Microloans

A friend of mine just told me about a cool thing he did. He loaned $25 to a woman in the Philippines. She needs some cash to buy more stock for her store. This will allow her to make more money since she has a wider selection of goods to sell when ever people shop there.

Nothing new or bold about the way this loan is set up. It is through Kiva, which makes a lot of microloans. My buddy wanted me to make a loan too but I think I need to learn a bit more about how all this works before I start loaning cash to someone living on the other side of the planet. One way I can discover more is to keep up with my friends lending and if what he has going on raises any questions I will ask him what he knows.

It sounds pretty cool and I will get involved, provided all of how this is set up works the way my friend told me it does.

New Earbuds

I finally had to bite the bullet and shop around for new earbuds. The old one's have been through heck. Frayed, nicked up and starting to even get a bit crackly when I try to listen to my music. They look like something the cat drug in.

Looking around on the web, there is a lot of info about this and that kinds of earbuds. There are wireless, noise canceling, noise blocking, cheap, expensive.....you name it. So I have to make some kind of decision to narrow things down. I think I should be able to do well as my budget is about $100. I do think I want something to cut down the environmental noise, which means I have to figure out if I want noise isolation, noise canceling or both.

I am pretty picky about buying stuff when I have a lot of choices and a range of prices. Probably I spend (waste!) way to much time figuring this kind of stuff out. So I am off on this new adventure and it will be interesting to see what I end up with!

Email and Time Management

I spend way too much time with email. One aspect of this is checking it to many times a day. The other is my inability to keep my in box empty. There are solutions though.

I have read a number of time management ideas that suggest making a commitment to only checking your email once a day. You set aside some amount of time, put it on your schedule, and stick to it. I don’t think I need to get that rigid with this and I realistically would not be able to have that much discipline. Still, I think I should try it for at least a week to see how it changes how I do things. I do believe it is valuable to shake things up once in awhile. This helps you see yourself, your habits, and how your approach things in a new and often helpful way.

The other is to be a little bit more aggressive in just dealing with the daily onslaught. Every email that I open, deal with it. Answer, throw out, or put somewhere else (and don’t just make a I don’t want to have an inbox with emails folder). At times I have been able to attain some success with this method but I have slipped far from that lately.

I guess the obvious thing to me in writing this post is I need to pay a bit more attention to being on top of myself in dealing with and processing my email.