The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll give you another tip for taming your inbox -- creating a 2Read folder. My email inbox is the main way that information comes into my life.  I make a point to get to inbox zero at least once per day.  Does that mean that I handle everything that comes into my inbox right when I get it?  No -- it just means that I don't use my inbox as a to do list.  It's simply a staging ground.   In order to do this, I have some rules around managing my inbox.  I quickly make decisions on each email: Trash, File, Act, or Act Later.  I delete emails I don't need.  I file emails that don't contain an action for me, but that I might need later.  I act on emails that I can take care of in 2 minutes or less.  Anything that takes longer than 2 minutes gets put on my task list.   In order to do this efficiently, you get really motivated ...

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll show you the hack that I use to “import” my Toodledo hotlist into Trello. Toodledo is my main task management system.  It’s essentially a tickler system that reminds me of things that I have to do daily, weekly, every four months or at a specific date in the future. Every day, I wake up to anywhere from 9 to 30 tasks that I should get done today.  Toodledo is fantastic as a reminder system, but when it comes to making a plan to get through a list of 30 tasks — it’s not great.  It won’t let me manually sort the items in my hotlist into the order that I want to do them and the workarounds for this are too time consuming. As a result, if I have more than 10 tasks in my hotlist for the day, I either use Notability to create an image based agenda (you can see my video on that) OR I import everything into Trello. Trello is a really versatile task and project management sy...

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share how I use Trello along with Toodledo for task and project management. My main software for Task Management is Toodledo.  It's a dumb name and it has a pretty clunky interface, but I honestly haven't been able to replace it because nothing else has quite the feature set that I need.  The most important thing Toodledo does for me is allow me to schedule future and repeating tasks in weird intervals -- like every 32 days or every 4th month.  I have a whole video on Toodledo if you are interested in how I use it. So, Toodledo is essentially my main tickler system.  Every day I wake up to anywhere between 9 and 27 tasks for the day.  Some of them are super short -- like clearing out my voicemail box one time a week, some are longer -- like spending an hour a day doing YouTube video tasks.  But despite the fact that Toodledo does exactly what I need i...

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll tell you why I love Trello and what kinds of boards you can create with it. Trello is one of my new favorite tools that I use for planning, organization, and productivity.  It is beautiful, works across platforms, has amazing collaborative features, is satisfyingly tactile, AND is so versatile that it is almost difficult to get started since there are so many ways you can use it.   So, what is Trello?  It is a kanban app.  You may have heard this term in reference to the Just In Time inventory system that Toyota developed in the 1980s.  Basically, the Japanese characters for kanban mean “Card” like index card and “Board” like white board,   Kanban is the visual and tactile system that Toyota used to shepherd parts through its factories — the arrival of the card would let workers know when a part had moved to the next stage and when new parts were need...

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I change the playback speed for videos on my iPhone using the app SpeedUpTV. I'm kind of an impatient person -- it is not a great character trait.  But nothing makes me crazier than having to listen to lectures or videos when the speaker is an extreme slow talker.   Nothing against these people at all -- lecturing takes concentration and deep thought -- but having the ability to alter the play back speed on videos and audio files is a total game changer for me.  I did a video already on how to adjust the playback speed for some of my most used apps -- Stitcher, Audible, and YouTube.   But what about other videos that I have on my iPhone?  Is there a way to change the playback speed for those? So, there are two ways that I generally have videos on my iPhone -- either on my Camera Roll or through Google Drive.  If someone sends me...

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I download videos from Screencast or YouTube to play on my phone while I'm offline. Like many of you, I have a limited cellular data plan, so I really try not to stream videos lest I use all of my monthly data in a couple of hours.  That said, I'm on the go a lot -- driving my kids or myself around -- and I'd like to be able to play some videos offline.  My main impetus for figuring this out is that I'm in a graduate program that has a distance-learning component and some of my professors upload their lectures to video sites that don't have a built-in way to save those videos for offline viewing.  Some of these videos are a couple of hours long and I'd like to be able to listen to them in the car without having to use up all of my data on streaming. Let me be clear that I do not use this as a way to steal copyrighted data, which would be il...

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll go over what I consider to be the biggest pros and cons of the EveryDollar budgeting app. I've been demo-ing a bunch of budget apps in the past several months.  I've had Mint, YNAB, and EveryDollar running in parallel on my computer and phone for the past month.  This has given me an idea of the strengths and weaknesses of each budgeting system and app.  I've already done series on Mint and YNAB and in my last video, I did an overview/tutorial of EveryDollar's budgeting software.  Today I'll share what I like and what I don't like about EveryDollar.  First PROS Easy to get started One of the best things about EveryDollar is that is is so easy to start a budget.  You can set one up in minutes.  You estimate your income, set up a couple of simple categories, estimate spending, and you are off and running.  The interface is easy to u...