Month: April 2017

When feeling overwhelmed by the mountain of tasks ahead of you, sit down, take a breath, and write a to-do list. This isn’t just a sneaky form of procrastination: Studies have shown that we’re more likely to achieve our goals when we commit them to paper. If you really want to make the most of your planning time, ditch the old-school bullet format. These expert-backed strategies will help you confront your deadlines with confidence.

1. TIME-BLOCKING

On a traditional to-do list, obligations that take hours to complete appear alongside tasks that last a few minutes. Without time-blocking, it can be hard to tell them apart. Fast Company defines time-blocking as assigning individual tasks to manageable time slots. So instead of writing out everything on your plate for the day and hoping you have enough time to tackle it all, this approach lets you set realistic goals for yourself one task at a time.

2. IF/THEN LISTS

To-do lists are inherently optimistic. By writing something down, you’re betting that you’ll have the time and energy to make it happen. But sometimes life gets in the way of your fine-tuned plans. One strategy for setting reasonable goals without selling yourself short is to make two lists: one for high-energy days and another for days when you struggle to roll out of bed. According to blogger and Bullet Journal enthusiast Kara Benz, both lists should follow an “if/then” model. An entry on the first list, for example, might read, “If I have a lot of energy, then I will take a walk at lunch.” The second list should feature more mindless tasks like cleaning out your inbox, organizing your desk, or even setting aside time for a power nap.

3. EISENHOWER MATRIX

President Dwight Eisenhower once said, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” Someone found a way to turn this maddening statement into a rather useful prioritization system. Plugging your to-do list into an Eisenhower Matrix breaks it into four categories. The first box, filled with items that are both urgent and important, is to be tackled immediately. The second set, labeled important but not urgent, can be scheduled for a later time. Tasks deemed urgent but not important can be delegated to others if possible, and entries that are neither urgent nor important should be crossed off the list altogether.

4. DRAWING

Many people use their own special shorthand when writing to-do lists—which is fine as long as they can decipher it hours later. If you’ve ever had trouble decoding the notes you write to yourself, consider doodling quick images to get your message across. One study found that words are more likely to stick in our memories if we draw pictures of them instead of writing them down. This is likely because drawing takes up more mental facilities (visualization, analysis, motor skills) than language alone. So not only does creating a visual to-do list help you memorize tasks, it also forces you to think them through ahead of time.

5. ONE-THREE-FIVE LIST

Instead of organizing entries by time or urgency, a one-three-five list looks at the size of the tasks at hand. Start by identifying the biggest job of the day—that goes in the number one slot. From there, pick three smaller, but still important tasks to fill out the middle of your list. Finish it off with five small items you’ll be able to take care of quickly. COO and co-founder of The Muse Alex Cavoulacos is a notable fan of this method. She wrote for her website, “Planning ahead like this also means you’ll be able to have more informed conversations with your manager when he or she drops something new on you that needs to be done right away—as well as the tools to re-prioritize your other work.” So while it may be impossible to stick with what’s on the list every day, it doesn’t hurt to have it as a guideline.

6. KANBAN BOARD

Like a calendar, a Kanban board helps you keep your day organized by visualizing the tasks ahead. Kanban was popularized as a scheduling strategy for manufacturing plants, but as productivity experts Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry write in their book Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life, it works on an individual level as well.

Start by finding a board. It can be a tool on your computer, a white board covered in Post-its, or a few columns of index cards on your desk. The important thing to remember is that any task you write down won’t stay in the same spot for long. After filling out the three columns—”To-Do,” “Doing,” and “Done”—jump into the items in your “Doing” section. Any items you complete should be relocated to the “Done” column, and any items you start from the “To-Do” section should move to under “Doing.” Ideally the board should be situated in a spot that’s easy to glance at throughout the day. That way you can easily visualize your progress.

7. COULD-DO LIST

Sam Bennett likes to be realistic when planning out her day. Instead of writing a to-do list, the author of Get It Done: From Procrastination to Creative Genius in 15 Minutes A Day takes the pressure off by creating a “could-do” list. In order to weigh the importance of her optional tasks, she plugs them into a worksheet. She suggests reserving columns for tasks, time (how long each task will take), expense (if any), inclination (how appealing the task is on a scale of one to 10), and the return on your investment (also scaled one to 10). Based on those metrics, it should be easy to see which items take priority—and if you don’t have time to get to everything, it’s not the end of the world.

Pastry fanatics lined up the block to get a taste of Dominque Ansel’s uber-trendy Cronut after its debut in 2013. Time will tell if customers will do the same for the latest pastry hybrid from Walmart: the “Crotilla,” a mix between a tortilla and a croissant, which Delish reports hit 800 Walmart stores on April 17.

“We know customers, especially millennial customers, are hungry for new food trends and cool ways to experience food,” Walmart Bakery’s senior buyer Bradlee Underwood said in a statement, “and we want to be a destination for that.”

If you’re confused about how to eat a combination of two foods that rarely appear on the same menu, Walmart has a few recommendations. “You can add Nutella and bananas for breakfast, or dress up a burger for lunch, or even make mini pizzas in the toaster oven for a fun dinner one night,” Underwood suggests.

Walmart isn’t the first brand to attempt to cash in on the pastry mashup trend. Since the Cronut, we’ve seen the Mufgel (muffin bagel), the Cherpumple (pie in a cake), and the Capookie (cake in a cookie in a pie). Based on the response to Crotilla so far, which has ranged from bewilderment to contempt, the product isn’t on its way to living up to the Cronut’s legacy.

[h/t Delish]

The paint job on Zipporah Lisle-Mainwaring’s London townhouse certainly makes a statement. According to her neighbors, that statement is meant as an over-the-top slight against them. Whether or not that was Lisle-Mainwaring’s intention, a London court has ruled that she’s allowed to keep the candy-striped house the way it is, The Guardian reports.

The conflict began when the neighborhood forbid Lisle-Mainwaring from tearing down her house, which she uses for storage, and building a new one in its place. The red-and-white stripes appeared on the facade in March 2015 and The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea demanded that she repaint “all external paintwork located on the front elevation” shortly thereafter.

The notice, which was served under the UK’s Town and Country Planning Act of 1990, said that the “stripes on the front elevation, [are] incongruous with the streetscape of South End and the local area.” Instead of painting over the stripes within 28 days as the notice required, Lisle-Mainwaring took the matter to court.

The 71-year-old property developer’s initial appeal to a small claims courts failed, so in 2016 she launched a judicial review action with London’s high court. The judge, Justice Gilbert, ruled that while the bold pattern may be aesthetically questionable, it’s “entirely lawful.”

As for whether or not the house was painted out of spite, it’s not the most outrageous idea. People have been erecting so-called “spite houses” (and even “spite fences“) for centuries. But as Justice Gilbert stated, the “color scheme may have come about because of an owner’s eccentricity or because of his/her pique. The [law] does not apply any differently to the latter than it does to the former.”

[h/t The Guardian]

There’s a familiar saying in the tech world: If you’re not paying, you’re the product. Which means, if you’re not paying to use a service, the company providing it has to be profiting in a different way, and that’s usually by selling the data it collects on its users to third parties. This is perfectly legal—you give the company permission to do so by signing off on its terms of service. As The Intercept highlighted earlier this week, the latest tech company to catch flak for giving away data on its often unwitting customers is Unroll.me, a service that helps you organize and unsubscribe from email newsletters. If you’re a user, it’s probably time you revoked its access to your information. But doing so, unfortunately, is a little more complicated than just deleting your account on the site.

The initial revelation came out as part of a New York Times profile on Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, which revealed that Uber bought information on Unroll.me users from a data analytics service called Slice—data that Unroll.me users probably didn’t know the company was collecting in the first place, like their emailed purchase receipts. “Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me, Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber,” the Times reported.

Presumably, when you signed up for Unroll.me, you thought you were giving the company access to your email so that it could help you sift through annoying spam newsletters—not so that it could sell other companies information about the stuff you buy.

Despite issuing an apology, the company isn’t going to stop how it does business. “We never, ever release personal data about you,” Unroll.me says, but it’s still going to collect information from your email. “All data is completely anonymous and related to purchases only.” But most people would rather not have a company trading data on what they buy.

So yes, it’s probably time you deleted the service. To do so, you’ll need to go into your email settings. Here’s how to do it in Gmail:

1. Go to “My Account.”

2. Under “Sign-in and Security,” click “Connected apps and sites.”

3. Go to “Apps connected to your account” and click on Unroll.me. Hit “remove.”

4. Start looking through those privacy statements and terms of service pages, even if they’re full of legalese. For an easy way to see what a company wants to do with your data, search the page for the term “third party.”

[h/t The Intercept]

It’s usually not until water stops flowing from domestic faucets that we realize how much we take it for granted. Sometimes, that’s due to a temporary plumbing emergency. But for a large number of low-income households, it’s because past due bills have forced the hand of utility companies.

A lack of running water can have a huge effect on a person’s quality of life, which is why The Human Utility—formerly known as the Detroit Water Project—has stepped in to help. The organization addresses delinquent water bill accounts piling up in Detroit and Baltimore and uses a donated pool of funds to pay them off.

Families in those areas with overdue bills fill out an application and provide proof of income; funds are then dispersed so their water can be turned back on. Since debuting in 2014, the project has helped nearly 1000 families, some of whom were so affected by the loss of the utility that they were drinking from neighbors’ water hoses.

You can make your own (tax-deductible) donation to help a family in need on The Human Utility’s website. The organization also accepts donations of time and skill from professionals like plumbers and lawyers. We may soon see similar programs spring up in other areas, especially as aging infrastructure continues to wear and water rates continue to climb, rising 41 percent in many major U.S. cities between 2010 and 2015.

[h/t Fast Company]