Playing catchup

“Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

– Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

An awful lot has been going on in my life lately. You might have noticed a lack of updates here on my blog, and I’m going to blame my crazy life for that. However, I’m no longer going to make excuses for not getting things done. I’m turning over a new content-creation leaf, and you all get to come along for the ride.

Double Down

As you know, my wife and I are now the proud parents of twin boys – Henry and Joey. The boys turned one month old this weekend, and it’s been a great journey so far. Carrie has been staying home with them during the day, and today is the beginning of Week 3 of me being back to work. It was MUCH easier when I was off, but it’s kind of important to be working in order to, you know, buy food and pay the mortgage and stuff, so I’m back at the office.

Expanding my influence

I’ve been asked to contribute to a new useful and cool new Apple mobile device website, Today’s iPhone! TiP focuses on all Apple mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPod Touch, and the new iPad.

TiP is a spin-off of the popular mobile device site PhoneDog. I am a contributor/blogger for the site, and I hope that you enjoy it. If you’re an iPhone/iPhod Touch user, please check it out. The site is geared towards folks from all walks of life – not just phone geeks. In addition to app reviews and news articles, there’s a discussion forum for questions about Apple mobile devices, as well as some awesome videos full of tips and tutorials.

My first article is Matt’s 5 must-have photo apps. It’s iPhone-specific (since the iPod Touch doesn’t have a camera), but if you use your iPhone to take pictures, I highly recommend you check it out for some insight into cool apps that will really improve the quality and creativity of the photos you take with you device.

If you have any ideas for topics you’d like to see me cover on the site, please feel free to comment here or email me. My main “beat” for TiP will be photography-related, but I’m going to be writing about just about everything iPhone related – some examples of posts I’m working on include apps for dog owners, a tutorial on the best methods for organizing your apps, reviews of some fantastic games, as well as reviews of neat iPhone photography accessories.

Getting Things Done

Obviously, finding time to update this blog, as well as the boys’ blog, and write for Today’s iPhone has been a challenge. But I’ve decided to look at this as a challenge, rather than a hinderance.

I’ve been a proponent of the time management system Getting Things Done for a few years now. But I’ve never been able to actually implement it. My expectation is that since my “spare time” is so tight right now, that time management has gone from a “nice to have” to an absolute necessity.

My first item to tackle is going to be managing my professional tasks. I’ve just implemented the Pay It Forward Email Management system. If you are a user of Microsoft Outlook, I highly recommend checking it out. The philosophy of the system is basically “GTD Lite”, but leveraging the abilities of Outlook. I’m going to use it as a “first pass” implementation, and will tweak it from there. I’ll write a longer post on this after I’ve used it for a week or so (I already have a couple of things I know that will need modification for my particular uses) but I’m fairly excited about it.

The money goes where the mouth is

I’m a believer in the concept that we can’t effect change in ourselves until we put some actual repercussions to the change. For example, when I was trying to lose weight, I would follow a system where I publicly posted my progress, with the hope that the exposure would “shame” me into doing better.

To put my virtual money where my mouth is, I’ve committed to Scott Bishop’s 28 Days of Blogging challenge. I will post new content on Good Old Rock every single day in the month of February. I’ve got some ideas for posts, but would love some input from you guys. If there’s something you’d like to see me write about, shout it out in the comments. This is in addition to my regular updates on Stratton Boys, my commitments for Today’s iPhone, as well as the guest posts I promised to some folks back in December.

One day down…27 days to go.