Blog posts

• Weekly review: Week ending September 13, 2013
• Sewing: Made a PS Vita case!
• When I blog with Emacs and when I blog with other tools
• Help me figure out how I should reinvest business profits
• Sketchnotes: Conversations About Social Business (Jennifer Okimoto, IBM)
• Sketchnote Lesson: Adding color
• Thinking about hard commitments and soft commitments, and adapting my life accordingly
• Ten years of learning how to cook

Quick notes

• Whiteboard Selling (2013) is a potentially useful book for consultants and others who sell services/products in face-to-face meetings.
• The Strategy of Conflict (1980) is mind-boggling. There’s an excellent essay on bargaining that’s like “The Art of War” for haggling.
• Kitchen math: A double batch of egg tarts needs six extra egg yolks, so 1.5 batches of coconut macaroons balances that out nicely with a need for six egg whites.
• If you can’t override a WordPress widget plugin because it doesn’t use a filter, you can subclass the widget and rewrite the output.

Link round-up

• Using Content Creators to Fill Your Blog With Quality Posts – My blog is pretty full. I want to experiment with getting some help in this area. I write a lot, and I’d like to see if hiring people can help me write better.
• Wealth Advice that Should Be Obvious – Good fundamentals. I still manually pay my credit card bills (electronically, though) so that I have a regular review cycle. Working on stocking up better, looking forward to analyzing a year of groceries to learn more about our consumption patterns. =) (I’ve got the data, after all!)
• Ask For Personal Stories When Receiving Advice – Similarly, give personal stories when giving advice. =)
• DPP040: Rethinking Blog Archives, Creating Challenges, and 2 More Great Ideas – I keep a manual blog index, and I should probably organize it logically instead of semi-reverse-chronologically.
• 23 Tricks to Learn Anything Better – Working on #18 (always be compressing)
• Invite Friends. Get Points. Introducing the Evernote Referral Program. – now you can try Evernote Premium for a month for free by following people’s referral links (here’s mine). Already have Evernote? If you share it with others, the first referral gets you a month, and following referrals half a month each (up to 12 months total). I think the ability to help people try Premium for a month is probably more interesting, although since it’s $4.99/month, it’s probably not that big a deal. =) (details)
• 3 Easy Ways to Increase Your Writing Speed – Keep ideas handy, create an outline, don’t mix research/editing with writing. Outlining helps with #1 and #3, so that’s worth getting really good at. =)
• Just One Thing: Do Better And Save Time With A Blogging Checklist – Make a checklist for more consistency. I like Michael Hyatt’s blogging template (it’s more thorough than that first blog post), although I haven’t yet gotten to that level of awesomeness. Maybe I should do that for at least one post a week, to see what it’s like?

Focus areas and time review

• Business (35.6h – 21%)
  • Earn (18.8h – 52% of Business)
    • [X] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Thursday
    • [X] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Tuesday
    • [X] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Wednesday half-day
    • [X] Follow up with SR
    • [ ] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Monday half-day
    • [ ] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Tuesday
    • [ ] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Wednesday half-day
    • [ ] Follow up with B
  • Build (12.2h – 34% of Business)
    • Quantified Awesome (0.0h)
    • Drawing (6.2h)
    • Paperwork (1.6h)
    • [X] Identify five top-rated article writers
    • [X] Modified BWP Recent Comments widget to rewrite HTTPS URLs to HTTP by subclassing it
    • [X] Plan business reinvestments
    • [ ] Rejig 404 page
  • Connect (4.5h – 12% of Business)
    • [X] Sketch Jennifer Okimoto’s talk on social business
    • [ ] Go to Hacklab members meeting
    • [ ] Host Visual Thinkers Toronto meetup
    • [ ] Make a hi-res version of Learn Emacs
    • [ ] Prepare limitations presentation
    • [ ] Create Org page
• Relationships (4.4h – 2%)
  • [X] Go to MEC
  • [X] Plan get-together?
  • [X] Set up appointment with U
  • [X] Try the lentil can
  • [ ] Go for a walk
• Discretionary – Productive (15.4h – 9%)
  • [X] Go through Latin Made Simple chapter 1
  • [X] Replace inner tube
  • [X] Set up the Colemak keyboard layout
  • [ ] Try reconstituting dehydrated food
  • Writing (4.1h)
• Discretionary – Play (18.7h – 11%)
  • [X] Played more Legend of Heroes
• Personal routines (16.4h – 9%)
• Unpaid work (14.7h – 8%)
• Sleep (64.3h – 38% – average of 9.2 per day)