Mind matters

I forgot to post an update on tuesday! It was not until after I had shut down my computer last night that I remembered what it was that was nagging my mind. But here’s the update now

Getting up at 7 am
I got up at 7 again. Pweh. I fell asleep around 02.30 pm, so I was really tired the whole day. But the extra energy I seem to get somehow from getting up that early balanced out most of the tiredness, so I could actually focus on a whole day of lectures and presentations! I’m attending a coaching course that I’m enrolled on by the Swedish unemployment service.

Eating breakfast at 8 am and lunch between 11 am – 1 pm
Breakfast got eaten at 8 am. And lunch att 11.30 am. This worked better today! Didn’t have much cravings for sweets, feels weird

Reading and answering e-mails for a maximum of 30 min per day
I think I read my e-mails for 20 minutes yesterday. Didn’t feel like replying to a lot of them, so I let them ferment in my inbox for a while more. The 20 minutes were spread over the day, most of it reading the e-mails to make sure everything important got replied to. This habit will be effective when I use 30 consecutive minutes to read and reply.

Tonight I got really bored watching TV. I watched Ghost Hunters and Family Guy for a couple of hours. I had much energy left after doing nothing more than sitting around, so I decided to finally update my CV.

It took me several hours! But now I’m finally happy with it! The former attempts have had a terrible layout to them, and tonight I managed to create one that I personally really like. As a guiding principle I’ve had that I must myself like my CV or else I have a hard time using it to sell myself to a potential employer.

Take a look at it. Unfortunately it’s in Swedish, but I appreciate all the feedback I can get!

File: mika-perala-cv.pdf

Technorati Tags: CV, Curriculum vitae

I’ll be writing one post each day for these first trials. For the next trials I might be satisfied with writing only one post that I update each time I wish to share how it goes.

Getting up at 7 am
I got up at 7 am. Wuhuu, and yawn! I fell asleep around 3.30 am, so the whole day I’ve been kinda groggy. But I expected that, it takes me abour 3-4 days to start adjusting to a new wake up time. Even though I felt groggy, I felt more energetic and got more things done during the day. And as a bonus I’ve managed to take a 35 min long walk directly after waking up!

Eating breakfast at 8 am and lunch between 11 am – 1 pm
I ate breakfast at 8 am and lunch at 1 pm. I expect this trial to help me sustain my energy level througout the day and also dampen my sweet tooth. Eating regularly does wonders for my whole digestive system, which I’ve discovered from previous trials. Today I’ve had a tremendeous craving for sweets, but I’ve withstood it, and hopefully it will dissipate quickly! Oh, I eat dinner too in the evenings, but I decided to not set a regular time for it since I got many activities in the evenings and am not always sure when the best time for eating will be.

Reading and answering e-mails for a maximum of 30 min per day
I’ve read and replied to my emails for about 40 min today, and that’s because I forgot that I changed my original goal of 45 min to 30 min! Last time I tried this I was really effective once I did read my emails, because I knew I didn’t have alot time to do it. It was also liberating not to read my emails all the time during a day!

And so ends the first day!

Steve Pavlina writes about 30 Days to Success which is a concept Steve borrowed from the shareware industry where you can download a trial and try it for 30 days. The concept is to try something out so you can, with your own experience, decide wether or not it is something you wish to keep in your life.

This can also be used to implement new strategies and behaviours and other stuff in your own life. By trying it out you get an inside perspective, you get experience, and you can use that to better guide your decision if it is something you wish to implement in your life. Also, when you wish to alter life long habits, the first weeks are the hardest. By trying it out for 30 days, you’ll be building up inertia that will make it easier for you to keep going if you decide it is something that you want.

There are some things I wish to change in my life, and here are the things I will be committing to for the next 30 days starting from monday 18/9 and ending on tuesday 17/10:

• Getting up at 7 am
• Eating breakfast at 8 am and lunch between 11 am – 1 pm
• Reading and answering e-mails for a maximum of 30 min per day

I’ll also be writing in my blog every day to document how this is affecting me. Wish me luck!

If this pans out, I have still more things I would like to try out. Some I nicked from Steve’s page I’ll be adding things to this list as I think of them, or if I get any good recommendations!

• Meet someone new every day. Start up a conversation with a stranger.
• Go out every evening. Go somewhere different each time, and do something fun
• Call a friend every day
• Spend 30 minutes every day to try implement Getting Things Done
• Meditate 30 minutes every morning and evening
• Giving up dairy products
• Drink a cup of tea at meals, instead of cold drinks like milk, water or soda
• Implement the idéa that the bed is for sleeping only
• Adopt the following mindset: Everyone you meet in your life — even total strangers — is already intimately connected to you. The idea that we are all separate and distinct beings is nothing but an illusion. We are all parts of a larger whole, like individual cells in a body. This is from one of Steven’s posts: Soulful Relationships.
• Train Qi Gong for minimum of 15 minutes each day.
• Pick up 3 cards, that have words or pictures on them, from a pile, and make a spontaneous speach for 1 minute that includes what they show
• Pick a subject to write a 5 minutes speach to
• For 10 minutes, relax my stomach since I tend to hold it in.
• In the morning, visualize how I wish the day to be.
• Implement a behaviour with which I will train on a friendly voice towards myself
• Do autokinetics for 15-30 min
• Listen to a photoreading lecture
• Listen to a Remote Viewing tape

Technorati Tags: Steve Pavlina, 30-day trial, Habits

If you’re like me, you are probably having difficulty remembering all your friends birthdays, and if you’re even more like me, you value the reaction of people whos birthday you remember. It’s a way for me to show them that I care by remembering days that hold importance to their lifes. But beware! Not all are happy to be reminded of the fact that they’re getting older!

For a while I solved this by creating a database and connecting it to a daily scheduler that every day went through the database and sent me an email of all the birthdays I wanted to keep track of that were upcoming the next week.

The only drawback was that it was hard to get a view of the coming birthdays, like if I wanted to view who had birthdays on a specifik week, or two weeks into the future.

Today I’ve solved it by putting all the people whos birtdays I want to track into my Outlook calendar. I’ve created reocurring day-events, with a year as the interval. I’ve also attatched an alarm to each event that goes off 2 days before the birthday, if I happen to miss it in my calendar. In the created day-event I also record what year the person was born, that way I know how old they’ll be too

Do you have any way of tracking your friends birthdays? If you do, I invite you to share it with me, so I can see if there’s even better ways of doing it!

Technorati Tags: Outlook, Birthdays

So, I’ve finally succumbed to letting in ads on my blog via Google AdSense. I sent in my application today, will probably receive information in a couple of days, and after that I’ll have to redesign things to fit in the ads.

There are quite a lot of rules about what you can and cannot do with the ads. But they all make sense, since they’re about preventing people creating bogus sites or scripts that automatically click the ads.

There’s one that I found a bit annoying though and it’s that in order to get Google AdSense, you have to agree not to click on the ads on your own pages. And since Google AdSense puts up ads for things that relate to what I write on my site, I’ll probably see a lot of ads that are of interest to me! Oh well, I’ll just have to copy and paste the link address… The pain of manual labour!

The other thing I’ve been pondering is to register a .com/.se/.net/.org address for my blog. I made a search for Mind Matters on Google and discovered that there are many organisations using that name! Blast! I wish for my blog to be easily found, which means I’ll be considering changing the name of it. Do you have any good suggestions?

I’m wishing for my blog to turn into a place for tips of how to use your mind and body and also to dwelve into the depths of modern mind and body sciences. I want the blog name to relate to that, and at the same time be used as a domain. Here are some random brainstorm spawns:

• Grey Area
• Grey Mind
• Lightbulb
• Bulb Fiction
• Neocortex matters
• Mind & Body
• Innerspace
• BoMi matters
• MiBo space

Technorati Tags: Blog, Google AdSense, Domain

Another tip to increase your productivity around your computer, or to meet your need for order, is to create a file archive. I’ve done this by creating a folder called ‘File archive’ and in that I’ve created the following folders:

A-B-C-D
E-F-G-H
I-J-K-L
M-N-O-P
Q-R-S-T
U-V-W-Y
X-Å-Ä-Ö

In these folders I’ve created subfolders, when necessary, or just placed the files according to their filenames right in the folder. The flatter the structure, the better. I try to avoid to add a third layer if possible.

Apart from the obvious advantage of easily finding my files, I also make sure that all the files I work with are collected in one place, which makes taking backup of them a piece of cake! I don’t have to worry about taking backup of everything on my computer everytime, I just backup the information I cannot re-create easily.

This tip is “stolen” from Getting Things Done, as many of my other productivity tips

Technorati Tags: Getting Things Done, File archive

Okay, I’ve been leading different types of groups for a long time now, and there is one tip that I can share that increases productivity. It’s to go through all the engagements people have taken upon themselves to do during the meeting. This way you make sure everyone understands what they have agreed to do, and nothing slips through.

As the leader of the board for the aikido section of Linköpings budoklubb, I’ve introduced this system. I do this by doing a round at the end of the meeting where each people tell what todos they’ve accumulated. During the meeting I always write down who agreed to do what, so that I can check that all todos get noted by the ones that are supposed to do them.

But only going through them is not enough I’ve discovered. I also need to maintain a list of these todos. Today I do it by entering all the agreed todos on a webpage that all the members of the board can access. It’s entirely feasible that someone else does it, like the secretary. For the aikido section I enter the information in this format:

* [name] Agreed todo (startdate)

If the todo gets done, I add (startade — enddate) and move it to a Done Items list on the webpage.

The best thing about this is that all the todos that you have agreed to do something about are collected in a single place, and you also get a history of things that you have done. Which is excellent when the time comes to write your report, be it a monthly/weekly/yearly report or any other kind of report where you wish to tell about what you and your group have been doing.

As a bonus you also get a view of how much people have taken on themselves to do and can do workload balancing if necessary, or to remind someone about their todos.