Organize IT

Good month for Organize IT. All stats continue to grow and it’s great to see you all leaving comments, subscribing to the RSS feed, talking to me on Twitter, etc. The community is growing! Remember, you can now contact me on LinkedIn and Facebook too. I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for the support.

Organize IT recap for 02nd May 2008.

• The BBC is taking a look at how the internet has a potentially bleak future. The internet is such an integral part of my life nowadays. I’m on it everyday. I have this blog, I watch TV, listen to music, buy and sell, research and read… I could go on. It’s important that we don’t take the internet for granted.
• We are all familiar with financial budgets, but what about time budgets? Litemind has a good writeup describing how you can implement one. This approach gives you an objective way of assessing your life balance, and sounds much more practical to do than a time audit. Personally I try to pace myself as much as possible, mixing leisure with work as I go along. Ever tried a time budget? What were your experiences?
• Dumb Little Man has a ten point guide on how you can drop pounds and years off yourself. Normally I wouldn’t pay much attention to such posts but I liked this one for it’s practical and realistic advice. Start drinking green tea? Wow, I can do that right now. Cut out the white flour? That’s an easy habit to start developing. It’s not all about going to the gym every week, it’s also about your lifestyle.
• I like theories and formulas when it comes to the topics I write about, hence my formula for productivity and my procrastination guide. Productive Flourishing has a very intriguing theory of productivity that covers the time management loop alongside the principles of effective time management systems. Definitely worth an in-depth look. I’m going to see how my weekly planner stands up to it.

On Monday I talked about how we can cut back on the amount of food that we waste. The simplest way to do that is to just not have as much on your plate. We often prepare more food than we can actually eat, and it got me thinking about other areas of life where the same situation applies. When I clean my teeth, do I really need to put that much toothpaste on my brush? A pea sized amount has turned out to be quite sufficient. When I wash my hands do I really need to use that much hand wash? I’ve found because it foams up so well it goes a long way.

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This month it emerged that in the UK, a staggering eight billion pounds worth of food goes to waste, which equates to 6.7 million tonnes or a third of our total purchases. Those are scary stats that are echoed in many other countries around the world. This effects us two ways. Firstly, with food prices rising dramatically at the moment, it’s a very good idea to start looking at whether we can be more efficient with what we eat, thus wasting less and saving money. Secondly, all that wasted food typically ends up on landfills thus producing the greenhouse gas methane, on top of all the damage the excess packaging and transporting causes. It’s with all this in mind that I’ve compiled an introductory list of habits you can develop in your life that will help you to stop wasting food so as to save money and be environmentally friendly.

Organize IT recap for 25th April 2008.

• Organize IT can now be found on Alltop under the lifehacks category. Thanks for including me guys! If you have problems with too many RSS feeds this site is a good way of distilling them down. One quick glance through the lifehacks page (or indeed under any category that interests you) and you can pick out top posts you like the sound of.
• Tim Ferris, famous for the Four Hour Work Week, has some great advice about public speaking from Al Gore’s chief speech writer. If you have any doubt about your presentation consider what your point is and whether your speech explains why it matters.