I might just be in love with the Remember the Milk plug-in for Google Calendar. This does what I need in a simple way, since before I was manually entering individual to-do items into my “all day” section on Google Calendar, and then typing “DONE:” before the item when it was done. This was pretty clunky, and I like my new system much better.
Today, in between researching the legal and tax issues that go along with fiscal sponsorship (long story), I switched productivity software. I was using Next Action, I am now using Remember the Milk.
A lot of people will tell you not to do this, since it’s just a fancy way of wasting time. But it was a long time coming, and here’s my reasoning. Next Action, while being very small and convenient on one computer, isn’t at all mobile, since it runs purely off Google Gears based on your own computer. That worked for a long time for me, but lately I’ve needed something that will follow me around, since I’m having to accomplish more in more places. Clearly, a piece of paper is the simplest of all, but if I have to do the same thing at the same time each week, then a computer will do the boring work of writing it down for me.
I’m excited about Remember the Milk because while it is web based, it also runs off Google Gears for off-line access. It also has a variety of reminder systems, including SMS, which would be incredibly useful for me. I think it will be robust enough to do what I want but not onerous to set up. So there’s some productive productivity.
P.S. I did do my research before messing with productivity software, so in the end the most important thing for today did get done!
Last year about this time, I was in the midst of finishing school, trying to find a job, and planning a wedding (all after having lost a lot of time and energy with a ridiculous flu/bronchitis/pneumonia whatever thing). This year, I am thrilled to be able to plan a garden and go about in an orderly way, rather than only getting what fell in my way through herb sales and several quick trips to Home Depot.
We joined a Community Supported Agriculture program this year, so most of our vegetables will be coming from Tempel Farms. My understanding of CSAs is that they are great, but that you have to be prepared for massive quantities of root vegetables. They are building a new farm this year, so I’m curious to see how that goes, and I’m also hoping to make a trip up to the farm sometime to take a tour and do some work.
In addition to the veggies we are getting from the CSA, Mike and I are also hoping to grow a variety of plants here, with sun/heat loving plants on the south facing back porch, and shade/cool loving plants on the north facing and well covered front porch. The most ambitious project we have planned is building an EarthTainer, which is a self contained planter and watering system that you build out of a Rubbermaid storage container. Lifehacker linked to it the other day and apparently that temporarily shut the site down, but it looks like it’s back up. There are 19 pages of instructions, but I get the feeling that once you build one, the rest are much easier.
Given the (mostly melted) snow and cold temps for this week, the only thing I’ll even try is to plant my mesclun mix seeds. I don’t have space for much else inside, and those should be fine even though it won’t likely be above 50 this week. It’s true what they say about April.