The fastest way to free time in your schedule is also the hardest: learning to say ‘no’. It’s a tricky endeavor, doubly so when the person asking something of you is in a position of authority. Here are some suggestions to make the process less painful:

1. Repeat the ‘No’. People expect a conversation to go this way: “Can you help with with project X?”, “I’m sorry I can’t”, “Oh please? I’m really in over my head.”, “Alright, what do you need?” Do not give in to this. When you say no, you have to learn to hold your ground.
2. No Excuses. Never, ever give an excuse for why you can’t do something. If you give an excuse, it puts you on the defense. The person asking will now launch into an attack on why your excuse isn’t (to them) satisfactory. (Not offering excuses, is a good rule in general, not just for saying ‘no’.)
3. Not Enough time “I’m sorry, I’d like to be able to help right now, but my current project take up all of my available time.” For lots of workers, this is the truth. You must not over schedule yourself and, more importantly, you must not let others over schedule you.
4. The Conditional ‘no’ Agree to help, but only if X number of other people agree to help as well. This is the best method for friends who want to move house, or want volunteers to help them with household projects. Moving house with 10 people is a world of difference from moving house with just two.
5. Switch Projects With bosses, often there isn’t a way to say ‘no’ to taking on an additional project. It’s best to keep a projects list and ask your supervisor what project you should stop working on to dedicate time to the new project. This serves two purposes: it reminds your boss of the things you are working on, and it also reminds them that if you start something new, something else must suffer.
6. Do an Excellent Job When You DO Help. On the projects you do say ‘yes’ to, do your best to do a superb job. It will help build your reputation as a person who does great work, but has limited time.

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Header photograph by Daquella manera

Every six months or so, one of my flatmates moves out and we need to find a replacement. At the end of the interview process we ask them to write their contact details on a pad of paper.

Every time, they don’t know their phone number.

“I just got a new phone,” they say. “I haven’t learned the number yet.”

But they lie. How do I know? I used that same excuse when I moved into the flat and was asked for my number. Truth was, I just plain didn’t remember, but felt stupid saying so.

The number of devices out there, leaping at a chance to hold important pieces of information is staggering. It’s so easy to let them be our outboard brain. Were it not for teachers and their tests, I’m sure the kids-these-days would find the idea of using their brain to remember things archaic.

I don’t think this lack of memory is necessarily a bad thing. It’s no worse than the deterioration of mental arithmetic since the invention of the abacus.

However, there are times that you may want to remember things.

If you want to keep your memory up-to-date, then Iflash is a great program to help you do so. It’s a flash card database, with one great advantage: it asks the flash cards you have the most difficultly with the most often. If I have five minutes to kill while waiting for a client I’ll fire up Iflash to do something useful with the time.

I use it to remember things like my wife’s phone number. While I have her number on speed dial, it’s easy to imagine an emergency where I don’t have my cell phone and need to contact her. It’s also handy for bank account numbers and passwords (I do, however, keep my database of flash cards encrypted, so that I can store sensitive information without worrying).

While you can make many different databases and categories, I prefer to leave the flash cards unsorted in one massive pile called ‘The Knowledge’ (after the arduous geography test that London cabbies must pass). This way, anything that I ever need to remember stays in there forever. It also makes the daily testing more interesting. Iflash asks ‘What’s the 92nd element?’, ‘Who assassinated William McKinley’, and ‘what does lexiphanes mean’ rather than just question after question on spanish verbs.

Even though a world where google is a verb makes looking up information so easy, just remembering something makes life a bit smoother. Eventually though, memory will be a kind of arcane art form — a calligraphy of the mind. But until that day, give Iflash a try.

[Click here to download iFlash]

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Header photograph by sanchom

Having trouble writing a coherent email to your family or co-workers? Here are six tips to help you through the process.

1) Keep it Short

Keep your email as short as possible. Writing a long email is a way to ensure two things:

1. You will never get a response because…
2. Your email will never be read

The rapidity of typing makes it too easy to spew a long, ill-formed messages onto another person. If you had to write emails by hand, you’d be a lot more succinct. Cut your email down to the bones. But, this is a harder task than you think, as Abe Lincoln once wrote: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

2) Limit Email to a Single Topic

Never write an email that covers many subjects. If you actually want a response, you need to make it easy for the other person to respond — the first way to do this is not overwhelm them with multiple tasks.

If you have many unrelated things to discuss with your recipient, send each one as a separate message.

3) Make it Clear

Emails are far too easily misunderstood. Therefore, make sure the email is as clear, unambiguous and easy to understand as possible. This means avoiding abbreviations, and brushing up on your grammar — yes it can be boring, but a little grammar revision cuts down on confusion.

Hardest of all it to make sure to explain fully to the other person what you are thinking about . It’s too simple to forget that the knowledge you have in your head is not the same as your recipient’s. Before writing the email, place yourself in their mind — think about how best to explain what you are talking about to someone who is not necessarily as familiar with the topic as you are.

In a reply, quote the exact text you’re responding to. This helps keep things clear.

4) Tell the Person Exactly What you Want

If you want something done, ask. Finish each email with a bullet point list of what you need. Don’t force the person to hunt through your earlier paragraphs looking for the things they are supposed to do.

The same goes for questions. Asking vague, essay-ish questions will get you vague essay-ish answers. Ask questions about specific topics that require specific answers

5) Write the Subject after the Email

The subject is an overlooked part of the email message. It’s often the first thing you write, before you’re even sure what the email is about. This is why subjects are often vague and unhelpful, i.e. ‘Hey,’ or ‘Hello’. After you’ve written your email — and have a better idea what the message is really about — then write the subject.

6) Writing the TO: Address is the Last Thing You Do

By waiting until the very end to enter the address, you prevent yourself from the embarrassing mistake of sending a half-completed email. Even better, if your email is written in haste or in anger, it gives you a final moment’s pause to reflect on whether you really want to send that message.

An Example:

remember the thing that we talked about the other day? i need some more information so I can do it, also what are your thoughts on the new place?

Yesterday we talked about changing the venue for the seminar on the 30th of August

Could you please:

* Tell me the new venue's name and address

* Do you think the space is adequate to hold and speak to 500 people?

Thanks,

Header photograph by Pink Sherbet Photography

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The ‘days ago’ counters are a handy way to keep track of how long ago something happened. Simple to use, there is just a button on the front that keeps track of how many days it has been since you pressed it. While the days ago counters are intended to keep track of expiring food, there are a number of motivational ways to use them. For example, keep track of how many days it’s been since you’ve worked on a project or exercised. I have three sitting on my desk, and love them.

[Click here to get a days ago counter]

If you are unfortunate enough to live a certain distance from the equator, for reasons of dubiousness value the government will mess with your sleep cycles twice a year by adjusting the clocks and hour forward or backward.

Next week is the Autumn ‘fall back’ half of the year. This Sunday we will wake up with an extra hour of time. Who doesn’t open their sleepy eyes on that morning, look at the clock, remember you have an extra hour and drift back into the arms of Morpheus?

I say fight Morpheus, take the radical approach: use daylight saving time to help you get up early.

If you’ve been trying to get up early, and found yourself constantly failing, now is your chance. Normally it’s difficult to stick to a schedule of early rising because of the terrible, terrible physical feeling that first morning. But when the clocks move, if you wake up at the same time you normally do, you’ll steel an hour of the day for yourself.

So, if you’ve been trying to wake earlier, I suggest you use this week as a trial run of getting up an hour earlier than you normally do. Use that time for whatever you want, but give it a go. Have a seven-day, pain-free trial of the early waking life.

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Header photograph from the wonderful and surreal toothpaste for dinner

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Nocturne

Nocturne is made by the same fabulous guy who produces quicksilver. Nocturne will invert both the brightness of the screen, making black into white and visa-versa, and it will also invert the color hue. Nocturne is my preferred application for working in the dark, as I find the color inversion much easier on the eyes. However, if your work involves editing photographs or creating vector drawings, nocturne color inversion is a problem. If that’s the case, you should try out the next application.

Shades

Shades is a preference pane that will add a small menubar icon that allows you to dim the screen more than you would normally be able to do. It makes your screen about ten times less dim than the lowest setting available via the sun buttons on the keyboard. Plus, shades does not invert the colors, so this is the preferred application for doing things where colors matter.

Go grab and app and get to work in the dark:

[Click here to download Nocturne]

[Click here to download Shades]

Arch-lever files are an abortional blight upon the world of office supplies. For those of you who have never organized files in England, you know not the horror of these devices.

For some ungodly reason, this malevolent device usurped the divine manilla folder in Great Britain. Why the English love their arch-lever files, I do not know. The problems with them are endless.

Practicality

Papers that go inside arch-lever files must be either hole punched or put inside plastic protector sheets. If hole punched, it’s only a matter of time before the sheet rips. This is unacceptable for original documents and a needless annoyance for others. These ripped sheets slowly accumulate, forming a precarious mass that lies in wait to spill out in catastrophe. The plastic protectors are no better. They merely take longer to rip and add an additional step to the already cumbersome burden of filing, which brings us to another point:

Arch-lever files are slow. The act of hole-punching impedes efficient filing. First you have to find the hole puncher, then separate your sheets into punchable stacks. Lift, shove, punch, tap, empty, lift, shove, punch, tap. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Trying to insert or remove a single sheet of paper from the back of an overloaded arch-lever file is a Herculean task — three inches of paper on top of the needed sheet is heavier than you think. And don’t try and lift it to quickly or the metal prongs will open and the papers will come undone. I hope you hole punched all 400 sheets perfectly or you’ll have trouble getting them back in.

And what about single pieces of paper that don’t belong in a logical large category? Trying to come up with a complete taxonomy for the arch-lever file is a lexicographical nightmare.

Space

Arch-lever files are an arbitrary, immutable size. The most common ones for business are three inches across. This encourages massive overloading — rather than have a file drawer for ‘client data’ with one folder per client, the English cram all client documents into a single arch-lever file. The desire to keep disparate papers together overrides the sensible limits of the physical world.

The finite size of each binder leaves no room whatsoever for expanding categories or changing your filing system. What if one middle section outgrows the binder, but the other sections are still small? ‘Screw you,’ says the arch-lever file. Filing systems need to be flexible, adaptable, yet the arch-lever files are willfully anti-evolutionary, managing to be simultaneously ambiguous and inflexible.

Arch-lever files eat shelf space. All the arches and levers and encasing cardboard take up vast amounts of space, and the shelving required to house this grotesque bulk is obscene. If you ever move offices the slothful arch-lever files must be handled individually where as a filing cabinet full of manilla folders just loads onto a dolly.

Aesthetics

The two holes of the English binders in general and arch-lever files in particular are antithetical to three point precision. They are too close together to actually hold the paper in place, so the sheets wobble back and forth, fidgeting their way toward freedom. As a teacher I manage classes which are, god help me, mandated to use two-hole binders. On the occasion an American student manages to smuggle a three hole binder across the pond, her binder is always much neater, because it actually binds the paper in its place.

How the Empire upon which the sun never sat did all their paper work is beyond me. Any American expats out there know where it’s possible to get decent office supplies in England?

A pox upon the arch-lever file!

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This was a collaborative post with my wife, Noelani Grey, who knows the horrors of office work in England far better than I.

Header photograph by aWee

Every year the biology department of our lab conducts an experiment to see where the most bacteria live. The students take samples with cotton swabs from different places in the school. The results are always a surprise to them: the toilet seat is nearly bacteria-free and their hands are bacteria farms. However, the winner for most bacteria nearly every year is chewed pen caps.

Think about it: the pen caps are in your mouth — a disgusting place to start with. Your teeth grind the surface, pitting it and making it more inhabitable. Your saliva, an excellent growth medium, remains on the surface and the pen travels everywhere: backpacks, tables, books, the floor, other peoples’ hands (and mouths) and then back into your own mouth.

It’s the perfect disease vector for a school.

Breaking the habit of chewing on your pen cap will help reduce your exposure to disease. But how to break that habit? While there are many methods to punish yourself (such as snapping a rubber band against your wrist) they require you to be proactive. Who wants that? People are lazy and don’t (usually) enjoy hurting themselves. Passive, automatic punishments are the most effective.

Here’s the solution: go into a drug store and buy the stuff they sell to stop people from biting their nails. It’s a clear varnish you paint on your nails that has a bitter, unpleasant taste. Then, paint it on the bottom and top of your pen. This way, the next time you accidently put the pen in your mouth, you’ll know.

After a few days of this, the negative reinforcement adds up quickly. I tried it, and after about three weeks the habit was solidly broken. It’s been months now and even without painting the caps of all my pens, the habit is broken.

Do yourself a favor and [click here to get some anti-nail-biting varnish].

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Header photograph by orangeacid

I must confess that a to-do once lived on one of my next action lists for three three years before I crossed it off. Three years. What was this monstrous task, you ask? Writing a PhD thesis, perhaps? No. It was to send a thank-you email that would have taken not twenty minutes to complete.

After letting something like that linger for so long, I’ve developed methods to ensure that it won’t happen again. Here’s how can you ensure that to-do’s get done, rather than become permanent fixtures:

1. After each to-do, write the date. The to-dos on my next action lists now look like this: Email Richard F thank you re: wedding — 2008-09-28. This way it’s easy and embarrassing to see which to-do’s are lingering in in system.
2. Never write anything twice. In a paper-based system, like my paa, only allow yourself to write a to-do once. This rule forces you to keep the original page with the to-do written on it. You may only throw out a list when all the to-do’s on it are crossed off. I particularly like this method because the old sheets feel scuzzy. Letting them build up for too long is like not brushing your teeth — eventually you just have to do it.

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Header photograph by CarbonNYC

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Yesterday on slashdot there was a discussion on the perennial problem of managing the many power cords to charge all your electrical devices. In usual slashdot fashion, there are some good tips from a geeky crowd who’s been dealing with this problem for a long time.

One interesting product that came up in the discussion is the chargepod: an interesting looking multi-charger.

[Click here to read the slashdot article]

[Click here to check out the chargepod]

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Header photograph by pvera