First things first: I became tired of writing semi-daily summaries on books I’ve been reading. If you care to look back, I didn’t get very far. The reason? I just didn’t see the point. They weren’t helpful. I’m more interested in discussing the main idea or the more interesting aspects of each book. My next strategy is to write about those. Coming up:
- Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
- Getting Things Done by David Allen
- The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
- The Dip by Seth Godin
- The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
- Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun
- The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz
- I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi
Lot’s of books. I’ve read most within that list already, I just haven’t gotten around to writing about my thoughts for each semi-eloquently. It’s all scribbles and mind-maps in my Moleskine at this point.
Otherwise, I’ve been working on software development skills, learning Vim once and for all (switching from TextMate), and learning Clojure for a rewrite and significant enhancement of integration software currently written in Ruby.
And once my system is fixed and everything organized once again, I should have many, many photography updates as well. This excites me …
In Ramit Sethi’s personal finance book entitled I Will Teach You to Be Rich, he discusses the importance of keeping track of customer support call information. I’ve been doing this for years in a web-application called Backpack. Great idea, great tool.
The mere thought of tracking customer support call information might be considered anal-retentive to many. But, truth is, having that information available is incredibly powerful. When a customer rep tells you “we don’t have a record of you ever asking us to remove that late fee, and no, we can no longer remove it because it’s been 30 days since the charge was incurred,” being able to refer back to previous calls, dates, times, names of reps, is POWERFUL stuff. Don’t be surprised if they immediately back off and start playing nicely — that’s exactly what will happen.
Of course you could use pen and paper to record this information, but the great thing about Backpack is that it’s available any time, from any computer with internet access, anywhere in the world. Keeping track of more than just customer support call information is a great idea too (some of those I’ll be discussing in later posts).
My strategy for keeping track of customer support call information is to keep it all in one Backpack page. I’ve created a Backpack page named “Call Logs” and then created a note for every company whose support call information I want to track. Within the note, I use the following bit of marked-up text as a table header:
|*Date*|*Time*|*Name*|*ID*|*Comments*|
When creating a new entry in reference to a call, it might look something like this:
|2009.03.04|3:15pm|Mark|---|Asked for lower APR, declined|
And the whole note, after several entries, might look something like this:
|*Date*|*Time*|*Name*|*ID*|*Comments*|
|2008.07.23|4pm|Allison|123|Asked to remove late fee (I forgot to pay), they removed, offer one a year|
|2008.08.15|2pm|Steven|---|Noticed that late fee was never removed, reluctant to remove at first, but after discussing details of July 23rd call with Steven, he finally noticed the call in the system and happily removed the late fee, apologizing for the mistake|
|2009.03.04|3:15pm|Mark|---|Asked for lower APR, declined|
The end result looks much better:
Backpack is a great tool, and incredibly useful for staying organized and keeping track of all sorts of things. Try it out!
The first week, a long business trip that seriously racked my brain. I didn’t realize how tired I really was until finally settling down at the airport — a 3-4 hour wait for my flight. My name never makes it off the standby list for the earlier flights. The trip — it was a success — many things learned, and the bed at the hotel was comfortable too. Below is a snapshot of a pond near the building I spent most of my time during the trip.
The second week, sick from the incredible amount of allergens floating around that my susceptible immune system couldn’t fight off. The combination of allergens and an exhausted body spell sickness for me. This time I was lucky that my lungs didn’t fill up with fluid like normal, causing me asthma troubles that are never any fun. I have blown my nose 53,535 times, but I won’t have a problem blowing it 14,236 more times if that means I can continue breathing semi-normally.
I discovered something more important than any of the technical details I learned during that first week: it’s difficult determining if the grass is actually greener on the other side. Because you see, on the other side, the room was much roomier, the bed bigger, and the sleep more sound. But, everything really important to me was missing: my wife, my family, my pets, and my home. However, it sure was nice sleeping in a king-size bed without cats hissing or dogs barking through the night (much less Sarah getting up to pee every five minutes for her new friend, Mr. Kidney Stone).
So two weeks have passed by and I haven’t gotten to do much of what I enjoy doing most: making photographs. Those wildflowers painting the sides of roads with beautiful color won’t be hanging around forever. I’m just glad things are back to normal.
