All posts by Dona

Rescue Time – a nifty time management tool

Technology,

I think I’ve mentioned before what a shareware/freeware addict I am. I think I called myself a betaholic. Sometimes it is a waste of time, other times it isn’t. For instance, I’ve been using a little program called Rescue Time for a little less than a week and I think it is going to save me time.

You install a small application that sits in your system tray and logs the programs on which you are actively working, then sends it to your online dashboard where your time is visually represented in a graph form. You can “tag” activities and the dashboard will display the tags as a graph as well.

Besides showing me where I was wasting time, this application is helping me keep track of my work hours. I’d been tracking my time with XNote Stopwatch, but often forgot to turn it on when I began working or forgot to pause it when I quit working. Then if the computer crashed or I forgot to save it, I’d lose my log of time. Now that I have tagged my applications and websites that I use exclusively for work as “work” I can get a pretty good idea how much time I spent actually working on tasks for my job.

Rescue Time is still in Beta and invitation only, but I got an invitation only a few days or so after signing up. I was worried that I’d discover that I wasted my time more than I do, so perhaps I am not such a slacker after all!

At the end of the day

Blogging,

At the end of the day when I sit down to write I think of all the writable thoughts I had over the course of the day.

First of all, “at the end of the day” is a tired saying these days.  It used to mean “when all is said and done” but was so overused that it means nothing anymore.

But here, I mean at the end of the day — my day. For me, today it is about 8:30 pm. Time to shut off the laptop and chill or veg or read. But quit using the Internet.

So, at the end of my day I think about the various thoughts I had during the day that began with, ‘I could blog this’. One has to do with my playthings as a kid.

I was  pretty normal. I had dolls and books and normal things to play with, but I also amused myself with kind of weird objects. Like oil paints and spark plugs. I’m planning on writing about my more unusual playthings at some point in the near future.

Stay tuned, as they used to say.

Get Mortified

Blogging, Entertainment,

Last week I had to go into the office to train someone else to fill out the web forms I’ve been doing for the past six months or so. On the way I listened to WAMU and heard the creator of Get Mortified talk about his concept. Get Mortified is, in its own words,

“… a comic excavation of adolescent artifacts (journals, letters, poems, lyrics, home movies, stories and more) as shared by their original authors before total strangers.”

I got pretty excited about this – after all, I’ve been sharing my angst-filled adolescent journals online for a couple of years. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see the show when it was in DC, but I suppose there is next time.

Hmm, I need to get back to the past and transcribe more teenaged entries. I kinda miss 17 year-old Cedar Waxwing.