SmoothSpan Blog

I’m a big believer that change is good, and that it helps us grow.  Sometimes, it’s the little things you change that can make a differences.  So change some of those little things.  Don’t change too many, you don’t want to upset your basic housekeeping routines to the point where you’re wasting productivity.  Instead, change things to make yourself more productive. 

Here are a few little things I changed at the beginning of the New Year:

1.  I’ve ramped up my Twitter usage.  It’s time for me to go meet some new people and refresh the networking process.  Twitter is a new avenue for me to exploit more fully along those lines.

2.  I’ve changed my Windows desktop.  I like an application dock, and since Microsoft did away with the one in Office (I’ve still never heard why), I’ve been improvising.  No more!  I now run RocketDock, which is very Mac-like.  It runs at the top of my screen with new apps, while I have the old Windows task bar along the bottom.  It works great and gives me a new bit of UI to play with every time I’m on the machine.  While I was at it, I nuked the desktop icon clutter too.  I don’t need most of it between the Task Bar and Rocket Dock.

3.  I moved out of Outlook for my personal email accounts.  This was a biggie for me, and I wasn’t sure I was going to like it.  There’s been a glitch or two, but by and large I’m very happy.  I now read all my email via Gmail.

4.  I got a big terabyte network disk, stuck it in our detached garage (so its “quasi” offsite storage) and I’m now backing up more frequently. 

5.  I flushed my backlog of unread blog posts.   I need to make a hard and fast rule to do that more frequently, but it sure was refreshing to have no entries waiting to be read!

6.  I’m trying to use Firefox half the time and IE half the time to broaden my web browsing experience. 

Like I said, these are just little things, but they’re helping me to be a little more productive, and they changes feel good.