I recently read an article on Lifehacker about managing multiple e-mail signatures and started lamenting my own lack of a decent one.
For the past few days it's been floating around in the back of my head and I've started wondering whether or not I should put one together. Before I dive into creating an e-mail signature, though, I thought I'd just ask if anyone out there uses them and what they usually include?
Do you have multiple signatures?
What do you consider vital in yours?
One of the hardest parts about getting into 'Getting Things Done' is breaking the bad habits and vices which keep you unproductive. For some reason we find it much easier to adopt bad habits as opposed to developing good practices. This morning I was wondering why it was that quitting my morning Dunkin Donuts trip was so hard - especially when less than a year ago I didn't drink coffee.
Between last year and this year nothing really had changed. There's always been two donut shops between home and work but until last summer I had never even considered stopping at them. For some reason during the summer I got myself hooked on Ice Coffee (I still don't drink hot coffee) and have been grabbing one every morning since.
I'm not going to bash coffee (for fear of the Arabica gods striking me down) but I am curious why it was so easy for me to start drinking something I had previously never craved. As I continue to fight my $1,092 a year coffee habit (3 bucks a morning * 7 days a week * 52 weeks = $1092 dollars) it maked me wonder: why is it so hard to develop good habits but so bad to develop bad ones?
Boy ... the Waleteer Organizer certainly looks familiar huh?
TinyURL is a surprisingly versatile tool that I'm surprised I've only just come to appreciate. The service basically works like this, you insert a url (preferably something long that's hard to remember) and TinyURL gives you a short URL that will redirect to that site.
Here's an example:
After plugging in several URLs I've learned that on average TinyURL tends to take any URL (no matter how long) and cut it down to around 25- 30 characters. While the resulting URL won't necessarily be easy to remember it's certainly easier to write down.
One thing I've started to do is record TinyURLs on my Google.com personal homepage. This way I can check them out from another computer at a later time and don't need to worry about long urls that track off a page.
If you regularly work in forums you can probably see where this would be useful as well. There's nothing worse than a long URL that destroys a page layout!
Here's a nifty leather case for those folks interested in mixing their Moleskine with a bit of Hipster flair. Available in both pocket and large size (for both versions of the Moleskine) this case holds index cards, a pen, and a Moleskine in a neat little package. The large case goes for $95 and the pocket size goes for $50. IF you have a few extra bucks and dig the look of these brown leather cases (as I do) check out Renaissance Art for more.
