Tag Archives: Convenience

Do you need a Smartphone? Or just want one?

Well, I just thought about whether I should buy an iPhone 4 or an Android based system and decided for the iPhone. But when I listened to other people for their thoughts about this, I often see that they don’t really need a smartphone.

Nesting Dolls
So, before you think about which model to buy, try to figure our what you need that for. Do you want it to call people and send text messages? To wake you up in the morning and listen to music? Take a picture from time to time? Then don’t buy a smartphone – the much cheaper Sony Walkman models or some phones from Nokia will be just fine for you. Do you spend your time on the workplace PC or at home where your PC is constantly running? No need for a smartphone.

A smartphone needs a more expensive priced mobile plan and is very expensive in general. So if you need a smartphone, accept that it will be expensive. Therefore, you should plan ahead what you are going to do with the small computer in your pocket – and if you only find reasons like “oh well I’ll surf the web on the busride”, then I believe you should better buy a book.

Smartphones have the capability to be your mobile data center – and I think this is the main use case. Besides, having mobile E-Mail and other means of communications at hand, like IM or Twitter, is the second biggest use case. After that, you may not forget that a smartphone should replace your MP3-player, your notebook, your calendar, your shopping-lists, the books you carry around and in a very fortunate situation even the netbook you only take with you to do exactly what a smartphone can do for you.

Creative Commons License photo credit: andyi

Time Management doesn’t mean rushing

I often see the misconception, that people think that time management means you have to do a lot more than others to be happy each day. The opposite is true if you do good time management: you know what you have to do today, you know when to do it and in which order. You know that you didn’t forget anything (as you properly planned it with a system you trust), and you know which tasks lie before you on the following days and which can easily be postponed till *someday*.

The key concept of time management is that you just have a better system of organizing your work – so you need lesser worrying and rushing and get your stuff done nevertheless. Time management is like a secretary for your mind. And for some people like me, it’s exactly what I need… while others might prefer rushing and a flurry to get their stuff done.

Related articles by Zemanta

A Waste of Time – How (Not) to Reach Your Goals

Recently, I’ve made some progress on the browsergame I’m writing and told a friend of mine about that – a friend who always has been enthusiastic about games, online and offline.  He told me:

Isn’t that a waste of time?

I was quite shocked, as I think that I can’t use my private time much wiser than by training the skills I’m earning my money with, having fun on a project I like and maybe get something out of it at the end that I might like to play myself and maybe even get some money via advertising, to come up for the server costs. So the answer is clearly: no, it’s not a waste of time. But it got me thinking what a waste of time is in my eyes. To answer this question, I must first address this question:

What is meaningful?

My first definition is: Wasting time means that you do something meaningless instead of something meaningful.

Meaningful would be something, that you had to do anyways or that gives you something in the long term. This includes learning for your job, acting to reach or keep your desired familiy situation (dating, learn to know new people – or spending time with your family), working to develop your economic measures and grow your character.

Not meaningful would be something that gives you nothing in the long term. Watching TV, playing games, consuming drugs / alcohol / cigarettes, surfing the web, listening music, comsume sports in the media, sleeping (longer than 8 hours), watching funny stuff on YouTube, relaxing on the couch, … the list goes on.

Hobbies

Hobbies are a special thing here – basically because everyone will constantly tell you that some of those “WasteOfTime”-activities just are important for them, as the person is not fullfilled or not happy without them.

Using time on a hobby for some time of the day makes you happy and fullfilled in the long term – so if you would count computergaming or watching a certain TV series as a hobby, I’d say its meaningful – for a certain amount of time, where its not procrastination of other things, that are really important or that would have to be done anyways.

If you don’t do the other stuff, that would bring you forward, hobbies are a waste of time. Especially the behavioural pattern of acting out this hobby is addictive – as usual for World of Warcraft-playing or online addiction nowadays – then I would clearly brand this as waste of time.

What helps me and others in doing meaningful stuff is the Getting Things Done-methods, that clearly stress your long-term-goals. After formulating them, you should try to do one task that is connected with your goal every day – which makes sure you evolve. (btw.: At Abelssoft we”re developing a ToDo-application that will also help you developing your goals, I’ll update you on this one as there’s still a lot of development to be done)

Bonus: the Time Eater

My definition is of course only a subjective view on this topic – even if I think its pretty nicely thought out. In spire of this, for some people, the most useful activity is giving in into some drive, like being lazy, eating or watching TV or gaming or taking drugs all day. THAT is clearly a waste of time in my eyes.

Especially the TV set earns an honorable mention here: is a time-eating machine. Most people burn time in their TV – and a TV set already is declared as a necessity of life by law! And as I already said in a former acticle I wrote in german: Time is the stuff that life is made of. Its the most precious good there is. With time, you can have fun, generate money, live your dreams. So don’t burn it in the TV-oven. Some also use the TV in a meaningful way, but that usually means watching the news – which doesn’t take long anways.

Final Thoughts

Make a list. Define who you want to be, which character traits you want to develop or get rid of, define which kind of social (family?) situation you want, which goods you want to have (car? home?), what you want to reach (professionally, skills, achievements) and put all this on this list. These are your goals. Try to do one thing that gets you into this directions every day, before you give in to your drives. It might take years, but you will see success sooner than you think.

Flattr – Critizism, and what they should do about it

Tante followed up my post about Flattr by summing up some critizism and comments about Flattr. I got some statements for these and some more critizism for you.

Well some statements to Tante’s post:

  • People don’t earn money by blogging anyways. There are more people getting rich by winning a lottery than people who can make a living with blogging. Therefore, blogging doesn’t earn you much money with Flattr too, but maybe enough so that you can give that away to Flattr other people.
  • This way, the money pools at the guys that are already “big”. This really sucks.
  • Tante also summed up, that there should be a way to Flattr people who don’t use Flattr. This is not possible technically of course as they couldn’t determine who gets the money and as there would be transmission taxes if the money doesn’t get transferred into their own system but outwards. But there should be a way for people to register at Flattr and flattr random people by entering those people’s E-Mail or Twitter name and the website for which the flattery is made, so that Flattr can connect to the flattered person telling him that he was flattered and that he can open up an account to recieve this flattery.

Some more critizism:

  • For this reason, it should and MUST be possible to register without putting in money using a Twitter name, an E-Mail and random “things” – so you could recieve flattery and pass it on.
  • They do this “you must put money” now, as this way the whole thing can be financed, but I really hope they don’t force you when they come out of their beta.
  • To combat the problem of the big money pools that the popurlar blogs would create if they used flattr, the value you give each month should be dependent on what you earn via flattr.
  • Flattr is technically not the best there could be. Their plugin places iframes on my page, which slows loading times a lot.Please update your WordPress plugin with a JavaScript that calles a cross-domain JavaScript if the div or the (included!) image is clicked. This would speed up things a lot.

Flattr – Future of High Quality Content

The Flattr Logo

Flattr is a service, where you (and everyone else) can spend a fixed value of money (like 2€ per month) for the high quality content you get in the web. Or for the stuff you really enjoy. Or so. By pressing the “flattr-button”, you direct some of your money to the maker of that content. If you’re on the other side and produce content for the web (may it be high quality or not), you can hope that people using flattr direct this money to you. Should you not flattr anything during one month, your money goes to some charity organisation. If you want more exact descriptions, you can find a good introduction on the flattr website and some thoughts of tante about the service.

But why exactly is such a service the future of high quality content on the web? First, there are different models of paying someone for content.

  • Not. If someone doesn’t get a reward, he can’t pay the bank loan, he doesn’t feel his work is appreciated, he produces lower quality content or just stops producing content.
  • The old way of journalism makes a magazine (this means a website since the last years) pay an autor for his writing. Today, content is free, and people don’t pay for magazines (other than generation pageviews for ads), so the author cannot be paid anymore.
  • Another possibility is paid subscription. In this world, not many people would read the New York Times, if they took money, but some will. Sadly, this only solves a small part of the problem, as people wouldn’t pay much, and you can’t pay the authors of the Times with this small amount of money. Additionally, people won’t sign up for every other website they’d read – they would rather switch to free content (there’s enough of that). Also, people would likely want to pay different websites for different well-done posts, and not one site even if not everything on there is really worth it.
  • The third possibility is paying the authors directly, giving them a donation or sending them a letter with money by oldfashioned (non-E) mail.

This third way seems to be the most fair, but paying people producing content on the web is a hard thing for multiple reasons:

  • You don’t want to send old-fashioned (non-E) mail
  • Every online transaction is prey to transaction fees (some are bigger, some are smaller). Usually, there’s also a minimum fee that is taken, so often you cannot give small amounts of money to an autor, as the paying service itself would take the whole pie. An you surely won’t want to pay 10€ for a nice post.
  • Every transaction makes you type in sensitive data and needs keystrokes and mouseclicks – a tedious process.

Flattr tries to fix this. They play bank account without fees for you. You might think that paypal (or any other service on the web who can accept money) could have done the same thing – yes, they all could, but paypal (and those others) are greedy and don’t do free transactions. With Flattr, you know how much money you give away (for a good cause basically), but its not much and you can decide who gets it. That its a built-in more meaningful Digg is only a bonus, but it’s a good one after all.

This way, Flattr may be THE way to pay for online content based on free decision. How they’re going to make the service pay for itself isn’t all too clear, but I could imagine it to be the same model that a bank uses – you hold people’s money, so it can work for you till it gets redistributed – a nice model that doesn’t do no harm. The only real problem seem to be the old gatekeepers, like paypal, who want some money of people transferring money to Flattr – but as you can charge your account for 5 month with only 10€, this doesn’t cut in too badly.

Flattr is still in beta, hope you like the idea. You can sign up for a beta invite on their site if you want to try it. And from now on, you may also flattr my posts if you like.

Related articles by Zemanta