productivity Archives - Michael Bianco

How to Throttle Your Internet Connection

A conversation with a friend recently turned me on to PFSense. It’s an open source firewall system that enables you to control what’s happening in your network. One of the features it enables is packet throttling. It got me thinking, can I throttle my internet connection speed just on my local machine? I’ve been interested in digital minimalism for a long time. One of the things I’ve never been able to crack is nudging me towards stopping the use of all of my devices without forcing me to do so. If I’m forced, I’ll need an escape hatch for when my predetermined schedule doesn’t work, and then I’ll abuse that escape hatch…

Git Completions & Tooling on the Command Line

I enjoy tuning my terminal environment. I’ve recently learned tmux, switched to zsh, and constantly incrementally improve my personal dotfiles. I’ve put together a stack of tools for working with git on the command line. I find this much faster than working in a GUI. Here’s what I use: git-fuzzy for generating commits (git patch is especially useful here) forgit for switching branches, viewing logs, stash list, git fixup, etc git (aliased as g) for misc git commands (like cherry-pick, etc) with a handful of config customization custom functions and aliases for various shortcuts, including interacting with the gh-cli command However, one piece of the puzzle for me wasn’t working properly: tab completions on the core git command…

Fixing Word Navigation in ZSH

Moving to zsh from bash has been a great quality of life improvement. However, there is one thing that has driven me nuts that I have not been able to figure out: customizing the word boundary definition. I’m using zsh 5.9 and have a lot of plugins. forward-word ,backward-word , and the kill variants were the main widgets that I use. I used bindkey to determine these functions. After some investigation, it seems like these widgets are controlled via zstyle ':zle:*' configuration. You can dump configuration via zstyle -L You can determine what underlying zsh function is used by a widget via zle -lL…

Book Notes: Making it All Work

Something new I’m going to try doing this year is book notes. I’m continually more bought into the idea that writing down your thoughts helps you harden and remember them. Books take a lot of time to read: if I’m going to invest the time in a book, I should be ok investing another ~hour in calcifying the lessons I learned—so that’s what I’m going to try to do. This should help me better filter what books to read: if it’s not worth spending the time to write the notes, I probably shouldn’t read the book (obviously excluding entertainment-only reading). Here are the notes for Making it All Work. The book wasn’t great, I wouldn’t read it unless you haven’t read Getting Things Done and are new to personal productivity. Here are the notes!..

Are You Being Deliberate About Long-term Goals?

Recently, I met with a mentor about some of my past and future goals. After listening and understanding my goals, he started to dive into the motivation behind my goals. Why did I want to build that product? Why was I interested in that type of business? What did I want my life outside of work to look like? What type of people do I enjoy working with? Am I working with those people? What type of work did I enjoy? What type of work am I excellent at? What type of lifestyle do I want to live? I had good answers to the first round of questions, but as he kept digging I realized my answers were becoming more and more thin, and I had a lot of thinking to do. I’m a planner by nature…

Why the Right Premium Services are Always Cheaper

By nature, I’m frugal. I love getting a great deal, and getting the most of out of my purchases. When I was fifteen I got a new MacBook Pro for free by working those “get a free MacBook pro” ponzi schemes online: my obsession with a great deal started early. I’ve learned that it’s often worth paying for premium services when your time is at stake. Not only your current time, but time that a premium service could possibly save in the future. Opportunity cost is a real thing: it’s important to consider what you can’t do or time that could be possibly spent on fixing a future problem with the service or product. Here are a couple of failures from recent memory: Low Cost HSAs…

Closing the Loop vs Completing the Project

Completing the project is crossing the entire thing off the list, eliminating the chunk of work completely. It’s moving a project from development to maintenance. Closing the loop is different. It’s eliminating the dependency that someone else has on you – or at least updating them on the state. Every project has dependencies, and if you are pushing for excellence your role is most likely key to the projects success. Leaving others hanging is the worst thing you can do. It’s when someone’s dependency on you becomes a blocker to the project or a drain on the projects momentum. And it’s one my biggest faults. I’m a recovering perfectionist. I love when things are complete and I can deliver them to a teammate or client…

How I Learned to Stop Being Dominated by My Inbox

I Turned It Off Everyone complains about email. There’s a reason: it’s a big stack of todos without context, priority, categorization, and some emails are hard to quickly handle and sit there representing a bunch of non-project work that needs to be done. Message queues with no context destroy your productivity. They scramble your brain. The best way to handle queues – whether it’s email, text messages, project management, etc – is to turn it off and batch process in a constrained amount of time. Tim Ferris checks email only twice a day. This might be too extreme given the culture you are working in, but turning off your email for hours at a time could be a game changer. Try it…

How to Outsource Everything

There are only a couple things that I’m really good at. That list does not include sending invoices, copy editing, fixing cars, scheduling doctor’s appointments, making small WordPress edits, designing flyers, going grocery shopping, going through paper mail, processing paper receipts, bookkeeping, filing taxes, or 100s of other tasks. I can do all of those things, but they aren’t things that only I can do well. As much as possible, it’s important clear the decks and make sure you are concentrating on those items and eliminating any items that don’t fit within your unique sweet-spot. Think of delegation and outsourcing in terms of systems, not just people. Here are some examples: “Outsource” shopping to Amazon…

3 Quick Tips for Managing Your Inbox

Email is hard. It’s so easily abused and can be an enormous time suck. Here some quick tips that I’ve been trying to implement over the last couple months: 1. Unsubscribe from any newsletters you haven’t read in the last month. The information won’t disappear if you don’t read it. If it’s important, you’ll run into it somewhere else. More emails is more noise; kill the noise, be realistic about how many newsletters you can read. 2. Use Unroll.me to manage newsletters you want to read. This tool bundles all email newsletters into a single daily email, reducing noise throughout the day. 3. Setup Gmail filters for any transactional emails that you never actually read…

Tag: productivity