BennyEast.Com/Blog The official blog of Kenny West

28Jan/110

My newest obsession: =rand()

I’m a lists kinda guy.  I like to make lists.  It helps me organize my thoughts when coming up with creative ideas or it helps me remember what I needed to get at the grocery store.  It also helps when I am trying to get things done around the house or at work.  Lists are great!

What’s my program of choice for creating lists? I like to use MS Excel.

Random factoid: you don’t have to fork over gobs of hard earned cashola to Microsoft for fancy pantsy MS Office!  There are free alternatives such as openoffice.org and Google docs!  They work pretty well too!

http://www.openoffice.org

There’s one problem with Excel and that is it lets you input WAY too much information then a human can possibly handle.  It’s like 50 thousand rows of data or something insane.  This means I have this tendency to keep adding to my lists and then not getting a lot of things done.  Its super easy to type up something,  hit save and close and then come back later and add more! So even if I get a lot of things done I keep adding more in then I am putting out.  But I think a lot of us do this?  Yes? No?  Maybe so…  or is it just me?

Anyone else?  Raise your hands?

*crickets chirping*

*or in this case, singing and dancing*

Right then…. I guess it’s just me.

So, anyways, there I was… I was just kind of looking over one of my lists one day trying to decide what to tackle first, and I had one of those “Ah-Ha” moments.  No, “Take On Me” didn’t come up randomly on my iTunes.

Click for Take On Me Video

(for some reason it wouldn't let me embed this video from youtube)

It was more of an “I think I just figured out why I don’t tackle as many things as I possibly could!” moment.  Well besides being just lazy sometimes I think there’s ANOTHER reason I don’t tackle as much as I could.

So what happened?

Well I found that one of my biggest problems with making giant lists in excel was the same problem I have when I go out to dinner at a fancy Mexican restaurant and I want to find the perfect taco.  Since there are 69 different forms of taco available I’m always inundated with tacophobia (that’s the fear of not knowing which taco to pick out, and not fear of tacos) and start to freak out as everyone else around me starts ordering their perfect taco and I’m no where near decided as to what I want on my perfect one!

People in general have a hard time with choice I think anyways.  But I always like to analyze over and reanalyze and try to figure out ok…, which is the best way to go about this.  Now when it comes to lists I suppose the best way to deal with things is to prioritize.  But again,  I am just terrible with prioritizing.  Because that means more choice!  Who am I to say what’s more important than anything else?  So instead I found that sometimes, it’s best to let choices be made for you!

How?

Well, it’s easy.  Just make your excel list up in one column.  Go over to the next column and type in the following equation: =rand()

Now once you have that equation in, it will generate a random decimal number.  Copy and paste that cell to all the cells next to the ones you have in the list.  Then go to the sort A-Z button and…

(Note: I left a gap between what's for dinner and day of week, this is so that when I hit the A-Z button if I have A1 cell selected it won't also sort the days of the week.  The days of the week will stay static and what to make for dinner will shuffle about. Oh also every time you type something new it will create a new random decimal, so if you keep hitting sort A-Z it will keep generating a new random list.)

The choice of what to work on in what order has been made for you!  This may not work for everyone, or even anyone but me.  But I’ve found that when I do this random sort it’s somewhat refreshing.  It keeps things interesting and new and I am more likely to just work on each item in the list.

The other thing I have found is that, if I don’t finish or I end up adding more to the list I can simply hit the re-sort button and it jumbles it around (note: this is different from the resort button which immediately whisks you away to a tropical island and places a nice cold beverage in your hand and puts your toes in some warm sand in front of a sunset on a beach).

There’s just something almost fun, well, ok not fun, but something fresh and exciting about not knowing what thing is going to come up next!  Some times I hit re-sort multiple times until the list looks funky fresh enough for me.  Although BE CAREFUL with this because then you’ll get into the same problem you had before where you keep hitting refresh because you can’t decide WHICH random sort list to go with.  So just hit it once and go with it.

The place I use this the most is when practicing songs.  Practicing the same songs over and over again in a row can get rather dull especially if you know what song is always going to come up next.  So I put all the song names I want to practice and then do the random formula next to all of them and hit sort A-Z and then I have a fresh and dynamic playlist every single time I go to practice!

Try it for yourself, the next time you have a list of chores to do and can’t decide what to do first make a randomly generated excel list!

So again the equation is =rand()

not

got it?  OK good.

I know what your thinking... this is just like the shuffle function in itunes.  Can you guess what my favorite part of iTunes is? 🙂  Random is my middle name... actually it's Edward... but we can pretend it's Random, right?  Ok, well, night!

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