Finding motivation to work is always difficult on Monday mornings, but today was especially difficult. I had managed to put off all of the really mundane aspects of my job for so long that I had no choice but to complete them today. Faced with all of my boring tasks, I decided that it would be the perfect time to test out the Pomodoro Technique. Let me preface this by saying that I have not read the book on this technique. I somehow ended up on the website and was intrigued.
The technique is a simple way to increase productivity. You make a list of the things that you want to accomplish, pick a single task, and then set the timer for 25 minutes. When your buzzer sounds, then you take a five minute break, check off the task, and move onto something else. I used an online timer that can be found here. In the morning this process was really effective for me because I got into work, didn’t want to get started, and then thought, “Well, 25 minutes is shorter than a half hour. That’s not too bad.” As the day went on I found myself struggling to stick to the schedule. My biggest problem was that I would find myself getting into something (either on my break or with work) and then I was pulled away. I’m going to clear some space on my computer so that I can download the book. I hope that it will offer ways to avoid breaking my working rhythm. The one thing that I can say is that it definitely offered me the motivation to get started. If this sounds interesting to you check out the website. You can even download the book in PDF format for free.
What do you do to motivate yourself?
Or at least our blog is. We’ve been playing around with new headers, the colors of ours ads, and plugins. What do you guys think? I don’t know about you but I LOVE visiting beautiful blogs and websites. Somehow the aesthetics just make me happier. We’re a far way off from where we’d like our little blog to be but as we make changes we’d love to hear your input. Does the twitter plugin that I just installed along the sidebar drive you crazy? Let me know and I’ll make it go away. Basically, we’re just trying to do whatever we can to make our blog more user-friendly for you.
We have some really exciting content to share with you this week so keep visiting!
Peter’s sister, Anna, is in town for the weekend so we’re doing Austin-y things. We met up with her and her friends today at The Tiniest Bar in Texas. The funny thing is that Peter and I used to drive by this bar every day on our way to work and more often than not we’d say, “That place looks cute. We should go there sometime.” But it took Anna coming in from Wisconsin and telling us to meet her there for us to actually go. It’s funny how those things work.
Overall, I really liked this bar. It has the feel of a dive bar without that awful dive bar smell. It was nice to sit outside catch up with Anna and her friends. It’s a little ways away from all the other bars in the downtown area but it’s worth the trip.
Check out other fun things to do in Austin on our Austin page.
Image credit Austin Citysearch.
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If you happened to try to visit our site anytime between late last night and early this morning (yes, I’m giving you the specifics), then you probably noticed that it was down. I tried to make changes to the code so that all of you fabulous readers could see our tweets when, all of a sudden, I killed the site. It was terrifying! I thought that all of our posts were gone forever! I hoped and prayed for an undo button–why doesn’t everything in life have an undo button?– but it was gone. So, I started emailing every technologically savvy person that I know as well as posting on forums asking what to do. I felt like Carrie Bradshaw from Sex in the City when she gets a virus and the everything on her computer is lost forever.
Eventually, my brother, David, was able to get back to us and fix the site. David is our hero today but I’ve realized that, even though we don’t have too much material, back-ups are invaluable. I’m lucky that we’re learning this lesson after only 30 something posts rather than after 130 something. If you don’t know how to backup your WordPress site, then make a quick trip here to find out all the steps.
In tribute to David and his save-the-day move: here’s a picture of the two of us getting rained on at ACL!
Yay David! Thanks again!
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The area near our TV needed help. My brother, David, gave us a great media stand but because we don’t own enough electronics to fill it, it just served as a shelf to collect clutter. Here is what things looked like before:
Do you see how we had picture frames, board games collecting dust, and the partially chewed box on DVDs collecting dust? We decided to take a shelf made of fiberboard and repurpose it as our media shelf. Since the shelf is much smaller we don’t have as much surface area to set things. Of course I forgot to take a before picture but here’s a shot of the shelf after a couple coats of primer.
(It had that awful fake wood look before we primed it.)
This painting project really taught me a thing or two about the strategy behind painting. Our most valuable lessons are as follows:
- Don’t do a bad job priming something because those drips of primer don’t just magically go away.
- Think about the surface areas before you start painting. If you will have to move the paintbrush over an area in order to reach something then don’t paint that passing ground first. I painted the surfaces that were parallel to the ground first, but if I had to do it over again, then I would start with the inside surfaces of the boards that stand vertically. My method ended up in a really gooey first coat, because as I painted the sides I would drip paint on the area that I had already painted, which forced me to go over it repeatedly.
- I would move the piece of furniture to a new part of the drop cloth before continuing to do the second coat. Both when we primed the shelf and when we painted it, we dripped little bits of paint that dried and formed a bond between the shelf and the drop cloth. When we eventually went to move it inside we damaged the paint on the edges.
- If you do have paint chips attached to the bottom because of the mistake mentioned above, use a razor blade to shave them off the wood. At first I tried pulling at them and it resulted in tearing some of the paint that was on the shelf.
Oh, learning experiences!
Here is how it ended up. What do you think?
(Yes, we’re dorks and still own a Super Nintendo.)
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