Matt
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Reading about Solar
I’ve been reading and doing some math on the feasibility of Solar electricity. Turns out that costs have dropped significantly over the last few years due to the scale of production in China that actually is currently over-supplying the demand, and new manufacturing technology that is making it much cheaper. You can find panels for…
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The Single Most Effective Productivity Tip
What do you believe is the single most important thing that will affect your productivity? Time management? Software tools? Calendars? ToDo Lists? No. The most important thing that will affect your productivity is your expertise. Knowledge is the baseline for almost all work that we do in today’s information economy. We simply cannot produce good…
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Book Reports
For the last couple weeks I have been trying to catch up on my goal for reading 36 books this year. Progress so far has been good and I have gotten through a decent backlog of books that I have wanted to read. With the new morning routine of reading before the day starts I…
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How to Maintain Momentum
The main lesson from a handful of recent books that I have read has been focus on fewer, more important things if you really want to make progress. Less but better. And that the best way to maintain the momentum on the projects you do want to take on is to make small steps and…
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Morning Routine Redux
Last year I had a morning routing going for a while but after a while I fell back into my old habits of spending the early hours of the day scanning Facebook in bed instead of what I was actually intending to do. Last week I got a tip to never leave your phone in…
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Fill your mind with good things
As the father of a 18 month old, it’s been fascinating to try and understand how her little mind works. Currently she is getting quite good at classification: car, cheese, door, dog. Everything she sees is echoed back. At this early stage in development it’s easy to see that what you say and do have…
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Personal Key Performance Indicator Dashboard
There are many things that make corporations work well (in well run businesses) that can be applied to a personal level. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are something that I’ve been fascinated by for quite a few years now. Building dashboards full of statistics has been a part of every one of my personal projects. The…
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Re-invigorating Old Products
Sometimes you need to go back and look at the things you’ve done in the past to see if anything is due for an update or refresh. Leaving old products to go stale is a sure way to let your customers know that you don’t care and don’t provide good customer service. With that in…
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New Bike and Fractured Rib
This weekend I picked up a balance bike for Ada to start playing with. These Strider bikes seem like a good way to get a child used to biking and gaining balance skills. It sort of takes the place of ever needing to go with a tricycle or a bike with training wheels. Once they…
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Finishing
There are plenty of hurdles that you have to make in order to be successful. Perhaps the most critical is taking something all the way to completion. When you are not working with a team this is a deceptively difficult thing to do. It takes determination, momentum and accountability to start a project and see…
