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sebast
July 25th, 2007, 02:46 AM
Hi,

Weird questions you may say, but I'll go on and ask anyway.

I'm a 20 years old student in Advertising currently working on a companies website 40 hours/week 'till the start of school.

I'm training for a marathon that is in about 9 month and starting a little Linux/Ubuntu business (solutions-linux.org) in my region to offer in home services to those who want to make the switch.

I also plan to learn a lot of technical things in subjects like linux itself (for which I'm pretty far from being en expert yet), python, php, apache, bash scripting, javascript, css, xml, ...

My problem is that I can't fit all those things in my schedule. I never watch TV and when I'm not with my friends of working, I'm on those projects. I would also like to help people on the forum, mailing lists and IRC, but barely find the time just to ask questions, not to answer some. I feel like I don't give back to the community doing this.

It also takes me a long time reading my technical books and finishing my website (too long). One thing that takes a lot of my time is reading what's going on with the FOSS world several times a day on sites like OSNews, slashdot and Digg, but it seems I can't live without knowing what's going on.

So my question is: how do you people manage to do your regular activities in life and learning complex technical stuff, reading and posting on mailing lists and forums at the same time? I see kids who can do everything with Linux, yet I struggle to find the time reading the books.

Thanks in advance.

HermanAB
July 25th, 2007, 02:52 AM
The difference is that some of us have been reading Unix books for 40+ years, but won't admit to it in public...
;)

23meg
July 25th, 2007, 02:52 AM
Have you heard of GTD (http://www.davidco.com/what_is_gtd.php)? Do some research online if you haven't; you may benefit from it.

I'm in the process of evaluating GNU/Linux GTD tools; I'll probably settle on todo.txt (http://www.todotxt.org/).

maniacmusician
July 25th, 2007, 03:45 AM
It's a bit over the top sometimes, but I use Google Calendar to plan most things. The hardest thing about managing your time is just that; actually remembering to manage it. I often neglect to write things down or schedule them properly and if I don't have it down, I sometimes completely forget about it.

Google calendar has some neat features that I can use such as setting up events to repeat daily or weekly. After the initial getting-used-to-it phase, I found it to be pretty flexible. With your kind of schedule right now (events that have redundancy, like training every day or every other day, allotting a period of time to work on the website, etc), I'd say that it may be a good fit for you.

freebeer
July 25th, 2007, 03:56 AM
Do what most of us do... give up sleeping. :D

sebast
July 25th, 2007, 04:11 AM
Do what most of us do... give up sleeping. :D

Well, unfortunatly that's what happens too often.

illu45
July 25th, 2007, 04:11 AM
The best advice I can give is to do one thing at a time. Its great to have a large amount of enthusiasm and energy for something, but if you start trying to do everything at once, you'll likely not get very far. I like to stick to a single programming language at a time, and read linux stuff from time to time (with newsgroups pretty well daily). If you need to train for your marathon, or help someone install Ubuntu, then I would do that first. Answering questions in newsgroups can wait. I think that you would be doing a much greater service to the community by installing Ubuntu for a new user than answering a question on a newsgroup, where others can help out. As far as becoming a so-called linux expert (which I am also far from being), it seems that the best thing really is time. We learn from experimenting with different aspects of the OS, and from FUBARing our systems :D, both of which take time to occur (and repair :P). Certainly, reading books and tutorials can help, but they're not the end-all and be-all of becoming a better linux user.

My two cents,
illu45

dcraven
July 29th, 2007, 05:44 PM
I'm in the process of evaluating GNU/Linux GTD tools; I'll probably settle on todo.txt (http://www.todotxt.org/).

Have you had a look at td (http://djcraven.blogspot.com/2006/12/td-command-line-todo-list-manager.html)? I think if you are interested in todo.txt, then
td might also be of interest. I wrote it to fill a void, and as far as I know I'm the only one on the planet that actually uses it :).

I just thought I'd point you towards it just in case. I rolled a new tarball with tags and defers just today.

Cheers,
~djc

Paul820
July 29th, 2007, 05:57 PM
Looks to me like you are trying to do too much. That's a lot of stuff you are learning all at the same time. Why don't you just learn a few things at a time and then move on to learning something else later. You are going to really tire yourself out, which is not good.:(