A lot of amazing software in a day

Today saw the release of Presto Linux and Opera Turbo beta. I have been extremely impressed with both pieces of software and have switched to Presto Linux at work and have begun using Opera Turbo as my main browser. While whether these pieces of software will replace Windows XP and Firefox/Chrome in the long term they are both very promising in that they both offer significant speed boost in their respective fields.

Presto can boot in less than 30 seconds perfectly with all drivers working on an old machine where I had issues with the Windows audio driver. Opera Turbo offers noticeable speed improvement on nearly all web pages by sacrificing image quality; which does not make a lot of difference for most sites as most images do not need to be of very high quality to server their illustrative purposes. Presto sacrifices a lot of Linux functionality that I do not really miss.

If the direction these two pieces of software take gains traction I do look forward to a lot more streamlined applications that takes stripping away the fat to extremes and offers users a much faster but lossy experience, ala MP3 compression.

Side project time management, alternating verses sequential

For the past few weeks I have been trying a few ways to manage my project productive in the limited hours I had in the early hours of the morning. For a whole week I tried alternating between my Passbook project one day, and focusing on marketing my MatrixSolver program the next. This alternating method was tried first because I felt both tasks required equal urgency and therefore I should give them about equal attention. However, after the first week I decided to try something a little different.

The next week, on the second or third week of February, I tried instead to schedule Monday to Wednesday for Passbook and Thursday and Friday for marketing. The result was not unexpected but the productivity gains were. I managed to complete a whole lot more tasks for each area of focus after the work periods simply because I could pickup from where I left off much quicker than before. The constant switching of areas of focus was causing me to backtrack a lot more than needed.

Therefore the need to reduce the amount of distractions, however productive and constructive towards other goals those distractions are, remains important in maximizing productivity. Although as a side note I have now stopped waking up at 1 or 2 am and have returned to a more regular routine of waking up between 3:30am and 5:30am, depending on whether I plan to workout before work. Putting the focus back on exercise instead of side project accomplishments has made me feel better as a person, although not as accomplished.