Well, maybe backlogged is a better word.
And actually, I feel like I am starting to catch back up now, but I felt pretty overloaded earlier this week… Might have had something to do with my taking so long to get this post up.
I spent the past weekend at the “No Fluff Just Stuff” conference. It was really good, but doing ten 90 minute sessions in a weekend left me feeling a little numb. The sessions were without a doubt non-fluffy. I learned a lot, but it was probably more than I could really absorb.
The last session I went to “Hacking your brain for fun and profit” while non-technical has been the easiest to start using. It covered ways to make yourself smarter/more productive. First up: getting more sleep. I don’t know if I can keep it up, but I really felt like I should try harder to stay on top of that one. The next point I tried to apply was avoiding distractions at work. I now have all my “new e-mail” sounds turned off, instant messenger can’t make noise ether, and my toolbar is set to auto hide. After nearly a week of that, I think I can tell that it is easier to focus on a task.
As sort of a byproduct of that, I found that Eclipse seems to prevent the taskbar from popping back up like it should sometimes, leading me to look into ways to improve task-switching. I hear there have been some great improvements in operating systems over the past… eight years or so, but my place of employ is still using XP so most of the cool things I initially found weren’t going to work.
Eventually I found out Microsoft labs had a product “Alt-Tab Replacement” in their Power Toys for Windows XP collection. It isn’t perfect, but it improved my situation fairly drastically.
And, that little tip is probably only useful to me… but hey the subscription was cheap right? 🙂
A (nearly) free weekend coming up, can’t wait to see what Heather and I end up filling it with!
-Jordan
Nelsons 