John Borwick's blog

Earlier this year I read the Four Hour Work Week.  Then I read the article “Diary of a Self-Help Dropout” and heard The Moth’s recording of A.J. Jacobs talking about outsourcing.  (As an aside, check out The Moth–it’s a really neat recorded storytelling group!)

Today I signed up for Ask Sunday, the outsourcing service mentioned in the above article.  They are a concierge service that does small things for you, and they are cheap because people in other countries are doing most of the work for you.

You get a week with 4 free requests, and thereafter you … Continue Reading

A couple of weeks ago I learned about Amazon’s Subscribe and Save Program.  You order items in bulk through Amazon, and tell them that you want them every one, two, three, or six months.  In turn they give you a 15% discount and free shipping.  Also you don’t have to worry about buying these items at the store.

We just signed up for it; here’s what we’ve ordered:

• Paper Towels (30 rolls each 6 months)
• Laundry detergent (6 bottles each 6 months)
• Dishwasher powder (8 boxes each 6 months)
• Clif Bar variety pack (24 bars each 3 months)
• Cinnamon Harvest … Continue Reading
  

I am not a very “handy” person–I don’t tend to fix things around the house.

A couple of months ago a carpenter built some bookshelves for us, and along the way he gave us a couple of shims to help straighten out our china cabinet.  This is when I learned that shims are awesome.

Shims, in case you don’t know, are tiny flat wooden doorstops.   They are little pieces of wood that you can put in odd places to fix things.  They are like the duct tape of wood.

So far we have used shims for three sorts of things:

1. Leveling out furniture … Continue Reading
   

A couple of months ago I read “The Four Hour Workweek.”  The author, Timothy Ferriss, is at times kind of a jerk, but the book overall was very helpful to me.

The book recommends a “nouveau riche” lifestyle based on outcomes, rather than bankroll.  For example, if you are saving money towards retiring to Sao Paolo, why not go ahead and get yourself an independent source of (US-denominated) income and move to Sao Paolo?

I say he’s kind of a jerk at times because the author doesn’t seem to be considering the suffering he may cause others.  For … Continue Reading

I just upgraded from my Cingular 8125 to the AT&T Tilt. The Tilt is a neat looking phone.

As you may know, I was very attached to my 8125. I learned pretty much everything there is to know about the “vanilla” 8125. In particular, I use Tasks like nobody’s business.

The Tilt runs Windows Mobile 6. WM6 apparently has a bug where its “Active Tasks” filter shows tasks with a start date in the future. That is, it shows you stuff you’re not supposed to start until 6 months from now as “active.” This is frustrating, … Continue Reading

I’ve been using David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system for over two years now, and I’ve gone from having over 200 open tasks, to 80 tasks, to 40 tasks, and have gone from a task-level view to a (more-or-less) project-level view of what I’m doing. I’ve reviewed The Book several times and have gotten to what I believe is a steady-state in my task management.

From this experience, I conclude that productivity to me is comprised of four factors:
1. Follow through on (or renegotiate) promises

Getting Things Done is all about following through on promises: promises that you make to … Continue Reading

I just switched my pobox.com account so it forwards to gmail. That’s one of the reasons why I love pobox.com; as long as you’re pretty good about advertising the pobox.com address over the actual address it forwards to, you can change your “back-end” system pretty easily.

I changed because I’d been experimenting with mixing work and personal e-mail–and that system has worked really well, because I can check that e-mail on my phone, but for a while I want to try gmail.com + alerts of some kind.

Lauren and I are excited about moving into our new house. In order to make our house liveable, we availed ourselves of Sears’s July 28 “10% off” sale. That in itself (today’s August 7, a week and a half later) should tell you we’ve had a problem.

We used sears.com to order a refrigerator, a microhood, and a stove. We checked the “ice box” option on the refrigerator: we asked for the ice maker that sears.com told us to get.

Here’s a summary of our communications with Sears Home Delivery and Sears.com, all via the phone:

• Wed Aug 1: automated … Continue Reading
  

At work, we’ve been re-organizing into a “Support” team and a “Projects” team.

At home, Lauren and I have been painting, moving boxes, and getting appliances for our new house.  Today the Wilson Pest Defense people came.
I just finished Harry Potter.

My Getting Things Done system broke down under the pressure; I didn’t do my weekly review on Monday and I didn’t even get through my e-mail inbox from Friday until today!  When there’s too much work to do I’m just piling it on rather than being more judicious with what work should be done.

Today at work I gave a presentation, “Getting Things Done with your 8125.” The 8125 is a Cingular cell phone that runs Windows Mobile 5.0. I use Outlook for my GTD system because it can synchronize to the 8125, which I then carry around.

I didn’t realize how long it would take to describe what I’ve learned about GTD (and task management, and Outlook) in the year and a half I’ve been using GTD! I only covered next actions, task management, and the weekly review–and it took an hour and a half!