Errand Day -- success

Errand Day -- success - brad's life — LiveJournal

Brad Fitzpatrick

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[Feb. 26th, 2007|05:53 pm]

Brad Fitzpatrick

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life

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This morning I awoke at six, made a to-do list a mile along, and have been attacking it with vigor all day long. Much stress relieved.

Many to-do items (such as "opening 2+ weeks of mail") led to many more to-do items (like "renew DAN membership" or "harass t-mobile about lame rates"), but overall I'm still making progress.

I'm particularly happy about the changes I just made to my T-Mobile bill. After getting a $170 bill for last month that was largely SMS charges, I decided to stop being lazy and look into it. It turns out SMSes are only $0.01 each if you pay $10/month for 1,000. Definitely beats the default rate of $0.10. Or I could kill almost all potential volatility in my bill and pay $15/month for unlimited. (Also amusing: I had a $5/month SKU on my bill which hasn't been offered since 1999 or something, which I was no longer using, and is nowadays included free in the $10/month messaging bundle anyway, so really it's only $5/month for my 1,000 sms/month, or $0.005, 20 times cheaper than before...)

Enough distractions. Onward!

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Comments:

From:

evan
2007-02-27 02:06 am (UTC)

I find to-do lists are especially useful for me because I'm so inclined to get distracted: "oh, in implementing [x] I think [y] could use some improvement, so let's open [y]... oh wait, for that I ought to [z]". Using a FIFO list forces me to do a breadth-first traversal of dependencies.

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From:

brad
2007-02-27 02:08 am (UTC)

Totally agree. I do the same.

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From:

ellenlouise
2007-02-28 04:16 am (UTC)

I really like that you described your to-do list as "FIFO"; previously I've only ever heard that term connected with a method of inventory control in accounting (i.e., LIFO v. FIFO).

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From:

evan
2007-02-28 07:19 am (UTC)

FIFO is a standard CS term as well. More terminology: a FIFO is implemented as a "deque" (or maybe just a "queue") and LIFO is a "stack".

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From:

mart
2007-02-27 08:34 am (UTC)

For some reason your to-do list made me think of “My name is Earl”. “So then I had to tackle number 243: ‘Harass t-mobile about lame rates’.”

I should make to-do lists, but I'm terrible at managing them: as soon as they get beyond a few entries I seem to involuntarily abandon them and start going back to ad-hoc task-doing. I also find that my to-do lists tend to get bogged down in minutiae to the point where the larger issues are obscured. In fact, that pretty-much sums up my problem with finishing projects! How do you keep your to-do lists managable?

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