Efficiency-Organization

I describe how Pillars, Pipelines, and Vaults is the best Life Management system I’ve found

Update: 2018-08-10 Shortly after writing this post, I switched to Spacemacs develop branch - cd ~/.spacemacs && git checkout develop This upgraded my Spacemacs to version [email protected]. This had the unexpected side effect of changing several of the key bindings below. Settinm schedules and deadlines - now require a prefix of SPC m d before entering your selection (d for deadlines, s for scheduling) Sparse trees - keybind moved to SPC m s s Archive tree - keybind moved to SPC m s A (I didn’t cover this in my original article, but this is how I archive DONE tasks) Show all TODO and deadlines - keybind moved to SPC m s s t and SPC m s s d Introduction This is a basic overview of org-mode inside of Spacemacs. ...

Trello fascinated me upon its release in 2011. I’ve written before about my time management (lack of) skills, and Trello appeared to be my solution - it offered a sleek view of all of my outstanding tasks. Try as I might, I could not make Trello work for me. Over and over again, I would fail to use it. I just could not make myself stick with it. There was a captivating quality about Trello, however, because it was constantly mentioned in tweets, blogs, and articles. I wanted to make it work for me but it seemed that I just could not. ...

In a previous post I discussed the complicated process of configuring S3 to use Letsencrypt to obtain a TLS certificate. That post served as a reference for me to re-implement Letsencrypt every 90 days. Since then, my 90-day Letsencrypt certificate expired, and I was at a loss for how to re-instate it. Using my own post as a reference didn’t help me with the arcane letsencrypt errors I was encountering. It was a pain in the ass trying to remember how to configure and use a combination of letsencrypt, awscli, virtual machines to run them in (letsencrypt has since implemented a docker option for running on OSX), et cetera, et cetera. I was hoping to get all of this done during a brief lull in my workday. Nope.jpg I’m chalking my experience up to the non-standard use case of using letsencrypt to generate a TLS certificate for a site hosted on S3. Perhaps in the future there will be native support for S3/Cloudfront sites in letsencrypt, but it’s not there yet. ...

I planned a post covering the Manager Feedback Cycle, but this blog post at Effective Managers covers most of what I was going to communicate. One thing I would add to this resource, is that both managers and subordinates should strike a balance in communications frequency: If communications are infrequent, important details can get overlooked, and it becomes harder to resolve conflicts. If communications are too frequent, the subordinate will feel like they’re being micro-managed while the manager will feel like the subordinate can’t solve problems on their own.

It’s early 2016, and there are a multitude of content management systems and blog platforms out there: Wikipedia’s List of Content Management Systems The security blog I contribute to, Penetrate.IO runs on the venerable Wordpress and requires constant updates to stay one step ahead of attackers. This becomes tiresome after a while, especially since the only thing I’m interested in hosting is a series of articles. These don’t require server-side computation, simply hosting. It’s a little like web development from the late 90’s - I only require simple HTTP hosting. ...

This is a topic I’ve had a love/hate relationship with my entire life. I was once forced to go to a time management workshop on Saturdays in high school. My friend and I spent more time talking to the girls in front of us than actually listening to what the lecturer was saying, so I wonder if I missed out on something there… I still struggle with time management and focusing on one task at a time until completion. Working in an environment in which a given task can be interrupted and superseded at any time is not doing me any favors. This post will cover the tools I’ve found to help me out of this situation I’ve found myself in. ...