67th Tuesday weigh-in

221.0 lb

Down 3 lbs. Worked out the whole week and was careful my food. A very good week for me.

66th Tuesday weigh-in

224.0 lb

Up 1.0 and I blame the deep dish pizza at Gino's East in downtown Chicago. At least I exercised at the hotel gym while I was on the road. By the way, traveling while sick really sucks. The best food I ate in the windy city was the deep dish pizza at Gino's followed by fantastic burger at Rock Bottom. I really hated the ribs at Weber Grill or whatever that place was called... I like moist sweet ribs but these were much too dry, spicy and tough, that didn't prevent me from eating them all anyway for some reason...

FourGablesGuy's Best Practice tip #1478: Don't use email clients to store your knowledge

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

If you were to lose all your email messages today, how high of a disaster would that be for you:

• as an employee or
  
• personally?
  

Scale where 1 is "no big deal" and 10 being "I am ruined, RUINED!!!"

If I am tempted to save an email after I have read it, I stop and think:
"Why do I want to save this? "
"Oh, it is because I will/might need this info again later."
"Well, if that is the case, it should then be put in a secure place or made into a blog post, forum post, document, etc.. on a knowledge site."

I don't always put important learned information in a blog post or in a secure archive, and sometimes I am searching my email for something that I didn't put in a place I could easily find later... However, I think the more consistently I avoid storing knowledge in my email box (either in folders, sent items, trash, etc..) the better off I will be. It takes some time up front to move knowledge to the place it belongs but it takes even more time to scour your email folders for the one bit of info out of your email-haystack when you need later. If I do have to search and find information in my email, then I always move that data into a better place, because the fact I needed the information twice indicates I will need it yet again.

In my opinion we should treat email as an ephemeral messaging tool, not as a personal knowledge compendium. So until Google Wave gets broad adoption, email is like a sticky note on your desk, neither should be used to preserve important knowledge.

Addendum: Email is a bad choice, but some do survive using it as a knowledge base tool. However, the absolute worst place to maintain important knowledge would be your IM chat history. IM chat toools are great and I use them to ask and answer questions, but I kick myself when I am looking through old chat history for a nugget of information to reuse that I neglected to preserve better. I also am frustrated when managers/coworkers repeatedly ask me questions in chat that I have answered weeks or months previously. I am trying to establish the habit to put the answers I give/receive in IM chat on a wiki or (maybe an email..) or somewhere more permanent so that I can refer back to the more stable place later. IM chat is a double-edged sword, it is fast and convenient in the short term, but you can be hurt long term by failing to capture knowledge from your chat sessions.

Awesome Personal Finance Tool

I have been using an online personal finance software program for about 5 years now and love it. The tool is called Mvelopes and was started by a company in Draper, UT (Finicity). The CEO is Steven Smith last time I checked. The biggest reason I have continued to use Mvelopes is because I am lazy. I don't ever want to manually enter in receipts. I don't want to keep a log book of checks I write either. Mvelopes takes away 99% of the effort required to keep track of your family spending because the software crawls your online banks, credit cards, mortgages, 401Ks, auto loans, student loans, etc.. and digests the transactions from them presenting all of them in a consolidated simple interface. I don't have to do anything but setup my accounts in Mvelopes and login once or twice a month to reconcile spending to my budget goals (or the buckets I have setup for types of spending.)

If you are looking for a tool that can help you plan and coordinate your spending, reconcile purchases so you can always pay off your card balances and always have money for the charges and checks you and your spouse make, Mvelopes is it. You can use if from any computer, Linux, Windows or Mac (you just need a browser with Adobe flash extension.) I would recommend getting coaching sessions as well to help you get the most from the tool. Mvelopes does provide free online chat support as well.

If you use the software consistently, then it will pay for itself 10 times over time.

I think another similar web-based tool exists called Mint but I have never tried that one to know how it compares.

65th Tuesday weigh-in

223.0 lb

No change from last week, I think I would have been down had I laid off Rebecca's brownies. The superbowl party was in Eagle Mountain and the location was really swank. Food was great and I think I did well avoiding over indulging, fast Sunday probably helped a lot too.

64th Tuesday weigh-in

223.0 lb

Up 0.5 again. So I was sick and stayed up too late and missed some workouts, and yes, I am like a broken record on my blog writing that. Winter sucks. Ran 3.5 miles in under 30 minutes today so I am still feeling good about my exercise, I just need to be consistent about going to bed and going to the gym. I am torn a bit because I want to work on a side project for my company (and my career) which cuts into my family/sleep time. I did track my food on the daily plate, but I really only track M-F and don't track dinner, which I plan to change to track EVERYTHING... the annoyance of having to input and track my chocolate-covered almonds should help me from eating them, right? I do feel good when I am able to track exercise on the dailyplate, seeing those extra calories show up is a nice bonus, seeing some better results would be nice too.

I hope when they say, "You change from the inside out", it is really true. Nothing big or earth shattering has happened to myself on the outside, body fat and scale measurements don't seem to move much for me either. But on the inside I am establishing a habit to exercise and monitor my food intake.