Jul
31
Personal Resource Planning
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
My current job is to implement an ERP system for a small manufacturing company. It’s about as exciting as it sounds. But there are moments of enlightenment. The other day, amidst meetings and arguments about which epoxy types will default on a lab screen, I had an epiphany.
I’m all about data. I keep lists of things to do, things I’ve done. I record when I work out, what I read, what movies I watch. I love Quicken. I’ve written about some other people who take this type of life tracking to an extreme, mostly as a reminder to myself that I am not alone. There is a certain type of person who keeps track of things–not because they necessarily like to, but just because it is what they do.
ERP systems just track data. You can use all the executive management ROI-cost-savings-at-the-end-of-the-day-net-net bullshit you want to justify these systems, but all they do is connect data. So I thought, why should the boring business of work have all the fun? Why don’t we have Personal Resource Planning software? Call it PRP.
Our lives a full off seemingly unrelated data points. We have to keep track of money and hobbies and sick kids and vacations we’ll never take and movies we’ll forget to see. But these things are all related. The commonality is you.
Consider money. People like myself can use Quicken to track cash flow. We see purchases, salaries, savings, and such. If one is so inclined, one can pull reports based on categories to see how you piss away your money in nicely formatted pie charts. If one is even more inclined, one can pull out tax deductible expenses, setting oneself up for a proper IRS audit.
I’m willing to bet that most people who use Quicken do so only as an electronic check book. And why not. Sure, you can capture automobile expenses, but what does this do other than create a colorful chart?
But what if you could tie those mechanic’s payments to a maintenance history of my car? A personal ERP system could add a whole new dimension to our data. I could see exactly how much my commute was costing each day. Thinking about buying a more fuel-efficient car? You could immediately see if the purchase would pay off.
Another example. Say you just bought a thirty year old house and have identified several projects you’d like to complete over the next five years. You could use such a tool to track these projects in close synchronization with your personal finances. You can see how much that new refrigerator cuts off your electric bill. Further, you can track the serial number and warranty expiration for said refrigerator in the same system. Total cost of ownership, payback periods, insurance data: it’s all there.
More: track birthdays to gifts given to your family tree.
Granted, such a system would be reserved for true data hounds or those on the slightly obsessive side of the spectrum. Think how easily you could pull out a Feltron Annual Report (sans design, of course). But this could be a financially viable product if you could appeal to more casual users. Start with financial management and build into popular modules like projects, home inventory, genealogy. Host it remotely and give a slick web interface.
There you go, a free idea. I’m hesitant to post this because I feel I should quit my job and immediately begin work on this.
The thing is, I’m only kind of kidding.
Jul
9
Productivity Hobbyist
Filed Under Organization | Leave a Comment
My name is Matt and I am a productivity hobbyist.
Just being able to write this sentence is a relief, a respite from the lifehacker clawing at my back. Like setting down a heavy backpack after a hike. A backpack full of binder clips.
Once upon a time, this was all very exciting. I had PDAs and lists and notebooks for capturing and tweaking my own personal productivity plan. It was fun. And it kept me from worrying about the idea that I really had nothing to do. But it was all very shameful, too. Addictions usually are, aren’t they? When I would find a new type of Moleskine notebook, I would ask myself, “How can I change my system to incorporate this notebook?”
I knew I should ask myself “Do I need this notebook? Will it help me do anything better than I am right now? Will it make my life easier?” But my internal monologue was usually drowned out by the clang of a cash register. So I carried on, pretending to be searching for my ultimate organizational solution, leaving behind a vapor trail of abandoned web 2.0 application logins and half-filled notebooks.
Until today, that is. At 11:57am. When I read this Lifehacker post by Clay Collins about Productivity Hobbyists.
It turns out that all my preoccupation with productivity was just, well, preoccupation. It never occurred to me that this could just be a hobby. In retrospect, it makes sense. I’m into productivity like my dad is into old cars. I spend time online reading about productivity tools and techniques. My dad reads about cars.
If only the distinction isn’t so clear for me. My dad knows cars are a hobby, but productivity is tangentially related to my work, so the distinction is not so clear. Productivity is dangerous like this because it applies equally to anyone in any job. Productivity hides itself as useful work.
Clay Collins warns of the dangers of productivity:
A lot of people consume hobbyist productivity materials for the same reasons that they buy an expensive personal digital assistant when a good ol’ paper planner would’ve done a better job. That is, they do these things because they elicit the often illusory feelings of being productive.
You can get mired in Bible verses without being a Christian, you can watch The Biggest Loser while putting on weight, and you can consume loads of information without gaining knowledge. It’s also possible to practice the productivity hobby without developing the productivity habit. The former isn’t bad, but it’s important to remain cognizant of the hobby versus habit distinction.
I’ll go one further. Mine was never a problem of being productive. I’ve always been able to get things done (no pun intended), probably because I did most of my productivity fooling outside of work and on my own projects. My side-effect wasn’t an illusion of productivity, but the illusion of having too much to do.
Lists begat lists. What would start out as a task to file my taxes would end up as a multi-step project to scan all financial documents, file paper copies under a scalable taxonomy, and store multiple digital copies for redundancy (including one copy on an encrypted thumbdrive for catastrophic environmental or political emergencies).
These are all first world problems. On some level, I realized these little projects were just contrivances. Other people knew nothing about any of this stuff and they did just fine. And not just theoretical people. Real people. People in the first world. People I knew personally. Even people who live in my house. I didn’t know how they all got along exactly, but I did know it was possible.
But if productivity is truly just a hobby, simply recognizing it as such should remove its power. I want to say I realized it was a hobby, but I can’t be sure. The feeling is much like reading a business strategy book where a highly paid CEO boils down his personal success to ridiculously commonsense strategies like “learn to listen”. Now, at least, I see productivity as a hobby. I can quit any time I want.
But first, Evernote just came out of beta and I’d really like to see if I could synchronize my Amazon wish list with my phone….
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