Warren Buffett on Time Management: “All You Need Is … Time”

Warren Buffett on Time Management: Warren Buffett once said on time management, “The rich invest in time; the poor invest in money.”

Buffett is currently the fourth richest men in the world. He can buy practically anything he wants to, and more than nearly everyone else could ever dream of.

Nevertheless there’s one thing that even Warren Buffett cannot buy, and that is time.

Here’s a brief transcript from a Charlie Rose interview:

Warren Buffett: I mean I can buy anything I want basically, but I can’t buy time.

Charlie Rose: And so to have time is the most precious thing you can have?

Warren Buffett: Yes, I better be careful with it. There is no way I will be able to buy more time.

Warren Buffett's Interview with Charlie Rose (Time Management) Charlie Rose: And living in Omaha makes that easy?

Warren Buffett: That makes it a lot easier. I, for 50 whatever, well for 54 years I spent five minutes going each way now. Just imagine that was a half an hour each way. You know. I know the words to a lot more songs and that’s about it.

Charlie Rose: It adds up. Doesn’t it?

Warren Buffett: It really adds up. Now if you’re doing an hour a day difference coming and going that’s two and a half percent of the person’s work week. That means 40 years you’re talking about a year.

An undisciplined mind will find every reason to do what should not be done and every excuse not to do what should be done. Warren Buffett once said, “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.”

Ira Glass Time Management Technique

This American Life‘s Ira Glass talks with Lifehacker about how he works. When asked what his best time-saving shortcut or life hack was, he responded:

I’ve got nothing. Reading other people’s answers to this question on your website today made me realize I live my life like an ape. I eat the same breakfast and lunch everyday, both at my desk. I employ no time-saving tricks at all.

Though come to think of it, I guess my biggest life hack—and this is the very first time I’ve attempted to use the phrase “life hack” in a sentence—is that my wife and I decided to live just a few blocks from where I work. We did this because of our dog. Since I spend at least an hour every night walking the dog, I didn’t want to spend another 60 or 90 minutes a day commuting. I don’t have the time. Like lots of people, I work long hours.

How Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Marissa Mayer Process Emails

How Marissa Mayer Handled Email while at Google

How Marissa Mayer Handled Email while at Google In an interview with tech journalist David Kirkpatrick for Fortune Magazine’s “Secrets of greatness: How I work” series, Marissa Mayer revealed how she processes emails. Marissa was then the Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, and is presently the CEO of Yahoo!

I don’t feel overwhelmed with information. I really like it. I use Gmail for my personal e-mail—15 to 20 e-mails a day—but on my work e-mail I get as many as 700 to 800 a day, so I need something really fast.

I use an e-mail application called Pine, a Linux-based utility I started using in college. It’s a very simple text-based mailer in a crunchy little terminal window with Courier fonts. I do marathon e-mail catch-up sessions, sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday. I’ll just sit down and do e-mail for ten to 14 hours straight. I almost always have the radio or my TV on. I guess I’m a typical 25- to 35-year-old who’s now really embracing the two-screen experience.

How Larry Page / Sergey Brin Handle Email at Google

Ever wonder how CEOs of large companies manage and process the hundreds or thousands of emails they receive daily?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google In a thread on managing loads of email, Quora user David Shin, who previously worked at Google, remembers Page and Brin being asked this question during a Q&A session at Google. When someone asked how they manage their email, one of them (he can’t remember which) responded like this:

When I open up my email, I start at the top and work my way down, and go as far as I feel like. Anything I don’t get to will never be read. Some people end up amazed that they get an email response from a founder of Google in just 5 minutes. Others simply get what they expected (no reply).

Three Ways to Use AutoHotKey to Rock Your Firefox Experience

AutoHotkey Numeric Keypad for Firefox

We are devoted aficionados of AutoHotkey, an open-source scripting language that can be used to religiously automate repetitive tasks on the Microsoft Windows operating system tasks and save time. AutoHotkey primarily works by overriding the default key commands on any software that runs on Windows. The core of AutoHotkey is a custom scripting language that can help define keyboard shortcuts or hotkeys.

If the keyboard on your Windows computer has a numeric keypad, you can use the keys on the numeric keypad to assist you with using the Firefox browser. By installing and running these scripts to scroll and close tabs, you don’t need to move your hands a long way from the mouse. Here are three simple scripts.

Scroll Down a Firefox Page using the ‘Add’ Key on the Numeric Keypad

This simple script substitutes the ‘Page Down’ key with the ‘Add’ key on the numeric keypad, thus helping you scroll down on Firefox pages.

NumpadAdd::
        Send {PgDn}
Return

Scroll Up a Firefox Page using the ‘Subtract’ Key on the Numeric Keypad

This simple script substitutes the ‘Page Up’ key with the ‘Subtract’ key on the numeric keypad, thus helping you scroll up on Firefox pages.

NumpadSub::
        Send {PgUp}
Return

Close a Firefox Tab using the ‘Pause’ Key

This simple script substitutes the ‘Control + F4’ key combination with the ‘Pause’ key on your keypad, thus helping you close the current tab in the Firefox application.

Pause::
        Send ^{F4}
Return

This AutoHotkey Script Needs ‘MozillaWindowClass’

To restrict the customization of these special keys just to the Firefox browser, you will need to an #IfWinActive block with the ahk_class set to MozillaWindowClass. Here is the full script. Actually, MozillaWindowClass refers to any window in any Mozilla application; hence you will notice that these shortcuts work on the Mozilla Thunderbird email application as well.

#IfWinActive ahk_class MozillaWindowClass
        Pause::
                Send ^{F4}
        Return
        NumpadAdd::
                Send {PgDn}
        Return
        NumpadSub::
                Send {PgUp}
        Return
#IfWinActive

For a basic introduction to the utility of AutoHotkey and a tutorial on installing AutoHotkey and compiling AutoHotkey scripts, see this useful YouTube video or this orderly guide from howtogeek.

ExifTool: Command Line & GUI to Remove EXIF Image Metadata in Photos

ExifTool: Command Line & GUI to Remove EXIF Image Metadata

Nearly all cell phones, digital cameras, and scanners insert metadata in the digital photos they capture. This is done using the Exchangeable image file format (Exif) data structure or standard.

Some devices just embed the make and model of the camera. Other devices insert more extensive data such as camera settings, GPS location data, and other information that might be specific to that camera or cell phone. Many owners of digital cameras and cell phones are oblivious that their photos are tagged with sensitive information.

Since the Exif data contain information about the photo, the Exif data pose privacy and security concerns. When pictures from these devices are posted online, the Exif metadata can be used to sense the time the photo was taken and the location where it was taken, if the camera or cell phone has the GPS location data feature. The distinctive ID number of the camera device can be used to identify the owner of the camera. It is therefore best to remove Exif data before publishing or posting pictures online and avoid privacy and security concerns.

My favorite software to remove Exif data is ExifTool by Phil Harvey. Exiftool is a cross-platform tool that can remove, modify, and add Exif and other metadata in various file formats. The software is intuitive and easy to use. I use the command line to manipulate whole directories of files using a combination of command options and wildcards.

exiftool.exe -all= -overwrite_original *.jpg