashed a couple of keys under the Burglars Welcome mat, e-mailed La Maya and M’hijito to suggest that if they hadn’t heard from me by 7 or 8 a.m., they should call 9-1-1 and tell the dispatcher how to get into the house.

The moral of the story is that today’s smarmy chucklehead on the other end of the phone line called at just the right time, and that’s what he was counting on. I’m always subliminally worried about being here by myself. But the recent fall had crystallized the obvious risk.

Meanwhile, researchers have recently discovered that people’s natural wariness of the smarmy and the untrustworthy weakens with age. This explains the ease with which con artists scam the elderly, often cleaning out Granma’s bank account.

I suppose my profound hatred for telephone solicitors serves like a flu shot against the creeps. But if I’d been another ten years older, who knows? Maybe the immunity would have worn off.

If you’re in that sandwich generation, keep an eye on the old folks. Ask them how they’re handling their money or if they’ve decided to make any changes in their investments. Keep your ears open for any sudden decisions to renovate the house or buy a time-share in an RV park.

And if you’re already an old folk? Hang up instantly on all phone solicitors. Do not speak with them, and do not be polite to them. Remember, they have already been rude to you by intruding on your privacy, so you have no obligation to speak courteously to them — nor should you. Do not open junkmail, and never respond to an unsolicited offer that comes in the mail.  And always consult with a trusted adviser before making any major decisions pertaining to money, your estate planning, and healthcare.

Is it only me, or is everyone else getting inundated with scammy phone solicitations — three or four hustles a day now?