Ed Bilodeau

This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

# Update on getting organized : At the beginning of the semester, I decided that I needed to get organized. So I set up a paper-based task organization system based on 43 folders (31 days + 12 months...; Google for the details). It works fairly well, and definitely better then anything I've tried before.

There is still lots of room for improvement. One adjust I made was to add four more folders to further organized the tasks for each day. These folders map onto Covey's four quadrants:

- urgent / important
- not urgent / important
- urgent / not important
- not urgent / not important

One immediate benefit: when you drop something into either of the "not important" folders, you can't help but ask yourself, "Why the hell am I even thinking about this?"

The problems: classification is not easy. The hard question is: "for who?". Urgent for who? Me? You? Them? Important for who? (The answer is, of course, "for ME!")

Another problem: the classification changes over time. Not urgent or not important can become urgent and important, even for me. The solution is to reclassify on a regular basis (and not throw items out, as a suggested before).

(Actually, you could throw them out, and wait for it to come around again when the status does change. If it never comes back around, well I guess it wasn't so important after all!)

I'm working on the daily sorting, culling, classification of the things I have to do.

Meanwhile, my research sits in the corner of my office, looming
a dark, opaque cube. There is no way
that thing will ever fit in a folder! I need to
break it down.

Ed Bilodeau

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

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