The first thing I noticed when I came back from the school was how much TV is used for getting news. Even though I never felt like I was missing news about the world, after all we often heard the news on radio, there was quite a contrast when I started to watch TV again. Now you might think that this is a point in favour of watching TV, as we all want to be up to date on what happens in the world, but the trouble is that the extra news in TV was all the news that we do not need in the first place! It was news like what was happening in the popular TV-shows, it was news like a story about the latest celebrity “scandal”, and it was news about the latest results in sports and so on and so on. The difference between the short news-stories we heard in the radio and what you get from watching TV is exactly the news about all the stuff that do not really matter. In other words I learned that you do not need to spend a lot of time on news to keep yourself updated about the world, it only feels that way because you are used to the kind of fluff-filled news you find on TV instead of the concise news you can find in other places (Here in Denmark we are lucky enough to get quality news from the state-financed radio channels). So consider this a productivity tip: you can actually spend very little time on news without loosing track of important changes in society.

Another thing I noticed was the lack of social interaction when you spend more time watching TV. Watching TV is really a rather poor substitute for real interaction with real people. Even though I am sure that your brain feels like it is a kind of social interaction to watch a soap opera or reality show, I am also sure that the extremely passive “fly on the wall” way of interaction is vastly inferior to the real thing with regard to learning life skills and social acuity. Watching TV can be pretty seductive though and when you are used to watching a lot of TV you will not notice how often you will just watch some TV when you could have gotten a much better experience by taking the initiative to meet with friends or spend real quality time with your family. The ease with which we can get our needs at least partly filled by turning on the TV means that you should always try to think of reasons not to watch TV. Otherwise you will probably be tempted to go the easy route when you should have chosen the most rewarding route.

Thirdly I learned that I can easily live without a TV. This might not seem like a big thing to you but I bet that if I threatened to take away all your TV-sets you would probably be a bit concerned about how it would affect your life. I have no such concerns, if I feel that I watch too much TV I just stop watching it. It is like a switch I have that can be either on or off but I have no preference for either state except for what serves me best in my current situation. When I talk to people about living without a TV they get this look on their face like it would be a major decision to do so and often they are not sure they could actually go through with it. Currently I only watch TV when I am at my girlfriends place and never when I am at home in my house. This is very beneficial to me as when I am at home I often have a lot of work to do and it really helps that I do not even have the slightest urge to distract myself by watching TV.

Living without a TV-set is something I would warmly recommend you to try out if you have the possibility. You might need to persuade other users of your TV-set that this is a good thing but if you manage to do so, you have even more of a reason to ditch TV as you can then make it a group effort where watching TV is replaced by doing more meaningful activities together. It is true that some of what is shown on TV is really quality stuff that is educational and rewarding but if you start by experiencing that you can easily live without a TV it becomes much easier to later add in your favourite show without getting seduced into wasting a lot of time watching all the other stuff. The only real disadvantage I have found to living without a TV-set is that you can not always participate with others in their discussions about the latest shows - it is however a small price to pay for all the extra time you will get by not watching TV.

Statistics show that the average American watches more than 4 hours a day of television, this becomes 1460 hours a year or nearly 9 weeks! Just imagine what you could do with all that extra time in your life : you could work on an idea for a business to start, you could spend quality time with your family and friends, you could visit friends or family members you have not seen in a long time, you could go on an intensive training program to lose weight and build muscle so your looks are vastly improved and your self esteem skyrockets, or one of a thousand other worthwhile endeavours that are possible in 9 weeks or less. The choice is yours but I really hope that I have inspired you to at least try what it feels like to no watch any TV, perhaps just for a month or two, you can always extend the period if you get hooked

I have previously been employed in the game development industry, so I have some experience with the usual modeling packages like 3D Studio Max and Lightwave, but the beauty of SketchUp is that it is not like the “usual” modeling tool, it is much simpler! Even if you are a complete novice in 3D modeling the simplicity of SketchUp makes it possible to learn very quickly by following the helpful tutorials available on the website. Dedicate an hour to learn the different basic features of the program and you are ready to starte experimenting.

What I have found Google SketchUp to be really good at is making a dimensional accurate 3D model of your home for remodeling purposes. SketchUp has this feature called the tape measure tool that makes it possible to measure the exact distance between 2 points and it will automatically snap to walls and corners. You can see it in action here :

This means that when you have made a 3D model of your home, you do not need to go and measure distances in real life anymore - furthermore you can actually measure distances across walls and other obstacles that make measuring in real life difficult.

When you are ready to start the remodeling you can view a part of your 3D home model and decorate it with the “dimension tool” so it is ready for printing and use during the remodeling work :

I have used the SketchUp tool for making a model of my house and let me tell you, the hardest part was the initial real life measuring so I could be sure to get a dimensional accurate model. The whole process took a few hours and I am very pleased with the initial result, it really makes it easier to get a feel for the 3-dimensional structure of the house. So all in all Google SketchUp is highly recommended as a tool for your remodelling purposes. Because it is so easy to use, I really want to develop the model further to include my garden and 1st floor/roof but you can see the result of my initial few hours of work here :

When you have a question or problem the first thing you should ask yourself is : “how common is it to ask this question?”. If you think that even a tiny tiny percentage of the world’s population could have asked the same you can probably find it on Google. Only if your question is highly specific to your situation you should start looking for other sources of information and even then it does not hurt to try anyway.

The first thing to try will often be to just type your question like you would ask it to another person. Say if you want to take some great pictures with your new digital camera and therefore you want to know about photography, just write how to learn photography.

Sometimes when asking such a question the results are sort of on target but what you are after is not found on the first page. Then it often helps to use quotes around the parts of the question that belong together : “how to” learn photography. This tells the search engine that these words must be found exactly in the order you specified within the quotes.

In this example the search engine might find a lot of pages about how to do things related to your query but you are still not satisfied with the ratio of interesting pages to uninteresting pages. Then you can adjust the search in order to tell the search engine that the word “photography” must be found on the pages you are willing to consider, if that word is not found on the page, you are just not interested. The way to do this is to adjust with the “+”-sign : “how to” learn +photography.

If that still does not do it, it normally is due to your results getting “spammed” by pages that want to sell you something. So in order to weed those out you want to tell the search engine what terms you do not want to see in the results. The “-”-sign is used for that and for the online marketers terms like “price” and “discount” will often work to get rid of them : “how to” learn +photography -price -discount.

Now you should hopefully get the information you were after and even though it seems like a lot of steps when I describe each adjustment in detail, in practice you will quickly learn to recognize from the results you are getting what kind of change you should make to your query. In some rare cases, even when trying each of these adjustments, you do not find what you are looking for. In that case you should look at the result returned by the search engine from your best efforts at a query - if the results are all about the same subject, but just not the subject you want to know about, there is still hope and you should probably just try to use some other terms that describes your question from another perspective. If instead the result seems to be about all sorts of different subjects and none of them are quite right and it seems like the search engine is really trying hard to give you results at all you might have found a question where the answer is not easily found.

If you are using Google and search a lot a good tip is to install the Google toolbar. It installs an extra toolbar in your Internet explorer with a search field so you can search directly on Google without going to the Google site first. But the best thing about it is that when you search the terms in your query becomes buttons on the toolbar, which you can press to search for the term within the page you are viewing. This is extremely helpful when you need some details in a big page containing a lot of text and can help you to quickly assess whether the page actually contained the answer you were looking for or not.

Another quick tip is that Google actually can do more than just search for pages; another feature I use a lot is unit conversion. If you need to know how many litres 4.2 ounces is, just type in 4.2 ounces in litre and Google will return the correct amount. And this works for distance(3.5 yards in centimetres), area(1000 square feet in square meter) and weight(2 stone in pounds) conversions as well.

There are even more things you can do but these are the basic tips I have for you and the features I use all the time. I hope this will help you to find what you are looking for.