PocketMod, planner for a pauper’s pocket

Found the coolest little portable pocket planner. Write your notes on it, stuff it in your pocket and toss when done. It’s called the PocketMod.

It’s an easy do-it-yourself - where you add the mini-pages that suit your planning needs then print it, fold it. It’s a bit of an origami puzzle till you get the hang of it… - make sure you print out the assembly instructions on one of your demos so you can review the process offline.

Postprandial plunge: to nap or not to nap?

Postprandial: following a meal

Plunge: to descend precipitously

Perhaps I exaggerate - but plunge was the only p-word that comes close to what happens to me after lunch most days… (and after as little as one glass of wine w. dinner) - I want to get horizontal and shut my eyes.

Supposedly it has something to do with blood sugar levels, but it doesn’t seem to matter whether I eat a low or high carb meal; I just get sleepy.

And then I resist it.  I sit at my computer trying to write, trying to compute, trying to think through a problem — gaining no traction but refusing to succumb.  If I get up and tackle a physical chore I can sometimes barrel through it, but at a detriment to my effectiveness.

Half an hour after a nap it’s as if I rebooted my whole system, and all the resource-hogging resident programs in my brain have cleared out.  My question to myself is this: why don’t I just go with the flow and make room in my schedule for a daily nap?

Napping is a high art in some cultures; there’s no shame attached to it. It’s probably good for your health, as a recent study from Greece indicates.   From that story in the NY Times:

Now, out of Greece, comes permission to do exactly that. A study of more than 23,000 adults shows that those who napped for about 30 minutes each week had a 37 percent lower risk of dying from a heart attack than those who did not.

So this should mean that all working Americans will receive permission from their bosses to close their eyes every afternoon at about 4 p.m., right?

Don’t bet your blankie on it.

This is hardly the first study showing that sleep is more than simply time when we really should be at work. Other studies, though few as extensive as the Greek research, show that short periods of sleep during the day increase productivity and creativity while reducing stress. And even without surveys, we know this from experience.

When you need a nap, you need a nap. Nothing — not caffeine, not a chocolate bar, not a pill — recharges the battery in the same way.

I welcome you to join me…

Post #100 - Persistent Practice Pays!

Yay me!  I’ve averaged one post a day for the past three+ months in pursuit of my main goal in blogging: to create a daily writing practice.

I am a writer by profession, but only write under deadline–if you don’t count the occasional dreary whines into my journal.   If one wants to improve in skill or expand one’s ouevre (love that word, ouevre - sounds so Important), one should write every day.

Since self-discipline isn’t my strong suit I had to create a ruse to make me place pen to paper (fingers to keyboard). I needed to feel that I was talking to someone outside my own skull, and that that audience (however tiny) expected me to keep my agreement to produce on deadline.

It’s said that it takes 21 days to make something a habit. For those of us with self-discipline issues, it may take longer.  For me, it took about 60 days to arrive at a point where I WANT to produce a post.  I called the blog 365Pwords, but at this point I suspect I could go on forever, because there thousands of great P-words, and many of them are worth revisiting several times.

Three side benefits of keeping my focus narrow (at least it seemed narrow when I began):

• I see the world through p-colored glasses.  P-words pop up in unexpected places like colorful toadstools after a spring rain.  Oooh. I have to write about THAT.
• Roget’s Thesaurus is my new best friend.  If something noteworthy happens and I’m plagued by a paucity of P-words to describe it, I get out Roget’s and lose myself among a plethora of word associations until I find the perfect one.  (Forget the online thesaurus, folks. Or the alphabetic ones. If you want to boost your creative thinking, you need the original Roget’s on paper.)
• I’ve discovered the dictionary. When I was little and asked the meaning of a word, my mom would say, “Go look it up in the dictionary…” which just pissed me off.   I had resisted it ever since, until the P-word Project.  What riches lie within those pages! Try it yourself sometime. Again, the paper dictionary, not the online one.

Pings and Productivity

An article in today’s NY Times about the perils of “pinging” - my word for the constant interruptions we face in our modern daily lives.

As the parent of young children, the pinging came from them: “Mom, I’m hungry (bored, tired, angry, mad at my brother, sick, in danger, have a dirty diaper); I need you NOW”. I don’t think I had a coherent thought for a seven-year period, except when they were in childcare. I was good only for low-level functions: buying and preparing food, cleaning up, running errands, arranging play dates.

Now, kids long gone (chatty husband too) the distractions are back. But most of them are (or should be) under my own control. It’s between me and the internet. Ping! I’ve got email! I do research for an article on Vitamin D (thank you google) and suddenly I’ve gotten from Vitamin D to auto-immune disorders to fatigue to distraction to this article - and now instead of further work on Vitamin D I’m writing a post about being distracted.

Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age has this to say:

What’s needed is a renaissance of attention — a revaluing and cultivating of the art of attention, to help us achieve depth of thought and relations in this complex, high-tech time.

The first step is to learn to speak a language of attention. The exciting news is that the enigma of attention has just begun to be mapped, tracked and decoded by neuroscientists who now consider attention to be a trio of skills: focus, awareness and so-called executive attention. Think of it this way: You can be “aware” that you’re in a beautiful garden and then you can “focus” on an individual flower. The last piece, “executive attention,” is the ability to plan and make decisions.

Coincidentally I was dead-heading the amazing Westerlund rose earlier today in the garden. Hundreds of blooms in thick clusters. A few branches so heavy they had broken (below, the flowers on just two stalks). I was clip clip clipping but somewhere else in my head. Suddenly I realized I wasn’t present and began to focus on each spent head and the shattering petals that fell as I snipped. Such abundance! Wow.

I used to do most of my writing on my laptop, which I keep offline. It is so much easier to focus when there’s no place else to go, no emails to worry about. I talk about self-discipline, but talk costs nothing. I feel myself with a big SHOULD coming on: I SHOULD ONLY CHECK EMAIL ONCE A DAY. I SHOULD ONLY CHECK DailyKos ONCE A DAY. I SHOULD ONLY….

What will I actually DO????

Planning - a prerequisite for profit

Plan: a detailed scheme, program or method worked out beforehand for the accomplishment of an objective.

Prerequisite: required as a prior condition to something

Profit: the positive return on a business enterprise after expenses have been paid

I have been doing feng shui and color consultations as a sideline since 2002 and it recently dawned on me to put some effort into marketing my services. I’m good at what I do but have never made an effort to promote what I do beyond a smallish sphere.

This morning I had coffee with a guy who had seen an article I’d written for the local paper and figured we should meet because he does organizing. I wouldn’t know how good he is at this, but he did share that he’d gotten a lot of help from the gal at the Small Business Development Center in town - a FREE service of Washington State University. (Who knew???) He suggested I call her.

First I looked up the SBDC on the web and right there they list the 15 essential steps to creating a solid business plan.

Business plan???? I’m an Artist.

Perhaps I should consider my business a bit more seriously, ya think?

Procrastination

Procrastination: putting off intentionally something that should be done,
from the Latin, pro (forward) and crastinus (of tomorrow)

Ben Zimmer at Slate.com says

How fitting that the word is lengthy and Latinate, taking its time to reach a conclusion. Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson once wrote that procrastination is “really sloth in five syllables.” And yet the word denotes so much more than mere sloth or indolence: A procrastinator meticulously organizing a sock drawer or an iTunes library can’t exactly be accused of laziness. Likewise, procrastination is not simply the act of deferral or postponement. It implies an intentional avoidance of important tasks, putting off unpleasant responsibilities that one knows should be taken care of right away and setting them on the back burner for another day.

Noting Ben Franklin’s dictum “never put off until tomorrow what should be done today,” Zimmer reminds us of MarkTwain’s response: “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.”

Which brings us to another great P-word perendinate, meaning “to put something off until the day after tomorrow.”

And - picture stories being worth 1000 textual declamations -join me in procrastinating a minute longer with cartoonist Lev Yilmaz. Laugh while you wince in self-recognition.

One of the main reasons I started this blog was to explore the P words that pave my path to Perfection. Procrastination is one of those words, and yet I’ve posted 60 entries on this blog without touching upon this pimple on the ass of Progress.

When I was preparing for a party last week, I reorganized a couple of kitchen cabinets, gathered a box of books for the second-hand store, and hung a bunch of pictures. Today, in preparation for an appointment with my divorce* attorney, I’m writing in my blog about procrastination.

John Perry, a Stanford philosophy professor whose public radio show Philosophy Talk is a favorite of mine, calls this “structured procrastination.”

I have discovered an amazing strategy that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.

Ah. I feel better now.

*Divorce - I’ve been separated for 7 years from my almost ex, but we have yet to finalize it. This gives you some sense of my capacity for procrastination.

Pigpen particles

Pigpen: one of Charles Schultz’s great characters. He walks around in a cloud of dust particles - spreading them everywhere he goes.

Particle:a minute quantity or fragment of something

Sometimes I have so much going on in my head that I feel like Pigpen. Except the cloud of particles surrounding me is not dirt, it’s partial thoughts. All the incompletes that I’m trying to hold in my mind. It makes it hard to move forward.

I should be free of extraneous thought-particles. I keep lists. Lots of lists. Lists of my lists. But sometimes lists aren’t enough to clear the mental air.

My lists missed two important requisites of particle-clearing: the big picture (the view from 5, 10 or 50 thousand feet) and next ACTION steps.

This morning I got out my colored pens and a big piece of paper and did a mind-map brain dump and began to see a pattern in my particles. And I also began making a list of what’s the first (however small) next step that is keeping so many of my projects stuck at the gate - making the phone call, locating the missing piece of information, scheduling those next ACTION steps.

Talk is cheap. Lists are easy. Action is (well) ACTION.

Pajama Pastimes

Pajamas: a loose-fitting garment, consisting of trousers and jacket, for sleeping or lounging.
Pastime: an activity that occupies one’s time pleasantly

No no. This isn’t that kind of blog, even though porn is a P-word.

A pajama pastime is when you get up in the morning, look out the window at the cold windy drizzle, consider your pulled pectoral muscle and decide you will NOT go to exercise class, and in fact you will not go anywhere. You’ll just putz around in pajamas all day.

That’s what I did yesterday and it was paradise.

I’m not a sloth, however. I spent most of the day at my desk plowing through papers, tossing, filing, re-organizing and re-labeling (with my precious P-Touch - see post two below).

If one is a paper person, as I am, this task should be done at least once a year. Usually I take a couple of days after Christmas for this project, but last year I was in California visiting my kids, and the year before that my kids were all here.

Of course someone who has the orderly mind and desk of David Allen would always be on top of things. HIS desk only has one piece of paper on it… the one he’s working with. I find this inconceivable.

SInce I trained as a feng shui consultant seven years ago, I know how cluttered my thinking gets if my desktop is cluttered, so I do get it cleared about once a month. Unfortunately the system breaks down in two places - more comes in than I have time to process, and my file system gets too full or out of date for current material to find a home.

By the time I went to bed last night my file drawers were conscious and current. I felt like a new woman. Today I can tackle what’s actually important…

Perseverance #2

Perseverance - continuing resolutely despite obstacles, opposition, importunity. Tenacity. From the Latin perseverare: per- through + severus severe

Twice a year, spring and fall, I call in the troops because my yard is in a state of emergency. Our fertile soil has produced more plant material than I can handle. Fecundity, they call it. In the spring it’s the unwanted - weeds; in the fall it’s the remains of plants I wanted – dead perennials, leaves, nuts, twigs.

Raul has been my main man for about fifteen years. He used to come with his two cousins. Now he’s the big boss and he sends three guys who whip thru the cleanup in a few hours laughing and singing.

I usually work with them, though not at their pace. They’re workers, not plant people, and I want to make sure they don’t mistake one of my babies for a weed.

But yesterday Raul’s crew was busy elsewhere and he just sent José. (“Call me Joe,” he said.). My heart sunk. The yard has never been more overgrown and I get one guy?

My back yard, where he started, is much worse than the front and I could tell that Joe was somewhat alarmed by the task ahead. I told him I wouldn’t be able to help because of my pulled muscle and asked if he wanted to send for reinforcements

He just shrugged and struck his hoe into the dirt. “I can do,” he said.

And he did. Section by section, hoeful by hoeful. Perseverance in action.

He worked for nine hours with only a lunch break. He pruned back a hedge and transplanted a rose too. In nine hours he transformed my yard from a jungle into a place of order.

Sure, there are still pockets where more work will be needed, but this just teaches me once again that no task is impossible if I would just hack away at it a little at a time, and again and again and again.

Once I set my priorities…

Purging excess possessions: 3 easy steps

Why would you want to purge your excess possessions? Let me count the ways…

No, actually I’m not going to enumerate them right now; it’s too depressing. I’ll just say that we Americans have a serious Possessions Problem, and it’s choking our ch’i.

So if you’re looking around your place feeling stuck, stagnant, stale and stupefied, consider purging. Here are the four most basic steps.

1. Stop clutter at the front door. Prevention is always the best strategy! Only buy what you need and have a predestined place for. Stop going to garage sales. Throw out junk mail before it settles on the kitchen table. As catalogs arrive, call their 800 number and ask to be removed from their lists. Accept other people’s stuff only if you really need it. If you acquire a new piece of furniture, let go of a piece of furniture that someone else can use. Ditto with clothing. Recycle or compost early and often.
2. Tackle small chunks at a time. Avoid feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the task ahead by biting off manageable chunks. Set a timer for fifteen minutes and choose one drawer, one shelf or one category of clothing. Do this for fifteen minutes every day and you’ll see remarkable progress in no time.
3. As you approach each item, ask yourself these questions:
   • Do I love it?
   • Do I need it?
   • Do I use it?
   • Does it enhance my life? (or does my heart sink when I see it?)

Then sort your things into 4 piles or boxes for dealing with. Mark the boxes Yes YES!; Yes, but…; No, but…; and No NO!

• Yes yes! I love it and I need it, it works and it’s useful
• Yes, but… I love, need, use it - but it needs fixing or is in the wrong location
• No, but… Someone else should have it (Goodwill, relative, friend, Ebay)
• No no! Toss it out (or recycle)

If you get stuck, enlist a dispassionate friend to help. Trade time. Or pay if you must. Their job is to keep you focused, to cheer you on, to help you realistically assess value (or lack therof), and to ask you the hard questions: “Do you honestly think you’ll be a size 8 again?” “Do you really believe your children will want that?”

You CAN do this. And you’ll feel sooooo much better. (I just finished de-cluttering my bedroom and home office and I feel like a new woman.)

Lather, rinse, repeat. (This is an ongoing process, not a state of perfection. Sorry)