The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll make the case for why you need a junk email address. You have a personal email address, right?  And probably one for work?  You also need a junk email address.  Why?  Because every time you sign up for ANYTHING on the Internet these days, you have to provide an email address.  And why do they want your email address?   To send you email -- generally emails asking you to buy things.  These emails are distracting, time-consuming, and potentially budget wrecking.  There is NO REASON that they need to be showing up in your main inbox that you use to organize your life, read news, and catch up with friends and family. So, create a junk email address.   Mine is with Yahoo mail.  It is free -- obviously.  Every time I am asked for an email for something that is not essential, I give them this email address.  So that ap...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share how I use Toodledo to remind myself to schedule outings with family and friends on a regular basis. How many times has this happened to you?  You are with people you really enjoy, but see infrequently.  You've just had a great time together and at the end of the evening, you all say "We should really do this more often!"  That used to be a recurring refrain in my social interactions.  Almost like a goodbye greeting.  Or, the analogous hello greeting would be, "It's been way too long since we got together last!"   So, it occurred to me that perhaps in some cases this was just social niceties, but in many cases, we actually  WERE unhappy that it had been so long since we had gotten together.  And we really DID want to get together more often.  In those cases, I decided I could make that happen with a reminder system. So, I ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll tell you how I read and take notes on non-fiction books.  This method helps me read faster, retain more information, understand the topic better, and gives me notes to come back to later.  How do you read nonfiction?  Do you read one page at a time starting at the beginning — the way you read fiction?  If so, you are probably doing it wrong.  I wish I could find the article that I read many years ago that changed my thinking on this.  Generally speaking, the point of fiction is to entertain and transport — to tell a story.  Also generally speaking, the point of non-fiction is to convince you of something, present a perspective, or educate you.  Now, in some cases, you WILL be reading non-fiction for enjoyment — like memoirs or history — in which case, use your best judgement and read how you want.  But AGAIN generally speaking, the purpo...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll show you how I “take away” my kid’s phone without actually taking it away.  Sometimes parenting can feel a bit like an operant conditioning experiment. You reinforce good behaviors with rewards and discourage bad behavior with punishments. The trick is figuring out what rewards and punishments work for your kid. My son does not have a ton of “levers” that work for conditioning his behavior. He doesn’t seem to be motivated by money, purchases, or curtailing activities. BUT there are 2 things that motivate him: his phone and socializing. I really try not to take away socializing since I feel like it is integral to being a teen and important for their identity development. So that leaves his phone as pretty much my only lever for molding behavior.  This is problematic. First of all, if I take away his phone altogether, it also serves to cut his sole means of communicating with ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll show you how you can use the Notability app to draw a visual representation of concepts with a mind map. First of all, what is a mind map and why would you use one?  A mind map is a visual diagram of a topic showing its interactions with other concepts. That just sounds like blah, blah, blah.  So, here’s how I’ll explain it. Sometimes, you'll have a topic which you can immediately put into linear form, which is how we are forced to present things when using text-based applications like word processors.  I consider an outline to be linear. Let me use an example of a book I’m currently reading. The topic is sleep and the author has outlined four parts to the book. Sleep: What is it? Why do we need it? How do dreams work? How to handle sleep problems Then you can group smaller topics underneath each of these broad categories to create a detailed outline....

Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share the process that I used to digitize all of my old photos. Occasionally, I have these morbid thoughts about what we might lose if our house burned down. I determined that as long as my family and dog got out safely, the only thing I would really mourn were our old pictures. I got my first digital camera in 2001, but I graduated from high school in 1989. So, that is 12 years worth of pictures that aren’t digitized and that don’t have back ups. Plus, there were some momentous things that happened in that period — like our wedding and honeymoon, for which I have like three albums of photographs. Would I be upset if something happened to all of those? Yes!  So, I embarked on a project to digitize them and put them up in the cloud.  I considered using one of the services online where you can mail away your photos and get them back digitized on a thumb drive. There were two issues...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll tell you why I keep a spreadsheet for batteries and light bulbs.  I used to be terrible about changing out lightbulbs that burnt out in my house.  I’d have to haul out the ladder and, let’s be honest, chances are, I’d probably not have the right bulb in stock. So, I’m going get all the way up on the ladder, unscrew the fixture and find that i don’t have that particular bulb on hand.  So, then I either have to screw the fixture back in, put the ladder away, and wait until I go shopping to get the right bulb, OR the more likely option is that I’d just leave the whole thing undone with the ladder there for a week or two before I get the right bulb. Well, NO MORE.  NOW I have a light bulb spreadsheet.  I started this spreadsheet the day I had to change out something like 7 light bulbs — which shows you how I procrastinate!  I brought out my stock of lightbul...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video I’ll tell you how I use 3 different browser for 3 gmail accounts and 3 different roles in my life.  Do you have more than one gmail account?  Maybe one for personal stuff and one for work?  If so, does it drive you crazy when you try to switch back and forth between accounts?  You think you’ve switched, but somehow it keeps going back to a different account?  Or you try to open calendar, but it opens the wrong calendar and you can’t get it to stick on the right one?  It’s a universal frustration.  And somehow, the accounts belonging to Gmail Suite are even more frustrating than the regular accounts!  Okay — first I'll tell you about my overall solution, and then I'll give a couple of additional tips for handling this problem.  My main solution is to use Multiple Browsers Hands-down my favorite browser is Google Chrome, but I also have a couple...