Language: English

„The hell was I thinking?”

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Emil Wu - Memory

There’s a funny line in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997): (recalling memories about a person whom she loved/admired in high-school): „The hell was I thinking?”.

Memories tend to be like this. In childhood, you get first memories. First memories of a technical game. First memory of ice cream. First memory of a toy. First memory of a friend. First memory of a person. First memory of riding a bicycle.

And time passes, and your taste in technical objects, in food, in people, in some activities, changes.

You also change, you’re not the same.

People, objects, activities, technical things change.

And you look right now, in August 2020, at a memory some years ago, when you were a child, and you liked ice cream X, game Y, activity Z, and you still think that the memory is nice, that you might have enjoyed it, that you do know why you liked it, but, on another hand, you’re a bit surprised by the choice back then.

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Printscreens of fragments of texts are overrated

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Tim Meaney - official

Let’s say you see a message on a web site which disturbs you some way or another, it annoys you, it offends you, you find it immoral, various other things.

You might think it’s a good idea to either take a picture of the screen (quite a non-technical solution), or just hit PrintScreen on a Windows PC and paste it in a Paint image/Microsoft Word document.

The thing is, it can be quite easy to change what you see on the screen, to manipulate the message.

If you’re using Chrome / FireFox / Safari / Edge (and I wonder what else would you use, if you’re in 98% of Internet users), you can read about document.designMode = ‘on’:

As you can see, it’s so easy to change the text in a page, that even if you do take a screenshot, that may not count as a proof for „But that web site, on date X, said Y”.

A better solution is to use an external tool to save the contents of the page and put a time stamp on it.

I will only link to a Google search because this kind of tool needs to be used for a while, and online tools tend to disappear after a while, and I won’t edit this article very soon. So, a Google search »

One web site which might disappear someday »

What a web site like this is to visit the page for you and save it and put a time stamp. There are multiple solutions for this.

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Second-best articles when you have nothing to write about

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Neil Conway - Research

One guy I like to follow online writes, from time to time, very good articles on how to write like:

From time to time, I suggest other people – „Hey, you should write, too! Start a blog! Just start writing, start from somewhere!”.

And, sometimes, I get this reply „But I can’t write 10x better articles than my competition!”.

This blog post is dedicated to those people.

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On productivity

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Dhruv Patel - TIME is Important

Some people say to make a quadrant with important/less important and priority/non-priority tasks:

  • Important and priority tasks – do them first;
  • Less important, but priority OR important but smaller priority tasks – do them later;
  • Not important, non-priority tasks – postpone them until forever.

I don’t agree with this model. By following these principles, there are some things that will only get done months after they were supposed to.

I suggest you also put in your program less-than-important tasks.

What is more relevant to me is dividing time into the following types of tasks:

  • Tasks to be done when you have a lot of energy (to me, that’s the morning and first part of the day); in here – put the most difficult tasks; creative tasks, tasks which require attention;
  • Tasks do be done when you have less energy, but, still, you can finish tasks (the second part of the day); in here – put some tasks which may be a bit boring and repetitive;
  • Finally, some tasks for which you have no energy (later in the evening); in here – watching movies, reading books, reading online journals.

The thing is, at times it gets difficult to schedule tasks. Putting limits helps, forcing now to waste time on some web sites, to only reply to some messages, not to do distracting activities, help. But, at times, I plan to do X, and, still, not manage to do so.

Anyhow, the planning based on energy level works much better for me than planning based on importance.

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In-kind gift

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Jani Halinen - Gift

In May 2020, I took part in an online event by „Biz” magazine, in which it was told that it matters more to make donations with products, rather than money.

I think that may hold true.

A lot of companies advertise in their job postings that they offer all sorts of small things, like free fruit and tea, a Kindle, things like that, even if the monetary value of thos products can be quite small.

I know a person who wants to give a physical gift as an inheritance.

On December 1st, some years ago, eMAG gave with all the orders a free flag of Romania.

Some real estate players give a „free” car with an apartment.

…

And the list goes on.

It may look like a more impact to say „As a company, we’ve donated X tons of food to people”, rather than say „I gave X amount of money to people”.

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