Work Lean

Cloud – You make my heart bleed.

All of your important data is already in the cloud, so embrace the danger.

The danger includes all kinds of things, bank and retailer screw ups, social media profile hacks, some sort of monthly bug or attack like last week’s Heartbleed. My prediction, in the future they’re going to start naming these digital bug storms like hurricanes.

A few months ago, I was trying out the much-maligned healthcare.gov site, mostly out of curiosity and to make sure we’re getting decent rates on our healthcare costs. I waited until all the initial complaints about the website had died down to give it shot. The experience wasn’t bad, but as I was putting in my entire family’s Social Security numbers, and a ton of other information, I realized just how much data we all have in the cloud.

If you have a bank account, use a credit card, email or file your taxes electronically, most of your important data is already in the cloud. What is the cloud? It’s a server in a data center, most likely secured behind a steel door guarded by an entry-level member of the nightwatchman community. It really doesn’t matter how many steel doors or security guards they have because that’s not how people break into these facilities. The real security guards are the coders and often former hackers these companies hire to keep bad guys, bugs, and viruses from visiting the server from the other side of the world.

When the term cloud computing became popular many of the major hosting companies just added the word cloud to a lot of their existing server packages – “boom” we are in the cloud and so are you. We’ve all been in the cloud for a while. The cloud is not going anywhere, sort of like this past winter.

You can’t hide from the cloud

There are entire books written about becoming digitally invisible and they have very little to do with deleting your social media profiles. Many of them have titles like “how to disappear” and involve living on a deserted island and spear fishing for survival. Most of the people who are reading these books have much bigger problems than someone snagging their debit card number and pin from the Target database. [Read more…] about Cloud – You make my heart bleed.

Bootstrapping Your Life. How a low overhead lifestyle will make you feel 25 years younger.

03/14 by The Frug Leave a Comment

What is Bootstrapping?

In my work life, I have bootstrapped two companies. Essentially that means bringing them to life and growing them from operating revenues with no outside investment. The biggest advantage of bootstrapping your own company is that you maintain control over decisions without the outside influence of venture capitalists or investors. The downside is the risk to the entrepreneur’s personal finances.

To minimize this risk, bootstrapped startups minimize overhead expenses so that revenues can be put to work efficiently. Overhead expenses for a service-based business could include expenses such as rent, utilities, and insurance. Even as the company grows, profits need to be reinvested and emergency funds need to be established for the inevitable lulls in business, shit storms and occasional outright chaos that comes with the territory. [Read more…] about Bootstrapping Your Life. How a low overhead lifestyle will make you feel 25 years younger.

Lean Investing. Doing Less to Earn More.

03/14 by The Frug Leave a Comment

by Brad Beckstrom

With most things in life, simpler is better. I’ve learned this is especially true in investing. It started out simple enough, it was the 80s and I was working at my first job out of college. I had a few dollars to invest so I purchased a mutual fund. It was the hottest fund at the time, The Fidelity Magellan fund managed by the infamous Peter Lynch. It was a few days before Black Monday one of the largest single day drops in US stock market history. I was off to a fabulous start.

But I stuck with it. I added a small amount to the fund each month. Over time, I purchased other funds, international funds, bond funds, small-cap funds, mid-cap funds, over-the-counter funds. At some point I consolidated all these funds into a Fidelity Brokerage account.

The brokerage account was very appealing to me. I could make stock purchases online and rollover retirement accounts into one place. I could shop in a mutual fund supermarket (Fidelity was one of the first brokerages to offer access to competitive mutual funds via a fund supermarket.) This made it easier to add even more variety to my portfolio funds with names like Pacific Tiger, The Clipper Fund, California Muni. I would look for funds highly rated by Morningstar. What could go wrong with a four-star rated fund? I was pretty much an investing genius. It was 1999.

The bubble bursting in 2000 was a wake up call. I would continue to stick with investing, but I would need an even more diversified portfolio, loading up on more bond funds and international funds, as well as individual value stocks. I would follow a bulletproof portfolio philosophy and be highly diversified, adding real estate investment trusts, emerging markets and global bond funds. Online trading made tracking and adding all of these investments much easier.

At one point, I owned over 30 different stocks and funds spread out across retirement and investment accounts. They were all with one broker, but it was a mess, hard to balance and even harder to fix. Not long before the global financial crisis in 2008, I also realized that many of these funds moved in the exact same direction, especially during a downturn.

Through all my efforts, I had basically created a giant global index fund with one key point of difference — I was wasting thousands of dollars in annual mutual fund fees. As with everything else in my life, I needed to simplify.

Around this time, I discovered The Stock Series by James Collins. I can sum up James’s investing philosophy with three bullet points:

You can’t beat the market long-term.
Buy no more than three low-cost index funds to cover the entire market
Low cost means funds with expense ratios of under 0.10%.

I can promise you once you read his stock series, you will be sold on this approach. If you need more convincing, visit personalcapital.com and try out their free 401K fee analyzer. You will find. as I did, that some of the mutual funds in your account have fees that are 10,15 or 30 times what James Collins is recommending.

How do high fees impact investments? Here is a sample for a 30-year-old active investor with a variety of widely traded mutual funds with fees ranging from 1.35% to 2.75%. Here’s the shocker, this investor will lose 44% of his earnings to fees from now to his retirement age at 65.

Image: Personal Capital 401K Analyzer Example

The funds listed in this example are actual funds and their fees are fairly typical. In my own research, I found that many of the funds I owned were charging fees ranging from 0.67% to 1.75%. Again, 10 or 20+ times the fees Vanguard charges for one of the funds that James recommends. Vanguard total Stock market Index fund VTSAX. Expense Ratio 0.05%. For those who don’t have access to Vanguard Funds you can research similar total stock market index funds. I was able to find Fidelity Spartan Total Market Index Fund with an expense ratio of 0.06%. FSTVX

If you want to do a quick check of your funds fees, you can also use Google Finance. Just type in the symbol of any mutual fund you own and scroll down to key statistics you will see both expense ratios and management fees.

If you’re a 30-year-old investor, you can thank me later after you’ve saved hundreds of thousands on fees over the course of your investing life. I found one of the added benefits to be less worry about picking a dog stock or a dog fund, and more free time through simplification.

So here’s my quick recommendation for simplifying your investing life.

Read the The Stock Series by James Collins. You can just start with the first five posts and get most of what I’ve discussed here.
Get a handle on what you’re paying in fees. You can use the free automated tool at personalcapital.com or go the manual route using Google finance to look up individual funds.
Make a quick spreadsheet of all of your funds called portfolio makeover include funds from your company 401(k) or 401(k) rollover accounts. You can also include fund investments in non-401(k) accounts
Make a plan to move money out of the funds in 401K accounts with the highest fees first.
Set a goal to consolidate all of the funds into two or three total stock or bond low-cost index funds representing the total stock market with expense ratios of than 0.25%
Buy and hold, avoid trying to time the market.

Not sold on this approach. I’ll drop in one simple chart from John Bogle.

I’d love to hear your experience in simplifying your investments. A quick disclaimer — Any concepts presented on this blog are simply opinions and should not be considered as professional investment advice. As with most other things in life, you are solely responsible for your own choices, make them thoughtfully.

The Frug

How to create your own personal search engine and remember everything.

01/14 by The Frug Leave a Comment

– Brad Beckstrom- Thefrug.com.

Have you ever scribbled a quick note, found something on your smartphone or online and bookmarked it, only to never find it again? Sure, the bookmark in your browser worked fine, it’s just you’re having trouble remembering some of the details, like what it was you thought was so great about the company, idea, article, gadget or piece of information in the first place. If the thought comes to you again this certainly makes it hard to find.

This can be especially frustrating at work. What was the name of that company that makes that free widget? Wazzle, Ziplot, Xplant. Search even becomes more difficult with all of the similar sounding Web 2.0 names out there. There’s just not enough information in most domain names or descriptions to make bookmarks very useful.

I have hundreds of bookmarks, dating back years. They are basically useless broken links from companies I don’t recall much about. I’ve found a better way.

On May 9, 2009 at 10:07 AM, I discovered Evernote. A free note taking, smartphone, web and desktop app linked to the cloud. I remember this because every note is automatically annotated with a date time and location. I took a picture of a place I wanted to stay at the beach. The photo automatically included a map and was now searchable by the address, name of the property, date time month location etc. Even the text in the photo of the sign was automatically synced and searchable. This included text in logos like Sunspot below.

I was just getting started. I also added the free Evernote App to my iPad , Google Chrome, and the desktop version for my Mac. All of these sync with one free Evernote account. This is where the personal search elements really come in handy. Once you add Evernote to your browser, you can clip and quickly tag information on any webpage. Evernote then saves all kinds of information to help you find that page in the future. You can add your own tags like “Taxes” or “Vacation“ or “To Do.” This browser plug-in / extension is available for most modern browsers and is super convenient for quickly saving a simplified version of any article, stripping away all of the extraneous screaming headlines and other unrelated information like banner ads with dancing monkeys.

For traveling, I like to add the airport code as a tag or note to make things easier to find. like PDX for an upcoming trip to Portland. The Frug likes to make reservations way in advance and this comes in handy when trying to instantly pull up flight, hotel and event details I lined up four months ago. It’s also helpful when you visit a city several years later and want to pull up your old info, like a cool restaurant or hotel you found. You can also clip any type of information and attach it to a to do or reminder in Evernote. Example: book this hotel next May.

The greatest feature of Evernote is the search function. You can obviously search in the app or in your Evernote account but the most useful feature is the search plug-in for your browser that displays all of your past related notes directly in your Google search results. So, if I search Dewey Beach not only do I get that note I created back in 2009, but also some important info related to a client program and a hotel reservation.

After a very short time, you will find yourself remembering everything and being of great assistance to friends, clients and family members who can’t remember the name of that thing we found or place we stayed. Because you’re primarily searching just your results, there’s much less muck to dig through to find what you’re looking for.

Here are my five quick steps to creating your own personal search engine with Evernote:

Go to Evernote.com and create a free account.
Download the desktop app and browser plug-in available for most computers.
Activate the browser plug-in or extension, Evernote calls this web clipper.
Get the smartphone app.
Start clipping, snapping, tagging and sharing anything that interest you. You’ll be glad you did later.

You’ll also be able to get rid of all those notes and scraps of paper that pile up on your desk and in your wallet.

Do you suffer from click tangents? How to get on a high quality, low information diet.

12/13 by The Frug Leave a Comment

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Herbert Simon

The first time I read about a low information diet was in one of my favorite books The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris. Tim talks about cultivating selective ignorance by ignoring news in general. It took me a while to adopt this philosophy, but living just outside of Washington DC, it’s become enjoyable ignoring the news, with a US Congress that has basically become a circus of bought and paid for fools, on both sides of the aisle.

I’m sure many may push back on this idea saying that they need to keep up on business news for their job or for the concern that they may come off as uninformed on current world affairs.

So, instead of ignoring all news, I am going to share my strategy for ignoring 24/7 world news outlets and, at the same time, improve the quality of information that’s relevant, and most importantly, enjoyable for you.

1. Ignore the major news outlets. All of them. Everywhere.

If this is a diet, then most major news sites are potato chips. Little distractions and pieces of news that you click on and 30 minutes later you forgot what you were doing. These include those little feature articles at the bottom of news sites with fascinating tidbits of information that you just have to click on. As an ad guy, I can tell you many of those articles are bought and paid for and really don’t have any useful information that cannot be found elsewhere from a better quality source.

Even with my efforts to ignore them, these types of stories occasionally still find me, primarily through cookies in my browser. Next thing you know I’m clicking through 10 slides about some useless tidbit of information that has nothing to do with what I’m working on or any entertainment value.

I still find myself occasionally wandering off on what I call “click tangents.” .Take a look at my browsing record and you can even see that the link I clicked on regarding inexpensive places to live was a paid link. If you start at the bottom you can see I was reading an article about Apple’s deal with China Mobile and was distracted by one of those boxes with eight pieces of fun and interesting news tailored specifically to my browsing history aka cookies. Then I continue to click through 10 consecutive slides that also were on pages with ads tailored to my browsing history.

While this may be effective for clients promoting products it’s certainly not effective for getting anything done personally.

2. Quality Content Curation

Recently I shared my rant on cutting your cable bill using content curation for TV viewing. The same strategy can be applied to the entire web, including what you listen to in the car or on your phone. This can all be accomplished with two simple tools RSS feeds (reading) and podcasts (listening).

Get an RSS feed reader. RSS now stands for really simple syndication. In a nutshell it allows you to follow a distraction free list of the most knowledgeable sources on any topic. I’m going to just recommend one feed reader here (Feedly) but there are many out there. Once your feed reader is set up you can search for top bloggers authors and writers on nearly any topic.

I like Feedly as it allows you to easily group and filter the blogs and writers you follow. They also have smartphone apps and apps that work right in your browser for Google Chrome, Safari and others. They also make it easy to un-follow or quickly add feeds directly from websites. Once your feed reader is installed, just type in the feed or topic you’re looking for and click subscribe.

You can organize feeds into simple groups.

personal finance
comedy
photography
technology
cooking
fitness

Now you’ve created high-quality curated news that’s designed just for you. You can completely skip over reading about Congress, the latest budget battles or Middle Eastern oil negotiations. Major news outlets just shovel the stuff out and are trying to deliver lots of content surrounded by distractions.

If you’re just starting out, go slow. Just follow a few of your favorite bloggers or writers. Avoid the major news outlets and other (firehose style) feeds that dump five or six articles per day into your feed. These will get old fast and you’ll be right back where you started with too much content and not enough quality. Search for quality content from writers who post maybe one or two well thought out articles per week.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Tim Ferriss

Mr. Money Mustache

AJ Leon The Pursuit of Everything

The Minimalists

If you do most of your reading on a tablet or smartphone, I would recommend the app Flipboard. You can search and follow the same writers there. The app uses a fantastic touch interface that is perfect for these devices.

3. Quality mobile curation for your listening pleasure

Once you dump the news outlets, it’s time to get rid of their radio broadcast counterparts including all the chucklehead DJs deep diving into completely useless topics. If you like to get your newly curated content on the go, walking or in your car and don’t want to be one of those people stepping off curves or worse because they’re looking at twitter on their phone then it’s time to rediscover podcasts. Podcasts used to be a pain in the ass. You would have to download them or transfer them to your iPod then try to sync the whole mess and go back in and delete stuff.

This has all changed with smartphones. Just search for a highly rated podcast app in your phone’s app store. You’ll be amazed at all of the high quality content on virtually any topic delivered commercial free largely with the exception of a few sponsor mentions. You’ll never hear another law firm or next day loan ad again. I’ve been using the new podcast app in iOS7 and I will never listen to the radio in the same way. Here are a few podcasts I’ve discovered and I’m just getting started:

Ted talks audio – Ideas worth spreading

Blogcast FM with Srinivas Rao

The Nerdist podcast

This American Life Podcast

Once you download the podcast app, you can search under any topic or try out a few that interest you from the popular by genre list. I recommend downloading a few recent episodes while on Wi-Fi so when you want to go for a run or a long drive they’ll be loaded up and ready to go and won’t run up your wireless bill.

Good god, I ramble on, time to wrap this up.

Simplify your life and avoid click tangents by putting some heavy-duty quality filters on any information that comes into your world.

Avoid the major news outlets. They profit from sensationalizing bad news that has little effect on your day-to-day life.
Curate what you do read with a high quality RSS Feed Reader.
Stop listening to chuckleheads and news on the radio. Subscribe to a few high quality podcasts.
Avoid similar distractions on Facebook and Twitter by using RSS feeds and podcasts.

Keep living lean….The Frug

Crush your ADD tendencies using a Pomodoro.

11/13 by The Frug Leave a Comment

Crush your ADD tendencies using a Pomodoro.

ADD. Attention Deficit Disorder. You hear this term so often now “She’s so ADD” or “Oops, that’s my ADD kicking in again.” Seems like many people have just self diagnosed. I believe most are just suffering from ADD tendencies created by our time crunched, multi screen lifestyles. The constant stream of Facebook updates, Twitter streams, and 24/7 streaming video, news, weather, celebrity updates. It’s difficult even for the most focused of us to get stuff done. There are a lot of “get stuff done” systems out there. Sure!!!! Just add one more checklist or website I need to go to to get stuff done, right? No thanks.

The High Intensity Answer

I’ve stumbled upon what I believe is an excellent solution for those with ADD tendencies. The answer lies in high-intensity training methods. Recently, I switched from traditional workouts, maybe two or three times a week to daily workouts, incorporating high-intensity training for short 20 minute periods.

This has been very effective for several reasons. When you know you can get something done in 20 minutes, there’s less dread involved in the task. Using high-intensity training, my workouts are so quick that they’re over before they feel like they’ve gotten started. The big advantage here is that I can always find 20 minutes to squeeze one of these in daily. This versus the two or three days a week I was trying to fit in a 60 minute workout which was significantly more difficult.

This worked well for me, so I began thinking about how the theory behind high intensity training could be applied to other everyday tasks. In my search, I came across the Pomodoro technique.

Are you ready, because it kicks ass.

The Pomodoro technique was named after a popular kitchen timer called the Pomodoro. This is a basic 25 minute kitchen timer. The Pomodoro technique involves focusing on single tasks in 25 minute intervals. The technique is designed to block and manage distractions during these intervals. (Don’t worry, you don’t need to set a kitchen timer on your desk. You can use any timer, or your smartphone, to time your intervals)

The technique works by training you to block distractions during, and completely focus on, the single task at hand during each 25 minute period or “Pomodoro.” Once you start a Pomodoro, you’ve committed to avoiding any distraction until the 25 minute period of focus is completed. It’s fine to mentally acknowledge a distraction and then train yourself intentionally avoid it. See – just now I acknowledged a distraction to search for the Molly Cyrus Wrecking Ball video I heard someone talking about. By the time I finish typing this, that distraction may be forgotten. If not I can just get to it after this interval.

Over time you learn to use these Pomodoros effectively, assigning one or more to each project you need to get done during the day. You’ll learn to quickly estimate how many Pomodoros certain tasks will take. For instance, this blog post may take two Pomodoros with a break in between.

Eliminate Burnout

Just like in interval training, the breaks are important. Essential to the Pomodoro method is the notion that taking short scheduled breaks while working helps eliminate task burnout and keep you focused.

Conclusion

The endgame is you get more done and take more breaks. You’ll find that the 25 minutes of focus makes it a lot easier to ignore phone calls, tweets and other distractions while that timer is running. It also helps you identify the distractions. When I first started using it, I had to set my phone, with the timer running, in clear view so if I had the urge to check something online or pick up my phone, I quickly saw I had X number of minutes left in that interval.

The more you do this, the better you’ll get. Check out the video and read the book on becoming a Pomodoro Master. Clearly something you’ll be able to brag to your friends about. “Wow, who would’ve thought Brad would ever become a Pomodoro Master.”