Category Archives: Personal

My Tools: CrashPlan

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Like many families the Chastney’s are producing data at a formidable rate. I have a son who edits music and a daughter who is into photography, add to that a reasonably sized music collection, my photographs and a bucket load of other documents and there’s over 150GB of important stuff. (Did I tell you about the days when we used to argue about people wanting 20MB hard disks (yes I did mean Mega Bytes)).

RydalThat’s where CrashPlan comes in by creating a safe remote continuous backup.

Getting all of this data copied to a location away from the house has always been an aim for a number of reasons. The main reason being that there are so many situations where a backup solution in the house wouldn’t be sufficient to protect it – fire, flood, etc.. There’s also the added advantage of being able to access data that you haven’t taken with you if you need to. CrashPlan Central provides a remote backup location that is always there to write to and to read from.

Another great thing about CrashPlan is that it doesn’t matter where the devices are. My son is at university and living away from home during term time. Because he has internet access all of his work is still backed-up and protected whether he’s at home or at university.

The CrashPlan agent runs all of the time on all of the devices and is continuously backing up the data. This means that we don’t really think about it making a backup it just happens.

We’ve had need to recover some files too and that works a treat also.

There are a number of other features of CrashPlan that are really good, but I don’t really use them.

The pricing is pretty good to. I use the CrashPlan+ Unlimited Family which covers the household for a few pounds a month.

Turn off your smart-phone: Reduce stress

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I’ve believed for some time that many of us are causing ourselves harm by the way we are constantly connected, and also constantly working.

RydalA new report by The British Psychological Society says that we need to be turning off our smart phones to reduce our stress:

The study established the existence of a helpful-stressful cycle; it found that a device is typically acquired to help an individual manage their work load. However, once the individual starts to use their smart phone the work load management benefits are displaced by the pressure to keep abreast with their new expanded virtual social life. The more an individual becomes stressed and worried the more compulsive behaviours such as checking will occur.

Richard Balding advises organisations to consider this problem seriously:

“Smart phone use is increasing at a rapid rate and we are likely to see an associated increase in stress from social networking. Organisations will not flourish if their employees are stressed, irrespective of the source of stress, so it is in their interest to encourage their employees to switch their phones off; cut the number of work emails sent out of hours, reduce people’s temptation to check their devices.”

Back in 2009 I wrote about My New Fear of Working from Home which highlighted a similar cycle.

My smartish-phone is set to turn itself off in the evening and I try my best to leave it that way.

Via Lifehacker

My Tools: Evernote

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The simplest way to describe Evernote is to call it a note taking and organisation tool, but that’s selling it a bit short.

Brockholes SunsetNote taking and collecting is incredibly important to the job that I do, and if that was all it did it would still  be very important.

I used to carry around all sorts of piles of paper. These comprised things I was reading, things I should be reading, thoughts, scribbles, diagrams, etc.. I still carry around a moleskin notepad which I use for taking notes in meetings, but for all of the other notes there’s Evernote.

My job involves me working with all sorts of pieces of information. Sometimes I need to read it, at other times I just need to know where it is for future reference. All of it goes into Evernote where it’s classified and organised.

One of the great things about Evernote is that it has been built from the ground as an internet application. It has client applications for all sorts of platforms, but these all replicate information with the central service.

I’ve also introduced it to my son who is studying at University and it works well for him too, quite frankly I’m a bit surprised that it isn’t promoted more by educational establishments

I’m not going to say much more because I really need to write a post about the ways that I process information and the way in which I use a number of different tools to collect, filter and organise. Evernote is a big part of that, but it’s only part of the journey.

Looking for life’s ctrl+z: Dealing with regret

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One of the most popular blogs of last year was one entitled Email is broken (and my embarrassment). The embarrassment that I outlined was a (in my eyes) a monumentally stupid use of reply-to-all.

It was a regret that lived with me for days, and still makes me feel embarrassment when someone reminds me of it. I wished, at that point, that I had an undo or ctrl+z for time.

Kathryn Schulz talks about regret in her TED talk from last year. She doesn’t tell us to simply get over it, she has a much more interesting take on why regret is a good thing.

Kathryn Schulz: Don’t regret regret

Use those 60 seconds wisely

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For many of you the next few days represent an opportunity to do something different with your minutes.

You have a choice what you do with those blocks of 60 seconds.

The worlds is busy doing all sorts of things, but what are you going to do?

60 Seconds - Things That Happen Every Sixty Seconds
Infographic by- GO-Gulf.com Web Design Company

As for me, no I’m not writing blog posts, I scheduled this one before the Christmas break. I’ll be following my usual holiday pattern and turning down the volume on my online interactions. I have the title music of a TV programme from my childhood ringing in my ears now "why don’t you…?"

Targeting Communications

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We have so many choices for communication that it’s easy for us to communicate in the wrong way, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Strange GrafitiI doubt I’m unique in the variety of places that I interact. When I write something I try to think about the different groups that I’m wanting to communicate with and to hone my message to fit that group.

At a high level the groups fit a bit like this:

  • Twitter: This is quite a broad constituency, but it’s mainly the people that I work with. I tend not to write about personal things because of this. I do send updates about my blog to twitter, but they generally fit with that constituency as well. Twitter is my primary update location, if I’m going to update my status anywhere it will be on twitter. I have been trying to tone down the volume a bit recently.
  • Linkedin: Although I’m quite active on Linkedin I don’t write very much. I mainly use it to keep in contact with where colleagues and former colleagues are up to. I could send automatic updates from twitter and other places here, but I don’t.
  • Facebook: Nearly all of my interactions on Facebook are personal ones. There are some colleagues who I have as friends but mostly my interactions are with people outside work. As well as updating and commenting I’m also likely to use Facebook for instant messaging and messaging communications with those who I know use Facebook. I also send my twitter updates to Facebook.
  • Google+: Well, next too nothing really, I feel like I’m still keeping a watching brief. I sometimes post a link to my blog. Most of the people in my circles are work people. Google+ has not really taken off with my outside work friends.
  • Email: I use email all day every day but try to keep the communications as tightly targeted as possible. Most of the time I avoid reply-to-all, but occasionally get caught out, and try to reduce the distribution list rather than grow it.
  • Blogs: I run two blogs because I write about different things. This one is mostly about things that I’m thinking about from day to day, I’m not very targeted in what I write, but people seem to accept that. The blessings blog is about, well, blessings. A few people read avidly, but most people find information via search (>65% of my visitors are new each month).
  • Skype: Skype plays a minor part on my communication regime. It’s sometimes get used for instant messaging communications and sometimes for video interactions with the family.

I think that’s most of it, but if you want to know more my about.me is a reasonable place to keep up to speed with what I’m contributing to.

I wondered whether other saw things in a similar way so I’ve talked to a number of people and many of them seem to be seeing themselves having similar persona to these.

With these broad collections in mind I’ll target different places based on what it is I am writing.

I also make assessments on the length of what it is I am going to write. This isn’t very elaborate, most of the time it’s a simple question – short or long? If it’s short I’ll try and constrain it down to the 140 characters of twitter, if it’s long it goes here on this blog. That is, unless it’s really one-to-one communication and that’s what I use email for, still. I don’t see that we have a suitable alternative to email for this type of communication just yet.

Communication is such an important thing that we do I think it’s vitally important that we do our best to communicate in the best possible way.

I seem to have written a lot about communications recently: