Mind the Beginner

Every once in a while you find a piece of software that helps you to make you plugged life a bit easier. Some people look for these things every day and are constantly updating and striving for the perfect setup. I don’t belong to that group, for me it’s about function and as long as it works and the competitors aren’t to far ahead I’ll keep using it. Although I’m constantly on the lookout for better quality, I don’t like to forget about practicality, it’s not practical to update every week or to change the software you’re using.

So, appart from the usual programs on any computer (the OS and some Office suite) what am I using to make life easier?

• First off there’s Evernote: A program that can be used online, on a pc and on a smartphone. What does it do? It allows me to make notes whenever I have a computer nearby or (and this is why I like it) I have my smartphone on me. A written note, a spoken note, a quick snapshot, upload it and you can reach that notefrom anywhere. It works both ways of course and it’s all synced. My main use is to take photos of books I come across and see if I can find then cheaper somewhere else. This app has saved me a lot of money

• Second app is Tweetdeck: It’s my main line into the online world. Real time information and a simple way to keep track of what people of interest to me are doing. I’ve already written about this app before so I’ll keep it short, it let’s me follow more peoplethan I could with just the twitter homepage.

• Third app is Rescuetime: A program that tracks everything I’m doing on my laptop (I only own a laptop by the way). It tells me how many hours I’ve been blogging this week, time spent reading mail and time spent in powerpoint or word. You can specify everything, make groups of things to track and at the end of every week you get a nice report stating what you have been up to. To me it’s a great help to see where my time is going.

• Fourth app is Keepass: If you’re a bit like me you’ll have dozens of places online where you need a login name and password. It’s almost impossible to keep up with them all at all times and because I don’t want to use a single password and username for everything I store them all in Keepass and protect them with one single master password. It’s not only a storage for my passwords, it also generates them. Do keep a backup of your password file somewhere other than on your computer though. It’s a lot of work to get new passwords for everything if something  ever went wrong.

• Fifth and final app is Gnucash: A nice little program that helps me keep track of my assets. I constantly know where my money is going and how much I have left. It has al the features I need and much more that I don’t need and it’s easy to use. What more could you want.

• Okay, one bonus app: Windows mobile stopwatch The simplest countdown timer I could find for my smartphone. I use it every single day. It’s my countdown timer for zazen meditation.

You might have thought that I use all kinds if great programs but I like to keep things simple. Winamp for music, Google Chrome for browsing, Google mail/reader/calender/iGoogle and it’s all working from an old PB Easynote R1801. No fancy stuff here, but it works and that’s fine with me.

As I was walking down the street today I had a thought about something, I dug my smartphone from my pocket and started to look something up. Only a few seconds later a bicycle almost ran me over. “Look in front of you, in stead of at that thing!.” I followed quickly with “This is a pedestrian area!”… Okay, a fast response  and he didn’t counter it. I doubt if he realized he had a point there. 

The sun was shining, the fragrance of spring in the air… and I was concentrated on my smartphone. I quickly tucked it back in my pocket and started to look around. Earphones everywhere, a laptop set on a table outside a cafe, suits walking by while phoning. Everyone was more active in their own little plugged world than what was actually going on. I wonder if people actually noticed the nice weather and feint smell of flowers in the air. 

When getting home I went through the usual motions of flicking on the TV and my laptop because I had a great idea for a post, this post. Hang on a second, I’m writing about the level of “pluggedness” in modern society while I’m no better myself. How’s that for a realization during blogging. I wonder, what would it be like if I shut down all electricity at home for a few days. I wouldn’t be able to blog (the horror), no music except my acoustic guitar, which -come to think of it- I haven’t touched in months, no TV (well, that’s not a loss I guess). I would be deprived of every manner of influence from the media on my life. This sounds interesting…    ..but is life possible in the western world without internet, a computer, tv and a phone? I could live without TV easily, without a phone would be harder but doable. Without a computer with internet access? I don’t know if that’s for me just yet. Even if I were to go vagabonding I would bring along a simple laptop just to stay in touch. On the other side of the coin, I spend hours a day staring at a computer screen, blogging, reading, working. No computer would mean hours a day to spend differently. 

How do they survive in places without all those electronics? How do they spend their days? if they are not working they are enjoying each others company, talking, singing, making music. They spend time outdoor, walking, listening, watching. 

The pro’s of plugged life:

• Huge social network
• Always up to date on the latest scoop/news
• Vast amounts of information at the push of a button

The con’s of plugged life:

• Less social time in real life
• Information overload
• Feelings of failure because of all the “you should be like him/her to be successful” messages in the media

The pro’s of unplugged life:

• More here and now instead of there on that screen/in that earphone
• The addiction to social media will get less
• Happier with yourself (less negativity from the media)
• you start to see what really matters

The con’s of unplugged life:

• You might not be up to date (I like living under a rock from time to time)
• It’s social suicide not to have the latest gizmo (or so I’ve heard)
• You might seem “strange” to other people

This all being said, from time to time I think I’ll unplug for a few days and enjoy the real life right here. My life is being dominated with plugged life and I realized it just from almost getting run over by a bicycle. I’ve survived just fine for most of my life without a smartphone (online 24/7), so why not do it again. I don’t need it. 

How plugged are you?

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Information is all around us, we get bombarded with it every single waking minute. And if this passive information (TV, radio) isn’t enough we constantly look for new information. After all you – my appreciated reader – are reading this blog after all. You sought it out and decided to read this post in order to find something you didn’t know or to reaffirm what you already knew.

Even the least (self) educated person in the western world today knows more than prehistoric man. But the speed of this information is getting the better of us. Take twitter for example, a great resource for information but if you follow enough people it’s hard to get the information you’re looking for. To help with that there are some great apps to handle twitter. My personal favorite is Tweetdeck in this matter. 

There are more “hacks” out there to help with the information overload. Lifehacker writes about those things daily. However, there are some skills that are not digital, they are true skills you will want to develop in order to get on top of things. I distinguish three groups of these:

1. Information intake
2. Information processing
3. Information storage and recollection

Information intake is actually the most important of them all. We need a way to effectively get the information we want. Seeing the speed at which information is presented we need a fast way of doing this. How do we take in most of our information?  Either through our ears or our eyes. Speeding up listening isn’t going to get you far, the big gain in intake is to be had in the eyes. Google reader and tweetdeck both present information for us to read, the only way to get through this information faster is to read faster. Yes, the infamous skill of “speedreading” is what I’m talking about. The skill to read 1000 words a minute or more. (The average speed is 200-250 words per minute) Although some claim it’s a myth, with some training you can raise your reading speed towards the 1000 words per minute without loosing comprehension. Just think about it, reading blogposts in half of the time or faster. That certainly would save you some time each day. 

Information processing  to me is what we do with our information, it’s what we do immediately after getting the information through reading or perhaps listening (think about college). We need an effective way to handle things. Take notes perhaps. But how do we take effective notes? Again, there is one system that seems to keep popping up out there and it’s called “mindmapping”. Although this system has it’s advantages for me it just didn’t cut it. I’m actually very bad at taking notes on just about anything. That being said, If I want to make notes I do it all in a simple small moleskine notebook. There are some attributes of mindmapping that did help me though. The main thing being images. I have that little notebook within reach at all times and jot down anything I might want to recall later. It’s full of one-liners from all the blogs I follow and quotes from books or conversations. While reading about mindmapping it got clear to me that images stay in your mind much better than words. We think in images so why not take notes in images right? This brings us to our third skill.

Information storage and recollection to me is being able to remember what you read. Even if that was a few weeks or months ago. How do we do that? It’s very simple but you need to practice it a lot: use images to remember. Exaggerate anything and everything and make it ridicules. If I was talking about an elephant I saw in the zoo, that wouldn’t be something you could remember. But just imagine a purple elephant on a unicycle holding a baseball bat with it’s trunk getting ready to take a swing at the giant pumpkin you’re throwing at it. Our memory works with images and remembers anything out of the ordinary we throw at it. 

So what is in this for the beginner? Think about all the information you are taking in every day and rethink how you deal with it all. Can you optimize the process? How do you handle all the information? Please tell me all about it.

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People have the great possibility of thought, thought about the past and the future and in this they can predict outcomes of certain undertakings. But thinking about the future has a great downside to it. We overthink, and panic.

Soon after the first thoughts on beginning a new business or planning a world trip the “but what if” ’s make their appearance on centre stage in our mind. Our mind is capable of churning out  thoughts at an astounding rate and there are always a few negative thoughts in there. The longer we think about something the more chance there is for negative thoughts to get the better of us. 

Eventually we end up with a very sorry state of mind I would like to call paralysis by negativity. We get completely consumed with finding the negative side to anything that is said, any ideas that come up and most of all any dreams we have. Once in this cycle it’s very hard to stop it. Once this paralysis by negativity truly sets in we don’t see a bright future anymore, we don’t believe in change and we certainly don’t feel great about ourselves or our lives. 

There are fine lines between states of mind. Unrealistic fantasizing, dreaming and life goals, realism and life goals, pessimism and abandoning goals and eventually paralysis. So, how about you and your dreams? Do you really see yourself living your dreams? Or is your mind pulling you down into pessimism about life and trying to get you to forget about it all because you can’t live your dream. 

Creativity is letting yourself make mistakes, art (and living) is knowing which ones to keep.

I dare you, make a mistake, learn from it and live. Stop the downward spiral of negativity and get out there. Visualize your dreams and get to work on them. Now, without thinking, turn off your pc (yes it’s scary, I know) and do something right now to set another step in the direction of your dreams.

Yes you can!

As part of probloggers 31 days to a better blog I’m giving the “list post” a go. Ten ways to get the all rolling or in other words, how to beat procrastination and start doing what you want to do. Some of these tips are in themselves great for procrastinating though as I’ll comment in the tips.

• Look at what you are doing right now (reading this blog most likely) Is this what you want to be doing? Think about what you should be doing right now, and not only think it, now go do it.

• Seeing as most of us have some sort of Internet addiction, disconnect your Internet and see how much time you can save. Tis means however that you can’t read any more blogs. It might seem a bit strange for a blogger to advise you to stop reading but it’s exactly what I should do if I were honest about this. is reading a blog going to get you where you want to be? It might contain a few pointers yes, but in the end it all comes down to yourself.

• Install a program like “Rescuetime” to keep track of the time you spend on your pc. If you’re anything like me you’ll be spending the better half o each day looking at the screen. It’s only logical that keeping track of your computer-time is the best way to find those time drainers and kick the habit.

• A tip I gladly borrow from “Getting things done” but that works brilliantly. Is there a small task you keep pushing forward but that can be done within two minutes? Perhaps answer a certain mail, place a quick phone call or pay a bill. If you can do something in two minutes or less, do it immediately.

• A less logical way to help overcome procrastination and start fresh is clean up. Declutter your workspace, get rid of anything that is not essential to the task at hand. This in itself can be procrastination though. Any time I don’t feel like doing something I’ll start cleaning. The closer a deadline gets, the cleaner my home is. If you keep things clean however, cleaning up won’t take more than a few minutes (perhaps even just two?) so it defeats itself as a means of procrastinating.

• Organize your deadlines and tasks. Only a clear system to know when you should do what can do this for you. Get a whiteboard on your door, make constant use of a notebook or even a PDA. Just make sure you always know when your next deadline is and be realistic about them. Concerning deadlines I recommend reading about “Parkinson’s law” and rethinking your deadlines.

• Set goals or as I’ve described them before, get your  own mountains. Be sure that they are yours though. If you don’t know where you are going any road will get you there, but you’ll never know when you’ve arrived. Set small goals for the day, some for the week, a few monthly goals. Always have something you’re heading towards. If you don’t have goals you have a serious problem, your life won’t wait for you to set your goals, every day you don’t spend working on a goal is a day lost. Watch out for procrastination here, making goal lists ust for the sake of it isn’t true goal setting.

• Minimalize everything. As Leo talks about in his brilliant little book “the power of less” it’s all about limiting yourself to the essentials. Think about it for a second, what are the things in your life that really matter? How many things in your head are there because others put them there? 

• Be ruthlessly honest about yourself and your intentions. This will certainly help clear your head and your actions. Why do you do what you do? Why do you put things off or react a certain way? More on ruthless honesty can be found in the books of Peter Ralston, especially his book Ancient wisdom, new spirit. Although this book is out of print, if you can get it I highly recommend it!

• The biggest tip of them all: Slow down and take small steps. We’ve all heard about “even the longest journey begins with the first step” but almost no-one actually takes this to heart. We all want our mountaintop but don’t want to hear there is no fast way to get there. Either we are dishonest and lie to ourselves that there is a surefire way to get there instantly (why do you think those self-help books are so popular?) or we are honest and acknowledge that getting to the top will take a lot of steps, one after the other. 

Don’t loose your dreams, but be honest about them an honest about yourself. In the end, no-one can get you up that mountain, you’ll have to walk up there yourself. All other people can do is point the way. You’re responsible for your own life.

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