But now we decided to take it a step further. We discovered that TV seems to suck the life force out of us – we were often rather tired after watching a movie, while being able to do things till late in the night if we didn’t. We played around with this for a while and found it to be a fairly consistent result – and we really didn’t feel like we were missing that much.

Add to that the fact that we both have about a 300-movie backlog on NetFlix (each!), and there’s no way we will ever catch up on that.

So a decision was made: We are not going to watch any TV or DVD in the next 30 days. (The idea is based on Steve Pavlina’s “30-Day Trial”

We started in earnest this Monday, and so far things are mostly exactly as we expected them to be – more time together in the evenings where we can actually talk, more things on our “I’d like to…” list we actually get to. Downsides so far? None for me – Petra is missing the background chatter of TV a little bit when doing boring chores. But audio books have been a good substitute for her.

I’ll post a summary of our experiences once the 30 days are over. So far, I’m liking it!

Recently I got a call from my attorney that you really don’t want to get. No, I didn’t lose a law suit. Instead, his office was broken into, and part of the records stolen include my credit card info.

So the question is, how to deal with this – and how to prepare for the next time this happens. (If you assume your credit card info will never be stolen, you are taking a risky gamble. I’m rather careful with my personal data and still have to cancel my cards about once every five years).

First, calm down. While it’s annoying, you’re not on the hook for large amounts of money. Federal law limits your liability to $50. Still, it’s a good idea to notify your credit card company immediately. Usually, they cancel your card the moment they receive your call, but if you want to be safe, follow up with a letter.

However, that’s when the fun starts. You’ll likely have several services that get charged to your credit card on a monthly basis. And the card companies take their sweet time to get a new card to you – up to 10 business days. In my case, I started getting lots of e-mails reminding me that my card was invalid – and Vonage was nice enough to cut my international phone services. (Understandable, but rather annoying)

So here’s the list of steps I’m now taking to be prepared:

• Keep a list of all your credit cards complete with the number to contact in case of loss.
• Keep a list of all services that are charged to your card on a recurring basis, complete with contact info.
• And finally, have an alternate card that you can switch over to.

That way, you’ll be able to minimize your hassles once the inevitable happens.

The “natural” schedule for a budget is a month – many of the major expenses you pay are on a monthly basis. Yet my paycheck arrives on a bi-weekly basis (i.e. every 14 days), and Petra has an even more irregular income. That’s no basis for planning.

So we sat down and figured out a few things. First steps, what’s the minimum income we’re guaranteed to make in any given period. For me, that’s two paychecks. For Petra, we picked the worst month in the last year and went a bit below that. That’s our ‘base salary’.

Next, we set up our ING account¹. There is a ‘Salary’ account that receives my paychecks, plus Petra’s monthly contribution from her account. From there, we have an automatic fund transfer every 1st and every 15th – into an account aptly named ‘PayForIt’. As a result, each month we have the same amount of money available.

We also save some money – a paycheck every two weeks translates into 26 a year, and only 24 of them go to the pay account. In other words, two full pay checks a year sit in a savings account – I’m automatically saving money without doing anything. Any ‘extra’ money that Petra makes above the assumed minimum also gets squirreled away.

This has the side benefit that we have to learn to live with slightly less money than we actually make – never a bad skill to have.

If you implement this yourself, be aware that the transition period to this scheme can be a bit awkward. Often, a lot of items are due on the 1st, so you’ll end up having to pay them in the month before. If you don’t plan for that, you will encounter moments where your PayForIt account is underfunded – and you definitely want to avoid that.

One of the changes in this year is that Petra and I decided to take a bit more control over our lifes. As part of this, we’re reviewing our goals and tasks from time to time. To be exact, we have a daily ‘meeting’ (usually right before bed time) looking at what tasks we completed and need to complete the next day.

And every month, we take a slightly higher level view. I won’t bore you with all the details – I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than to follow Petra and my goals in meticulous detail. However, I’d like to share the basic ideas behind it with the web at large. I’ve been googling for ‘monthly review’ before, and never found something that really made a lot of sense to me. Consider this indexing my brain via Google…

There are three sections to this review, at least in our version.

What happened last month

It’s a great way to reward yourself for the things you achieved, and it reminds you of the things that went wrong. For example, my wife finished her recent lab assignment with a 97% grade (Yay!), and I finally started a decent workout routine. Also, by looking at the things that didn’t happen, I realized that my blogging has been non-existant. (It’s gonna change, promise!)

What did we learn

There’s really no point in looking at what you did if you don’t decide to learn from it. Our first monthly review yielded quite a few interesting insights, at least for me:

• Without taking notes, the daily task-setting is useless. You’ll forget by next morning
• Trader Joe’s is great shopping – cheaper AND better food.
• Buying big ice cream large tubs prevents pigging out – you need to scoop some into a bowl and can’t just eat the whole thing.
• I’m reading less than I thought

And of course, quite a few more.

After we’re through that section, we come to the final step

Goals for next month

Turns out it’s surprisingly hard to set goals when you don’t have a larger framework to operate in – and we haven’t yet bothered to set yearly goals. (And, frankly, we want to take a bit of time before actually committing to goals more than a few months out.)

So we used a little trick to get our brains working – instead of just thinking of goals, we’d think of goals for specific aspects of our lives. I.e., “what are my goals as a professional?”, “as far as my health goes”, “as a financial entity”, etc. For some reason, that makes it way easier to come up with goals.

Just as an inspiration, here are a few of the ones we set for ourselves this month:

• Finish at least 6 assignments
• More workout – at least 5 times a week
• Investigate working from home
• Draw 2 designs
• Read 4 non-fiction books

As you can see, it’s a wide variety of goals – but they all have the advantage that you can say yes or no to the question if they are completed. There’s nothing more annoying than having vague goals and not knowing if you achieved them.

Over the next month, we’ll see how well we’ll stick to them, and how things work out. Expect another update end of February.

If you’re in a similar situation, you know how annoying this is – I really don’t want to do the same status update on 15 webpages. For a long time, I’ve been only updating my Twitter page. It’s the most convenient one, just one key press away, thanks to Twitterific. A few days ago, Tim Bray was also wondering about different places to update your status. And one of his readers was kind enough to point out MoodBlast. It’s a wonderful little application that lets you post your status to a large number of services simultaneously.

Unfortunately, Facebook seems to have decided it might be a good idea to make legal threats against anybody who’s not using their approved API – which doesn’t support status updates. (Interestingly enough, Facebook has no problem employing the same techniques to scrape data from other applications, like gmail.)

This points out a fundamental problem of many web applications – your data is under the control of somebody else. Both import and export only happen at the whim of somebody else. And in Facebook’s case, that’s a 23-year old who seems to have power delusions.

This probably means I’ll abandon Facebook sooner or later, and I’ll definitely be re-evaluating all the web services I use if they provide open access to my data. I suggest you do the same – otherwise, more important data than your “status” might be locked away.

Tags: Twitter, Facebook, open data

Cramped Writing

Don’t you hate writing in spiral-bound notebooks? Whenever you work on the left page, you just keep bouncing against the darn spiral about halfway through writing a line. Well, at least I do. Or used to do. The other day, my wife saw me writing and heard me mutter about “evil conspiracies”, “waste of paper” and other such things I’m wont to offer when I’m frustrated. So she just walked over and said: “Honey – why don’t you just fold it in half?”

I was dumbstruck. I never even thought of that before. It’s easy, it’s fairly obvious, I’m usually not exceedingly stupid, and yet I never realized this.

Much improved!

There are of course at least two things to learn here. One, my wife is really clever – and yet, she still puts up with me. Which does make me rather grateful. (Note to self: “Self, get some flowers!”)

Two: Sometimes it just pays either asking for advice or asking yourself “What else besides the intended purpose (writing) can I do with it, and can it solve my problem?”. Sometimes, the solution to a hard problem is just sitting there in plain sight, too obvious to be discovered by deep thoughts about the problem. (Not that I had too many deep thoughts about writing in spiral-bound notebooks…)

Tags: writing, lifehack

How would you like it if you could just call a place, dictate a message to your phone, and receive a transcription in your inbox? That’s exactly what jott.com is. Well, plus contact management, jotting messages to friends, etc..

And, best of all, it’s completely free – at least during the beta. So far, it’s working wonderfully. I’m seriously considering abandoning my Moleskin. Try it out, and let me know what you think!

As all things security, this is a trade-off. You trade security for more convenience. The loss of security in this case is that a single compromised server will yield your password for all low-security sites. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a different password per server, yet still only remember a single one?

Thankfully, the Internet – as usual – has provided the solution. Or, more correctly, Nic Wolff has given us a password bookmarklet. (If you’ve got better things to do than keep up with the newest web terms: A bookmarklet is a bookmark that contains Javascript and, instead of just sending you to a site, does something else. In our case, generate a password)

What does it do? It takes the current sites host name and a password you provide. Those two are then combined (with MD5, for the technically inclined) into a password for that specific site. That password is then automatically written to all password fields on that page.

How do I use it? First, drag the bookmarklet onto the bookmark list or the button bar of your browser. Here’s the bookmarklet: Generate Password.

Or, if you want something even more comfortable, use Chris Zarate’s password bookmarklet builder. It has a couple of improvements over Nic’s, it allows you to build a browser-specific version, and you can actually burn your master password into the bookmarklet. (Just make sure you don’t forward it to your friends!)

Then, whenever you need a password, just click on the bookmarklet. It will prompt you for your master password and generate the site specific password.

Now, a compromised site will only lose you that site’s password. And since MD5 is a “one-way function”, the hackers who compromised that site won’t be able to deduce your master password from this.

Remember: If it’s really important data, use a separate password. This is for low-risk applications like your local newspaper or your favorite bulletin board.

One day of junk

Most of us get flooded by junk mail. And it’s junk in more than one way. It harms the environment. It sucks up your time dealing with it. If you’re even slightly paranoid about personal information, you’ll probably shred everything that’s a credit card offer, or at least the cover letter. In short – you don’t want it.

To turn off the flood completely is a herculean task – so let’s focus on a couple of quick and easy steps to get rid of most of the junk mail. Offender #1 – yet another credit card offer. This can be easily dealt with at optoutprescreen.com. This site is run by Equifax, Experian, Innovis and TransUnion – the four major credit reporting agencies. You can choose to opt out for five years, permanently, or even to opt back in – in case you don’t have enough credit cards yet… And if you don’t trust websites, go call 1-888-5 OPT OUT (or 1-888-567-8688)

Next, the majority of the other stuff – blame the Direct Marketing Association for about 75% of it.

Done blaming? Good – now send mail to Mail Preference Service, Direct Marketing Association, PO Box 643, Carmel, NY 15012-0643. There’s a lot of info to mail them, and it’s easiest to just fill out their online form and mail them a print-out.

Why not send it online? Since sending junk to you generates money for them, opting out should be as inconvenient as possible – so opting out online costs $5. You’ve got to admire the chuzpah.

And that’s it for starters – two letters, and your junk mail should decrease significantly. It takes a while (up to 6 months! for the DMA) to take hold, but it’s well worth it.

If you want to get even more aggressive about purging your in-box, there are plenty of web sites to help you on that quest: From more complex how-to’s to dedicated sites like http://www.junkbusters.com/.

To junk-free living!

Tags: junk mail, lifehack

But it’s easy to lose sight of that big motivator when you’re working on small tasks for a project, or things less self-evident. One way to keep the motivation up is rewarding yourself. Now, it’s easy to reward yourself for big things. Shipped that game? Go on a cruise! Completed a major sale? That new iMac sure looks enticing!

It’s getting harder the smaller the tasks are. As much as I’d like to, I can’t go on a cruise just because I worked through that backlog of e-mail messages. And even for big tasks, I can’t just spend money all the time. There’s more in this world than blind consumption. The solution – for me – is to find fun things to do.

Sounds easy, right? Well, go try it. Make a list of fun things that take a week. Half a day to a day. One or two hours. Less than 30 minutes. Less than five minutes.

You have completed that list? Good! If it was anything like my experience, you’ll find it hard to find items for certain time ranges. I found less than 5 minutes to be the hardest. The most important thing I learned from is was to keep a list of fun things as they occurred to me – it’s hard to “just have an idea for fun” when you’re looking for one.

To get your list kick-started, I’ll give you some of the items I came up with – maybe I can get you to share your ideas?

Less than 5 minutes

• Give yourself time to listen to a tune you like. Just the tune and you, no interruptions.
• Look through your favorite coffee-table book. Be inspired by the beauty of the pictures.
• Read your favorite comic strip.
• Close your eyes and meditate, or just breathe deeply to relax.
• Treat yourself to a mini-spa. Wash your face, put on some moisturizer.
• Find a few more answers for your crossword puzzle.
• Just take a quick walk around the office.

Less than 30 minutes

• Learn a few words in a foreign language. (Or more!)
• Do a walk through the neighborhood.
• Make plans for a nice evening out. Don’t forget to invite somebody you love spending time with!
• Brown-bag your lunch and eat outside.
• Read that article you have wanted to read the last five days.
• Have breakfast with a friend.
• Listen to an audio book. Inspirational, learning, career development, or just plain fiction – whatever makes you happy.

Less than two hours

• Play an instrument – for fun. If you practice regularly, just forget about that and play around instead. Pick up your old favorites and see if you can still play them.
• Write an entry in your journal. Unless you truly love sitting in front of a computer, keep it in paper format.
• Play a board game with your partner.
• Make a list of all the places you always wanted to go to. Then pick your favorite one and research it a bit.
• Call someone you haven’t talked to in quite some time.
• Go to a nice cafe and people-watch.
• Get a massage – by somebody who has learned to do it.

Have fun!

Tags: fun, lifehack, rewards