Flickr Image by aditza121
So I’m totally addicted to the Printable CEO Time Management sheets by David Seah, which I rediscovered this week. One of the suggested methods is to set a timer every 15 minutes. When it goes off, you make a note of what you’ve been doing during that time period. It helps keep me on track, and it also brings awareness as to where my distractions are (hello, RSS!)
Flickr Image by tanakawho
The question then became: what to use to time myself? I have a few options – I can use my iPhone, which has a nice timer built into the clock. I can use the oven clock, but that would require heading to the kitchen to reset it every 15 minutes – not very efficient. Or, I could use a Mac widget, and set a timer in my dashboard. I don’t actually own a physical egg timer.
I decided to start with a widget. I did a little search and found a couple candidates. One, called 3-2-1, you can set for 15 minutes and then it silently pops into the foreground. This is fine if I happen to be at my computer, but what if I’m doing dishes or watering the lawn? Without a chime to alert me, I wouldn’t know the 15 minutes were up. The next one I tried was the Meditation Timer Widget. This is designed, obviously, for meditating, but the pleasant chime at the beginning and end of the 15 minutes appealed to me. The tendency to fail, however, did not. Twice yesterday I set it but it failed to go off after 15 minutes. Today, it just flat out refused to work.
I have to confess, here: I don’t really get the Mac Dashboard. The only widgets I currently have activated are the clock, the calendar, the dictionary, airline tracker, and the calculator. I don’t even know why the clock and calendar are activated, I never look at them. I can see what time it is by glancing at the upper right-hand corner of my screen. To see the widget, I’d have to click on the Dashboard icon, or press F4. I know what day it is, and for any calendar planning I go straight to Google Calendar. The Dictionary widget is great, but I use it rarely. The web provides plenty of substitutes, with richer abilities to drill down into meanings and synonyms. As for the airline tracker and the calculator, these have been completely replaced by iPhone apps.
Flickr image by Robert S. Donovan
And the iPhone is where I’ve turned, now, for my timer needs; indeed, it’s where I’ve turned for all my “widgets”. Track an airline? There’s an app for that. Look up a word or its synonyms? You bet. Need a flower pot? Okay, I don’t know about that one. Probably there’s an app for that, but I’d rather just look out the window.
This blog post inspired by Twitter:
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