Month: September 2010

Ruthless email de-cluttering..

3 weeks ago, I looked at my mailbox and I found myself simply annoyed by all the spam I had accumulated over a period.

So, I got down to being slightly more proactive and went on a major email de-cluttering spree, and did the following –

1) Centralized newsletters to one account, and in the process eliminated a couple.

2) Removed 3 accounts from outlook and my life altogether. Set up permanent auto responders just in case someone does send legitimate emails. (And if its to the spammers, that’s spam right back at them!).

3) Went about unsubscribing from promotions/online stores and lots of other stuff that had just accumulated over the years..

4) Realized I could do without the news.. so that went out.

5) Removed email subscriptions from a couple of the blogs I subscribed to and just added them to the ‘Blogs I read‘ section as I hardly ever miss posts that show up there..

All in all, in 3 weeks, I’m 90% clean. There’s still the odd promo that I’ve not managed to erase but I can already feel the joys of not having to delete unwanted emails and mentally cursing them for coming in (again)..

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De-cluttering once a while is a genuinely liberating experience! So, if you’re feeling messy, Happy de-cluttering!

Waking up to a nice sounding alarm..

Everybody typically has their own philosophy with alarms – some like it loud, some soft, some a sound they hate so they’re forced to wake up and snooze/shut it.

I’ve been experimenting with different songs – slow ones, fast ones, loud ones and finally have settled on a nice number that starts off with a slow pace and picks up gradually.

Waking up these last few days has been an absolute pleasure. Since I love having an extra 10 mins of sleep, I then set my timer and wake up finally to the guitar from ‘Wonderwall‘

Funnily enough, I look forward to waking up to these lovely tones. These small things add up and make a huge difference to the day!

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Do let me know what your alarm experiences are.. :)

Tethering means you never have internet down time..

I’ve been having crazy internet issues at home this weekend. And thanks to having some carry over work yesterday, it began to get frustrating to see internet repeatedly connect and disconnect.

And the solution – Tethering! If you have an iPhone or an Android(i.e. any phone with an Android OS), all you have to is ‘tether’ your 3G connection to your computer. In simple words, this means you can transfer your 3G internet connection to your laptop by just connecting your phone to it.

So simple, yet very good!

Admittedly, I realized the power of tethering when we lost internet at our office for a day thanks to some maintenance. And we were working off a shared internet connection from my tethered phone. In simple words, that means –

Step 1: Connect my phone to my laptop and have my laptop use 3G
Step 2: Share the 3G internet with a wireless network created on my laptop to others around me..

And the good news – it actually worked at optimal speeds even with 3 people using it for all practical purposes at the same time!

Investing time in getting ourselves planned and organized – A story..

John was writing a book by the sea. The book was a neat sheaf of papers piled one on top of the other at the moment.

All of a sudden, a gust of wind blew and John started scrambling to get put the papers back. But, as he did so, another gust blew and more papers flew.. and before he knew it, he had been fighting for 15 minutes to keep the order of sheets in tact.

And that’s when he realized that he could have saved his time and avoided frustration if he had only shut the window the first time and put a weight on top of the sheets.

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Life is such that we always have interruptions that throw us of. It pays to plan and organize so we are fighting what we need to do vs fighting meaningless interruptions.