Jess Pomfret is hosting month’s T-SQL Tuesday, and asked us to share our favorite life hacks – something that makes our day easier. I have a few,some people have told me are insane.
We will start with the least insane. Why did Lenovo put the Function key where the Ctrl key is on every other keyboard we use. Well you can hit F11 and bring up a program they created to switch the keys, so now when you going between computers you will be hitting the right keys as you use all the shortcut keys we are so fond of.
At a previous job, a had a hack around Ola’s scripts for backups where if you ran them again it would only pick up the backups that haven’t ran in the desired time period (note to self: sounds like a great blog post) so that you wouldn’t run out of disk space if you just ran the whole job repeatedly and you wouldn’t have to figure out which one missing. I also had Ola’s index maintenance scripts setup into a queuing system so it only ran for 6 hours a night then stopped.
For my Guardian ad Litem work, I get a lot of email and paper work. So I store everything in Evernote for that. I have Evernote hooked into my gmail with one click of a button it is stored in Evernote, once a week I groom it and give each note a title that means something. I use an app on my phone to scan all paper work I get and store in Evernote as a pdf. My case files can get two to three feet tall in just the first couple of months and I can’t just carry that around or find stuff easily that way.
I still use a paper planner to achieve goals, a few people in the community have spotted and asked about it. It’s the Full Focus Planner. The premise being you have 10 goals per year in across all domains in your life (spiritual, intellectual, emotional, physical, martial, parental, social, vocational, avocational, and financial). Work on three per quarter, break down into what you get done in one week, then set three big goals per day to get done. Coincidentally, I started using this planner around the time I started doing what about 20 SQLSaturdays a year and keeps me focused on everything in life and balanced. For example, when the book writing came up last year, I dropped and rearranged goals and thus could not write a new presentation so attended far less events than normal. This quarter I got really simple goals, getting my step and stair climbing goal in each day (not happening today), work more on my mental health talk, and getting my apartment on a cleaning schedule that can survive without me when I leave my kid home alone (he is 23). This leads to the next life hack.
Most insane is I track my time in Outlook (don’t groan) down to 15 slots for major things going in my life even free time. So I block of time for all my major goals and plan time out months in advance. Of course things change around, and I don’t detail out my work day because it is too unpredictable, it just has a block that says “work”. I include driving to places and put addresses in there and sync in to Google, which then has Waze tell me where to go. I’ve been doing this for well over three years and the Google calendar isn’t flexible enough for me to switch to using it but I’m open for suggestions.
I’m sure I have more I don’t realize I do anymore because they have just become an ingrained habit. But maybe one of these will be useful to someone else. I already shared the F11 key with someone else so I know that one is useful.
Thanks, I’m looking forward to hosting next month, and still batting around ideas for topics, so stay tuned.