Home: 82/100, Work:97/100

You simply browse for a book, select a delivery schedule and Bob’s your uncle, you’re reading. Every day. Now, even the busiest of the busy can’t make an excuse, right?!

Sure, it will take you 675 days to read War And Peace, but you can say you actually read War And Peace! Personally, I’m starting with one of my heroes. Benjamin Franklin’s The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. I’ve always wanted to read it and now I just can’t put it off.

Happy reading.

Materials List (I’m including this only to show it’s exceedingly easy to find the materials and you do NOT have to go crazy with this)

• Cardboard box for the frame – any old square or close-to-square box will do. My choice was a 14″x14″x14″.
  Suggested sources – Any office supply store, your basement or attic
• Tissue paper or tracing paper for the diffusing windows – I went cheap with tissue paper.
  Suggested sources – Any craft or card store
• Gaffer’s tape – LOVE this stuff. Not a cheap item but well worth it. You’ll use it for all kinds of things.
  Suggested source – Midwest Photo Exchange. Get the 2″ wide black Permacell.
• Posterboard for the seamless background – this is cheap too. I went with a sheet of white and a sheet of black.
  Suggested sources – Any office supply or craft store

Then just follow the pictures on this Strobist post and you are all set to have some fun. I chose some of my son’s colorful toys and did some tests. Here’s a few shots to illustrate how simple this is to setup and the great results you can get. Keep in mind, I am very green with off-camera flash still, so if my results are good, think of what you can do if you have some established skillz.

The ever so sophisticated setup. Single flash to camera right, perpendicular to diffusing window.

Test shot with bugs

Test shot with octagon blocks	Test shot with circular blocks

Check out the Strobist Flickr group for more great examples and inspiration.

You can sign on as a contributor and make a few bucks picking domain names for creatively challenged folks like myself.

Hey bloggers! As long as you have an actual blog, one use of their service is free!

You see, this little man doesn’t like to sleep past 4:30AM or so and he gets pretty darned cranky by mid-day. Then he decides to make life harder and pass on nap time. Now it gets really fun. Dad-ee going out the door without Lord L? Time for a fit. Mom-ee going upstairs without Lord L? Time for major whining. Can’t have the frozen sweet potato fries to throw around in the supermarket? You don’t want to know.

The best thing to do is take mini-breaks away from the cantankerous tike. Even 10 minutes away will help you keep your cool. If you don’t have the help of someone in the home this is tough. Try distraction. Sticker books, blocks, TV. Anything that will get you some quiet to collect yourself and down a glass of water or something.

Remember, they just can’t help themselves and they aren’t trying to piss you off. It’s a side effect that you have to deal with.

Happy parenting!

I’m the diet book you don’t need to buy to know you eat like crap. I’m the nag at the back of your brain reminding you how inadequate you feel for letting e-mail win. I’m not the expert that explains it eloquently. I leave that the Mr. Mann and Mr. Allen.

To get started, read the great series “Inbox Zero” over at 43 Folders. Before or after that, watch Merlin’s recent Google talk, conveniently inserted below. Here’s are my major takeaways from the video.

• Use a processing system. This is basic common sense. We tend to forget or ignore common sense because it tends to require being honest with yourself and taking action. Anything you need to do over and over and over again is worth doing quickly and reliably. Automate as much as you can with filters and automagic folder sorting. I like Merlin’s proposed system and it happens to be the one I naturally arrived at. For every single message, there are five choices.

1. Delete or Archive
2. Delegate
3. Respond Now
4. Defer
5. Do Now or Create a Next Action

• Always keep the ball moving. Don’t let a message sit in your inbox without a decision made on it. If you need more information to take action, make the request and either get rid of or file that message. Letting messages sit around and accumulate dust makes your life harder because you keep processing that message every time your eyes run across it.
• As with just about anything in life, the key principle is “It’s all about doing.” The greatest theory or idea is worthless without action. Consistent action leads to habit.“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle
• Remove barriers to effectiveness and action
  • If you check mail every minute you are wasting a lot of time.
    • Turn off new mail notifications – This includes toast, dings and the like
    • Establish a schedule for checking mail – Once every 20 minutes, once an hour, four times a day. Whatever it is it’s better than spending all your time in your inbox.
  • If the volume of mail puts you in panic or procrastination mode you need to conquer that fear.
    • Use Merlin’s dash hack to take action in small chunks – Committing to processing mail for 10 minutes at a clip is less daunting than clearing 100 messages. May sound dumb and too simple, but it is amazing how well it works.
    • Use sorting options in your mail client to identify spam and junk and delete it right away.
    • Consider deleting anything older than a month, two weeks or whatever timeframe you feel OK with.
  • Get fast, The Flash kind of fast, at processing and responding to mail.
    • Take a look at www.sentenc.es for the elegantly simply approach of limiting all the email you write to a set number of sentences. I know that won’t work 100% of the time, but even it worked as little as 25% of the time, you’d save a heck of a lot of time.
    • Ingrain whatever system you follow or come up with in your mind so it becomes pure habit. No thinking. Pure action.
    • Limit the number of folders you store mail in. More folders leads to more thinking which leads to slower action.

Happy processing!