“By their deeds you will know them. Does a man gather grapes from thorns or figs from briars?”
Matthew 7:16
What am I doing?
Memo to self: STFU. Just do.
Get as close to unmediated truth as possible. Not interpreted. Not collated. Not curated for me. This music playing. Curated. This carpet. Designed. That food. Pre-decided by bureaucrats. Not that there is anything wrong with it, except it’s all a facsimile of what someone thought would be good.
Is. Just look for what is.
There is a reason for first class seats, Skyclubs, fancy hotels to exist. It’s to entice you to do things you don’t want to do. To keep your soul quiet.
Why?
The LRS daily practice chain breaks and then the daily posting chain breaks.
Again, it’s before dawn. I had a rocky sleep night, including the dog whining to get outside at 3 am for (I guess—I didn’t check) biological imperatives. The rocky sleep, I suspect, is in part from the mid-afternoon nap on Sunday.
Today is the day to be methodical. What is my most important thing? It’s on the calendar now. What is the second most important thing? Research the email question yesterday. What is the third most important thing? Take action based on the answer discovered for the email—there are probably two. What is the fourth most important thing? Don’t know—there might not be time for them.
During the day, do not add to the project list. Keep the project list open on the right monitor.
The last day.
Sleep as usual is the trade-off item for me. I missed the cut-off time last night because I was doing most important work and was on a roll — so I kept going.
I was doing MIW late in the day because it was a busy day at work and I didn’t slot my normal 100 minutes into the front end of the day.
And (the real reason) I had a chunk of time that I used to start next week’s newsletter instead of devoting the time to MIW (the videos).
So it’s a cascading effect of a full day and poor priority handling when the opportunity came up. And all of that culminates with “late to bed” and of course that has a cascading effect on the next day.
In related (to MIW) news: housekeeping matters. I am keeping all of my files and resources in a semi-well organized folder. I am slowly creating a standard system for developing webcasts.
I read a mini biography of Hergé yesterday (author of the Tintin stories) and how he burned out from overwork, then built Hergé Studios with artists doing the time-consuming work, freeing him to conceive stories and ideas. Inspiring. I’m slowly trying to get that system assembled piecemeal around me—not successfully, so far. Meaning: I cannot count on reliable execution, even at the basic levels.
What I am doing, by trial and error, is this:
The immediate goal is “build the subscriber numbers for the email newsletter.”
Ok. Time to sit with my laptop and put in the MIW.
Early to bed, early to rise. I would love to sleep longer—I never feel completely rested. Ah well.
Friday and it’s showtime today: webcast day.
Let’s reflect on the Pentathlon. 100 min per day MIW gets things done. It also sucks up a big chunk of the day. It is two 30-minute cycles with a 10 minute break in between.
I wonder if I can set up the early to bed arrangement and get up early, let’s say 5 am. I have a workspace set up. Biology, feed the dog, some water and some coffee and I can get an hour + of quiet work before the house starts to stir.
That means early to bed.
It’s a plan worth developing.
And in other news . . .
And on the other hand . . .
It’s time to write the newsletter today. The MIW routine is getting me ahead of the curve for the videos but I have to catch up on the newsletter. And get ahead. I’m not enjoying the JIT lifestyle.
In a perfect world, Fairy Godmother style, poof!
How does “poof” happen?
I have a stand-alone Notion instance and a folder on my phone with the tools for the big project (not well-executed yet but good idea). The newsletter is part of that project. The resources and plans should go there. With a folder on my laptop for the companion files—drafts and finished product, resources used, graphics created. That is how I’m handling the webcasts.
Boom done. The five minutes a day writing process didn’t pay off with a blinding insight, just a pragmatic suggestion from the brain. Thanks you, brain.
Today is an all-target day. I’m going to hit everything. Boom.
The discipline of a “get to bed by 10 pm, lights out” deadline is useful to me. I would otherwise futz around and go lights-out later. I have a simple brain that needs simple instructions.
There is a parallel between having good taste and being good at a job such as mine, I’m starting to see. It’s not immediately obvious, because mine is a technical occupation, relying on a mental bank of decades of technical experience and constant study.
But there is a distinction between a technician and what I do (he said, modestly and humbly). 🙃 it’s the distinction between a woman who believes that buying Gucci creates style and a woman who assembles a wardrobe around items, regardless of brand, that are Good.
I am not exactly how to articulate this yet but it is part mastery (and self-awareness, for example, of knowing why an old Jaguar is beautiful and a modern Camry merely pedestrian, as if sketched by a seventh-grade boy, bored in math class). Hell, even a modern Jaguar is better than a modern Camry, though vastly inferior to its forebears. The bloodline has been diluted by successive generations of interlopers marrying into the family.
Anyway. It’s a useful exercise to self-reflect and ask self, “Self, explain to me why this is Good. Deeply good.” Grasping to find the words to explain the inexplicable is a worthwhile discipline in the same way that training for the half-marathon is worthwhile: self-discovery.
And most important, when you find Good, seize it and treasure it. Do not accept its cheaper imitation, the OK. Do not compromise. Be opinionated, unapologetically.
Vampires slink away when confronted with the brandished cross.
Yeah. Up early. Couldn’t sleep.
I will hit the targets today.
I’m going to have to get MIW in place when I can, in increments.
Now. Let’s get to real work: shedding loads. First, as soon as I get finished with these five minutes will be an email to reject a new project in order to preserve sanity.
Second, review products waiting for me to close out a long-dormant client. Grab them from the server so I can look at them at my leisure.
Some sort of mantra: kill what needs to be killed, throw away what is not immediately useful. Keep pedaling on everything else.
https://viewfromtheiowaporch.blogspot.com
She wrote, then stopped. Or maybe she started writing elsewhere. The last post is from 2014.
Maybe she forgot the password to log in, so she walked away. Maybe she thought no one was listening, sighed, and turned to mundane day-to-day life.
There is a real person there. A soul. A yearning.
Thank you for writing 25 blog posts. Maybe that’s all you needed to do for yourself—get a few thoughts out of your head and get on with life on life’s terms.
You made my day a little better, nine years after you stopped writing.
You’ve been choosing this life you have all along.
If my life is unacceptable to me, it’s my own damn fault.
If my choices have created a life that is unacceptable to me, what does that say about my choices? It says that I made my choices to be acceptable to others, at my own expense.
What does this mean for today?
What choices do I make today?
I choose, today, to build my heart’s desire. One step at a time. Either it will work or it won’t—but I want to give it the opportunity to blossom and bear fruit.
Then let everything else fill in around that.