Agile Personal Development

I’ve been traveling a lot for work lately (which explains the lack of posts). I’ve always been a big fan of “packing light”. With the latest plans for the airlines to charge even more money to pay for checked luggage, it is especially important now to be able to carry everything on.

I have a great bag (similar to this one, but larger) for business travel. I especially like the ability to convert over to a backpack mode - great for moving quickly through an airport. I normally roll up my non-dress clothing to avoid wrinkling. For dress shirts and slacks, I’ve folded them up inside of an Eagle Creek Pack-It Folder. For the most part, this roll and pack method worked, except I still ended up with large wrinkles in my shirts. I usually wrap them in plastic dry cleaning bags which keeps the small wrinkles from appearing, but I still have the large folds and creases from being folded up. I noticed this seems to be a bigger issue for shirts that have some starch in them.

On my latest trip, I’m checking out “bundle packing” from the OneBag.com site. I’ve been a fan of OneBag for awhile, there are some good tips for what to take and what not to take on a trip. After packing for this latest trip using the bundle packing method, I definitely felt like I got a lot more clothes stuffed into a smaller space that usual. At the same time, it seems like I’ll probably end up with similar large wrinkles to what I got with the folding and rolling methods. Another downside is that it definitely took longer to pack.

Even with the downsides though, the fact that I crammed so many clothes into a small space has me really excited about using this new method in the future. I love having a little extra space in my bag (and being able to easily carry it on), since it seems like it is always harder to fit everything back in on the way home.

For the past two months, I’ve been evaluating the Toggl tool for keeping track of how I spend my time relative to my life budget.  While the initial iteration of the tool worked great, the latest version has taken away a number of the features that I really need. I’ve now decided to move on to another tool. I think the Toggl tool is great for the purpose it was designed for (real-time tracking of tasks), but without features such as being able to easily input a number of tasks that have already been completed or keep tracking tasks if you shut your computer down, it is now too hard to use for life budgeting. This would still work fine if you are tracking your freelance activities while working, but it makes it more difficult to capture tasks when you are not on the computer such as sleeping. I’ve found that since the transition to the new version occurred, I stopped using the tool to track my time since it took too long.

In keeping with the ‘Agile’ part of Agile Personal Development, I’m now trying another tool, 1Time, for doing something similar. I’ll keep you posted over the next two months as I determine the best way to use this tool for Life Budget tracking.