Well we did it.
My wife and I did our first days walk, something that’s to become part of the rest of our lives.
It felt good, the weather is sunny and warm, legs got a good stretch and lunch (a light ham salad and some fruit) tasted all the better for it.
Here’s to a life time of walking.
I want to start this week with an idea that many may find difficult to grasp; that, by and large, happiness is a choice.
I’m following on from a posting on Six Degrees Of Inspiration on this topic as it’s something I’ve believed myself since my mid-thirties. At that time I was living with an ex-girlfriend because he house we’d bought together had so much negative equity we couldn’t sell it, our business had gone bust and we were in serious debt. I was far from happy.
Then I can distinctly recall one morning thinking to myself, “I am not going to put up with feeling depressed anymore”. In that instant of choice my depression lifted.
The reason why I’ve added a caveat “by and large” to my statement above is because whilst I believe it’s a choice to be happy I don’t believe that everyone is in a position to make that choice. Some people (and someone I’m very close to) suffer from clinical depression which is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. Do these folks have the luxury of a choice in this matter?
Finally the post on 6doi.net has some excellent quotes and I’m going to take the liberty of reproducing them here;
Happiness is a way station between too little and too much.
Channing Pollock (1880 – 1946)
Happiness is a present attitude… not a future condition.
Hugh Prather
Happiness is the only good.
The time to be happy is now.
The place to be happy is here.
The way to be happy is to make others so.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833 – 1899)
All these seem to be saying to me that happiness is Now!
Here’s something I learnt today:
That 1lb of body fat contains about 4100 calories.
Here’s something else:
In one hour of aerobic exercise I can expect to burn about 300 calories.
So to burn off 1lb of fat I’ve got to exercise for 13 hours and 40 minutes.
Wow! That’s a lot of exercise!
This is a time of upheaval in my life with my permanent job coming to an end at the end of May and I’m in the process of reviewing all areas of my life. In GTD terms I’m doing a full review at 50,000 feet.
One of the areas I’ve really let slip over the years, if I ever had a grip on it at all, is my overall fitness level and in particular my weight. Some time ago quality pair of scales, the sort that tell you your fat and water percentages; but when I got on them yesterday I realized it was about 12 months since I last weighed myself. No need to tell you that I had put on weight!
So my current weight is 197lbs and my ideal (target) weight for a man my height is 173lbs. That’s 24lbs I’ve got to loose. Ouch! In fact I’m only 0.8 Body Mass Index (BMI) points away from being obese (double ouch).
OK, this is getting depressing. Let’s move on.
This goal is intended to contribute to the overall goal of improving my fitness and loosing those 24lbs. Note that I’m not defining the weight loss goal here as I have to do some more work defining that one. This goal is to start me back to gaining some sort of fitness as well as making a small contribution to losing weight.
The goal is to walk for 20 minutes, unencumbered, 3 days a week for a month.
This may not seem like a very arduous goal to achieve; but in the past I’ve set goals like this that were doomed to failure from the off because they were over ambitious. For example; walk for an hour 3 times a week. An hour for me is a long time to fit in around all my work and personal commitments and it was very rare for me to actually get away from my desk for an hour.
On the other hand 20 minutes is just 10 minutes outbound and then home again. This I’m sure I can do and part of the idea of doing this for a month is to establish the walking goal as a habit. The “unencumbered” bit is to stop me from hanging my camera and / or binoculars round my neck which are guaranteed to slow me down. This is walking for exercise sake and nothing else.
The intention is that if I can achieve this for a month then I increase the time to 30 minutes for a month, then 40 minutes and so on; but let’s get this month over with first.
So I have tomorrow marked as the first day and the end date is 7th May.
Here goes….
That I have a choice.
Judi Sohn on the Web Worker Daily blog posted a great article about how to be Productively Unproductive Online. Without Guilt.. I’m not sure I agree with all of the points about being unproductive being ‘OK’; but it was the guilt thing that was an apt reminder for me.
We all have a choice in how we spend our time, be it productively or unproductively. If we recognize that the choice is ours and take responsibility for having made that choice then there is no guilt. It simply cannot exist in an environment where we take responsibility for our choices.
Can you get away with doing less??
Leo Babauta of Zen Habits has written a guest posting for Scott H Young about the benefits of doing less to be more productive.
At first this looks like a vain promise of ‘More For Less’; but the article reads well and seems to make sense. Until, that is, I came upon this statement:
Cut back on the number of goals and tasks you have on your plate, so that you can focus on the most important ones.
I think that the vast majority of us are not in the position where we can arbitrarily decide we’re not going to do a whole rake of stuff. The company I work for mandates what needs to be done though the year and I don’t think I’d get a very good merit review if I decided I wasn’t going to do some of it.
If, on the other hand, you work for yourself or in a position where you make the rules then I would agree that if you can cut out some stuff and focus more then the quality of the finished product will probably be higher and the satisfaction and rewards greater.
One of my major stressors is the gap between who or what I think I am and how I then behave.
For example I think I’m a good enough parent; but then have occasion to yell at my daughter then I get stressed. Or if I think I’m a caring husband and then have an argument with my wife I get stressed.
So I have to realize that I can be the one thing (good parent, caring husband) and still do the other thing.
I must admit that I first got hold of Mark Forster‘s book last September (2006) and only finished reading it just before Easter this year. This has less to do with the content of the book and more to do with the turmoil that was going on in my own life at the time. “Maybe if I’d read the book straight off there’d have been less turmoil?”, well that’s a possibility. The reason I mention this is because I can recall little about the first 50% of the book that I read piecemeal; but the rest is very fresh in my mind. Anyway, here goes the review.
The main thrust of Mark’s book seems to be concerned with handling the constant flow of incoming tasks that bombard us daily from email, telephone calls, colleagues, family and friends. How do we manage all these new pressures on our time? Mark’s premise is that anything that arrives today is to be done tomorrow (unless you’re working in an industry that requires an immediate response). This recognizes and respects that a day is a finite resource and that you can’t do more in a day than you have the time and resources to do. So anything new is for tomorrow.
So far I don’t think this is particularly radical as it appears to be what anyone doing GTD would be doing; anything new goes into an In-box unless it can be done in under 2 minutes. However where I feel Mark’s book adds value to GTD is with the suggestion of using a Closed List. Whereas GTD maintains a number of open ended action lists Mark suggests that these are counter productive because they are continually being added to; there’s never a chance of finishing a list and this can be demotivating. As you can only do a set amount in a day Mark suggests making a daily Closed List of the things that you are going to do that day. A heavy line is drawn under that list and (within reason) nothing is added above the line.
For me this is a very useful exercise. It means that every evening I have to review all the things I want to get done in the near future and make a conscious decision about which ones I’m going to do tomorrow. Then I start tomorrow knowing that I’ve a fixed amount to get through and not an open ended list of stuff. It gives me a great sense of achievement to complete my daily Closed List.
Finally I promise I will go back to Mark’s book and re-read it straight through to make sure I haven’t missed anything from the first half.
I award this book three stars: * * *
There’s been a fair bit of comment online recently about the Fianna Fail posters of our esteemed Taoiseach Bertie Ahern.
Personally I was furious about the posters! I mean they are so obviously falsified; do they think the electorate is so thick that they’d fall for such amateur photo editing?
Come on guys this is Ireland in the 21st Century. You simply can’t pull the wool over the voter’s eyes and expect to get away with it anymore. Will you ever cop on to the fact that your electorate is now a sophisticated and savvy group that know when it’s being sold short.
We’ll have to wait a few more weeks to see if the election prospectus is also a patched together bunch of falsehoods.
Finally there is a lighter side to this story over on The Snackbox Diaries.
Here I am, back from a week off work. The week away was great; but the return to the grind is less so.
I don’t imagine I’m the only person who suffers from the back-to-work blues; but my stress levels are off the scale today. It’s a bit like walking along enjoying the sunshine when BAM! You walk into a lamp post. Ouch!!
What is causing all this stress? Stress originated in the ‘flight or fight’ response system; we get stressed when we’re getting ready to either run away from a situation (flight), or to face it head on (fight). This was great when the situation was a wild animal; but these days is this an appropriate response to daily domestic or work situations? I don’t think so. OK, I agree that some stress is a useful thing; but often I get stressed over things that are inappropriate, or my stress level lasts longer than is appropriate.
If you do a search for stress related stuff you’ll find masses of it on the net. Trying to read all that would really get me stressed out. However there’s a few pointers that I’ve gleaned from an initial scan of some of the material:
So this is one area of personal discovery for me; find out what causes me stress and learn how not to get stressed out. I’ll report back how I get on.