Visualization

One of the most powerful tools for eliminating waste is visualization. If you can clearly see that you are throwing away money, time, or any other resource, you will generally do something about it. It is much more likely that your losses or shortfalls are hidden. Seth Godin had a great post related to this today. Why should you even display something that does not help you to improve? Generally the metrics that are displayed around your house, in your car, and at your job, are those things that are easy to track and display. Seldom do they allow you to directly see what is needed to reduce waste. Your thermostat displays the temperature in your house. From this information you can indirectly estimate what your energy bill will be wrong. If you had a meter that showed the rate of power consumption and the cost to you at the current rate, what would be your reaction? Mine would be to search the house turning off lights and unused electronics until I could minimize that consumption. How do you think that would affect my spending on power? Going back to that thermostat, you probably have one or two of these in your house. These measure temperature where they are positioned in the house and control that temperature. How often do you sit beside your thermostat? Do you care what the temperature is there? Thermocouples could easily be positioned throughout the house and routed back to the thermostat to give you an overall overage temperature, or you could select the one room that you will be using most and control the temperature based on that. This also could have a large effect on energy consumption. Visualizing is a great way to control consumption.

Try the Buffet

Lately I have noticed that the majority of my tasks are completed online. I pay bills, research projects, follow interesting developments on my favorite blogs, shop, look up reference information, and keep up with friends all through the computer. This has the advantages of reducing the amount of paper I must keep track of, limiting the number of books that I need to keep handy, and making my projects available from any location. The downside is that I end up tabbing through multiple sites to get to the applications and information that I really need. I am also easily distracted by shiny objects, which results in my following links that look interesting but are completely unrelated to what I am trying to get done. The list of sites that I was using on a daily basis included:

1. Hotmail
2. Twitter
3. Amazon
4. Triiibes
5. The Four Hour Work Week Blog
6. Litemind
7. Seth's Blog
8. US Bank
9. Google
10. Blogger Dashboard
11. JustPlainMoody
12. Facebook
13. Various Blog Statistics
14. CNN.com
15. The Springfield Newsleader
16. Fidelity.com

Opening all of these, even with the tab function of Firefox was very time consuming, and refreshing all of the tabs to keep things current only added to the total. A few weeks ago I discovered iGoogle and Google Reader. Together they have made a huge difference in my online activities. I now have collected all of the sites that I need into one page that opens quickly and has only what I need. In this lighter form, my daily tasks have been reduced so much that I sometimes feel that I am done too quickly. The best part about iGoogle is the buffet style selection of gadgets that can be displayed on your page. These gadgets are very easy to search through to find what you need and are extremely easy to add and subtract from your iGoogle page. I found myself searching through them and adding ten or so gadgets then trying them out and removing all of the time wasters of slow loaders. Now I can open one page and scroll through everything that I need look at in five minutes then move on to other important tasks. I highly recommend this tool for reducing wasted time.