MyklK

OK, here’s something new.  If you know me, you know that I am not a big fan of driving.  For one thing, I consider myself a below average driver, so if a competent driver would volunteer to tote me around I would be overjoyed.

But since that doesn’t seem to be happening any time soon, I try to find things to keep myself awake and engage while driving.  Long drives are a different animal, but the daily commute is a, well, daily challenge.

The radio doesn’t seem as effective as I’d like, although I seem to doze less than when I just sit in silence, I am trying a car cast which is just me rambling on as I tootle off to work.

Well let’s see if this even works:

Here’s a direct link to the audio:

Kelsey Car Cast Episode 001

And here’s an alternate way to stream it while on this page:

(It’s not working, yet…)

For years I’ve been looking for easy ways to get thoughts and ideas out onto a web page.  Yeah, most people call that blogging.  Consistency is always a big hurdle for me.  This blog is a testament to that fact.

I couple months ago I found a service that would connect with Evernote and allow me to automatically post things I wrote in there.  Well it got a little flaky and it didn’t have some of the functionality I wanted.  So I decided to just get back over here and use this old site as a proving ground and slowly fix it up as I have ideas, opportunity, and inspiration.

But what do I do with those original posts?  I could just copy them over here in one lump.  Since blogs are dated (like a journal or log, hence the name), I could back date them and fit them into the time stream as they originally came out.  But that seems like cheating somehow.  Creating an alternate history.  So here’s my idea.  I will repost them with a little introduction and that way they’ll be inserted here organically and they won’t be lost (not that they’re any great treasure of wisdom, only of effort).  And I’ll be able to get into the swing of doing things the “hard” way by posting directly to the admin side of the blog.

Now if only I could get motivated to update the fonts and graphics around here…  hmm, not really my thing.

Update: So one thing to fix is the time stamps.  This had me posting an hour earlier than I did.  Silly daylight savings.  How much daylight do you have in your savings?  Let me know.

I love a good series.  Back and forth.  I didn’t grow up a basketball fan.  In fact, I was resentful when a coach sought me out and asked me to try out for a team.  “You only want me to play because I’m tall.”  I was young and foolish – being tall’s a real advantage on the court.

But in the finals of ’93 with the Suns vs. the Bulls I finally developed an appreciation for the game.  Granted, I’m a fair weather fan and only get interested towards the end of the season.  I used to complain that it seemed like all the action happened in the last 3 minutes of the game.  Why not just skip to that and just play an intense 3 minute game.  You could play two or three a day!  Much more exciting…

I then realized something.  You had to attain a certain level, you had to persevere to a certain point to be “in the hunt” for those final three minutes to matter.  When two teams qualified to battle it out for those last 3 minutes – then it finally became the game within the game.  But you had to be worthy to make it to that place.

We have to qualify, we have to do the work, we have to take the action to be able to be there for those final seconds where so much drama and so much potential for victory or defeat are put before us.  Do the small things that will get you there,  I’ll endeavor to do the same – and in the end we can leave it all on the court and be satisfied with that.

This year we lost, but you can’t say we didn’t fight hard.

It seems like one of the biggest excuses, at least in my circles, is being too busy.  Busy or not, we all have the same amount of time in our day.  We get to choose to fill it up with busy activities or to relax, or to just be a bump on a log.  But we choose busy because we think busy gets us where we want to be.  Most of us don’t know where that is.  So as I have heard said before, “I don’t know where I’m headed – but I’m making good time.”

Activity isn’t achievement.  We have to put some thought into where it is we want to be in order to have our busyness count for something.  For it to be effective in moving us in that direction.

Some of this busyness we bring on ourselves, but some of it is just a fact of life in our modern world.  I guess I’m saying you may be able to reduce it, but I am skeptical that, short of heading off to live in the woods, you won’t be able to eliminate it.

So the key will be to reduce where you can and rise above where you can’t.  Accept that you will have some measure of busyness and you still need to do something to move in the right direction.

A post a day for 5,000 days. That’s an achievement. I can’t even keep up with a weekly post. The problem is looking over his posts – they are short and sweet.  This 5,000th post was back on June 5th.  Here is a link to Seth Godin’s 5,000th post.

And here is my takeaway quote from that little post:

Showing up daily isn’t my challenge–it’s learning to live with the fact that I can’t say everything I want in a single post, that the trade-off of reaching people easily is that you can also lose people easily.

I would like to take up that challenge, because writing too much – too many words for the thought I want to convey is a problem of mine.  Pithy I’m not.  But a challenge like that brings up in me fears of not being able to succeed like few things I’m currently aware of.  More than public speaking.  And the excuses start pouring out, “Which blog would I put it on?”  I have about 8 dead blogs to choose from.  😀

Well, I put this one here.  That’s enough inspiration for now.

OK, not much to add today. It was a long one. This morning started out with a cranky review of some software. After that the rest of the day was just recovering from that.

Then after work I had some phone calls to take in the car and then a meeting with some high school buddies about some web endeavors we are trying to start up.

And after getting home around 9pm – I have some things I wanted to start in December. I’m trying to develop some plans and habits for 2012. So the month of December will be a test case. I’m starting a Bible study online. People can follow along as we go if they want through the year. So even though 2012 is a whole month away. I’m trying to set out a line in the sand to make sure that I’m well into the habit by the time the new year comes around.

What do you think? You want to get involved? Leave me a comment or find me on Facebook or somewhere and tell me you want to participate.

The house is now back to it’s currently regular occupants. It’s time to get back into the swing of things. I haven’t left myself much time to write. But it’s not about the time or the amount – it’s about the habit… the doing it.

So I’m back. Let me ask you – how do you handle a backlog? What do you do when commitments and tasks has piled up on you and there’s really more than what you can do?

Here’s what I’m trying. It’s a simple 3 step process.
1) Keep your head and stop the madness. Drop the hatchet. There is what needs to be done today, and there’s all that piled up stuff. Put the piled up stuff in a pile (or in my case, in a plastic bin). Make sure you are keeping up with the things that need to be done today. For me… today’s “day job” is going to be a thriller with 2 meetings in the morning and a continued investigation of a bug in production. I found it but my boss wants to know what it does, when it got introduced, and why wasn’t it caught in testing? To answer all these questions is taking time. Time that could be spent moving forward – but hey, I do what I’m asked to do. If I wanted to work on a CSI team, I would’ve signed up for it. But it pays the bills. Plus I have a meeting over lunch regarding a church meeting coming up this weekend. And then tonight I have a meeting to possible bring in some side business. (However I think that will fall through because I’m going to be asked to do somethings that aren’t my specialty. Just because they would pay me to drive a race car, should I? I don’t think I’d be good at it – so an offer shouldn’t always be accepted just because it’s “there”… word to the wise).

2) Make “working the backlog” one of your tasks and take it on as you can. It will get smaller and you wont break anything due today that will eventually get you back on track.

3) Be ready for explosions and handle them expeditiously. Some of the things in your back log pile will have due dates that slip past (like a birthday card being sent out? oops). Handle them the best you can… move them to the top of the pile when you work on it. And be flexible.

It works better for me than just lining everything up chronologically and being “behind” on everything for a couple of days to a couple of weeks.

Would it work for you? How do you deal with these things?

Today is my last day of work before getting some time off over Thanksgiving. I have a lot of things I need to do at home and in side projects, it makes it very tough to follow through with my “day job”. But I do want to keep my commitment to write here. So I’m simply going to put down a “Will Do” and see what happens there.

Today’s Will-Do list:

• I will write a revision of the magazine article
• I will get a typist to cover my for my sermon

Those are the only time pressing issues – I think.  Those are the urgent, the important list is waay longer.  TTFN

No, this isn’t the beginning of a series on my critical need for some kind of physical fitness routine. This is about conflicting priorities.

I have to write an article for our church’s magazine. The deadline is looming and I have to determine if I should be pumping out words here or there? This goes back to what I just posted the other day. There are times when you make a conscious choice to skip, to take a break, to be inconsistent. As long as you are consistent about your reasoning, right? Am I wrong on this? Make up your own mind.

I was sure I’ve talked about this before – – some things are just worth repeating.

One of the things I’m considering using this blog for is my “Will Do” list. Now why a WillDo and not a ToDo? Maybe you can think of it as a MustDo list. These concepts and lists have different purposes.

For example, in the time management system called “Getting Things Done” (GTD by devoted fans, and the rest of us…) the idea is to put everything on your list to get it out of your head and on to paper. Then you spend your time prioritizing and deciding whether that was hair brained, an errant dream, or a vital task that must be accomplished.

I’m not looking for something like that. That is an all encompassing tool. I would like a comprehensive system. But there is no system that works if you don’t run it. And for me, consistency is lacking so any system will fail when you don’t crank the handle.

However, I do still have things that need to be accomplished in my life. Hmm, authorizing my newly issued debit card is on the list since the gas station doesn’t believe me when I say I have the new one while I’m trying to convince them to “just use the old, expired one for now.” There’s also that little issue with one of the taxing authorities, they’re looking for about a hundred bucks and some form from 3rd quarter of 2010. And they probably won’t wait forever… Things still need to get done.

Enter the “will do” list. It is a list that contains items that must be done today for the day to be considered a success. So how would this list work?

• It would have to be a short list.  You couldn’t put everything that pops into your head on this list, there are only so many hours in a day.
• It would have to be specific.  “Work on my book” doesn’t fly,  “write 200 words” would, or “review chapter structure” would if even just a cursory glance is enough.  (Helpful tip, sometimes even just saying “open and review outline” sounds simple and an easy throw away task.  But once you’ve gone to the trouble of opening it, you might as well work on it for a little while.  It’s a great way to trick yourself out of procrastination.  Or, as I like to call it, overcoming static friction.  Inertia works both ways, staying at rest AND remaining in motion.  I know that’s hard to believe with our friend friction around, but it’s true!
• It has to be a closed list.  This means you have to predetermine what’s on there.  You have the list laid out and you say “Go!”
• It has to be reviewed.  Now there is an amazing phenomenon that just putting the list down and never reviewing it will get at least 60 – 70% of it completed – that’s been my experience at least!  Could this be the “Law of Attraction” at work?  Don’t get me started… another time.  But “testin’ and trackin'” is the only way to incremental improvement.  If you don’t review, that percentage will remain at it’s 2/3 success rate (not bad, but lots of room to improve.

It’s that last point that this blog might come in handy for.  It would be the accountability that pushes for a review.  Of course this may mean that there has to be two posts – one for the list and one for it’s review.  Is that really true?  Could I just post that the last WillDo list has been reviewed and that be enough?  I’m still thinking about this one.  How can a blog be used as an accountability partner or tool?  Have you got ideas on this?