Thank you to all who have provided helpful feedback about the content and direction of the site, and in response we’ll be expanding the coverage of OPTED topics and focusing on the issues important to YOU, the reader!  As always, please use the content form to provide feedback and suggestions and comment freely using the content form at the bottom of each post.

This week on OPTED Magazine…

• Check out tips for organizing first aid and medicines as flu season kicks in
• Read a cutting edge review of the new Google Wave
• Enjoy the iPhone Tuesday and Fortune Friday regular series
• And much more!

Hope you enjoy the content this week and that you’re enjoying the changing seasons as we move into Fall!

Vacations are an adventure, and even a business trip can be energizing, despite the work purpose for which it is intended.  It’s easy to get stuck in a rut with a regimented routine, where visiting anywhere but your home, office and errand route would throw your schedule off balance.  So when the opportunity to abandon the routine and leave the city comes along, under almost all circumstances I’m elated!  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a hermit — it’s just that some weeks the busy schedule allows for nothing more than the basics and a voyage away from home is a welcome distraction.

This week’s Chinese food was delicious, and this was my fortune cookie slip:

Ask a friend to join you on your next voyage

This weekend I have a business trip that involves an in-state drive a few hours away and inspired by the fortune cookie, I invited the love of my life along for the voyage.  There was not much chance for an element of fun before finding a companion — between weekend traffic getting out of the city and many hours of work obligations for the next few days, it’s anything but a vacation.

But we will be making it fun!

We have plans for a mixed CD contest for tonight’s evening drive and old school car games, like the “license plate game” and getting up early for the next two (weekend, ugh) mornings will be much more tolerable after a night of cuddling!  Meals by yourself in a restaurant are much less enjoyable than great conversation with loved ones.

So, I’ll also use this opportunity to share that there won’t be any OPTED Magazine content through the holiday weekend, but I’ll resume posting on Tuesday.  Enjoy your weekend everyone!

After conversing with many of you, I realized the wealth of knowledge and experience that OPTED Magazine readers have given me to support the growing archive of content on this site.  You may have a blog of your own, you may not, but the topics covered on OPTED Magazine are a part of everyone’s life — organizing, enhancing productivity, planning and making lists, striving for personal excellence, and decluttering our spaces are all broad topics for which we each have a unique perspective.

Thus, I am putting out a formal call for readers to submit content as guest posts on the site.  If you are new to the site:

• Check out the most recent welcome post for topics we have covered
• Visit the category sections on the right hand sidebar, or
• Click on some of the topic tags at the bottom of the land hand sidebar to see what issues we’ve covered

If you have a passion or interest in a topic you think is relevant to OPTED Magazine, contact me and pitch your idea for a guest post on the site.  I’d love to include your perspective to add to the conversation!

Plug in your friends on different lists (for example: coworkers, family or book club) and add restaurants to different groups.  The restaurants become searchable by zip code, so if the one decision that you ARE able to make is that you want to eat downtown or in a certain neighborhood, it shows a list of your options to your lunch group based on that preference.  Everyone in the group votes for their choice using the website or their mobile phone, and even better: it all syncs with Google Maps.

Apart from all the features to help you make your choice, here are some other cool aspects:

• Add a car to your profile and offer to drive your friends when you vote
• Post comments on restaurant and group pages
• Tie breakers to help resolve tied lunch location votes!
• And every day you use the site to cast a vote, you can use points in a contest area to win prizes!

Scheduling any event, even one as seemingly simple as a lunch with friends can take up significant time and energy trying to organize and plan for logistics.  Websites like Lunchn streamline the process and make it fun at the same time.

Now there’s no excuse to avoid scheduling a group lunch!

It occurred to me just how appropriate some of my fortune cookie slips are for this blog!  They give great snippets of advice, that when discussed further can we a source of inspiration and words of wisdom.

Thus a new feature on OPTED Magazine: Fortune Fridays.

Each Friday I’ll take a fortune cookie slip from my collection and use it as an inspiration for a daily post.  And as part of the fun, I encourage you to participate in this exercise as well!  The next time you order Chinese food and acquire an inspiring fortune cookie slip of your own, write up a short post inspired by the message and submit it for publication at OPTED Magazine!  Contact me to join the fun!

After just over two months of blogging, OPTED Magazine has gained many new followers and enjoyed a lot of success, and I wanted to personally thank each and every one of you for participating and visiting the site!

For those who are new, OPTED Magazine is a blog and forum for Organization, Productivity, Tasking, Exceptionalism, and Decluttering solutions to help individuals succeed in reaching their personal development goals.  Readers are encouraged to participate on the site in a number of ways including:

• Sharing comments on the tips and articles so we can learn from each other about best practices for self-improvement
• Voting in OPTED Magazine polls on the left hand sidebar of the site
• Submitting guest posts and becoming a writer for OPTED Magazine
• And more!

Readers can also follow OPTED Magazine on Twitter or subscribe to the site using an RSS reader.

And if you’re just joining us, check out my top 3 favorite posts in each of the five OPTED Magazine categories:

Organization

1. Organize your daily bag
2. 5 ways to organize your books
3. Create a portable cleaning caddy

Productivity

1. Avoid wasting time with portable read and review
2. New strategy for calling in sick
3. Top 10 Gmail labs features you have to activate

Tasking

1. How to maximize your day with only 24 hours
2. The art of the perfect thank you note
3. How to simplify and regroup after your day derails

Exceptionalism

1. Celebrate your accomplishments and reward your successes
2. Improvement is what is important
3. Your guide to a minimalist life

Decluttering

1. Do possessions define your life?
2. Clutter of a spouse: how to deal with it
3. Freeze the madness

Once again, thank you for all the support and happy reading and commenting!

The Basics

The Habit Factor, by Equilibrium Enterprises, was submitted in May 2009 and as of the date of this post, is on sale in the App store for 99 cents.  The app is marketed as a way to help you “quickly establish, track and align your habits with your desired goals to improve yourcharacter and enable more precise achievement.”

Concept is great, features have problems

After downloading the app, the first step for me was to review the “about” link about how and why to use the app.  I confess that I was impressed, and based on the specific imagery, as a consumer I felt I’d hit the jackpot to provide myself a product to enhance my life (welcome to the marketing concept of most products!)

So, I visited the goal feature first.  I cleared out the “factory-installed” goals and proceeded to set one of my own: Reaching my goal weight.  I filled in the goal, then entered my reasons for wanting to achieve that goal and entered today as the start date.  The last field on the page was a completion date and it gives no option for picking “never” or “until I reach my goal” — I was required to enter a completion date to make the goal feature function correctly.

This is a problem for me.  For instance, reaching my goal weight is a long term process and I don’t know when my completion date will be!  I also intended to add a goal for “Making family a priority” which I intend to be an ongoing goal until the day I pass away — gladly I’m not able to predict that date and schedule it as my completion date!  I imagine most people have goals they will be working on for years if not decades and will be unable to use the feature.

Okay, so I won’t be using the goals feature, what about the habits feature?!  The same problem arose.  I was required to schedule a completion date — but my habits don’t have completion dates, they are “lifelong habits” which is precisely the point of the app in the first place!

The other reason that the required completion date is a flaw in the program is that after testing the tracking feature for a habit using 2050 as my completion date, it filled in the total days left in the period for tracking as 14,975 days.  And the tracking function marks your progress as a percentage of instances required to reach 100%.  My statistics will always be flawed based on this system because I do not have an accurate end date for my habits and goals.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of using the app was the frequency that the app froze, or shut down completely.  After reading similiar reviews in the App store, I realized this was not a problem limited to my phone.  I also noted that the overall ranking for this app by over 60 people was only 3 stars — certainly not popular.  Many of the reviews were not favorable.

Overall assessment: it’s only 99 cents, but as someone who values every cent of every dollar that I can save, this app is not worth the money if you are seeking to build daily habits and accurately track your progress over time.  If your intent was to use this app as an alternate to do list, that could be more efficiently combined with your current system and you wouldn’t risk the app crashing in the middle of your data entry.

Have an iPhone app you’d like us to test and review?  Contact us and we’ll add it to the queue!

This post is part of OPTED Magazine’s “iPhone Tuesdays” series, where we’ll feature a new iPhone app that helps with productivity, tasking, goal setting, or organization.  These posts will include a review and all the information based on a personal test and evaluation.  Watch for the series again next Tuesday!