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Author: Samuel
Over the years I have constantly struggled to maintain a “productive” schedule. I tried post it notes, calendars, too-do list… pretty much any kind of productivity hack you can think of, all of which I had various degrees of success with. The main problem with all of these methods is that they would get complicated, and they don’t really show you a “big picture” of how you are doing. I recently came across a quote from Seinfeld about the method he used when he was early in his career, and he credits it with powering his success. Naturally this intrigued me since he is one of the most successful humans on the planet, so I set out to see how this method works for me.
The basic premise behind this method is very simple. Get a large calendar, hang it up on your wall in a place that you can easily see it. Then decide on 3-4 activities you want to do every day. If you do those activities, you get a big check mark for that day, if you don’t do those activities then you have to put a big ugly x mark on that day. I’ve been using this method for 5 months so far this year, and it has REALLY improved my life, and my overall productivity. The goals for each day are completely arbitrary, and will be different for everyone. My goals happen to be to wake up at an appropriate hour, to spend between 3-6 hours of “focused” working, and to get at least 45 minutes of exercise in. To get an idea of what kind of calendar you should use see my setup below:
My book of the Month to read was Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell:
General Thoughts:
I went into this book pretty excited because I have herd a lot of “hype” and good things about it. For the most part it did not disappoint. Gladwell has filled the book with tons of interesting insites. My favorite portion of the book was the chapter on professional ice hockey. I think this struck me as the most interesting chapter simply because of my love of Hockey. It was very eye-opening to see that such an arbitrary thing like your date of birth could have such a profound effect on your likelihood of playing hockey in the NHL.
There were portions of the book where I thought Gladwell stretched or was reaching a bit. Specifically in the portion he wrote about intelligence. However he does very well to back most things in the book up with concrete examples, and research. The most interesting part in the entire book for me was the discussion of underprivileged kids school performance. Specifically that they statistically actually “out performed” rich kids if you looked at just the school year, then when rich kids spent their summers doing as Gladwell so aptly phrased it “rich kid things” like summer camps and continuing their education, they started to leave the poor kids behind. Additionally the fact that we even have such a long summer break for kids, and how that is directly tied to our cultures way of farming I found very fascinating. I really love learning about things like that. Once Gladwell presented the question I realized I had no idea why we took the whole summer off from school growing up. I remember loving it at the time. Seeing how this formed over 100 years ago so that kids could help farming activities makes total since, and also his proposal of removing this antiquated summer vacation to allow for underprivileged kids to keep pace with “rich kids” made perfect sense to me. It is really interesting that something as simple as basing our school schedule off of how our ancestors farmed over 100 years ago could be the leading cause in education and income inequalities in this country (assuming you subscribe to the notion that the more education someone has, the more income they will earn over their lifetime).
Would I recommend it:
Definite Yes in the recommendation column.
I recently purchased a Nest Thermostat, I’ve gotten tons of questions from friends and family about it so figured I would write a blog post on it and direct anyone with questions here:
Step 1: Turn off the power to your furnace and thermostat, then decide if your system will work with a nest? Any low voltage system works with a nest, according to their website they say that is ~95% of all home systems. A real easy way to check is to pull off the cover plate on your thermostat, and check the back. If it says less than 95 volts you are good to go (for reference mine was installed in 1982, and was listed as 25 Volts). A quick picture of what removing the cover plate looks like is below:
Step 2: After you have determined that your system will work with nest, its time to buy and install one. This is very straightforward, and they come with solid directions. The first one I installed took about 25 minutes, the second one took about 10. To start with you have to fully remove the cover plate on the wall (not just the cover plate from step 1 above, there is actually a second plate that needs to be removed) See picture below:
A couple notes from this picture:
-You will have an extra “jumper” wire or 2 that don’t hook to anything once you install the nest, that’s fine these are no longer needed
-You will have a big hole where your old thermostat was, dont worry Nest provides a plate to cover up this hole
-Once you unhook the wires from the plate, and unscrew it make sure to hold onto them as you remove the old cover so wiring does not fall back into the wall
-If you are the one installing the nest, make sure to download the app onto your phone so you can exert unilateral control of the thermostat from wherever you are!
The Final Result and Cost Savings
-First full month with Nest installed my heating bill was 113.21, My previous months heating bill was 157.23.
-Second full month my bill stayed pretty constant at 110.51 (both of those are great savings!)
-As its starting to heat up and the AC is needed, I’ve saving a ton of money by not cooling the house much during the day.
Final install photo:
Miscellaneous notes:
I’ve found after installing and living with the Nest for several months that is its well made product, and it is really promoting me to be more energy conscious. It gives me the “leaf” scores, and almost gameifies energy savings a bit. I’ve found myself not using the AC much during the day, and then just opening the windows at night to cool the house down… I spend a lot of time in the basement anyway so its has been surprisingly easy for me. In conclusion if you are on the fence about getting a nest, Do it! And if you have an old “dumb” thermostat you will save enough money to pay the nest off in a year or two so its more than worth it “financially”
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Running A 5K In A Spandex Suite
Last fall my roommates and I decided we were going to dress up for Halloween and try to win a local costume contest (the winning team got 2k and which we all agreed we would spend that night on bad decisions after we won). Long story short we showed up too late and too drunk to the contest to win.
But a couple weeks later we decided it would be a great idea to run a 5k in costume, and in character chanting “feel the rhythm, feel the ride, get on up its bobsled time” as we ran… needless to say we are idiots, and people loved it. Here is a pic of us in mid chant that made it into the paper:
The old saying “winning cures everything” really is true. No matter how small the victory. Recently I was part of a small victory, and it really got me thinking about how doing well in something that is meaningful to you is so fulfilling and also something that people don’t stop to do much these days. Everyone is caught up in the routine of wake up… go to work… come home from work and try to go to the gym or make food, pass out early so you have more energy tomorrow…. often times I think the kid versions of ourselves would be super disappointed with how we spend our time… with that being said, a couple weeks ago the small victory I was a part of was that my hockey team won our leagues championship…. this is not a big deal by any stretch of the imagination… non of us are going to be pro hockey players, or even good amateur players for that matter…. but winning this, with a group of guys that I’m great friends with was such a fun feeling. Not to mention it qualified us for nationals in Toronto so we are going to get to take a big road trip up as a team and play hockey in Canada….. I think the 8 year old version of myself would be really happy about this win:
