The desktop mind map that I started using New Year’s Day is a study of time. Not enough time. Wasted time. The value of my time. What am I going to do with my time? How much time does it take? How do I balance my time?

It’s interesting to find out, with certainty, that there’s a difference between the things I want done and the things I want to do. Or the things I would want to do if it weren’t for the road-blocks in my head.

December 31, 2011

By spreading it out on my desktop, without judgment either way, I’m able to see where my traffic jams are. You know the ones. Can’t do this until I’ve done that. And I can’t do that because I haven’t organized this other thing yet.

When that circular motion gets going in my mind, it’s really easy to turn it off by taking a side road until the next time it clamours for attention. Then repeat avoidance mechanism.

Looking at the same conversation in a mind map is not so easy to turn away from. The one rule I set for this experiment is that I have to spend at least half an hour on each goal before I can open up the whole wheel and start over again.

That means when I hit a road-block I have to deal with it. Even if all I do is sit here for my required 30 minutes and think about it; why I can’t do it, why I think I’m incapable of doing it, why I don’t really want to do it … there’s progress. Instead of wasting 30 minutes whining, chances are I’ll just open a folder or a project and have a look and something will begin to happen. It’s only half an hour. I can bear almost anything for half an hour. And the odds are, by the time I’ve looked at it for 5 minutes I’ll be well on my way.

There’s a difference between ‘don’t want to’ and ‘can’t’. Can’t is not nearly as big as we sometimes think it is.

After I’ve worked on one of my goals for half an hour or so, I give it a green tick so I can see where I am in the grand scheme of things. If I keep working for another hour or two I cheat the rest of the wheel. And if I let that happen there goes the balance in my life, right out the window.

Some of the items are long-term projects that could take several months to complete so my mind gets in ruts of wanting to make deals about how I can get through them quicker and shorten the tedium.

But the point is not racing through it all; the point is to enjoy the process and take a reality check about time. Nevertheless, about once a week my mind can’t stand another minute of having only ten goals to choose from and I go off the grid. It’s my game; I can change the rules. Then I get back on the wheel because it works.

I’ve also resurrected ATNotes; desktop post-its to catch thoughts racing by so they don’t interrupt what I’m in the middle of. The chaos of multi-tasking is one of the bugs cured by this system.

The wheel has changed a lot since January 1st. It expands, contracts and changes shape almost daily. I started with six goals. I now have ten. By Day 29, I realized that four of them have to be taken care of every day, no matter what.

January 31, 2012

One of them is managing email. It took me half an hour a day for 27 days to clear out my Inbox. I’m not re-creating that problem for myself ever again. I now tag time-sensitive email with dates so I can clearly see it.

The other side of the wheel is comprised of the other six goals. On an average smooth-functioning day I can go all the way around the mind map. And also have some dinging-around time. Sometimes it takes me more than a day to get through it all. It depends what life is dishing up on the side.

Right now my wheel isn’t much new, just a list of things I’m running behind on. I’d like to have huge chunks of it done by Spring.

From January 1st to Spring is 80 days. At half an hour a day per goal, that’s 40 hours each. Either I’m finding out that un-distracted slices are a lot of productive time or that I grossly under-estimate what I can do in 30 minutes. It depends on the project. Some are one way, some are the other. In any case, all the goals are being pushed along the road in tandem. It’s only Month One. And so far I like it.

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

Remember the WLPG GPS disaster of 2010? Well, that’s over, I guess. I don’t know. I haven’t been back.

I remember someone complaining about date/time stamp corruption in WLPG long after I recovered from the GPS/Exif damage. You know how things slide past you because you’re too busy. I thought it was probably just the latest screw-up and I was long gone, whew.

If you use WLPG, you might want to run over to your photos right now and have a look at the date/times taken.

I’m not an out-of-control camera nut. I only took 2,577 photos between 2004 and the Fall of 2010.

The problem started with what looked to be a time difference of 8 hours. Having supper at 3:30 AM in broad daylight, friends on the street in broad daylight at 4:41 AM, photos taken at night showing as mid-afternoon, etc. Clearly times that don’t fit. That’s relatively easy to repair using an option in Photo Mechanic to “Adjust Capture Times and Dates” or a similar option in GeoSetter.

I put it on my to-do list months ago and didn’t get back to it until today. What awaited me today is this:

Note the dates in the second column.

The mess goes on like this folder by folder. What I’ve come to think from looking at these pictures in GeoSetter is that WLPG wiped out the ‘date-taken’ and replaced it with ‘last modified date’.

So, for instance, if I added GPS or tags to a photo some months or years later, that date is now considered the date the photo was taken.

Although you wouldn’t know it by looking, the information above refers to a photo that was taken on January 2, 2005 at 7:02 PM.

How do I know that? Well, back in the Fall of 2010, when WLPG mangled my 12,000 photographs with its GPS madness, I was able to restore most of them from my Carbonite backup. It took about six months to replace the damaged photos one by one and I wasn’t sure where the damage ended, (one thing after another kept cropping up) so I decided to keep the restored files. Just in case.

The restore date on most of them is August 2010, prior to the WLPG disaster and the numbers on the photos and the dates-taken line up as they should. I cannot find a single photo with a 3 o’clock in the morning time stamp on it because, frankly, I’m not usually up and about with my camera at 3 in the morning. The other reason I know is because my 2011 photos are 100% fine.

The restored files are a step backwards in terms of GPS and IPTC annotation work. I have two choices. I can restore them as they are and spend weeks or months re-naming and re-tagging the photos because they came from Carbonite in this format:

2009-jlb-0583 (Restored) 08-07-2010 16.34.jpg

Or I can copy the correct time and date stamps to the present set one at a time. Yippee.

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

I discovered another use for the Firefox Scrapbook plugin.

Back when the discussion about moving from Blogger to WordPress was a hot topic, I got to thinking about saving my blog in a readable format. Not for any reason except that after awhile a blog starts to look like a book and someday, someone might find that interesting.

When you make a backup of your blog it happens in xml format. It can be imported if you need a backup, that’s what it’s for, but it won’t be much fun to read.

So, I started looking for options (Print Friendly, FeedFabrik, Anthologize) and the only one I found that also includes Comments is Scrapbook, an extension for Firefox. As much as I love the sound of my own voice, I actually find the comments the most interesting part of a blog post.

I wrote about Scrapbook before, so no need to go back over that. For this purpose, I created folders for months and years.

And then started going backwards one post at a time and saving the pages and sorting them into folders.

All of these pages are saved by default in the Firefox profile folder but that can be changed under Tools/Options/Organize.

Another advantage I see to this is having a complete index of my blog posts in a sidebar. This can be quite illuminating. For instance, being able to see at a glance what I’ve written over the years which might give me ideas for what to write in the future.

Another one is comparing titles to subject matter. As we get more experienced with the Internet, we find that titles relevant to our content count for a lot in order for people to find us in the search engines.

I once wrote a post called ‘Back at The Ranch’ and it was about several non-ranch related things but mostly a problem I was having with Internet Explorer. This kind of meandering does not help people who are looking for specific content.

There’s nothing wrong with going back and trying to improve on some of our worst errors, which means I have lots of extra work to do.

Scrapbook is also able to combine and export pages. Right now the Combine function doesn’t work in either Firefox v.3 or the latest Firefox v.9. Unfortunate, as that was my point; to save the pages and then combine them without having to print each one separately.

But, Scrapbook has been around for a long time and I hope the update will arrive shortly.

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

Mystery contributor has sent the second part of the EverNote 2.2 clipper workaround for anyone interested. Regular programming will resume shortly.

I think a little more explanation about a couple of things may be in order.

There are two AHK scripts because I am a novice at writing the code. I wanted the ability to either paste and close EverNote or paste and leave EverNote open for further editing of the entry. Many times the title and tagging needs to be done after pasting into EverNote.

There are two changes that have to be made to point to the right folders where your information is stored.

First, in the AHK scripts files,

Loop, E:\!Dropbox\My Dropbox\My EverNote Files\DataBases\*.enb

must point to your EverNote files. I currently have eleven EverNote files to match my areas of interest.

Second, in the Customize action of click.to,

G:\=CodeRoom=\=AHK=\Evernote.ahk

must point to where you store the two AHK scripts.

Here is the window that is presented to you from the Evernote.ahk script.

As you can see, all my EverNote files are in my Dropbox folder. You can have as many files as you want. You can double-click a file or select it followed by OK.

I place the copy of my AHK script files in my QuickLaunch folder so I can paste from any program that uses the Clipboard directly. Opening the AHK script file directly will open the window above.

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

The following was submitted for posting by a regular JLog reader. It addresses compatibility issues with the EverNote 2.2 clipper button. The purpose of the workaround is to be able to paste directly to EverNote as was possible in earlier browser versions.

I haven’t tried it yet. Please report back if you do. I have installed click.to and it looks simple enough to work with. Even if you’re not interested in EverNote 2.2, click.to is a fascinating and useful tool.

I have taken three independent thoughts to allow me to use EverNote 2.2 in any application that can copy to the Clipboard including Firefox 9.0.

First was Anita’s comments about CTRL-ALT-V option in EverNote.

The problem was that EverNote needed to be open to paste the Clipboard.

Anita 9-22-2011 at 6:16 PM

Yes, you’re welcome. I was desperate to get this to work. I’ve been using EverNote 2.x for some years now, both at home and at work. A couple of things I discovered during my experimentation:

a) You have to have EverNote running, first – but you don’t need to switch to it at any time.

b) You have to have the CTRL-ALT-V option checked in the Tape Option settings as I mentioned
in my previous post

c) This functionality appears to work in ANY application, not just Firefox, so…
selection + copy + CTRL-ALT-V will copy ANYTHING into EverNote

As Rebecca mentions below, this isn’t as one-click easy as using the web clipper, but at least we don’t have to lose the functionality.

Second, I ran across an program which could send a copy of the Clipboard to an application called click.to.

I needed a way of automatically connecting these two thoughts with a third one.

Third, I wrote two AutoHotKey scripts to solve this problem.

One is evernote.ahk.

(Right click and ‘Save Link As’ or ‘Save Target As’ to download.)

I wrote a second script that would paste the Clipboard and stay open called evernote (paste).ahk

There was a small problem of click.to only opening .exe files and not .ahk.

I copied the .ahk and created .exe files to get click.to to accept the path.

Then I edited it back to .ahk inside of click.to. (see below)

EverNote 2.2 Clipper Workaround, Part 2

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

I had a to-do list. I did not have specific goals written down. All I had to do was work backwards putting the to-do’s in the mind map into the goals that spawned them. This is easy.

On the other hand, it might not be. Our minds don’t like ‘different’. They like ruts.

Decide the areas of your life where you want to change or improve or begin something. If you don’t yet have a list, use a Wheel of Life for ideas.

Right now I have six. That could change. For sure, the details will change.

• Computer
• Business/Finances
• Genealogy
• Home
• Health
• Spirituality

Then start listing what you can do/want to do under each one to move toward your goals. I use mind mapping to do this. Break each idea down as far as you can into actionable steps. Progress is made through small consistent action.

The detailed to-do’s under the six categories are in plain sight on my desktop. I choose a category from my mind map and something to begin. I set a timer for 30 minutes.

After spending a minimum of 30 minutes in one category, I close that one down, choose a different one and continue so there’s at least a semblance of balance.

That’s at least 3 hours a day focused on specific goals. In a year, that’s over 1,000 hours. I have the other 21 hours a day for cooking, eating, sleeping, friends and family, dinging around and whatever else ‘just happens’.

Some days I might go around the wheel several times. Or it might take me more than one day to cover all six categories. The only rule (and no cheating) is that I have to go all the way around spending time in each category before starting over.

Desktop Mind Map, Part 1: My 2012 To-Do List
Desktop Mind Map, Part 2: Goals & To-Do’s

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

Here we are in 2012. And it only took a minute.

Since I put my to-do list on my desktop or, rather, since my to-do mind map is my desktop, it really makes me look at it. Every time I sit down there it is, in duplicate on my two monitors.

What occurred to me is that we can make to-do lists that go on forever. Mine, although it looks short, is good for at least another year. But do our to-do’s have anything to do with our goals? Getting through a to-do list is not a ‘goal’. It could be but just for the sake of this argument, it’s not.

Let’s look at this backwards. One of the items on my to-do list is ‘set up a Facebook account’. This has been on my list for two years. It could change but, at this point, I’m going to bet it will still be on the list at the end of 2012 unless I delete it first because I’m tired of seeing it there.

Is that particular to-do a step toward any of my goals? Not really. Ok, then why’s it on the list? Because I think I should do it? Not good enough.

Decide Your Goals

A goal is a place you want to get to, be it physical, mental, spiritual …

I want to visit/attend …
I want to learn …
I want to develop …
I want to be …

Or to change/improve career, relationships, finances, recreation, health, home, etc.

Define Your Steps

To-do’s are steps toward a goal. After defining your goals (the end points):

1. Write some steps you think will take you closer to each goal. Break each one down into small steps you can actually take.
2. Start doing the steps. Leave room for life to offer you opportunities to reach your goals. It’s not only about what you ‘do’.

Now, I have to go think some more.

Desktop Mind Map, Part 3: Setting Goals for 2012

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

This was not on my to-do list for today but it came to me while I was taking a nap. Napping is on my priority list.

As I’ve been watching 2012 resolutions appear online, I got to thinking that one of the ways that I sabotage myself is by having a to-do list that’s hidden inside software that’s easy to forget about. It’s just the way of computers. And if I could find a way to keep my to-do list in my face maybe I’d have a better shot at reaching my goals.

I think it’s not so much that we have too much to do, it’s that we can’t decide what’s most important, i.e. what our goals are. And if everything is important all the time, it’s too much obviously and we give up instead. At the end of each day we’ve still done what we’ve done so it must have been ‘most important’.

These days, and blame it on computers, there are so many places to go, so many people to talk to, so many things to read, so much information to collect, so much to learn … and I tend to think, if I could just be more organized, I could handle all this better. Bullshit. It’s just simply too much.

Since I want to do what I want to do anyway and I have an endless list of ideas that pop into my mind as appealing, I’ve reached a compromise with the onslaught by learning to write it all down. And I’ve discovered mind mapping as a perfect tool for collecting those random thoughts. A single mind map is expandable in any direction forever.

There’s nothing wrong with setting a list of priorities. Considering the burdens we take on, it seems necessary. But don’t be surprised if the list changes. I’d be shocked if I can keep a priority in mind longer than one day.

Instead of nailing myself to specific tasks, I like to reinvent my priorities on a daily basis. Having an ongoing list of what they are gives me that opportunity.

I keep FreePlane pinned to my taskbar. And I keep mind maps pinned to FreePlane. If you have Windows 7 you know how this works. If you don’t, it’s just drag and drop.

My TO-DO mind map is divided into main categories and projects and broken down into actionable steps from there. Every once in awhile I open TO-DO.mm and have a look around and decide there’s nothing I feel like doing right now. Obviously, something else is more important and it’s not on this list. Sometimes while I’m trying to decide what’s ‘most important’ I’ll wile away several hours doing nothing. I think ‘doing nothing’ is valuable time so I’m not knocking it.

Making a Desktop To-Do List

What I’ve done to put all this supposedly ‘important stuff’ into perspective is to take a screenshot of my TO-DO mind map. In FreePlane it’s possible to set the background color of the map as well as the color of the text.

I saved this screenshot to my desktop. And then right-clicked and ‘Set as Desktop Background’.

I now have my to-do list on my desktop. When I make changes to the mind map all I have to do is take another screenshot, overwrite the old one and set it as desktop background again.

I focus my day by choosing an item from each goal and setting up timers in The Action Machine. In this way, each goal has some effort expended toward it. Small consistent steps work.

As my mind map changes so will my desktop. Because this is a mind map it’s possible to close off some of the nodes to focus down on a particular goal without being distracted by the rest.

If I get to next December and this map looks about the same as it does today, (and it won’t) I will not beat myself up, I will not give myself a grade, I will simply say “I guess it wasn’t important”. Because if I can’t get my to-do’s done when they’re staring me right in the face, they really can’t be that important.

I’m curious how this will go, so tomorrow at midnight I’ll take a screen shot of where I’m starting and another one a year from now. Maybe I’ll take one at the end of every month along the way.

Your Goals as a Screen Saver

Or put your goals into a rotating screen saver. (Thanks, Lavender!) In Windows 7, right-click on your desktop, click on Personalize and you’ll see the Screen Saver option. Click on that and you’ll have an option for Photos in the drop-down list. If you click on Settings, you can browse to the folder of photos you want.

So, first, make a folder containing graphics of your 2012 goals. In text or a combination of text and image. (Or even a series of mind maps.) Choose carefully. You’ll have them right in front of you throughout the year to reconsider. As they manifest, you can delete them and add new ones or put gold stars on them to keep up your spirits.

It’s almost New Year’s!

Desktop Mind Map, Part 2: Goals & To-Do’s
Desktop Mind Map, Part 3: Setting Goals for 2012

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

Every time I write about backup I think it’s going to be the last time because, I mean, what else is there to say about it?

After reading Susan Clark’s post about losing all her Google properties in an instant and the many comments following, it makes me wonder how many data loss disasters we have to hear about before we take backup seriously.

Good Lord, people, do take this seriously.

I think we fall into a daze with our computers as being physical things because the monitor is and the keyboard is and the mouse is. And pretty soon, the pictures and the words in front of the back-light seem to be. Do you remember the first time you turned on a computer and you felt like you’d gone to Mars? It seemed miraculous to me – all these people and boxes talking at me from … where??

And then it gets totally normal. First thing in the morning, haven’t even washed your face yet and you’re on Twitter, saying, Hey, peeps, it’s me, good morning! It’s like a college dorm 24/7 and we know how real that felt.

The words you’re typing, the words you’re reading, the words you’re collecting, the photos, the contacts, the genealogy records, your favorite websites, all of it – some other planet. If your computer crashes, if the infrastructure you’re depending on tosses you aside, they’re gone. Nothing but a memory.

Computers are a world onto themselves with their own set of rules and one of those rules is that if you haven’t lost anything yet, be patient, your turn is coming. And probably on a day when you already have a full schedule. It only takes a split-second and it’s happened to me twice. Both times I felt like the light bulb had gone out in the center of my head and I was sitting alone in a pitch-black tunnel. It’s a delightful experience.

First of all, you have to get over the thing about backing up computer files as being ‘too techy’. Instructions should come as a mandatory pamphlet for first-time computer users. It’s about as ‘techy’ as remembering to take your birth control pills. (Or pop your teeth in before you answer the front door.)

Here’s the question you need to ask yourself. Of everything on your computer and on your blog and everywhere else you put yourself online, what are you NOT willing to lose?  Here’s the answer: Back It Up.

Website Backup

I don’t have much online because I’m not that much of an exhibitionist. I can go weeks without craving human attention if I have some intelligent books to read. I also prefer to keep my stuff close where I have some control. I attribute this trait to an excessively chaotic childhood with no clearly-defined personal boundaries. Fuzzy boundaries. OK, no boundaries. So, backing up my online ‘stuff’ is not a major concern.

I own my one and only website, as far as a piece of the sky can be owned. I prefer that to the vagaries of free hosting. And I keep it backed up. It’s not a hard thing to download a small xml file every time I make a change. All the graphics on my site are on my hard-drive. They were uploaded from there to my site using FileZilla Client. Even the html code for the widgets and navigation is backed up in text files so I don’t have to recreate it if I accidentally kill a widget here or there. The theme and any custom code for it is also backed up.

If you’re set up on a free site, you can still back up your data. (Maybe. Depending.) After you’ve written 100 or 1,000 posts it starts to look like a serious investment. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used my own site as a reference library for things I used to know but have already forgotten because my most personal hard-drive (my head) is too full of other things.

Twitter Backup

I don’t concern myself with the little blips I put out on Twitter. I can’t believe I’ve written 1,257 of them. What in the world was I talking about? I don’t use photo-sharing sites. I don’t spread myself all over social networking sites mostly because there’s a limit to how much I can think of saying. No-one really needs to know when I had a nap, a headache, a walk to the park or what I’m cooking for dinner. But, if you do care about recording all that, and back it up, there’s a personal diary for your rellies down the road. Tweetake, TweetBackup or … ?

Dropbox & SugarSync

I know most of you have already heard this before so I’m only writing it for the one or two beached starfish who may be trying to get back into the ocean.

I do keep files in Dropbox and My Dropbox folder is backed up daily to an external hard-drive and two others on a rotation schedule so if Dropbox goes down I’m not depending on them. SugarSync directly syncs files from their location on my hard-drive to their server so if they disappear the files are still on my hard-drive and backup drives; they haven’t gone anywhere.

Every time there’s a change, I back up my Firefox bookmarks, my email, my calendar, my address books, my rss feeds, (OPML file) and my Skype contacts. Everything except the email is kept in Dropbox. They’re all synced to my laptop regularly. If you keep any of that online for ‘convenience’, it should also be on your personal hard-drive. Look through each of those and find where it says ‘backup’. Or ‘export’.

A lot of my genealogy data, including my Legacy database, is synced between computers using SugarSync. It also works for lots of varieties of phones and other pocket-sized devices that I don’t know anything about. I believe Dropbox does too. If you’re confused by the word ‘sync’ don’t be. Just sign up for a free account and all mysteries shall be revealed.

All my ‘notes’ are in either mind maps, EverNote 2, ActionOutline or OneNote (don’t use the latter anymore but might) and all of this data is kept in My Dropbox so it’s available on my laptop. Or online should I ever find myself without one of my three computers, god forbid.

My Computer

All the files and folders in My Documents, My Music, My Pictures and My Videos are also backed up to external hard-drives.

What holds my backup strategy together is a program called Syncback. I tell it what to do, it does it and keeps everything all nicely cleaned up.

Online Backup

I keep 180GB of files backed up to Carbonite and I pay them for it. But do I depend on them for the only copy of my backup files? Not bloody likely.

Keeping your data with online services (even the Almighty Google) is not a fail-safe approach. I don’t have anything anywhere that I can’t put in my pocket on a small hard-drive and walk out the door with. Now, if computers disappear, then I’ll be in trouble.

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

1. Back up and secure your data (you never know when your computer will crash)
2. Access all of your files on the go (from any browser or mobile phone)
3. Share entire folders and collaborate on projects
4. Send large files you usually (try to) email or FTP
5. Share high res photo galleries with friends and families
6. Stream your entire music collection
7. Take pictures with your iPhone, auto-sync them to your computer
8. Open, edit and save office docs with your Blackberry
9. Work from home, without having to lug around your work computer
10. Restore all your data if your computer crashes or is stolen

The most notable difference between Dropbox and SugarSync is that SugarSync can sync any file or folder on your computer directly from its original location. Files do not have to be moved to another location first, as with the My Dropbox folder.

When I decided to run Legacy from Dropbox I made copies of the folders I wanted to sync and then a special backup arrangement for the various folders to sync them back to their original locations. It worked fine but doing the same thing with SugarSync is much easier. Just right-click on the folders in their original locations and add them to SugarSync.

Open ‘Manage Sync Folders’ on other computers or devices and choose to sync. Or not.

Another difference is that a free account at SugarSync is 5GB of space instead of the 2GB given by Dropbox. Although it’s an enticement, it’s not a competition. I use them both.

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.