Shaine Mata Blog

This morning while working out my schedule, I thought that I would have to pull out all the stops on my productivity tricks so that I could stay on task. Enter the Pomodoro Technique . The technique has been a great boost to staying focused in the past. There is something about working against the clock that keeps your priorities straight. The Pomodoro Technique, if you've never heard of it, has you set a timer for 25 minutes. You ignore everything except your work during those 25 minutes. Once the alarm sounds, you take a short 5 minute break. No cheating on this one. If you work through your break, you'll burn yourself out and then not complete the next 25 minute stretch. You repeat the cycle 4 times and then take a longer break of 20 to 30 minutes. The Pomodoro Technique is a named after a kitchen timer that looks like a tomato. In reality, you can use any timer, so long as it's not complicated to set up. Which brings me to the Amazon Echo . If you are not fa

I am really liking Microsoft's new Windows 10. I updated a laptop at work yesterday to make sure that the drivers for our printers would continue to work. We didn't want to have flaky installations should our customers decide to upgrade. At least, that was my excuse. The upgrade was painless. I quickly went through the settings and new features. I'm really going to like having Cortana on my desktop. Having dabbled with Cortana on a Windows phone last year, I thought Cortana was one of the best features. Part of the reason why I am liking Widows 10 is because they brought back a more familiar Start menu, which still has elements of the Windows 8 Start menu. When Windows 8 came out, I didn't really like the modern UI; but, I grew accustomed to it and accepted that it was mainly meant to work with touch screen devices, which I lacked for the most part. Windows 8 was a little lame with no touch screen. I think what really sells me on the whole experience is that I was

Many years ago, going by Internet time, I suppose, I was all into blogging. I worked for hours thinking up things to write about and then spend hours writing it. That eventually morphed into podcasting. I spent hours recording and editing audio, which eventually led to live recordings through +BlogTalkRadio .  Finally, I started playing around with video, both recorded and live. The quality of my work wasn't great; but, it was good enough to gain some recognition and somewhat of a following. Eventually everything that I was doing became so easy to do that just about everybody was doing it. People I knew were throwing up blogs. They were recording audio and posting to  +SoundCloud . They got phones that could post directly to  +YouTube . I just didn't see the value any more. So, I stopped. I'm even hesitant to Facebook these days. This brings me to something that has become front and center in my life. Purpose. When you have purpose, it is easier to make decisions. Eit

This year has been, oddly, a year of waiting. There have been products and services that require me to wait, which is the antithesis of web economy. If you pay for something today, you expect to receive it within a reasonable amount of time, right? Last year,  +Karma WiFi  announced that they would be launching their new WiFi hotspot that would run on LTE. I was excited about this because I like the idea of prepaid data subscriptions that do not expire. Pay-as-you-go data has long been lacking. Currently, I am using  +Truphone  to pay for my data as I go; but, that is another story. So, I ordered my Karma hotspot last year with the understanding that it would be ready by the end of the year. Then it would be ready by April. Then it would be ready by summer. And, here I am in August waiting for my order still. I ordered mine in October, which is what is being shipped out now. So, hopefully in the next few days. I think what makes things more difficult is that I have pre-bought data

Once upon a time, I would agree to do things for people. Some of it was paid. Some of it was a favor. I found myself stressed out and working into the wee hours of the night. In order to chill out, I would engage in escape behaviors, such as avoiding work or drinking beer later in the night than recommended. Then one day, a big goal came into my life. It was huge and gnarly. This giant goal made me realize that I would need to be very focused and determined to overcome it. Even if I was inclined to want to help others, I could not afford to spend time distractions lest the big goal get out of hand. I started to politely decline requests for help that took away from meeting my objectives. If the request was along my path, I could help. Otherwise, I would only disappoint the requestor. I am still on my quest. I can't help thinking that if I had the big goal earlier in my life, I would have figured out my life's priorities much sooner. I would have either avoided wasting s