Smart phones have turned every idle minute into an opportunity to catch up on e-mail. But you’ve probably noticed something. Say you were in line at the bank when you started catching up on your messages, but then after your transaction’s done, you decide to sit down and finish e-mailing. Had you really intended to use that time to deal with your mail? Same goes if you’re waiting for a child or a friend to show up — how often have you made that child or friend wait so you can finish sending your message?

Start using the “doctor trick.” When doctors have one patient after another throughout the day, they don’t take every phone call as it comes in or return every call the second they see the little pink message slip. And you know this is true if you’ve ever waited for a doctor to call you back. Many doctors will wait for those little message slips to pile up, will return them during a quick break, and then will get back to business until they have time to deal with the next message pile. Sure, your doctor — as well as you — needs to deal with emergency messages as they come in, but as for the rest,  just because a call or e-mail is actionable, that doesn’t mean it has to be acted on the second you receive it.

Experiment. Set aside two half-hour blocks during the day to check your messages, and you might find that you won’t be keeping people waiting and you won’t risking your life checking your messages while crossing the street. And not incidentally, only checking your e-mail during designated times does wonders for productivity in the home or office, too.

This simple strategy has been known to change people’s day-to-day lives dramatically. Leave a comment if you’ve tried this approach, or if you have a different timesaver tip you’d like to share.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The term productivity app needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Consider the productivity king of the Microsoft Office suite, Excel. Seldom does an application come along that permits you to do more than this program. Problem is, once you get sucked in to perfecting an Excel spreadsheet, you can spend the better part of an hour or two noodling with formulas, fields, and formatting. Now, is that productive? Many times, no, because sometimes the more variables you have at your disposal, the more tempting it is to change them for fun.

Next, consider solitaire. Not a productivity app per se, but if the guy down the hall who’s always immersed in a hand is the one coming up with the great ideas, maybe he’s on the something.

Sort of splitting the difference between a spreadsheet app and a flat-out game, Internet Anagram Server takes any word or phrase you enter and rearranges the letters to form new words. How is that productive? Say you’re trying to come up with a meaningful name for your new company, and you want it to incorporate the names of your darling children, Lisa and Hector.  Enter those names, and instantly 230 alternatives appear. Scanning the list, you see options like “Its Cholera” and “Roach Tiles.” Probably not viable picks. But then you scan the list further and the choices get better: “Toil Search,” “Oracle Hits,” and “Last Heroic.”Let’s say you pick one of those three. You can decide to let the derivation of the name be your little secret. Or, you can market it for all it’s worth by telling your investors and customers that your company name is an amalgam of your kids’ names. It may not get you all your funding, but it’s a great story that will become part of your brand.

By the way, one possible anagram of with beans = new habits.  We’re just saying.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Self-help books can certainly get you in the mood to rethink how you organize your life, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Everyone from habits-of-effective-people guru Stephen Covey to the famously prolific Stephen King has inspirational ways to increase your efficiency and free up the cluttered sectors of your life. But when it comes to efficiency, one of the best bits of advice is a saying so simple and homespun it’s almost profound: Don’t touch a piece of paper more than once.

What this saying refers to, of course, is a scene that has played out in homes and offices for centuries: Piles of paper accumulate on desks and dining room tables, the piles are arbitrarily dumped into bags when company comes or shoved into drawers when the clutter’s unbearable, and a fair amount of our lives is spent sifting through those piles multiple times, looking for scraps of paper we may never find.

Consider instead how uncluttered your life would be if you held up that piece of paper the second it came into your possession and immediately made the decision to file or scrap it or otherwise do that actionable thing that makes that paper irrelevant. And this is where the idea of finding your bills and paying them efficiently intersects. Missouri-based blogger Chett, inspired by the 4 Hour Work Week, explores the book’s concept of “batching,” which essentially means grouping like tasks together so that you’re not “arranging your work area, getting the materials needed, and getting in the right frame of mind” every time you need to do something. And in Chett’s case that something was getting organized to pay bills. Beyond the physical set-up obstacles, Chett and his wife came up with a very shrewd way to help consolidate the process:

“We called each one of the companies that we make payments to i.e. utility companies, phone companies, mortgage, insurance, etc. and ask that the payment dates be changed to dates between the 21st and 26th of each month. Every company was willing to accommodate our request. In the future we will sit down to pay bills once each month. When we finish we will immediately know what residual income is left over and can make plans accordingly. This process should also make debt reduction easier as you can immediately see how much extra you can apply to your smallest payoff to eliminate that debt.”

Chett correctly observes that mastering personal finance often has less to do with understanding numbers and more to do with finding a process that works for you. Batching could be your thing and, certainly, so could gathering all those document piles in your life and touching a lot of that paper for the last time.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

If you’re reading this, your DNA’s likely comprised of 23 pairs of chromosomes. That would make you a human, as well as a potential customer for the at-home DNA testing kits sold by 23andMe. Order and register your kit, send in a tube of your spit, and in upwards of four weeks you’ll get access to genetic information that’ll clue you in about your health and heritage in ways you never thought possible. Or, perhaps, important.

How it’s possible is an explanation best left to the scientists, but why it’s important is best left to you to repeat to as many people as possible: genetic testing will tell you if any children you plan to conceive will be at risk for inherited traits and conditions. And that’s not all. What can DNA testing tell you about such “garden variety” diseases as diabetes? According to 23andMe, “on average, one person in five develops diabetes by age 79. Variations in your DNA tested for by 23andMe might raise your risk to one in three, making your lifestyle choices on factors like exercise and weight control even more critical.” Whether you use this site’s kit or choose to have genetic testing done in a doctor’s office, there’s no debate that that’s news you can use.

Once 23andMe tests your DNA, they store it in their database, allowing you to access your genome or genetic information online. You can also pay to compare your genes with those of others registered with the service, making it a genetic Facebook of sorts, enabling you to potentially find potential living relatives as well as details about who your ancestors were and where they lived.

Whether you spring for the testing or not, watch the site’s Genetics 101 video that’ll re-school you about DNA’s building blocks and help you appreciate that the next time someone tells you that “you have your father’s hair,” what they’re actually saying is “you appear to have inherited a gene or genes from your father that makes a protein that instructs your hair follicle cells to produce hair that curls like your father’s.”