One of the instructors at the spin classes at the gym likes to play this song/advice by Baz Luhrmann at the end of sessions, so its now wedged in my brain.

It seems like pretty good advice though!

I use Dropbox as an offsite backup to complement my Time Machine backups that I have on a pair of external hard drives, however backing up my entire Lightroom catalogue contents to dropbox is impractical due to its sheer size.  So after a bit of searching I figured out how to backup only the good pictures in a structured folder hierarchy of Year/Month/Day in JPEG format to dropbox:

1. Install the DateExport Lightroom plugin, you can find it here on GitHub.
2. Filter the photographs you want to backup in Lightroom.  I use the star rating system built into Lightroom so its as easy as selecting the entire catalogue and filtering out all un-starred images.
3. Export the photographs you’ve just filtered using the DateExport plugin, I have highlighted the two important options in the export dialogue.
   
   The First important option is to use the DateExport plugin for the export and the second controls how the files are exported in this case into a folder hierarchy of Year/Month/Day into my Dropbox.

Backup up Lightroom in a structured manner like this becomes very simple with the DateExport plugin, so I’d recommend using it.  You can export using all the normal options with this plguing e.g. DNG, RAW, sharpening etc but for me right now having an extra backup of the JPEG files is enough as I have a double backup of the RAW files else where.

Inspiring video about getting started by the comedian zeFrank. I watch this every few weeks as a pep talk to myself as he makes some excellent points about getting started and letting go of the fear of starting which can be closely tied to the fear of failing.

An Invocation For Beginnings from ze frank on Vimeo.

I think too often we hold ourselves to a higher standard than we hold other people to and pretend this is a virtue. I think that instead of this being a virtue it can turn into a handicap as it makes us too scared to fail, so scared that we don’t even start. Failure is a natural part of creative iterative process without it we will stale and not progress, I know I need regular reminding of this.

As an engineer it is easy to complain about things that don’t work as well as they could, especially when you first encounter the issue.

However the difference between an average engineer and a truly effective engineer is that effective engineers don’t just stop and complain about a problem, they will actively suggest and implement solutions to allow them to continue working.  This is especially apparent when it comes to repetitive manual tasks, I have witnessed so many people complain about tedious manual processes but then fail to automate the process!  So do not view a problem as a road block preventing further progress, instead view it as an unexpected opportunity to solve a problem and improve something.

A pleasant side effect of this proactive approach is that those that habitually remove problems when they encounter them are also building a reputation as a problem solver and someone who gets things done.  This reputation will dramatically increases the chances that they will be listened to when it comes to getting management buy in to solve a significant problem.

This is an interesting video manifesto from the guys at Hacking Work: working around cooperate processes and systems to achieve higher productivity.

What stands out the most to me in this video is the following statistic: ‘Workers receive 325 pages of information a day but only uses about 5 pages’.  As I’ve recently had to modify my email filtering scheme to mark certain categories of email as read automatically to prevent information overload.

Scott McIntyre recently wrote a post for Zen Habits on ‘The Small-Scale Approach to Achieving Great Things’, I found his post particularly interesting as I’ve observed a similar pattern over the years.

For me, the stumbling blocks to success were that I allowed myself to be overcome by the size of the task and how long it would take to get there. What really helped was to break down the overall journey into smaller steps and to stop looking as far into the future.

To successfully complete a big goal requires breaking the goal down into small actionable steps.  This doesn’t need to be an intricately detailed master plan, knowing as little as the next actionable step is sufficient to make progress.  Without knowing at least the next actionable step it is very easy to become discouraged by the scale of the goal.

It is also easy to underestimate how much the positive feeling of ‘getting stuff done’ when completing these small steps can encourage you to continue pursuing your goal to completion.  Without the feeling of making progress towards a goal it is very easy to become discouraged and give up.