Organize IT

Welcome to the tenth part of my Clutter 101 series! Imagine that you have friends or family who have unexpectedly decided to visit you (as they always seem to do…), yet you have piles of paper on the table, laundry waiting to be washed in baskets and, and overflowing kitchen drawers. How do you go about tidying up and de-cluttering in a such a short space of time? The trap a lot of people fall into is to rush around to try and clean the entire home, dumping everything into the first drawer they find. Out of sight, out of mind right?

Organize IT recap for 29th July 2007

• Productivity advice from Jerry Seinfeld? You read that right, check it out here. He basically suggests getting a big wall calendar and putting a big red X through each day when you complete your tasks for it. After a while you create a nice, long chain which you really don’t want to break.
• Over at Achieve IT! there is a 10 point guide to squashing a bad mood in 17 minutes or less. I’m not entirely sure where he got the 17 minute figure from though :)

Inspirational quotes for 26th July 2007.

Marcel Pagnol: “The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.”

Albert Ellis: “The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.”

Tommy Cooper: “You know, somebody actually complimented me on my driving today. They left a little note on the windscreen, it said ‘Parking Fine’. So that was nice”

I am now heavily reliant on my single sheet template for organizing my projects and staying productive (I also have a few older ones here). However there are a lot of other printable templates you can experiment with. Below is a small list of links I have found that may be of interest if you are after some ideas or want to print a few out. Please share any others you know of in the comments and I will add them to the list.

It’s been roughly a month since I started using Mozy so I thought I would do an update. It works great for me still, though there are some niggling issues (what program doesn’t have them?) and thoughts I want to make people aware of. Firstly I should point out that Mozy mirrors your content and can’t be used for just storing files.

Mark in the comments brought up a few good points related to this. Most importantly the free version only backs up the last 30 days worth of data. This isn’t personally a problem in my lifestyle, but if you are away from home/work regularly, it’s useful to be aware of it.

Mozy was not always detecting my internet connection too which meant automatic backup didn’t happen (though this may be because of my dodgy router rather than an actual bug). However if you go to configuration and select the option to attempt backups even if no connections are detected, this should fix any problems.

The way to get your backups is to select them via the Mozy website and they will email you when the files have been prepared for you to download. The backup process is done via their website rather than the actual program. It’s great if you need to access a file from another computer, however it’s not the fastest process, and do you really want to be downloading an entire hard-drive via this process? Next time I partition my PC I will get the chance to really test it.