T’was a very busy day today, and I wasn’t sure if I could squeeze out something for the day. So first, I lowered the bar. Second, I chose to start a project that I’d held off from doing because it was expensive: the production of 10,000 sheets of full-color offset printed instructions for the various Emergent Task Planner products. This will run around $800-$900 just for printing the instructions. 10,000 sheets is about the economical minimum for offset printing locally, last I checked.

Details follow. (more…)

I go through spurts of digital photography, which I do mostly to document things that I’m doing. One of the tools I use is an EyeFi SD card for digital cameras. This card automatically downloads photos over WiFi to my computer. While it’s admittedly easy just to pull out the card and plug it into a reader like a Muggle, having the wireless transfer is a nice time saver because I have three cameras that I pull photos from: an old Canon EOS-40D DSLR, a point-and-shoot FinePix F200EXR, and the built-in camera of my iPad 3. The less fiddling I have to do, the better.

I’m now handling all my photos through Adobe’s Lightroom import workflow, with the originals stored on Western Digital MyCloud 2TB network-attached drive on a gigabit ethernet hardwired network. It’s not a perfect setup, particularly because the backup of the MyCloud isn’t automatic at the moment and it could go BOOM at any moment, but overall it’s been pretty handy because I can access this drive through local Lightroom catalogs on my PC and my Macintosh.

The point of this? I just realized that since I’m generally taking pictures of notable things going on, and I have all the photos from all my cameras in one place, I perhaps could write my Groundhog Day Resolutions Review just by collecting the pictures.

And so, that is exactly what I did. I went through all the photos I had between October 10 and November 11, added 45 interesting ones to a collection I called “GHDRR November 2014”, and then printed a 9×5 contact sheet to a file. This is my Groundhog Day Review report for November 11. It’s not as wordy as they usually are, but I think it may work as a “good enough” reflection tool. It usually takes me two or three hours to review and write-up the past month’s experiences, and frankly I didn’t feel like doing it today. The photo collection does a pretty good job of reminding me what I did this week. What it doesn’t capture are some of the behind-the-scenes actions, but I’ll just quickly fill those in.

Read the Groundhog Day Resolutions Review for November 2014 here. Time…saved!

Today’s thing-a-day looks like food, but it is really process. (more…)

I have historically disliked of all activities related to shipping and fulfilling packages. There are a lot of small details in the procedure, and it’s also time intensive and expensive. When I fulfilled Emergent Task Planner pads out of my house in 2009, I discovered it took me all day to process and ship eight orders. This is why I’ve spent so much time looking into automated e-commerce/shipping solutions; while I make less money, at least I didn’t have the aggravation of being annoyed all day.

These days, though, I’m feeling much more excited about shipping because I’ve figured out a few things about it, and I am starting to see that this is an opportunity to design some nice packaging plus maintain a stock room of ready-to-ship product. Today, I spent some time setting up some new stock+ship options. (more…)