My recent bloghopping led me to AhKong.net’s post of how to save money in electricity bills in Malaysia. The post recommends that you use a power-saving gadget to lower the cost. The gadget itself costs around RM350, which I’m sure is a good investment in the long run if the gadget does work.

However, there is an easier and FREE way to save in electricity bills. It’s a technique that I use and works without fail, doesn’t require any gadget, and applicable wherever you are in the world.

The key is to eliminate what is called “phantom power”, whereby any appliance or charger left plugged into an electric socket, even though switched off and not in use, continually uses bits of electricity. An accumulation of these phantom power are still counted towards your electricity bill and causes you to have to pay extra for energy you’re not utilizing in the first place.

So, how do you eliminate phantom power? Easy. Just unplug your appliances and chargers once you’re done. That’s it! The only appliance I leave on 24/7 is my refrigerator. If you read my post concerning my experience eliminating phantom power, you’d be motivated to do so yourself, since I saved almost 25% off my bill, the same amount that the power-saving gadget claims to help you save.

Sounds good, yeah?

That’s the name of a system I use to organize my life.

Back in the days when I was single and almost constantly in front of the computer, it seems so effortless to use and rely on my MS Outlook and my other computer- and online-based scheduling applications to get me organized. You would think that since I don’t hold a full time job, I have all the time in the world to be in front of my laptop blogging and doing all those IT-savvy stuff. No such luck. I gave up on organizing my life through a computer. Now, it’s a chore to even switch on the computer, while making sure my 7-year-old son is doing his homework, me finishing with the laundry, cooking, stopping my toddler from climbing up the furnitures, etc.

I had to ask myself, though — since my life is more chaotic than ever, shouldn’t organizing and scheduling be more important now? With that, I tried the old-fashioned way of getting myself a filofax/organizer and stuffing all my to-dos and schedules and priorities and my contacts and my business ideas and sketches into it, the way I always did when I was in college. Didn’t work. Just more mess for me to sort away.

So what a relief it was when I read a post from one of my favourite blogs, Success from The Nest, called How I Gained an Hour a Day by Ditching My Productivity Tools. I started following the tips given in the link, and my notebook/organizer now looks something like Bill Westerman’s. I don’t use Post-Its and I don’t keep my receipts (except if it’s tax-deductible), instead I record them almost immediately in my notebook, which is then stuffed into my handy handbag. I love looking at my sketches and ideas for the next big niche site even if I don’t get around to building it, but it feels good to record them and access them whenever and wherever I like. I do use something electronic for one part of my daily scheduling, and that is using my mobile phone (specifically a Nokia N95) for reminders and snapping pictures of important paper-based notices that I don’t have time to note into my organizer.

Here are a few more references if you’re interested:

• The site that inspired me to go for it. The system is called Getting Sh-t Done.
• Many people recommend the hard-to-find Moleskine notebook, but Mike Rohde can show you how to make your own from an ordinary notebook, and here are his notes and thoughts on having an offline planner.
• I use Isahrai’s technique of checkbox marking with the arrows and stuff.

1. Take advantage of single letters and numbers. Bah. Surely you know of this already. Free4u.com is a domain that is simple and easy to type. While that may look good in writing/typing, it is when you have to spread the domain name via word of mouth that the horror begins. I can only imagine the effort it takes to explain to another person, “no, not ‘for’, but the number four… oh, you mean freefouryou.com?… no, the number four… you know, the character four that you draw with three lines… three? you said it was four….“

2. Take advantage of subdomains. It’s so easy for many web sites to implement this technique. Case in point — del.icio.us. Or, my Blog of Rugrats, which is mainly a blog about my babies, may get away with having a cute domain name like ba.byblogging.com. I know, it kind of sounds awkward at first, but so did Del.icio.us, Google.com, and Wikipedia.com at one time or another. The more important thing is what you do with the site and how you brand them that matter in the end.

3. Take advantage of IDNs. Who needs those boring domains like lorna.com or lorna.net when you can get a groovier domain name like lor.na? In fact, I really would have registered for lor.na if Namibian domain names weren’t so expensive. Like approximately USD385.00 expensive. But that’s beside the point. Checking out different international domain names can be fun and may even help you out in branding your web site more prominently than others.

From Through the Eyes of a Recruiter, it basically highlights the following:

1. Listen more than you talk.
2. Network up and down your organization.
3. Be a problem solver.
4. Seek feedback.
5. Don’t curb your enthusiasm.

I’d like to think that I practice all five of them whenever I’m in a new working environment. I’m especially fond of using tactic number 2, where I would even chat up with the cleaning ladies. Oh, the gossips and news you get from them can be really amazing. Not that I’m such a gossip monger or anything, but the info you get from them concerning what’s going on in a company can be dizzyingly accurate. It helps me at least to be alert and take action before any of my colleague would, and takes away the surprise element on any news I get after.