Many thanks to Pat over at roam4free.ie for directing my attention to Hotel Ballymun. I’m sure staying in the Clarke Tower would have been preferable to the Ballymun Plaza.
The Tower has, indeed, been demolished now.
Or maybe they just repainted it and called it the Plaza?
Review of Ballymun Plaza Hotel, Ballymun, Dublin, Ireland
Rated as /5 on Jul 26 2007 by David Hollingworth
I would not normally have chosen to stay in the Ballymun Plaza; but a combination of a conference at Dublin Airport and a weekend break deal from Supervalu swayed me in the direction of this hotel.
Initial impressions were far from encouraging; the ground floor retail units weren’t completed giving the hotel a half finished look; but these were not as discouraging as the completely run down surroundings the hotel has been built in. Ballymun was renowned for its poor social housing and whilst the tower blocks have been demolished the hotel is surrounded by large tenement blocks, some of which are still occupied and some boarded up; and the whole area speaks of decline and deprivation.
Having seen the area then only thing that persuaded me not to look for somewhere else was the provision of a secure underground car park.
Check in was very slow, despite having emailed the hotel a few weeks before to ensure we’d have a family room we still had to wait in reception while the house keeper searched empty rooms for one with a single and double bed. The room itself was clean; but very basic. There were complimentary tea / coffee facilities in the room; but the kettle was mounted half way up a wall in a very inconvenient position to use. The furnishings in the room had to have been the most basic of any hotel I’ve been in.
We’d booked a table for dinner when we checked in; but when we went down to the restaurant we were asked to take dinner in the bar – something that I refused to do as I didn’t want my seven year old daughter in the bar that that hour of the evening. Having insisted on a table in the restaurant we were shown to a table for two (there’s three of us in case you’d forgotten), perhaps the waiter couldn’t count. Anyway there were plenty of tables for four available so I selected one and we sat down to eat.
The food was quite reasonable, and if anything this was the one redeeming feature of the hotel. Nothing exciting, I ordered Chicken Supreme and got Chicken Kiev; but it was well cooked and nicely presented. The breakfasts too where very tasty.
Noise at night was also a problem. Being a hotel I always expect some noise with guests coming and going. However both nights we stayed were punctuated by both guests and staff yelling up and down the corridors and guests repeatedly slamming doors. Desperate.
One final thing; I wondered why the fire alarm sensor in our room was covered in a plastic bag thus rendering it useless.
If you’re like me then you need a gentle prod every so often to remind you to work on the targets you’ve set for yourself. If this is the case then the Hassle Me site might be good for you.
A very simple idea, you provide the frequency you want to be hassled in days, the text of the hassle, like “Go for a ride on your bike”; and a number of email addresses. HassleMe then emails you a reminder at roughly (not exactly) the number of days you’ve asked to be hassled. The slight randomness helps to prevent the hassle just becoming part of the routine “select / delete” part of email processing.
Try out the service (it’s free). If it works for you then great, if not then simply put it back on the shelf.
In my last posting on attaining goals we looked at maintaining an All Projects list and a Current Projects list. However even my Current Projects list is too large to be easily manageable with eight projects on it, six of which are active.
To be really productive you have to be focussed and this means concentrating on one project at a time. Every time you switch projects it takes some of your productive time to get into the mind set for that project, pick up the tasks and get yourself organized. All this is time that is not actually moving the project forwards. If you spend your time doing a bit here and doing a bit there then you’ll make little progress across a broad spectrum of projects. This can rapidly become demotivating as seemingly little progress is made on any front.
With the index card system it’s easy to maintain the focus. Every morning, as part of the morning routine, review the Current Projects list:
Here’s my Current Project list for this morning:
This immediately puts me into the mind set I need to do focussed work on this project and makes the project stand out from the rest. Every time I glance at the Current Projects list I know just where I must focus my attention. Once I’ve completed all the tasks I can on this project then I’ll move the Focused Project sticker to the next most important project and start to focus there.
Soon we’ll look at breaking goals and projects down into the individual tasks needed to get them done and looking at how these fall into the organization structure.
Review of Topeak Comp 150 Wireless Cycle Computer
Rated as /5 on Jun 22 2007 by David Hollingworth
I bought this wireless cycle computer to go with my new bike for two reasons. One was the fact that it had lots of functions and the second was the fact that it said on the box that it was suitable for mountain bikes. Also it wasn’t cheap so I thought (erroneously) that it had to be good.
So I installed it, which was fiddly; but no more so than a wired cycle computer. The instructions specified a maximum of 18 inches (1.5 feet) between the top of the sensor and the display unit. However at that distance no signal was being received by the display unit.
Tests showed that unless the sensor was 14 inches or less from the display unit then the signal was lost. On a mountain bike with a 20 inch frame this distance is impossible to achieve.
So I’ve been unable to check out the functions of the Comp 150 because it didn’t do what it said it would do; support 18 inches between sensor and display.
Hust in passing I found the Topeak web site attractive to look at; but lacking is useful information. The FAQ section of the site didn’t work at all and there was no troubleshooting section that I could find.
In one of my other lives I build web sites and I’m very pleased to be able to announce today the launch of a new site for The Social and Health Education Project (SHEP).
The project does sterling work in the area of providing personal development and community training courses as well as training the facilitators to go out in society and deliver the courses. Here’s a small snippet from the description of their work:
Through its Training and Development Services, SHEP offers a wide range of courses aimed at helping people to be effective in their personal lives, in their family relationships and in their communities. It also trains people to become group-facilitators. Many of these use the skills they learn with the Project in their professional work or in their work in the community. Others undergo advanced training in order to play specialist roles with the Project, working either as Community Tutors or as Organisational Mentors. Community Tutors deliver a number of introductory courses in personal development through SHEP’s Community Training Programme, while Organisational Mentors provide support and guidance for organisations operating in the community and voluntary sector through the Project’s Community Governance Enhancement Programme.
If you’ve an interest in personal development or community and society issues then please visit the site and help support the work that they do.
I wanted to highlight an excellent posting by Leo over on zenhabits.net on the subject of creating daily and weekly review routines.
I disagree somewhat with Leo’s assertion that David Allen leaves out structure from his Get Things Done (GTD) philosophy, personally I found it highly structured; but perhaps that’s just my mind imposing my structure on it, as Leo has done in his article.
Anyway, give the posting a read, I’m sure you’ll find it useful.
If you’re anything like me you’ve probably got dozens of on-going goals or projects that you went to get done. How do you keep track of all of these and ensure nothing gets missed?
Part of the answer is in having regular reviews; but then you need to have something organized to look at when it comes to review time. Now you can either go high-tech (computerized) or low-tech (paper based) in this and there’s often an on-line debate as to which is better and what tool is best for the job. It’s not what you use that matters, it’s making it work for you that counts.
My current goal tracking system starts with an All Projects list.
The All Projects list is used as a high level overview of all the goals I want to achieve. An entry on here ensures none of my goals slips under the carpet and gets forgotten about.
I was amazed when I wrote out my All Projects list that I had so many things I wanted to get done. It was no wonder some things never got addressed – there were just too many of them to keep them all going around in my head. Here’s the first page of the list in full and thumbnails to the second and third pages if you want to take a look:
That’s one big list of projects; but some of these aren’t active yet. In fact I’ve only got eight active projects out of this list of thirty one. When I decide I’m going to address a project or a goal I move it onto a Current Projects card.
Now I can see the eight goals or projects that are currently active and need me to spend some time on so that’s narrowed the field down somewhat. However some of these projects are temporarily on hold so I use transparent sticky tabs to highlight those projects that can be worked at present:
At every review this shows me which goals I should and can be addressing now. At review time I can check my All Projects list for anything that has come into scope and needs further work; these get moved to my Current Projects list. I then check my Current Projects to see which projects need my immediate attention and which are on hold.
In a future post I’ll be looking at how the project cards integrate with task lists and to-do lists. Until then I’d love to read how you manage your high level goals, particularly if you’re using a low-tech system.
Review of Foundation Course in Social and Health Education – Part One, Bessborough Centre, Mahon, Cork, Ireland
Rated as /5 on Jun 15 2007 by David Hollingworth
The course is run by The Social and Health Education Project in Cork, lasts six months from September to May and consists of a 2 1/2 hour meeting each week plus several weekend workshops. The groups are a reasonable size (the one I attended started out at 17) and there are two trained facilitators. The course starts gently with introductions and setting the ground rules for the next six months, things like confidentiality and respect for the other group members, before moving on to develop listening skills.
Over the next six months we studied a wide range of areas including managing emotions, assertive communication (three full days on this), stress, exercise, interplay of relationships and the super-ego. All the work is experiential, there’s no note taking and very little in the way of handouts; but I found that this did not detract from the learning experience.
Personally I found the course immensely beneficial. I’ve gained a much deeper understanding of myself and the ways in which I interact with other people. I’ve gained more confidence and now have strategies to recognize and deal with my super-ego when it criticises or judges me. All in all I would thoroughly recommend this course.
I set my weight loss goal on 25th April and it’s now mid-June so it’s definitely time for a review. I had a fairly major life change at the end of May when I was made redundant. So another reason to take stock and review.
I followed my goal review method and above is the resulting map (please click the thumbnail for a larger view). From this you can see that:
It boils down to the fact that I found it impossible to establish the new walking habit at lunchtime because I needed to be more flexible at that time. I could have done it; but I chose not to!
I’ll be following up on these new goals in a latter posting.
By the way, I have lost some weight! I lost 5 pounds during my stomach upset and, at the last weighing, I’d kept them off!