Date Posted: April 30th, 2009
After a few years of collecting books, movies, and CDs it can get a bit difficult to keep track of what you have. Eventually you’ll find yourself browsing the bookshop, looking at one of your favourite books only to realize you aren’t sure if you already own it. And if you move in with another book lover, such things get even more difficult. You may know what you have, but chances are you won’t know what stuff your Significant Other has. Do you really need two copies of Lord of the Rings?
To solve this problem, six months ago Aaron and I catalogued our combined books, DVDs, CDs, and video games. We were moving at the time, so we had to uproot all of our stuff anyway. As of today our system still works, and is almost effortless to maintain. In this post I’ll share with you how we keep track of all our books and digital media.
Cataloguing The Books
To catalogue our books we use an online service called LibraryThing, and, let me tell you, it is an excellent tool. Signing up for the service is simple, and once you have your profile, adding books to your personal library catalogue is just as easy. Just type in the ISBN (or title or author or library of congress number) and search from a wide variety of book databases. I was able to find the vast majority of books in our library almost instantly. Once you find your book, just click on the title and the book will get added to your library. LibraryThing also lets you know if you’ve already entered that book in your library. Very useful when you’re adding a bunch of books. You’ll quickly find which books you have two copies of!
On the off chance that your book isn’t in some book database (and I have a handful that aren’t), it’s pretty easy to make a new entry for the book. There are a lot of fields, but you don’t have to fill them all out.
Once you have books in your database, searching for books in your collection is just as painless as adding them. Just type the title of the book (or the author name) into the search box on your profile-page and the books in your library that match your search term will appear. As a rule, I’ve found searching by author gives the best results.
The cost of the service is really reasonable. With a free account you can add up to 200 books, and the lifetime membership with no book-limit is all of $25. The value/dollar ratio here is very high. The system is very intuitive and reliable. I highly, highly, highly recommend it.
If only there was a LibraryThing for digital media…
Cataloguing The Digital Media
Alas, LibraryThing does not have a direct way to catologue other media like DVDs, CDs, and Video games. (I’ve heard that it’s possible to add non-books to your collection, but the system isn’t intended for it.) So for this stuff we just used old-fashioned spreadsheets. Google Docs is our spread-sheet system of choice because we wanted to be able to edit the same document simultaneously and we wanted the ability to view the spreadsheet online. Google Docs does both of these things fairly well.
We have a separate spreadsheet for each type of Media: DVDs, CDs, and Video games. The reason for this is that there’s different information we want for different stuff. For instance, we only rip CDs, so while there’s no need to track whether or not a DVD has been ripped, it is nice to see this info for the CDs. I won’t say what fields we have for each type, because it’s really up to you. We don’t care about cataloguing things by genre, but maybe you do. I will suggest you add one specific field for every item you have, though: the UPC. It serves as an ISBN for non-books. Very useful if you want to quickly check the going price on your specific edition of whatever you have. You can search by UPC at almost any online retailer.
Stickers
The most important thing about maintaining a catalogue of your books is keeping it up-to-date. Once you’ve created the catalogue, you’ll probably feel confident that everything in your library is also in there for a few weeks, but after that you’ll start losing confidence. You’ll buy a new movie and forget to add it to the spreadsheet, or your SO will get a book and put it directly on the shelf with out adding to LibraryThing. It won’t take long for you to lose faith in the completeness of your catalogue, and as soon as that happens you’ll stop updating it. I mean, what’s the point? You’d have to recheck every book in order to make sure it’s there. That’s a lot of time, and isn’t a catalogue supposed to save you time?
The way we combat this problem is with stickers. For every book, DVD, CD, and Video game that’s been catalogued we put a small removable sticker on the back. That way we can quickly tell which item has been catologued and which one hasn’t. New stuff doesn’t get a sticker until it’s been catalogued. Once in a while we’ll forget to put a sticker on a book that’s been catalogued, but checking one book isn’t nearly as bad as checking every book. With this solution it’s very easy to feel confident that the books on the shelves are also in the database.
Of course, once in a while you’ll put a sticker on a book without cataloguing it, and unfortunately the system won’t catch that. Chances are it won’t happen that often though. If you’re worried about accumulating these errors you could do a check-up on your collection ever few years. Verifying won’t take nearly as long as entering everything in, and you can find out just how error prone you were. 
Maybe you’ll find that you didn’t have any errors!
If you decide to go with this system I’d suggest you keep extra stickers on hand, so that you can enter new items into the database and sticker them at any moment.
So that’s our system. It works very well for collections of things that don’t get used up (wouldn’t work very well for food, for instance), don’t get washed very often (stickers wouldn’t work well for silverware or clothing), and are easily distinguished (How do you tell apart 8 identical white socks?). At some point I’d like to expand this sort of system to other things, but I’m not sure how yet. If you have any ideas, let me know!
Tags:
Organization, Self-Discipline.
Posted at
12:19 pm | No Comments »
Date Posted: April 15th, 2009
Without any doubt, I’ve experienced all of the signs listed below with regard to electrical engineering.
1. You picked your major (or career) because you “know” you won’t hate it 20 years from now
Believe it or not, this seemed like a good reason when I was a senior in high school. I figured it was better to pick something I didn’t hate than something I enjoyed doing because the pressure of trying to make a living out of thing I loved doing would squeeze the joy out of it.
Of course that was the wrong paradigm. It’s much more effective to find a mission that inspires you and then find a major or career that enables you to do that work.
2. You have the same major (or career) as one of your parents
My dad is an electrical engineer.
Mind you this doens’t mean that following your parents is definitey a bad thing, it just means you ought to check that this is indeed the right decision for you instead of the default or something you were pressured into.
I never felt particularly pressured into being an engineer, but when I did decide that that’s where I was headed my family encouraged me to do EE instead of computer science. I went along with it because of the next sign:
3. You picked your major (or career) because you wouldn’t have the motivation to teach it to yourself
I don’t know how common it is for people to pick a major for this reason, but I’ll list it because it’s what I did. I could easily envision my future self learning about computer science, philosophy, psychology, music, and history among other things on her own, but EE not so much. That’s what college was for. It never crossed my mind that if I didn’t have the motivation to teach myself the material I might not have the motivation to use the material either. Alas.
Honestly if you picked your major with this in mind, it might not actually be a problem. If you have an incredibly motivating reason to learn a subject you’re not interested in, that reason alone may be enough to power you through the learning process. For instance reading incredibly dry, boring, badly written musicology books is possible for me since I’m fairly strongly interested in Early Music. But I didn’t have a truly motivating reason to do EE.
4. You spend a lot of time doing escape activities in order to avoid classwork (or work projects)
I’ve spent way too many hours of the last 6 years playing Solitaire, reading feeds, and talking to people online in order to avoid doing classwork. My justification was that none of these activities take very long to do individually. A game of solitaire lasts only a few minutes. Reading LJ post takes only a few seconds. Refreshing LJ takes less time than that. But of course I don’t read one post or play one game of solitaire. 
Later on I decided to make my escape activities things that were actually worthwhile, like reading personal development books and working on this blog. These made me feel better, and I actually had something to show for my not-work time, but ultimately they were still escape activities. They also had the side-effect of making me really feel like I shouldn’t stick with my major.
It goes without saying that if you’re doing something you value you don’t tend to feel the need to do escape activities.
5. Your default emotions when you think about your major (or career) are guilt or disgust
Guilt for not doing enough to secure your success.
Disgust if you do end up spending a lot of your time on it.
6. You don’t have much interest in befriending your classmates
The idea here is that if you really enjoy what you’re doing, you’d presumably want to spend time with people who also enjoy doing those things. If you like yourself then you probably like other people like you.
During the second half of college I became less and less interested in befriending other Michigan engineers. Instead I spent a lot of time with swing dancers and SCA people. For some reason being around people whose life revolved around engineering no longer felt good to me.
Granted I know plenty of people who love what they do but don’t have much interest having their social circle include their co-workers or classmates. For the people I know, though, it isn’t that they’re opposed to spending time with people in their field it’s that there needs to be another point of intersection. A doctor I know, for instance, tends to spend his spare time with the SCA, geek community most of which aren’t doctors. He does have friends that are doctors, but as a general rule the ones he’s closest to are also geeks.
7. You don’t look forward to going to school (or work) after a break
When I was younger I used to believe that it was normal to dread going back to your regular life after a wonderful vacation. Now I know that it’s a sign that normal life isn’t compelling enough.
8. You sincerely believe you have better projects to work on than classwork (or job-work)
I have this feeling often. Blogging has the potential to be more useful. Reading good books feels more useful. Developing my leadership skills through my clubs also feels more useful. Unfortunately one can’t get student loans or scholarships for such things. (At least not that I know of.)
Ideally you should feel that doing well in school (or at your job) is a good way to spend your time. If it isn’t, something’s wrong.
9. You don’t retain most of the material you’re taught in your classes (or you forget things you’re supposed to have learned on the job)
In the classes I’m sincerely interested in I tend to retain the material. I remember quite a bit of the material from my computer science classes, for instance. When it comes to EE, however, no matter how many times I see the material it never sticks. I can do it for a little while and then I forget. And it’s not that I’m incapable of learning the material, it’s that I don’t really want to learn it.
This is definitely an omnious sign, since one presumably doesn’t want to be spending years and years relearning the same material.
10. You rarely, if ever, experience a state of flow when working on classwork (or work projects), nor do you want to.
By flow I mean the experience in which you’re working on something (problem set, project, etc.) and time seems to slow down, you find that you’re incredibly productive, and you feel euphoric. I’ve had this feeling while writing posts, programming, practicing music, and a few others things. I’ve even had it while working on engineering stuff from time to time.
If you’ve never had this experience while doing your work that might be a sign that something’s wrong, but a more telling question to ask is “Do I want to experience flow while working on my major (or career)?” And when I think about engineering I know that I don’t actually want to experience it. That’s a problem.
Why wouldn’t someone want to experience flow? Methinks that’s a post in and of itself. A short answer is that when you experience flow while doing something that means that that something is an important part of your life. If you really don’t want something to be important you don’t want to experience flow while doing it.
11. The work you look forward to is brainless busy work
In ever career and every major there will be some parts that are just busy work: filling out spread sheets, easy problems, easy assignments, etc. After doing some difficult tasks it can feel good to do a few easy things, but it’s really not a good sign if you would always rather have the easy task instead of the hard task. It means you don’t want to think, which means you aren’t really doing what you want to do.
12. Acquiring a Significant Other totally messes up your motivation
I had a boyfriend in high school and was arguably more obsessed with him than I ever have been of Aaron, and yet my high school sweetheart never negatively affected my studies. Aaron did. Looking back, the core reason for this is quite simple: I no longer believed in the sanctity of my work. If I had actually believed that what I was doing was important and a good use of my time, having a boyfriend would have ultimately enhanced my studies not made permanent damage to them.
13. The idea of spending 8 hours a day 5 days a week doing work related to your major fills you with dread. (The idea of working in this field for another 10 years fills you with dread.)
Methinks this is pretty self explanatory.
14. You compulsively [insert feel-good action of choice here] to medicate yourself
I compulsively eat chocolate, but it could be anything. World of Warcraft, TV, sex, potatoe chips, whatever. If you’re doing some quick-fix feel good activity to help you make it through the day with a little more comfort, something’s not right.
If you start calling it your medication…
When you’re feeling good about your work the need to medicate yourself decreases. You get enough good feelings from the work itself.
15. The thought of speaking to your professors (boss) fills you with shame
Why shame? Because you know you aren’t living up to your potential. You’re afraid of letting your professor or boss down. If you’re experiencing this often then you definitely ought to rethink your major or your career. If you can’t bring yourself to take the actions necessary to overcome your shame you’re in the wrong place.
There are many more signs, of course, but these 15 really hit home for me. I think if I’d read this list three years ago I might have done something about it earlier. Such is life. Hopefully you won’t make my mistake.
Tags:
Career, Purpose, Self-Discipline.
Posted at
1:32 pm | No Comments »
