Last week, Speaking Freely had a popular post on what do with a PC when you have no internet connection. Tips included cleaning out your bookmarks, deleting old programs, and physically opening your computer to clean the dust out.
"Well," I thought, "I have a good half hour twice a day with no net connection while I'm on the train. I could use this." Some of the tips, sure, like cleaning the bookmarks. But most of those maintenance programs take longer than 20 minutes or so to run, and hibernating your computer in the middle tends to be a bad thing :). So I've got my own list of shorter tasks you can do when you're only briefly offline:
1) Clean up disk space. This is different from going in to Add/Remove programs, I'm talking about getting rid of all those old partial downloads that never completed, archive files that you've long since installed, and those various movies that you have no idea how they got on your hard drive. In Windows, go to Start, Search, All Files and Folders, then under What Size Is It, choose "Large" and hit Search. Results will start coming up immediately. Sort by size descending and take a trip down memory lane while deleting all the big ones. You'll be reclaiming gigs of space in no time.
2) Better iTunes playlists. I don't know about you, but I'm lousy with my playlists. I have one for "Work Music", for example, but more than half of it I will skip past if I'm not in the mood. Sitting on the train is a great opportunity to dig into setting up some smarter playlists to track things like 'Only include music that I haven't skipped 10 times' or 'Keep all my newest podcasts together and then sort by date'.
3) Write an eBook. Face it, your blog isn't making you any money and it isn't likely to anytime soon. But if you can find a niche where you have enough info to bang out more than a few pages, then there are lots and lots (and lots!) of opportunities to get into selling what are called "information products." Naturally this isn't the sort of thing you can do in one half hour sitting, but it's a project you can work on if you're regularly without your net connection, as I am. Heck, you could work on a novel if that's your thing.
4) Write some code. I suppose this only applies to coders, but I'm betting that a large portion of the audience reading blogs these days and hacking their laptop on the train are capable of writing code. Set yourself up a development environment - IDE, database, language of choice - and have a pet project to work on. Very few programmers who do it for a living really get to say that they love the particular project that they're paid to work on. Getting some time every day to work on a project that really does scratch a personal itch for you tends to recharge your batteries for when it comes to banging out code for the day job. (If you don't have a new project, then dig out an old one and make it better. Write some unit tests, write some documentation, improve the API. There's always code to write.)
5) Brainstorm. Have some sort of wiki or other "scratch pad" on your machine where you can just write stuff. It could be your todo list for the day, a budget for next month, or a business plan for your hypothetical dotcom. It could be ideas to present to your boss for how to enhance the product. In other words spend the time using your brain, and use your laptop as a way to record it. If you can get into the rhythm of it you end up in a stream of consciousness loop where the ideas get documented literally as fast as you can type them. Much, much better than staring out the window, getting an idea and simply telling yourself, "I have to remember to email that to the boss when I get home."
BONUS!
6) Catch up on your RSS feeds. I use a client side reader (Newsgator) for all my RSS needs. I don't like the server-side ones like Bloglines and Google Reader for exactly this reason, I wouldn't have access. Before I leave for work in the morning, and again before I leave the office, I make sure to hit the "Get new news items" button and then take off for the train. Depending on how far behind I am I'll have several hundred posts to scan through. Without a net connection it's not like I can link back to the story and comment on it, but I can certainly flag it for later. I don't get images or other embedded objects (like video) either, but luckily that very rarely makes the post unreadable. Sobasically when I do get back to my net connection I've narrowed down my few hundred posts to just a handful that I want to explore further (or comment on, or link back to).
0 comments:
Post a Comment