Break Time

I have found that there is a certain common misconception that being efficient means not taking a break until the task at hand is completely finished, and this misconception has seeped into businesses and work ethics of professionals for years. 

Coming into Spring Break, I found it an opportune time to try and break this for my readers.

Okay, so it seems counter intuitive. Because it is. To get a task done, you have to...stop doing the task? Yes.  Taking breaks has many positive effects, especially if you have been laboring on the task for a long time and put a lot of work into it nonstop. What are some of these positive effects? Here are some

1. Clears your mind to reorganize your thoughts later
2. It gives a fresh perspective when you resume the work
3. It lowers blood pressure, thus physically giving the ability to concentrate on the task better
4. Gives time to sort out any other distractions, like hunger or drowsiness

Here is the thing. This is not anything that is a secret. Stephen Covey wrote about taking a break in his book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and his son Sean wrote about it in his adaptation Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens. Lifehacker interviews CEO's of major companies and professors at Ivy League schools and asks them how they work and what their office looks like. Many of them, surprisingly enough, have a bed or a comfy couch in their office. Why? Because they understand the value of a break.

So students: Enjoy the mess out of your break. If you have been working hard, it is well deserved. If not, then you have a clean slate when you come back. It is a win win, really.

Create an Action Plan

This week I enlisted into the United States Marine Corps. It was a huge step in my life, and will consume many of my young adult years. I had supporters, and those who were maybe a bit more negative, but it was ultimately my decision, and I ultimately followed through with it.

But, I am by no means going to spend the rest of my life in the Marines. Make no mistake, I love the Corps. I loved it before I started the process of joining, and I love it even more now. However this is not my end-goal for my life. This is merely a stepping stone to my end-goal: to end human trafficking and slavery. That fight is my passion, and what I spend much of my time thinking about. So, why did I join the Marines? It was a means for the end. It serves as a stepping stone.

What does all of this have to do with an action plan? Let me break it down for you. Your parents want a clean house. That is their end desire, for the week at least. The clean house is not going to happen by you wishing for a clean house. That mess is for fairy tails.

How do you clean the house? First you figure out what all that entails: vacuum  sweep, mop, wash clothes, clean bedroom, clean bathroom, wash dishes. Now you know what needs to happen. Next step is to figure out what order would best suit your interests. You don't want to mop before you sweep, and you definitely don't want to wash clothes before you can get all of your towels and cleaning clothes in the machine. So the next step is to carry out that plan.

This simple recipe can help you create the action plan for anything you need to get done.
1. Establish end goal
2.Assess the situation
3.Establish means by which short term goals can be carried out in order to reach end goal
4.Do it.


Yep. It's really that simple. Your going to be skeptical when trying it. I just ask you, try it. It helps me out so much that it has become methodical.


So here is another fun game. Please, feel free to get addicted. I need pageviews. And this one is from a more credible site, so I wont get a virus on my site.

Be An Individual

Okay, first and foremost, I want to apologize that 0ptimizR was down for a few days this past week. Apparently some malware got onto the site by way of the snake game, so I took it down. The post is still there though. That will not however be the last fun HTML content I will have, so stay tuned.

Now on to the good stuff. Your asking what being an individual have to do with personal efficiency.

Well, here is the thing. I watch people ride the coattails of their parents political, religious, moral, and practical beliefs, and honestly they are wasting their life. I have peers who claim a certain party affiliation, but their life or personality goes against that platform, and numerous people claim their parents religion purely because its the only thing they have ever known.

I repeat: THIS IS THE BIGGEST WASTE OF YOUR LIFE YOU COULD POSSIBLY ENDURE.

Am I saying become the opposite of what your family follows, leave your religion behind, and separate yourself from everything your friends believe? Absolutely not. If you didn't think similarly with the friends you have, they would not be your friends. What I am saying is, know what you believe and follow, and why you believe or follow it.

I'll give you a personal example. When I was little, I never really grew up in church until I was in middle school. I claimed Christianity, but only because I didn't know much different. When I entered middle school, I had the epiphany: What is it that I believe, and does it actually make sense. So, without any push from outside sources, or without any type of pressure, I began to actually read my Bible. I asked the hard questions: If God is good, why is there suffering? Why would Jesus die for sinners? What does the Bible say about dinosaurs and whatnot? So I did my own research. I understood that there were questions that needed to be answered, and I searched for the answers. If there were things I found in my search that were compleately illogical, or definitely disproved the existence of God, then I had no problem planting my faith elsewhere.

In my search I found the answers to all of the hard questions, and furthermore I wholeheartedly believe in the existence of a pure, good God, who sent his son to die for sinners, because he made people to love and to love Him, and without a sacrifice of His blood, there would be an eternity of separation from Him, thus our existence would have been void. I believe God is logical, and omniscient, and understands all things. I also believe that God is compassionate, and ever loving of not only His followers, but everyone He created.

But this post is not about my conviction. If you want to know how I believe, you can take a look at my buddies blog. He and I have very similar beliefs. This post is about you finding your own.

I had very similar experiences with my political and practical ideals. You may call it an awakening, but I call it simply knowing what you believe and why you believe it.

Until next week. 'Mericuh.

0ptimize Chrome with These Two Extensions

As we all know, an 0ptimizr's favorite web browser is Chrome. It works well with the tools at Google, and it gives the capability to log in from different computers, in order to keep all of your bookmarks and extensions, thus making your Chrome experience portable.

Chrome comes with a crap-ton of extensions that help make surfing the web more fun, productive, and helpful. There are two extensions that I fully recommend that are available on Chrome to further 0ptimize your experience.

FlashBlock

Whenever you search the web for long enough, you are bound to run into annoying advertisements that use Flash player. These advertisements slow down the page you are loading, so it takes longer to see what you want to see. FlashBlock stops all of that. It shuts off everything on the page that runs Flash. But what about the things I want to run Flash, like videos and games? The extension gives a little button at the top left corner to turn on flash for that portion of the page. So the extension speeds up your surfing, and give you control of what you want to run Flash.

The Great Suspender

We've all been there. Your a student working on a research paper with multiple tabs open or your working on a presentation for an executive at work. Your surfing the web, and have about seven tabs open. Web pages slow to a crawl to load up. It takes forever to get what you need done. Here is the problem, your browser is taking a ton of memory to keep all of those tabs alive. The Great Suspender relieves this stress. It can be configured to suspend any tab that has been open for a certain amount of time, meaning all of the tabs you are not working with at that particular moment stop taking up memory, making it faster to do what you are currently doing. When you want to bring the tab back, just click on the screen that comes up, and the tab instantly reloads. But what about the tabs that I want to stay open, like a playlist on Youtube or a Gmail account? The Great Suspender gives the capability to white list certain sites.  

So there you go. Two extensions that help to make your Chrome experience a bit more efficient. These are by no means the only extensions that help to make Chrome a more productive atmosphere, but they are flexible for everyone, from the student to the professional.

Make Your Internet Life Easier Part 2: Going Deeper

Last week we delved into the basics of the internet, in order to get a handle on the simple things. We went over browsers, email, searching, and bookmarking. This week we will finish the two part segment, and learn about some of the more advanced things you can do to 0ptimize your online experience.

RSS Feed Readers

As a devoted Googler, and for purposes of keeping on the same platform throughout, I am obviously going to recommend Google Reader for this. An RSS Feed Reader is exactly what it sounds like, it reads RSS feeds. Now, the question is "What is an RSS feed?" I will  tell you. An RSS Feed is "a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format." Basically, whenever a blog or news site updates, it sends out a signal, called an RSS feed. What an RSS feed reader does is collect the signals that you want it to, say from your favorite personal efficiency blog (say, I don't know, 0ptimizr), you just put in 0ptimizr.blogspot.com into the feed reader, and it give you a notification every time 0ptimizr updates. What makes this helpful is if you want to keep up with multiple blogs or news websites, then you can have them all in on place, and don't have to manually go to them every day.

Power Searching

Okay, we went over the basics of web searching in the last part. However, we merely went over the basics. Anyone can type in a keyword into a search engine and shuffle through results. However, if you hone your skills enough, you could become a power searcher. For most search engines, the Boolean Operators OR, AND, NOT all work. If you want to search for synonyms, you use OR. Like, a search query might be [Women OR Females] (in honor of International Women's Day). Use AND to narrow searches. Like, if you were trying to find a lifehacking blog, that also might incorporate minimalism, the, you would type in [lifehacking AND minimalism]. Not filters out all unwanted words. Like if you were looking for how to slice an onion, but didn't want to know how to not cry while doing it, you would search [slice onion NOT crying]. All of these are better covered in the power searching courses that the engineers at Google just put out. I highly recommend them, and I went through both of them myself. Start with the normal, then move on to the advanced. Which leads me to my next point

MOOCS/Online Learning

As an 0ptimizr, I understand the value of learning, and how vital it is to never stop seeking new information. With the age of the internet and instant correspondence, learning has taken on a whole new form online. People can come together to learn an array of things online, from math and physics through the prestigious Khan Academy to the ins and outs of social media with the people from ivy league schools. One of the newest ways of doing this is through a MOOC, or "Massive Open Online Course". In a MOOC, people from all over the world correspond through YouTube, email, GDocs, and other programs. The teacher or teachers teach through a specific platform, whether it be through video or text lessons, and gives assignments. Most of the time, the assignments aren't graded, and you can go at your own pace. The best part about it is that most of the courses were at one time or are still courses that you can take at colleges. And I'm not talking about your average community college, I'm talking MIT has put these bad boys out. You don't get college credit, but that's not always the point. You get an education on the same level, for free. That is valuable.

Make Your Internet Life Easier Part 1: The Necessities

Now we are starting to get into the meat and bones of 0ptimizR. This is the first of a two part series on how to 0ptimize your Internet experience. The first one is a general starter course to Internet 0ptimization.

Browsers

If you are reading this, you are in a browser. So there is no doubt that you understand how to access the internet. Now doing so efficiently is what 0ptimizr is here to teach you about. Chrome is an 0ptimizr's favorite browser. Why? Because it is quick. Many people are caught up with Internet Explorer, and are afraid of change. Listen to me, IT IS OKAY TO CHANGE. Internet Explorer is standard on any PC, but it by no means is the best way to access the internet. Another noteworthy browser is Firefox. The only downside is the relativly slow startup. But, I will say again, ANYTHING IS BETTER THAN IE. 

Email

It is no secret that we live in a technologically advanced society. Email is the way to communicate with each other. So much so that it is putting the United States Postal Service in financial decline, causing them to take a day out of their workweek. But if you've been on the internet for long enough, you'd know that there are quite a few email providers out there, and choosing from the masses can be pretty confusing. As a previous user of three email providers, I find that Google's Gmail is the most efficient. And of course, efficiency is the name of the game at 0ptimizR.

Searching

One of the main purposes of the internet, and the reason it it indispensable, is the fact that you can find out information on just about any topic on the planet, using the array of online search engines. As you will probably soon catch on, I am an avid Google user. So much so that I am a Google Power Searcher, but more on that later. Other noteworthy search engines are the up and coming Bing, and Yahoo. (0ptimizr tip: when you open yahoo, make sure your speakers are on and press the "!" at the end of the logo)

Bookmarking

Okay, now that we are on the internet, we found some good stuff, but everyday that we come back to it, there is new stuff, so we want to come back a lot. The address is long, and typing it is tedious, like 0ptimizr.blogspot.com. Is there a way to make it easier to get to my favorite web pages without having to type so much? Why yes, inquisitive reader, there is. All of the browsers have different bookmarking systems. Chrome has the star in the address box. So, every time you want to go to your favorite personal efficiency blog, all you need to do is go to 0ptimizr.blogspot.com, click the star in the address box, and then every time you press "0" in the address box, 0ptimizr will be in the drop-down menu to just click on. 

Note: If it is a blog, there is a much easier way to keep all of your favorite blogs in one place, called an rss feed reader. We will get to that in the next part of the series.