Want to drive yourself batty? Of course you do. The following list will show you how to do exactly that in clear, easy, and practical steps.

1. Acquire an extensive portfolio of duties and responsibilities. The amount of work to be done always expands, right? It’s like a vacuum. No matter how much time you have, you’ll find some way to fill it. What you want to do here is be a vacuum so large you attract work like brown biscuits attract flies.
2. Make yourself indispensable. If you’re in a room full of people and you can’t point to at least five of them that absolutely depend on you to do something, you’re doing something wrong. You need to be that critical junction, that cog without which no-one else can function.
3. Make a mental list of your most critical jobs. You need to know what you need to be doing if you want to be properly driven batty. Make a list.
4. Ignore the list. Look, the work isn’t going to do itself. Of is it? You won’t know until you’ve properly ignored it.
5. Do somebody else’s work. Co-worker unpacking a bunch of boxes? Go help. Technical documents need that fourth-draft polish? Get out the buffer. Carpets need cleaning? Tweezers.
6. Invent work. All that stuff you always wanted to do but never had time? Don’t procrastinate! Invent that new device. Figure out how to make a space elevator. Write a manual for something only you use. Anything you can defend as useful that is at the same time completely useless.
7. Review the list you made earlier. By now there should be some extremely pressing concerns. People screaming, that sort of thing. If people aren’t screaming, you’re doing it wrong.
8. Waste time. Get a blog. Get on Facebook.
9. Let the list of important stuff intrude of your every waking hour. Don’t stop fretting about the list. The list is the only thing you’re allowed to worry about. But don’t do anything about it. Maybe chip at the edges if you must, but allow the list to remain at the centre of your thoughts.
10. Suffer a breakdown. The weight of these important things you can never seem to get to should be, by now, right on your shoulders. And, like a burned-out star, you should be ready to collapse into a black hole of stress and depression.
11. Take a vacation. Let someone else deal with it. Seriously. If you play your cards right, you’ll win some sort of VIP award, or at least a cash settlement from the lawsuit.

Please do remember that you use this list at your own risk. Also not it can be adapted, with a little imagination, to almost any scenario involving responsibility.

First install the essentials. Thankfully the good people at Debian have got some packages ready for us already.

sudo apt-get install apartment-core

sudo apt-get install electricity

sudo apt-get install stove-gasrange6

sudo /etc/init.d/stove start

sudo apt-get install h2o-2.1.29

sudo apt-get install pasta

Now you’ll want to define what sort of pasta to use. Find out the acceptable values for “pastatype =” by doing this:

man pst.conf

I’ve used nano as my editor of choice, but feel free to use Vim or something else if you wish:

nano /etc/pasta/pst.conf

Once you have the pasta defined properly, you’ll need to start it boiling:

sudo /etc/init.d/pasta start

Remember that /etc/init.d/stove needs to be started and h2o installed for at least ten minutes before you can run the above command.

You can check the status of you pasta by running this command:

pastcook --status

Or if you want to install a pretty frontend onto that, do this:

sudo apt-get install italian

which will when you run

italian

from the command prompt give you a graph with time remaining.

Remember, when the pasta has reached its finished state, make sure you turn “stove” and “pasta” off! You wouldn’t want to, you know, fry your kernel.

sudo /etc/init.d/stove stop

Assuming you know one acute angle and the side adjacent to it, use a calculator (or a chart) to do this:

tan(angle) x adjacent = opposite

In a right triangle with an acute angle of 3deg whose adjacent side is 2.5 you’d get:

tan3 x 2.5 = .13101

Sign in to Facebook. On the right hand side, click on

My Notes.

Find the Notes Settings box on the right hand side. Click on

Import a blog

In the Web URL box, enter the URL of your RSS feed. My blog’s feed, for instance, is

http://www.rmfo-blogs.com/daniel/feed/

Check the box that says you have the rights to the content you intend to share (if you indeed do have those rights), and click

Start Importing

Facebook will then take the most recent posts from your blog and import them as Notes. From then on, every time you post to your blog, Facebook will import your latest posts as Notes as well, automatically.

sudo apt-get install discus

This will install the Discus disk space program. It’s a command-line interface tool.

discus

This will output a handy chart of space available, percent used, and so on.

man discus

For more options (there aren’t many).