Little did I know that I was trying to make Evernote an Everynote, which no software will ever be. I think Eddie says it best here.

Don’t approach Evernote with an all or nothing attitude. Instead, 1) look for specific ways that Evernote can make your life easier, 2) use it for those things, and 3) STOP.

If you haven’t tried Evernote, give it a try. It’s free. I use it to mainly deal with pieces of paper that are shoved to me (think pamphlets and business cards) and I don’t know how to politely refuse. Now I just take a picture of it and dump it into Evernote.

I also “force” other people to use Evernote, unconsciously. When I need a certain document from Jane say, I just ask her to send to myemail+note@gmail.com. This way, my gmail filter system will grab this email and auto-forward it to Evernote and delete it from my email account. It’s like magic.

p/s: “Enough” is one of the very few podcasts I listen to regularly. Subscribe to them if you haven’t already.

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When paying bills moved online, I thought it was going to be easier. It wasn’t. I have to remember the website to go to. I have to remember my username and password, which I seldom use. I have to dish out my credit card details and painfully key in each number and double check that I have keyed in the correct numbers.

I’m glad I have moved on.

I paid for a software called 1password which I got it as part of a bundle of a host of other softwares, thanks to MacUpdatePromo. Using 1password has been a real treat. I stored my login and credit card details, and poof! I can now pay my bill under 2 minutes. It’s like magic, and you know how much I like magic.

Thanks to MacPowerUsers for introducing this fantastic software. I gladly paid it as it took away a lot of my pain.

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Twenty years from now, you will be disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones that you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Check out the wallpaper below, or choose one of the many from Smashing Magazine.

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Unfortunately, Apple lawyers came down on them so fast that it’s not for sale anymore. However, you are able to buy the following cassette tape though. If you don’t know what a cassette tape is, you are really young…

My favourite part is the case, which can do this.

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You can google around to find out what is RSS, but sometimes, a picture does say it better. That might explain why I have a hard time convincing people about it.

For reading, I have been using Google Reader to feed me things that I choose to read, rather than things other people choose for me. I could go to Google Reader directly to get my feeds, but I rely on Reeder now. I fire up Reeder before breakfast, and it sits beside me while I have my breakfast. I don’t do newspapers anymore. This is my “newspapers”.

For podcasts, I have been subscribing through iTunes to get it fed to me. Instead of the tango between my MacBook and my iPhone, I have recently removed the MacBook from the feeding equation and rely on a nifty little tool called Instacast on my iPhone. Now, it feeds directly to my iPhone.

I do hope you give RSS a try. It saves you from going to the content, and let the content come to you. I just need to prepare my breakfast fast enough before all the news come gushing into my reader. If I’m lucky, I might even get a free serving of food and news, all on the same table.

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As much as I like wordpress, things do go wrong. In fact, I don’t even know what the error was because I did not see one. I couldn’t log into my wordpress admin! I had to manually and randomly delete some plugins to allow me to just log in. And then, staring right in my face, was a blank screen, in wordpress dashboard… This will rank quite high on my horror list of managing a website. I truly needed a dummy’s guide…

I am truly grateful to be able to call upon my support structure. This time, moongster came to the rescue. I had to go into the sql database to deactivate the active plugins by running sql queries… If that all sounds incomprehensible… it is, to me anyway. He had to walk me through what they are. If you do find you run into this blank page (a white screen death!), you might want to try the following.

Step 1: Go to the cpanel of your host

A lot of host should have this. You’ll need to login to your own host and find the cpanel. It’s an administration access to a lot of your website’s functionality. I’ve only been in once or twice a year, normally when something bad happens e.g. hacked, bandwidth problems… This is another occasion that I needed to login. Hope you kept your login details safe from the time you signed up with your host!

Step 2: Look for phpmyadmin or mysqldatabase

The idea here is to dive into the database. You see, all the information about anything on wordpress is collected in this vast information vault known as the database. And within this database, there are separate sub-database to identify what type of database they are. There is a sub-database on your posts, a sub-database on your comments, a sub-database on your plugins, a sub-database on what you tell the plugins to do…

Step 3: Look for that sub-database

It is this sub-database, the sub-database that tells the plugins whether to switch them on or not, that you’re looking for. Here is the sql query (a command to ask this phpmyadmin to do its thing) that you require. It will give you a list of all the active plugins, although in an incomprehensible format.

SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘active_plugins’;

Step 4: Make a backup of it, just in case

Go to the edit function (mine is shown as a pencil). You will then see a long string of characters. Copy the text somewhere. Save it, just in case.

Step 5: Deactivate all the plugins

Now that you have backed-up the command, you can replace the whole command in Step 3 with the following.

‘a:0:{}’

This will tell this sub-database to switch off all the active plugins. Your plugins will still be intact. They are just being deactivated.

Step 6: Go back to your wordpress dashboard

You should be able to access your wordpress dashboard now and do your thing. Switch on the plugin one by one. Test your website after every plugin that you switch on. Find out which one is the culprit.

While you’re at it, make a backup of your posts. You might also want to consider upgrading to WordPress 3.0 now. That is what I did. Might as well… It’s working fine now.

Step 7: Congratulate yourself!

Have a break. Pat yourself on the back. You have just done an amazing thing with very little technical knowledge. I was quite impressed with myself, but wouldn’t have gone through this not without some help.

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I first come across this concept from David Allen of Getting Things Done fame. It is on dealing with emails and why having only one touch is so important. I didn’t understand it then, but I just understood it when I came out of the shower today. I have to say, it is surprising how many of my “aha” moments came from showering. Must be the water…

It’s the football season. Having just watched Spain lift the World Cup, the commentators talked about how Spain was so effective in their one touch (or first touch). I remember watching them. Their passing was very quick. Some of the time, all it took is a touch. I believe this is football skills at its highest. Not only you must receive the ball. You must diffuse the force from the ball, and redirect it to another player or space. This creates a kind of speed that is very rare in quality. It is not just speed, but efficiency coupled with accuracy. I find it quite hard to describe this quality, but I am sure you know it when you see it.

It is also like how my teacher does his Tai Chi push hands. It is definitely one touch. Once he touch, he knows where you are going, where is your imbalance point, how should he diffuse your force, and how should he redirect your force back to you. All from a single touch.

So what about the one touch emails I have just understood?

It’s again about deciding what to do with that email with just one touch. From the very first moment you saw that email, you must decide what to do with it at that moment itself. The direction must change in order for it to qualify as a one touch email. It must change to something different, something that moves towards the path to resolving that email. This is one touch email.

Let’s use an example. An email lands in your inbox. You look at it. You read it. You don’t have an answer. You don’t know what to do with it. You leave it there and look for some more interesting email. A few minutes later, (or hours) after you have gone through all the emails, you are left with no unread emails in your inbox. But those emails you have read are still there. You decide maybe you should now go through these emails more thoroughly and see if you can do something about them. So you open the email a second time. Looked at it, and can’t decide if you want to go out to dinner with a bunch of friends. You leave it in your inbox for the second time round. And go to the next “read” email. The cycle continues…

Now you see how one touch is so efficient. You have to know what to do with that email at the point you first see that email. You see, you read, you conquer i.e. you decide what is the next action for it. Most of the time, it’s probably delete. Otherwise, you just file it in your filing system. The remaining ones you can either decide what to do with it to move it along, or delegate it to someone else. Deciding what to with it might be simply calling Susan to find out who’s going to that party. You don’t have to answer Yes or No for now. As long as you know why is it you don’t want to attend the party. Maybe there’s someone you don’t like there, someone whom you just absolutely hate. So you think you better find out if this person is going. That is your very next action. Call Susan to find out. Or email Susan. This is the power of one touch. You have moved it closer to the resolution of that email.

Striving for the one touch philosophy is hard. I have been trying in my push hands, and now I will extend this quality to emails. Even though it’s hard, I like the quality of progress it gives. It makes competition irrelevant.

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I remember a time when I desperately wanted to be labelled “cool”. It is the only label that gets you into places. It is the only label that you want to be seen wearing, or holding. It gives you an all access pass to all the cool places with all the cool people. Slowly, I began to realise that being cool has such a wide meaning, it might as well have no meaning at all…

This realisation brought me to understand that as we grow up, labels do not grow. In fact, they shrink. Labels are a shortcut for us to put a definition on someone or something. You may be an artist, a writer, a teacher, a student, a philosopher, a mother, a Christian, a Jew, a spoilt brat, a conformer, a Tai Chi master… You might be seeking a journey within, a spiritual journey, enlightenment, career change, excitement, adventure, torture… All these are just labels.

As I grow older, I seem to be focusing on actions and doing away with labels. A person can easily be pigeonholed into the rich and famous, but the same person still has to eat and shit like the rest of us. He still faces the same family and relationship problems. He also has money issues even though he’s rich. In short, any label that we put on a person is always a sub-set of who he is. Most of the time, it’s a very small sub-set.

When you journey within yourselves, learn to see the truth from the labels. Labels help to filter part of the truth about yourself, but it cannot define the whole truth.

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The concept is actually quite simple. You basically reduce your “stuff” by half. For example, you have 100 apps on your Mac. Reduce that by 50. That’s it. The next time you do it, assuming you didn’t add anymore apps, you reduce the 50 to 25. And so on.

It won’t get to zero unfortunately, as you will still be adding stuff in. But once in a while, try this method. Take what you have, half it. Dump the half. So here are the steps for you:

1. Pick a time

Block off some time for this. There might be a lot of stuff, or you might have a lot of emotional ties to your stuff. Pick a day to do this. Block off at least 1 hour. Tell everyone you’re doing this. No distractions.

2. Create a list of items

Start by creating a list of items that you think will benefit from this exercise. Be honest now. For me, my list is my bookmarks, my RSS subscriptions, my clothes, my apps on my MacBook, the apps on iphone, the audiobooks on itunes, the podcasts on itunes, the store room. I might add more in time to come. One thing at a time.

3. Choose an item and reduce by half

You don’t have to do all items at once. Choose an item, e.g. the number of subcriptions. Cut that by half. The number of channels you watch, cut that by half. Or something simpler (?), the number of hours spent on the internet, cut that by half. I just did this for the number of things I read online through RSS. New stuff keeps coming in. I have a category I call “on probation”. Things that I haven’t read for a while, I put it in this folder. I use the block off time to dump half of those on probation.

4. Repeat for that item.

Repeat the same exercise for the same item after a couple of days, weeks, months, even years, depending on how frequent you feel comfortable with. You can set up a schedule to do this halving every 3 months, say.

5. Repeat for other items.

You can also use the steps to reduce other items on your list in 2.

I find that clearing the environment is always good for clearing the mind. It’s like clearing a path into the mind. It makes the journey within easier, or rather, less distracted. I do hope you try it, and let me know how your exercise went.

An alternative to this method will be to start from ground zero, like how TJ Luoma did to his iphone apps. Start with a blank page, and start adding apps that you actually use. Dump all the others.

p/s: this post is partially inspired by the Annual 50%. You can actually sell some of the things that you plan to dump!

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