Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

Unplugged

I've just returned from a week at Boy Scout summer camp with my son's troop, at Camp Meriwether on the Oregon Coast. What a relaxing experience - a full week with no connectivity to email, cell phones, or anything like that.

I regularly take vacations, but somehow seem to stay a bit "tethered" to electronic communications during those vacations. This is the first time in about 3 years that I've truly unplugged. I highly recommend it to you, if you can pull it off.

Of course, the down side is that I have about 1500 emails to process (I was at zero the day I left). I need to dust off my email kung fu and get busy.

By the way - I had a couple of posts while I was gone, thanks to my "tool of choice" for blogging: RocketPost. I wrote a couple of posts last Saturday before I left, scheduled them to post during the week and RocketPost did all the work. Pretty cool.

More "live" posts coming as I continue to dig out from my email backlog. I made some interesting brain connections during my week of being unplugged.

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Travel Light: Kensington Charger

I like my laptop, but it came with a big, clunky power adapter that took up a lot of space in my bag. Additionally, my laptop's "default" adapter only worked on AC power outlets.

iGo is a no-go

For that reason, one of the first "Travel Light" purchases I made was an Auto/Air/Wall combo power adapter. The first one I tried was an "iGo" brand adapter. It was very pretty, and had all the functionality I was looking for, but I was very disappointed in the iGo. It was too bulky, the connectors weren't tight and kept coming undone, it overheated and shut off when I used it on planes, etc. I couldn't get my money back so I sold it for 10 bucks at a garage sale and vowed never to buy another one of their products again.

Kensington makes me happy

Next, I purchased a Kensington travel adapter that includes adapaters so I can run my laptop on AC or DC power, at home, on planes, or in cars.

The Kensington adapter also has multiple, interchangeable power tips so you can use it with a variety of devices or continue to use it if you change laptops. As you see in the picture above, can get a "Y" adapter to charge multiple devices at once.

As I mentioned in my post earlier this week, I tend to charge most of my extra devices via USB so I only really use this charger to charge my laptop (I then charge my other devices from the laptop's USB ports).

However, for devices that can't charge via USB, this adapter supports a large variety of devices with optional tips (the only tips it comes with are for laptops - you have to buy additional tips for other devices for a nominal fee). Mine came with a complimentary adapter to charge iPods.

Bottom line, this adapter is much thinner and lighter than the default adapter for my laptop, and has lots of expandability. I have found it to be very portable and extremely durable in a variety of situations. If you want to travel light, this will help.

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Travel Light: USB chargers

On the topic of traveling light, I have a guiding philosophy that helps quite a bit: Whenever possible, I charge my travel devices with USB.

In general, I charge things at night in my hotel room, so I turn on my laptop and charge devices off its USB ports. This approach comes in handy when traveling internationally, since I only need an international travel adapter for my laptop - not all the other devices.

On occasion, however, I need to charge one of my devices when it isn't convenient to boot up my laptop (after all, the laptop must be powered up to provide power to the USB ports). In those situations, I use a little travel charger, which I originally purchased for use with my iPod Nano.

This works for my Treo 650, my iPod, my camera, etc. and means I don't have to carry a bunch of different flavors of chargers.

I also carry a USB car charger in my suitcase, just in case (not in my laptop bag, since I don't use it as often). This can come in handy on road trips, long treks without my laptop, and also works in cars outside the US (in case I forget my adapter, or it's too bulky to carry along).

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Fresh Gear: Where does all the time go?

Do you ever sit down to do something at your computer, only to find that the "thing" didn't get done but you've just whiled away an hour of your time?

In the past, I've talked about some techniques for auditing your time (Audit time! - 1 March 2006), but it can be tricky to track how I'm spending my time on my computer. That's where "TimeSprite" comes to the rescue.

I recently discovered TimeSprite thanks to its author Andrew Rowley who pointed it out based on some of the posts on my blog.

What's TimeSprite?

TimeSprite is a cool program (there is a trial version, and the full version is $19.95) that monitors what you do on your Windows-based computer all day. It does a nice job of tracking what programs you're running, when you're idle, etc. It even tracks window names so you can get more granular than "Internet Explorer" or "Firefox" and actually see what sites you've spent most of your time viewing.

TimeSprite has two apps - one that monitors what you do, and another that provides some easy-to-use reporting functionality to help you analyze where you spend your time.

What's the Use?

I plan on incorporating this into my weekly review process to figure out if there are time sinks that are out of whack with where I want them to be.

A nice feature is the ability to create arbitrary, higher-level groups to organize blobs of related activities into projects or other meaningful categories.

This can help you with tracking how much time you spend working on specific projects, actions for particular clients, etc. Or you could simply create categories like "Research," "Blogging," or "Weekly Reporting." Pretty cool stuff.

Bottom Line

You can't improve what you don't measure (or at least you can't prove it's improving). If you want to put a bit more rigor in your time auditing, TimeSprite is a rockin' way to do that. Check out the free trial and see if it's for you.

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Have you noticed? - Issue 2

I was catching up on things over at the Mind Unbound business blog and found a thought-provoking post on "Not-so-human Resources." The post deals with the mechanization of the Human Resources function in a lot of companies, in the name of efficiency.

This rings true for me. In my past, I spent a lot of time working with HR as I built my teams. Getting their input, helping them "grok" what I wanted my team to feel like, and so forth. The HR folks provided lots of value in hiring and coaching. They also helped talk me through difficult situations. I'm lucky enough to work in a small company now, where I get a lot of this kind of assistance, but in large companies that is harder and harder to come by.

In my last "big" company experience, our company grew to the point where HR was one local person who basically dealt with coordinating insurance forms, paperwork associated with hiring and firing, and proofreading personnel reviews. They didn't feel like a partner any more - just an information desk.

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