I live in a big city with lots of traffic. The issue with the traffic is that not only do you waste time dealing with it, you also waste time to avoid it.

Here’s the scenario: you have a meeting 10 miles away, on the opposite side of a major city, in 3 hours at 5:00PM. You know that you have a 50% chance of dealing with traffic and being very late. Most people would just leave about 30 minutes earlier to deal with the traffic. The problem here is that you waste maximum productivity time even if there is zero traffic. Instead of sitting in traffic, you’re sitting in the parking lot for 30 minutes trying to find stuff to do in your GTD system

I don’t do that.

I leave 3 hours early. Whenever I finish a meeting, I look at my schedule to see where my next meeting will be. Even if it is 3 hours later, I immediately head to the very nearest working center (usually a Starbucks) so that I know I am only 5 minutes away. I can then maximize my working time from a comfortable workspace and leave for my meeting at the last possible minute.

I write this at 6:45 AM sitting in a Starbucks in a heavy-traffic area waiting for a 8:00AM meeting. I didn’t hit any traffic this morning when I arrived at 5:30AM. I am maximizing my highest quality work time and will leave about 5-6 minutes before my meeting because there is a very finite amount of trafficable road between me and that meeting place.

For the average consumer, going green can be a multi-part question: What green products can I introduce into my daily life, are they really making a difference when it comes to saving energy and the environment, and are these products any good? Answers to all of these questions intersect neatly in an unlikely place – an Amazon Listmania! List on the Best of Green Gadgets and Energy Savers.

A Listmania list can sometimes be self-serving affair constructed around the motivation of the lister – that’s not a cynical comment, it’s just the way it is, as all of the products on the list are for sale. But given that all Amazon reviews have user comments attached to them, the list begins to feel more objective.

The selling point of the green gadgets list, quite simply, is that it’s a good discussion starter for your household. Many of us know there are little ways we could be saving energy, but we’re not often armed with enough information about them. Did you know there was such a thing as a handheld electricity usage monitor that, according to the manufacturer, “shows the operating costs of your household appliances” and “calculates cost and forecasts by week, month and year”? Perhaps you heard tell of such a thing, but does it work? Two hundred customer reviews add up to a cumulative 4 ½ star rating, which, if you’re accustomed to relying on user reviews, is a good sign. The “works great, fast results” type of comment dominates, but look for yourself. As with any product, it’s the details, even within the positive reviews, that call the product’s usefulness for you into question.

Among the list’s items is one that’s decidedly old school –a classic push-reel lawn mower that users say is safer, quieter, and better for the environment. But in the words of one user it requires “a little more elbow grease” especially on hills. So you might want to ask yourself, is that additional exercise going to benefit you in the long term, or will it cause a strain? Hypothetical questions, of course, but all worth asking if you’re thinking about new ways to go green.

Image Source: P3 International

The idea of taking baby steps has been around for ages – for as long as babies, actually – but when you apply that idea to how to overcome shyness, taken up by personal growth writer Mark Harrison, it helps to know what those steps might be. The indefatigable Lisa Hoover at LifeHacker zeroed in on this point in her post about Harrison’s article, noting that one tactic for practicing your public speaking might be to “ask a question from the audience during your next company presentation, or vow to say hi to two new people at the next party you attend. It’s okay to be nervous—baby steps.”

Harrison goes well beyond the “imagine everyone in their underwear” trick to explore ways to build your confidence day to day. Repeating in the shower every morning that “you’re the man” may seem silly (especially if a person within earshot outside the bathroom asks later who you were talking to) but it goes to Harrison’s idea of using your subconscious to pump yourself up.

When it comes to public speaking, it helps to remember that your audience is going to respond to how seriously you take yourself, and Harrison observes that “shy people often take things far too seriously. So what if you make a mistake, if your voice trembles, if you forget your lines? So what if nobody laughs at your jokes? Is it going to kill you? I doubt it. Lighten up and keep things in perspective.”

Lightening up is easier said than done, but think about the presentations you’ve most admired. They probably haven’t been perfect, and somewhere along the line the speaker was probably a bit self-deprecating. Think about the whole notion of being up at the podium and your next thought suddenly going out of your head. Rather than putting your head down and standing in silence of twenty seconds, you might say, “Wow, my brain just shut down, give me a second to re-initialize” if you’re speaking to a techie crowd. Tweak it to your audience. You might change the line to “My mind just took a short vacation” if you’re addressing a roomful of travel agents.

You get the idea. Lightening up has almost nothing to do with the charisma of the speaker and almost everything to do with admitting your lapses to your audience – it’s something they can relate to, and thus an excellent way to connect with them.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) still generates enough buzz that CNET’s into its fifth year of nominating products for its Best of CES Awards, and among the gadgets that made the cut for its Best of CES 2010 round-up is the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid.

Hearing the word “hybrid” associated with a car may not immediately generate skepticism about whether and how well it works, but when it comes to smaller gadgets it’s a natural reaction, and CNET raises good questions about this notebook whose screen undocks from the keyboard “to become its own handheld Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered tablet.” CNET makes the point that a Lenovo rep demonstrated the undocking at the show, which makes the reviewers “curious as to how delicate the procedure is and whether the laptop might accidentally disconnect under casual use” and also wonder “will both devices sync well with each other? Will the battery life be suitable? None of these could be determined in the space of a few minutes.”

Those concerns aside, it’s hard to deny not only how cool this thing looks but how cool it would be to utilize it in a presentation if it actually works the way it should. CNET noted that the tablet’s touchscreen performance and video playback was a mixed bag, but the one feature to get excited about is that “the base, when detached, can continue to function as its own Core 2 computer independent of the tablet–a monitor would need to be attached, but it opens up possibilities for the U1 to truly act as two devices in one. Separate batteries and Wi-Fi antennas are contained in both the base and the tablet screen, while the tablet has the 3G and Bluetooth antennas, as well as speakers and a webcam.”

This kind of redundancy, we’ll say again, is exciting, especially when you consider how versatile the hybrid would be if, say, at a trade show you could easily attach another monitor to the U1’s keyboard to let your colleague continue demonstrating an app at your company’s booth while you ran off with the tablet to demo something else. Practically, it would probably be easier to have two separate devices, but that’s where the cleverness of the end-user comes in – how could having this undockable tablet really save me time and energy on a day-to-day basis? What do you think?

Image source: Lenovo