The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in this video I'll talk about the benefits of block scheduling and show you the tool that I use for it -- WeekCal -- an app for the iPhone and iPad. Block scheduling is one of the hot productivity ideas right now.  Basically, it refers to the idea of blocking time on your calendar for specific tasks, projects, or themes and then following that schedule by actually shifting focus when the block changes just like you are changing classes in school -- even if you haven't entirely completed the task you were working on.  Your block schedule usually recurs either daily or weekly, but you can always change it up based on what you have going on that particular day.  So, your weekly block schedule might look something like this with each block representing a specific task, activity, project, or theme. Block scheduling is particularly good for people who don't already have a ton of structure built into their ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll show you how I set up regular reminder emails using Google Calendar.  If you’ve seen some of my other videos, you’ll know that I use Gmail as the main single-stream communication funnel for the electronic information in my life. That means I check my email frequently.  I am also super forgetful and basically run my life on reminders.  I have lots of systems — see my plethora of videos — but many times, I would like a reminder delivered to my email inbox.  I've tried a bunch of solutions to this issue including Memo To Me and Boomerang -- some of which cost money, but I prefer to use Google Calendar since it is already a tool that I use frequently. There are two types of email reminders. The first is an Email Reminder with Appointment So, sometimes I KNOW that I’m going to forget an appointment or to do something at a specific time.  Here are a couple of e...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll tell you all of the reasons that I use Google Calendar and iOS Calendar together.  I did a video a little while ago encouraging you to ditch iOS’s innate Calendar app and use Google Calendar. I still totally stand behind that decision, but I have a confession to make — I didn’t entirely delete iOS Calendar. Instead, I use both apps together working in parallel  Google Calendar is my front man, iOS Calendar does some work behind the scenes. Let me show you how.   Search Searching your Google Calendar using a desktop browser is amazing, but on mobile devices the search function leaves much to be desired.  For example, if I’m searching for the last time I had dinner with my friend Debbie, the browser produces all of these results, while the mobile app only produces these.  It seems like it might be a problem with the amount of historic data that the a...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I resurrected the Quick Add feature that Google Calendar killed off in their last interface release.  This allows you to schedule appointments using normal English syntax (rather than having to parse everything into database fields).  I'll also show you how I use this practically in my life.   I'm not sure exactly when Google Calendar did away with the Quick Add function, but I miss it.  Normally, when you put in an appointment, you have to parse your fields for subject, date, time, location, etc. like you are putting in a database entry.  The Quick Add feature used to let you type in a calendar entry using normal English grammar, Like  "Lunch with Sally on 2/28 12-2pm at Panera" and it would do the work of parsing that information into the database fields with reasonable accuracy.  Getting rid of this feature, frankly feels like tec...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share how I get organized and stay on top of my assignments for my part-time grad school program.  First of all, let me just say that although my life seems hectic to me, it is no where NEAR what some of my fellow students are experiencing.  There are lots of folks who are part-time students, working full time, and raising small children, some of them as single parents. Hats off to them.  That said, I think my methodology could be helpful for anyone — regardless of how crazy your schedule is.   I started grad school this fall, so I’m still working through some of the tools I’m using. I started out with a different organizing system than the one I use for everyday life and promptly discarded it after a couple of months.  Life is too crazy to have to check multiple systems.  If you’ve seen any of my ADHD videos, you’ll know that I use Toodledo for a task l...

Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock with the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share how I plan big projects out using Toodledo and Google Calendar.   Okay - you have a big project looming and you are doing EVERYTHING you can to avoid getting started. Where do you even start?  We all know that awful saying about how to eat an elephant.  Well, of course that is how you have to handle big projects — one bite at a time.  So, the first thing you do is give yourself a 30 minute task — today or a couple of days in the future — to sit down and break down the individual tasks making up the project. I do this on a Google spreadsheet — I’ll  link  to a sample of the one I use for brainstorming.  You need to break it down into doable tasks and estimate how long each will take.  Let me give you an example.  I have a 15-page term paper due for one of my grad school classes this semester.  It’s about 5 weeks out from the due date...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll tell you why you should ditch the innate Calendar app on the iPhone and use the Google Calendar app.  A couple of weeks ago I decided to stress test the Google Calendar app for iPhone and iPad and temporarily ditch the innate iOS Calendar app that I had been using for nearly a decade.  Okay -- admittedly this was a pretty low risk proposition on my part: I already use Google Calendar to sync with my iOS calendar, so i didn't need to migrate data or manage parallel systems during this test.  I could cut over immediately with no import or really any work at all. AND I could revert back to the old system at any time without any loss of data.  I had tried the Google Calendar app at times in the past, but I have some picky requirements that I am not willing to compromise on, so the app never totally met my needs. I guess they have done some development, since I'm now us...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar and in today's video, I'll show you how I use Evernote to "attach" files to my iPhone calendar events.  I use Google Calendar to keep track of personal and family appointments.  And I access Google Calendar from a variety of places, but the majority of the time I'm looking at my calendar from my iPhone or iPad.  Up until this week, I've been using the built in iPhone Calendar app.  I decided to try out the Google Calendar app, which I like so far -- but this video really applies to either mobile app.  Just a quick technical note before I dive in - Between web-based Google Calendar and the indigenous iPhone calendar app, most of the fields translate perfectly. Like date, time and place. But some fields don't have counterparts. For example, the URL field in the iPhone Calendar app doesn't have a corresponding field in Google Calendar, so if you populate it on your phone, it doesn't show...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll review all of the systems and apps that I use for reminders.  This is part of a series on my ADHD brain and all of the systems I use to compensate for a lack of internal structure and organization.   Okay -- if you've seen other videos in this series, you know that I use a bunch of systems to help me remember events, tasks and correspondence.  I rely heavily on three tools: Gmail (single stream email), Google Calendar (scheduling), and Toodledo (task management).  I commit to checking these 3 apps daily and keeping up with my commitments for each.   But even so, some things were still falling through the cracks. So, in some cases I needed additional help to plug the holes.  Timers Okay, so I'm very distractable. If I put a load of laundry in, it could be days later when I realize I haven't moved the wet clothes to the dryer. Yuck.  Partially for ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today I'm going to share an overview of the organizational tech systems I use to compensate for my ADHD forgetfulness and distraction.  I come from a long line of folks afflicted (and blessed) with ADHD Inattentive type. Everyone in my family of origin has some degree of ADHD and I've passed it down to both of my kids. They are, as you can imagine, eternally grateful. I've never been diagnosed and I don't take medicine for it, but I definitely have many of the symptoms: distractibility, organization problems, forgetfulness, and tragically bad working memory (or the ability to keep more than 2 things in your head at one time). Even though I didn't have a label for what I was dealing with early on, I knew I needed to compensate for my clear deficits in these areas, just to get stuff done and not be constantly apologizing for not responding, missing appointments, and forgetting things.  The wa...

In this video, I'm going to show you how to use Google Calendar to share your family's schedule in real time with all of the members of your family.  See if you can relate to this scenario: it's Tuesday morning, as your son is headed out the door and you have 500 things on your mind, you realize you haven't yet given him the plan for the day. So you run out after him yelling, "Remember!  Today is Tuesday, so I'm picking up from school and taking you directly to tennis. Do you have your tennis shoes?  No, okay -- I'll pack them. Also, Dad is picking you up, so make sure you call him when you are finished. And I'm taking your sister to choir, so I won't be there when you get back!"   Or how many times have you had this conversation with your husband. Where he says: "Wait what is the schedule this weekend?  Who has a tournament, where is it, who's driving?  Can you just review everything that is going on both days for me?" ...