"blog to discovery" - 5 new articles
Reviewing the spam on my blog
You may have noticed there has been a lot of spam comments on my blog recently. I’m sorry I haven’t got into action earlier to deal with it. I have found the spam interesting for two reasons; firstly I seem to get more spam the less active I am (although that could also indicate I’m not upgrading my anti spam plugins). Secondly, reading how the style of spam comments has changed to try and get round these plugins such as Akismet. The comments containing long lists of url now go straight into my spam folder, but the new style of responding to the post topic are still getting through. However, there are still comments that stand out as they are not related to the post. I’ve been reviewing the comments during my lunch hour and some of these random comments have broken the monotony of the task and made me smile. Here are my favourites: Using processes to aid efficiency – Gold plating of combustion contacting engine parts, would it increase the efficiency of the engine? ? Don’t forget maintenance actions – Hi,Friction, moving a lot causes heat (internal energy) to build up in your body. Also small muscle movements can help circulate blood which also heats through friction. My organiser; the diary section – Dairy is a farm or processing of milk from animals for human consumption. Soy milk is the grinding of the soy beans with water and extracting the liquid and can be done at home…unlike a dairy!! To try and reduce the amount of spam in the future, I’ve closed posts older than 3 months to comments and updated Akismet. Fingers crossed this means I’ll get some real comments in the future rather than from water skiers, banks, blind companies etc. Similar Posts:
Using processes to aid efficiency
I admit I like processes; in fact I’ll go as far as to say I love processes. There are so many wonderful things about processes, here are a few:
I get a great deal of pleasure from breaking tasks into its component actions and arranging them in an efficient manner. Despite this I’ve never used processes at home; maybe I thought it was too much like work or perhaps I thought it was just too anal! One of the tasks that is constantly on my task list is to sort through photographs and particularly to put them on the internet to share them with friends and family. It seems I upload only a small proportion of the events where I take pictures. While I was downloading software to help me sort some pictures from a recent weekend with my parents, I realised one of the reasons I don’t work on the task as often as I’d like is because I have to think too much about what needs to be done.
Having completed the process for how I deal with photographs on my laptop, I was inspired to discuss with my husband how we will store photographs when we have established our server. We have agreed how this is going to work as well as a file naming format. So although it could be months before our server is up and running we can both ensure our folders are in the same structure and files use the same naming format. Of course this means, I now need to update my process with a second version to incorporate what we discussed. Plus I need to decide what I’m going to do with these processes. Do I establish a household wiki and upload them or create a hard copy manual! Similar Posts:
Don’t forget maintenance actions
It’s easy to identify an action or goal; sometimes it’s easy to complete them and cross them off your list. However, it is the maintenance actions that really make a difference. For instance, in terms of losing my pregnancy weight I could just think about reaching my pre-pregnancy weight, but the real desired outcome is to maintain that weight. This means when I reach that weight I don’t stop exercising, instead I move to the maintenance level of exercise and diet. This is currently on my mind because I am in the process of reinstalling software on to my laptop after I reformatted at the weekend. Yes, less than two months since I bought it. After buying the laptop, my first tasks were to remove Vista and install XP, remove the preinstalled software I didn’t want and to install AVG antivirus. Then I moved on to the business of installing other software and moving across my files. Unfortunately it seems something went wrong either with the installation of AVG or with my settings so in the last two months a full scan had not taken place and I did not check. Even though I spent a lot of time in AVG to work out why the email scanner was not working I didn’t notice the main antivirus hadn’t run until I had been infected by at least one virus (the one I noticed redirected my google searches). This is certainly an example of crossing an action off my task list without really thinking about my desired outcome. In this case my desired outcome was to have a virus free laptop. I hope, the time taken to reformat and reinstall software will re enforce the lesson that I need to think about a task before I cross it off my list; has this task achieved the desired outcome or are there follow up / maintenance tasks? On the positive side, I am very grateful for my external hard drive as it makes backing up files easy and for my software registry so I know what software I want to reinstall and where to get it from. Similar Posts:
Losing technology and losing my way
During the last few months, my approach to getting things done has been very much based on what is urgent or what is on my mind, so not as productive as using my AutoFocus list. It has also involved using paper so I now have several lists and blog posts I’ve started at different times that I need to locate. I’m very keen to get back on track with both my productivity and writing blog posts, therefore I plan to start making the most of my available time. I’m starting today, by writing this as I sit on Studland beach in Dorset between going for a sail and for a swim. I have some interesting times ahead because I return to work in a few months and after a year away it will be a shock to the system! I want to develop good productivity habits now so I can implement these in the office and ensure I continue to get things done at home. Similar Posts:
What you want to read
Almost three weeks ago, I put out a poll asking what you wanted to read on this blog, I’m delighted that some of you spent the time to complete it. As you can see from the chart below, the results were fairly even.
Its great that you want to read more about goal identification and achievement because I am keen to write about this topic as I think it keeps me focussed on what I’m trying to achieve. I’m usually happy to talk about productivity especially as it’s what I originally started this blog for, plus I believe if I’m more productive I will achieve my goals more quickly. These are the two topics I was hoping you would want to read about Dealing with work is a tricky topic for me to write about at the moment as I’m on maternity leave, however I will be returning to work before the end of the year. Its going to be interesting returning to work after 12 months away and I hope to have some good observations to write about. I’m particularly pleased to see journal writing in the list because this is a topic I’m interested in at the moment as I encourage myself to write my own journal more frequently. However, I decided a few months ago this blog wasn’t the best place for these posts so one of the online projects I mentioned in my May monthly review is about journalling. I’ll let you know when it goes live. The result I was surprised about was the desire for more personal posts; I was expecting you to say you wanted less personal posts with perhaps more instructional type post. I will work on providing more posts about my experiences, but maybe you can help; let me know if you would like to share your experiences on any of these topics, by writing a guest post. You can follow my activities by subscribing to my posts or on Twitter. Similar Posts:
More Recent Articles |
Therefore, I created my first home process to describe how to deal with photographs. It covers the file structure for storing photographs, sorting the pictures, cropping, resizing and watermarking them and adding them to my website. It was a very worthwhile exercise as I had to really think about several areas meaning I did not have the complete process worked out in my head.
I’ve had a few problems recently. The most noticeable being the loss of my computer. The battery stopped charging and only occasionally registered the power supply. One theory is this may have been due to my daughter’s fascination with laptops; she had a tendency to pull out of the charging cable and chew on it. I now have a new 17″ latoptop, but have had to reinstall programmes and transfer files which has taken a long time (in fact I’m not quite there). This was soon after followed by a holiday where the internet connection wasn’t working. All this loss of technology, along with some illness, has meant I’ve lost my way in terms of productivity, and unfortunately my blog is one of the things to suffer
