Alan Gutierrez

New Orleans taught me: When someone asks: What do you do? Take aback. Say: Tsk. That is such a personal question. Ask me something else.

What is your guiding principle in your life? Mine? I don’t have one. I never know right from wrong. My gut fails me because it is too busy reporting with a klaxon call the slightest hint of abandonment. What can a person to in the world of reason to guide them?

I quit coffee once. It was before I moved to New Orleans in 2001. I am going to quit again. It makes me nervous. It is an expensive habit. When I am renting space at a coffee shop, I’ll drink orange juice. This morning, I had half a cup, to stave off any headaches. Now I’m sitting here at Bayou Coffee House with a small glass of OJ.

When you have a stuck In-Sink-Erator, you’re going to want to read Installing A Food Waste Disposer from HammerZone.com (Better Living Through Handymanness).

There is a term out there. Lifehacks. A hack in computer science is an elegant solution to a problem, that comes through minimal effort. A life hack is the same, applied to our day to day. I’m reading through two articles about the Shangra-La diet that are lifehacky, one at Creating Passionate Users and another at Aaron Schwartz. In this example, our brains are programmed to want food when it is abundant, we can hack obesity by tricking our brains into thinking food is scarce. In the prior, Kathy Sierra puts down the essence of Lifehacks by saying that you have a brain and a mind, the brain is concerned about legacy issues such as preditors or hunger, while the mind should be worried about career advancement. (Let’s gloss over the huge percentage of the world population for whom neither preditors, nor hunger has become legacy.) I’m finding that Lifehacks are getting pressed to their limit, however, especially in the culling the unhappy meme. A clever hack does not ignore a problem. It addresses it. Culling the unhappy is a Lifekludge.

In applying getting things done, I’m finding that I’m capable of piplineing tasks, in the way that processors pipeline instructions, or better still, the way the salesmen pipline sales. Things happen in parallel. You move each as far as you can go. Because of Getting Things Done organization, you can work on the next action, inching along. Then you’ll find that there are bunch of tasks that need a nudge and they’re finished. Suddenly, you’re getting a handful things done every day, because they are at the end if their pipeline.

Waking up on time is never a problem for me at my place on Esplande Ave in the French Quarter. Windows run all along one side of my narrow slave quarter apartment. The morning sun fills my apartment with light. I’m always awake before nine. I do not own an alarm clock.