Today I took care of quite a few things I've been putting off. It feels liberating. I canceled my business insurance because I am not doing enough business to justify it. For what I pay in vs what I actually do anymore, I can self-insure the little bit I deal with. I spoke with Comcast about reverse dns (it wasn't setup before) -- they will actually let me have my own reverse dns entries, which is amazing. They are also going to send someone out tomorrow morning to deal with my 30-second disconnects throughout the day. Feeling encouraged, I canceled my unused Embarq business DSL, as well as my unused gym membership (I now have my "office gym").
So let's see:
- Insurace = $500/year
- DSL = $190/month, $2280/year
- Gym Membership = $20/month, $240/year
So in one afternoon, I saved $3020/year. Not bad.
From another angle, I installed "FoxFilter" which is a personal content filter. I got rid of the default entries and added the urls for reddit, slashdot, and digg. I have been using these sites a lot recently as a sort of mental distraction. I'll be sitting around and start craving some mental simulation and instead of diving into one of my projects, I end up bringing up one of those sites. Sometims you get a rather interesting article, or one of the articles has a really good comments thread. The problem is that the whole experience is mostly a waste of time. Maybe you might get some small insight that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise, but generally you get just stimulated enough to think for a few moments, then you start diving in for more. Once you exhaust the 2-3 (tops) worthwhile stories on the frontpage, you still aren't satisfied so you start clicking on the other stuff -- a funny picture, a funny video, someone's pointless ramble.
My goal in blocking these sites is to hamper my efforts to waste time. I've been telling myself and some of my friends about certain projects I'm going to work on in my "downtime", but after a few months of distracting myself, no work has been done.
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