If you poke around in your phone for a bit, you’ll find that keyboard options usually include a personal dictionary you can use to add words to avoid the dreaded "AutoCorrect screwed me." You can use this same set-up to save time (and typo frustrations) for things you type often or don’t want to use internet slang (on a somewhat related note, if you find your phone cleans up your language, you can use this or a new contact to avoid. Read more here).
Here are some examples of shortcuts I have set-up:
A few notes:
Here’s how you can do it in iOS - we’ll go with lol and make it “Laugh out loud!”
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I am a creature of routine. Some of my friends tease me about this, and I can appreciate their point, to an extent. Routines can trap us, and the word itself doesn’t spark much in the way of creative process. But for me, and I suspect for many, routines can actually free us.
When I wrote about Evernote and my own set-up using it, I shared that my system is drawn in no small part from David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) System. One particular piece of the GTD system that appeals to me most is “your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” This doesn’t just apply to emails and to do lists. A routine, for me, puts me into autopilot for the menial, everyday tasks, and frees my mind to be creative, or allows me to focus on the tasks at hand, without worrying I’m forgetting something important. Routine doesn't have to be a dirty word - we all have routines. I’m sure you don’t do laundry by staring at your dirty clothes and wondering where to start. No. You sort, load the washer, add detergent, start the washer. The washer’s done, and you move the clothes to the dryer. That’s a routine, and one you don’t put much thought into. Why?
So, how do you create a routine? You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who claims they don’t enjoy traveling. I think that’s an unfair description; most of us enjoy vacations, but traveling for business or other reasons can be a headache. I’ve done my share of business travel over the years, and still recall how excited I was for my first trip. So excited that, by the time I was done packing and adding “one more thing,” I ended up with enough luggage that it looked like I was embarking on a cross-country tour.
Over time, and lots of fine-tuning, I came up with my own system to avoid the headaches and enjoy the journey, so to speak. Today, I’m sharing the headache prevention parts of my system - pre-trip, homecoming, and everything in between. When I launched this blog just a couple weeks ago, I told y’all I wanted to try out some new things and share my experiences. I’ve got several notes going in Evernote with a few of those, but there’s one area of particular importance that I’m purposely announcing first, before I start: I need to redesign my home work area. Because I’m a freelancer, and paperless, I’m able to work from anywhere. This is splendid - a few weeks ago, I was able to take an impromptu trip and know it had zero impact on my productivity. However, while I can work from anywhere, the reality is most days I work from home, and while my current set-up works, I don’t love it. When I embarked on my entrepreneur adventure, my mom was kind enough to offer me a guest bedroom to save on expenses (related: my mom is a really nice lady). My furniture is in storage, including my desk. I’m going to pause there to tell you about my desk. It was a gift to my grandmother when she was a child: it’s huge, it’s heavy, and I love it. It sat in her own home office for years, and when I spent summers with my grandparents, I spent many hours sitting at it and playing “office.” Clearly, I was a REALLY cool kid. There just isn’t room for it, sadly. My current living situation is limited on space, so the area I have to devote to an “office” is limited to a corner in my now bedroom. And while I could theoretically make it work, it wouldn’t be ideal. So for now, the desk is safe in storage, and I’ve grown tired of setting up shop at the dining room table and am taking my office corner to new heights. So, why share something as simple and basic as setting up a work area? For one, I welcome input. I’m new to the “working from home” game, and there are plenty of people out there who are pros at it and have designed set-ups that would make the rest of us jealous. Teach me your ways! Equally important, we all know where we work plays a big role in our productivity. If you’re uncomfortable, or inconvenienced, your productivity suffers. So, I’m here to serve. I’ll be sharing my experiences with the process and how it impacts my workflow. I guess, while the meat of this project is the actual work area, we’ll be taking a look at how that spills over into work. A few requisites for this project and the space: first and foremost, it has to be functional. Two, because it won’t be a permanent area, I’m not willing to throw a lot, if any, money at it. Again, I have office furniture in storage, so no need to reinvent the wheel. Finally, it has to be nice to look at and a place I look forward to using. If I wanted ugly, I’d throw a folding table in the corner and call it a day. In short, I want a functional, cheap, Pinterest-worthy work area. Shouldn’t be too hard, right? Speaking of Pinterest, I’ve created a board for this endeavor, and I’ll be tweeting throughout the process. I’ll share a few photos along the way, of course. Suggestions are welcomed and encouraged, as always. And stay tuned for the big reveal - my goal is to make Martha Stewart jealous, but I’ll settle on just having a kick-ass space that inspires obscene amounts of productivity.
Interested in having someone handle the day-to-day for you? Need an extra hand for a short time? Check out my FAQs for more of what I can do for you, or head over to my consultation page so we can connect. You can also follow me on Twitter or Pinterest. Be it an episode of Hoarders, or news of people dying in their homes (or in recent news, of an elderly, legally blind woman who had unknowingly been living with her own son’s corpse for possibly 20 years without knowing), we all watch in horror and find inspiration to clean our houses whenever we see hoarding situations. Here’s the thing - most of us are not in danger of becoming actual “hoarders.” Most of us are just regular folks who have too much stuff. (NOTE - if you are being consumed by your stuff, reach out. Hoarding doesn’t begin at the first scene of a TLC episode, and none of us plan to go through life only to end up so consumed by our possessions they literally consume us. As humans, we have a complicated relationship with our belongings and that can spill over into our mental health (and vice versa). So, if you suspect that’s you, or becoming you, again, REACH OUT.) Minimalism, a concept of owning minimal items, has taken off in recent years (I blame Pinterest, personally). While the concept of owning less and organizing what you do have better isn’t new, in my opinion, the concept of “minimalism” is relatively new. As a former pack-rat, I was intrigued by minimalism when it first started showing up in my Pinterest feed, and even more so when one of my friends started to embrace the concept and raved about how much more free she felt with less. When I say I was a packrat, y’all, I mean it. I never kept “trash,” but I damn sure kept a whole mess of stuff I wouldn’t need. I had binders of high school and college notes I kept because I may need again. Old phones, in case I could find a use for them. Toys and books from childhood. Clothes I hadn’t worn in years but they were still cute. The list goes on. I’d like to tell you all that stuff was organized. Some of it was, but truth be told, it wasn’t. Case in point: I once rented a two bedroom townhouse with the thought I would convert the second bedroom into a home office of sorts. I never did. Lived there for two years, and the room served more as storage. I would walk in with “stuff,” get overwhelmed, and just throw it on a desk and walk back out, closing the door behind me. It was embarrassing, and when my partner at the time and I moved into a new place, he convinced me to toss quite a bit. I eventually got all that crap organized, neatly packing things into tubs, labeling them, and all that jazz. It took a few years, but after all my friend’s raving about minimalism, I realized that while I had organized everything, it was all taking up space. And I wasn’t just wasting space, I was creating clutter. And so my journey into a pseudo-form of minimalism began. I started slow, but after I went paperless and realized the freedom I felt over there could be applied to other physical stuff, I wanted more. There are any number of systems and methods out there to help us all combat the “stuff;” organizing it, sorting it, labeling it. I won’t knock these - some have proven helpful to millions (and some are total crap, in my opinion, but that’s a topic for another day). But here’s the thing - above all, more than anything, the decision to go minimal begins within all of us. Not exactly groundbreaking information, I know. But I’ve read and pinned enough methods and tips and fought my own good fight against my “stuff" long enough to know all the methods in the world aren’t going to do diddily squat for us if we don’t start inward first. Most of us have too much stuff. This isn’t lecturing - we just do. Things we don’t need, things we don’t want, things we love, and things we don’t. We want more, too, so we get more only to watch it accumulate. I’m not exempt from this. Far from it. And I often think I’m controlling how much and what I own well, only to find myself finding I still have too much and want less. So now, while I won’t claim to be a full-fledged minimalist, I will claim that I only own things I want, or need, and am much happier in this state. That being said, it’s not a one and done project. I find myself having to give myself a pep talk of sorts often. Sometimes it happens when I go to find something and can’t find it. Sometimes its when I come home with new clothes and run out of hangers. Always, when I move. |