inbox0

This is my goal. Twice a day, my inbox is empty...for at least 10 seconds.

This post originally appeared on the Hermit Haus Redevelopment website on 2019-11-22.

Are you a slave to your inbox?

Email is supposed to be a tool that helps us be more effective by communicating efficiently. But like many other productivity enhancements, email has become a time suck that actually degrades our effectiveness.

Half of the problem is that email is such an efficient way for other people to demand our attention and time, two of our most limited resources. The other half is that we allow them to do it. Today, I want to share a hack I discovered by accident a long time ago. Since then I’ve learned it’s a legit strategy and also has its own hashtag, #inbox0.

I actually clear my inbox twice a day with a simple five-step process. Most of you probably already know my process. For y’all, please take this post as a call to action or a review. I hope the rest of you will find something useful here.

1. Block your time.

I work my inbox twice a day in designated time blocks: once as part of my start of work ritual, and once as my end of work ritual. Each of these activities takes about 30 to 45 minutes. That’s it! An hour and a half a day on email, and I’m done.

Many of us feel a sense of urgency about working our inbox in real time. We may even feel a sense of false accomplishment for responding quickly, even if it’s only to delete spam. But each of those pointless distractions erodes our decision making ability and takes us away from the important things we need to be doing during the day. Studies show that just looking at an email, deciding it’s spam, and deleting it keeps us from doing something meaningful (by our own definitions) for at least 15 minutes. That’s how long it takes us to get back on track with what we were doing before the interruption.

I can hear the objections now. I’ve heard them all before. “I could never do that.” “My boss expect immediate response.” Even, “What if I miss something important?”

In reverse order: if it’s really important, the sender probably has other ways to contact you. But I’ve found almost all “urgent” emails can resolve themselves when ignored for a while.

Your boss is another matter. Just remind them that they would rather you focus on being productive than answering quickly. If your boss is too self-involved to put the needs of the company first, find another boss; your department is probably facing a re-org, whether or not your boss knows it. And if you haven’t noticed, there’s a labor shortage.

And finally: yes, you can. You just have to make yourself feel as good about accomplishing something important as deleting that spam or sending that cake recipe.

This is a fairly light spam load for me, probably because it contains only spam that came in after seven last night.

2. Filter Your Mail

Filtering your email is an automated process once you set up your own filters.

Filters from your email provider are useless. Their job is to make sure you get as much mail as possible. That’s how they measure their effectiveness. Some even make money by allowing some spam through. That’s why I set up my own filters. It takes time, but once it’s done, it’s done. Tweaking those filters only costs a few extra seconds for each tweak, and that’s out of my allotted email time budget.

I filter by junk senders, by specific subject text, and by specific text anywhere in the message. For example, I know that I don’t need to waste time on any message with the word “Viagra” anywhere in the text. It goes straight to the filter.

Filtering out junk senders is a little harder. Most legit stores send their spam from a different email account than their order statuses and invoices. I seldom do business with those that don’t more than once. “Fool me once…” and all that.

I also know that any email with “Just Listed” in the subject is a complete waste of time. Those are retail listings from agents who don’t know anything about what I want. True spam.

3. Review Your Filtered Email

I’ve had my filters in place so long that they only rarely filter out something I want to see. Sometimes, they do. Sometimes I am looking for something that I would normally consider spam. So, I spend a few minutes looking over the messages my filters strain out of the flow. I seldom spend more than five minutes on this step, and I’ve eliminated as many as 300 time wasters in one session. I think that’s a good ratio.

I have several entries from Amazon because they send out spam and mail I need from different addresses. Thank you for that small courtesy, Jeff.

4. Tweak Your Filters

I tweak my filters when I find a message that was caught or passed over in error. Because spammers are constantly tweaking their spam engines, I do the latter more often than not.

Spoofing email addresses makes it harder and easier to filter by sender. My client software isn’t robust enough (it was free) to recognize that mail domains with six subdomains are always spam, but can filter out anything with “.zzzz” where the “.com” should be.

Filtering by text is a highly personal endeavor, so I can’t really give you much, or any, useful advice here. But I did show one of my filters in a sidebar.

5. Pay Attention to What Matters

As I go through the rest of my email:

• Answer what I need to and can
• Set up to-do’s for what will take more time so that I can prioritize them
• Delete a lot
• Tweak my filters

Let me know if you found something you could use here. Maybe share some of your own filters in the comments. We’re all in this together against the spammers. And yes, Domino’s, you’re a spammer. I don’t need three emails a day suggesting your fairly expensive pizza would be a good deal if I just bought more of it.

Thanksgiving 2019

Rollie, Suna, and Declan picked dead things for the table centerpiece. Omnia perit. Photo by Declan

Where’s Declan? Hint: he shows up twice. Photo by Suna

Easy lovin’, everyday’s Thanksgiving,

To count all my blessings,

I wouldn’t know where to start

— Freddie Hart (1926-2018)

I swear I’m not just writing so much about gratitude this week because it’s Thanksgiving in the US. That is a factor, but it’s not the only one. I am really feeling grateful for all that’s happening to me and that I’m accomplishing. But this post focuses specifically on Thanksgiving Day.

Using my new journaling system, I blocked off the whole day as Family Time. And that’s how I spent it. I watched my Cowboys lose again. I listened to someone cry about everyone treating her unfairly. We had friends and family over. And I finally went to bed having accomplished everything on my to-do list—specifically eating too much.

Someone on NPR today said that Thanksgiving is representative of America’s genius. You don’t need to have a specific ethnicity, creed, or religion to celebrate it. All you need is people and food. And to day we certainly had those in abundance. I really am grateful.

The dishes can wait for another day.

Grateful Monday

I am always grateful for these two cute dogs—even when they eat my shoes.

I got to give Milam Touch of Love a check to cover buying materials for the new dog run at the City of Cameron pound. Photo by Suna

Harvey and Suna both love to sing, and I enjoy listening to them.

A big black dog

Little too much gray around the muzzle

A big black dog

Why she ended up at the pound is a puzzle

—Emmylou Harris and Will Jennings

This week is another of those that prove the need to cherish the things that don’t go to plan as much as those that do. Everything you experience goes how you want it to, benefits you or your community in unexpected ways, or teaches you something that will make you a better person going forward.

Sarita snags … again.

The Sarita sale keeps hitting snag after snag. On Friday, the title company called for payoff so they could complete the settlement statement. The mortgage company “couldn’t find the loan.” By the time this snag was resolved, it was too late to finish the statement today. They can finish it on Monday, but FHA requires three days to review it. That would put closing on Thanksgiving Day. Looks like next Monday will be the earliest we can close.

The incompetence of title companies and mortgage companies is outside of my control. I’m doing better at accepting this reality. The Realtor® helping us with the sale thanked me for “being so patient.”

Better living through chemistry. Right? Not so much. I’m grateful to be learning to focus on what I can affect.

Cars are expensive!

Through a series of decisions, we now own three cars that need to be inspected, licensed, and maintained in November. This year, I failed to set up a reserve to handle this expense. So of course, my car needed thousands of dollars in repairs.

The timing is set and can’t be changed unless I trade vehicles. The lack of reserves is something I can correct, and I will.

I am grateful I had more than enough set back in the family’s general reserve account to cover the combined expense.

Tractor Supply rocks!

Suna and I went to the Herne Tractor Supply to buy things for the horses. While we were there, we got to talking with a really nice guy who turned out to be the store manager … at least, until January sometime.

He helped us find all the materials we need to build a big dog run for the City of Cameron’s pound. Now that we know where to find all the materials, Hearts, Homes, and Hands cut a check to Milam Touch of Love, the charity that supports pounds and animal rescues in Milam County, to cover the expense. Next week, we will go pick up all the materials, and my nephew Chris has promised to help put the run together over the Thanksgiving weekend.

I am so grateful we could help further the work of MToL and help take care of the lovely animals who end up in the Cameron pound.

Do I Need a [New] Car?

Once you decide to buy a new vehicle, deciding which model is a delicate balance of needs, wants, and abilities.

This post originally appeared on the Hermit Haus Redevelopment website on 2019-11-16.

This topic has been on my mind a lot. It turns out that none of our vehicles are really suited to the new business, which has some fairly specific needs. Unfortunately, so do I. And those needs don’t have a lot of overlap. But rather than talk about the process of selecting a vehicle, let’s answer the question in the title of this post. Do you really need a new car? Maybe following my thought process can help you with a similar decision.

As I see it, there are three ways to answer that questions:

• Yes, I need a new car.
• Yes, I need a car, but a used one makes more sense.
• No, I don’t need a car at all.

You notice I’m not getting dragged into the semantic nonsense about “pre-owned.” If someone else has owned a car, you can make it a true Daily Double that they used it.

Now, let’s look at those options.

The No Car Option

If you live in big enough city, you may not need a car at all. That doesn’t mean you won’t have any transportation costs. You’ll still have to pay for mass transit and for each ride you take in a taxi, Uber, of Lyft. But those costs are often lower than the cost of owning, and you only pay for what you use. I’m not going to say you pay for what you need, because you may not really need all those trips to Papadeaux.

While somewhere around 80% of the US population lives in metropolitan areas, that leaves 20% of us who do not. For those of us without access to any form of public transportation, the decision boils down to new or used.

For those of us who can’t do without a car, the decision boils down to new or used? That decision involves a huge cost/benefit analysis.

New Versus Used

Most of us want a new car even when a used car will suffice. We don’t really need a new one. But there are a few people who really do need a new car. So, let’s figure out if you really need one or just want one.

Costs

But first, let me tell you why it’s important. Most of us finance the purchase of a new car. That means we pay the price of the car, the additional cost of interest, and the opportunity costs of not using that money elsewhere. For almost everyone, a new car is the second leading source of Bad Debt, right after credit card debt.

Bad Debt is like the flu. It’s very prevalent. Surviving it can make you somewhat stronger. But it sucks (money out of your pocket) while you’re fighting it. For most of us, it doesn’t matter if you have a new car or a used one, but the costs of a new car are generally higher. For example, I bought a new XJ-L in 2013 just after the new models came out. It cost about $90,000. Today, it’s worth about $25,000. I still love that car, but was it worth $65,000 in depreciation over the past six years. That’s only the book value. I’m not going to add interest expenses on this car because I got really good financing where the interest rate was much less than the rate of inflation. (More about that later.)

But even so, for the equity I spent on the car, I could have bought two rent houses in Austin or three (maybe four) in Cameron. Those rentals would have paid for themselves and put money back into my pocket. That is the classic definition of an opportunity cost. Maybe a less expensive car or a used one would have sufficed.

A car may be Bad Debt, but for many of us, it’s a necessary one. It’s a debt that enables us to get out of the house for work, community, and food. I don’t personally know anyone who lives completely off the grid.

Interest Expense

Hearts, Homes, and Hands occasionally needs to move people, their belongings, and accommodations (like wheelchairs). To make sure we have enough room, Kathleen suggested a Yukon/Expedition class vehicle. So, I went shopping.

Sticker shock! These cars are a lot more expensive than you might think. But the slightly used ones were significantly lower priced than the new ones. Someone else had already realized at least some of the depreciation costs. But that didn’t mean the case was closed. Financing costs were so much higher on the used ones that the advertised monthly payment was higher than on a new one. In fact, the finance costs eliminated more than half of the difference in the total cost of the vehicle.

But the more depreciation someone else pays for, the less you do.

Maintenance

Maintenance costs can represent one of the true advantages of buying a new car. Some plans include all the maintenance for the first few years. There is also the perception, not always true, that new cars are more reliable than used ones. My dad used to refer to used cars as “buying someone else’s problems.”

The truth is today’s cars are usually very reliable. Pat Goss once said on MotorWeek, “The least-good cars today are still better than the best cars of twenty years ago.” He was talking about things like fit-and-finish and general reliability.

As a rule, I wouldn’t let maintenance costs factor into my decision for new or or lightly used. You should expect about the same maintenance cost regardless. Now if you buy a 20-year-old clunker, you’ll have to weight the maintenance costs against the monthly payments on a newer vehicle.

First impressions go a long way to establishing our credibility. Data shows it also helps to be young, healthy, white, and male. So why do I find the guy who shows up so much in my Google search for “credibility” kinda creepy?

Status/Credibility

We tend to think of status as a soft asset, one that makes us fell good but doesn’t pay the bills. An early mentor of mine said, “Status is when you look good and smell good, but you’re broke.” It took me a long time to overcome that mindset. I now prefer to think in terms of credibility.

For many of us—investors, real estate agents, and other professionals—credibility is our life blood. Without it, we don’t make deals. And we don’t make money without deals. It’s a sad fact that many people form their opinions about us based on what we drive. That’s why I think of that Jaguar as “instant credibility.” When I lived in Austin, I could see people’s opinions change for the better when they saw that car. In fact, Phil Grove tells the story of one of his friends being advised to buy a Bentley to attract more investment into his growing business.

But that credibility depends on where you live. In a small town like Cameron, my Jag often buys the “rich snob” reputation instead of the “successful businessman” one. That would hold true whether or not I bought a new or a used Jag. Trades often want to charge me more when I show up in the Jag than when I show up in my 2012 pickup. I’ve overheard them say, “He can afford it.”

What to Drive

I have no idea what, if anything, you should drive. That depends on where you live and what your goals are, and I’m having a hard enough time making up my own mind. I’ll let you know when I figure out what I’m going to do.

Gratitude (Introduction)

Cesar reportedly had a slave to remind him of his mortality. Stoicism suggest we approach every action, every decision as if it were our last. Photo source: The Daily Stoic Store

Of Fronto, [I have learned] how much envy and fraud and hypocrisy the state of a tyrannous king is subject unto, and how they who are commonly called ευπατρίδαι, i.e. nobly born, are in some sort incapable, or void of natural affection.

—Marcus Aurelius

I know you, my theoretical readers, have noticed I don’t blog religiously. A lot of my blogging is playing catch-up, copying what I have written for other publications into this solitary reliquary.

What I do, or try to do, religiously is journal. That’s right, on paper. I’ve found using electronic journaling leads to focusing on minutia at the expense of more important matters. I can jot down a bullet point if something is important enough and then review those jottings to keep my focus on what matters.

Part of my journaling practice involves meditating on what I am grateful for each day. I focus on two things first thing in the morning as part of my wake-up transition. I also leave room for one more to be discovered in the course of the day. That way I am reminded to always be on the lookout for something to be grateful for. As Marcus Aurelius said, “The quality of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts.”And I want the quality of my thoughts to guide me toward gratitude and tranquility...as well as financial success. Those three goals are not mutually exclusive. According to Maslow, they are linear and dependent.

I first read Aurelius either late in high school or early in college. I’ve kept a copy of his Meditations with me ever since. As a stoic, he believed that we should be grateful for everything that happens to us—good, bad, and indifferent.

We don’t know if a thing is good or bad when we experience it. We can only make that determination in hindsight, once we look back and see its effects. For example, a friend of mine developed sever stomach pains. It turned out she had an ulcer. But in diagnosing the cause of the pain, her doctors found out she had picked up a parasite on a South American vacation a couple of weeks before. The parasitic infestation was not advanced enough to cause symptoms, but the ulcer enabled them to find it before it started doing irreparable damage to her organs. Her ulcer, painful as it was, turned out to be a good thing.

Thinking about that, I realized I should publish my gratitude on this blog in the unlikely event that someone will find it interesting or useful. I will start with today’s three items and incorporate future and past items as I can.

Penny and Carlton often make us go,“Awwww.” Photo by: Suna

Today’s Gratitude

Suna’s company

Until she retires, we are maintaining separate residences. She lives in Austin half-time and at the ranch with me the other half. I really appreciate her company when she is here. I also appreciate her absence when she is gone because it reminds me how much I enjoy the time I do get to spend with her.

The Daily Stoic

This podcast reminds me that everyone faces trials and tribulations. These rough patches can be prepared for and are not so upsetting if you teach yourself to expect them. It taught me that I have always tried to live a semi-stoic lifestyle. Like Buddhism, stoicism is a practice, not an accomplishment.

Carlton and Penny

These two have been exceptionally sweet today. They made Suna and I both go, “Awwww” many times.

“Uhmm, yeah. I’m gonna need you to work on ... Saturday...”

Setting goals can be a spiritual experience that helps make sure everything you do supports your core personal values. Background photo by: NASA

This post originally appeared on the Hermit Haus Redevelopment website on 2019-11-12.

I know a lot of people who hate the idea of setting goals. This aversion can make it difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish anything useful—except by accident. I believe the reluctance to set goals stems from the way we were forced to set them and ignore them in favor of 10,000 trivial tasks in the corporate world—only to be punished for not accomplishing them in our annual review.

Yes, I’m talking to you, computer industry!

But I have come to view goal setting as a spiritual practice. It focuses your intent on what matters to you.

All of your goals should derive from your personal values or principles. But you must first identify what those are. Once you do, you can use them to determine whether the 10,000 things that beset you in the course of your daily life support your values or distract you from them. With well-defined goals, you can quickly determine which tasks are important, which you should do now, which you should put off, and which you should ignore. Many of the things that seem urgent in the moment resolve themselves if you ignore them, but others can still come back to bite you in the butt.

An Example

Scheduling your time appropriately probably supports every value you have, from fighting homelessness to spending more time with your family watching Power Ranger reruns for the hundredth time.

Values

Before you can set goals that support your personal values, you must first determine what those values are. Values are what really matters to you. I like to think about values as nouns—ambiguous ones at that. Some values might include:

• Integrity
• Frugality
• Kindness
• Social responsibility
• Family and other relationships
• Independence
• Spirituality

SMART goals help you stay on track to support your values. This picture is one of my computer desktops. I am such a geek!

Attainable Goals

The goals you set to support your values should be attainable, something you can get done. I have talked about SMART goals elsewhere, as has my partner, Russell Mangum. So, I won’t distract you by repeating myself here. Not too much.

Let’s say you have an aspirational value of Social Responsibility, and you’ve decided you want to do something about homelessness. An attainable goal to support that value might be to help Habitat for Humanity build two affordable houses this year.

Milestones

Each of those two houses is a milestone you can check off once it’s built.

Steps and Tasks

Now it gets interesting. To meet that goal, you can contribute your time, your money, or both. Each of which involves layers of tasks and sub-tasks.

If you choose to donate $1,000 of your time, you have to:

• Determine how much an hour of your time is worth.
• Divide $1,000 by your hourly rate to determine how many hours (more or less) you need to contribute.
• Coordinate your schedule with Habitat’s to know when you need to work.
• Prioritize that time to keep it available so nothing prevents you from helping out.

Real World Intrusions

Understanding your values and the goals that supports them helps you decide what to do when an “urgent” task tries to invade your awareness. It enables you to focus your intent on what matters to you and even helps you identify and resolve conflicts between values. So, the next time your boss wants you to work on a Saturday you already have devoted to something else, you can think about it and decide what you want to do. Working that day may bring in more money that you could satisfy multiple values. You could donate the extra money (assuming overtime) to Habitat and provide for your family by keeping your boss happy. Or you could decide what you already had planned is more important to your values and happiness.

Each new request, each new item on your unending to do list is an opportunity to support your values or a distraction from them. It’s really all your choice.

Sponsorships Available

If you do business in the Cameron area, here's a chance to do good and spread the word about your business at the same time. Image by: Cameron Rotary Club

This post originally appeared on the Hermit Haus Redevelopment website on 2019-11-06 and on the Hearts, Homes, and Hands website on 2019-11-06.

Every year, the Cameron Rotary Club hosts a casino night fund raiser. Last year, the Rotary Club raised about $8-thousand for various charities and scholarships.

This fiscal year, Casino Night is 18 January 2020.

Why am I talking about this so early?

Now is the time for the corporate sponsors to sign up. Each year, Hermit Haus parent company Hermits’ Rest Enterprises, which is based in Cameron, sponsors the activity. Hermits’ Rest Enterprises will be joined by its sister company Heart, Homes, and Hands this year.

If you would like to sponsor this fun fundraiser, you can contact me or any other Cameron Rotarian.

What do companies get out of it?

Well, that depends on sponsorship level.

Level	Donation	Tickets	Recognition
Individual	$50	-	Thank you!
Silver	$150	1	Looping slide at the event Show advertisement
Gold	$300	2	Table sponsorship Looping slide at the event Show advertisement

What do individuals ticket holders get?

Each $20 ticket (you can get those from me, too.) entitles you to:

• A night of fun at the charity casino with slot machines and other games
• Dinner
• Drinks—and we are talking adult beverages here

For more information:

• Here is the Rotary Club’s page. You can buy tickets online from the page.
• And here is the Chamber of Commerce’s page on last year’s event. Note the significant drop in the cost of tickets.

Save Money and Lose Weight

Would you pass up a pizza a month to pay off your mortgage seven years ahead of schedule? Photo by: Shutterstock

This post originally appeared on the Hermit Haus Redevelopment blog on 2019-10-09.

Most of us make at least one mortgage payment every month. It’s not one of our favorite things to do, but we do it so that we can continue to have a place to live. Those of us with rental properties probably make a mortgage payment every month for each property.

This week, I learned of a painless way to pay off your mortgage—one or many—early. According to Kristen Berman, co-founder of Irrational Labs (a behavioral economics company), one simple hack can help you pay off your mortgage up to eight years early. That’s right. One simple behavioral twist can save you thousands of dollars in interest on your mortgage…painlessly.

By paying $625 each month instead of $613.86, my friends could pay off this $70K mortgage a little more than three years early. By paying $650, they could pay it of 7.5 years early. This is the power of rounding up.

Would you like to know what it is?

Round your mortgage payment up to the nearest ten dollars and instruct the bank to apply the rest to principal. I can pretty much guarantee you won’t feel the difference in your cash flow, especially if you make your payments automatically. You make the change once, and it increases your net worth and saves you money going forward until the mortgage is paid off. Just by rounding up to the nearest ten dollars, you can pay your mortgage off at least eight months early. If you round up to the nearest $25 or $50, you can save even more.

This graphic shows the difference in rounding up to the nearest $25 and $50 on the $2000 payment in the body of this post. It works the same because $1200 of that $2000 payment goes to taxes and insurance, which never go away, only up.

Think about it. If your mortgage payment is (like one of mine) $2000.72, paying $2010.00 is a negligible difference—less than the cost of a bacon cheeseburger combo at Dairy Queen. Yet it could save thousands of dollars. You can save even more for the cost of dinner out once a month. I’m not saying you shouldn’t ever have a nice dinner out, just that you choose to do it being aware of the cost and benefits. Do it intentionally.

What I really like about this hack is that you already think this way. If I asked my friends what their mortgage payment was, they probably wouldn’t say, “$613.86,” like I did. They’d probably say something more reasonable, like “$615” or “$620.” Our brains are wired to round.

To me, this hack is better than setting up an automatic transfer to your savings account because you can’t sabotage yourself by spending your savings on—okay, necessities—later on. Even if you run onto hard times and have to stop paying extra somewhere down the road, the money you’ve already paid down continues to reduce the amount of interest you pay every month. Until the mortgage is paid off.

The sooner you implement this strategy, the more money it can save you!

Now seriously, when was the last time you heard of a financial tip that can save you money and help you lose weight at the same time?

Lungs

This post originally appeared on the Hearts, Homes, and Hands website on 2019-10-22.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed my lungs, which were never that healthy, have become a lot more sensitive to environmental factors: pollen, scented oils, dust, household cleaners, and so on. I started thinking about this topic because of something that happened the other night.

I was in the bathroom getting ready for bed, when I noticed an uninvited guest. It was some kind of insect. Since we have the house treated for pests regularly, I didn’t have a can of insecticide nearby. Or at all. So I grabbed the first thing at hand, a spray bottle of Scrubbing Bubbles that I keep in the shower.

It was like I turned off that bug’s switch. It didn’t kick or spasm. It just stopped, literally dead in its tracks.

I didn’t think a lot about this at the time because I’ve also killed insects with hair spray.

A couple of nights later, I killed a spider with the Scrubbing Bubbles, which really do a great job on the shower. It was really irritated and hid under a rug. I found it a couple of feet away the next morning.

For once I was glad that growing up near a chemical plant damaged my lungs enough that I instinctively hold my breath whenever I use a spray product. That’s also when I really started thinking.

What is it in this common cleaner that kills so effectively?

When I googled “scrubbing bubbles and lungs,” the top hit was a scary page called “10 of the Most Toxic Cleaning Supplies.” Turns out my favorite cleaner contains some really nasty chemicals (not really a big surprise), including one that is banned in the EU at concentrations of more than 3% for its effects on human lungs.

I’m going to continue using my spray-bottle helper. But I’m going to be even more careful about holding my breath.