The local arts council holds "progressive" dinners, where you start in one location for appetizers, move to another location for the main course, etc. They've just announced one where attendees will walk to five of the showcase loft spaces in architecturally significant older buildings in downtown Durham. It is prosaically yet functionally titled "Downtown Durham Loft Progressive Dinner."
They also announced the third or fourth year of a progressive dinner to showcase the music and architecture of three historic downtown churches. It is titled "2018 Organ Crawl."
Does that sound...odd and...unmusical...to anyone else? Or maybe I have a tin ear...
I've tried starting a side business before, but it kind of sputtered and I took it as proof that this was not something for me. It confirmed an acquaintance's belief that there are "employee mindsets" and "entrepreneur mindsets" and you're
either one or the other.
What is different this time is my coach's approach: no master plan, no blueprint for "how to do it," no pumping up the passions. Instead, it's about trusting my creative
prompts and going where I feel pulled (not pushed) to go.
So my homework is to make five pots about becoming a time management coach. We don't know what those pots will look like. We don't know if "time management coach" is the destination. We know that this is where we will start and that the doing will generate new ideas.
Some ideas floating in my head at the moment about the kinds of pots I want to make:
Ed Emberley's instruction to his kids: "Think up something you can make and sell it." (via Austin Kleon)
LinkedIn offers a way for you to basically start blogging within its ecosystem. Maybe write two 600 or 800 word posts on a new way to think about time and task management. What would 3 Principles-based or an inside-out understanding of time management look like?
Maybe draft a short ebook or PDF as a giveaway outlining my ideas. Not "laws" or "things to do" or "lifehacks" but understanding how you work in the world and how that informs your results in time and task management.
100 years ago today, the very last Carolina parakeet passed away in Cincinnati Zoo. The reasons for its extinction are complex and somewhat mysterious, though evidence points to human activity playing a significant role.
The following image of the Carolina Parakeet is from the Public Domain Review's online store for fine art prints. The image appears in Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina (1731).
There are many health and fitness blogs and sites out there, but I enjoy most the blog of a serious dabbler named Michael Allen Smith who blogs at Critical MAS.
MAS has years and years of exercise, health, food, and fitness posts, among other topics (though his beloved hot beverage requires its own site). It was from MAS that I learned about the Potato Hack. His Best-Of page curates those years of posts into a more digestible format.
His post on his personal "fat loss cheatsheet" is a great example of what he does best: condense his self-experimentations and learnings into a highly readable format.
MAS makes the point on his blog -- often -- that he is not prescribing or recommending anything. He is only describing what practices work or don't work for him. It's up to the reader to find their own recipe for success.
Still, it can be fun to measure myself against someone else's yardstick. So, let's run down his list and see how I measure up. The strategies are from most important to least important.
Defining the WHY. I have not done that. The main reasons have been health (reduce hypertension) and ego. Those reasons may be enough to get me started, but may not be enough to keep me going through that long middle period.
Create a story. What story, supported by my WHY, will keep me from breaking down in front of the snack machine at 4pm? By not having that story, I risk relapsing and gaining the weight back. What will I do the day after I hit my target weight?
Get good sleep. I have lousy sleep habits. I could cite many reasons but they are excuses. One time I did a current reality tree exercise on the various difficulties I thought I was facing in my life; the root cause of all of them was not going to bed early enough for a good night's sleep.
Stop snacking. This is true for me also and is the heart of the No S Diet, which is one of my mainstay methods. Once I start snacking, I do not stop.
Remove trigger foods. We buy those only for special occasions; by and large, the house is pretty clean.
Reduce daily eating window. I will sometimes skip breakfast and start eating at 1 or 2 pm, stopping before 8pm. But I've not kept the data to determine the optimal length of my own eating window.
No liquid calories. I'm pretty good about this, though I do like a little sugar in my coffee. I will have cider or wine two or three evenings a week; Brad Pilon says the body will, overnight, burn through the alcohol first before burning the fat. One of Brad's sayings is that it's not weight loss that's a problem as much as weight gain.
Eat higher volume food that is lower in calories. This is a big idea I've gotten from MAS, though I've not adopted his Peasant Diet.
Increase protein. Another idea I've adopted; I now keep hard-boiled eggs and nonfat Greek yogurt in the fridge at work for appetite suppression. If I snack, I snack on protein.
Cook more at home. We do that, thanks to Liz's wizardry.
Baseline exercise. I do kettlebell routines 2-3 times a week (probably not for long enough), with some walking (not enough), some yoga and stretching (not enough).
Intermittent fasting. Skipping the morning or evening meal is usually good enough for me; fasting for 22-24 hours once a week is doable, though Pilon recommends two 24-hour fasting periods in a week if you're interested in fat loss.
Update: MAS added a new #4 to his list, an obvious one in retrospect: Measure your weight. He uses a tape measure, I use scales.
Problem: On my iMac, I'd type search keywords into the Chrome browser's address bar. Google is my default search engine. After the search results displayed on the Google page, the tab would refresh and load the search into Yahoo.
Diagnosis: Browser malware installed somewhere in Chrome, likely a new extension. Not a virus, but annoying behavior nonetheless.
Solution:Resetting Chrome to its factory default settings, which also disables all extensions. Confirmed that searches worked as expected after the reset, which confirmed the bad extension hypothesis.
Turned on each extension one at a time and ran a search to determine which one forced the search to Yahoo.
The culprit: The Facebook Video Downloader extension, also called Social Video Downloader on the Chrome extensions site. Deleted this extension and searches have worked fine since.
Reference
Reputable products: A few products were recommended for detecting or removing malware or other issues. I did not install Malwarebytes nor Combo Cleaner; they look reputable but I don't know -- I'd want to find recent reviews of them. I installed Etrecheck to run a scan of my system and it found only minor issues, nothing related to this problem. Etrecheck can repair some damage, but its main value is in providing a report on your Mac's setup you can use to paste into a support message.
As my first coach told us, you can have anything you want as long as you're willing to pay the price.
So whether it's saving money to pay off debt or dieting and working out hard to get a six-pack, if you want to put in the work, and persist to the finish line, you'll get where you're going.
But he also said the goal is never about the goal, it's about who you become on your way to achieving the goal.
When he asked me what my goal was, I said, "To get my master's degree in information science."
"No, Mike, that's not the goal, that's a milestone," he said. "The goal is who are you going to be, what are you going to be doing, the day after you get your degree?"
It was a question that brought me up short and that I now deploy on myself whenever I remember to do so.
HIs analogy was of a golfer aiming to sink a putt. The golfer does not aim for the hole -- instead, she aims for just beyond the hole. By aiming for that invisible point, she sinks the putt.
Likewise, my music teacher tells beginning guitar students there are eight strings on the guitar: one invisible string above the six you can see, and one below. So when you strum, you strum all eight strings. That way, you guarantee that the pick has enough speed and momentum to make a pleasing sound from the middle six strings.
Amid the many tiny goals and objectives I have these days -- losing weight, exercising more, starting a side business -- I will forget and then remember my coach's lesson. Particularly the "what will you be doing the day after?" question: after losing all that weight, will I sit down with a cheeseburger and basket of tater tots? Why not start thinking about that now rather than the day after?
I need to shift my gaze from the goal to the life every now and then to make sure I'm going where I want to go.
Cinderella (1965). The color version of the Rodgers & Hammerstein piece, with Lesley Ann Warren. Liz remembered seeing this as a girl and adored seeing it again. It was my first time watching this entertaining, rather darling miniature. I was struck by how it could have been titled "Cinderella and the Prince" since as much time was spent on him and his predicament as was spent on her. Stuart Damon really looked like a handsome prince and was a great actor and singer on top of that; I loved his comic asides at the dance. My friend Scott says the black-and-white 1957 version with Julie Andrews is the superior production. Amazon Prime.
The Crown S2 (2017). We didn't enjoy this series as much as the first, but there is something about this high-class soap opera that is hard for us to resist. Claire Foy's natural warmth resists the cooler, more detached monarch and matriarch that Elizabeth must have been by this time in real life: when Charles returns home from his wretched school, he is greeted and embraced by the staff, but not his mother, who watches concernedly but does not comfort. Spare us the sulking and tantrums from Margaret and Philip. The two best episodes dealt with Lord Altrincham's personal criticism of Elizabeth and the twin story of Philip and Charles' schooling at the cold and remote Gordonstoun school. Netflix.
The Detectorists S2 (2015). Oh my GOD, what a dear, lovely, wonderful show. No farcical situations, no tight one-liners, just a slow-paced, gentle comedy of gentle characters trying to make their way in this world. This is a TV world I want to live in. Beautiful, lingering shots of English countryside that MacKenzie Crook and Toby Jones' characters never see because they're heads-down, sweeping the ground with their metal detectors, looking for buried gold -- but whatever would they do with it if they found it? The Christmas special answers that question in a touching and clever way. The third and final series aired in 2017 and I cannot wait to see it. Netflix.
The Good Place S1 (2016). I'd heard good things about this sitcom but was not prepared for its snap and cleverness. And so plotty! Most sitcoms run their characters through their standard paces and expected farces. But this show's "what-if?" creates a world with rules, then breaks those rules, then sees how the characters recover from those broken rules. Although I could feel that the writers' room had honed every beat to a machined polish, I could not wait to see how they would wrongfoot me yet again. Because we don't watch network TV, we're waiting for the second season to show up on the usual streaming services so -- avoid spoilers! (But I did read they were picked up for a third season - yay!) Fantastically sharp comic acting from everyone and kudos for only doing 13 episodes. Netflix.
The Big Bang Theory S10 (2017). Apart from the ongoing genius of Jim Parsons is there another reason to watch this show? It's pleasant to have on during supper, but once viewed, forever forgotten. There are now so many characters that Melissa Rauch was basically sidelined with the rather standard new-mommy storyline. Hats off to Kaley Cuoco for making the most of a character who now exists mainly for reaction shots. Netflix DVD.
I became less invested in milestones and also those lovely hallucinations we have, when our kids are going to become astrophysicists. I also decided that my job is not to try to make the world safe. I think I thought you just create a beautiful, Instagram-y bubble for your kid, and then that’s parenting. And then I realized that I was going to be the worst thing that happened to him if it went badly. I couldn’t live with that. I decided that my new parenting philosophy is that I can’t protect him from the pain of the world, but I can show him that there is truth and beauty in the midst of it. And if I can make him that person, then I have won as a parent.
We attended Kate Bowler's reading at the Regulator Bookshop for her new memoir, Everything Happens For A Reason (And Other Lies I've Loved). She was smart, funny, down-to-earth, and probably the best pal one could imagine having. Her Fresh Air interview is worth a listen.
In 2015, she was unexpectedly diagnosed with Stage IV cancer at age 35. In her viral New York Timesop-ed, she writes about the irony of being an expert in health, wealth and happiness while being ill. Her subsequent memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason (and other lies I’ve loved) (Random House, 2018), tells the story of her struggle to understand the personal and intellectual dimensions of the American belief that all tragedies are tests of character.
If you search this blog, you'll find UK time management coach and author Mark Forster's name pop up quite a bit. I've been a student, devotee, and practitioner of most every to-do list or task management book, app, or program going. Of course, not much got done as I kept changing systems but that is beside the point. It's my intellectual hobby and I enjoy it.
(Also -- maybe my work is so boring and unimportant that I need new methods to keep myself interested? Discuss.)
But once I found Mark's work, my desire to explore or try other systems -- even other ways of thinking about time management -- faded. His ideas on many issues related to the field are so deep, simple, and profound that I have basically stopped my search for other methods and other teachers.
Last year, Mark challenged his forum denizens to stick to a single system for a specific time period. For the time period, he chose events off the liturgical calendar. Thus, we had Lenten and Eastertide challenges. So in addition to learning a little more about these events, we also learned the ins and outs of our chosen systems by sticking with them for 40 or so days and reporting back on our results.
For this year's Lenten Challenge (Feb 14-Mar 29), I'll use Mark's most recent system, FFVP, at my workplace. At home, where things are more relaxed and I don't typically face deadline urgencies, I keep a long list of items in a Moleskine cahiers and use one of Mark's "no-list" methods.
[In looking at last year's posts on Mark's forum, I saw that in 2017 I also gave up podcast-listening for Lent! Sounds like a good idea. I'll start tomorrow. Thank you, past-Mike!]
Brad Pilon writes about the goal some men have of being "shredded": getting their body fat to such a low percentage that you can see their six-pack abs.
Pilon advises remaining aware of how pleasant or not the journey is to your destination. He is not saying, "Don't get ripped." Sure, by all means, if that's what you want to do, go for it. But enjoy it. Don't forget all the other things that go into making a good life.
As Pilon concludes:
You absolutely can get ultra-shredded, but please be aware of the time, effort, and energy it will take, and always remember that the results are not, and never will be permanent...
With whom you eat will always be more important than what was eaten.
