Productivity, True Confessions

Piling System

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Often when I get overwhelmed with clutter, my first line of defense is a piling system. To clarify, my definition of a “piling system” means that I organize my things contextually, or based on function (i.e., what they are doing), rather than putting things that look the same all together.

Some years ago I started using an old shoe box to aggregate all the items I wanted quick access to for decorating and repairing my apartment. The box contains a hammer, screwdriver, exacto knives, three different kinds of tape (electrical, duct, and painter’s), tape measurer and a box of hooks and nails for hanging things on the wall, among other things.

It may not seem like these things go “together” because I have wall paper/fabric samples, exacto knives, different kinds of tape and some tools. If you went to a hardware store you would likely find all of these things in their own aisle. However, for my purposes it made perfect sense to “pile” them together. Usually when I’m fixing something around the house, I need more than one of the things in my quick access box. Before I created the pile I spent a lot of time locating each item.

There were a couple of reasons contributing to this:
1. I hadn’t figured out my system yet, so a few things were still “homeless.”
2. I was using these things constantly and it was taking too much time to put everything away, wherever it was being stashed at the moment, and then retrieve it again. Consequently, things were left in random places resulting in time wasted to find them.

Having the quick access box made it easy to find the things I needed instantly and put them away when I was finished.

Other times with paperwork, electronic documents or emails, I create piles (or folders) based on actions. For example, I set up folders in all of my email addresses to collect tax-related documents. Then when I’m ready to list my expenses, or assemble my documents, they’re easy to locate. I have a similar system set up on my computer to manage tax-related documents.  As a small business owner, and someone who has to file cross-border taxes, it amounts to a lot of paperwork!

The piles may not look neat, but I know where everything is. Finding things and putting them away is quick and effortless.

Digital Dilemma, True Confessions

Rise of Self-Care Apps

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Everywhere I turn it seems more and more people are using things like watches, fit bits, and other devices to help them with self-monitoring. Devices and apps that prompt us when to breathe deeply or stretch to reduce stress levels. Apps that monitor how much sleep we get each night and the quality of it.

For women, there are apps to monitor menstrual cycles and ovulation or to help plan for egg freezing. I remember speaking to one woman who said her app knew when she was getting her period before she did. Several days before her cycle began, she would start receiving ads for products. Maybe some of you are reading this and thinking such a reminder might actually be kind of useful. But there are bigger things to consider. In order for those ads to be sent means that your personal health information about your monthly cycle is being shared with corporations.

Last month I was listening to a webinar on “The Legal Implications of Collecting Data” by Montaña & Associates. I was horrified to learn that certain apps used to monitor heart rate information were automatically transmitting the collected data to Facebook!  Without the user’s consent or knowledge that this was happening! The data was being transmitted to Facebook even when the user wasn’t on Facebook.

I think many of these tracking apps can be amazing and really useful. I’ve tracked a lot of these kinds of things manually but I’m sure it could be a lot more precise with technology. However,  I’m terrified to use them specifically because I’m nervous about the privacy implications. I don’t want corporations or Facebook knowing how many hours of sleep I got, when my period is coming, or my average heart rate. I don’t feel this way because I’m trying to hide something or because I feel like I’m doing something wrong. I feel this way because these are private and personal things about me.

I can’t help but think that if we turned off our devices more often, we probably wouldn’t need to rely on them for things like self-care and tracking. The irony of using self-care apps to get back what we gave away, or lost, by using our devices so much in the first place. What’s wrong with paying attention to our own body to monitor it?

Human Archives

Life Languages

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As a tweenager I started learning a foreign language. At my school in fifth grade, we studied Spanish for half a year and French for half a year. Then we got to pick which language we wanted to study for the next three years. This felt like a big decision in my life at the time. I picked French mostly because I was weirded out by the upside down punctuation marks in Spanish.

Learning a foreign language was tough! I remember my mouth struggling to form new sounds. My ears working hard to make sense out of an unintelligible string of babble, trying to discern patterns and identify words I had just learned.

Even at the tender age of 11 with a young, spongy brain, I complained mightily about it to my father. Stamping my foot and chastising him for not teaching me a foreign language when I was younger and therefore could have picked it up effortlessly. My father laughed and said that he had raised me bilingual, in English and mathematics.

I didn’t find this comforting at the time, but now I realize math is a language. It was true, he had raised me with math as a “second language.” I’m fluent in reading numbers and not at all scared of equations. One of the first songs I learned was the “addition song” where we would add 1+1, 2+2, 4+4, etc. to a memorable tune not giving up until we reached 4-digit numbers.

The more I learned about the world around me I realized that I was fluent in a couple of life languages. In addition to math, I would also consider I’m fluent in music. In first grade I learned songs with solfieggio, a method of assigning hand gestures and names to notes. With practice I also learned how to read sheet music, rhythms, and other symbols used to indicate articulations, speeds, and dynamics. As a bassoonist, I’m fluent in two clefs, bass and tenor.

Excerpt of the Bassoon 1 part from the first movement of Beethoven Symphony No. 6, Op. 68. My part switches between bass clef and tenor clef (looks kind of like a “B”).

As I thought about these life languages, I wondered what other ones are out there that other people might be fluent in such as reading body language or facial expressions, dance movements, or actors who specialize in improv.

I did eventually become fluent in French, though I’m not anymore. Two years ago I got over my weird aversion to the upside down punctuation in Spanish and started taking courses. ¡I love it!

Iceland

Iceland: Geothermal Fields and Tectonic Plates

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Our first day in Akureyri started with a bus ride to Myvatn, an area with a lake surrounded by geothermal activity. We learned about the area in the visitor centre. After we met a local bread maker who cooked the dough in geothermal hot pockets, rather than using an oven! Containers of bread dough are placed in crates and then lowered into holes. The holes are covered and the dough is left to cook in naturally-generated heat. Later that day we tasted the bread. It was rich, brown bread, a bit sweet and extra delicious when smeared with Icelandic butter.

Geothermal hot pockets that the bread maker used to bake bread

After the bread maker, we went to Hverir, a geothermal spot. The bus ride was short, but it felt like we had been transported to another world. A reddish, muddy landscape spread out before us in stark contrast to the snow covered hills surrounding the area. The air was hazy with pungent, sulphur-scented smoke.

The Hverir landscape. Boiling hot and enshrouded in smoke.

We were given special booties to cover our shoes and protect them from the soft, viscous mud. While tromping through a particularly muddy patch, the suction of it pulled off my booty. Needless to say, my shoes didn’t stay clean. erp.

Despite the snow surrounding us, Hverir was boiling hot, literally! Some of the mud holes were bubbling. We were cautioned to stay on the trails. The ground and mud were hot enough to get a severe burn.

Boiling mud!

After Hverir, we stopped at another scenic view point. It was a cold, crisp day and most of the land was covered with a soft dusting of fresh, white snow. Having lived in cities for most of my life, it’s always a treat to see unspoiled landscape stretched out before me.

Even from a distance you can see the steam of the geothermal hotspots dotting the area.

After we visited one of two spots in Iceland where you can see two tectonic plates touching each other. In the other spot, which we visited a few days later, the plates are 6km apart. But in this spot, the plates were almost touching and we could stand with one foot on each plate. It might just look like another craggy rock crevice, but these are tectonic plates.

Two tectonic plates

Stay tuned for the next posting: Dimmuborgir, the “dark city,” pseudo craters, and the legendary Godafoss, “waterfall of the gods.”

Read more about the trip to Iceland here.

Productivity, True Confessions

The Messy Minimalist

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Most people are surprised to learn that I’m not a neat freak. I’m actually a little bit messy. My goal is to be as efficient as possible. Doing something efficiently is not always the fastest way to accomplish a task, but it is the most complete. This means I spend less time and effort on redoing things. While studying business process management I learned that reworks, basically having to do the same thing twice because of mistakes, takes at least twice as long as doing it correctly the first time. Who has time for that?

Sometimes being organized takes too much time and it slows me down. For example, I place all my kitchen utensils in a couple of buckets. I don’t separate the large spoons from the spatulas and can opener.

I’m always trying to be balanced about this – organized enough that I can find what I need when I need it, but not to the point it would slow me down to put something in its proper place.

Here are two of my favorite strategies:

#1: Have less stuff. Maintain only what I need, basically one of everything and purge regularly. With less stuff to worry about crowding up drawers and closet spaces, it’s a lot easier to throw things in and find them quickly later.

Then when I go to put stuff away (see #2), I just throw it in. I don’t take time to organize it. My bookshelf is loosely arranged by size and type (fiction, professional, photo albums, and cookbooks). But beyond that I just throw them on the shelves wherever there is space. However, I only have 4 small shelves of books so it doesn’t take me that long to find something. All my kitchen utensils live together, but I also only have one of everything I need making it easier to locate something.

Same goes for my bathroom. My toiletries are spread out in individual drawers and tubs to minimize the amount in any one place. I can throw stuff in the proper place and find what I need in seconds. (Read more here.)

#2: Have a “home” for everything. This means dedicating a space to store items. One of my favorite places to create is a “use me first” spot. This method works well in places like the fridge and bathroom where products/groceries tend to expire.

Digital Dilemma

Analytics and Dashboards

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A few months ago I noticed some big changes in my online credit card account. The dashboard panel, which had always shown my credit card stats with numbers, was now displayed with colored graphs and charts. Now the dashboard shows me my current balance, as compared to my total limit, visually and numerically.

The dashboard shows me a wheel that indicates how much has already been credited and how much is pending against my total limit, by using different colors. It also displays my current balance, available amount, and total limit numerically. To the right of the balance wheel, I get an overview of how much I spent each day on my credit card, relative to other days. If I hover over the graph, I can get an exact number of how much I spent that day.

From the dashboard I can go to the “Transactions” section. This gives me a detailed breakdown of all my transactions which I can then filter based on date, vendor, transaction type, or expense category. The credit card determines the category, which includes household, groceries, shopping, services, transportation and miscellaneous. From “Transactions,” I can look at “Trends,” a bar graph showing how much I spend in each category, or each day over a period of time.

All of this is fine in theory, but my challenge is that the categories don’t match how I like to track my expenses and they’re not accurate. For example, my monthly health insurance payments get categorized as “miscellaneous” instead of “health.” I can’t change this.

In general, I find the miscellaneous category problematic. As a records and information management professional, we’re trained not to use this word to describe anything mostly because it’s a word that can mean everything or nothing, all at the same time. I find this category assignment pretty useless and misleading.

I suppose the goal of this is to give me more information about my spending habits. Perhaps then I can make better or more informed decisions about how and where to spend my money. I can notice patterns and identify which categories I spend the most money in. But if I can’t customize the categories, or at least have the option of reassigning transactions to the proper category, the end result is not that useful for me.