i.justrealized

Almost a month has passed since school reopen. I’ve been spending time on things that probably didn’t matter to me that much. It saddens me a little when I look back on how I allocated my time.

To claim that school is busy, work is busy, is perhaps just a lie. I’m obsessed with reading US election news lately and it got the better of my time. I spend about 1.5 hours a day reading on something that would affect me little. This sucked.

Also I have a stack of books I can’t complete. Books that were purchased, perhaps, 2 years ago even. I aim to complete it last year, half a year ago and a month ago. I’m still bookmarking (pretty much the same) the third quarter of the book.

I read four books at the same time. I just realized how horrible an idea that was.

Time seems to pass faster these days.

Google Reader is a blessing, it works on all major browsers and is really useful for users who have multiple computers. If you mark a post as read, your post is marked read on any other computer you log in from. And that’s the main reason why I use Google Reader.

But Google Reader is always a struggle between productivity at work and, well, you know, just slacking. When I am at it, I just read and read and can spend hours on just a bloody RSS reader which is really sad in a way. It’s almost as if God created me to read RSS feeds and mark them as my favorites so it would appear pretty on FriendFeed or something.

Here’s how I combat my productivity problem:

I previous sort my feeds in tags like technology, blogs, social, funny and blah blah… First thing I did is to remove all the RSS feeds that I typically just skim through. So bye bye Boing Boing and Engadget. I figured one day that any really amazing gadget would end up at Reddit.com (which by the way is my whole new playground to waste time at) or Digg.com (my ex).

Today I sort my Google Reader categories in what I think I most like to read at the top, i.e. essentials. Light reads are things that aren’t heavy and are still quite informative. Nosy reads are my friend’s blogs. I syndicate far too many of them and after a while, I noticed my friends are blogging more and more of their private stuff and it almost seem like I am spying on my neighbor applying her face mask.

Thinkers are feeds that makes you think. They’re heavy reads and I put them at the bottom to save myself from potentially balding before thirty. Xtras are a bunch of feeds that I really shouldn’t start reading.

Tagging feeds by frequency of reading sort of helped me read RSS feeds better. Maybe you could try it too.

I’m really happy today and I keep posting new entries. And why is this so? Because my internet seemed a lot faster and Media Temple seem to be behaving pretty well. Is it the end of their storage and whatever problems?

We’ll see. But so far so good. I’m pleased. I mean, at least these stuff actually is loading.

On a side note, having internet has always decrease my productivity a little. So much things to read, so much things to catch up. Often, I hear people saying they aren’t productive and attribute it to the internet. I work and breathe the internet, and I thereby admit that I grew unproductive due to it. I guess that’s a reasonable tradeoff considering the wealth of information available in the internet.

Even with search, newsreaders, social networks and blahblahs, I never really achieve much productivity boosts. These tools merely introduce new distractions, new things to try on. Things that require your time, your energy. Things that break time and again and have this huge beta label on it.

I live by them now.

I don’t see how people can get productive with this:

Saw this in my lecturer’s computer. The quick launch area takes up half the space! I don’t even have the quick lunch area in my desktop, I hide it ’cause it’s pretty unnecessary for me. I didn’t take a picture of that lecturer’s desktop but let’s just say that the Desktop Cleanup Wizard apparently is not working.

Okay, as I was saying, my computer’s getting kinda cluttered and things are just getting harder and harder to find. I use Windows Vista Business, I have multiple copies of Apache, MySQL, Ruby, PHP and other this sort of programs in my computer. If you don’t know what they are, you probably wouldn’t like my blog, maybe you’d be better off at BoingBoing or watching some inspiring videos at TED.

The problem with having multiple copies is that you don’t know when to launch what. Every time I want to - say - launch MySQL, I start thinking really hard which folder should I go into. And when my mind is kinda switching off I often find my mouse pointer moving towards Safari browser icon and visiting Digg.com. Counter-productivity at the very best or worst - you decide.

I always tell myself, okay, next time when I re-setup my computer I’ll do this and that and so on… Each time I re-setup my computer, I always find a flaw with my existing setup. I will restructure my folders again, partition things differently this time. And I always have this optimistic thought that this time I’m really getting it right.

I rarely do. Two months later I would look back at my system thinking of new ways to refine my setup for the future.

Maybe the problem isn’t with me. Maybe the problem is with just the way computers are. All these labyrinth-like hierarchy of folders, it’s more messy than my family tree. Some day, we should kill the ideas of folders, they’re a good way of organizing things but today with people storing more and more files, the concept of folders is hardly a good idea.