Tag: Lifehacker

I just learned how I learn

While I was reading Lifehacker.com today, I noticed a story I had missed yesterday as I hadn’t been on the computer much. It had a link to a quiz asking “What type of learner are you?” and then gave a bunch of helpful hints based on your answers.

Up until today I had always heard “Are you a visual or audio learner?” and I always kind of had trouble figuring out which one it was. In this test I noticed “kinesthetic/tactile learner” and kind of sat there like “Wait… what’s that?” So I take the test in order, from visual (no points), audio (3 points), and then kinesthetic/tactile (7 points). Mind you each section has 8 questions. The one I missed on kinesthetic was that I don’t prefer to ride my bike to work, as it is an hour away and I love to drive on country roads and listen to music at full volume.

So this actually answered a lot of my own personal questions and made me realize why I do a lot of the things I do or can do. I always thought my memory was great, and thought for awhile it might be photographic, but every time I tried to test myself for it I failed miserably. So I was always caught between “Well, I can remember all these things with great detail but whenever I try to purposely do it, I can’t.” This helps explain why I pay attention vividly as I learn directions to somewhere new (and can recall those directions 2 years later as I have done a few times by going through and doing it). And with cooking, I have to re-read a recipe a million times as I’m making a dish the first time, and after that I know how to make it and can even go to a store and recite every ingredient I need just by thinking about cooking the recipe with ease.

It also helps describe a lot of the things I like or dislike, as well as some tendancies I have. For awhile I had a feeling that I “sort of had ADD but didn’t” in that it didn’t seem like I couldn’t concentrate, I can, I just concentrate on a lot of things for very small periods of time and jump between them to keep from getting bored. Some things I noticed from these lists:

• Likes to cook
• Loves playing games/good hand-eye coordination
• Loves using computers
• Doesn’t read instruction manuals and can easily figure out how things work by simply using them
• Can remember how to do things once they have done them
• Has to be active in some way while focusing (most recently I notice I loosen my wedding band and play with it in my hand as I read online articles just about every day)
• Benefits from exercising in the morning before going to work (cannot emphasize this enough since I just started a few weeks ago and it changes my whole day)
• Wears comfortable clothing (I adjust my clothes/how I sit all day long to try to be comfortable)
• Doesn’t like traditional desks (I often slouch and adjust things in weird positions to accommodate me being in any position besides sitting up straight)
• Takes lots of small breaks
• Strong muscle memory
• Takes notes to keep busy but won’t use them
• Talks with hands
• Doesn’t hear things well
• Remembers what was done rather than exact things they saw or heard
• Impulsive
• Likes role playing (in the sense of acting something out, although I do enjoy geeking out and doing the fantasy thing in video games from time to time)
• Knows the temperature of the room they are in
• Has to stand up and walk around from time to time
• Saying things like “This feels right” (I usually say “I feel you” quite a bit when saying I understand something, and almost never “I see what you mean” or “I hear what you are saying”)
• Have bad handwriting (bad is an understatement for me)
• Great at multiple choice quizzes (I usually finished ahead of most or all in the class on any multiple choice quiz)
• Enjoys field trips (especially places with physical examples like museums and such)
• Big on reading how-to if I have to read about something I don’t know (ESPECIALLY cookbooks)
• Has a hard time listening to lectures
• Studies with loud music on
• Great at typing (I’m fast and accurate)
• You feel things are right or wrong based on gut instinct

I bring this up since I appear to be in a minority of about 5-10% of people. Immediately as I read descriptions of people like this it just clicked that this is why I can’t do things like Google Calendar or Evernote when they appear to be so popular with so many people as productivity tools. I just don’t get them. My wife is an extremely visual person and uses lists and calendars for everything and then would get mad that I don’t do them as well in an effort to help remembering something.

This brings me to a dilemma in that so many of the tools out there focus on what the majority need. I want to be more productive and do things to help me remember and such, but nothing out there is all that helpful and I usually give up pretty quickly. Even recently I have tried to start using Remember the Milk, yet I have no idea how I’d use it to be honest. It would never occur to me to plot out my entire day of what I need to do or remember a few days down the line. On the other hand, I’m sure my wife would immediately “get it” and have all sorts of organized lists, alerts, etc.

I suppose the closest thing I could understand to use was Jott since I understand how it could take what I say, translate it into text without me needing to take the time to write it down, and then remind me when appropriate, but I don’t have enough things during that day such as meetings or remembering to go to the store (I just go do it). What would be great is a tool that lets me track progress on multiple things at once or reminds me to get back to work when I wander too far off while taking a break from getting bored of staring at something.

Hopefully some people will find their way here to realize that maybe kids who fidget and have problems with long lectures or things being written on the blackboard are not necessarily ADD/ADHD. It’d be nice if there were more learning/productivity tools that were encouraging for kinesthetic/tactile learners though. Of course I don’t expect there to be many considering this is really not how the majority need to understand things (I’m sure taking an auditory person and telling them to just do something rather than sitting and telling them the instructions first would be unfair), but can we at least get a few? I barely see information about this on the internet from Google searches, and what is out there seems old, dated, and focuses specifically on children as they are being taught rather than how to organize and be productive as adults.

Evernote: The greatest idea, the worst implementation

I really need some kind of good note taking service and preferably one that works across my PC to iPhone via the web (a web-based interface if I’m not at my main computer would be fantastic). Whilst browsing through Lifehacker’s Five Best Journaling Tools, I happened upon Evernote. This seemed great at first. It addresses the need for PC/web/iPhone sync’ing. It lets you do typed notes, pictures (and even recognizes the text in those images!), or audio notes. It lets you search through everything and it can basically be an extension of your brain for anything, stuff you expect to remember and that which you don’t. I didn’t get around to the Firefox plug-in, but that seems like it would be handy, and even if not you can still use a bookmark they provide where you can drag a webpage to this icon to ‘clip’ it to Evernote. Snazzy.

So I open it on the PC and it is a big application. By this I mean it takes up a lot of screen real estate to record notes. I figured, for a company that has this down so pat, there must be some kind of desktop widget? Nay. There is no little app that can sit on my desktop for me to throw something to and have it remind me later…

Even if there was some kind of desktop widget, the remind me later part? Not there, at least not from my surfing the internet for 15 minutes and also looking throughout the program to try to tell it to remind me of something.

So let me get this straight, you create this huge service for people to remember stuff, it even can interpret handwriting in pictures you have taken for search indexing, and you leave out the ability to let it tell you when something important is going to come up?

Am I the only one who sees a serious design flaw here? I read an article about people not understanding how to use Evernote, and this programmer wanted to take it upon himself to explain how he uses it for the benefit of all those who don’t understand it. He went on to explain that he saves his online passwords (mistake), code snippets, online receipts, and logs from his IM’s in there. First of all, I have Firefox for a reason on the password part, I don’t code but even if I did need to throw snippets of code around I could just as easily use any text editor, the online receipts all get organized within GMail with some fancy filtering and tagging, and AIM and every other IM program in the world already logs your conversations.

Thus, I already have systems in place for all of those things, not to mention each one of those items is done in a better manner than Evernote can do it and also in an easier manner, in some cases automatically without me even having to drag something into Evernote or type it in. So perhaps it is Evernote that doesn’t understand people, rather than people not understanding what to do with Evernote?

I’m really shocked for a note-taking application, it doesn’t have the reminder feature or the lightweight interface (even a “mini” version of the program like iTunes can be turned into the “mini player” version would suffice). Note taking should not be a full-scale windowed effort. If it is, it is no longer a note, but an essay. If I want to write essays, I will login to my blog and write one about programs that leave out completely obvious features. Obviously.

I know lots of geeks (I use that term endearingly and self-descriptively, as always) get into these neat cloud-based programs/websites that fill obvious needs within every day life. From work-flow organization to remembering things or managing your bank account with tips about what you are doing wrong, there are companies for everything now. I think we may be seeing a dot com explosion again, yet rather for version 2.0 there are savvy investors who are throwing money into companies that actually make sense, rather than anything some idiot could think of and pitch to a guy who did not understand the internet at all and only knew it “meant he’ll make money at some point.” I think that is all great too. I just think that maybe we should be a little bit more critical and maybe even recommend some of these services merge to have some more one-stop shops. Google is doing a great job in that department, but they cannot and should not do it all.

After 20 minutes I deleted the app from my iPhone and will be uninstalling the Evernote program from my PC. I said good day.

Lifehacking

Within the past few weeks, I’ve become a huge fan of lifehacker.com, a site which is inline with where I am heading in my own life. I finally have finances to work with rather than always being broke – not that I’m rich by any means, but I can afford to pay bills, enjoy life a little, and take advantage of setting up new goals. I’m in a pretty good position in my life for the first time in years, things are finally looking up and as I pointed out in my previous blog entry, I’m happy and looking forward to beginning to accomplish new things.

A few major things on my mind lately:

Money – I really want to get control of my financial situation. When everything seemed dire, and I couldn’t afford to pay bills no matter how much I was working at crappy jobs, I simply gave up. Now because of giving up in the past, my credit is terrible and in the process, now that I have money, I want to upgrade my life with all the things I’ve needed or wanted but could not afford. A new car is one need, as working out of town is going to require Tracy to be able to get herself around to stores and thus she will take over my car. I also need to purchase some furniture and a better TV for my apartment, which at this point are ‘wants’ but it would certainly make the nights go by a little faster than squinting. So, I got Quicken, linked it up to my Bank of America account, and will be plugging away at that sometime this week while I sort out what my income is, what my expenditures are, how much I can put towards bills every month, and how soon I can get all the things I want. In fact, I remember I had bills to pay while writing this and am taking care of them and entering them into Quicken as I go.

Productivity – A huge reason I love Lifehacker is its focus on using software and tricks to make things much easier and less of a hassle. I always think about what a hassle things are and wind up procrastinating, so if I can just automate everything, then I don’t have to do it in the first place when the time comes. Lifehacker was recently feature in TIME.com’s 25 Best Blogs list, and following that got me to ZenHabits.net, which I’m already reading quite eagerly.

Exercise – There have been a ton of reasons I’ve put this off, starting with it being boring and I can’t stand it to having asthma to thinking the process will just take too long and it isn’t worth all the work. The more I read, the more I see how I can eliminate my reasons.

Being better throughout the day – Usually I go to bed too late, wake up with way too little sleep, rush into the shower, out the door with a banana and bottle of water or frappacino, get to work and immediately begin to slack off because I’m too tired to focus until another hour later. This isn’t to say I don’t get my work done, quite the contrary I am pretty good at managing my procrastination by evaluating how much time a task will take me, and scheduling it in during my day at some point rather than right away. However, procrastinating other things in life due to being too tired to get up and just do it usually affect me negative, to the point where I start paying penalties, both literally and figuratively, for not getting bills done on time or not running to the store when I needed to get something. I’ve always been a night owl, but is there really a reason to stay up until 11:00PM or midnight? No, especially not when all I do is aimlessly surf the internet until I’m too tired. So, I think getting on a real schedule and sticking to it is going to have to start happening.

Getting in the right mindset – I hate things that take me away from being lazy, though they usually are rarely at the true cost of my life that I see them as. Today I still have to do laundry (no excuse for putting this off) and run and buy groceries from the grocery store (something I put off until the afternoon to beat the crowds, so I do have purpose for not having done this until the end of my weekend). In all seriousness though, all I’m really doing is websurfing otherwise, which can be done at any time, and very often I find myself scanning the same websites looking for any update and any reason to continue being lazy.

Using my computer better – I redesigned my desktop (picture is here, it is too big to include in my post), which is my beginning to getting to use my computer more efficiently. Having the notes right on my desktop and simply clicking the button to enter in new notes is great, it keeps it on my mind all the time. The RSS feeds show me if the sites I read actually have updated, making it so I don’t have to visit them and waste more time checking just to see if they did or not. Although minimal, it gives me another reason to not have an excuse to aimlessly surf. I’m downloading and implementing more programs to help me get automated (Quicken being a prime example already). And, for computer related tasks, I’m automating the things I always am bad about when it comes to computer care. A perfect example is now using Carbonite to automatically backup my files, which I have almost never done, even though I once suffered massive data loss with a previous hard drive failure years ago. The other beauty of Carbonite besides me not having to think about being redundant in saving files (really, transfer files to multiple different places every week, including moving external hard drives to off-site locations in case of fire? Yeah, ok… not going to happen) is the remote access feature right through the website. I use my main computer at work and usually take it home on the weekends, though some weekends I’m too rushed and don’t want to bother hauling a mid-tower into my car as the day ends, my laptop at my apartment at nights and sometimes on the weekends that I don’t bring my big computer home, and a third computer with tons of old files at home on my desk which also serves to stream hockey games or keep other things of interest on the screen while I actually use/work my main computer. Worse, my files are usually constantly split between my main box and my laptop, and my 3rd computer rarely receives any kind of file updates because I never actually work off of it. This gives me a chance to get any of the files I need from any computer no matter where I am. While this isn’t really a new idea, the way I’m going about it is incredibly simple given that I don’t have to initially think to upload the files in the first place, so I am never stuck later thinking “Damn, I wish I had uploaded that.”

Eating better – I love to cook, previously I was too poor to buy ingredients just for one meal to eat something delicious that was also nutricious. I can kill three birds with 1 stone, which is kind of like off the bleachers, out the window, over the bridge, off the office building, into the basketball yard near the street, nothing but net. I can reignite my passion to cook along with getting better by practicing more, I can discover new food I like by trying new recipes, and I can eat foods that are more healthy.

In the end, when I get lazy, and therefore tired, I can actually rest rather than think about all the things I put off and burn myself out even more. It is all very zen.

Here is to hoping that I stick with it and don’t procrastinate. Bills are paid, off to the store!

-Falaris