I love the close all but this menu option that Visual Studio gives you when you right click on a tab but I have been looking for a keyboard shortcut for it for awhile. To set one up go to Tools > Options > Environment and type in File.CloseAllButThis and enter in your shortcut keys, I chose Ctrl + Shift + Y for mine.

I just noticed that ITunes has a new section called ITunes U. I checked it out and I was happy to see that they have a couple of Computer Science MIT Open Courseware courses available for download.

In addition to MIT there is a number of other Universities from the US offering courses for free download.

In the 4 hour work week Tim Ferriss talks about Parkinson's Law. Parkinson's law states that  "work expands to fill the time available" which seems to hold true for me. I figure that if I have time to spare I can read RSS feeds for just a little while or check email. 

To combat this I have been setting fake deadlines to challenge myself. In the morning I usually have a lot of meeting so setting a deadline of noon to finish things is really challenging, if I finish the task before then it is a lot more rewarding than if I let it swell to the time allotted for it.

A concept that I like from the 4-Hour Work Week book is that we are not naturally multitaskers but we convince ourselves that we are.

Try and take one task during your day and do it without getting distracted by anything else, I bet you can't. The distraction can include other people, outlook, or meetings try to eliminate it!

As a developer if I am working on a piece of code is there really a reason for me to have Outlook open? It is natural to say yes, but

The first thing that I tried to implement in my life from the book was setting times that I could check email and sticking to them. My times were 11:30am and 4:30pm. How did it go? It went really well and I quickly found out that email wasn't as important as I previously thought it was. I also found out how hard it was to change the habit of letting things like email take a backseat to the task I wanted to accomplish. My best advice is to disable the popup that comes up when you get email and to disable any sound notification. 

Last week I finished reading the book 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. The book is very motivating to say the least, I highly recommend it.

After I read it I stepped back and took a look at my profession and my life to try and find out what makes me happy professionally and personally. Over the next little bit while I am waiting for my foot to heal, I am going to post on various topics from the book that I have tried implementing in my life as a software developer. Hopefully they help out someone else as well.

Last year I had an unfortunate incident where my foot met a puck. Once again my foot has met a puck and I will be in a cast for a yet to be determined amount of time. If I have any advice for other software developers that need to get a cast it is to bring a book that you haven't been able to find the time to read. I guarentee you that getting a cast will take a lot longer than you expect and you will be able to finish your book.