Just reading a post on Open Loops where Bert talks about outsourcing your taxes to an accountant. I started doing that last year, and it was such a breeze this year to get my taxes in early. Having someone else prompt me for what to do and when was a lot easier than leaving it up to me to schedule time to sit down with TurboTax and do it myself.
Other areas I've outsourced that have added to my quality of life include:
- I use "Dry Cleaning To Your Door" to handle my laundry and dry cleaning - they pick up my laundry every Monday morning, and deliver it back clean and pressed on Tuesday evening, and it costs the same as going to my local cleaners. When you travel as much as I do, it's easy to miss the pickup hours at the dry cleaners and end up with nothing to wear to a business meeting - that never happens to me any more.
- I have a great yard guy that comes over every Thursday and cuts my grass, cleans our flower beds, trims trees, etc.
- costs about $30 per week, and lets me spend my valuable home time with the family (as well as saving me a day of allergy hell every week)
What about you - any areas you are outsourcing to make life more liveable?
Read MoreI see a post tonight on Slacker Manager about a cool use for Google Maps. Well it just so happens that, this afternoon, I was using Google Maps to plot a course to take my family out for dinner at Gino's on Portland's east side (it was quite good, by the way).
While plotting the course, I discovered yet another badass Google feature - they will plot your course on an actual satellite photo, complete with highlighting, etc. I was so impressed I started bringing my kids and their friends upstairs to see it.
Check out this map that shows the course from the Portland International Airport to Powell's City of books, should you choose to visit our fair city and shop at the best bookstore in the world.
Read MoreCall me obsessive, but I've been tracking stats around my inbox, number of items in my various lists, etc. as part of my weekly review (although it's been more like an "every few weekly review" unfortunately). I put the counts in Excel and create a simple graph to look at is as a kind of dashboard.
The graph shows me my inbox is very cyclical (the big, dark blue line), and the peaks are when I slack on my weekly reviews. My dashboard has been useful for figuring out things like whether my "@waiting for" list is getting too long, which might indicate I'm falling behind on follow-up of delegated items.
The dashboard approach is helpful, but doesn't help me with one of the bigger recurring challenges I've had - how do I create better focus on the items contained in all these lists?
As a result, I'm experimenting with creating a "cockpit" (or maybe 'weekly flight plan' is a better analogy) to help me create a narrower subset of the lists to focus on each week. I ordered and just received my PlannerPad (www.plannerpads.com) and am going to give it a whirl for this project.
Why and what am I doing? I do so much stuff electronically now that it's easy to accumulate lots of things in my trusted system. It can, however, be overwhelming. What I'll do for this experiment is, as part of my weekly review, to decide what short list I want to work on during the coming week and write that stuff in my PlannerPad - that will serve as the flight plan for the week.
I'll let you know how it works. If you have any better ideas, come on with 'em.
Read MoreThanks to TiVo, my favorite time-shifting time saver, my wife and I have really gotten into the BBC series "The Office." It is extremely funny, and makes you really uncomfortable in an "oh man I can't believe I'm watching this - please just let me watch some more" kind of way.
It's a mockumentary kind of format set in a typical UK office, and the actors are convincingly real (and oh, so funny).
As of a couple of weeks ago, there is an American remake of the series under the same name. It uses pretty much the same script. But it just isn't the same.
Why do the studios insist on remaking things that are perfectly good to start with?!?
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