First of the month maintenance and reminders

Hey, good morning friends. It is the first of the month. It's May 1st, and I'm actually not having coffee this morning. I already had my coffee, and so now I'm carrying my coffee, my mug, back to the sink. That's one of the cool things about this app is that it's all done through the phone, so I can be somewhat mobile when I'm using it and carry you around. I probably should have put on a headset. Now I'm just carrying this phone around.

Anyway, it is May 1st, and I just had a calendar entry pop up on my computer. That entry says, today's the first of the month. There is a link to a Google Doc that I have called First of the Month. Now this may all seem a little strange, like why do I need to be reminded that it's the first of the month? Well, I'll tell you why.

The reason is, there are a lot of things as you become an adult, and even when you become maybe middle-aged, I would say, but any age in your life, there are certain things that we are supposed to do on a regular basis, but we don't do them. We forget about them. I'm talking about things like cleaning out my air conditioner vents. I live in a very, very windy and dusty part of Oklahoma. At our old house, we had the air conditioner die, and when the repairman came out, he basically just pulled grass and dirt out of the air conditioner and said, here's the problem. You never clean these vents, and it's so windy, people mow their lawn, and dirt gets in here, and grass gets in here, and then the air can't get in, and then it burns up the compressor, and then you pay me $1,000 to fix the air conditioner.

I have a workshop in my backyard, and I have two window air conditioners in the workshop, and they face a dirt field. They fill up with dirt. It's really terrible. Once a month, I go out, and I pull the filters out, and I clean them up with the hose. That's not the only thing I do. We check the batteries. I don't do it every month, but we check the batteries in our smoke detectors. It's those types of things that we're supposed to do on a regular maintenance, but we forget about them because we don't set a reminder. We don't do anything like that.

I'll tell you, this is kind of humorous, but I have access to some websites at work. One of them is a place where I could go get my W-2. When it's tax season, basically, it's really the only time I go download this information, or I go download my yearly pay information, or something like that. I only use this website once a year, but if you don't log in every 90 days, they mark you as inactive. I don't need it every 90 days. I only need it once a year, but I put that on my first of the month list.

On the first of the month comes up, I get this reminder, and it goes to this Google Doc. When you go to the Google Doc, it has a list of things. Right now, there's about 10 things that are on the list. I have a server which is running a kind of outdated version of Windows Server. Don't tell anybody. I haven't upgraded it because it's not public facing. It's only used in the house, but I still apply patches to it, and I reboot it once a month just because I'm an old Windows guy, and that was what we used to do. So, that's when I do it. I do it on the first of the month.

I have this entire list of things that I do on the first of the month. When that reminder pops up, I go through the list. I have three different websites that I log into. I patch a server. I go during my lunch break or whatever, I will, or after work, I'll go hose out those air conditioner vents, and there's a couple other little house maintenance kind of things that are on the list. Sometimes going through the list only takes five minutes, but it's those types of things that we forget about. They fall off.

So, if you are a person like me, and you have things that regularly need to be done, but you seem to forget about or whatever, I think this is a great recommendation. Just make a list of things that need to be done on a regular basis. I mean, maybe you could have a quarterly list too, and it'd get a little complicated, but make yourself a list, and then just do those on the first of every month.month and then that way you won't forget about them so anyway I'm gonna go finish the things that are on the first first of my month list and I'll talk to you guys tomorrow