If so, you’ve probably noticed a nice benefit of marking things as Read Later, a benefit expressed well by @longstride of 37signals:

“One of @Instapaper’s best, secret features? Time. It’s amazing how many articles I DON’T want to read a few days after saving them.”

Amen. I use Instapaper a lot: it’s one of my most-used products. I love how it formats articles for easy reading, and how it keeps them in all in one location so I can read the articles at my leisure, instead of being distracted and reading everything I come across “on the spot.” (I generally use the Instapaper app on my iPad for reading, although I sometimes use my Kindle 3.)

Just about every time I go into Instapaper to read, I see a handful of articles that no longer interest me, and so I just delete them. A pretty good time-saver.

The ebook is so poorly formatted as to make it not worth my time to read. Oh, no doubt the quality and value of what Mr. Pressfield has to say, makes the book a worthwhile read. The paperback version has great reviews (not just at Amazon, but anywhere you look).

I’ll show you what I mean. Here is the first paragraph from the first chapter:

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and t
he unlived life within us. Between the two stan
ds Resistance.”

Notice the breaking of the words “the” and “stands.” The whole book is like that. The formatting prevents me from even highlighting the text, so that I could save it to My Clippings. When I try to select the paragraph, the selection only applies to the “ds Resistance.”

This is not the first time I’ve gotten a poorly formatted book from Amazon. It also happened with The Brothers Karamazov. But that ebook only cost $0.99, instead of the $9.99 that Pressfield’s cost.

After fuming for a bit, and writing a negative review at Amazon, I decided to see if the book was available for iBooks, so I could read it on my iPad. Viola … it was, so I download The Sample and the formatting is fine. I guess I’ll go ahead and buy it again, even though I can’t use highlighting within the iBooks version. Perhaps it will force me to take notes instead. That is probably a better way to learn than just copying and pasting highlights into a big text file that I might not ever fully read. (The My Clippings.txt file for me is becoming huge.)

If I had just gotten the sample of the ebook from Amazon first, I would have seen how poorly formatted it was (hopefully), and would have saved myself $10. Often I do check out samples before buying. But this book had such good reviews. And my experiences with Amazon have been overwhelmingly positive over the years.

Lesson learned for me. Hopefully a tip that might save you a few bucks someday.

While on sabbatical, I accidentally dropped my iPhone 3GS into a tub of water … this can happen when you carry your phone in a wide shirt pocket. I called AT&T and asked for help and they gave me the Apple support number. When I called that number, the Apple tech support person told me the trick about putting the iPhone into a box of rice. Apparently it works pretty often. You are supposed to leave it in the rice for at least two or three days, to make sure it gets all the water out.

I tried it for a day and a half. Then my extreme impatience got the best of me. I called Apple and asked them how to go about getting a replacement. I gave them my credit card number, they sent a box to me to put my existing iPhone in, I shipped it back to them, and I am waiting on the replacement.

Why didn’t I give the rice at least 2 or 3 or even 4 days, instead of spending money again? Well, I am extremely impatient, something I’ll talk about in another post. But, I also figured I had truly killed my iPhone, because I tried several times to turn it back on. I even hooked it up to its charger. All of this was after I tried to dry it out with a towel (before talking with Apple), and was based on my panic at having dropped the phone into water.

If you get into this situation, do not try to turn your iPhone back on while it might still have moisture in it. Doing so will almost guarantee that you will short-out its circuitry.

Also, if you carry your iPhone in a shirt pocket, as had been my habit, you may want to rethink that and use a holster instead.

TechCrunch has published some of the material, although not much, and has been working with the folks at Twitter to not “go too far” in reporting on the confidential material that came into their possession. My own view is that the material was stolen property and they should not publish any of it … doing so makes use of stolen property. But that is just my view. I am not a lawyer. Arrington is and also has lawyers to assist him in deciding what to do with the material. Not being a pure journalist, I do not have a journalistic view on the material.

Regardless, I think this demonstrates very clearly the need for all of us to ensure we are using good password protection. We all really need to ensure that we use strong passwords. Hacking technology is continuing to improve, alongside other technology, and hackers can more easily break difficult passwords now than they could even a year ago. The trend will continue. Hence, the need for us to be smart in choosing strong passwords.

Okay, some of you may be asking, what is framebuster code and why would I want to use it anyway? The answer is provided by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land in his post The Growth of Framebars and Kevin Rose on the Diggbar. In that article, Danny talks about how Digg’s use of the Diggbar can keep you from getting link credit (it passes the credit to Digg).

When I read Danny’s article, I immediately added the framebusting code into the custom_functions.php file for my Thesis theme, so the code would be added to the header. Here’s what the javascript code looks like:

I’ve shown it as picture because javascript doesn’t copy nicely into a post. If you want to copy and paste the actual javascript code, you can just view the source of my header.

Anyway, being the perpetual tinkerer that I am, I also decided to tinker with another theme, and activated it for a few hours. But, when I tried to switch back to Thesis, I could not do so. The reason was that WordPress gives you a preview of theme before you can activate it, and the preview is shown within a frame. And, since my Thesis code had the framebuster code within it, it busted the WordPress preview so that I could not choose the activation button.

The fix was simple. After I finally realized what was going on, I just removed the code from my Thesis theme, uploaded the change via ftp, activated the theme, and then added the framebuster code back in and uploaded it via ftp.

So, if you are using the framebuster code and you run into this when you are monkeying around with different themes, now you know the fix.

Update: My good buddy Thomas R. Hall modified the javascript code shown above so that it works to bust frames except those generated within your own site, including the WordPress Theme Activation Frame. The code is shown pictorially below. Again, to copy and paste the actual code, just view the source of this page with your browser and copy and paste the code, modifying it for your site of course. Note: sometimes I have the framebuster code turned off, though, so it is best to just use the code below.

When I was tinkering with the email in my iPod Touch the other evening, I noticed that there were over 100 items in the sent mail folder. Since I have no need to keep any of those, I deleted them all. And, I deleted all the ones in the Touch’s email Trash box. (I empty the Trash box regularly). Admittedly, this didn’t save a lot of space on the drive, but it did free up the email database a bit.

The email program it really pays to clean out is Microsoft Outlook. There, sent emails and trash emails can add up, and they not only take up space (with all of their attachments), they also slow Outlook down. And, after you clean out the folders that need cleaning (sent email, trash, old project folders you no longer need, completed tasks, etc), it pays to compact your Outlook data files. These two steps can speed up Outlook a lot, depending on how much unnecessary email you get rid of and on how much the database needed to be compacted.

The first step is to ensure your Gmail account is setup with IMAP enabled. The chances are good that IMAP is already enabled for you in Gmail, since it is the default. But, to set it, or double-check, just do the following:

• In the upper right corner of your Gmail account, click the Settings link.
• From the menu that it gives you, choose Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
• This will bring up the screen shown below, from which you click on Enable IMAP.

Now you can open up your current Outlook account, presuming that this is the one you want to import into Gmail. If you want to import an archived account instead, you can use Outlook to open the appropriate *.pst file, such as archive.pst, or backup.pst, or whatever it is named. For me, all I had to do was open my current account, because all of stored emails are in it. [I have backup pst files (Outlook's file format), but I keep everything of interest to me in my current account.]

• As a Precaution:
• You may want to backup your Outlook data before doing the following steps. To do so, just use the File Menu, select Import/Export, and then select Export the data to a file (pst format). A set of dialog boxes will walk you through the process. Be sure to backup all the data by selecting the main folder and then check the box that for including subfolders.

Once you are within the appropriate Outlook file, create a new Outlook account. (You may want to refer to the following Google Answers Page for help: http://goo.gl/t41aS ) Set the Views within Outlook to show Folder View, and then it is simply a matter of copying your Outlook folders up under your Gmail account. You can grok this by examining a snapshot of my Outlook folders below:

Note that my original Outlook email account consists of all of the folders under “Personal Folders” and that my Outlook’s Gmail account is labeled “imap.gmail.com.” To copy items from the “Filed” folder in my Personal Folders to Gmail, I position the mouse on top of the Filed folder, hold down the Control key and drag the folder up under the “imap.gmail.com” folder. When I do so, Windows asks me if I want to Copy or Move the items. In my case, I selected Copy, so that my original Outlook email folders still contain the stored emails.

As soon as I do this, Outlook begins transporting the emails in my Filed folder into Gmail, assigning each of these emails a Label of Filed. For me, the whole process took under 20 minutes (for all folders of interest) … if you have thousands of stored emails, expect it to take longer. (Mine was in the hundreds, but not the thousands.)

That’s all there is to it. Pretty straightforward, eh?

• Merlin Mann talks about dealing with email conversations. Some good tips and insights in this one.
• CrunchGear reviews a backup battery for the iPod Touch. As a recent purchaser of the Touch, this obviously caught my attention, and is likely something fellow Touch users will want to look into. The article does not say whether this can be used with an iPhone, but I see no reason why it couldn’t. If you know otherwise, let us know in the comments.
• Gina Trapani of Lifehacker has just published Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better. You can download a sample chapter and table of contents from her introductory link at Lifehacker. Gina, how about a freebie copy for an old man, huh sweetheart? Note that I have not read this one yet, but I am confident it is a good book … I did get her original Lifehacker book as soon as it was available and learned lots of good stuff from it.
• Matt Cutts has a great article on how to back up Gmail to Linux. I know several of you are Linux users, and you will find a lot of good detail in this article. By the way, next week, I plan to have an article on how to easily import Outlook mail into Gmail. It is a snap.
• Jason Calacanis shares 17 tips on how to save money running a startup. He took a lot of heat from other bloggers on his comment on getting rid of folks that do not work their butts off, and he later clarified that he looks for people who are passionate about the company, which is a slightly different spin (with the same ultimate result). Regardless, there are a lot of good tips in his write-up.
• Apple notes that there have already been more than 100,000 downloads of its iPhone SDK!
• Since we started with a link to Merlin Mann, might as well end with one: he has a short but insightful article on loss aversion (loss aversion means we will go through more effort to avoid losing something than we will to gain something).

Best wishes for the weekend, folks … Enjoy!

“… how about successful blogging from the ground up? From personal experience, and interviews with other successful bloggers. What works, what doesn’t, software, hosts, ads, revenue, traffic, logs, etc.”

I addressed some of his suggestions in my behind the scenes post, but there are several blogging-related tips I did not cover. Since a lot of you are fellow bloggers, I thought I would share some of my “hard-learned” tips with you. I suspect most of you know much more than me about this stuff, so hopefully you will chime in with your advice in the comments. By the way, when I talk herein about actual coding changes you can make, I am speaking only about WordPress … if you use a different blogging platform, some of the principles may apply but the exact coding may not (probably won’t).

I am also trying to write this post so that it has some advice that non-bloggers (that is, anyone) can use.

Note that I do not claim to be a blogging expert, by any means. Just a guy who has learned some stuff and is pleased to be able to share it. For real expertise, please consult blogs like Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger, Sarah Lewis’ Blogging Expertise, and search engine optimization (SEO) sites such as SEOmoz.

Now, to the tips:

Design Tips

The first tip I have is one that may cause some of you to chuckle, because you have seen me learn it the hard way: choose a good, clean site design and stick with it for a long while. Don’t constantly try out new themes (designs) and don’t waste your time trying to tweak a design to death. A long while back I used the same theme that Matt Cutts uses on his very popular site:

The theme is one that won a WordPress design contest a few years back, and, while it is not especially attractive, it is very functional. Matt made a few tweaks to it to give it a larger content area, so he could add in pictures up to 640 pixels in width, but he did not make many other changes to it. And he has stayed with it.

I, on the other hand, would look at my site statistics and see that my traffic is not increasing and that people weren’t spending a lot of time on my site and I would conclude I needed a better design. Wrong. I needed something compelling to pull people to the site and to keep them on it longer. The only way to really do that is with consistently good content.

The key to Matts’ high traffic is that (1) he is a recognized authority on search engine optimization, (2) he writes really well, and (3) he always delivers useful content. I personally also like the fact that he throws in a lot of neat technical tricks that have nothing to do with search technology, such as all of his neat Ubuntu tips, his recent Gmail tips, and so on.

So, what’s in this for non-bloggers? Simply this: don’t let yourself get sidetracked on things that don’t have real payoff value for you. Every project has some facet that can distract you from what most drives the success of a project. Giuliani’s failed bid for the Republican Presidential nomination exemplifies this awfully well: Rudi thought that strategy would be the key to success. Well, as we all know, it turned out that interaction in every state is far more important. He spent his time and effort in a way that distracted him from giving proper attention to people in New Hampshire and South Carolina and so on. There may be many other reasons why he failed, but you get the point.

Back to my design(s): I wish, very much, I had just stayed with the design Matt Cutts uses. That way I would not have spent countless hours working on something that really doesn’t matter that much and I could have added better content to the site.

Content Is King

You already know this. But, do you really know it?

I could sorta paraphrase Warren Buffett and come up with the two rules of successful blogging:

1. Always give people something useful.
2. Don’t forget Rule #1.

I chuckle every time I read the following quote of Richard Feynman in his What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character

I always thought I would be a specially good father because I wouldn’t try to push my kids into any particular direction. I wouldn’t try to turn them into scientists or intellectuals if they didn’t want it. I would be just as happy with them if they decided to be truck drivers or guitar players. In fact, I would even like it better if they went out in the world and did something real instead of being professors like me.

But they always find a way to hit back at you. My boy Carl, for instance. There he is in his second year at MIT, and all he wants to do with his life is to become a goddamn philosopher.

I chuckle because it sounds like something I would have said 10 years ago. I have more respect for philosophers now than I did 10 years ago, although I still think they too often turn simple problems into complex ones. (My own talents and preferences are to turn complex problems into simple ones.) But, as I age, I have to fight a desire to become an “armchair philosopher.” There is an enormous temptation on my part to want to share with you a philosophy on life that I hold or that I have read about.

But, by and large, people don’t care about that sort of thing. We want something we can use. So, I have to keep reminding myself of that and have to work at minimizing my tendency to post on matters that are really not useful to you.

The trap that many bloggers fall into is feeling like we have to write something, because we have to keep content in front of our readers to keep them.

I fell for it 2 times just this week, posting such completely useless articles as one on my opinion on the Microsoft buyout of Yahoo! and one on the Super Bowl. I probably got a little boost in traffic from those two articles, but they are useless. I should never have posted them. The only positive thing I can say about the posts is that I am at least smart enough to know how stupid it was to post them.

For non-bloggers, this principle clearly applies to you, too: be someone who delivers instead of someone who spouts philosophy.

Pay Attention to Your Customers and Adjust as Needed

While this one is obvious, I will give you an example that is not so obvious, and maybe you can benefit from it.

I pay a good bit of attention to my Google Analytics software to see what pages are most viewed along with the average amount of time spent on those pages. A couple of months ago I noticed that my most popular page was one on syncing a Mac, Outlook, iCal, and Pocket PCs. I also noted that people were not spending a lot of time on it, although the article was pretty in-depth. It ranked well in the search engines, and people were being drawn to it, but I had the sense I was not delivering what they were looking for.

So, I took a hard, critical look at the article and saw that it really wasn’t delivering everything it should. It explained what I knew about six months ago, but I had learned a lot since and it really needed an update. And, it needed to be better organized. It had no subheadings, although it was a long article, and I was going to make it even longer by adding in more information, so subheadings would be important.

As a result of me paying attention to this and making some adjustments, that page has had 1,143 views over the past 30 days with an average stay time of 3 minutes. Contrast that with 199 views in October, with an average stay time of 2 minutes.

I have done the same thing for a few other of my more popular pages, and it seems to have had similar payoffs. What makes me feel good about this is that I know customers are more satisfied now than they were before.

Make Key Points Stand Out

It is important to decide what key words you want to target in your blog, and then make them stand out whenever you can.

This is an area where I have not done as good a job as I should. I have written many an article that dealt with the subject of Getting Things Done without bolding that term in the text or using it in the article title. If I want to draw a Getting-Things-Done audience to my site, I have to make that phrase stand out. (And, I have to deliver with useful GTD content, of course.)

So, key words should be bolded within an article and should be placed in the article title, when possible and reasonable. Of course, one could carried away with the bolding, too. But, if you never use it, the search engines are not going to assign any weight to the phrase. The popularity of a phrase means nothing: the weight you assign to it does.

It also really pays to do some keyword research. I have been noticing that my ebook page is just not getting the traffic I would expect. So yesterday I did some keyword research (using this site) on ebooks, and noticed that the phrase “free ebook download” would probably be good for drawing attention to my ebook.

So, yesterday I changed the “post slug” of my ebook page from “my-ebooks” to “free-ebook-download” and did a 301 redirect in my htaccess file (because of all the links that point to the my-ebooks page) and today, just one day after doing the change, I have had a few dozen more hits on that page than normal. I doubt that this is coincidence.

Like I mentioned earlier, this is an area in which I could improve considerably. I am more inclined to just set down and write an article without doing any keyword research or without giving proper attention to bolding keywords within my articles. I am trying to change this, and thought mentioning an example or two might be helpful to fellow bloggers.

Also, there are some coding changes you can make that will also generally help you get more noticed by the search engines, and therefore by potential readers. The first of these is to change your header.php file so that it puts the name of your blog after the title of the page that is being viewed. Most WordPress themes put your blog’s name first and then the title of the page being viewed, so the title of this page would look like


Keener Living | Tips for Fellow Bloggers, And for Non-Bloggers


If your blog, like mine, is not yet well-known, having the name first is going to get less traffic for you. The following would do better:


Tips for Fellow Bloggers, And for Non-Bloggers | Keener Living


If you use a theme like Chris Pearson’s Copyblogger design, you don’t have to worry about this: Chris has done the coding for you. But, if you have to make the code changes yourself, here is the code I use:


    <title><?php if ( is_404() ) : ?><?php _e('Page not found on Keener Living') ?>
    <?php elseif ( is_home() ) : ?><?php bloginfo('name') ?> | <?php bloginfo('description') ?>
    <?php elseif ( is_category() ) : ?><?php echo single_cat_title(); ?>
    <?php elseif ( is_date() ) : ?><?php _e('Blog archives') ?> | <?php bloginfo('name') ?>
    <?php elseif ( is_search() ) : ?><?php _e('Search results') ?> | <?php bloginfo('name') ?>
    <?php else : ?><?php the_title() ?> | <?php bloginfo('name') ?><?php endif ?></title>


Mine is a bit more complicated than most … I think I ripped the idea off of the Blog.txt design (if I remember right), and then probably made a few little changes to it. But the idea is: you want the eye-catching wording to show first.

One final point on making the important stuff stand out: use an H1 header tag for single-post pages. Most WordPress themes use H2 for these headings (code is from a single.php file):


<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
            <h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>


But, it is best to use an H1 in the above code instead of an H2, because it tells the search engines that the title is important. If you leave it as an H2, it gets no more weight than all of the H2′s that are used in your sidebar coding. One qualifier, though: you have to make sure your stylesheet handles this change nicely for you. It could be that the theme designer only has H1 coding set up for the blog title at the top of the page and that it is enormous … that is not what you want for the title of your posts. So, be sure to test this out. If you are pretty good with css, you can fix it yourself. If you need help, there are plenty of folks who can do that sort of thing for you. I probably could myself, but I ain’t cheap. (I can be had, though. )

Again, if you use Chris Pearson’s Copyblogger or Neoclassical designs, you don’t have to worry about this.

As for non-bloggers, there is clearly a message here for you as well: be sure to emphasize the key points you want to make so they don’t get lost in all of the other points. Really obvious stuff, I know, but are you consistent at doing it? Perhaps a reminder about this, from time to time, is useful … there are so many things for us to remember, aren’t there?

Miscellaneous Points

A few other things that come to mind are:

• Make subscribing to your blog easy. When I added a separate page for it, and made a menu item for it, that helped my subscriptions a good bit. I also put a little “subscribe” link at the bottom of each post, which probably helps a bit.
• Don’t fill the sidebar with clutter. It is fine to put relevant material there, but too much seems to turn people off. I think a lot has to do with how well it is organized, though. If it is organized well, you can probably get away with showing more than I do (I am pretty conservative on what I show on the sidebar), but there is still a limit.
• Use pictures for at least some posts, to sort of break the monotony of pure text. I personally get pictures from Dreamstime, but there are plenty resources you could use (including your own photos, perhaps).
• Don’t get carried away with using blockquotes. I used two in this article, which is perhaps a bit much, but their content is very small relative to the total content of the page. The thing to watch for is that you not use them so much that your content begins to not look original. Readers and search engines look for original content. While it is appropriate to use blockquotes on occasion, overuse could become a problem.
• Use a Related-Posts plugin. While the technology for such plugins is not perfect, and will often result in links that are not really related, such plugins generally give your readers links to additional articles that may be of interest to them. The snapshot below shows this being done for one of my recent articles:

(By the way, in this example, the plugin does not do a very good job of giving truly relevant links.)

Wrap-up

Well, that gives you a sampling of what I have learned along the way. I hope it is useful to fellow bloggers, and that it is not useless to non-bloggers … hopefully, there is at least one or two gems in here for everyone.

Note that I pretty well stayed away from some SEO-type suggestions. Frankly, I think some of them are a bit overrated. WordPress handles a lot of the SEO stuff for you. If you really need to do some tweaks, I suggest you pay real close attention to what Matt Cutts says, to what is said on SEOmoz, and to other credible resources. But, when all is said and done, I am still convinced, after learning the hard way, that the most important thing you do for your blog is to feed it with good, useful content on a regular basis.

As I mentioned earlier, I’d very much like to hear from you on what you have learned in this area.

Finally, I am probably going to take a few days off. Why? Because I can. What’s the point of being retired if you don’t take time off, huh? Besides, I want to start forcing myself into a pattern of posting about three times a week. I think that is about the right pace for me, and I have been slipping back into more of a pattern of daily posting, sometimes a couple of times a day. I’d rather pace myself so I do a better job with content.

Gmail

Just in case you haven’t noticed it yet, Gmail now has colored-label capability, as illustrated in the screenshot to the right (from my inbox).

This is really a slick feature, and enhances Gmail’s use as a task management interface. My sense is that more and more people are turning to using Gmail and Google Calendar as their sole means of managing their activities. I do not have hard data to support this, but I hear of more and more people doing it. (For example, see RK’s comment on one of my recent posts.) It is possible I could move toward doing this myself, especially if and when I get an iPhone.

Pocket PC Notes

On a separate organizational topic: Dan emailed me a couple of days ago with a question about how best to sync his 450 Outlook Notes to his Pocket PC. Seems when he tried to do this using the normal sync method that he ran out of memory on his Pocket PC.

In doing his own research on dealing with this, he came across a forum discussion on storing Outlook Notes on a Pocket PC Storage Card. I thought some of you might be interested in this forum article, and I thank Dan for bringing it to our attention.

My initial comment back to Dan was that I thought it would be better to store programs on his storage card, leaving more room for storing Notes (and other data) on his Pocket PC. That’s what I have always tried to do: keep programs on an SD card so there is plenty of room for data in RAM (and/or ROM). There are a few programs you cannot do this with, such as Today Plugins (these need to start when the device starts and before its boot-check coding scans for programs on cards), but you can do it with most programs.

But, it occurred to me that some of you may have yet another alternative, so I (and Dan) look forward to any suggestions you have.

By the way, you may say: that’s a lot of notes. Well, yes it is, but it is not that uncommon for someone who comes from a Palm background, as Dan has and as I have. (Of course I have been using Pocket PCs for years now, but I did start with the Palm framework, but I do still tinker with my Palm TX from time to time.) Palm makes it so easy to organize Notes, because it lets you assign categories to them. Unfortunately, the Windows Mobile platform does not do this, and it just lumps all of your Notes together.

There are ways to overcome this WM deficiency, such as through the purchase of additional programs.

But, if you want to just stick with the basic apps on the Pocket PC, the method I would suggest would be to set up folders in your Pocket PC’s My Documents folder. You could use folder names such as Personal, Business, Projects, Maybe, Someday, etc … basically whatever “categories” would make the most sense for you. The Notes app will still show you a list of them all lumped together, but if you use File Manager to view the folders, you can view them by folder.

If you would like to use this folder method and don’t mind spending a little bit of money, then I would recommend Agenda Fusion, which is a nice PIM and will also let you view the notes by these “categories” (folders).

By the way, while I use the Notes in my Dell x51v and Palm Tx (mostly for reference), I pretty much side with Tim Ferriss that the best way to take notes is with good old pen and paper. I do not have an indexing system as sophisticated as his, nor do I use the variety of notebooks that he does: I pretty much use a college-ruled legal pad or Moleskine notebooks. A lot of my idea generation is done on paper, as is all of my blog brainstorming, my diary (Moleskine), and progress tracking for selected projects. Just wanted emphasize again that I strive to use the tools that work best for me, instead of trying to mold what I do to fit certain systems.

For Fellow CrackBerry Users

The following is a quote of a quote, with my quote coming from a BlackBerry Cool article:

Professor Middleton, who teaches at the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management, found reports of BlackBerry use in the shower, at funerals, at children’s soccer matches, school performances and on vacations. She came across one woman who caught her husband e-mailing under the table during their Valentine’s Day dinner and another whose companion checked e-mail during their first date.

If you see yourself being talked about in this quote, here’s my tip: take a breather. Get a life. Get perspective. No doubt you are thinking: Whoa Keener … you are sure sounding preachy. Well, I just don’t want anyone to make the mistakes I’ve made in my past. When my wife passed away, she knew beyond a doubt that I loved her more than anything in the world and she knew it for many years. But there was a time when she probably thought of herself as an item to be worked into my schedule. Fortunately, I came around, but, sadly, a lot of people still have some learning to do in this area. Probably a lot of us need some tweaking in this area from time to time.

The topic of the BlackBerry Cool article is “Study: BlackBerrys fail to balance work and life.” Whenever I come across an article like this I think back to the fact that Warren Buffett does not even have a cellphone. Yet, he probably gets more done in a day than most of us do in a week.

I love my BlackBerry. And, yes, they are addictive. But, they will not keep me from enjoying the time I spend with my family. Life is short and how we spend our time matters.