Anthony Panozzo's Blog

This post will show you how I will save roughly $1400 over the next two years by buying a new unlocked phone and getting a prepaid phone plan instead of a standard contract.

Why I Switched

I put my last phone through the washing machine (and dryer), and while it still somehow works, it ain’t pretty. It now can serve as an ugly alarm clock or workout MP3 player.

So, I was in the market for a new phone.

New phones under contract are not often expensive to obtain, but the costs add up over time due to high monthly subscription fees. According to one article, the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a brand new iPhone 5s with mobile hotspot is roughly $2200 - $2700. That is $1225 a year on average. This does not count the new accessories Apple will probably make you buy to connect it to your computer or charge it. :)

Realizing this, I set about finding a cheaper option.

The prepaid option

The last I had heard of prepaid phone plans (PPP) was when I was in college and you used it for either a throwaway number, calling abroad, or you didn’t have good enough credit to pay for a “real” plan. Probably a misinformed bias on my part.

When I looked into them again, a few things appealed to me:

It’s Tuesday at 3 PM. I have a few hours of good work left, but get stuck on something pretty basic. Without thinking, I flit around on the internet for a little while doing fruitless research or goof off or grab a snack, and then return to the problem at hand ten minutes later. I then proceed to fix it in two minutes.

Did it really take me twelve minutes to fix it, or could I have fixed it more quickly by taking the right approach?

I find being able to unblock myself important because I work fairly independently. Bouncing ideas off of others is useful, but perhaps no one else is not around or it would be pretty distracting to bother them. Obviously, it’s important not to overlook coworkers or experts who might know the answer to the question I’m having. These strategies also help others become unblocked.

(Most of the examples and fixes here apply to software development, but they could also apply to business strategy or other domains. I had a subset of this post in The 20% Difference post, but I thought there were more strategies than I outlined there.

I got married in April of this year. I’d like to share the tech we used to make planning and communicating a little easier. Then I will get all mushy at the end.

Project Management

Setting up any large social event takes a bit of planning. We were initially pretty overwhelmed by the amount of things that needed to be done (invitations, ceremony planning, cake tastings, music coordination, and the list goes on and on.) It felt like every time we talked with someone else, there was another thing to consider, and we figuratively chased our tails a lot. What’s more, remembering key deadlines and keeping ourselves on track and motivated was pretty important.

So I thought to myself, “what tools do I know that can help with this?” We need some sort of tool to see what needs to be done and to keep us organized. Pivotal Tracker came to mind, but seemed a bit too geeky and software-specific.

Then I thought of Trello. That seemed lightweight enough, and would provide us with a good dashboard of what needed to be worked on. So step one was to take our list of tasks that started to pile up and put them into Trello.

The next step was figuring out what sorts of columns to do. After some experimenting, we went with the following, from left to right:

• two months after the wedding
• every month leading up to the wedding, in reverse chronological order
• what we are doing this week
• all done tasks

When a new task came to our attention, we tried to slot it based on the other tasks or when it really needed to be done by. For example, getting a dinner tasting needed to precede deciding which dinner options to choose. Then all tasks hopefully flowed from their month to “this week” or “done”. When a given month was over, we could see what tasks still were not complete and to move them to the subsequent month.

Basically the tip is: find some way of playing a sound every fifteen minutes or so, and when this happens, check my posture. I have found this useful for better ergonomics and posture while using my computer.

I’m using the Mindful Mynah app on Mac, and have it set to chime every fifteen minutes or so. When I hear the chime, I quickly check my posture and often find that I can improve it. I think this increases my mindfulness of how I type and sit, as the bell reminds me to check it more often. Even without the bell, I realize that I have incorrect posture more often. The nice thing about automating this process is that I just need to have the intention to have better posture once, and then I can automatically lock in that benefit over time without needing to expend much effort.

Today I want to talk about something I read about in GTD-creator David Allen’s book Ready For Anything.

A key quote for me from his book is: “Nobody will even try to absorb and manage two hundred percent of what they can do. But they will take on enough to let themselves get ten percent behind their curve. And when you are ten percent behind, you feel like crap. But on the other hand, if you can manage to get ten percent ahead, you’re transformed and on top of your world.”

The idea he presented was that there is only a twenty percent difference between being ten percent ahead and ten percent behind, but the difference is huge*. Allen suggests that this 20% difference leads to feeling a general sense of ease and also the ability to think more strategically. Fighting fires does not lead to giving time to think more holistically.