I am Sheamus - Very Personal Development

Hi. I see you're new here. That's cool. To find out what this site is about, please read this page. You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. It's free, you won't receive any spam from me (like, ever), but more importantly: you'll never miss a single word. Thanks for visiting!

Seven things has kind of become a big deal in how I’m trying to get my life back on the right track. So, in light of that, I present to you, seven things I’ve learned about this week - that everybody else already seemed to know.

It’s a bit worrying - some of this stuff has been around for years.

Or maybe it isn’t just me. Drop me a comment if any of this stuff is new to you, too.

43 Folders

This one is a bit of a cheat - I had heard of the 43 Folders system. I’d actually visited David Allen’s site and have Getting Things Done on my Amazon wishlist. I’d even briefly looked at the 43 Folders web site.

What I hadn’t done was read about what it was in any real detail.

My eyes have been opened.

The 43 Folder system, also know as a tickler file, is a system to organise data in such a way that future tasks are recorded, reviewed and filed on a regular basis, thus providing a way to send a reminder to oneself in the future. Hence, ‘tickling’ one’s memory.

The file is broken down into 43 separate folders = one for each month of the year, and one for each of the maximum thirty-one days in any given month.12+31 = 43.

Each day you check the folder that matches that day’s date, take all the items out of the folder and put the empty empty sleeve into the next month. You then take care of the items that you just pulled out for that day.

I have a real problem with clutter. I’ll be writing a big piece about this soon, but the 43 Folders system appears to be absolutely what I need to take care of my paper clutter (particularly bills that need to be paid a month or so in the future), but it’s also a great way to store concert or rail tickets, reminders for articles that need to be written for a certain deadline, birthdays and things like Father’s Day, when a favourite TV show is returning, and pretty much anything else that one is prone to forgetting.

Some people favour an index card version of the tickler file, with handwritten (or typed) notes one each card. For me, the option to file bills and other tangible items is far more appealing, simply because it will eliminate paper clutter and also stop me forgetting to do the really important stuff.

Will it replace the to-do list on my N95? No. One, because the tickler file will always be at home, so is not accessible in my house. And two, there are some things - mostly to do with this blog and stuff like that - that is not necessarily time specific (for example: rough ideas for an article) but needs to be logged so that I don’t forget about it altogether.

Learn More: How To Make And Use A Tickler File System

The Hipster PDA

The Hipster PDA is a paper-based personal organiser that was made popular by 43 Folders website owner Merlin Mann.

Here’s how to make one.

1. Get lots of 3×5 inch index file cards.
2. Clip them together with a big old binder clip.
3. Enjoy

That’s it. The Hipster PDA (PDA, incidentally, is said to stand for ‘Parietal Disgorgement Aid’) originally began as a bit of a joke (mostly regarding consumer culture and technological fetishism) but has become quite popular amongst enthusiasts of David Allen’s Getting Things Done and other folk who favour a return to a less complicated world.

It does have a couple of attractive features that fans say make it a better choice than an electronic PDA:

1. It doesn’t need batteries.
2. It’s unlikely to be stolen.

Likewise, there are a couple of serious cons, too:

1. It’s not very easy to back up, because
2. It doesn’t integrate very well with your PC or Mac.

Serious Hipster users have all manner of tips and tricks to ‘pimp out’ their PDAs, including printable templates

Minimalists might favour the Hipster Nano PDA, which uses a series of blank-backed business cards (which most executives often have in a surplus), finished off with one last card with a calendar on the reverse.

Can I see myself using either of these items? I’m not sure. I might try it for fun. I can definitely see the appeal of the system. Fans suggest that tearing up a card when everything on there is taken care of is extremely satisfying - far more so than deleting the same item on a ‘real’ PDA.

Learn More: Organsing Your Hipster PDA

The Moleskine

The Moleskine is a type of notebook - again, in the old-school sense (i.e., not a laptop) - that was fashioned after the journals that British travel writer Bruce Chatwin used.

Despite the name, the Moleskine is not bound in actual moleskin, but in oilcloth-covered cardboard. Again, enthusiasts - and they come in their numbers - share tips and tricks about improving the basic model, which from what I can gather is little more than a nicely-made writing pad.

As above, the Moleskine has found an eager audience amongst David Allen fans but I’m not entirely sure what makes it significantly different from the Filofax movement in the 1980s. Okay - the enthusiasts are quite a different breed (they’re not really yuppies) - but the thing itself doesn’t seem all that much of a departure.

I guess maybe I’d have to actually hold one in my hands to really get it. Of course, one problem for me in all of these things is, like a lot of men (why is that?), I have such lousy handwriting. That’s something I definitely want to work on this year.

Learn More: Moleskine Hacks

Feedburner’s Feedflare Feature

Yes, I know this has been around forever. And I know this because I’ve looked at it forever, clicked on it a few times, then figured out it wasn’t of much use and gone elsewhere. This week, I’ve found out it’s actually a really nice feature.

Feedburner has its faults. It bugs the hell out of me that my (admittedly fairly slight) subscriber count seems to reset to zero at random times of the day (usually in the early morning) and that it can be really fussy about things you submit to your blog (earlier this week it went absolutely mental for 24 hours because I had an ampersand in the title of one of my posts), but as a resource it’s chock-full of options and bells and whistles. So much so, in fact, that it’s quite easy to get overwhelmed and/or miss things that might be of some value.

I subscribe to quite a few blogs in my Google Reader, and, while browsing that, I’d noticed that a few of them - mostly the well-established ones - had one or two things on the bottom of each of their submissions that I, and most of the other blogs, did not.

Specifically, this:

Whereas my submissions had nothing. Like most bloggers I use a social bookmarking plugin on my site, but that doesn’t always transfer well to the RSS feed (sometimes, not at all).

I figured it had to be a feature that Feedburner offered, and eventually traced it back to the Feedflare option.

Feedflare is great. As the blurb says:

Give your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish by including as many or few of the services listed below. FeedFlare^TM places a simple footer at the bottom of each content item, helping you to distribute, inform and create a community around your content.

You choose the features you want to appear at the bottom of each of your RSS posts - Digg, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us, Mixx, Facebook, Email Author etc - click submit, and that’s it.

Better, you can also use these same features on the bottom of all posts on your site, too. Feedburner generates a snippet of Javascript for your blog. Insert that in the appropriate place (on K2, I eventually figured out it needed to go into the loop file) and away you go. (Scroll down to the bottom of this page for an example of how this works.)

If you use Feedburner - and if you don’t, then do - I highly recommend utilising the Feedflare feature, and definitely with your RSS feed output.

Learn More: Feedflare

Authority Blogger

Authority Blogger is a blog, forum and newsletter provider that is owned and ran by Chris Garrett.

Garrett, a well-known professional blogger and marketing consultant, has written for many leading blogs and is also the co-author (with Darren Rowse) of the Problogger book.

I’d known about Garrett for a while (I’m subscribed to his blog) but kind of stumbled into Authority Blogger backwards through a post he made on Twitter where he mentioned the creation of a ‘blog pack’. (See below).

Authority Blogger’s best feature is its forum. I haven’t really got stuck in yet but I absolutely recommend it for any new or intermediate-level bloggers. There’s tonnes of information on there and the place has a great community feel about it.

Read More: The Authority Blogger Forum

Blog Packs

As said, thanks to Chris Garrett and Authority Blogger, I learnt about ‘blog packs’.

Based on what I think was an original idea by Michael Martine at Remarkablogger (and borrowing from his text), a blog pack is a group of bloggers who agree to help each other:

• Get established
• Build personal networks
• Increase traffic
• Increase RSS subscribers
• Get organic backlinks

Garrett took this principle a step further on the Authority Blogger forum and has kick-started a process where all members there are invited to add their blog URL and RSS feed to an ongoing list, and then subscribe to everybody else’s blog URL and RSS feed that is already on there.

Garrett also suggests that each person should then

Randomly stumble, favorite and/or comment on a recent post from as many articles THAT WE ACTUALLY LIKE in the pack as we can manage.

It’s early days yet but joining the pack has been quite beneficial for me. I’ve picked up a lot of new followers on Twitter (and I’ve also followed them - that’s how it works) and a few extra readers on this blog (and signed up to as many as I can myself).

It comes highly recommended. It’ll take a bit of work at first but you’ll discover a lot of new blogs and it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll meet some good people.

Learn More: Blog Packs

Blog Tagging

Possibly inspired by the above, Amy Lillard, an independent writer who runs the Quiet Rebel Writer blog, discusses the concept of ‘blog tagging’ in her excellent post, “8 Random Things And (Un)Success Rant“.

Amy submitted eight random things about herself - that she’s a lovely drunk, is maintain an affair with her bed, grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and more - and then ‘tagged’ eight random bloggers from around the blogosphere, and invited them to do the same.

Here are the rules:

1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
3. At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment and tell them they’ve been tagged, and to read your blog.

Learn More: Blog Tagging

One of those bloggers happened to be me. No, I don’t have any idea why, either.

Still, it was, naturally, much appreciated. So here I am returning the favour. I’ve cheated a bit with this post, but I’d been planning to write an article like the above all week and it kind of just works.

So, and without further ado, please find below a list of eight blogs, and bloggers, I heartily recommend you check out:

• Hunter Nuttall @ HunterNutall.com
• Cassie @ BlondeByNature.com
• Bob Samii @ CultureSlurp.com
• Garth @ ClearAndFizzy.com
• Rob @ 2Dolphins.com
• Ken @ SEOpsCentre.com
• Stephen Mills @ Stephen-Mills.com
• James Munday @ JamesMunday.net