After reading a blog post about charitable giving and how the money gets spent, I’m spending more time considering which organization is the best with regards to administration costs and overhead. There are so many charities that spend more on the company and executives than they do on the people they supposedly want to help.

Image Credit: This is a cropped image clip from the Mint.com blog post - Mint.com

Check out Charity Navigator for more information on organizations and how they are going to spend your hard earned money. You’ll want to look for organizations that have very high Program Expense numbers. To see just how bad it can get, look at the Top 10 Charities Drowning in Administrative Costs. Another good site to help you check out an organization is the Better Business Bureau and their Charity Review page. All of this detective work may cause analysis paralysis for some people and they might not donate anything. I would hope not - I’m just saying to be careful where you donate.

Program Expenses: This reflects what percent of its total budget a charity spends on the programs and services it exists to deliver. Dividing a charity’s program expenses by its total functional expenses yields this percentage.

Over the years most of our charitable donations have gone to the local church and the donated clothes to a couple of the local organizations. But in the last couple of years I decided to spread our giving around some. PowerFM, a local Christian radio station, received a large gift from us last year and I thought it was for a good cause. My thought was several thousand people listen to the radio everyday and it’s a great way to reach them on their commute or reaching students in other locations since the station streams its broadcast online. So here are some of the other organizations I’m considering giving to this year based on what they do and how they spend the money they are given.

• International Children’s Fund
• American Red Cross
• Homes for Our Troops
• Thru the Bible Radio

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Every spring we get some crazy weather here in North Texas. Large thunderstorms with hail, tornadoes, and flooding are common and part of living here. During the storm, our large tree in the front yard lost one of its limbs and now has to be cut down. These Bradford Pear trees only last about 15 to 20 years and the builders love them since there are easy to grow and look good. There are hundreds of these in the city and every year the storms take out several of them. They are a soft wood tree and their branches can’t support the weight of all the leaves. Add some wind and you have a deformed tree.

My usual commute of 4.5 miles normally takes about 10 minutes and is great. It’s one of the reasons I like where I work. But today my commute took about 40 minutes. With last night’s storm, the high winds took out some power lines in Irving and some of the roads were closed. I felt like a mouse in the maze – go down one street closed – turn around – go down again street – turn around.

This picture shows a broken power pole at Beltline Road and Royal.

For more info on the storm, go to www.dallasnews.com

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After using Vitalist and some techniques from David Allen’s GTD book for 20 days, I’m happy to say, “I’m Getting Things Done”. Maybe not as fast as I would have liked or maybe not in the order everyone else wants me to. But, oh well, what can I say. These things are like anything in life – it’s all based on what you put into something that determines what you can get out of it.

I found a couple of other reviews by Oyvind Solstad and David Mackay about Vitalist just to see what others thought about this site.

The interface is clean and well organized. All of the pages are driven with client-side ajax to speed up the display of the pages.

Here’s a couple of things that are annoying:

1. On the iPhone, all of the lists need a complete button so marking things complete don’t require several steps (clicking the item, scrolling to the bottom, clicking the complete checkbox, and then clicking on the save button).
2. When adding a new action with a date, the new item should be sorted accord to the last sort operation. So in other words, if you have the lists sorted by date and you add something in the future, it should show up at the bottom of the list – not at the top.

On a positive note, here are some of the things I really like:

1. Reminders – they re-create a new action for you based on the reminder interval. Just complete the current one and other one will be there shortly. For example, you could have something you want to do every Friday (review your lists) and every Friday the system creates a new action based on your last one.
2. Double click for a quick basic edit – if you wanted to change the date.
3. Control-click to edit multiple actions (I would like the ability to change several due dates at once with this).
4. Grouping by Context and Filtering by Overdue, Today, Tomorrow, Later.
5. Publish your list as a calendar and have it show up on your Google calendar.
6. Send actions from email. This is great for your family or friends to use.

See my other post for information on David Allen and GTD.

Go ahead and give it a try.

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Just came across an interesting article online at Wired.com. It is a profile of David Allen and includes some of his thoughts on the GTD movement.

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Today I was looking for a task list/manager for my iPhone and ran across www.vitalist.com. This web 2.0 app is cool and fast. It’s like Remember the Milk (they charge for the iPhone version) or some of the other to-do lists sites out there. VitaList is free for the basic to-do lists, but they charge for the advanced features. This is a Dallas based company by the way is kind of neat – good applications can begin in Texas.

So I was reading about their software and found out it based on GTD. That turned out to be Getter Things Done which is a book by David Allen.

GTD^® is the popular shorthand for "Getting Things Done^®", the groundbreaking work-life management system and book by David Allen that transforms personal overwhelm and overload into an integrated system of stress-free productivity.

After looking at Amazon and other bookstore to buy the book, I ran across the Inbox Zero presentation with Merlin Mann of 43folders.com. From the Google campus, he talked about some simple techniques to stay ahead of your inbox and possible email overload. I don’t get that many emails a day, but any time I can save helps in the whole life hacking mindset.

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Did you every think about where all of our stuff comes from and where it all goes? This short 20 minute video by Annie Leonard shows us how our stuff impacts how we live.

She makes a very good statement that we have only one planet and we need to protect it by changing how we consume “stuff”. It’s made me think about my consumption rate and how my whole family can make a difference in the big picture.

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My friend, Dave, found these and I hadn’t seen them before.

The first one shows 1 hour time slices for winds, isobars and temperate. It’s more for pilots since it allows you to pick an elevation.

http://adds.aviationweather.gov/winds/

This one has several different views for windspeed, gusts, temperature, etc. and is divided into 3 hour windows of time.

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/graphical/sectors/fwd.php#tabs

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I was driving home last night and saw this car on the freeway, so I had my buddy take a picture with my phone.

I often would laugh to myself when I saw those cars with those small and wide tires that stick out past the fenders.

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Watch out for the state troopers.

While drive from Dallas to South Padre Island for my first windsurfing camp, I started to notice several state troopers with lots of cars pulled over on the side of the road.

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Found a great deal on a Yakima rack for the van: www.campmor.com

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