80 20 Time

A writing modus operandi based on data

2012-02-09T06:48:00.000-07:00

An author's take on how she moved from writing 2000 words a day to 12,000 - and a book in 12 days! The analysis she did of her process is all kinds of wonderful:

http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html
http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/08/12-days-of-glory.html

2012 daytimer process

2011-12-31T12:43:00.000-07:00

The planner pad is the best daytimer I've seen for ensuring progress on goals and projects. I'm not using the daytimer in the way that the planner pad people recommend though. My focus is more of a goal-oriented focus.

The biggest problem that people usually have with goals is that they fall off their radar some time through the year. It's hard to keep our goals in mind on a daily basis. Having a good daytimer that doesn't let you fall off the wagon is a big help.

At the top of the planner is 14-15 lines (which the planner calls categories). I use them as days. 10 of the lines are used for tracking goal-oriented activities that I want to do every day throughout that week. When I go back to work in a couple of weeks, there's space then as well for 4-5 lines of work-oriented goals I will have - the primary one will be being a good manager and all that entails. I'll know more about how to attack that once I start in the role and see what kind of mess I'm dealing with.

In the first column (Monday), I list the outcome I want to reach or daily activity. Here's what they are for next week:

30 day shred daily
Tax accounting done (Monday's activity is recording gains / losses on shares)
Decluttering (Monday's activity is posting office chairs on freecycle)
Writing
Workout (eg. Monday is 3-4 sets of arms)
Fitbit (Monday is to reach 10,000+ steps and stay within calorie limits - there's about 5 different metrics I can play around with hitting targets for)
Fun (eg. reading, going out, kids, movies etc.)
Renovation - eg. a week of painting and putting together the master bathroom
Deep clean on house (Monday is bathroom - gotta get ready for that painting!)

There's a lot of focus on there on fitness and that's because my #1 goal this year is to get back in shape and not let myself get derailed like I have in the past. Work is important, yes. But some day the work will be gone and I don't want to be left with 20-30 extra pounds and a lonely life because I forgot to put myself, my family and friends - and my health first.

Under the daily things to do is other things that aren't time-oriented that I want to get done that day that have nothing to do with the above goals. eg. errands and weekly type of things and one-offs. And over on the side are about 20 lines for misc. things that I don't want to forget to do but are sort of like "someday / maybe" items in GTD. I go through that to pick out things to do for the daily list as well as top of the head things. But I don't work from this catch-all area.

Below that is a small section of 10 lines that I've made into a grid for my daily cleaning list - the goal being to touch each room once a day (also a vitamin reminder). I tried going without a daily list for awhile and I'm just not at that stage yet to do without it. Maybe I never will be - or not for another 7 years or so when the kids and pets are gone. I'd rather have the mess and have them here with me anyway.

How other people spend their time

2011-12-26T13:05:00.001-07:00

This is sort of a fun little graphic to waste several minutes (or an hour!) playing around with selecting different criteria to see how the average person spends their time:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/31/business/20080801-metrics-graphic.html

From the survey:
A person, an average, spends 24 minutes a day preparing meals. Other top household activities include interior cleaning (22 minutes), lawn care (11 minutes) and laundry (10 minutes).

Er... women spend 2 hours and 11 minutes on these things above apparently while men spend 1 hour and 19 minutes. My guess is that I spend at least an hour a day on cooking alone - but then again, I like cooking. Having said that, it's not something I spend as much time on when I'm working since I consolidate it all to the weekends, just like the cleaning.

Here's a neat post on how to get ahead:
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/12/ouch_a_years_worth_of_occasion_1.html

And a consumer price index calculator that's kind of fun to play around with to see what that car you bought in the '80's would cost you comparatively today:
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

Also an interesting paper on goal intentions - how you're much more likely to get done what you want to do if you set a time to actually do it:
http://cancercontrol.cancer.gov/brp/constructs/implementation_intentions/goal_intent_attain.pdf

A couple of nifty sites

2011-12-22T10:30:00.000-07:00

Accomplish lets you set goals for the year - and track them. I set up about 30 goals myself - some of which are really projects rather than goals, but that's okay. Here's the goods on it:
http://lifehacker.com/5863496/accomplsh-makes-setting-goals-simple-and-slightly-social?tag=productivity

750 words is along the lines of Julia Cameron's The Artists Way, where you write 3 "morning pages" every day. Here's their site:
https://750words.com/

Here's a couple of really good articles - on starting and finishing:
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/02/get_your_goals_back_on_track.html
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/06/how_to_become_a_great_finisher.html

And one on When Healthy Food Makes you Hungry - I know! What's up with that anyway?

This is fascinating: Identifying and Battling Temptation
On page 8 of the study paper, the researchers described the effect of menu choices (healthy or unhealthy) and layout of the menu. What would people choose if everything was jumbled up in one big menu OR if the healthy and unhealthy choices were separated? Apparently they eat healthier when they're on separate lists.
This made me think about the ramifications of this on a to-do list system and makes it logical for a person to not put their fun and mindless activities (like websurfing or tv) or sort of unnecessary and not so fulfilling tasks on the same list as your priorities. No, duh. But it's nice to see research backing that up.

Another plug here for fitbit.com and loseit.com - after a couple of days of using this fitbit gizmo, I have 1000% faith in my ability to stick to my weight loss goals for the year. It's incredibly easy to use, self-updating, HIGHLY motivational and cheaper than a month of weight watchers meetings. I think the reason it is so motivational is because it relies heavily on the "to-go" concept in Halvorsen's article on finishing above. Basically, every day you start fresh and try to reach activity thresholds for the day which is balanced against your food intake. Exercise more and you get to eat more - woohoo! It's incredibly addictive though. ;-)

Fitbit !

2011-12-19T17:19:00.003-07:00

I bought a fitbit to track my activity levels and it just came in. It's so cute!

Here's the page about it on Amazon: Fitbit

I also set up the android app Loseit (calorie tracker) to interact with the fitbit since my beloved noom wasn't one of the choices. :-( Yay though! Loseit has a bar code scanner so you can just scan your foods in which is strangely entertaining.

Off to walk the dog and see how many steps I can rack up yet today. Too bad I didn't get it this morning since I was up and down and all around the house doing laundry and tackling the last bastion of clutter in the storage room.

Here's what I racked up in 4 hours of use from 5:20-9:20 p.m. The activity score was so low because it was just for part of the day of course.

To be honest, another major factor that contributed to a fairly high activity level was that my son got a Sirius satellite system and thanks to the 80's channel, I've been "Dancing With Myself" to Billy Idol and dancing with the little kid to "You Spin Me 'Round." ;-)

11431 steps taken today

114 % of goal of 10000

15 floors climbed today

150 % of goal of 10

You have climbed: The Statue of Liberty

5.87 miles traveled today

117 % of goal of 5.00

1914 calories burned

88 % of goal of 2184

691 active score

69 % of goal of 1000

Wiseman's 59 Seconds - Motivation

2011-12-14T10:16:00.000-07:00

59 Seconds is a really good book and a fun read. It's basically a scientific look at self-help topics - what really works, what doesn't. Wiseman covers it all - from parenting to happiness, weight loss to dating and relationships.

Here's my notes on the chapter on motivation:

On daydreaming (as related to weight loss) - you'll have better results by not having positive fantasies about how great you'll do but by being negative and seeing the pitfalls. Apparently being a negative Nelly led to 26 pounds more weight loss over a year than the positive visualization people.

The best tactics for succeeding with your goals are:

make a step-by-step plan (with sub-goals etc. that are concrete, measurable and time-based)
tell other people about your goals
think about the positives of achieving the goal - like buying new clothes!
have rewards that don't conflict with the goal - eg. don't have a special meal out when you've lost 5 pounds, go buy yourself some flowers or a new pair of jeans instead
record your progress in writing

Use the Zeigarnik effect - "the tendency to experience intrusive thoughts about an objective that was once pursued and left incomplete"

Use doublethink: Visualize the process of seeing yourself doing the things that will allow you to succeed with your goals as well as seeing yourself succeeding. Be optimistic about getting to your goal but realistic about all the problems you'll face. Focus on your #1 & #2 benefits to getting what you want - then focus on the barriers.

Dieting and drinking: Women should eat normally, then slow down 1/2 way through the meal; men should eat slower all the way through. Use smaller plates and thin, tall glasses. Move the easy to overeat food out of sight. People eat more when distracted. People using large spoons and bowls take a lot more food. People who keep a daily food record lose twice as much as those who don't. Make yourself exercise by thinking about how much you'll regret not doing it. Eating out of small-portion "diet packs" can make you eat more.

Another interesting read: 25 famous thinkers and their inspiring daily rituals.

Articles I enjoyed

2011-12-06T06:33:00.002-07:00

The exercise effect - pump up your mood, not just your muscles

Well, there you go - I'm an active procrastinator (sometimes) and quite happy with it:
Rethinking Procrastination: Positive Effects of “Active” Procrastination Behavior on Attitudes and Performance

Mark of the INTJ rational - I'm more wishy washy than this, but it's a great article.

Willpower: It's in Your Head - one of the authors is Carol Dweck (loved her book Mindset) - I didn't totally buy that whole glucose theory that Baumeister put out in his recent book on willpower. Not saying it's wrong, but it seems very incomplete. I've always thought it's sort of like a muscle that grows when you use it - and thus change your concept of yourself from a weak person that can't resist anything to someone who is in control of themselves. Tell yourself enough times that you don't have the willpower to stick to something, and (shocking!) you won't be able to stick to anything. This is why it's so important to really notice all the things you do right and not beat yourself up (too much) for what you fail to do.

Distracted? It's time to hit the reset button - "Starting the day with a to-do list is important, but if it’s overly ambitious you will put yourself in a state of anticipatory anxiety, Dr. Pillay says. That makes it hard for the brain — which doesn’t like uncertainty — to concentrate. “Choosing three or four things as your priority for the day allows your brain to settle down and focus,” he says. Look at what is realistically possible and be specific with yourself about what you can and cannot do that day." No arguments here on that.

Questionable research practices in psychology - which hopefully doesn't negate the studies above. ;-)

The totally obvious: Impatience makes you bad with money - no really? Say it isn't so.

Tops on my "to read ASAP" (as I patiently wait for it to come available at the library): Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. From the blurb: "Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble." Yeah, my intuition isn't that trustworthy.

Emotional Intelligence 2.0 is another one I'm looking forward to reading.

Why has this never occurred to me?

2011-12-05T18:07:00.000-07:00

Because I was so very excited at the thought of using my NEW! IMPROVED! daytimer, I drew up a facsimile of the thing (one week) in my notebook for this week.

Sometimes people resist following a daily plan just because they feel that it's too rigid or that they have to do everything on the list. I know I certainly have resisted doing things on a to-do list because of that. But the thought occurred to me today that I could have something on the list to do today (eg. burn old bank documents) - but it doesn't mean that I have to actually finish doing it today. I mean, I certainly could finish it, but the main thing is that I get started and make some progress.

Needless to say I got quite a bit done today with just this one little distinction. I guess I've always thought of a daily to-do list as something that I had to do everything on it or finish everything off that I started. I had given up the thought of finishing everything on a daily to-do list years ago, since that rarely happens anyway. But today I finished "touching" everything on mine, and only carried forward two items, which I think is pretty great.

I strongly suspect that they'll get finished tomorrow.

SAD / Not SAD and daytimer p0rn!

2011-12-05T14:01:00.001-07:00

OK, I'm not SAD anymore, I'm happy happy. Like - very happy. I don't know how much this has to do with the blue light therapy - like did it put me into a manic phase? Because if this is a drug, I'm not going to stop taking it.

A couple of good things happened in November - I finally started a diet that I like and feel like I can stick to for this long haul. Almost 8 pounds off in the last 2 weeks, so it's all good. I've got most of my decluttering done upstairs and the living room project that I was dreading ended up taking me a grand total of 2.5 hours in one day. I'd somehow thought this was a 3 day job. Shows how I can trick myself into not starting things cuz they'll just take sooooooo long. Not. I also got all my big stuff (old mattresses, futon frame, old doors, exercise bike etc etc) hauled away to the dump today. That only took 2.5 hours too. And the landfill guy complimented me on my exceptional backing-in abilities. ;-) Yes, I have an RV and I know how to drive it.

I'm also super excited about working with my new daytimer for 2012 - only 21 more sleeps until December 26! Here it is:
https://plannerpads.com/booksec1.asp
https://plannerpads.com/booksec2.asp
https://plannerpads.com/booksec3.asp

I like that it categorizes things and allows me to clearly see my priorities. I do think this daytimer could be useful for any type of system such as Autofocus, DIT, GTD, Lakein... The only AF system I could see myself following again is the project oriented one.

Where I think that it could be useful is for incorporating the outcomes aspect of Agile Time Management as well. The outcomes could be listed on the top under categories and the day to day tasks (if you need them) could be incorporated under the daily list. Anything that doesn't fit into your outcomes or projects could go along the side under Notes/calls (20 lines) and / or expenses. Alternatively, the expenses section (only 10 lines) could be useful for something simple like a gratitude list.

Tentatively, I've headed the 7 columns for categories as follows:

House renovation
Writing
Blogging
Cleaning - want to do things more on a "on Friday super-clean the kitchen" basis
Diet and exercise
Fun, Friends and Family
Read / Watch

We'll see how it goes and what I end up doing. I expect it to change as life itself changes. If / when I go back to work, I don't know if I'll keep a one book format or one for work and one for home. I've gone both ways in the past and although it's nice to have everything in one spot (there's certainly enough room!), I sort of like keeping home and work separate too.

SAD experiment

2011-11-23T08:58:00.002-07:00

I have been quite SAD lately - seasonal affective disorder (I think). Haven't felt like writing, haven't felt like doing anything really. Fortunately haven't felt like eating either. ;-)

Yesterday I bought this light therapy device: http://www.amazon.com/Philips-goLITE-BLU-Therapy-Device/dp/B001I45XL8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322063197&sr=8-1

$199.99 in the stores here - so it better work.

I went to bed last night at around 11 p.m. and was up early as usual - before 5 a.m. This is the 3rd night in a row that I've slept less than 6 hours a night. Sometimes I wake up at 3 a.m. Ugh. I fall asleep extremely easily, so don't have insomnia, just early waking.

I charged the device last night and used it for 30 minutes at 100% strength this morning starting at around 5:30 a.m. If I feel sluggish this afternoon (and I'm sure I will), I'll put it on for another 15 minutes or so. But not too late in the day in case it makes falling asleep difficult.

Here's an interesting study on light therapy, exercise and bodyfat percentage:
http://www.nature.com/oby/journal/v15/n7/full/oby2007208a.html

Apparently the light devices (only 3 times per week) lowered bodyfat percentage but not BMI which makes me think that maybe they were eating less carbs (less need for serotonin?) and that's what caused the BF% change? Or did they just spontaneously exercise more or get a better sleep?

Currently at about 9 a.m., I'm feeling kind of... jittery - sort of energetic I guess. But still tired which makes sense because I'm sleep deprived. Will report back on the results. I'm hoping that it shifts my circadian rhythm somewhat so that I can have a normal full 8 hours of sleep a night if nothing else. Apparently for some people, the effects show up after a week or two of use, not instantly. Here's hoping.

Day 2 update: Went to bed around 10:30 last night totally exhausted but still kind of wired mentally. I initially tried to go to bed at 8 but couldn't fall asleep which isn't normal.

It actually took about 15 minutes to fall asleep by ~ 10:45 which NEVER happens. I didn't set the clock properly on the go-lite so the alarm on it went off at 5:04. That's right - the device that was supposed to help me sleep woke me up. But I went back to bed (which also NEVER happens) and woke up naturally at about 6:55. Still kind of moderately dopey but not too bad. Going to use the go-lite for 1/2 an hour this morning at 8:30 and then only 15 minutes around noon or so. I am definitely happier this morning but who knows why, it could just be that I got enough sleep.

Day 3 update: Forgot to use the unit on Friday but Friday a.m. I woke up at about 5:30 so maybe 6.5 hours of sleep? Felt pretty good all day.

Day 4 update: Just used the unit for about 20 minutes. In bed around 11 and up at 7:15 which is totally awesome. Unbelievable really. I never ever get more than 8 hours of sleep. Oddly enough though, I feel kind of groggier than normal. Who knows though since I've been eating pretty low carb and lost like 5 pounds this week. I should technically have less energy than normal because of that. In an ideal world, I'd like to go to bed at 10:30 and wake up at 6:30 only problem being that the kid doesn't go to sleep before me, so I think I'm stuck with 10 and 6 and waking him up at 7.

Great articles around the web

2011-11-21T11:42:00.000-07:00

Stillpower

10 Laws of Productivity

30 minutes a day

Choice anxiety

Productivity is the ultimate distraction

25 insights on becoming a better writer

Banishing your inner critic

http://www.theironsamurai.com/2011/07/16/managing-depression-with-weightlifting-or-how-you-feel-is-a-lie/

Ugh, had to go down the next action path

2011-11-08T17:56:00.001-07:00

I Just. Could. Not. Get myself inspired to want to tackle my home office today. So I had to play with my system. While I was at it, I thought - what the heck - let's throw the garage in there too. I highly doubt that I'll have any wild urges to clear that out this week either. I just hate doing this stuff. Yet sigh... I want it done and out of the way.

I added a page to my book and wrote at the top: Home office organized. About 1/2 way down I wrote: Garage decluttered. And wrote the next action down beneath those headers (about a 15-30 minute task). When I got them done, I wrote the next "next action" down and so on.

Throughout the day, I've gone through the 3 pages of stuff to do thusly:
Page 1 - one-off tasks - picked one (and only one) task to work on, didn't really matter which one
Page 2 - daily list - I go in order here since it's time of day oriented somewhat
Page 3 - the home office and garage projects next actions
Break after page 3

Writing was pre-scheduled this morning so that was out of the way. I wasn't happy with it afterwards, but maybe there's something to work with there tomorrow. Maybe not.

Yikes! Am I doing GTD?!? Oh noes!

Harry Raddick and Tuscan Whole Milk

2011-11-08T12:10:00.000-07:00

Harry Raddick's Amazon reviews - hilarious - here's all of them:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/AA9IP6AYACFK5/ref=cm_aya_pdp_profile
One by one they're not always super funny, but when you read all of them at once, you'll be crying by the end.

Review for the book Don't Shoot the Dog:

Kopp's marvelous guide shows how to train a dog without resorting to desperate measures. Thanks to this book I have kept my spaniel Barry in line with a couple of mock executions.

And one for Positive Discipline for Teenagers:

The authors map out clear, effective and proven strategies for rewarding parenting in this excellent well-written guide. An imaginative approach was called for when my 16 year old boy Jonathan threatened to barricade himself in his bedroom using just twigs, leaves, and his own spittle and dung, and this guide provided just that. There's nothing wrong with setting parameters, the authors say, just as long as that are not arbitrary or capricious and they are clearly articulated - and for crying out loud why should he be allowed to act like a nesting African Hornbill under my roof?

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1HQIT4P8J1UME/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

And of course, the 1,228 reviews for Tuscan whole milk, 1 gallon, 128 fl oz
Oooh, look 9 new jugs are available for $49.99 apiece!

Swiss cheese or baby steps - is there a difference?

2011-11-07T19:28:00.000-07:00

About 3 weeks after I first entered it as a daily task, the "organize my bedroom closet" task is finished. Some days I worked on it for a minute or two, sometimes for 1/2 hour. But there are no clothes in the closet that don't fit me now and everything is arranged to my liking. And the goodwill is probably happy with my surplus.

So I replaced it on the daily list with "organize front and back door closets". It will probably take a week or two to get those done. I'm okay with it taking that long - because I don't really care.

To me the main difference between the baby steps (aka little and often) principle that I used for these closets and Alan Lakein's swiss cheese method is that swiss cheese is used to get involved in a project. Do little tasks to draw yourself in and feel your way around the project - use it to figure out the path to take. Little and often or baby steps (to me) isn't that powerful - it's just picking away at things on a regular basis because the whole job isn't something that inspiring that you'll ever want to dive into. It's a maintenance kind of thing, not a creative thing. It's important to be sure - we all need to address at least some of these boring tasks (hopefully not build our life around getting them done though!) since not having little things done can be annoying.

Personally, I really don't like to be perfectly organized or perfectly neat. I think of it like Beck does in the work on CBT she's done with dieters - is the incremental effort of being 110 pounds vs. 130 pounds worth it? Really? If it means you have to exercise 2 hours a day and not just an hour - or can never have dessert - is it really worth it?

Here's a picture of Albert Einstein's desk:

It was a lot neater when he worked at the old patent office. I wonder why.

Small things

2011-11-07T12:44:00.000-07:00

"Life consists of small things, just your ego goes on saying these are small things. You would like some great thing to do - a great poetry. You would like to become Shakespeare or Kalidas or Milton. It is your ego that is creating the trouble. Drop the ego and everything is creative."

~ Osho

Check out this post from Sivers.org: Kurt Vonnegut explains drama

Pulled ATM Outcomes into daily list grid + not to do's

2011-11-07T07:30:00.000-07:00

Since I wanted everything I want to have done this week in one place, I've moved my weekly outcomes onto my daily list grid. It doesn't necessarily mean I work on them every day (except the ones that I want to work on every day).

So now I have 2 pages in my notebook that I refer to - one page of one-off tasks (there's 22 of them - technically 21, since I've sent out a bunch of emails already this morning to help my niece find a co-op job). I'm not fussed about when the one-off tasks get done - most of them could wait a month to do, so there's no urgency there. That works for me since I'm kind of a "do it now" person anyway. This is just a mini brain dump of minor annoyances.

Doing this will make it even easier to pick out what I've done today for my idonethis.com reporting. Also because when I finish one of the one-offs, I put the date in front of it.

On the grid, I've included the following outcomes / bigger projects I want to see done this week:

write about, contact and privacy page
home office organized
write 500 words other site
garage decluttered

Because I want to focus on getting the home office organized on Monday and Tuesday and the garage decluttered on Wednesday and Thursday (it's all about the weather forecast) - I've drawn a box around those days on the grid. The other 2 writing projects are something I intend to work on every day.

I also have a mental map of the day that's constant this week - to write in the morning and organize in the afternoon.

Barring some unplanned time suck disaster (could happen since my son is off school on Thursday and Friday and I cannot focus on anything with Mr. Interruption around), I'm going to shoot for a week of 100% completion of the grid. I always did like to shoot for 100% on tests. ;-) Not the one-offs though. It's kind of nice to delay doing unimportant things until you actually HAVE to do them. They don't bother me to have them hanging around undone - for some reason I see it as a good thing that I don't tackle things before necessary, especially the little minutiae of life. Yet paradoxically, I like having the important things done earlier than necessary. I guess everyone is that way - we just have a different view of what we think is important.

If you think about it, that's a good thing to not get around to these little things. People sometimes spend time thinking about "not to do" lists or projects - so in theory, everything on your list that you haven't done is self-identified as a "not to do" without your having to make a separate list! That's kind of neat actually. That you can look at everything you haven't done and give yourself a pat on the back that you're not getting (all) things done.

ATM for Friday, Nov 4 - home office hurray!

2011-11-04T11:01:00.003-06:00

Painted chair project

Above is a pic of the painted chair project. One coat on and one to go. It feels completely normal to sit in - funny what you can do with one $3 can of "oops" paint and a $2 jar of textile medium. It looks very pumpkin orange in the picture but isn't in real life - more of a burnt orange.

It's sitting on the area rug (to be steam cleaned another day - price tag on the rug was $449.95 and I got it for $50) I picked up at auction and behind it is 2 mirrors, 1 clock picture and 2 other pictures I picked up at auction. Total was $160 or so - thanks to my friend who got the auctioneer to throw in the mirrors for a great price (ie. free). This is what happens when you just ask. ;-) Retail price on the mirrors (sticker was in the back) was $50 apiece. Apparently they're hand-made, although I don't know how you can make anything hand-made for $50.

The pictures and clock are distributed by Ren-Wil Inc. (not a retail site, probably bought through a show home interior designer place). No idea how much they're worth, but they're extremely well made and framed. VERY heavy though, so I need to find a stud to hang them and very solid picture hooks.

And they're beautiful of course. My guess is they would have originally cost around $400+ apiece. Lord, I love a good deal! $2,000 worth of useless stuff for $200 - hooray! Now I just need to find more useless things for the shelves. Also some (useful) furniture.

Today my outcomes / projects are all related to decorating the house - particularly the home office:

finish the chair - 2nd coat (this is going to be the kids chair)
finish right hand built-in shelving clear-out in home office (this will take no time at all, so I'll probably / hopefully keep going on the other side.)
putting up above pictures

Also got done 7 one-off and weekly tasks yesterday as well as 2 of the outcomes planned (changed my mind on one of them) and 60% of the daily list. I should note that I don't expect 100% completion of the daily list and am happy if I get even half of it done. Getting 100% done is pretty cool though too.

After this post, I'm not posting my ATM outcomes and details anymore. This is a good add-on to my existing system. I have zero interest in TM systems that don't focus even a little bit on establishing and sticking to priorities.

ATM for Thursday, Nov 3 - one-off focus

2011-11-03T08:19:00.000-06:00

Yay! I had a wonderfully productive day yesterday. Guilt at being a slacker on Tuesday was clearly a good thing for me. Everything got done that I wanted to and then some.

Today, I want to focus on cleaning up my one-off tasks and the weekly / bi-weekly tasks that I haven't got to yet. All this focus on projects is causing them to not get addressed as quickly or as often as I'd like. Plus I think I'm freaking out my working partner by moving faster than she has time for or is comfortable with. Can't have that.

Here's my outstanding one-off tasks - not much of a list is it?:

clean out car trunk - which won't be around to do until Saturday
firewood - do I spend the time getting pallets or just buy the darn stuff?
get cable / internet sorted to drop the price substantially
fix my bike seat
get rid of son's bike
put little kids bikes into shed
fill out Health form
winter coats, gloves etc. to front closet
guest post for CAD Dream
pick up soccer shoes
dye hair
mine my connections to help my niece get a job
pantry door painted and put in
electronics upstairs to home office
fix ends on scarf
take down Halloween decorations
put up pictures

And the outstanding (bi) weekly tasks (some are done twice a week, in which case I put the date beside them and don't cross them out to keep them on the radar):

water plants
clean out fridge
clean microwave
bottle depot
fitness class @ GP
compost out
clean front window
roomba basement
try new recipe
SM blog post (having a hard time thinking of what to write)
take out garbage
tanning

I've got 4 days left to clean all of this up before a new (bi) weekly cycle starts again. But I'm going to a cooking class (make ahead hors d'ouevres) on Sunday afternoon with a friend so that day is virtually a write off. Hey! That can be my "try new recipe" task completed!

So today I'm going for non-labour intensive outcomes that don't require a lot of running around. Here they are:

paint chair
deep clean right hand side of built-in shelves in home office
book truck / trailer for landfill dumping this weekend

ATM for Wed, Nov 3 - psychopaths wasting my time? Really?

2011-11-02T08:25:00.001-06:00

I am not happy with myself at all about yesterday. I got pulled off into a tangent with research and a documentary on psychopaths - here's the link in case you want to go into a rabbit hole as well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKvhKI6Kxew

Here's a book that I've got on order from the library: Snakes in Suits
http://www.amazon.com/Snakes-Suits-When-Psychopaths-Work/dp/0061147893/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_i#reader_0061147893

My only excuse is that there's an evil psychopath in my novel and that I love novels and movies with evil psychopaths. And sometimes my ex acted like a psychopath - with less confidence. But since I haven't had to deal with him for 3 years, it's quite useless to research it.

Here's what I was supposed to do and what I actually did:

Clarify with partner the to-do list for the site and learn some more about the theme we're using which I'm not familiar with. Did a bit of research on the thesis theme. Not much - lame really.
Find fabric medium and oops paint for chair project. To be honest, I was out getting my hair cut and knew I was supposed to be getting something else and completely forgot about it. Note to self - WRITE IT DOWN on a piece of paper you bring with you. Kind of like when you go downstairs to get something out of the freezer, see the laundry is done drying and go do that, get upstairs again and realize you forgot about the freezer food.
Deep clean on home office to prep for some kind of decorating (I'm going to a showhome furniture auction tomorrow and am hopeful I'll score some nice furniture - and possibly artwork - at a good price). I won't be able to get this finished, but a good start is what I'm aiming for. Just went through a few boxes and pulled some stuff out for goodwill and the garbage. Burned a bunch of misc. papers. Boy, am I / was I a research junkie. Am confused about what to do to decorate these built-ins - to me they're bookshelves, but other people seem to put miscellaneous things that they never use on shelves for some reason. They look kind of neat but I'm afraid that anything with a flat surface in a shelf orientation seems like it should hold books to me. They call it things like "table-rama". I saw pictures of these table-ramas and thought they just look like clutter that you have to dust. I think what I'll do is put books in them for myself and then when I decorate to sell, will do what other people do and find some of these useless things. There's whole stores devoted to useless things - I was in one and bought some of them last xmas (they're still on the dining room table from last year) - so it shouldn't be too hard. I think that these decorating people just don't read enough. And that I read too much. :-( I wonder if there's a whole world of bibliophile decorating that I'm missing out on - hmm, maybe should research that. ;-)

Anyway, what I missed doing for yesterday that would have (maybe) helped was to make up a kind of schedule for the day like I did on Monday. That helps me to see how I don't really have all day to do things and have to get moving.

Outcomes for the day are the same as yesterday. Maybe it will be like Groundhog Day and today I'll do just a little bit better?

Oh yeah, my eating was crappy too. When it rains, it pours and all that.

ATM for Tuesday, Nov 1

2011-11-01T10:31:00.001-06:00

Yay to friends that help you get your to-do list finished when you need 2 people to get 'er done!

Here were my 3 goals for yesterday and progress:

Eat low carb - I caved on the Halloween avoidance but didn't go literally hog-wild. 270 calories of potato chips isn't bad in the grand scheme of things.
Map out site - done for the most part. It's a draft anyway.
Move big things - my friend helped with this. If she wouldn't have come, I would have made my son help me but it was awesome to get it over with.

Here's my list for today:

Clarify with partner the to-do list for the site and learn some more about the theme we're using which I'm not familiar with.
Find fabric medium and oops paint for chair project.
Deep clean on home office to prep for some kind of decorating (I'm going to a showhome furniture auction tomorrow and am hopeful I'll score some nice furniture - and possibly artwork - at a good price). I won't be able to get this finished, but a good start is what I'm aiming for.

Obviously, this isn't ALL that I plan or hope to get done today. I just want to move these things as far along as possible given my time constraints today (have a class to go to tonight, need / want to get my hair cut and dyed...)

Oh, and I've also hidden the Halloween chips - being out of the house in the evening for the next couple of days means I won't think about them (I hope). ;-)

ATM for the week

2011-10-31T07:02:00.000-06:00

I'll be giving Agile Time Management (ATM) a trial run this week - here's the startup guide for planning your day: http://gettingresults.com/wiki/Chapter_6_-_Design_Your_Day

The 3 outcomes I'd like to see myself accomplish today are (tied to my weekly outcomes):

Eat low(ish) carb and NO halloween candy - yay to not liking chocolate at least. This fits in with my weekly goal of losing 5 pounds - actually 6 to get down to the next 5 pound increment. Also do a whole bunch of squats and lunges. Or at least 5 sets of 20 reps anyway. On the menu is slow cooker ribs and chipotle pork chops and a gorgeous salad - mmmm. Also on the "menu" for the day is an earlier (and longer) than usual dog walk - I want him good and tired so he doesn't get worked up when the trick or treaters come around.
General map of the new site on paper. Sort of like a table of contents in a book.
Take apart the old futon frame in the living room and move it to the garage for disposal later in the week. Move old mattress and box spring to garage so they can go straight into a truck and go bye bye later this week.

And of course, I'll be doing all (or most) of the daily routine tasks and maybe a couple of weekly and one-off tasks but probably very quickly and throughout the day, not in one full shot. I want to keep up with this stuff and not get too behind - but not make them my primary emphasis either.

Here's the general map for the day:

8:30 - 11 - site work

11 - 12:30 - futon + mattresses
12:30 - 1 - exercise legs
1 - 2:30 - site work
2:30 - 4 - walk dog
4 - 5 - get ready for halloween
5 - 9 - halloween related

Links on writing

2011-10-30T08:50:00.000-06:00

Great post by Kevin Anderson on the simple math of writing a novel - "The Mathematics of Productivity":
http://kjablog.com/?p=1257

He wrote three novels in 2 weeks. I'm having a hard time getting my head around that - and he's a good writer at that.

He has a series of writing tips - here's #4 - Dare to be bad (at first) and then fix it.

Exciting projects

2011-10-29T11:36:00.003-06:00

I think everyone needs to have an exciting project going at any one time. The kind where you want to delve into it and do it AND look forward to getting it done.

I used to do quite a bit of sewing and more crafty kinds of projects, but haven't done them in quite a long time. I don't know why I stopped. I think it's because I started to look at things as too ROI (return on time investment) oriented, and not enough of the sheer pleasure of doing them. Plus I had so little free time.

Why spend 5 hours making curtains when you could go out and buy a set for $100? Because it's fun!

I have a yucky looking canvas chair that I'm going to experiment with painting this week. Here's the process for how I'm going to do it:
http://meandjilly.blogspot.com/2011/06/ghetto-fab-chaise-makeover.html

Here's a tutorial for a sewn roman shade:
http://nattybydesign.blogspot.com/2011/03/roman-shade-tutorial-part-1.html
There are no-sew options though with tape.

And check out this front door transformation done on the cheap with molding:
http://meandjilly.blogspot.com/2011/05/front-door-miracle.html

I'll put up some before and afters when I get it done.

I've still got a bunch of projects to do that I don't really look forward to doing (like doing some reno work on my home office), but the prospect of being able to decorate it with fun projects like this makes me far more motivated to tackle it.

Stephen King on ideas

2011-10-28T11:19:00.000-06:00

From The Atlantic. (This is why I don't write down much for to-do lists either).

SK: In the old days, it would seem like ideas were crammed in like people in an elevator. And my head was sometimes a very noisy place to be. The other thing that happens with that is, say you're working on something and it's going along pretty well, and two or three ideas occur, and they're all yelling "You should write this! You should write this!" It's almost like being married and all of a sudden your life is full of beautiful women. You have to stay faithful to what you're working on. But it can be uncomfortable.
JP: So do you keep them in a different file, or ...?
SK: No. I never write ideas down. Because all you do when you write ideas down is kind of immortalize something that should go away. If they're bad ideas, they go away on their own.
JP: So this awful thing of the writer who goes, "Oh, I had a great idea but I forgot it!" -- you don't really subscribe to that.
SK: No. Because that wasn't a great idea. If you can't remember it, it was a terrible idea.

Personality: An Owner's Manual

2011-10-28T06:43:00.000-06:00

Some notes on Lenore Thomson's book Personality: An Owners Manual

This is a good book on personality types, but a little on the deep side for a newbie to Myers Briggs Typology.

This is from the Exegesis Wiki on her work:

"The peculiar disconnect that nearly always happens between INTJs and INTPs. From the INTJ's standpoint: "He seems awfully attached to his model, as if it's the only possible one. There are so many possibilities he hasn't ruled out. His argumentation is simply unfair: he is choosing observations to stack the deck to favor his interpretation over all others. He seems oblivious to the complexity of the subject. He does not seem to know what he's doing."

From the INTP's standpoint: "I'm trying to point things out and draw distinctions in order to define a vocabulary that carves out some aspect of the subject matter. That would be forward progress. But he refuses to look. He keeps translating everything I say into some moronic vocabulary that he's already familiar with, where what I'm saying is a trivial goof. He seems completely stuck in his box."

From the book: (INJ's - so good for INTJ's and INFJ's):

"INJ's may, for example, feel a strong need to express themselves creatively. But without sufficient Judgment, they don't know how to structure their ideas. Such types may not even know what they want to say. So they spend their time acquiring more information about the writing process itself - perhaps by reading other people's books or finding out more about publishing. Instead of applying their Judgment to their inner world and limiting their options, they apply it to the outer world and keep their Intuitive approach intact."

"The irony is that INJ's figure out who they are by way of Extraverted Judgment. It's the attempt to give their insights outward form that ultimately shapes their social identity. Unless INJ's find a way to honor their Intuitions in the public arena, they won't recognize themselves in the feedback they get from others. Even if they've been highly successful in their outward pursuits or spent many happy hours in solitary pastimes, they're likely to feel unfulfilled."

Some other INTJ traits:

don't take criticism of their ideas personally.
position, title and reputation mean nothing
don't consider other people's opinions of them worthy unless they think they're intellectually qualified to make the assessment
legit judgments show the other person's assumptions, not anything about them
often driven and impatient
don't like to say anything more than once
need to find an alternate viewpoint to understand things, so may sound like they're disagreeing or critical when they're not trying to be
when young, may be intellectually precocious but emotionally immature (oh yes!)
distance themselves from others through ironic comments and juvenile sarcasm - so like playing with humor
try to avoid sensation and feeling - or see it abstractly
when there's too much outer stimulation or conflict, they become restless, bored and emotionally exhausted. Have to spend a LOT of time alone.
the communion of minds is like falling in love to them
neat saying: "after ecstasy, the laundry"

Measuring, measuring, measuring

2011-10-27T17:15:00.001-06:00

I'm trying to get a handle for how long my daily routine actually takes. Mentally, it takes 8 hours, but that's not the case in the physical world.

This stuff is intensely boring to me but I think in analyzing it like some kind of science experiment, it becomes a little (not much) more interesting. I do know for sure that if / when I start working again, I'm getting cleaners in once a week because this stuff is crazy-making.

Look at that table below - 2 hours and 18 minutes TO CLEAN HOUSE?!? My life sucks. Well, there were a few little breaks in there. I didn't even include exercising at say 1/2 hour and walking the dog is an hour. So the total is around 4 hours a day. I wonder how long other people clean every day?

I read somewhere once that a study was done where people were doing something physical and it was shown that more got done and they felt more energetic when they took a break once every 1/2 hour or so for 5 minutes. That makes sense.

My daily routine doesn't seem nearly so onerous when I split it up into multiple sessions of about 15 minutes to 1/2 hour each. The only problem with that is that I don't always finish all of it because I hit a mid-pm slump and then don't feel like cleaning in the evening. But I should push myself at the end because it's only maybe 15-20 minutes that I'm missing.

It doesn't seem right to me that it should take this long since when I'm working, I certainly don't spend that long cleaning every day. But everything is also messier when I'm working so how do I know? I think about an hour a day would do it then. That still seems kind of ridiculous given that I'm only home and not sleeping for maybe 4 hours a day - how could I spend 1/4 of my time cleaning? Perhaps some of the shortfall comes because when I'm working I really only cook twice a week. I don't know.

All I know is that my back hurts. And that little kid has already messed up my kitchen table. And the big kid left a book out on the kitchen counter. And I want a drink for medicinal purposes but I'm afraid to dirty a glass.

27:Oct:2011 02:06:: Dishes
27:Oct:2011 02:16:: Clean kitchen table
27:Oct:2011 02:23:: Kitchen counter - Oops got distracted putting some other stuff away there on the kitchen table
27:Oct:2011 02:23:: Quick break for phone call
27:Oct:2011 02:26:: Run roomba on floors - still on phone
27:Oct:2011 02:33:: Kitchen counters
27:Oct:2011 03:00:: Wow that was traumatic - shouldn't have got going on those spice bottles - floors are still being roomba-d - next organize closet
27:Oct:2011 03:00:: Take out compost first - oops
27:Oct:2011 03:03:: Set minty loose on kitchen floor, roomba in hall
27:Oct:2011 03:09:: OK - organize closet now - put away summer clothes + shoes ~ 20 pairs of sandals?!?
27:Oct:2011 03:20:: Bedroom clean
27:Oct:2011 03:22:: Clean out roomba cage and brushes
27:Oct:2011 03:28:: Clean bedroom
27:Oct:2011 03:35:: Laundry - bedding + folding other
27:Oct:2011 03:43:: Clean bathrooms
27:Oct:2011 03:48:: Totally having a break
27:Oct:2011 03:53:: Take out garbage
27:Oct:2011 03:59:: Clean office
27:Oct:2011 04:17:: Clean halls / closets
27:Oct:2011 04:19:: Clean living room / dining room
27:Oct:2011 04:21:: Spare room
27:Oct:2011 04:24:: Wash wall

What was weekly is becoming bi-weekly

2011-10-25T17:24:00.000-06:00

I had a number of weekly tasks, but now that I've been doing them for awhile, I think they can all be done biweekly. Heaven forbid I, you know, DO too much or do things before they actually NEED to be done. :-)

They aren't things that I want to over-achieve in anyway. This leaves a bit more time for my special projects.

For the special projects, I'm moving towards one per day (most, not all days). Tomorrow, I'm going to focus on the garage and the back yard. It's starting to smell like snow will be coming soon.

Recent reading

2011-10-25T13:56:00.000-06:00

Restlessness and moving around too much to different geographical locations - why it's a bad thing:
http://onlyhumanaps.blogspot.com/2010/03/american-restlessness-american.cfm

How to phrase goals or tasks - use "will I?" and not "I will"
http://onlyhumanaps.blogspot.com/2010/03/willingness-to-wonder.cfm

How not giving up on some impossible goals is actually harmful:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2007/09/19/who-says-quitters-never-win.html

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it."
~ W.C. Fields

I've found the same thing as this author - most people really don't want demanding jobs:
http://www.launch.is/blog/do-we-deserve-or-even-want-more-jobs.html
On the upside, it makes it really easy to excel in today's workplace. That's why I'm not worried about being out of work if I want to work. The bar has been re-set so low compared to how it used to be.

The Myth of Binge Eating - I'm totally grateful they're starting to do studies on this kind of nonsense.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman/2009/09/myth-of-binge-eating.cfm

This is cool - can saying that life is meaningless prompt a search for meaning? It worked for me years ago - and here's the answer for why it did:
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman/2009/08/cognitive-metamorphosis.cfm

Pleasure leads to mastery. Follow your bliss and all that:
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman/2008/12/taste-for-mastery.cfm

Apparently I should price my house more precisely when I sell to get close to the asking price:
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman/2008/01/why-things-cost-1995.cfm

Mothering (or parenting) styles. Nope, we're not all the same and there isn't one size fits all:
http://www.motherstyles.com/types.asp

The path as the goal

2011-10-25T10:47:00.000-06:00

Here's an interesting book on the impact of the digital world and how it's maybe not such a good thing:

http://www.indranet.org/the-digitally-divided-self-table-of-contents-introduction-and-chapter-1/

From the book:

"He introduced me to the reality that research was most welcomed by society when it could be translated into products and money.
What about the fun and enthusiasm I had doing that research? What about the almost mystical states I reached in diving into the mysteries of prime numbers? What about the development of my perseverance in pursuing such a task, even though (or maybe because) it was an impossible one? What about my capacity to tolerate frustration when my long calculations had been faulty from the beginning of the series?
I recognize now that some important inner qualities had been shaped as I chased those prime numbers. I had learned that the path is itself the goal."

Whatever the opposite of ADD is? Yeah, I haz it.

2011-10-18T11:45:00.001-06:00

I'm finding it difficult (as always - I've written about this before) to switch attention and not want to delve into and finish things in one session. I realize this hyper-focusing tendency has a good side - and a dark side. It's a terrible method for cleaning, but the daily list helps with that. At least I have a compulsion to finish the daily list - most days.

I was doing ok on the projects on my project page using the method of working on everything every day in pomodoro chunks - until I started having that feeling that I really REALLY just wanted to focus and finish one thing at a time. So I ran with it.

This doesn't work for things like exercising obviously. For some reason, I even wish I could walk the dog for 8 hours one day and then he'd be set for the week. ::rolls eyes:: Yeah, that doesn't work. Although it does work for 2 days worth - I've tried it. :-)

I also forgot that I have a course running for 12+ hours a day from Wednesday to Sunday and would like to get all the regular stuff out of the way (like pre-cooking, laundry, vehicle maintenance and some one-off tasks like buying/selling stocks and banking) before then. That sucks up today. I've also got one of those 7 links meme posts that I guess I was tagged for this summer while traveling (just got a notification from the 7 meme people) to do for the other blog.

Estimated time to completion for my current goals is going to be October 30th then. I'll need a day after the course just to deal with everything daily that piles up during the course and then will be off and running on the stuff to be done this month again.

I guess I don't think of this as a bad thing. Maybe many people have that urge to just resolve things for once and for all and focus on a single thing for one full day or a few hours or weeks instead of pecking away at it for days on end. I often lose my enthusiasm for doing something when I break it into multi-day projects. Then it gets left half done.

I'm so happy the toys are all done (apart from having to drop the box off to goodwill). I just got sick of it towards the end and threw all the little willy nilly things out (all these parts! eek!) and kept the big things for goodwill. I don't even know where these toys came from since I've never really bought him toys like I did the oldest one (not cuz I'm a big meanie pants, he just never asked for much in the way of toys, just craft materials). It could have been that time I hit a garage sale a few years ago and got a few boxes for $2 apiece but the kid never really played with them much. He only likes making his own crafts - origami these days - heheh, at least those burn in the fireplace.

There's only one time management "system" that I know of out there that relies on a kind of daily focus. It's the entrepreneurial system by Dan Sullivan of The Strategic Coach. They break up the week into focus, free and buffer days. Buffer days are essentially administration task days. Focus days are where you focus your time on where you provide the most value in your business. Free days are family and leisure type days. So I guess I'm having a buffer day today.

Wee summary of the book `Change Anything`

2011-10-15T22:10:00.000-06:00

I`m summarizing the section on weight loss here because it`s the most relevant to me. The book is pretty decent for just summarizing general information in this area of changing bad habits.

IDENTIFY YOUR CRUCIAL MOMENTS

Flowchart your day, week or month. Figure out when problems occur with overeating or skipping exercise. I (almost) never miss walking the dog, but often miss lifting weights or doing higher intensity cardio. I also have a real problem with keeping any kind of potato chips in the house - they`re like crack to me. I also have a problem with enjoying a glass or two of wine or something else alcoholic about every second night. I never overeat during the day and have no problems with portion sizes at meals but snacking is my downfall. Fortunately I don`t like sugar.
Focus on temptations, obstacles, and excuses. (Crucial moments). List temptations you gave in to in the last week and obstacles or excuses you use to avoid exercising. Look for patterns. For me, that`s a couple of habits - primarily that I bought a big box of individual chip bags for Halloween at Costco and have a real problem with stopping them from calling my name. I also don`t think I eat high enough protein foods early in the day lately - or at strategic times (around 3-4 p.m. is critical). This week I`ve been ok with exercising but stop too soon and don`t lift heavy enough. It should be painful the next day after I work out, but it`s not. I need to get out of the house more in the evenings in non-food situations. But I`m not sure how to do that without putting my kid into tons of activities and just ferrying him around. The smartest thing for me to do is probably to register in fitness classes and have him go to the swimming pool during that time. Now that I`m feeling so much better, I`ll have to make that a goal for next week.

CREATE YOUR VITAL BEHAVIORS
- create rules you`ll follow during those bad moments. OK, I did that in step 2 above. Other things could include sharing an order at a restaurant (which I already do) - or bring half of it home (the other thing I do). Make your bad days become good data.

LOVE WHAT YOU HATE
1. Find what you love - find an exercise that you enjoy. Find `good for you foods` that you really like.
2. Tell the whole vivid story - getting at your `why`for losing weight or getting in shape.
3. Visit your default future - unfortunately, mine isn`t too bad. But I could end up like a couple of aunts that have had hip replacements or like my grandmother with mushy muscles so that if I fell, I`d definitely break some bones. I`ve got the advantage of being fairly youngish now, but I know that most women put on weight after they go through menopause. The thought of that really freaks me out and makes me want to do something about it now.
4. Use value words. I`m doing this to not be a burden to myself, society or my kids some day. I don`t know if that`s really strong enough, but the thought of being a burden to anyone is anathema to me.
5. Connect to who you`re becoming. eg. become `a hiker`
6. Make it a game. I already do this through my noom app and writing down my meal times.

DO WHAT YOU CAN`T
1. Start with a skill scan. I have this down, I`m like a walking calorie counter and there`s not a lot about working out that I don`t know.
2. Employ deliberate practice. eg. if you have a problem with late night snacking - break the times from dinner to bedtime into half hour chunks. Use techniques like distraction, activity and eating options to beat the temptations. Set goals within the half hour times like putting in 20 minutes of exercise and then a 100 calorie snack.
3. Learn the will skill. Basically distracting yourself.

There`s more blah blah blah in the book. But what I think I need to focus on is just a couple of things - making myself go out in the evenings - it doesn`t even have to be to exercise, just being out of the house is good enough - and moving the main TV, Wii and weight bench up to the main floor of the house. When I was in really good shape in 2003-04, my weight bench and exercise videos etc. were smack dab in the middle of the living room. No, it`s not exactly great interior decoration and doesn`t look good - but I worked out every day for at least an hour or two and *I* looked good. :-)

I`m a big believer that having kids can make women fat(ter). Where we`d go out in the evenings before we had kids, after we have kids, we stay home. I don`t have a huge drive to be around people in the evening either (would rather be at home), which is another downfall. Now that I have a vehicle that I`m not sharing, at least my being out in the evenings isn`t a problem anymore. But I have to find something that I really *want* to do that`s in my city. Sadly, my city is small and a bedroom community so isn`t conducive to finding things to do locally.

Got over that "waaa - I don't feeeeel like it" nonsense

2011-10-13T12:14:00.001-06:00

OK, so I identified my big projects for the next couple of weeks here in this page (during which I will decimate my friend Mel) by coming in under the two weeks with 100% completion (I hope.)

I have to say that I think my mood and focus is much improved due to the focus I've put on my health stuff these last few weeks - taking the vitamins, sticking to the diet, finding out my uterus is apparently normal... - yay! Maybe it's just tired. ... Seeing that if I just work a bit on the house every day, I make decent progress (more importantly hardly even noticing that I am doing it). Knowing that for anything that I do if I just keep plugging away over and over again, it works. Picking myself up and starting over again the next day whenever I "fail" to do everything I planned on one day.

Here's how I'm doing it.

OK, so if we calculate that every normal day has about 10 hours of potential "work time" that we are okay with actually working. Note that I only include 10 hours because everyone deserves to have at least 6 hours of non-sleeping break time - and mine is higher than yours might be because I don't have that time-sucker also known as "a job" and "a commute" or other time-suckers like a "husband", but I do have an active dog, a whiny cat and a yappy kid, so maybe we're even.

Those 10 hours gives me about 20 pomodoro sessions a day. It also gives me about 20 pomodoro breaks a day. Because I tend to go overtime and miss the timer occasionally if I'm on a roll, I actually end up with about 15 pomodoros a day.

I have 7 big projects that I'd like to get done in the next 10-14 days. Those fit into the 25 minute pomodoro sessions. I also have about 15 or so little home / health maintenance tasks that I want to address every single day. Those go into the pomodoro 5 minute breaks.

Here's how I've broken out the time allocation for the big pomodoro sessions:

SEO site - 6 pomodoros or ~ 3 hours
OAWC guest post - 1 pomodoros
Motorhome - 2 pomodoros
Knit scarf - 1 pomodoro - kind of an afternoon break during which I watch a dvd (must be done before the kid gets home from school because he talks ALL the time)
Wii Fit - 1 pomodoro - after dog gets his walk otherwise he lays on me or gets agitated seeing me flail around vigorously for no apparent reason
Toys to goodwill - 2 pomodoros - afternoon, done with my son after he gets home from school
Large items - reserving one day for this as other goals (like the toys and motorhome) get wiped out
Weekly and one-off tasks - 2 pomodoros (generally more time consuming than the little daily stuff) - this post is written in one of those 25 minute time slots

I have my daily list sorted as to how / when I want to do things so generally I go in order like a robot. For instance, I like to always run my dishwasher at night so unloading it in the morning while the coffee is brewing is first on my daily task list. That makes me engaged with the book first thing in the morning because I want to check something off. I'm weird that way. The task for reading (at least) 50 pages of fiction and 50 of non-fiction is at the end of my daily list because I know that putting it there will remind me that I would rather read before bed than play a mindless game of Hearts or President on my DS - which is irritating to play anyway because I always win.

Ping! The timer just went off. Off to run the mint on the kitchen floor. ;-)

My motivation for decluttering

2011-10-11T13:02:00.000-06:00

This weekend I listened to Peter Walsh's recording "Does this clutter make my butt look fat?" The book (I'm halfway through it) seems kind of ok, mostly common sense. I don't really see a lot of correlation between the two things, except that I guess some people have so much stuff they can't use their own kitchens to cook. I used to know a lady like that, her house was like a landfill.

There was ONE big aha I got from it though, it had nothing to do with food - but it was a letter that he'd received from someone about his other book - "It's All Too Much." A lady wrote in and said that her motivation for decluttering was to be able to clean her house in 1/2 an hour - or each room in less than 5 minutes. I was like YES!!! That's exactly why I want to get rid of a bunch of stuff! Because I'm mad at the housecleaners (see why below.)

I know I've talked about decluttering a lot on here and that makes it sound like I'm some kind of uber-hoarder which I'm totally not. MY personal problem comes from putting stuff away literally years ago when we moved into the house - and not dealing with it since. In theory, all of it could and should - and IS going out of the house. Because realistically, if I haven't needed it or used it in 5-6 years, it isn't something I need or care about. I have absolutely no problem with getting rid of stuff since I'm not particularly sentimental which seems to be the problem with other people.

The other "problem" is that both my son AND the house cleaners had a modus operandi of putting a whole bunch of unrelated stuff together into a garbage bag and just hiding it away in the spare room or storage room. I just "found" a whole bunch of spices and tupperware lids and miscellaneous stuff like my son's DS games (no wonder we couldn't find this stuff) piled together in a garbage bag along with a bunch of tax papers - and rotten food. Thanks a lot house cleaners.

My problem with this is that just chucking it all into a truck and taking it to a landfill is environmentally bad. But recycling and "goodwill-ing" is a very time consuming process. Back when I used to get rid of everything very easily, I lived in a city where you could call a charitable foundation, leave a bunch of bags or boxes of miscellaneous stuff on your front step and it would magically be gone when you came home. These days, I'm taking a bag of clothes to the clothes donation bin, taking kids toys to the abused people shelter, taking electronics to the e-recycling, taking books to the book swap place at my local grocery store, dreading the prospect of the time consuming process of transferring all of my photos to digital format... Now THAT is "all too much" - of a process.

I'm torn as to whether to do it as a "Clean Sweep" process or a day by day like I'm doing. In Walsh's decluttering book, he recommends doing it every day for 3 months (every day = 1 trash bag to garbage, one to charity, one to possibly selling). Fortunately I don't have that much stuff left to warrant 3 months of doing it, and that would also mean making a trip to put these things where they will be of use to someone else every 2-3 days. Or would have with my previous vehicle, now that I have the massive cargo space in the SUV, no it wouldn't.

It's my goal to have all of this done by the time the snow flies, so about a month. I sort of hate having to face doing it EVERY day though. Maybe I'll just get annoyed enough and ruthlessly tackle it all in a week and get it 99% over with. I hope so.

Writing and deliberate practice

2011-10-07T12:32:00.000-06:00

Nietzche on writing:

The seriousness of craft
Speak not of gifts, or innate talents! One can name all kinds of great men who were not very gifted. But they acquired greatness, became "geniuses" (as we say) through qualities about whose lack no man aware of them likes to speak; all of them had that diligent seriousness of a craftsman, learning first to form the parts perfectly before daring to make a great whole. They took time for it, because they had more pleasure in making well something little or less important, than in the effect of a dazzling whole.

For example, it is easy to prescribe how to become a good short story writer, but to do it presumes qualities which are habitually overlooked when one says, "I don't have enough talent." Let a person make a hundred or more drafts of short stories, none longer than two pages, yet each of a clarity such that each word in it is necessary; let him write down anecdotes each day until he learns how to find their most concise, effective form; let him be inexhaustible in collecting and depicting human types and characters; let him above all tell tales as often as possible, and listen to tales, with a sharp eye and ear for the effect on the audience; let him travel like a landscape painter and costume designer; let him excerpt from the various sciences everything that has an artistic effect if well portrayed; finally, let him contemplate the motives for human behavior, and disdain no hint of information about them, and be a collector of such things day and night. In this diverse exercise, let some ten years pass: and then what is created in the workshop may also be brought before the public eye.

But how do most people do it? They begin not with the part but with the whole. Perhaps they once make a good choice, excite notice, and thereafter make ever worse choices for good, natural reasons.

Sometimes when reason and character are lacking to plan this kind of artistic life, fate and necessity take over their function, and lead the future master step by step through all the requisites of his craft.

Other articles:
The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance
The Expert Mind
Training writing skills

Progress this week

2011-10-02T20:45:00.000-06:00

Overall, I'm very happy with the progress I've made this last week. There's still some niggling little things that I'm not happy with where I'm at though.

Like exercise. I only lifted weights Monday and Wednesday. On Saturday, I literally read (almost) ALL day long. So I wonder if I shouldn't put that as a daily thing so that I don't binge on it on the weekends. It is frustrating to me - having always been a big reader - that I'm moving away from books and towards online content for my reading. In some ways, reading blogs (some of them) is like reading fiction to me. It depends on the blog of course, but I don't get absorbed in reading blogs like I do with books. So maybe I should have a goal of reading one fiction and one non-fiction book per week. I'm a super fast reader (with non-fiction), so that should be enough. I just don't want that desire and tendency to read books every day to go away. I truly believe I've become more distractable the more I'm exposed to the internet on a daily basis. It doesn't help to not be working out of the home. In a work place, I have so few distractions and rarely go on the internet (if I'm busy). I'd sort of like to be in that state when I'm at home now.

Plus I want to get to the point where I'm only checking my google reader once a day, both of my email accounts once (maybe twice) a day, my bank and stock accounts once a day. The only way I know how to do that is to monitor it more closely.

I believe that an "ideal" life is just made up of a series of good years and good months, which is made up of a series of good weeks and good days. I'd like that to mean that I'm doing something that's important to me every day. Or a bunch of things.

I'd also like to get to the point where I'm getting done the things that are most important to me every morning (I'm a morning person) and at this point that's writing. Even though I don't know where that's going (if anywhere), it just seems more fulfilling than all this cleaning stuff. I like knowing that the cleaning stuff is getting handled and getting a feel for how long it *really* takes vs. how long it takes in my imagination (which seems to think that it takes hours, but clearly I'm wrong.) Funny how it took until I was 46 y.o. to figure this stuff out.

This week I've got way more stuff scheduled so I'm moving everything into the Uncalendar format. Truthfully, I'm not that thrilled with the layout of this planner but am totally excited about using the Planner Pad (PP) that I bought for 2012 in a few months. There's just tons more room available in the PP format to focus on daily tasks. Now that I know how well this daily method is working for me, I'm totally pro-daily work (not just going by inspiration or intuition - if I did that, trust me, I'd NEVER exercise). If the secret to procrastination is "just keep starting", there's nothing like doing something daily to get you on the road to non-procrastination.

Now I just have to figure out how to fit my 31 daily things into a 15 line area on the uncalendar. Or just stick with what's already working and just plug these darn appointments into my phone. Cripes, I hate feeling like I wasted my money on this time management p0rn.

Going more daily than before

2011-09-29T10:50:00.000-06:00

I've added the following projects to my daily list:

Clean / declutter garage
Write SM post (doesn't mean I'll post every day, just means I'll write or edit daily)
Guest blog post
Novel - 250 words
10 blog comments (sometimes I am shy to comment on new-to-me blogs that I do really enjoy)
Organize my closet - too many clothes in there - and I was in denial that I'm not a size 6, so they're getting boxed up for when I am - cross fingers - or check off exercise & diet ;-)

Yup, that's 31 things listed on my daily schedule now (some are really really minor though). 15 things on my weekly schedule. 5 things on my monthly schedule. These add-ons were previously mostly one-off things and the thing about them is that I kind of avoid them (I have perfectionist / writing fear way too often) but if I just get started, I'm fine with continuing. This provides the little push that I need to get started and into that zone.

How am I doing so far on the daily list? I think I have about a 98% success rate looking at all the check marks. If I were doing this and working full or part-time, I'd cut the # of projects down for sure. Or not require myself to do something daily on everything. Or work extraordinarily quickly. :-) Probably all of the above.

What's also good is that even though I may have a check mark in a spot indicating that I've touched that for the day, sometimes in the early evening I go back through the list and do a little bit more on a few of the items. Yay!

I am giving myself permission though to do as little as I feel like on weekends. I consider the weekend to be Friday - Sunday these days. That's because of those "get out of town field trips" I'm doing on Fridays. Those are also the days that I like to clean up the one-off tasks too. Most of them I can wipe off on a Saturday morning. It looks like on those days, I'm running about a 50% rate on the daily stuff. That's pretty good. Progress, not perfection and all that.

There's a method to this daily madness

2011-09-28T18:29:00.001-06:00

In looking at my detailed daily list and how successful I've been with it, I think there's some logic to why it's working as well as it is.

First up, it has some elements on there that *make* me interact with the list on a regular basis throughout the day - all day long. Having my meals on there has been a huge help with this since I have to eat every 2-3 hours. To write down the time of my meal (that's all I write down, not what I ate), I have to interact with the notebook. When I take my vitamins, I have to check them off in the notebook. At the end of the day, I have a task saying "did not drink". Although strangely enough, last night I saw it and thought - hmm... actually I DO want a drink - which I didn't even want until I saw that. Weird, should maybe take that off. I broke the multiple day chain there. I think it may have had something to do with having a piece of my son's birthday cake earlier that triggered off a sugar rush. I'm so not a sugar eater, so that was probably a shock to my system.

It also has an aspect of "don't break the chain" in it.
http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret
Back in the day when I belonged to Weight Watchers, a big part of my success with the program was just down to logging every day. I ended up not missing a single day of logging what I ate the entire time I was on the program. My biggest concern wasn't so much how many points (although I tried to stick to the limits) or what I ate, but that every day I restarted and logged without fail.

It also gives me permission to do as much or as little as I feel like doing that day. On a given day if I'm just not in the mood, I might do as little in the kitchen as clean the counters for less than 5 minutes and that's it. Or I might spend over 1/2 hour in there. But I'm hitting it every day so it has never felt overwhelming.

Last but not least, I start off fresh every day and have a chance to have a perfect day of everything checked off. #1 tip for overwhelm and procrastination for me is "just keep starting."

Best blog / site for personal development

2011-09-28T11:16:00.000-06:00

Psyblog - by a long shot. This blog presents the results of scientific research into reader-friendly posts on a variety of subjects including goal setting, procrastination, building habits...

It's not a site like zenhabits or Steve Pavlina which is more about what works for one person, if their methods even really do work that well for them. Sometimes I wonder...

Here's some of my favorite posts:

http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/09/how-to-fight-the-four-pillars-of-procrastination.php
http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/01/how-to-avoid-procrastination-think.php
http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/03/11-goal-hacks-how-to-achieve-anything.php
http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/02/reaching-life-goals-which-strategies-work.php
http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/01/how-to-commit-to-a-goal.php

Apparently I've become inspired by cleaning

2011-09-26T13:10:00.000-06:00

Who would have thunk?

It's not the cleaning by itself, it's trying to hack the process and make a workable plan that's interesting. I think I'm still under some delusion that once I get the process done and implemented fully that the job is finished forever. That's obviously wrong. I just want to have the process working and a whole bunch of little annoyances cleared up by the time I'm back to work - whenever that is. Hopefully November but at the latest my guess is it will be January. The big annoyances like renovation projects? Well, I'll pay someone else for most of those to be done. The big things that I don't like to do anyway. If I'm not working by January, I'll do (some of) them myself.

Anyway, I added a few things on to a weekly list to use the same method (3 columns for 3 weeks).
As follows:

water plants
fridge
clean microwave
pick up mail
recycling
clean mirrors
clean inside windows
roomba basement
litter box
library
cook w/Marc
new recipe
groceries **
SMRM blog post
take out garbage

** Really going to try to restrict that to once a week at about $25 or so each time for a couple of months since I'm still only buying $20/trip (except for one Costco run/month - and that I order a bunch of beef from the butcher at one shot every year) - but apparently I'm one of those people who can buy a lot for $20 2-3 times a week. Anyway, my membership to Costco ends in October and I won't be renewing. I really only got it to buy the bed / mattress set. I'll have to stock up on rawhide for the dog though since it's 1/4 the price there that it is anywhere else.

Here's my monthlies: dye hair + trim, clean basement stairs, organize pantry & pick up dog poop. Oh yay.

In the weekly plan, I have a lot of room to write in my columns, so can write down what area I've done last if it's a job that doesn't get finished. Like this morning I cleaned the fridge side door and all the little crannies (17 minutes - I timed it) so next week I'll clean out the main part and the week after the freezer. Just rotating through like this means I'm not dreading the job anymore. Of course I'm also not dreading it because I let myself take a break after - and last, but most importantly - I'm not working.

That's what always used to bug me when I'd read about cleaning methods and how people think that there's one size fits all for cleaning. Nonononono. Maybe the methods can be somewhat the same, but the level of detail or delegation has to be very different. Unless you want to be cleaning all the time I suppose after being gone from home for 12 hours a day. And there's really no reason why we should assume that methods should be the same anyway. Nobody in their right minds would assume that a middle manager should have exactly the same time and project management methods as a contractor reporting to them. The work is just too different.

I also wrote a list of things to do for this week and am almost embarrassed by how little - and what - is on it. Here it is:

pick up birthday cake
dump rv tanks
buy trickle charger
drop off moho to storage
research battery storage
birthday invitations
fix my bike
finish cleaning out garage
garage shelving put together
clean out Yaris
winter firewood ordered/found
organize small pantry
OAWC guest blog post
deposit Marc's cheque
write kid's grandma
fix hotmail sync on phone
watch Pillars of the Earth
watch season 1 of '24'
read Sin Killer
read Kitchen Confidential
read Too Many Murders
read Domino Decorating
Genesis place fitness membership & schedule
books decluttered dropped off
clean out silverware drawer

I decided to put my entertainment stuff on there since they all come from the library and too many times I've borrowed a season of something or a book and failed to watch / read them. Even though it's something I really want to do. Weird.

Oh, and I also want to take an all day "field trip" once a week to somewhere out of town during the weekdays. Maybe make that on a Friday as a reward for getting all those onerous tv shows watched. :-)

Milgram's experiment - BBC video

2011-09-25T13:03:00.000-06:00

Great video on the effect of authority on the average person.

What surprises me is that back when the original study was done, 65% of the people wouldn't go all the way with the shock treatments. In this experiment, it was 75%.

One even seemed to be really enjoying herself. Ugh.

Note to self: stay far away from any overly authoritarian environment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdk9-zbk6XQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cNyRYF-vFc&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3jE7XHVi9A&feature=related

The daily to do + cleaning list

2011-09-24T22:21:00.000-06:00

I started with this daily to-do list system on Sept 5 and in the 20 days since working with it, it's proven to work out very well. This last week or so I've added a decluttering project into the mix and also added meals and exercise into it. That's because I abandoned that intermittent fasting protocol because it was too much of a pain and felt like deprivation to do while at home. I've been following Body For Life eating + exercise (5-6 small meals a day plus a couple of meals a week when I eat out and don't pay attention (much) to what I eat on those occasions) for a little over a week and it's going well. I've eaten this way before and it's really quite easy to stick to although I don't do well with the "cheat / free" DAY approach as in standard BFL. Since I go out to eat or to a bbq or something about twice a week, this fits well with my lifestyle.

Here's the set up:
Just put the days of the week in columns across the top. I fit 3 weeks worth onto an 8.5 x 11 sheet in my notebook.

Then I list the rooms of the house (just the top floor since we hardly go into the basement) along the left-hand side of the list, and also the vitamins I have to take as well as Meals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (which should be somewhere between 150-250 calories apiece). Also, laundry and dishes go on the list since I want to be sure I do those every day. Although I am running out of laundry to do most days, so instead in that slot I am working on cleaning out the laundry room in preparation for doing something or other with the floor. I've even put washing walls on the list, since I just want to clean one wall per day this month and breaking it up like this makes it really easy. Sadly, I have more than 30 walls to wash in the house, so this might take 2 months to get finished.

With the cleaning, I use the "Mount Vernon" method (sort of) mentioned in Sandra Felton's book The Messies Manual. This is a method of cleaning where you start at one corner of a room and just work in a clock-wise fashion. For the decluttering, it's mostly confined to my spare room where I just open the door, pick the first handful or armful of items that come to hand and make a decision on them for garbage or goodwill (I've only re-homed about 2 things since to somewhere else in the house - imagine that!) Then I close the door until the next day. Done. I suspect that will take a good month to get cleared out at this rate, but that's okay. It only takes about 5 minutes or less.

I'm really quite surprised that I've stuck with this cleaning system as long as I have. Maybe there's hope for me yet. I'm not doing everything up to a perfectionist standard, just trying to have everything a little bit cleaner and tidier than it was the day before. Sometimes I do a little bit because I'm just not in a cleaning mood or pressed for time but sometimes I get carried away too and keep going for a couple of hours just because. Just like life I guess.

Now that I've got that plate spinning, I might put some weekly and monthly to-dos on a list as well. I don't imagine that I'll have more than half a dozen items on each list. Just minor things that I tend to put off or forget - like doing a thorough cleaning out of the fridge or watering the plants.

I'm not a big fan of any kind of universal capture system anymore. It just leads to busy work for me. If I'm interested in pursuing a project, I just do it and don't need to write it down. I'll still sometimes write out a little check-list just to organize my approach, but it gets abandoned once I get the map in my head. A semi-daily-ish to do list works fine for me just to map out a day or remind myself to do something. Sometimes there's one thing on the list, sometimes half a dozen. If they can get done that day, they all get done. If not, well then I'll do them the next day.

I do keep a list of potential blog posts and books to request from the library. OTOH, I haven't written a single blog post from that list. Maybe that's telling me something. I'm afraid that it's telling me that I'm no longer interested in the topic and maybe I haven't been for quite some time. That's not good.

Do you have to be inspired?

2011-09-20T08:40:00.000-06:00

Merlin Mann wrote a great - actually fantastic - post some time ago on being inspired. Here it is:

First, care.

My project this week is to declutter and clean the garage. But I don't even need to list anything out because I'm motivated to do it. Why? So that my new car "Mitsy" can be inside. She's too pretty to be left in the driveway.

I've been procrastinating on getting my motorhome put to bed for the winter. Why? Because it doesn't need to be done until October when it goes into storage. Guaranteed that on September 30th or so, I'll take 4 hours one day and just do everything.

I've lectured myself for months that I *should* be writing guest posts for other sites - but I haven't been doing it. Yet on Sunday, I wrote up a guest post in a couple of hours for a very popular finance site. The site owner thinks it's great - and even I think it's pretty decent. It's going to run in Oct/Nov.

Then I contacted a fellow blogger yesterday and asked if she'd be interested in collaborating on what I think would be a very useful guest post article for others - AND that's something that I want to be doing / providing a methodology for to help other people save time and money. Basically using engineering and project management methods for a "once a week" (not once a month) cooking style - which is something both of us do when we're working. We're both geeky that way and I never, ever have to force myself to cook, I just love it. Cookbook porn! If we're fascinated enough, we'll make it into a little e-book / pamphlet, who knows?

The ONLY thing that inspiration doesn't work for is those things that are pure maintenance activities - like cleaning. I'm still using a checklist for that. Although I do have a couple of friends that are true neat freaks (in an OCD kind of way). I'm sort of envious of that - but not really. I've got my own things to be OCD about.

I'm not sure how to "make" inspiration happen or if you just wait for the voice to come. I do know that for me, getting myself physically "repaired" (ie. hormones) has been a big help. It's given me energy and creativity back. When I'm not mentally muffled, the inspiration voice gets loud.

Being a polymath probably doesn't help with consistency. Yet it makes for having an interesting and varied life. So if you can't beat it out of yourself (believe me I've tried!), you've got to embrace it.

A hilarious review of productivity generally and GTD specifically

2011-09-19T18:45:00.000-06:00

The cult of efficiency

Gotta love this:

"I had looked at other methods. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey just did not take, I think mostly because, unlike the author, I'm really lazy, petty, and morose. And that's my good side. Rather, I needed something that could really exploit the one thing I can do: plan. I can plan endlessly, I could have outplanned Rommel. I constantly fill out lists of tasks from the trivial to the surreally complicated, from checklists of what 5 dry cheeses to bring camping to complex plans for taking over pizza delivery franchising in small third world nations."

"It's easy to recognize GTD hipsters by the fountain pen spots on their shirt and the packs of index cards bulging in their pockets. Did you just have weekly review or are you happy to see me?"

"my wife is getting unnerved, her womenfriends commenting on my personal case study of digital folly. "He won't do anything if she doesn't send him an email with a classifiable subject line" they say. "

Stopping myself from drifting

2011-09-16T10:23:00.001-06:00

Sometimes I'm my own worst enemy and have to kick myself into getting stuff done. These last few days have been kind of yucky because I've let myself fall into drift mode again and only doing the essential (plus a fair amount of cooking, which I love doing). It's part anemia and part that these are things I don't really want to do. Which is why they've been undone for so long. Before I had the good excuse of work that I'd rather be doing but not anymore. Oh well.

So I've added a couple of elements to my existing plan. Here's the whole thing:

Current project (STILL the motorhome - BAD girl)
Master list of things that have been annoying me for awhile
Cleaning list
5-6 things that I don't HAVE to do today, but want to have done by the end of the day: recycling / goodwill run; wash kitchen floor; groceries; make carrot cake with kid (he's been nagging me forever); blog post - not sure why I haven't felt like writing, maybe because I made the mistake of looking at my stats for the first time in forever and got stage fright by all these people reading the blog; work out; go to vehicle auction preview (thinking about buying a new (to me) vehicle)

I'm just circling around them doing 1-2 things per page with 10 minute breaks in between. So far so good.

Accidental intermittent fasting - results

2011-09-07T13:19:00.003-06:00

First, some background:
I've probably been on some diet or consciously controlling, watching and whining about my weight for at least 1/3 of my life after the age of 20. For years, it was pretty easy to maintain a decent weight for me of about 125 pounds. Mostly because I had a fair amount of willpower in that area. All that willpower bit the dust after I had my youngest son 10 years ago and stopped making it a priority to work out consistently and eat consistently. Since that time, I've occasionally tracked calories, joined WW, gone on draconian diets for long periods of time, stalled out, gave up, all that jazz. I end up having the goal year after year after year of getting back down to what I think is a reasonable weight for me for my age and amount of time that I'm willing to invest in exercise every day. It's getting stupid. And the thought of having to track my calories for the rest of my life is not a pleasant thought. I needed to find a way to have this goal happen a little more naturally.

So I was left with 29 unwanted pounds on my body when we left for the recent 7 week RV trip. I didn't diet when we were gone, we ate out more than we normally do at home, probably a little more meat than usual but that's about the only difference. We did exercise more, but not a massive amount more than I do when I'm at home. When I came home, I found I had lost 8 pounds and it's stayed off ever since (granted it's only been a little over a week, but I've just been eating normally - I did quit drinking however).

What happened to help lose the weight is that about once a week, we literally ran out of food - miles and miles away from any grocery stores or towns. Sure, we had a few cans of soup, but eating soup on a 95 F day isn't my idea of a good meal, so usually I just wouldn't bother to eat for a day or two, or very little anyway. Plus I had to conserve the good stuff for my son since he's not as used to deprivation as I am (BTW, he also lost weight too). This way of "dieting" was so easy to do, it was kind of freaky.

I'm going on the "alternate day diet", also known as the JUDDD (Johnson Up Day Down Day Diet), QOD and also known as Eat Stop Eat. Yesterday was my first day eating on a down day, and I logged in about 675 calories with almost no hunger and almost no feeling of deprivation. I had a whey shake with frozen strawberries and a bit of milk, 2 oranges and 1.5 hamburger patties. (Grass fed of course, because all the cool kids eat grass fed beef. If you're super cool, you're a vegan. But I'm not super cool. Also because that's what you get at my butcher's for $2.50/lb.) I lost 1.4 pounds overnight which is about what I suspected would happen.

Here's my menu for today:

Breakfast (10 a.m.): leftover 1/2 of a homemade enchilada. I wasn't really hungry but thought I should eat something so I wouldn't be starving later.
Lunch: homemade chicken salad with sesame dressing and a whey shake.
Dinner: who knows, but I have a craving for some baked sole, corn on the cob and fresh tomatoes with watermelon for dessert. And ONE beer - if it's hot, and if I mow the lawn that will be my reward.

Obviously, it's early days yet, but I think this can be a sustainable diet (that won't drive me crazy) to lose about a pound or so a week and get down to my goal shortly into 2012. I'll report back on any progress or lack thereof.

My roomba is a girl - and she's barking orders at me

2011-09-06T19:07:00.002-06:00

All this time, I've been calling my roomba a "he" but when she told me today in a distinctly feminine voice that I had a #2 error and had to clean her brushes, I learned the truth. Rats, I wanted to be bossing around a boy robot for some reason. Or at least be bossing, not being told what to do.

I will blame the Flylady system that I attempted to follow (and before that the messy sisters - can't remember their names, but they had an index card file / box approach), but couldn't - for making cleaning and decluttering seem like an incredibly complex task that I had to have intricate spreadsheets and zones and all of that stuff to be able to do.

Yesterday, I built myself a little table in my task and project notebook that just has the main rooms and all the other routine little stuff that I want to get done every day. It's worked surprisingly well the last couple of days. Here's my list:

kitchen
bedrooms
bathrooms
office
LR/DR
hall/closets/pantries
laundry
iron (the vitamin, not the thing that gets hot and gets out wrinkles - I'm giving that away to goodwill)
lysine
sea kelp
l-tyrosine
St. John's Wort
B-vitamins
Dogs ear medicine
Noom (calorie tracker)

Then I just have the days of the week across the top and the goal is to have a check mark in each box every day. The house was kind of a disaster area when I got home, but now, after 2 days, it's looking pretty good and I only spent about 2 hours each day working on it. Maybe more, but I couldn't seem to stop myself and the time flew by. Which is pretty good for me considering how domestically challenged I am on this front.

I'm sort of thinking that if I manage to get say 90% of everything checked off in a week and do it for a whole month (an unprecedented event unless I'm selling a house!), that I should reward myself in some way. There's no other robots out there for me to buy though, I have them all and there's nothing else that I really want. Well, except for this gutter cleaning robot... cheap too:
http://store.irobot.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2874294

I decluttered as I went along and found myself being quite ruthless with chucking things. My environmental conscience was bothering me a bit, but I told her to shut up - she's caused me more grief in the last number of years than I should have to put up with. My house is not a freaking landfill and nobody would want some of this shit anyway. To make amends though, I took in the recycling and made a drop off of clothes and books to the goodwill bins and the local book trading center at the grocery store. And as always when I declutter - promised to go and sin / buy no more.

Very easy pomodoro-ish time management system

2011-09-02T14:42:00.005-06:00

I think what I've been working with the last couple of days would be good for any type of person who had project work (whether they were dreading it or not) as well as some miscellaneous one-off tasks to do as well as routine tasks. Which is kind of almost everyone. So here it goes:

Identify "Project Dread" (one you really do want to "have done" but find it difficult to get going on it.) Take a page in a notebook and put Project Dread title at the top.

For me this week, this is doing a soup to nuts cleaning out of my motorhome after almost 2 months traveling. Write out in fairly heavy detail the tasks related to the project (whether you can do them right now or not). If you're not sure if they need to be done or need to be done right now, just preface them with a question mark. I ended up with over 30 discrete tasks on the project, which ballooned to about 40 after I got going on it and thought of more things.

Like Alan Lakein says in "How to Take Control of Your Time and Your Life" - my favorite time management book (and in my opinion the best one ever written) I re-read on holiday: (paraphrased) The purpose of listing or doing swiss cheese type tasks to poke holes in a project is to lead you into getting involved or absorbed in the project. After you've become engaged in the project in a session of work, you really shouldn't HAVE to keep referring to next actions all the time. That's how it works for me anyway. It's just enough to get me in motion and the tasks are small enough that I think "oh, that's not so hard, I'll just start on one." Then I get carried away and keep working on it, but because I've listed everything out on one page, the next time I go back to it and have to get going again, I don't have to update any lists.

Have another page in your book labeled miscellaneous to-do's. I ended up with about 70 tasks on my list after coming home from holiday. I didn't include any REGULAR cleaning tasks or basic tasks like laundry because those go on the next page. Just because they need to be done regularly, more often and with probably less time spent doing them.

That 3rd page says nothing but CLEAN, DO LAUNDRY, "do Noom calorie track" and "take vitamins" on it. It could also have other things on it that you want to make into a routine or do multiple times a day for a brief period of time. You don't have to cross anything off here, but could put a checkmark beside the ones that you've done. I'm not sure if it's necessary or not to even have this page, but for me it is since I'm abnormally aversive to cleaning. When it's just 10 minutes or so at a time scattered throughout the day, it doesn't bug me too much though. Also because I want a reminder at regular intervals to do these things because I forget otherwise. I would never put normal things like "take a shower" or "have coffee" on the list because that's overkill. But then I like showers - even more now that I've been away so long and wasn't able to have one every day. :-) And I like coffee.

Then the 4th and 5th pages in my book are full of other miscellaneous tasks just like the 2nd page.

Here's how I worked the pomodoros today.

#1 - Exercise (30 minutes) - my dvd program is ~55 minutes long per DVD, but I stop after 1/2 hour. Because I'm anemic and weak. HIT is too much for me nowadays although I can still walk for hours.

#2 - Break (MAX 30 minutes) I need/want a long break after exercise. Why? Because I don't really like lifting weights, I just like what it does for me.

#3 - Project Dread (MINIMUM 25 minutes) - classic pomodoro with a 5 minute break afterwards. If you get carried away and keep working, then go for it. I usually do. The pomodoro timer I use lets you go over time and just start your break when you are ready to.

#4 - Miscellaneous to-do's (MINIMUM 25 minutes) - at least ONE has to be done on each page and whatever time remains is spent on the Clean / Do laundry page. How do you know what to clean? Whatever is bugging you - because it is probably in your face. If it's not really in your face kind of cleaning like tackling an organizing or decluttering project, put it on your miscellaneous to do list or make it into a Project Dread for a week. Plus if you're like me, you'll start cleaning the oven, then move along to the counters, then when you're putting something away on the counters, you'll mindlessly start reorganizing your pantry... I don't put on things that I actually LIKE doing and know that I'll do anyway like net surfing, reading, blog commenting or emailing. That gets done on the break.

#5 - Project Not Dread - as long as you want. This is what you love doing and get absorbed in. For me, that's writing this kind of mindless drivel. Back in the days when I was working, it would have been building spreadsheets or writing an annual or quarterly report. Really. Doing something like reviewing legal claims and preparing an assessment would have been a Project Dread.

#6 etc. - start over again from #3. Or #2. If you feel lazy. It's also a good breakdown for eating times / intervals of about every 3 hours (for me anyway since I get carried away on the project parts).

Back when I was working in the corporate world, I used to do a quick check of my email every morning to ensure there was nothing urgent, followed by working on a more major, ugly project that I didn't really care for just to get it out of the way. That's the "Eat the Frog" first thing in the day mentality. Then I'd clear up the small tasks in my email followed by other incoming to-do's. I'd usually save my favorite projects for later in the day knowing that everything else was taken care of. Or, because I was kind of a workaholic, I'd work on them at night too. I didn't have set times like I do now with these pomodoros, but these days it's too easy for me to take breaks and not come back to the things in life that are more important than watching the entire series of Damages.

What I think that I'll do once I finish up this Project Dread is to re-write and condense everything that's not done on the miscellaneous to-do's lists. By then I should be caught up with everything that has fallen through the cracks in the last while I've been gone and should probably only have about 30 items at a time on the go, which is one or two pages max. Any more than that is unmanageable and means I'm trying to do too much little stuff and not spending enough time on the bigger projects that I *should* be doing or projects I love doing.

We'll see how it works long term though and whether or not I have to tweak it a bit. If I'm not making enough progress on the renovation project I have on the schedule to do this month, then I might have to put a max time limit on the writing stuff.

Structure. Who needs it? Lists. Who needs them?

2011-08-31T14:16:00.000-06:00

Apparently I do.

I've spent the last couple of days at home. Alone. One would think I would have achieved a lot in all of this free time. Yet I haven't.

Part of it is decompressing from the trip which, at 7 weeks, went on for too long this time. Two weeks is the max I should spend in vacation mode before I start going insane from boredom and feeling like I don't have a mental challenge - or a purpose - and I've finally learned that lesson.

School starts tomorrow though - and that's a good thing as it will give me that much needed hard landscape to the day. I've also registered myself into 2 fitness oriented classes per week - bootcamp and curling and the kid into 1 sport - soccer - and 1 activity - scouts - per week. So we'll be out of the house and on the go much more - up until mid-December anyway. Just the way I like it.

I've also made up my various lists for most of the projects I have planned to complete in September. These are written in a fair amount of detail for the projects that I have a hard time motivating myself to do. For example, getting the motorhome prepped for winter has a list of over 30 tasks alone - varying in time to do from 5 minutes to an hour or so. With 4 or 5 per day completed, it should be done within a week. Sometimes I only need to use the list to get myself moving when I really don't feel like doing something. Once this particular rock is in motion, I usually stay in motion but that's a lot harder to do when you're at home all day.

Here's a couple of other android apps that I've found very helpful over the last little while:
Pomodroido - a timer app - this doesn't track what you've done into a nice little file like the computer version that I've got, but it gives you levels of completion which is strangely motivating. It does give you a Task reminder message however which is a great thing to have if you happen to be looking at your phone.
Noom - weight loss app that tracks calories and exercise - I love this thing, it's far less fiddly than any other calorie tracking app I've ever used. (Calorific on the iphone).

Does the technology matter?

2011-07-13T10:56:00.000-06:00

So I picked up a new top of the line phone since it was time for an upgrade. My oldest son came with me and basically picked it for me since I'm not terribly interested in that kind of thing and he tends to research the best technology.

So far I'm not too happy with it, but we'll see.

It was very hard to explain to the sales clerk what I was looking for. She didn't seem to care what I used my current phone for as much as wanting to show me cool apps that she had on her phone. But here's the thing - I don't use the apps that I do have on my blackberry. Part of that is because some of them are a PITA to use with a scrolling mechanism like a trackball. But part of it is because I used my phone for email, taking about 2 pictures a month, and that was about it.

I don't like facebook, I don't like twitter, don't really like talking to strangers - so even forums etc. are out until I get some kind of connection and feel like it's worthwhile to be there. And I don't talk on the phone because I don't like talking on the phone. Also don't text on my phone more than maybe once a day. When I do talk with someone whether digitally or in person, it's a long conversation / email. 140 characters doesn't cut it. My phone habits are basically the opposite of the average person's which makes buying a new phone difficult.

But maybe this is one of my "problems" or at least one of the things I would like to work on this year. Staying in touch with people on a more regular basis. Forcing myself to go on facebook because whether I like it or not, that IS how my friends connect.

Besides, I found some cool apps to track habits. I just have to change the words for the pre-configured ones. Instead of "don't go on facebook", I just have to erase the don't part.

I'm going with my beloved paper methods for general planning and calendaring though. Here's the two products I'm going to be using for the rest of this year and in 2012:
https://plannerpads.com/concept.asp#top
I found and used this planner about 10 years ago but haven't seen it in a store since. It was great for working with and tracking goals.

Also this as a more free-style system for the actual planning and as something to use for the remainder of this year since my small planner doesn't really give me a broad overview of the forest AND the trees. It's really just good for writing down something like important tasks or errands to do when I'm out to ensure I don't forget anything. But I want to see both the big and small view:
http://www.uncalendar.com/closeUp.jsp?orderCode=ULF-00001&tabs=5&current=P

In the meantime, the 10 year old kid is organizing my phone for me. :-)

Just a bunch of really good links

2011-07-09T10:56:00.000-06:00

Great article by Dan Ariely in Wired on time and money:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/06/ff_gamed/all/1

Best thing Merlin Mann (ex-GTDer) has ever written:
http://www.43folders.com/2011/04/22/cranking

Great thread on procrastination over on the GTD forum:
http://www.davidco.com/forum/showthread.php?10916-Procratination-Insight-now-how-to-fix&highlight=procrastination

A really good writing book: Weinberg on Writing. Because part of me thinks that writer's block is a bunch of bullshit. Part of that might be because we think we have to write linearly vs. poking away at the project in a non-linear way. P.D. James writes in a non-linear way, as do a few other writers.
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/32676

Great post on the traditional publishing and gatekeepers:
http://kriswrites.com/2011/07/06/the-business-rusch-slush-pile-truths/
The thing that made me stop writing fiction was the knowledge that I could put a year's worth of work into a book and never have another person read it.

A day on pomodoro

2011-07-02T20:12:00.000-06:00

02:Jul:2011 09:54:: Unload dishwasher, load dishwasher, move pots and pans to other cabinet
02:Jul:2011 10:29:: Finish moving the pots and pans to another kitchen cabinet and move the big stuff I rarely use to the other cabinet. Throw shit out. Clean cabinets.
02:Jul:2011 11:08:: Breakfast - cream of wheat and an egg - high in iron! Oatmeal for kids.
02:Jul:2011 11:28:: Big break - write blog post, email cleared
02:Jul:2011 12:27:: List of stuff to do updated + lift weights - squats and lunges
02:Jul:2011 01:04:: File tax stuff. Take out garbage.
02:Jul:2011 01:35:: File tax paperwork.
02:Jul:2011 02:12:: Tax filing done, pick up dog poo in back yard; more garbage out.
02:Jul:2011 02:58:: Motorhome bedding. Camera chargers organized.
02:Jul:2011 03:43:: SD card into orange camera. June invoice done and sent to A/P. Over $5k, wow, hardly felt like I showed up at all. Maybe because I mostly worked from home.
02:Jul:2011 04:12:: Take out bag of garbage from garage. Have a beer and read Lawrence Block - Hit List - on the deck.
02:Jul:2011 04:48:: More beer, reading and playing with dog. Why am I the one that's fetching here? Oops forgot to eat since this morning. Maybe do that too.
02:Jul:2011 05:20:: Make hamburgers. Eat seaweed. Have beer. Clean mint floor mop.
02:Jul:2011 05:58:: Read. Finish beer. Finish cooking hamburgers. Throw ball. Sweep deck. Clean top of microwave.
02:Jul:2011 06:54:: Tidy night stand.
02:Jul:2011 07:00:: Read Hit List. Wonder where boys are.
02:Jul:2011 07:07:: Eat supper. A hamburger - no bun. Alone - waaahhh. Text back a couple of friends.
02:Jul:2011 07:12:: Walk ze dog.
02:Jul:2011 07:43:: Yay! Boys are back in town. Lots of talking to ensue I'm sure.
02:Jul:2011 08:32:: Load dishwasher.
02:Jul:2011 08:40:: Calling it a night. The end.

Hmm. This clock is an hour off. Guess my computer didn't update for daylight savings time. Fixed.

I really like this method of time tracking - even though it looks like my life is incredibly boring. Oh well, I went out for dinner and drinks with friends on Thursday night - can't be too exciting. I'd originally planned to go hiking and fishing today with the boys only the oldest really wanted to take the youngest to see Transformers and has a date tonight - to go see Transformers AGAIN.

The little one and I will go hiking this week - during the week - when everything is quiet. Also have plans to go make / paint ceramics one day early next week. Other than that, just have to get some more stuff done with the motorhome and then we're off for the summer. Once my passport gets here. As soon as that comes, I'll just need a day to finish everything up, charge up the moho and go pick up the health insurance and then we're outta here for parts unknown.

Love this pomodoro app

2011-07-02T11:22:00.000-06:00

Here's the timer I'm working with today:
http://keepfocused.codeplex.com/

I like it because it stays open right on your desktop but down low and small so it's unobtrusive. It doesn't have a very loud alarm, but that's the only thing I would change about it - the ability to adjust the volume and / or make the timer pop open a big screen that covers up your computer screen. It also makes a nice little log for you to see what you've done at the end of the day. Here's mine for today so far:

02:Jul:2011 09:54:: Unload dishwasher, load dishwasher, move pots and pans to other cabinet
02:Jul:2011 10:29:: Finish moving the pots and pans to another kitchen cabinet and move the big stuff I rarely use to the other cabinet. Throw shit out. Clean cabinets.
02:Jul:2011 11:08:: Breakfast - cream of wheat and an egg - high in iron! Oatmeal for kids.
02:Jul:2011 11:28:: Big break - write blog post, email

This one's a keeper.

Best post on procrastination I've ever read

2011-07-01T08:26:00.000-06:00

http://www.raptitude.com/2011/05/procrastination-is-not-laziness/

Hilarious post on "The Secret" + rant against procrastinators

2011-06-27T14:57:00.000-06:00

Funny review of The Secret:
http://my.opera.com/coxy/blog/index.dml/tag/Ari%20Brouillette
I'll have to remember that if I ever go to prison.

I'm losing my mind. Tax return is due Thursday, payment will have to be couriered out of the country by tomorrow, all necessary info was given to the firm that's preparing the return 2 MONTHS ago (by me) - and I'm the one sweating over it at the 11th hour. Freaking procrastinators drive me nuts. If they had to pay the late filing penalties personally on almost $2 million it would serve them right.

Why do tax accountants complain about always being so busy in June? It's because they can't get their shit together earlier. I've seen it in every firm I've dealt with or worked for. I hate dealing with incompetents even if they are nice. You can't even get mad at them though since they make you feel like you're kicking a puppy.

Some good writing about writing etc.

2011-06-26T10:45:00.000-06:00

Love this article:
http://www.dennispalumbo.com/dennis_palumbo_bio3.html

Article on writing mysteries that gave me an awesome idea for mine:
http://www.dennispalumbo.com/Dennis-Palumbo-article16.html

How to become a great finisher:
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/06/how_to_become_a_great_finisher.html

I read Halvorson's book: Succeed: How we can reach our goals - not a lot new there, which just means I've probably read too much of the underlying research already, not that it's not a good book.

I read this and think I'm too wedded to this idea of getting things done in the shortest amount of time vs easiest (ie. most enjoyable) way possible:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/07/goal-planning-for-optimal-enjoyment/

Seminar - what I learned

2011-06-26T09:06:00.001-06:00

In hindsight, the seminar I went to was a bit of a waste of time for me at the stage that I'm at. Way too much time was spent on dealing with something that I thought should have been dealt with and finished in the first course. Perhaps not IN the course, but in the intervening months - which indicated to me that these people didn't "pop" / get it like I did in that course. Up until the middle of the 3rd day, people were still going up and telling their "stories" and although it was a good refresher, there was so much abdication of responsibility in their stories that I just found it quite frustrating to listen to.

Here's a few learnings from the first course that I was most impressed with and still remember even though I took it 5 or 6 years ago:

Probable almost certain future - basically "if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got". You'll have the same problems, you'll date the same kind of people who are wrong for you, you'll deal with people exactly the same way you always have - unless you change what you do. If you've never saved money up to now, you won't save any money. If you've never stuck to an exercise plan, you never will. Something has to change and probably drastically. No zenhabits "baby steps" for you. This was quite depressing for me to accept - and then it was HUGE in making me change my mindset towards work and money.
Own your actions - we've become so namby pamby / don't take on any blame (or responsibility) for what we do nowadays that it's amazing we're surviving as a species. This is where people were mostly still stuck in this second seminar. There was a lady who was late on the second day (I think she was late on the first day too) - the leader told her to stand and acknowledge to the group that she was late and what she was going to do - that's it. But she went into this looooonnnnngggg explanation about how her wake-up call didn't go off and that didn't mean she was a bad person. Then she started babbling about her ex and how he'd never hit her but she was emotionally abused because he would throw things when he got mad and what a victim she was - blah blah blah. He used her as a learning tool for the rest of us because she wouldn't just stand up there and say "I was late. I'm sorry. It won't happen again." THE END You don't even have to say you're sorry - just acknowledge that you were late. It's not like she was going to get thrown out of class or booed by everyone or anything bad was going to happen, she just made it exponentially harder for herself and could have stopped it at any time but chose not to. It was very odd. She was up there for over an hour fighting with him, refusing to just say it with NO explanation at all. We weren't asking for her excuses and her silly stories about her 501 reasons of why it happened. Interestingly enough, she was late again on the 3rd day I believe and had some more stories about that accompanied with lots of tears. I think she used tears to get sympathy or something, not sure about that. I think she finally got it in the end. I would imagine that her whole life was that refusing to acknowledge that she had any part in any of what had happened to her and not being able to let go of things. It certainly sounded like it.
Acknowledge what's so - without attaching any meaning to it. Basically you look at the facts of a situation and don't add in your wild interpretations of what those facts mean to such a point that you lose sense of the facts. So someone could be late to meet with you and you represent that to mean that they don't value your time or they don't care about you. Although those things may be true, the reality is probably that they're just a pinhead about time like that lady that kept on showing up late after every break. On the other hand, if someone is consistently late, it's probably something that they do everywhere and has nothing to do with you personally at all. My oldest son is like that because he never experiences dire consequences from it - but he's learning at his new job that there can be dire consequences, which is a good lesson for him at his age. We had to have a little talk about how he always expects things to work out absolutely perfectly and leaves himself the bare minimum of time. He's particularly bad because he just considers himself in the equation and doesn't factor in other people. I had to tell him that it really wasn't a sin that he shows up somewhere 3 minutes early and doesn't have to rush because he's left himself lots of time.
A few other things that I took away - that this life we have is just a game, there's no big successes, no big failures, we're all just playing a game and you can play full-out and have things work out or not work out, but chances are fairly good that they'll work better when you do give it all you've got. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn't but you're just stacking the deck in your favour. That was HUGE for me at work, I've made a ton of money from that one distinction.

What did I get out of this course? The big thing with this one was discovering what they call your "Act" - it's a story that you tell yourself when you're younger and you go through life telling yourself this whenever things get tough or you're confused. I think I already sort of knew it when I went in, but I think mine is "hold yourself back". I'm not entirely sure, but I think it had to do with when I skipped grade 1 after a couple of weeks in the grade and when I went into grade 2 they put me into that purple group by myself and everyone made fun of me - for the rest of my time at school. So I deliberately made myself not get the highest marks in the class except where I couldn't help myself. I didn't get over that until I was in university.

It probably didn't help that my dad's mantra was "children should be seen and not heard" along with "silence is golden" so we weren't allowed to talk most of the time. It wouldn't surprise me that he's sensitive to noise, just as I am - hence my not liking to hear a TV or radio playing. But of course, my issue is explainable, his is just being a jerk. :-) Unfortunately, the more you cut yourself off to noise, the more sensitive to it you are.

You could have a lot of acts, but common ones seem to be things like "don't work too hard" (because it won't pay off) or "hide from your problems" (I've had that one too!) or "I'm helpless" or "failing is bad" (so you won't promise others or yourself anything - or you'll drive yourself much harder than you should). A lot of starving artist types have this philosophy around "money is bad" - which probably means that they don't value what they do enough. OTOH, it could also mean that they're not very good at what they do or the demand just isn't there. Oh well, they learn the hard way then I guess.

Some no-brainer other things that were taught were things like:

How you see things (your point of view) is how you act - which includes feelings and thoughts which leads to your results. The moment you change your point of view is when you see new actions to take. Years ago, I had this director that everyone hated except me. The only reason why I didn't dislike him was that I could see that he was probably an aspie and just didn't understand how other people needed empathy and that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar (although apple cider vinegar does work for fruit flies) - or maybe he just valued hard work too much. Oddly enough, he was very nice and bent over backwards with me but not with anyone else. He even had a bad habit of firing anyone in public that I had told him weren't pulling their weight in our group. Yikes. He'd just go ballistic and tear a strip off them in front of everyone when it could have been done much more humanely. I learned not to tell him those things...
Create stories from nowhere that empower you and then live into those stories
Nothing really happens until you totally put your ass on the line
We tend to class people etc. into right / wrong categories and not recognize that those are preferences just as liver vs. steak is a preference. We don't make liver "wrong" for being liver and not steak (well, some people actually do this kind of thing in a steak vs. broccoli kind of way - or anyone who holds up their eating habits as some kind of moral code to follow.) This is why I prefer being a friendly atheist where I can be and how I can justify to myself sending my kids to catholic school in a hypocritical way - it's much easier to not care about other people's personal praying habits when they've probably only got them because of where they were raised and the family they've been born into.
If you're always keeping your word and doing what you said you would do, you're not playing a big enough game.
How empowering and powerful it is to come from a place of contributing to others, not just helping yourself
How we make what's real unreal and what's unreal real. This ties into your personal test for reality (which is NOT reality) - those thoughts, feelings, body sensations etc. about what is going on. So you could have 1000 people tell you that you're a good mother, but you don't think you are because you feel it's wrong that you get angry once in awhile and worry that you're damaging your kids for life because you yelled at them. But only a good mother would care about whether they were a good mother or not. Bad parents don't worry about whether they're good or not, they feel justified in spanking and yelling as much as they feel like.
The more you try to "fix" your problems, the more real they become. This is kind of a hard one to get your head around, but it's more living into a totally new way of being. Maybe learning to focus on your strengths and kind of ignoring your weaknesses helps here.

This stuff is hard to explain, and it makes a world of difference being there vs. just reading about it - but particularly the first seminar. It was kind of a good refresher anyway.

But like Erhard said, understanding is the booby prize. What's important is what I take away from it and apply to life - that's a breakthrough. Fortunately, I thought of a business idea a few days before the course that I'd like to play full-out with - AND that is good for other people and the environment so I think it would be wrong of me to NOT do it! Win-Win! I'll pursue it as soon as I come back from holiday. No holding back. :-)

Making a fair deal with yourself

2011-06-24T12:11:00.000-06:00

I'm trying to work out a deal with myself that seems fair in terms of work vs. not work. The "not work" I want to do today would look like work - if I were a grad student in neuroscience, which I'm not and never will be. But tomorrow, it will probably be genetics or bond markets or something equally thrilling. I don't know why I can't like something like facebook. Then I'd really know I was wasting my time.

So I have a bunch of things I have to get done for or before my trip. Since I don't have to actually w*rk for a living right now, I figure that a 50 / 50 split between things I want to do vs. things that are on my list is a fair split. To that end, I'm making pomodoros of time. So I just measure how long it takes me to do or finish something and then do my fun research for an equal amount of time. The longer I work on the thing I don't want to do, the longer the break I get. So far it seems to be working and follows the same principle as my task sandwiches.

The difference is that I have a whole master list of things to do vs working from a kind of daily to-do list like I ordinarily do with task sandwiches. Most of what I do is not day specific at all (except I want to avoid errands on weekends or after normal working hours), if anything it's weather specific. So if one of the pages in my master list has about 25 lines of to-do's (3 pages), only maybe 8-14 of them really do have to get done before our trip. Anything else is gravy.

How I am doing them then is to say that since we have about a week before we head out (possibly longer - depends on my passport), if I have 30 things that must be done, then I have to do about 5 a day (assuming that I'm missing something on the list that hasn't occurred to me that has to get done.) So I'm getting them out of the way first before I tackle anything else.

Obviously, you can't do this in a normal work environment - although it probably is possible since I've observed that most people don't actually work very long every day. I know many of my friends think I'm a fool to not sit and get paid somewhere for 8 hours, get my work done in 2 hours and goof off online or going for coffee the rest of the time like some of them do. I just can't do it though, I want to be either on or off, no middle ground.

Oh - here's a neat little test on autism:
http://eppl604-autism-and-creativity.wmwikis.net/file/view/BaronCohenWheelwrightEtAl2001.pdf

The characteristic I was most interested in was Attention Switching and I was off the charts with that part. I cannot switch attention easily at all from one thing to another and it takes a very long time to pull myself back into doing something when I've been distracted. My youngest son complains all the time that I get a lost look on my face when he interrupts me and that I actually don't hear what he's saying until a few minutes into his conversation. And he talks A LOT so this is an ongoing frustration of his that I don't listen and an ongoing frustration of mine that he interrupts. Poor little guy.

And he's so amazing. Yesterday, he came home, didn't even come into the house first, got the whipper snipper out and did all the front parts of the house. Then later in the evening, we were sitting out on the deck and he just went and got the snipper again and did the back yard. I don't understand how he operates that way and I'm 45 not 10 y.o. - sometimes I wonder who the adult is here. He sees something to be done - and he just does it. I guess I do that at work, but I never do that at home.

Oh, my score was 28. Somewhere between a "control" / normal? person and an autistic person. I kinda figured that.

The seminar - some observations

2011-06-21T09:17:00.001-06:00

First up, something I didn't get out of the seminar I went to but occurred to me while listening to people. It's not that often - if ever - that we end up getting to hear a bunch of people that we don't know tell stories about their lives and hardships that they've gone through. Oh, let's call it what it is - whining.

Our stories are very well-rehearsed about how we screwed up in some area or how other people have hurt us and how ill done by we are. It's quite clear that we tell them to ourselves - and probably annoy others with them - over and over and over again. I try very hard nowadays to leave those past things where they belong - in the past. But I never used to. Actually, I don't have to work much at it, it just happens now. Funny how things never really worked that well for me until I let that bad habit go. We're like broken records that ruminate over and over again on how so and so did us wrong and as a result, our development and personality gets stuck at that stage. And holy crap is it annoying when you hear dozens of people go on and on about this stuff. You just want to shake them and say "get over your self already." And then you want to shake yourself and tell yourself to get over yourself. :-)

And thanks to our culture's emphasis on whining about ourselves, we're not allowed in a sense to say how we've done things right - that's looked on as bragging and that by me or you saying you've done something right or really succeeded in some area, people want to pull you down to be as unhappy or unsuccessful as they are. If we say something like we made $20k one month, that says nothing about anyone outside of the fact that you made $20k. But we make stories up about what that says about us if we didn't do that. You're not as hard of a worker, you're not as smart, you're not as lucky, their way is the right way and you are a screw-up. They're a better parent because their child is gifted and yours is not (personally I'm ecstatic that both my kids aren't gifted since they don't play with their heads much and even more ecstatic that they're both damn hard workers - no thanks to me). Then you'll get angry with that other person because you feel like they are somehow saying that to you when they're saying nothing of the kind. Well, some people are actually saying that their way is the right way and yours isn't but generally if you're pretty secure in your decisions, you don't get that envy. They made different choices and focused on different things - that's all. And maybe that's something you should consider doing if you want the same results.

Anyway, it makes me wonder what one should do when someone is constantly whining about an area of their lives or a specific person. I could whine about my ex or my dad for 2 days straight, but it wouldn't change a thing except make me depressed and make me feel like a victim which is a very unempowering state of mind to be in. I'd prefer to not think about them at all or think about the positives. Fortunately I have a bad memory for the past since I stopped telling myself stories about it. :-)

It's not as simple as telling them to take some responsibility for their interactions with people or in an area of their lives on a go-forward basis. Or is it?

I'm going to write up some notes in a couple of future posts about the content of the seminar. It wasn't that productive or enlightening for me at this stage of my life but think it might have been maybe 10 years or so ago. I'm glad that it wasn't that great since I don't want to continue on with their courses. The funny thing is that after the first seminar I took with them 6 years or so ago, I actually started doing many of the things that this course taught naturally.

Another thing that drove me nuts was the preponderance of people that felt compelled to get up and share the most banal and trite statements with everyone. eg. "I just want to say that I really got it!!!" Thanks so much for that piece of information. I'm sure you have altered my life trajectory with your insight.

This over-sharing seemed kind of limited to a certain group and demographic of people - flaky extroverted attention whores. There was about 20 of them out of a group of 108 that just kept going up there and saying stupid shit. You just wanted to tell them that as much as they liked the sound of their own voices, they weren't such special snowflakes and they weren't really *adding* anything of quality to the discussion. I would imagine that most were updating their facebook awesomeness status at every break. It made me realize too that my world of people - who are mostly very practical and intelligent - is probably much different than theirs and that's why I have little tolerance for it. But there's something to learn from them I guess, although I'm not quite sure what that is. Maybe that I need to develop patience.

I wonder if that's like a version of Tourette's if people feel compelled to blurt crap out and talk constantly. I noticed that none of them had any focus at all. One of the "rules" of the course was that you weren't supposed to side-talk with anyone. But those people were the absolute worst at sticking to that rule. One of the things about the course was that we were supposed to develop a cohesive group. All I could think was that there was no way I'd want to be in a group where someone couldn't follow simple rules like showing up on time or shutting up while someone else is talking. In all the seminars and classes I've ever taken I've never seen anything like it.

Oh, I also really lost my temper with this one volunteer too. We were supposed to stand up and say something to our little group of 4 other people. But there's 20 people standing up doing the same thing and it gets quite loud. So I was trying to keep my voice down to not interfere with other people - too many years spent in a cubicle environment has made me cognizant of the noise I make I guess.

So this volunteer comes up and says - in the middle of my 30 second statement that I was being too quiet. I said that my voice wasn't really that loud. She said "I want to suggest to you that that's part of your *story*." I almost wanted to tell her "I want to suggest to you that it's part of my *story* that I don't like looking at stupid, ugly bitches. I wonder what deep-seated issue is behind that." But I just told her that - no, it's not my STORY. I appreciated her concern but perhaps she could have waited 10 seconds until I was finished before critiquing my performance like I was being judged in a Toastmasters competition. Again - must learn patience. I don't think I'll qualify as a zen master any time soon.

Some great reads

2011-06-16T14:00:00.000-06:00

My new favourite writer of the week! Very funny.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/19/change-your-life-calmness-burkeman

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/04/wellbeing.to.do.lists

Good things taken too far

2011-06-08T06:59:00.000-06:00

By and large, structured procrastination can be a good thing. I've read many stories of authors who, when blocked, will madly clean their houses to avoid working on their novels. There was even one author who would keep about 20 work in process novels on the go - when he wasn't inspired to work on one, he worked on one of the others. He was very prolific. But I don't think he applied it to EVERYTHING - and that's where structured procrastination can be taken too far.

It just seems to me that it's human nature to do the easiest things over the hard things - especially if you have any tendencies towards procrastination. If you procrastinate at all, it's because you are avoiding the anxiety of working on something - usually something hard.

With writing projects, I find it freakishly easy to write on the other blog when I'm avoiding writing on the novel. When I just had this blog and the other, it was easy for me to write on this one to avoid writing on the other one. That's what structured procrastination should be about - to use it for your high priority projects. And to use it only as much as you have to. If you have a schedule to sit down and write for a certain time every day and you stick to that and it works for you - why on earth would you change that?

Part of the problem is that just because you have a certain tactic - let's assume it's something like PULL motivation - it doesn't mean that it has to apply to your whole life and everything you do. I'm pulled to do work 99% of the time when at work and I'm pulled to read and write every day too, but there's still some areas where I have to push myself and will probably always have to push myself a little bit. Oh well. Welcome to being human.

TM stuff - Pull not push mode

2011-06-04T15:07:00.000-06:00

Here's an iphone app based on a role-playing game that rewards you for doing chores:
http://www.rexbox.co.uk/epicwin/
Makes me wish I had an iphone.

The people over at lesswrong.com don't like Structured Procrastination (my guess is they're INTJ's and value effectiveness over efficiency of getting the wrong things done.)
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1sm/akrasia_tactics_review/

I abandoned my micro-bursting attempt yesterday since I realized for - oh, about the 1000th time - that I really hate not finishing something and the set-up and take-down and stopping of projects is pretty counter-productive. Little and often sometimes works, sometimes sucks.

Instead, during a break I used PJ Eby's visualization / NLP-lite technique here for "Pull motivation":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpS_cJP5nzs
And got pulled off track and was freakishly crazed to want to clean and finish some physical projects. You have to do it for each one, but approximately 1.5 minutes of visualizing can easily push you to do 1.5 HOURS of cleaning - and worse yet, WANTING to clean. Oh the horror! :-)

It didn't seem to work as well with non-physical things. I think that it could though, although I'm not quite sure yet how to do it. I think that's how I motivated myself to study in university, I'd always visualize and plan on getting 100% back on the test or paper and feel some kind of pride in that. And it's what I do at work - I visualize getting some project done that day, having everything work really well and then woohoo! getting to go home early.

I'm not quite sure what I'd visualize to get a good feeling on writing - specifically fiction - since it's such a big job. So right now, I'm sticking with The 90 day novel for that.

I really enjoyed PJ's www.thinkingthingsdone.com site. Good stuff.

Micro-bursting - step 1

2011-06-03T10:56:00.000-06:00

Here's an explanation of micro-bursting:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060625155050/http://cherylmillerville.com/scgl/newsletter/2.htm

This is similar to Steve Pavlina's micro-tasking process. This is something that I do myself a lot - only I call it a checklist. Whatever.

How I'm doing it is that I have a few things that I want to get finished today.
Specifically those things are:
1. Build a cabinet (a big pull-out drawer one - those are quite a bit harder than the 20 minute ones)
2. Finish writing a blog post on the early retirement personality
3. Go through my blog roll and comment
4. Clear out my email accounts
5. Lift weights - arms
6. Clean my bedroom
7. Clean my bathroom
8. Clean the kitchen
9. Finish reading Time to Murder and Create
10. Do goodwill laundry and bedding from motorhome
11. Murder 10 dandelions
12. Clean out car
13. Walk dog
14. Deep clean fireplace threshold
15. Water compost (although I think it will rain tonight)
16. Book oil change appt. for next week
17. Get passport photo taken
18. Put registration sticker on car
19. Mow lawn (this is kind of like exercise too!)
20. Tax - utilities

Whew! Are you tired yet? I sure am.

Some of these are tasks and some are small projects (some are small projects that are part of bigger projects).
So I broke the big ones down and am using my insane desire to finish things to push me through the list. Every one of the big(ger) projects gets its own little checklist. But the thing is that as much as I want to finish them once I start, I can't let myself do it - basically let the compulsion for closure pull me through the list. Because that's where I stop doing things - when I feel like "oh, I've finished - okay, all done, let's go read a book or surf the net." Then I have to get myself all revved up to get going again.
It's sort of like the technique of stopping writing mid-sentence so that you are pulled to go back and finish. Of course, I won't get it all done, but I'm curious to see how far I can go with it.

Will update later.

Getting comfortable with uncertainty and good enough for today

2011-06-01T10:33:00.000-06:00

Even just a year ago, it was hard for me to let go of planning everything out. I had to have some kind of deadline and some kind of end state to aspire to. It's not that I still don't kind of like to do that, but I'm also starting to realize that it's not that important too.

Traveling by meandering around for long periods has been a huge help with learning to embrace this journey vs. destination mentality. That's why I don't like planes I think - it's so here you are here - and then you are there - but just look at everything you flew over. There's so much that we miss doing it that way.

As I'm playing around in the world of my novel, I've also been reading just one book about the craft. Alan Watt's "The 90 day novel." This is a GREAT book on writing.

In the book he says "I learned an important lesson: that if I can make the story more important than the result, the story has a chance to live." "When we allow the thrill of creation to be its own reward, we are often surprised by the result."

This advice isn't limited to writing. I've kind of even surrendered to the idea that how I want my life to be - to be free to relax or do something fun in the evening or on the weekend - or - gasp! in the afternoon - and not have the guilt that I should be doing something (esp. cleaning - lol) is the state that I want to be in. I get that when we travel - I clean the motorhome in the morning and do a quick tidy up at night and am never sitting there reading my book thinking I *should* be doing anything else but enjoying the book that I'm reading. But I still have to get to that point at home unfortunately. :-)

When I used to exercise first thing every morning, I never sat there all day thinking I *should* be exercising more or again that day. I'd gotten it out of the way for the day and that was enough.

It's also been helpful to now have a very part-time job that I'm not very committed to, it's just a job. When I'm done for the day, I leave. Whether that's 4 hours or 6 hours or (rarely) 8 hours, I'm done. And I don't think about it outside of when I go in. Yet in a way, I kind of miss the emotional investment in work. I'm sure if I lay down, that feeling will pass. :-)

So there's quite a lot of freedom that comes with doing what you are *supposed* to do when you are supposed to do it (or at the earliest available opportunity). It's not a "force yourself you lazy dog", it's holding out the carrot of free time when you're finished. This is basically the concept behind The Now Habit by Neil Fiore which I've talked about before. I think I probably had issues with that approach before because I really did have waaaayyyyy too many commitments and responsibilities for one person back then. But I was too lost in the mechanics of trying to get it all done. Further proof that the concept of the benefits of "Slack" (see book by the same name by Tom something or other) is so very true.

Having this time off now has also made me realize what I don't want to lose sight of with the other blog - what I want it to be about or to represent. First is hope for others. That if they stick with the basics, financial independence is guaranteed. There's really no other alternative - it has to happen. It's just a basic mathematical truth. Also to maybe make the process of reading about finance a little bit more fun. It's such a boring topic sometimes and I kind of forget that some people aren't mathematically oriented like I am so it can be quite intimidating for some I think. And I also believe that by joining the many voices out there together, that maybe we can all help people live their lives a little bit more how they'd like to. Because ultimately, I'd like to have other people have this same kind of freedom that I have today.

Going Luddite

2011-05-29T15:52:00.000-06:00

Loren Feldman wrote a beautiful post here:
http://www.lorenfeldman.com/the-future-of-tech/

Sometimes I wonder: What have we become? What has technology done to us and what is it going to do to us and society as a whole? Do we have to become mini-versions of the unabomber to opt out of all this noise?

Isn't it enough sometimes just to write a blog for your own entertainment? Do you have to be branded? You know what branding is with cattle right? It's a label saying you are the property of someone. It does seem to me that most people who talk about their "personal brand" are very sheep-like.

Do you have to advertise, guest post, turn everything into something commercial? Why? I get requests for guest posts and advertising ALL the time on the other blog. It's incredibly annoying since it's pretty obvious if anyone actually READ it that:
a) I write everything - it's my experience. How anybody else could guest post about MY experience, I have no idea
b) there's no ads on there now, so isn't it entirely possible that I don't want to and don't have to make money off it?

That's why I like this blog better. I can write stuff and nobody reads it. :-)

And another question: Why do people want to set up an online business so badly? I'm starting to wonder if it isn't because they're socially inept and can't cut it in the normal work world. Add in low barriers to entry (free to set up a blog), and the false perception that you have a kajillion friends (that you've never met in real life) - and if you did, you'd probably be trying to sell stuff to each other anyway. I suppose it's the same reason that some people like to work from home. Maybe they just don't like other people very much. Unless you're doing it because your commute is ugly or something or you want to live somewhere outside of a city.

Then you get people doing stuff like traveling etc. and it seems like they're spending more time writing and connecting with other people through their travel blogs than they are just enjoying where they are. Why? Why aren't they getting out and enjoying the other in real life people that are at their location more? Although it does make a nice trip journal I suppose.

Anyhoo, I'm going to figure out what I'm going to do with my main computer when it comes back from getting serviced to take off the internet access entirely or make it very inaccessible. Leave on word and excel and that's it. Not one single thing of value has ever come from the time I've spent on the net and it's gotten in the way of many things that I do value. I'll print etc. by putting everything on an SD card I think. We'll see though since I do like writing long-hand anyway. Maybe I'll buy an old electric typewriter...

The joys of getting older and caring less

2011-05-21T21:28:00.000-06:00

Another daytimer turned up and hit the fireplace this weekend. This one from 1995 - wherein I realized that I had slight mental problems back then.

What did I find?

Months and months of trying to stick to a 700 calorie a day diet while exercising for several hours a day. Fortunately I wasn't a very successful anorexic since it doesn't look like I ever got below 120 pounds.

I also seemed to have a habit of working from 9 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. in addition to the regular 8 to 5. Hmm. Wonder why I was so burned out. It seems it is entirely possible to burn out on self-discipline.

The thing that made me the saddest was realizing that the mortgage on my house back then was only $43,000 and I would have had it paid off in 5 years (actually 54 months) had I not quit that job to go work for myself earning erratic income. And I had no other debt besides a car payment which would have been paid off in 1999.

Hindsight being 20/20 of course, I wish I had never gone into audit and would have worked at an asshole-less company and not been such an asshole to myself. It makes me wonder how different my life would have been had I known how to establish reasonable boundaries back then. Sometimes I wish I didn't have to learn by making mistakes so much.

There can be only ONE. Or two or three...

2011-05-19T10:35:00.000-06:00

I have officially decided that days with multiple things to do in them do not fit with my brain. Also that it's not necessary to fit (most) things into a "must do daily" kind of strategy.

Years ago, I kept in pretty good shape going to the gym once on the weekend for a couple of hours, once during the week (like on a Wednesday) for 2 hours and a nice brisk walk / jog almost every day before or after work (usually coupled with going to pick up groceries and doing errands since I had a little rule that the car would not move after I came home from work). That was more for a mood enhancer than anything since I get peppy if I walk fast (oddly enough I am a slow walker normally, but at work I walk very very fast).

So in my schedule the choices were pre-made for me. What are you doing Saturday morning or Wednesday evening? Going to the gym. No-brainer. Working a lot these for those 5-6 years kind of disrupted all of that balance. It became "what are you doing on Saturday morning?" Working - or feeling guilty about not working - or feeling tired from working too much.

So now that my time is my own again (yay!), I'm figuring out how to go back to that system. Which is actually pretty easy peasy. This week, I worked on Monday and Tuesday in the office. I had a partnership return to do (due May 31) that I knew would take about 10 hours of work, so I worked about 10 hours on it, did a couple of little tasks that needed to be cleaned up - and then got the hell out of there - putting in 6.5 hours on Monday and 5.5 hours on Tuesday. Next week, I'll go in again for a couple of days and get done the stuff that needs to be finished for the corporate tax return due at the end of next month.

If starting is what is hard for me, I have to make the starting easier. And then commit to finishing. And it's easier when I have something clear in my head that (a) it does HAVE to be done and (b) I can finish it in a decent time frame.

Today, I've got about 6 loads of laundry to do (no, I don't really let it pile up that much, it's a combo of the muddy dog getting on the beds and the cat horking up a hairball on some pillows) - so my (such onerous...) goals today are to get ALL the laundry done and, since it's raining, not to declutter the garage like I'd planned, but to finish (I think I can get it all done except I've got one of those multi-drawer ones coming up that take 3 times as long - and a corner one too I think) building the cabinets and super-clean the laundry floor (prepping it to lay some tile so it has to be spotless).

But I'm also going to throw reading a book in there a la task sandwiches to start off with, just to get myself going. And that's because, on this rainy gray day with the dog feeling dozy from his super long walk yesterday and the cat hopefully free of hairballs, what I'd really like to be doing is to curl up all day in my quiet house with a good novel. :-)

Anything else is gravy. Speaking of gravy... maybe make swedish meatballs and gravy for supper. Good comfort food for 2 growing boys on a rainy day.

P vs. J and S vs. N - time management

2011-05-16T06:50:00.000-06:00

Delving a bit more into the intjforum.com - these people are great at over-analyzing people... even better than me! Although it does seem like a bit of a waste of time spending too much time on those forums beating the concepts to death, it does serve the function of letting them "talk" in a way they're comfortable with I guess. And I'd bet that if I wanted to waste a bunch of time talking about personality theory, I could get sucked into there pretty darn fast. So we won't go down that rabbit hole.

Oh yeah - here's a link for what I'm talking about:

http://www.personalitypage.com/four-prefs.html

INTJ - procrastinate starting (yes, that was me until I used that stupid INTP time management system that made me start doing a whole bunch of shit that I couldn't reasonably expect to finish)

INTP - procrastinate finishing

Anyway, the consensus seems to be that the "P's" (perceivers in Myers Briggs) don't seem to really care whether what they do has practical purpose in the world, whereas the "J's" (judgers) do. So the perceivers will develop systems ad nauseum because they are more perfectionistic - and procrastinators - and (another P - just look at all those P's!) - pedantic and more academic.

The system itself is the purpose, which just seems kind of odd to me. Well, I suppose it would, since I'm an INTj and not an INTp. Although I do often get into planning but not follow through with the plans. Usually because it doesn't look worth the time - or I see the aspect of having to finish and it looks kind of overwhelming and I know I don't have the time available to do it well.

Not when I'm at work though and that's something that interests me. Part of that is because I just have more TIME at work. But personality can change somewhat due to context. But I wonder if there's just too many open possibilities for what to do at home for me and most of it is routine. At work, there's just work. Most of which I enjoy doing.

But I can totally procrastinate if I'm dealing with routine work in a workplace and not literally building something new or an improvement project, I've just been lucky enough to find jobs that didn't have a lot of that routine - except for a couple (fortunately short and I got out quick).

The judgers are more "show me the money" / what are your results / what have you DONE / have you focused on the priorities and made a working system - one that gets the most done in the least amount of time? So that kind of solves some of the confusion I had with these 'choose your own adventure' time management systems that seem to be more about going all googly eyed over the system itself vs. what kind of results you get - and I don't just mean number of check marks / tasks crossed out or really lame goals. Oh right. They don't have goals - the system itself is the goal. I just can't wrap my head around that.

What I wonder is whether someone who's a sensor + perceiver - because they'll spend money more frivolously and not plan ahead (ie. fly now, pay later) - can they ever change? Can you make yourself change if that's not working for you - you've gone into debt over it etc. etc.? I think that it's possible, since I've learned to not be so INTj'ish. I was trying to think of an INTj I knew that was in debt, and I couldn't think of a single one. The strongest perceivers / sensors I've known personally have been the worst with money - and there's a lot of them in my family. I don't know though, it doesn't seem to bug them at all, so I guess it's okay. It would drive me nuts to waste all that money on interest and having to work longer because you made some dumb financial choices, but they seem okay with it. I imagine that I see all these future financial disasters looming ahead that they just don't see because they're living right now and don't learn from past experience - and perhaps I see potential disasters that will never happen. Just like the time management perceivers seem to be happy developing their little systems that aren't very efficient - or perhaps they are efficient, but are they effective?

I'm also a bit of anomaly being an INTj female. I think it's more acceptable to be that way as a man - to have focus only on your work or only on the priorities. To become a workaholic at times when you're doing something you love and enjoy is not looked upon well in our culture if you're a female and a parent. My parents were both ISTj's - ZERO procrastination and they got a lot done - but it was a pretty manual way to live too - But I look at my one brother who is an uber-INTj (far stronger than I am) and he's got the pushing himself plus the strategy down pat. Sadly, at only around 50, his body is kind of breaking down so it's catching up to him. And his marriage broke down because he was so uninvolved and such a workaholic.

I also wonder if those people that are on shows like Hoarders are extreme perceivers as well. Perceivers will see the possibilities in all their crap. When you look at those shows, those people don't want to give anything away because they "could" have a use for it some day. Some of them even move and buy extra houses because they're so resistant to giving or throwing away their stuff and all the possibility it represents to them. I do that a little bit with my pantry - I love to cook, so like to have lots of selection around just in case I feel like cooking something and I want to have any option available to me. Part of that probably comes from growing up on a farm in the middle of nowhere with no possibility of running into town to pick up whatever you need. Besides, that's inefficient. ;-)

And do perceivers have a much stronger sense of money burning a hole in their pocket or is that more of a sensing tendency? They just HAVE to spend it on something - maybe because that can open up the doors to something else and they see all the possibilities in it? Whereas someone like me sees only a few options that are worthwhile to spend money on so it's easy not to. Sometimes too easy not to. Yeah, maybe it's boring, but it's kind of nice to only find a few things worthwhile doing or having, not everything.

Back to time management - the thought has occurred to me before that what comes easily to me - always scanning the environment for the best and most efficient way to do things - and having a strong drive to make things efficient and a compulsion for closure - doesn't happen with most other people. I see it at work all the time. For example - how can anyone NOT finish reading a book? That's just mind boggling to me. I even made myself finish that crappy Happiness book through using speed reading techniques on steroids. I suppose INTP's won't use speed reading techniques since that's too efficient for them. If I quit reading a book, it's within the first couple of chapters and only because it isn't very good.

Having said all that, I don't know if the answer to procrastination or not planning for the future financially is due to the J vs. P functions as much as it is to do with the N vs S although most MBTI suggest that it is the J vs. P. Most "S" types live much more for the here and now, they just don't see that far out into the future but what's right in front of them. The Intuitives will be sitting there planning ad nauseum and meanwhile, the Sensors will already be done. The Intuitives will definitely build a better mousetrap - but run the risk of not building one at all. This is sort of where I think Myer's Briggs isn't as good as, say, the enneagram - how do I *grow* to be more of a sensor and less of an intuitive? Not all the time, but some of the time - for things that don't interest me specifically but need to get done nevertheless? Or do you just embrace it and run with it?

Here's a whole book on time management and types. I haven't read it apart from a peek through, but it looks decent:
http://www.amazon.com/Out-Time-Sixteen-Types-Manage/dp/0935652663

Here's an article on it:
http://teamlab.wordpress.com/2007/09/23/myers-briggs-type-indicator-7/

Here is a great post on focusing on the important things you *should* be doing - unless you want to be a wandering generality, and maybe you do and maybe there's nothing wrong with that. http://tewalkerjr.com/blog/?p=921

I prefer Drucker's approach to time management:
http://www.inc.com/articles/2009/11/Drucker.html
http://ccdl.libraries.claremont.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/dac&CISOPTR=3001&REC=13

Focus on your strengths - that will pull you towards doing the things you "should" be doing, develop ways of measuring your effectiveness, and I really like his mirror technique in the above article.

OK, let's try that again

2011-05-14T08:14:00.000-06:00

The little time management system I used yesterday worked pretty well. I didn't touch a couple of the A's though, which pisses me off. I realized that I just put too much stuff on the list. And usually, I just need a little push to start things and then I'm off and running. That's why, for me, half the battle (maybe even 75%, maybe 90%) is just starting something. I don't start something unless I feel I can finish it in one sitting, which is death to a little and often approach. Finishing isn't a problem. So I have to be careful in what I take on because of that damn "must finish" perspective.

That's why I think I'm more inspired by things like NaNoWriMo because you get to just focus on a novel for 30 days and nothing else. Seems like heaven to me - except I've always had work and kids and a dog and a house and... This summer will be my NaNoWriMo but I'd like to get the bones of something fleshed out before we head out. Since we won't have electricity or internet for much of the time, I'll be having to work long hand and I'd rather spend the time editing than writing (I get interrupted constantly while out camping).

This is why something like Steve Pavlina's (and others) 30 day challenges are so motivating for INTJ types (or any type, just have to have some component of that "J" in there) - they just LOVE finishing things and the thought of being given permission to focus on nothing but ONE thing for a time period is just a thrill and a half. In my career, I just pretty much focused on work, but always felt kind of guilty about it. Mostly because it isn't just a 30 day project, it's a 5 year thing (or however long). Right now, it's just a job though, which is kind of an interesting mindset that I've never had before.

I overachieved on the cabinets by finishing one off when I'd only intended to do half of it, but it was bugging me. (There's that compulsion to finish...) I got a blister from screwing - for real.

Today is kind of a wash since I'm getting my tires replaced and then ferrying children to a child torture palace for most of the day. So I will bring a laptop which will help get some stuff done.

Here's the list for today:

A - Novel - 250 words - X X X X
B - Blog post - 100 words - X X X X (on OCD - heheh not what you think)
B - Declutter - 5 items - X
C - Desk - put 5 items away - X
C - Cleaning list - X X X
A - Weights - 15 reps - X X
A - Tax return - 1 step/box - X
C - Laundry - X
B - One off tasks - X
D - Email - X X X X
D - Web surf - 10 min - X X
C - Blog roll on other blog - X X
B - Read fiction - 1 chapter - X X X X X
A - Take iron - X X X

Part of me wonders why I don't just use this "compulsion for closure" for good, not evil (since it kind of tortures me to work that way). Why even try to take on multiple projects at one time? Why not spend a week decluttering EVERYTHING - and then spend another week writing 20 blog posts - and a day doing my tax return, a week putting the cabinets together, a week writing a really shitty first draft of the novel? I don't know, I guess I'm a sucker for punishment. Maybe that's what I'll end up doing. I also have that mindset of "there can be only one" (not a Highlander dude, but a priority item). But it's not like I can put my kids and the dog on hold for a week (or can I....?) LOL

Things like dieting or exercise can't be done that way though, it's just not sustainable. Well, unless you're Tim Ferriss. In which case he rotates through and does little mini-challenges in a fitness-ADD kind of way. Which is also kind of appealing to me, sad to say since he really creeps me out and I hate to admit that I'm like that.

Will have to think about this some more because I think I'm trying to buck the system that actually works for me.

Non-work day schedule

2011-05-13T12:23:00.003-06:00

So the weirdest coincidence happened today. Yesterday, I did up this new list for everything I want to do today. It goes like this (pretend that the little X's are boxes and not X's and the A,B,C is just for priority):

A - Novel - 250 words - X X X X
A - Cabinets - 1 step - X X X X X X X (14 steps to the next cabinet, so it will be done in 2 days)
B - Declutter 5 items - X X X (picking a number of items was easier than picking a time and I have 3 specific areas where I have item bloat)
B - Blog post - 100 words - X X X X
A - Weights - 15 reps - X X X X X
B - One-off tasks - X X X (stuff like renew vehicle registration, cancel the paper that got automagically delivered, book appointment to get summer tires put on - cross my fingers it doesn't snow again)
C - Cleaning list - (10 boxes)
D - Email cleared - X X X X
D - Web surf - 10 min. - X X X X
etc. etc. (includes fun stuff like reading, taking vitamins, meals...)

Then today I got an email from the guys at timenative.com - and Barak from that site had the same little box system, but just for big projects. How cool of a coincidence is that? I sort of swiped it from Jerry Seinfeld's hash tag / "don't break the chain" approach myself.

Here's a link to their new "Curious person's guide to time management": http://www.timenative.com/ - good stuff. I realized I see time as a blueberry. Yes, it makes no sense, but read it and you'll see what I mean.

One of the things that I'm trying to work out is the difference between work time and home time and why I struggle with spending my time wisely when I'm at home vs. when I'm at work. I think a big part of it is that when I go into work, I have a list of things (mental or written down) that I want to get through that day. When I'm done, I go home.

But the amount of work is manageable, I'm responsible for a certain "product" and I work until my brain starts going fuzzy (around 3:30 p.m. - yes, my schedule is totally dreamy since I don't come in until 9 a.m. and still pull in about $6k/month) - or the project is done (eg. month-end - which means I'll stay late if I have to). I have a very clear sense of "ok, you've done enough for now" at work. The "problem" at home is that I tend to take on more than any one person can reasonably do and then beat myself up when I don't achieve it. I don't run around at work taking on other people's projects or dreaming up more work to do - but will at home. And I don't set myself up to fail at work, yet I do at home.

This is why I think that having finite lists for me for my home life is important for right now, even if only to have a firm sense of what I can reasonably accomplish. If there's one thing I know, it's that I have to push myself to do things at home, but never do at work because most of what I do at home is not what I do best and much of it is routine. I am compelled to work on things that matter in the office - but this particular job also happens to be a wonderful fit for my personality. I've had to push myself in the past in other jobs that weren't. And at home, I also have to put restrictions on what I think I can accomplish and to keep my priorities in mind. The nice thing is that I can sort of rotate around the list and do as much or as little of each one as I want and as long as I touch the big rocks (the A's), I'm happy. So far it's working great. Except I overachieved on the cabinets and was compelled to finish it, not just get it 1/2 done.

INTP's - procrastinate finishing
INTJ's - procrastinate starting

Which is why I've (almost) never not finished a book I've started. In fact, usually I feel compelled to finish it in one sitting. If I watch a TV series, I want to finish the whole thing in one sitting. Weird stuff.

Oh, here's a couple of gems I pulled up in my web surfing (sure used those boxes up fast! LOL):
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2904-forget-passion-focus-on-process
http://changethis.com/manifesto/6.HowToBeCreative/pdf/6.HowToBeCreative.pdf

I also emailed Tim Brownson about how to incorporate goals into time management in a non-scheduling way. His reply was this:

I hate scheduling, I don’t use to-do lists and I never write goals down! Weird eh? ;-)

We’re all different Jacq, find out what works for you and do that, don’t try and bend to convention.

I really love that guy. :-)

Day 1 of 5 - The meaning of life

2011-05-02T14:39:00.001-06:00

I'm off for 5 days - and then going back to work for 2 days a week until the end of June. They made me an offer I couldn't refuse. I am weak. Weak and greedy. I couldn't help it. They begged.

A good book that I'm re-reading today is Paul Thagard's "The Brain and the Meaning of Life." Thagard takes a naturalist and neuropsychological view of life's meaning, so it jives with my perspective, but maybe would not with someone who is more spiritual.

So what is the meaning of life according to this philosopher? Work, love and play. Seligman would say that these are the realms of life, not the meaning, but he'd say it was happiness or possibly flourishing (like the title of his new book) - and I suppose we derive happiness and flourishing from work, love and play.

The other book that I'm reading this week is "The Philosophy of Money" by Georg Simmel. This is a fascinating read - all 600+ pages of it, but I'm only 1/2 way through. Part history, part philosophy, all interesting - free download here:
http://moneyandthebrain.com/ebooks/philosophy_of_money.pdf

I can't say enough about how much I love being home with no one talking at me constantly and with no noise generated from anyone. It kind of sucks to be an introvert in a house full of extroverts - not the oldest kid and not the cat, but the dog and the little kid are both extra-extroverts. They drive me and the oldest one nuts with their constant flurry of activity and excessive talking and need for interaction. I don't know how I produced 2 such different children.

But the best thing about being home now? That I don't have to worry about money or think that I should be working and earning a living anymore. Obviously I will for another 8-10 working days or so - until the end of June but I think that might just be it since the stocks have done far better than my expectations / hopes and I made enough this last 6 months to cover 3 years of spending. Unless the NDP get into power and decimate the oil and gas industry and my stocks nose-dive.

I will never forgive Jack Layton if he takes away my ability to read all day guilt-free if I want to.

Yet oddly enough, I haven't really wanted to read today, I've been pretty busy cleaning and trying to sort these cabinets out - there's just so many. I'll have to plan things better tomorrow and on my other days off so that when I'm home alone is the quiet / non-activity time (except lifting weights) and I save my active period for when the youngest kid is around. Plus he can help, earn his allowance and it's win win. He loves doing stuff that I don't get around to. He spent 3 hours straight chiseling ice off the deck last week on his own - without anyone asking him to. Definitely not a chip off his dad's block.

Oh, here's a pic of me before I had him:

Look at that classic introverted pose. Pure "don't look at me!" LOL

I do want the waist back though. The occasional intermittent fasting has been going well - check out the abs on this guys blog: www.theleansaloon.com

Does experience count online?

2011-04-25T06:52:00.000-06:00

I read about time management hacks from people who haven't kicked ass in their careers - or life (until their careers are blogging). They market well though. I read on linkedin that a popular time management blogger has been working out in the real world (post university) for 3 years. Yes, that's a Three.

Three. Years.

He now does life coaching. Jesus wept. Should a person do life coaching without life experience? It's like a priest giving marriage counselling - it's possible but... it just seems a little hard to do if you've never been married.

I don't know, sometimes I do get remarkable insights from my kids.

What I find interesting is that when you look at writing by different demographics - despite the presumed flexibility of thinking in younger people - they are amazingly rigid. It's a good thing online because your message is more clear. It's the older people who are saying - well, maybe be moderate, you have to consider other people besides yourself, there's no one right way - do what works for you.

Upcoming scheduled programming...

2011-04-22T21:28:00.001-06:00

Woot! I'm off work in 5 working days - probably for the rest of the year - unless I'm bored in the fall or something REALLY cool comes up to do. Maybe forever, I'm not sure yet. But I'm only 45 years old! Way too young to put myself out to pasture. Nobody my age is just hanging around except for SAHM's and under-employed people. And I don't do the "just hanging around" thing very well. I wouldn't have got where I have if I had been that type. I'll figure out how to deal with that down the road.

May and June should be fairly busy though. I plan on taking off in the RV as soon as school lets out for the summer at the end of June. I don't even know where we're going yet. I think I might decide in June. Maybe. I might just get in the RV and drive. That would be fun. Like Jack Kerouac's On the Road - without the drugs and booze and getting laid. Well, maybe a little bit of booze... ;-) It's not important to me where I go really, it's BEING there, wherever that is. Being present to where I am. Every place you go has such wonderful things to experience. That's what we had on our trip last summer, and what I want again. My son said it best - he didn't remember where we were or where we went but any place we went to, we loved. And we will be there again.

But before that happens, there's the next couple of months. Here's my quasi-schedule for then - Monday to Thursday:

6-7:30 - write
7:30 - 8 - get ready
8-8:30 - walk little bug to school and a flip through the park with the dog
8:30-9:30 - write
9:30-12 - house
12-1 - lunch / break / clean
1-2:30 - errands / dog
2:30-6 - house
6-7 - supper / break / clean
7 onwards - off / sports / family time

Like a job really. Because that's what it is. And I'm great at jobs. :-)

Fridays, I will get the camper ready in the morning to go camping at 2 p.m. when school gets out - any weekend it doesn't have rain in the forecast. And if friends who work like normal people are available for lunch, I'm in.

Next week, I'm going to unsubscribe from all the blogs I subscribe to through email and put them on my google reader (that I never check, but will once in awhile) or a blog roll that I will have to build and figure out how to shut off the notification for comments on my own blog. I have to get rid of the noise in order to hear the sound of my own thoughts. Love comments - hate emails - they seem too urgent - like they must be answered. That's a relic from the work world.

Bottom line is I don't care about traffic and stats and monetizing and all that other stuff that consumes so many other bloggers. I want to learn to write well again in a non-business way since I haven't done it for so long - and that's it. And to make sense of things. I learn a lot about what I think through writing - and the research that comes with that (real scientific research, not just blog or anecdotal b.s.). Right now, I'm just amusing people - some of the time. There's no focus to it and being unfocused is highly annoying (to me).

The question is - do I kick it up a notch or keep the writing as a hobby? Steven Pressfield calls it "going pro" - and I agree with him. If writing is your job, you show up and you produce and you get good or go home (or go to a job I guess - fortunately not something I have to worry about). Not necessarily "get big or go home". I'd rather be good than be big.

Some book recommendations

2011-04-22T14:13:00.001-06:00

Nicholas Lore hit one out of the park with his book "Now What? The Young Person's Guide to Choosing the Perfect Career". Even if you already have a career that you like and aren't necessarily a "young" person, it's a good read to find how to make your work even more fulfilling.

It's also a manual of sorts for life too. I can't say enough good things about this book. They should hand it out along with the high school diplomas.

"Train Your Mind - Change Your Brain" by Sharon Begley is another great read. Interesting point from the book on the link between Neurogenesis and Depression - and the wonderful world of neuroplasticity:

"...people suffering from depression are unable to recognize novelty... And this inability to see things as new, as fresh, as different, this is what elicits the feeling of depression. That may be why you want this reservoir, this cache of young cells in the hippocampus. It's able to recognize novelty, to recognize new experiences. Without that, you will have these fixed connections unable to recognize and acquire new information."

Chronic stress impairs neurogenesis, exercise adds fresh neurons... And of course, being under stress or being depressed doesn't allow you to see the options you have available to you. We all see that with people where we may try to give them advice or help them out and they'll tell you the million and one reasons why they can't do whatever you're recommending. Ahhh, but we've all been there I guess. Maybe instead of giving advice, we ask to go for a walk.

Hey, I don't think I mentioned - I'm so excited... I'm going on the LF advanced course in June. Off to do some more mind*uckery and bending the plastic in my own brain! It's finally available in my city. I was going to do it on the trip this summer but the logistics with the dog and kid and locations and all that stuff was just too much of a PITA. Which really hurts because the USD is so low, I would have saved like $300 by taking it down south.

I'm also thinking about having a couple of the housecleaners move in for almost free since I don't think I'm going to even try to sell the house this spring. If the election goes the right way, the O&G and therefore housing market will take off again in the next 2 years. I can wait. And it's better anyway because I want a stable environment while I figure out which way to go from here. It's a win-win-win - I get my house cleaned and they get zip rent and I get the quasi-daughters that I've always wanted - just grown up size. Well, sort of, they're awfully tiny girls.

Something I want to write about on the other blog, but my thoughts haven't gelled yet - I don't think that what people want is something like early retirement. I think we want a more fulfilling life right now and we see early retirement - or sabbaticals or whatever - as allowing those choices. I just don't think that having 100% of the nest egg is necessary. I mean, you need to have a certain amount to cover your very basic expenses, but you don't really need much more than that to take a few risks and do what you want to do right now and have a better life balance right now. I think the bigger issue is for people to find what that "good career" is right now for them. And it's partly about passion in a way, but not really some burning kind of thing, more something that fits your personality like a glove. Like I have with my work right now.

I was thinking about this while looking at my youngest son running his little lemonade stand with his friend yesterday. Then today, he was all geared up to go out and do it again from the time he woke up. I asked him why it was so exciting to him and he said that he loved serving people - people were so generous and he got to talk to everyone passing by, practice his negotiating and his manners and all that stuff. We figured out his gross margin and costs of operation and all that as well (yay algebra!) He's a born salesperson and any attempts by me to turn him into his introverted, academic brother would be futile. Believe me, I've tried. :-)

What I want for myself right now though is to find that sweet spot of what I want to do that is not dependent upon a company hiring me and also not depending on a bit on luck in finding the right thing. That means that I have to have the occupation be entirely self-directed - or know A LOT about the job, which might not be possible. It never is until you get into it. How could I tell if there was almost zero routine and always challenge after challenge? Oh, and nice people. You can't really. I've been super lucky thus far, but...

I kind of figure that I don't have to make any money at all at it, but a little bit would come in handy - I'd really like to be able to help my kids get started with a grown up version of a lemonade stand someday.

You're just soooo... precious... puke - some thoughts on anemia

2011-04-18T20:44:00.000-06:00

Ok, I must have been going through some wicked hormones lately. Which I have with all this estrogen dominance, I'll have you know. I think I've lost some blood flow to my brain. I don't know why I can't just go through menopause already without all this other drama and physical issues. I feel like threatening my uterus with physical violence if it doesn't behave.

But still. I sound so freaking whiny. Waaaaa - I have a lot of readers... (oh, you poor thing.. (idiot))

Waaaaa.... I get lots of comments and I don't liiiiike it.... (Hello? Other people would kill for that.)

"I vaaaaant to be alone!!!! Can't you tell I'm an introvertard?!? Why you bother meeeeee...."

It's funny as hell actually.

Except when it's sad.

What's that saying? You know you've grown up when you don't take your drama so seriously? Apparently I haven't quite grown up yet. I'm working on that. :-)

But seriously, it's hard for other people to understand what anemia can do to you and how it can make you feel. You look normal - except for those blue, tingly fingers and that pale, waxy skin. Sort of like a character from a Twilight novel - except for that strange gasping that you do when you try to breathe.

I tested out severely anemic last year right about this time - and it's something I really never want to repeat again. I have the feeling I'm somewhere around the moderately affected range right now. You think something's wrong with you mentally and it happens so slowly. I felt like crying all the time. I saw it as character defects - silly me - when it was actually lack of oxygen to the brain. I kind of figured out something was wrong when I couldn't seem to breathe. I don't care how much iron-rich foods you eat, if you're slowly bleeding to death, it won't help.

My older sister had something of the same issue a few years ago. I feel so bad that I didn't get what her problem was. I thought she was just spacy and disoriented and kind of annoying - and she's so incredibly smart. She didn't even go to the doctor for herself until it was almost too late. She could have had a stroke. By that time they wanted to just do a hysterectomy, but she knew enough to force them to do a less invasive procedure and they gave her a transfusion. If someone has a migraine, do the doctors cut off their head?

So my recommendations of the day - and what I'm going to follow personally:

In Europe, they use a synthetic form of lysine for menorrhagia - I think it has an 80% success rate. I'm going to do the whey shakes and BCAA that I did last year that worked to stop this shit. Very high in lysine.

Go low carb. Low calorie. It worked for me last year. Seriously, it was just a few days and it stopped after months and months. And those fucking doctors just telling me to take iron 3 times a day rather than try to fix what the problem was.

Manhattan clam chowder baby. Clams are super high in iron and the tomato / vitamin C helps the iron absorption.

Stop drinking. That means booze. And coffee. And tea. Tea has tannins that block the iron absorption. Coffee and booze are bad for your liver. If your liver is working well, it helps modulate your hormones. I gave up tea last year - I used to drink a pot or more of it a day, every day. Now I drink too much coffee (4 cups a day for sure), but I'm cutting back slowly to 1/2 and 1/2 decaf. And no booze - period. That's the easy part, thank god.

Time management and personality

2011-04-18T06:16:00.000-06:00

Someone wrote about the Myers Briggs typology the other day on their blog. It was interesting to see what type other people are that I kind of know through their writing that are writing finance stuff. And of course, they were all introverts and mostly intuitives - I could have told them that without them taking the test. They are that because they write - almost all writers are those two. Could probably have told them what type they were by reading their writing for one or two articles too. Sometimes I forget how important this stuff is in understanding yourself and what approach you'll take to things.

And speaking of stuff - that's also why this debate over buying stuff vs. experiences and happiness is SO lame - you're looking at generalities, and you should be looking at YOU. Extroverted people will be buying lunch out with friends and going on trips (some introverts will do this too - but for different reasons) and introverts will be buying books or things that make their homes more comfortable (unless they're an extremely strongly expressed INTJ and then they really won't care about their surroundings and be okay to live in a shed - even better if it's a shed that they've built with their own hands) and they'll both be happy if they do that - there you go.

So I thought of a really good article - that would actually be way too long - for the other blog (at least I hope it's helpful to people) on the way to pick up the car (combined with dog walk) yesterday from where my (responsible - does not drive when he's been drinking) son left it on the other side of the city.

Because your personality type will define whether or not you're going to ever get into debt and from what, how much you'll save, what you'll spend your money on, and really, whether you should listen to advice about how you should get out of debt by a person (most of whom will be strongly expressed judgers because they're very rigid in their opinions of what other people "should" do) who is a completely different type from yours. Because their approach will - and SHOULD be - totally different. (Heheh, there's that *should* crap). Add values and all that stuff into it and it gets kind of crazy. But values are usually led by your type as well, so maybe it could all come together coherently.

But this has a lot to do with time management too. I sort of forgot that - well, not really fundamentally forgot, since I usually remember to think that there is NO ONE WAY - there's a way for you.

In Myers Briggs typology, you have 16 potential different types based on the following:
Extroversion (E) and Introversion (I)
Intuition (N) and Sensing (S)
Feeling (F) and Thinking (T)
Perceiving (P) and Judging (J)

You really can't change your fundamental type. You can kick yourself for not being that way as much as you want (which you'll do - the kicking that is - if you're on the thinking side). You can say "I should be just writing a list and doing it like the Franklin planner people" (which you'll do if you're on the judging side, but won't if you tend towards perceiving). You'll have goals that you'll stick to quite well if you're on the judging side, but if you're on the perceiving side, you will be more open-ended and want to experience more of a go with the flow "choose your own adventure" state.

A system like GTD tries to incorporate both spheres - which is why many people fall down on the weekly review. Because they aren't thinkers, they're feelers and they aren't strong judgers. Being a thinker, the weekly review was the only part I liked, but I can get lost in the thinking and planning too (at home - not at work) and not put on my judging hat and do it because it doesn't give me a map to follow for the day. It overwhelms and confuses me to have a big list of minutiae - unless the minutiae is segregated into its own list. Which I guess is another reason why people might like GTD - because it does provide that segregation.

I wonder if a system like AF or SF will not work for people unless they have a perceiving side. Strong judgers will keep trying to fit priorities into it or pull tasks out to do for the day - or dismiss crap tasks ahead of time. I certainly did. Strong perceivers will want to hold on to all that crap because they can't decide. To tell people they shouldn't use their judging because it's "wrecking the system" - is completely insane. IT'S WHO THEY ARE and how they look at the world. The creator of it has confused me though because there's a strong conundrum there that I can't figure out between the perceiving and the judging. Seems to be a very very strong perceiver AND a strong judger - the perceiver looking for conceptual perfection - and will constantly build complex models but can't make themselves stick to them - very possibility-oriented and with all that new information that comes in, so it's difficult for them to finish developing their ideas (which is driving those judging people kind of nuts - just stick with a system already, they say). Reality is the thought process - not the world itself. So they'd probably drive a very strong INTJ nuts who needs a method that will work in a more logical way. Interesting how the computer programmers are being told they're doing it wrong. But I think there can be two kinds of programmer types. Those guys will go for the system because it has heuristics built into it and that appeals to them, but I don't think it's ultimately their "answer" - but what do I know. Maybe I'll figure it out once I put more thought into it.

You can also end up having a combined system if you're like me - kind of a combined person. At work, I get into a strong INTJ role because it's the nature of my work (numbers, logic, etc.) so I have to know what I'm doing, pick my priorities for the day and just do them. At home, I become more feeling and perceiving - unless I perceive what I'm doing as my "job" in which case, I get quite frustrated if the kids or pets expect me to be all feeling and perceiving and don't see that - damnit - my judger is trying to GET THINGS DONE. Yesterday, I had my day all mapped out in typical judging fashion and then those pesky kids wanted to go for lunch and then watch a movie with their friends and me (the introvert in me kicking and screaming all the way so I shifted and put on my extrovert hat to make them happy). And I had to let the thinker go and be the feely type.

I suppose that that's really the answer for why I'm somewhat different in my time management style whether I'm at work or at home. You can't really fight what you are. It's also why my writing doesn't have and will never have a whole ton of authority in it - because my judger isn't that strong when it comes to people.

I think a little analysis of this stuff more indepth related to time management would be good and helpful to people. And helpful to me in the researching of it - because I don't want to ever forget that people are different and there's no one right way. When I'm off work in a couple of weeks, I'll write some more on this. My judger already has the next couple of weeks mapped out and doesn't want to be distracted but she has a plan to write for about an hour and a half a day then.

Self-discipline and joy

2011-04-16T08:31:00.001-06:00

Years ago when I was going to university, I was very focused on getting on the honour roll. It wasn't an ego thing, it was because accounting firms just weren't hiring articling students unless you had a GPA over 3.7 or so. So every time I wrote a paper, I'd write to get an "A" on it. Every exam I wrote, I shot for 100%. I used to have a little hand-made spreadsheet where I calculated what I'd end up with as a final grade. LOL - what a geek I was! Because no "A" meant no job for me. And I had to have that job.

Sometimes when I'd get those papers back a few weeks later, I'd read it and think - wow, this is really good writing - *I* did that? I couldn't remember because it was usually done in a big blast the night before handing it in, although all the research and prep work was done before. Same thing for exams. I'd write all my notes before hand over the week or so prior, condensing them down and down until I could see the words on the whole page somehow - and then set my alarm for 3 a.m. for an 8 a.m. exam so that I could totally pound it into my head. I think I was one of the few people that actually studied for 6 or so hours a day during reading week. Well, why not? Studying was free. I was self-disciplined.

But I did have one professor that didn't give me A's like all the others - that jerk was bringing down my average! I didn't know what to do, it was advanced accounting theory (note that I'm not a *theory* person - I'm a practical implementation person) and I just couldn't get my head into that space. I didn't do battle with him over my grades or anything a la Tim Ferriss, I asked him what he was looking for and tried my damndest to give it to him. But there was no joy in it because - especially when you write or do things of that nature - you're partly writing for yourself. It was a good exercise in a way though because I learned how to give someone what they wanted.

The nice thing about writing today is that:

a) I don't care who reads it or what they think of it - I'm not going for grades or readership or ego. It's almost embarrassing to me when someone says they like what I've written. I don't understand why that is. I should feel happy - but I don't.
b) I write mostly for me and because I love words
c) I write as a free person. People who have to do it for their day job to make money to live aren't free. People who write for acclaim aren't free of the opinions of others.

I think I've figured out how to make that other blog less overwhelming to me and more joyful. I like getting comments so very much, but when I get an email that a comment has come in - I get a sick feeling in my stomach - like someone is going to say something mean. I've only had two people ever say something mean to me and I deleted one and left the other one, but it made me pull back somehow. So maybe what I could do is turn off the comment notification so I don't get overwhelmed by it. Just like I get overwhelmed by too much email (so regularly unsubscribe from things), people "talking" to me via comments or posting too often on their own blogs overwhelms me. OMG, I wonder if this is how J.D Salinger felt.

The reason why I like comments I think is because I get a feeling from it that someone is listening. But maybe I only feel that way because I don't have stats for that blog. So if I get 5 comments, I think 5 people have read it. But it's mostly other bloggers who write comments - what about all the people who are like I used to be and don't have a blog? They don't write much. If you take the bloggers comments out of a blog like GRS - which regularly has loads of comments, you have a blog like TSD, which gets very few comments - many of them very mean. It makes me nervous to get link backs because I think that someone who doesn't *know* me will say something bad to me.

So I also have to build a thicker skin and learn to not be upset over things like that. Because if you don't put your heart into your writing and try to give people a piece of yourself that hopefully they can identify with, what do you have? Nobody can say anything bad about a post like "how to cook XXX on the cheap" - but I think I'd rather slice and dice my wrists and cook them rather than write that stuff.

Being sensitive to criticism is not writing and being free though. I'm held back from it by being afraid of what other people will think or say. I'm going to do some research on how not to be affected by criticism. I'll probably never be free of that self-consciousness, but it's good to try.

Speaking of criticism...

I'm about 30% through reading The Happiness Project. It's not making me very happy. Not sure if I'll finish it or not, it's just too pithy for me. Plus I look at her neuroses and think - holy crap woman, you're married to a billionaire - or at least a MULTI-MILLIONAIRE - and you're obsessing over a sweater in your closet??? Get some real problems - like having 2 shirts and 2 pants that you can wear and no money to buy any more. I think she should have spent more time volunteering and just cut out all the other "Be Gretchen" shit.

And there I go, being mean. But nobody I don't know really reads this, so I guess it's ok. I wouldn't want to say it to her face, which means I shouldn't say it at all. But it's just really so... pithy.

I think I'm going to start a self-discipline project. Oh wait, I already am!

A post you really should read

2011-04-13T07:22:00.000-06:00

No not this one, it's this one:

http://www.supercoach.com/2011/04/your-most-enjoyable-year-yet/

A”s were things I wanted to do regardless of whether or not they paid well or worked out the way I hoped.
“B”s were things I enjoyed doing and would happily say “yes” to if they fell into my lap, but had no desire to try and “make” happen.
“C”s were things I was only doing for the money
“D”s were things I just flat out needed to stop doing

My A's: writing, some travel, helping other people with money (I think I should go volunteer at Debtor's Anonymous or something similar), making a work (or any environment that some people consider a necessary evil) an enjoyable place that other people want to be

My B's: most accounting / work projects that involve improving things

My C's: cleaning (because I don't want to pay someone else to do it ALL the time), renovating, a normal job like other people have

My D's: cleaning, most home chores

I'll sit with this and think of some more stuff this weekend.

I was sitting at the empty office alone on Monday waiting for the storage pick-up guys. No computer, forgot my kobo e-reader, no phone, low battery on my cell... basically being the highest paid receptionist ever. They never did show up, but I went out and picked up Alice LaPlante's "The Making of a Story". What a great book so far! Just the first chapter reminded me of why I love to write. I'll write a post on that this weekend when I have more time.

I went over to the other office (sister co to the sold company) to work yesterday and met the controller. She's frustrated because her #2 guy left to go work with the previous controller at a new company. She seems nice, but she's looking at resumes and needs to hire someone and can't find the right person - someone to manage others and report to her. (Can you imagine? - they actually thought that would be me. That's kind of funny.) I found it odd that she herself didn't have anyone to poach from her previous job that could do the job and wanted to follow her like her #2 guy followed the previous #1 guy. And the reason why is that if I were a controller again, I'd be having about 20 people call me and say "can I work with you again, do you have something for me?" Because I have had numerous people ask me why I don't be a controller again and then hire them. If she doesn't have that, then I question her managing style. But she's a typical accountant type, most are kind of up-tight. I am too when it comes to getting the work done, but boy do we have fun doing it. I want to see happy faces on those journal entries !

A really horrifying time management thought...

2011-04-11T11:42:00.001-06:00

...just occurred to me.

Sometimes I don't know what to do when I am home, moreso when I'm kind of overwhelmed with hungry pets and kids that all want petting, feeding and attention at the same time. If I'm well rested and peppy, I take it all in stride and it's all good. If I'm not, I hide in the bathroom (sensory deprivation works for me) for 1/2 hour and am ok. But I don't think very clearly then.

But usually I have to be very very tired to feel that listlessness all day of not knowing what I should do next. A nap usually fixes that - unless it's depression from being anemic of course. :-)

But if some people really do like using these "choose your adventure" / no path to the day every day all day long - they must feel that brain fog ALL the time?

Even when you go on vacation, when you wake up every day you have a bit of a plan don't you? And you get really hyper-focused in the days before you go on vacation. Pretty much every normal person I know just writes down a list of everything that needs to be done before they go and gets it all done. Or at least the important things. How terrible it would be to not have any focus at all - all of the time. It seems so anti-thetical to having any real goals at all. It's drifting through life, letting tides take you along.

And most of the time, if you REALLY have to push yourself all the time to do certain stuff or play time management tricks all the time, maybe that's not what you should be doing at all. But following a system will mask that. I know I was certainly guilty of that.

Hmm. Will have to think about this some more.

Project update and maybe quitting ze blog

2011-04-11T07:02:00.000-06:00

The kitchen cabinets are piled into the garage - can't believe it all fit in my little car! Well, three times. Now to put them all together. That's going to take at least a month working on it almost every night. Wow, what a job. I can see why I was quoted $2700 for assembly and putting them up. Although it still seems a bit pricy.

I've come to realize I don't really like the world of the internet. People can be very mean to each other - *I* can be mean to other people even. And I don't like not knowing someone and figuring out their context. Even when I've had to have sensitive conversations with people, I don't do it through email, I try to find them and talk to them if a phone call won't do.

And so much of the net is just venting and bitching about things. I find myself sucked into that too. It reminds me of years ago when my sister would complain about her husband constantly and I'd sit there frustrated, thinking and trying to nicely say "stop talking about it - either DO something or DO NOTHING, but stop it". But I know that's a way for people to process what they should do. The net makes it easy because I suppose your friends would get tired of hearing it.

It can also be a huge time suck too. I never find myself *happy* when I go on the net.

A couple of blogs I read have gone or are going down soon. This is very sad to me because I really did enjoy them and I don't read many blogs. But I understand where they're coming from. And may make the same decision myself on the other blog. I gave myself a deadline of April to decide and it's April now. This one I'll keep since it's more like a diary of sorts. I'm not interested in making money from writing - I don't even have stats for that blog. It seems kind of silly to throw it all away when the last time I looked months ago, it was getting something like 250 readers a day. Maybe that's page views. Hell, I don't know, but it seems like a lot. But I'm not interested enough in readership to find out. It makes you wonder though where all these people come from? Maybe it's the introvert in me, but it makes me uncomfortable to think that 250 complete strangers are listening to me and thinking they know me.

Plus it seems like kind of a job. An unpaid job. That's not even that fun half of the time. Where everyone is talking and nobody is listening and let's face it, money is really quite boring. Or maybe I've just hit that boredom threshold like I do with every other job and hobby. I'm not sure if it's real scanner behaviour (a la Barbara Sher) or not. I have learned to "dive" into my field of work but it has to be at new companies all the time. But that's okay since I do consulting and that's what we do.

Anyway, I'll decide this week. I'm not sure if I'll pull the plug entirely or just post once a month or something when I actually have something to say and am not just pumping out filler thinking anybody really cares. Maybe write a short e-book or something and give it away for free. I've got tons of food and cooking tips and all that - that I don't share because I think it's maybe kind of boring, but maybe someone else would find it helpful. I know I would have when I was younger.

I'm not sure what to do. I can limit myself on it, I'll keep it. If I can't, I'll let it die this summer when we're traveling.

"Shift on the fly" time management system

2011-04-09T16:15:00.000-06:00

One of the things that's puzzled me for a little while now is how people will look for one - and only one - time management system that will work for all jobs, all situations, all energy levels - and even all personalities. To watch some people (including me!) try to fit their square pegs into round holes in the search for the time management holy grail is kind of sad.

And even worse, to be told that you're "doing it WRONG" is really, really sad. And really really wrong. YOU aren't broken, the system is.

The sign of a really good time manager is probably the same as that of a really good carpenter. A good carpenter will have a whole set of tools and he (or she) will use the ones that are right for the situation. Just because they have a claw hammer, they won't use it when they have to lay a hardwood floor. They'll use the specific hardwood flooring hammer and slanted thingamajic (the name of which escapes me even though I've laid a lot of hard wood flooring...) :-)

But time management is a business, and to have a business you have to have a "product". And that product has to have the perception of answering all things for all people and it just doesn't seem possible. So I would suggest that a really good time management system could have the following elements:

1. Something to provide focus when you want or need to focus and move on your goals - this would be something along the lines of Leo Babauta's focus stuff, Alan Lakein's priority system (A, B, C...), the 3 task system, Mark Forster's current initiative, The Best Year of Your Life's primary goal for the year, Julie Morgenstern's time boxing/scheduling... (I think that's Morgenstern, it could be someone else), also in Franklin/Covey work

2. Some kind of routine - for example, the rituals in The Power of Full Engagement

3. Some way to break down resistance to big projects that scare the crap out of you - eg. Alan Lakein's swiss cheese method, GTD next actions, Flylady's 29 thing decluttering blasts, my task sandwiches

4. Some way to ensure that you capture everything you want to do at some time, just not right now - Auto/Super focus, GTD, Get Sh!t Done master list

5. Some way to ensure you are somewhat balanced (as much as you want to be) - TBYOYL, any kind of goal work in most other systems, Neil Fiore's "The Now Habit"

I've been experimenting with something the last couple of weeks that helps with this "switch on the fly" system and has made it work quite well for me. Generally, everyone has times when they're super motivated (like I am this weekend at getting my cabinets home and put together) and times when they're just not. We all have times when we want or need to push ourselves when we really don't want to - and times when we should just give it up and re-create or recharge. It would be silly to expect ourselves to be like a robot and just write a to-do list for the day, stick to it unfailingly and not pay any attention to energy lulls and highs, circadian rhythms and all that good stuff. Because we're not robots. (Besides, even my little mini-me vacuum needs to recharge). It would be silly to stick to a time management system unfailingly every day, all day long. Because we're not robots.

I have my "focus" items in my weekly scut cleaning spreadsheet - but found that I was always resisting the "10 minute decluttering" items. So I wrote a big, very specific detailed list of everything to be decluttered (a la GTD next actions) on a master list and it's going much more smoothly. I go through that like GTD or Autofocus and it's been working great. And I made it into a routine that I do for as long as I feel like every day when I get home from work (a ritual / focus).

I find it nearly impossible to write on my other blog when I'm not alone and there isn't someone yapping at me (the youngest kid talks. A lot.) That's the kind of thing that I have to have a time box and a routine for. And unless I get up at 5 a.m. (which I haven't wanted to lately), I just don't write. And that's okay since it's not like it's my day job or something. If it was, I'd be getting up at 5 a.m. to write.

I tagged the weight lifting / Wii Fit exercising work that I want to do with the ahem - "challenge" (yes I know that it's a lame challenge to watch TV, but I've just never really done it before) I set myself of watching Waking the Dead and The Riches on netflix. The Wii streams through the TV where the Wii Fit and my weights are located, so I just make myself do 15 minutes of exercising (that usually turns into an hour) before I sit down to watch TV for 40 minutes twice a week. I'm happy to report that I've been successful in that onerous challenge. :-) And I usually fold laundry while I'm watching. Lots of little behaviours are getting tagged together that way.

But one of the biggest things that's been helpful has been to actually HAVE more free time to get all these home projects and cleaning tasks done. In the past, when I'd be gone from home for 11 hours a day, most of the time it was as much as I could do to get supper on, walk the dog for an hour, help with homework most nights, maybe have swimming lessons or something once or twice a week and just collapse in exhaustion after 14 hours of go go go. And I wondered why I wasn't "GETTING THINGS DONE" at home and just wanted to vegetate. Now I'm gone for only 7-8 hours a day and am actually motivated to do things when I get home. Shocking really. That's why I'm not switching to a 3 or 4 day work week but am putting in 20-25 hours a week or so instead. This last week, when I had to "work late" (ie. an 8 hour day), I cut myself some slack and just didn't do anything beyond the daily stuff on my weekly list plus a few other things, nothing big. It feels so much better to not be that evil task master to myself.

Mini-me is a little and often machine!

2011-04-01T21:02:00.000-06:00

Well, she actually is a machine. It's my NEW!!! mint floor cleaner (that I bought 50% off, I'll have you know).

What has mini-me taught me in the week that I've owned her?

A half decent job (trust me, I clean floors better than she does) is better than no job at all (sometimes). She does this stuff every day, she doesn't do as good of a job as I do (but she DOES it), but she does it good enough for me. And because she comes back and does it again the next day, overall the floors stay cleaner.
I'll move heaven and earth to get someone (or something) else to do my shite work. Oh mini-me, you want that chair moved? OK! Oh mini-me, you need more water? OK! Oh mini-me, you don't have the power to clean that spot? Let me! It's all really quite pathetic if it weren't so funny. Following a bloody robot around the house tending to its needs - err.. there's something wrong with this picture...
There is no point #3, I just love her, plain and simple. I want to marry mini-me.

Freedom from the internet - woot!

2011-03-26T07:05:00.000-06:00

My computer has been freaking out over the last week - shutting down on its own. So I'm sending it off to dell and have bought my youngest son an Apple laptop.

Anyway, since I had these problems, I've stayed off the net since the computer only worked for about 1/2 hour before it died. It's been great. We've played tons of Wii Fit together (the strength section is lame, but oh well), I've watched a bit of TV (LOL) - I'm up to episode 4 of The Riches! (I love Eddie Izzard), we've gone out and done more stuff together and I've moved some of my other projects along.

I ran across this software: www.macfreedom.com - basically, you can shut off your net for however long you want up to 8 hours. Sweet! And it works on windows systems as well. So it's sort of like my "computer works for 1/2 hour before it dies" system. Basically you have to power down to start up the net again, and that should be enough to keep you on the straight and narrow.

ROWE / Do people like to feel busy?

2011-03-26T05:12:00.001-06:00

Even though actually *being* too busy can lead to a lot of things - stress, overwhelm, burnout...

As I try to grasp why others use a system beyond just a master to-do list to capture things to do and a to-do list for the day (and my cleaning list for the week), I wonder if they use these systems just because a big long list makes you feel like you're busy. Maybe even important?

Despite trying to use superfocus a couple of times in the last month or so, I just can't bring myself to keep up with it past a few hours. Because those kinds of systems don't have an end to them.

Imagine being at a workplace and you've got everything important you need to do finished - but you can't leave because there's something else put on your desk, over and over again. Not too dissimilar from Office Space and those TPS reports - "can you come in Sunday - yeah, that would be great..." I've always been a big fan of ROWE (results oriented work environment) - the people who are fast and get all the important stuff done get to leave whenever they want - or not even come in at all. And sometimes they work a ton when there's an important project. But they're not working because they have to be there for face time. And maybe those systems like GTD, AF, SF... are sort of like face time. Personally, I like having a finite list for the day and then relaxing and calling it a day, but I guess that's not for everyone.

Anyway, my ""grass catcher list" plus picking off a few things to do on the flylady alternative maintenance list daily plus working through my projects on the weekend" system is working great, and I don't like fixing what isn't broken.

I just got word today that I'll be working into April. I knew that they'd need me longer 6 months ago, I guess the powers that be just figured it out now. The quasi-boss leaves first week of April and I am the last one left after a shut-down yet again. I think this is the 3rd or 4th time this has happened to me. Oh well, I guess I'm paying someone else to put a new lawn in instead of doing it myself. Yay! And since I can show up whenever I want or work from home, I can be here when the kitchen gets put in in April. Double yay!

My Flylady Alternative

2011-03-18T12:47:00.001-06:00

OK, the formatting didn't quite come out right... BUT I did up a daily / weekly schedule for everything that needs to be tended to / maintenance activities.

Isn't it cute? (note - it looks better in Excel and with colours).

I like that mantra: An hour a day keeps the problems (or dust bunnies or whatever) at bay. I'm going to post it up on my fridge.

I just hate this stuff cluttering up my regular to-do list and I'm kind of thinking that if I really push, I can get most of the weekly stuff done early in the week.

I was also thinking that I could play it like a game card. Get it all crossed off (and believe me, I don't care if I'm not the one that does it or if it's kids or

housecleaners or whomever) every week and give myself a reward of some kind at the end of the week.

Good lord, how pathetic am I ?!? LOL

DAILY TO-DO's
Dishes + kitchen		Mon	Tues	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
Marc's agenda + homework		Mon	Tues	Wed	Thu	Fri
Walk Sparky		Mon	Tues	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
Vitamins / Sparky meds		Mon	Tues	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun


WEEKLY TO-DO's - AN HOUR A DAY KEEPS THE PROBLEMS AT BAY
10	Sweep kitchen floor		10	Wash walls
15	Wash kitchen floor		5	Declutter 2 books
15	Deep Clean kitchen counters		10	Declutter garage - 10 minutes
5	Clean out fridge		10	Declutter basement storage - 10 min
5	Litter box		10	Declutter spare room - 10 minutes
10	Fireplace ashes		20	Wii Fit or DVD
5	Compost out		20	Weights - upper
5	P/U dog poo back yard		20	Weights - lower
5	Sweep office floor		30	Recycle OR Bottles OR GW OR Books
5	Sweep halls		10	Trick train Sparky
5	Sweep my bedroom		5	Clean out car
5	Sweep LR/DR		0	Clear G-mail
15	Wash non-kitchen floors		0	Clear hotmail
15	Clean my bathroom		0	Clear blackberry
5	Clean toilets		5	Organize 1 closet / pantry shelf
55	Laundry		5	Deep Clean kitchen table
10	Change + wash bedding		5	Clean out purse
30	Groceries		20	Library / Tracpac
5	Take out garbage		5	Declutter one item clothes
5	Check mail		7	TOTAL HOURS

GTD review - advice applies to all instinctual / intuition based systems

2011-03-13T13:52:00.000-06:00

Here's one of the best comments to a review of GTD that I think I've ever seen.

Here's the review:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R3GU78YMNHD5GW/ref=cm_cr_rev_detmd_pl?ie=UTF8&cdMsgNo=1&cdPage=1&asin=0142000280&store=books&cdSort=oldest&cdMsgID=Mx1J63BASH8JJTE#Mx1J63BASH8JJTE

And here's the comment (note that I am a "thinker" - and not good at deciding except for at work where I seem to have a very clear sense of priorities, and my "feeling" isn't too bad (I'm pretty evenly balanced between thinking and feeling on the Myers Briggs scale, more heavily weighted towards thinking though):

I found your review very helpful. It also points out one of the things that an industrial psychologist told me about how people function. His concept is that there are people who are, "thinkers," "feelers," and "deciders." We each have a way of functioning that will primarily be one or two of the functions, but rarely is one person all 3. I am primarily a decider. I do well with flying by the seat of my pants because deciding is rarely a problem for me ( a show salesman once told me that I was the only woman he had ever helped that bought the first pair of shoes that she tried on). I am fairly adept at feeling (I have a tendency to decide then reflect on how a decision feels before finalizing it), but I hate to think! I NEVER suffer from analysis paralysis (says my husband the engineer who has a tendency to be the brakes in our relationship while I am the accelerator). Your review helped me realize that this book probably fits well with my style of functioning and would therefore be useful, and it probably would also work for the "feelers" out there, but it does not seem to fit well for the thinkers, because it is simply giving them information, perhaps in a new system, that is what they already do ---- so it is not filling in the gaps for them.

"Getting Things Done" is an incredibly helpful book. It's been indispensable for my personal productivity. It teaches you to do a few things well and does so in a relatively clear manner.

However, it has two serious problems. First, it is presented as a complete organizational system, when it is not. Second, it encourages a seat-of-the-pants, ju-jitsu approach to daily life that can be very counterproductive and exhausting.

But, first the good. For me, the main gist of the book is this: if you try to keep your life organized in your head, you will not be maximally productive. You'll be using an inordinate amount of energy trying to mentally keep track of all your "to do" items. "Getting Things Done" shows you how to get all of these out of your head and into a system so you can concentrate on the present and attack each action item one at a time. This is good stuff.

But, now, the bad (or not so good):

The first problem is "Getting Things Done" provides no guidance on how to prioritize your projects or sub-projects. It does not help you decide what to do next. Instead, it helps you produce very organized, contextual lists of next actions to take. To decide WHICH next action to take, it just recommends that you use your instincts. For many people, one of the big problems (and often THE big problem) with their organization is DECIDING which projects to work on when; and GTD is of absolutely no help. This is not an insurmountable problem as there are books ("Time Power" by Charles Hobbs) and computer programs (Life Balance from Llamagraphics), that can help you prioritize.

The second problem, and perhaps considerably more grave, is "Getting Things Done" encourages you not to plan. It encourages you to simply decide in each moment what to do (based on the excellent lists and reminder system you've created). It encourages a seat-of-the-pants, ju-jitsu approach to daily life. And this is a BIG problem for a lot of people, myself included. If you have trouble prioritizing what to do next in your day and life, then having to make those prioritizing decisions 200 times a day, as GTD encourages, is incredibly draining. GTD preaches that you live life efficiently, but that there's no need for habits or rituals. This is a contradiction and truly counter-productive.

If there's one common thread that you get from reading the biographies of incredibly productive and successful people, it's this: they have very regular, structured, and beneficial habits and rituals. They do not "wing it." "Getting Things Done" could be retitled "Winging It In the Most Efficient Manner Possible." There are successful people, of course, who do "wing it," but the vast majority of successful people are habit- and ritual- driven. That goes especially for work habits (and often for sleep habits, exercise habits, eating habits, and social habits, too). For a great example of this, read "On Writing," by Stephen King.

If you read "Getting Things Done," seriously consider supplementing it with "The Power of Full Engagement," by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz -- especially chapter 10, "The Power of Positive Rituals." It explains very convincingly why purposefully "winging it," even in the most efficient manner, will not work and could be your undoing.

"Getting Things Done" is still a great book, but it does not stand well, on its own, as a system for organizing your life. It needs supplementation.

SF3 and minimalists I have read and loved

2011-03-12T07:59:00.000-07:00

I think I've given the wrong impression that I don't think that minimalism (or optimization - or what I think of as "right sizing") is a great thing, which isn't correct. It's just not a topic that I've read a whole lot about in the last 10 years because:

(a) I grew up more minimalist than most people could fathom so it's kind of ingrained in me to think this way - which isn't a good thing as I attempt to decorate a house, which I have never done and which my parents never did. I mean that they never owned anything that wasn't completely functional and never had a single picture on the walls, except one of the last supper over the kitchen table, a family picture and a bunch of bull awards - literally awards for prize winning bulls.
(b) I don't shop anymore for crap I don't need or really want

All that decluttering that I'm doing now and have been for the last year or so is for stuff that I got years and years ago that my environmental conscience doesn't allow me to just throw in the garbage. Sometimes I wish it did.

People who have shaped my thinking: Thoreau, Duane Elgin, Janet Luhrs, Elaine St. James, those Diet for a Small Planet people, YMOYL, Diogenes, Epictetus... all old books because that's how long it's been since I've been interested in the topic. So the nouveau minimalists do kind of freak me out a bit. But only the ones that quit their jobs to become famous interwebs bloggers and bash all gift giving at Christmas.

A thought occurred to me this morning on how to force priorities into SF3 since I do like the system but need something to push me to do what I need to do a bit more. So I'll put those priorities into column 2 whether they "stand out" initially or not. Then it will be more similar to my task sandwich concept.

We'll see how that goes this weekend. If I bust my hump today, we'll take the day off tomorrow and do something fun. I went through the Entertainment book last night to pick out all the fun things to do in my area. Downside is that I've been to every one of them already. :-(

I imagine that this time management farting around would probably seem quite silly to someone else. I know when I read about people on forums that are REALLY into it (getting dressed for the day needs to go on a list??), I find them kind of bizarre. I mean, just write a damn to do list and do the stuff already! Why get so obsessed with minutiae? But many of us come to it from a place of overwhelm, habits of procrastination and extreme resistance. Someone who's naturally a neat housekeeper would look at a system like Flylady and think those Flybabies are insane. But the key is that it really really helps to find a system that circumvents your inner lazy person that doesn't want to do that stuff and just wants to read novels every night (that's me).

I've got an early appointment this morning to finalize the order the kitchen cabinets and the price has come in much lower than I'd initially forecast. I'm getting a discount of 48% and the sale price is good for 3 more days. W00t! Progress is being made! But with it will come a whole bunch of decisions to be made. Like appliances. Black? Or stainless steel? Something tells me that even though I don't like stainless steel personally - that for selling the house, that's what I'll go with since it's more upscale. On the upside / downside, they're not magnetic so the kid can't constantly clutter up (aka decorate) the fridge. Now he'll probably start putting post-it notes and tape on the walls again...

Those crazy minimalists are driving me insane

2011-03-09T20:01:00.000-07:00

Julien Smith over at In over your head had a guest post today up on his site about some guy who quit his job like 6 days ago and has another - errr - manifesto on minimalism.

TV is a big thing for these people to eradicate. I'm not sure why, but then I don't watch TV and never have. I'm talking since childhood. I wish they'd eradicate the internet since it seems to me they've just replaced one addiction with another. I'm not linking to the post because it was incredibly annoying and I just wanted to punch this dude in the face.

I read too much, I admit it. At least that's what an old boyfriend once told me. Although he was kind of stupid. Good looking, but stupid - but in that I think he was right.

Yes, I read too much. As in books. Always have, always will. I've read to the point at times in my life when it's gotten in the way of my life and goals. I have to put limits on my reading where I see other people pushing themselves to read more.

As a project, I forced myself to watch a whole season of the Tudors on netflix this last month in the goal of diversifying my home entertainment. I think I'm set for the next year or so.

**PLOT SPOILER** - Henry dies in the end.

I don't know why these 20 something year olds annoy me so much. Maybe because they're at where I was at about 15 years ago, listened too much to this kind of rhetoric, wasn't practical enough and getting broke and in debt in the process. None of these guys (and they're mostly young guys) are quitting their SOUL SUCKING jobs to do something useful like work at a non-profit or build furniture or own a funky bakery with quality goods. They're all chucking it all to start an internet bizness. That will hopefully pay off at about $2/hour for their labor so they can have a subsistence living I guess. Woohoo!

I don't know why their lives suck so much. I just don't think that your job can make your life suck that much. I've had some pretty sucky jobs too - working 14 hour days non stop for months and months while trying to raise a couple of kids. Today I wouldn't put up with it, but back then I didn't have the financial resources or confidence in myself to walk away. Today I would. And have. But I didn't run around thinking my job was sooooo SOUL SUCKING. (I love that stupid phrase, what a bunch of f*cking emos). It just wasn't a good fit for me, so I found something else that was. Easy peasy, lemon squeasy.

Steve over at brip blap had a really good post up the other day on the wonderful benefits of being busy. Now that my quasi-boss-who doesn't act like a boss-lets me do whatever I want-but signs my invoices - is on vacation for the next couple of weeks, I've cut my hours by 50% at the day job. This makes me more busy and I just go in and plow through everything that needs to be done - and I love that feeling of urgency. Get in. Get done. Go home. Even though I'm the last one there, I'm happy to go in every day and just work my ass off for a few hours.

In fact, I've been feeling downright peppy. That's one thing that I think that getting older and more realistic and more - dare I say it? - wise? - has brought - that knowledge of what kind of work I like (improving things) and how I can make that work more enjoyable (turning it into a game - often of speed - or having that feeling that I'm doing whatever XX is better than anyone else could do it).

I think I've figured out my modus operandi for the upcoming time off as well. Only 3 more weeks until I'm off. Possibly for the rest of the year. I'll create an artificial shortage of time (that's not really that artificial) by going camping every weekend. That will push me into getting as much done as possible on the house from Monday to Thursday so that I can have weekends off.

And I wish I could go back and give that 20 something year old version of myself a talking to to tell her what would really make her happy.

20 something bloggers and hubris

2011-03-07T07:13:00.000-07:00

Penelope Trunk posted one of those cute electronic-type videos recently:

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/03/03/everything-you-need-to-know-about-driving-traffic-to-your-blog-my-first-video/

She wrote "you can only judge age by the amount of hubris on the page". I find this to be true. I'll often read something quite well-written (because it sounds like advice lifted from a book, not life) and realize it's a student - basically a kid - writing it. Ugh.

Via Wikipedia:

Hubris (pronounced /ˈhjuːbrɪs/), also hybris, means extreme haughtiness or arrogance. Hubris often indicates being out of touch with reality and overestimating one's own competence or capabilities.

I know that I was more certain of how the world is and what other people should be doing when I was in my 20's than I am today. I know what's helped me a lot over the years, but everyone's so different that I hate giving general advice to anyone.

Just a few things off the top of my head that I would recommend to anyone:

#1 - Landmark Forum (because it's all about taking control of your life)
#2 - reading Nathaniel Branden's books, especially Taking Responsibility and The Six Pillars of Self Esteem - I did sentence completion work every day for about 2 years straight. It changed my life.
#3 - Albert Ellis' work on REBT or anything on CBT - people seem to like David Burns' stuff a lot

How'd I do?

2011-03-07T06:47:00.000-07:00

2.0 - Blog post - Feb. 50% finished
~~.25 - vitamins and dog meds~~
~~.25 - clean kitchen counter - w/kids~~
~~.25 - litter box~~
~~.25 - sweep floors~~
~~.5 - wash floors - kids~~
1 - laundry room declutter finished - w/kids - 25% finished
1.5 - prime laundry walls - w/kids - decided not to do since it's not all drywalled
? - read The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest - 50% finished (give me a break, it's 520 pages)
.5 - weights - upper - didn't do
.5 - make banana bread - didn't do
~~.5 - check email~~
~~.25 - take out compost + garbage - kid~~
~~1 - library~~
~~1 - laundry - w/kid~~
~~.5 - drop clothes at goodwill~~
~~.5 - groceries~~
~~.25 - mail tax documents - little kid~~
~~.5 - email re. kitchen quote~~
~~.5 - phone re other kitchen quote~~
~~.5 - clean bathroom~~
~~.25 - clean fridge~~
~~.25 - lightbulbs in - kid~~
~~2 - walk dog - 1 h kid, 1 h me~~
~~1 - blog comments~~
~~.25 - clean toilets~~
~~.5 - dishes - kids~~
~~1 - make chicken and salads for lunch for next week~~

I've said it before and I stand by it - my "intuition" is incredibly stupid. Everything I did NOT do is what is most important to my goals. That's why I don't feel that systems like GTD or AF or SF solve that time management puzzle for me. I have to work somewhat according to priorities or I get a lot of trivial stuff but not the Covey Quadrant 2 "important but not urgent" stuff done.

Yes, eventually you get those things done because you eliminate your list down to them. But it seems to me that when you have a running list as you do in those systems, the list gets re-populated again with noise.

A friend emailed and told me that she feels successful when doing these mundane things and knowing she did something. I don't. At all. Why not? Because a monkey could do them. It wouldn't even have to be a smart monkey.

I wonder sometimes about who gets attracted to time management as a study. It seems that you come at it from one of two directions:
1. You are overwhelmed with too much to do and are trying to fit it all into your life.
2. You want your life to be better. To be about something. To accomplish things.

And that is hard.

Kicking yourself when you're down

2011-03-05T10:07:00.000-07:00

First off, a good post from Jonathan Fields called That's What Pros Do.

Basically, just hunker down, get to work.

My life this weekend is not as exciting as his. Why? Because I haven't had the cleaners come in, that's why. And I don't have a spouse to do some of this crap work. But I do have kids, and I know how to use them.

Here's my list of what I want to get done this weekend. FWIW, I just pulled a bunch of stuff off my master list and hope to get 'er all done.

2.0 - Blog post - Feb.
.25 - vitamins and dog meds
.25 - clean kitchen counter - w/kids
.25 - litter box
.25 - sweep floors
.5 - wash floors - kids
1 - laundry room declutter finished - w/kids
1.5 - prime laundry walls - w/kids
? - read The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
.5 - weights - upper
.5 - make banana bread
.5 - check email
.25 - take out compost + garbage - kid
1 - library
1 - laundry - w/kid
.5 - drop clothes at goodwill
.5 - groceries
.25 - mail tax documents - little kid
.5 - email re. kitchen quote
.5 - phone re other kitchen quote
.5 - clean bathroom
.25 - clean fridge
.25 - lightbulbs in - kid
2 - walk dog - 1 h kid, 1 h me
1 - blog comments
.25 - clean toilets
.5 - dishes - kids
1 - make chicken and salads for lunch for next week

Now if that isn't boring, I don't know what is. 18 hours of (mostly) ugliness. But that's what a weekend in the life of a single parent looks like when:
a) you don't have the housecleaners come in (MUST pre-schedule this every 2 weeks)
b) it's too freaking cold to go anywhere or do anything
c) you were busy during the week with a flat tire in -30 weather (sucked up 2 nights), kids homework, work work
d) a general disinclination to do more than the basics all week so it comes back to bite you on the weekend

So step 1 is to figure out what I can fob off on or do with the kids. I like sharing pain. Other than that, just work really really fast and get it over with as soon as possible.

Is it any wonder that I enjoy working more than I enjoy being at home if this is what "home" represents?

And then there were none

2011-03-01T07:05:00.000-07:00

One more month of work. Only two people left in the office. Me. And the boss. Only he won't be there because he's going on vacation. And I'll be working from home. Which is okay I guess since there won't be anyone there to talk with anyway. The countdown begins.

I'm looking forward to the time off. Yet not.

I've realized how very much I enjoy working. Oddly enough, this is a surprise that I wasn't expecting. I think I would be super duper happy as a male with a stay at home wife in the 1950's where I'm expected to bring home the bacon and that's about it. Everything else is outsourced and I just show up.

Yet another possible job offer

2011-02-21T07:22:00.000-07:00

I went for lunch yesterday with a couple of friends. The one friend and I have been meaning to get together for awhile, but she's been really busy since she got a promotion and is managing a larger group - essentially has taken on two managers jobs. But she was keen to know when I was finished this contract and wants me to work with her. Sigh... there's a conspiracy afoot to not let me have any time off.

She's a decent manager but is too detail-oriented and too hard of a worker. She'll put in 90+ hour weeks in on year-end for weeks on end and totally burn herself out. She does it because she has a good puritan work ethic. I do it to work on improving something. Somehow it's a different mindset because I don't get burnt out when I work a lot - IF I'm working on fixing something, not just on mundane stuff like last year. That was a killer. When we worked together before, she didn't like it that I like to change things. A lot. So what I'd have to do is not tell her what I was doing, but just go ahead and change everything and show her when it was done that it worked better. She got over it, but I had to train her. Then when she left and I became the manager of the group, we managed to eliminate overtime for everyone by the next year-end. Well, except me - but I enjoyed it so it was okay. :-) She doesn't get it that she has to work hard and will always have to work hard because she's not working on the process of eliminating or reducing the work.

The job itself would be kind of exciting but scary. It involves revamping the asset tracking system of a big company. How big? $43 BILLION in assets. Same principles as anything else I guess, just more zeros.

The timing sucks though. There's a bit of a hiring freeze there right now because a bunch of people have come off a big project and she's supposed to hire those internally if she needs someone. The problem is that she wants someone that she can just give stuff to and it will get done. Apparently it's not that easy to find people like that - which is totally true. There's such a lot of incompetent people out there, which makes it easy to stand out a bit if you're just above average.

So I'm torn. A project like that would be so exciting. But I want my summer off to travel. The ideal would be if she was hiring in September. That's just five months from now. I'd get the house finished at last, hopefully sold, (some) travel done, new house (convenient for commuting) bought with no mortgage and no upkeep. And maybe - just maybe - get that acreage to escape to on weekends. Buy or build a small cabin and have the best of all worlds.

I need a crystal ball.

Superfocus 3 is tiring

2011-02-19T16:19:00.000-07:00

And feels like ADD. But I got A LOT of crap done that I've been dreading, so it's all good.

The laundry room is 1/2 prepped for painting (ZOMG the cobwebs!) and partially decluttered, I've lifted weights for about an hour off and on today, finally got my basement stairs cleaned, blackberry and other email purged, about a dozen boxes of hardwood flooring pulled apart and stacked, and a bunch of other stuff that I can't even remember doing. I think it must have involved the kitchen because it's super clean. And I actually forgot to eat until 4 pm today, which is weird.

The other thing I noticed in doing this is that I STILL have the tendency to take on way too many projects at home given that I'm still working pretty much full time. You can see that you have too much to do and the projects are too big because you'll resist starting another bigger project because you know you won't be able to finish it on a timely basis - and you don't want to spend all day doing all the huge, crap jobs and not be able to get to the simple maintenance stuff you still need to do.

And I need down time every day - just time to read and chill out. And it has to be for at least 2 hours a day. I don't know why that concept is so hard for me to get.

I have a dream though - that I can get back to that state I used to be in when there was nothing to take care of and maintain but the necessities. That there was time to do everything I had to do - and most of the things I wanted to do. Six more weeks of working at the job and then my home will become my "job". So I've cut my list down by quite a lot and said no to myself and other people because I just don't have the time.

This time management system is not something I'd want to spend all day working with and it's not something that I've even done every day this week. But it's nice to know that I can pick it up for a little while, get a bunch of ugly stuff out of the way and pick it up again where I left off to get my butt in gear on another day. Right now, I'm going to walk the dog and then be comatose for the rest of the day. I've definitely earned it. :-)

What was I thinking?

2011-02-06T06:28:00.000-07:00

After only a few days of working off of a master list with no prioritization (kind of like AF and GTD) and, as I found before - this is a stupid way of working (for me). The trivial gets done at the expense of the important. One of the quirks of being an INTJ is that things have to work, and have to make sense, we're not very good mindless followers.

I would suggest to anyone that if one of their big "goals" in life is to have a cleaner house, this would be a good way to do that - at the expense of achieving anything really relevant. I think it would be a really good alternative to Flylady for people who don't want to do zones and shine their sink every day even though it's not really dirty.

I think that a master list can be a good thing to have, but just to pull things off of onto a separate list for the day and thereby provide some structure for your day.

So I've settled on a basic Get Sh*t Done combined with the Premack Principle to get the goal-related "A" tasks out of the way first or scatter them throughout the day. So far today, have got a lot of sh*t done. And am looking forward to getting the rest of the weekend sh*t done tomorrow. So in just today, I've got more priority stuff done than I had the previous week using those "choose an adventure" systems.

The other nice thing about using my daily list is that for some of the other, bigger projects, when I'm making my list up for the day, I can break down one of those into a checklist right on my daily plan. That's basically what I do at work most of the time as well. So this gels with how I work normally - the only difference being the nature of the work. Home is usually recurring things with not as much "there it's done - forever" - sadly. :-(

Time management experiment

2011-01-31T18:43:00.000-07:00

I have goals. I have chores. I like playing around with time management stuff and systems. For the month of February, I'm going to do a little self-experiment.

I've built a master list of around 100 items to start, some are recurring, many aren't. They're about equally split between the following:

A - relate directly to goals and are important to me - mainly lifting weights, a renovation project and blogging
B - pretty important - kids homework, other exercise, decluttering projects, getting my taxes done, playing with my kid, blog comments
C - chores. Ugh.
D - fun. Yay!

There's a few more "chores" items since a lot of those are fairly quick. As much as I feel like doing the dishes will take 20 minutes to do, in reality it's more like 5 minutes - if that.

I'm going to be testing a couple of things - for example, phrasing. Which type of phrasing makes you more inclined to exercise - "do 20 squats"? "20 minute leg workout"? "squat 150 pounds..."? (Yes that's wimpy, but I don't have a smith machine at home or a spotter).

More importantly, I want to see what gets done when there's no prioritization. In March, I'll follow up with a month where I work according to priority. Same kind of list only rules in place to provide selection by priority.

If I'm feeling remarkably ambitious, I'll keep a time log for the 2 months. This isn't that big of a deal since back in the auditing and billing days, I used to keep a detailed time log and did that for years and years.

Oh - and the time I'm at work, commuting or getting ready for work is off limits - that's from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. or so. Unless I'm commuting by bus (got blackberry, can work) or during lunch.

4 hours that felt like infinity

2011-01-30T09:24:00.000-07:00

I read The Four Hour Body this week on my e-reader. Big mistake - wrong media device for the book. Actually, I would say that any non-fiction should not be read (by me) on an e-reader. The "time to read" gets extended by about 10 times my normal non-fiction speed and retention seems like it's lower.

The book is somewhere around 650 pages and took me about 4 hours to slog through page after page on bro-wisdom that isn't anything new to anyone who's been on a bodybuilding forum. There were some other things that you won't find on the typical BB forum but if you know how to use google... - some stuff on running (I don't run anymore but if you do, maybe get the book Chi Running), jumping (ok...), batting (don't play ball anymore after that broken face from a line drive) , holding your breath (who cares?).... The sex chapter was possibly one of the creepiest things I've ever read, and I've read lots of books on sex - maybe they didn't sound so much like they were "hacking" the process.

I suffered through it looking for why it was 5 stars but more importantly, for the swimming chapter. However, in that chapter, Ferriss recommended that you read the book on the Total Immersion technique then states that the book is hard to follow, but the DVD pulls it all together. So I kind of wonder why he bothered to write the crib notes on it because if a whole book on swimming is hard to follow, the crib notes aren't going to be much better. That's a book that I'll get on paper and buy rather than download from the library as I did the 4 Hour Body - which was worth about what I paid for it. Or make my own crib notes that I can bring to the pool... I could have saved 3 3/4 hours of my life just googling "best swimming techniques" or typing "swimming" into Amazon search.

A little tidbit on the Ferriss marketing machine - which I find more interesting than the bro-wisdom:
http://sivers.org/tim-ferriss

Speaking of hacking - a 4 hour serial killer / mystery read that really was worth it: John Verdon's Think of a Number. What I like about this novel - besides the plot, which is very good (the writing isn't perfect but good enough) - is that it's the first novel of this early retired ad man who went on to build furniture for 10 years somewhere in the boonies and then turned his hand to writing fiction. What an awesome story! And he seems like a super nice, humble kind of guy as well. It was one of those books that you didn't want to stop reading - even though I figured out whodunit about 1/3 of the way through. Excellent book for the e-reader because it's harder to jump ahead and find out if you're right (not that I do that anymore...)

Here's a really good time management system set-up if you like the mobility of over-priced Levenger stuff but don't want to pay the $100 or so for the binder etc.:
http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/01/a-bit-of-productivity-pr0n/

Here's a hilarious article on time management from Wired:
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/magazine/17-01/mf_self_help?currentPage=all

The Premack Principle

2011-01-20T06:19:00.000-07:00

Well, what do you know - my time management system has a name - and is further detailed in this post:

http://gettingstronger.org/2010/12/stop-procrastinating-use-the-premack-principle/

Anyone can die at any time.

2011-01-12T05:48:00.000-07:00

“Believe what you want. But here’s a clue. The secret to life: Anyone can die at any time.”
“So what do we do about it?”
“Amuse ourselves. Don’t live by rules or boundaries. And take what you want, when you want.”
—Franco and Maxie, General Hospital, November 24, 2009

http://nymag.com/print/?/movies/profiles/67284/

I would add - don't hurt anyone else along the way. Which is harder to do than it seems.

Focus

2011-01-09T15:21:00.000-07:00

I found this in the comments section of one of Cal Newport's blog posts - not sure which one or I would have linked to it. Hear hear!

What other meta-principles or meta-techniques have served you well in more than 1 area of your life?

I’m real big on doing a small number of thing, but putting in a lot of time to doing them well. I’ll wait months, if not years, sometimes to take on a new project, before I’m sure it’s something I can commit to. I place a lot of emphasis on the quality of my life, and work backwards from that to figure out questions of my work, my hobbies etc., and am a big believer in treating your mind like a private garden. Finally, I put a lot of effort into determining what hours are actually making me better and what don’t matter, and trying to eliminate the latter at the expense of the former.

Oh there's one more thing...

2011-01-08T14:13:00.000-07:00

Use your tools wisely. I'm FINALLY writing in Word and not Wordpress. That was (one of) my big mistakes. It takes a little more time to pull everything over and format it properly, but it's not wasted time since it keeps me focused on the post and I can actually see the flow of it rather than just this teeny little window with 5 lines.

What fun I had writing the post today! I got the bones of it put together a couple of days ago and then pulled it all together this morning. Five hours of work to write though - at least. But it was pure flow work all the way through. Then a little bit of satisfiction (that's satisficing / satisfaction) and let it go. OK, I'll admit I had to go back and add one line at the end that I forgot which wasn't even the line that I had in mind that was really good. I don't think those edits show up on a reader, I don't know how that works.

I even had a theme! A list (of sorts) absorbed in disjointedness. OK, I know it's no Lolita, but I've got to start somewhere.

A guy emailed me - a kind of famous internet guy - and told me that he liked my writing. I have to stop thinking that people are just being nice and pitying when they say these things. If my boss at work tells me I did a good job, I don't say "no I didn't" - well, sometimes I do think to myself "that's just my job / what you hired me to do." But I'm confident in myself in that arena and know I'm better than 99% of other people at what I do. That's what years of practice will give you.

So I will show up (almost) every day to write. I may not "publish" every day or even every week, but I will show up. And I will work. I have to believe that if I've killed the self doubt in one area, it's possible to kill it in another. With practice.