posted by bluematrix at 08/22/08 15:01 | link | comments (3)

late again with blog this week...final project due for my class and designed a team building seminar for execs in our IT group that I facilitate tomorrow. anyways. i’ve read lots of time management techniques over the years. some, like getting a time/design daytimer and learning how to use it, made a huge difference in making me more effective at work tasks. others just regurgitated common sense. the tips below fall closer to the latter, but still can be valuable if taken seriously. they come from a interesting blog called the happiness-project.com...


An accumulation of tiny tasks, even if they aren’t particularly irksome in themselves, combine to make me feel overwhelmed and drained. If I can keep little chores from piling up, I feel much more capable of tackling bigger, more difficult tasks.

For that reason, many of my most important daily personal productivity rules are very low-tech and simple – they’re aimed to help me accomplish the most basic tasks of my day.

1. Follow the “one-minute rule.” I don’t postpone any task that can be done in less than one minute. I glance at a letter and toss it; I put the newspapers in the recycling bin; I close the cabinet door. Because the tasks are so quick, it isn’t too hard to make myself follow the rule, but it has big results.

2. Observe the “evening tidy-up.” I take ten minutes before bed to do simple tidying. Tidying up at night made our mornings more serene and pleasant, because I’m not running to and fro like a headless chicken; and it also helps me prepare me for sleep, because putting things in order is calming, and doing something physical makes me aware of being tired.

3. Do a daily errand, or a bi-weekly errand afternoon. I keep a list of things I need to do (get a prescription filled, buy a new toner cartridge, return library books), and each day, I do one of them. Doing one errand is manageable, and although it doesn’t sound like much, it adds up. 



4. Ask yourself, “Why do I need this?” before you keep anything. I have a friend who filed the stubs from her gas bills for years. “Why do you keep those at all?” I asked, when she was complaining about how far behind she was with her personal paperwork. “My father always told me to keep that kind of thing,” she said. That’s not a good enough reason!

5. If there’s something you don’t want to do, prepare all the necessary preliminary steps the night before, and make yourself do it first thing in the morning. For example, I dislike making even the easiest phone calls, so I always steel myself to do those right away.

6. Keep a daily scratch pad. You know those notes you write to yourself—phone numbers, URLs, the “call John Doe” reminders, the quick “don’t forget” notes…all those nagging loose ends that clutter the surface of a desk, and then vanish, get thrown away, or can’t be deciphered when you’re looking for them? Now I keep a scratch pad on my desk, and anytime I have the urge to make a note, I discipline myself to write it there. At the end of the day, I copy anything I need to keep (this is important!), then toss the paper.

7. “Identify the problem.” This sounds so obvious, but it’s astonishingly helpful. For example, I like to work in coffee shops, and for years, and I mean years, I spent a lot of time running out of battery power and chasing around looking for someplace to plug in my laptop. Then I asked myself: “What’s the problem?” Answer: “I need more battery power.” Light dawned. I could buy an extra battery! I did, and it gave me a huge boost in productivity.


ok, so not exactly particle physics or tai chi in a river, but god is in the details, oui?

posted by bluematrix at 08/18/08 22:11 | link | comments (2)

how is your passion level? not just as in passionate love, but passion for life, for feeling things passionately? do you remember when you first realized you had a passion for something? do you remember it fading? and finding a new one? and another? only to have it fade too?

at the end of my emails i tag on a quote that touched me by joseph campbell - ''People say what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. But I think what we're really seeking is an experience of being alive so the life experiences we have will have resonance within our own innermost being, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."

my friend k recently read it and returned with a susan olrean quote - "i suppose i do have one unembarrassed passion. i want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately...there are too many ideas and things and people. too many directions to go. i was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size." - susan orlean

i love the reason she proposes for passion - i had never heard that before. often when i conduct training i mention whittling things down into more manageable chunks so the learner can absorb it better but i never thought to apply it to a subject that i grow more fascinated with as time passes. its always been a relatively easy thing to for me to become passionate about something, yet difficult to sustain - perhaps that is an integral part of its (my?) nature? and on further inspection perhaps my new found interest in the subject is connected to my growing unease as i find my own passion for things waning somewhat as i experience more and more of life. for all my childlike wonder of things, and awe of the myriad of diversity in the world, there is a growing, world weary voice in my head whispering, 'its just a variation of a plot, or a position, or idea, or landscape, that you've seen or experienced already'. for years i've beat the voice down with excitement of travel, the newness of diverse reading materials, the learning of new skills, the sensory rush of adrenline filled pursuits, and in younger days drugs and alcohol than could make even the most mundane fresh again. yet the whispers always return.

k continued "i've heard the whispers, too. and it's true--it gets just a bit harder every day to be surprised, moved, shocked or rendered completely speechless by something. i've found i resort to melancholy the easiest, though."

i like wallowing in melancholy myself. wrapping it around me blanket. feeding it with sad, heartfelt music, that threatens to overwhelm. but it rarely lasts more than evening. with the dawn of each new day, its like my slate is somehow wiped clean, and i am very grateful for this gift. to wake up with a complete negative carryover from the day before would totally suck. sure there are traces of the sadness or joy, but la petite morte each night is a cleansing ritual.

hold on one more day...there is just no way to tell what the universe has in store for you with any certainty.

posted by bluematrix at 08/08/08 06:23 | link | comments (2)

this weekend i finally got out on the water. the cold rainy spring, the massive flooding here in the st louis where the two largest rivers in america converge, the new job - all conspired against me doing one my favorite things all year...getting onto and into a good sized body of water. beautiful day with friend jeffe and his speed boat. there were a hundred boats on the sandbar in the missouri river we ended up at ranging in size from little fishing boats to half million dollar yachts and all kinds of people playing frisbee and volleyball and barbequing.

and i did the coolest thing while we were chillin at the sand bar at the long tree filled island. some of you may remember that i enjoy doing tai chi. i like it much better than yoga in that there is a flow to the movements that really resonates with me, body and mind. there is one move where at the end you bring this little ball of energy you worked on generating between your palms and you push it into your dantien (a chakra or spiritual body point right below your navel) and yea I know its invisible and all, but it always, always, sends out this little wave of warm tingly feelings outward from my stomach area. Weirdest dang thing. not logical at all, but still undeniable from an experiential standpoint too. but i guess if you consider that all matter is energy and we are just batteries made of meat for using and releasing some of that energy, its not so far fetched.

anyways the sandbar from the beach went out a ways into the river which is still pretty high and strong (from the recent floods) with a 7 or 8 mph current. I went out almost chest high and the fast moving water is wanting to push me and it required a fair amount of balance and strength just to stay in one place. and I had the idea to do tai chi. after a few minutes of adapting myself to the new much heavier medium, I totally got into it, and it was not only a good workout but forced my movements to be absolutely aerodynamic. now I so want one of those little forced current lap pools to not only do laps, but also this vigorous new form of tai chi.

yes i live in st. louis, about as far from large bodies of water as you can get, but somehow manage to keep water in my life still. one day i will buy another sailboat and actually take advantage of the charterers license i worked hard to obtain, and sail the caribbean as was my original plan. until then, i play with the cards i've been dealt, and enjoy the game as much as i can. which some days is much easier than others...especially when i'm on a boat on a beautiful day.

posted by bluematrix at 07/30/08 19:54 | link | comments (8)

this might sound strange to you but no one ever ‘fails’ at anything.

everything you do produces a result. if you're learning to playing catch and you drop the ball when its thrown to you, you haven't failed. you simply produced a result. the real question is what you do with that result. you can either say, 'i suck at catching balls' and leave or you can say 'throw it again' and eventually learn to catch. (yes, you can fail to pass a test or a class, but that is simply a label for a measurement and i’m talking a bit broader definition of fail here)

failure is a judgement. it is an opinion. it comes from your fears. the best baseball sluggers in the world ‘fail’ 70% of the time. it’s all perspective. as an individual we are all ultimately failures at life in that we all die eventually... so should we stop trying to live?

we need to learn how to fail. to not let one failure defeat you altogether or keep you from attempting new ventures. how many people can lose a big business deal and say, "that was great. I learned something from it and am better for it." unless you can say it - and really mean it - you probably weren't learning that much from the experience.

it may come as a surprise to hear that truly successful people not only have failed, but also are good at failing. studies have found that we may have been lucky if we were forced to fail. one might even say that a key to success is learning to fail well. i guess i’m lucky then because i sure have been shot down a lot. (and truth be known, i do feel lucky and kind of successful too)

we have to understand that it is the fear of failure that hurts far more than the failure itself. actually, it is the fear of not being sure what will happen. most of us can learn to accept and deal with the worst if we really know what's coming. we may not like it or look forward to it, but we can handle it. not knowing is a different story. it creates anxiety and a very gut level desire to escape the whole problem. each of us is different in the things we fear, and to analyze the reasons we are pressured by the fear of failure we have to find out what kinds of failure bother us..

basically two things happen when we begin to feel pressured. we get anxious or nervous and tighten up, and we begin to rely on our defense and escape mechanisms. some of these mechanisms are: getting a lot of sleep but still feeling tired, coming home at night and getting lost in the TV or newspaper, or a hundred others.

the result of these mechanisms is that we begin to lose sight of the issues or problems by trying to put them out of our minds so they don't worry us so much. As the problems become vague, solutions become more improbable, and, unconsciously, that makes us more anxious.

reducing the pressure requires that we break the mental set that "success is equal to right and therefore equal to good, while failure is equal to wrong and, as such, is bad." We have to learn to accept failure as a normal healthy part of life. We all fail sometimes, and if we can learn to bend rather than break under the pressure of failure, we are much better off.

so go try something new and/or hard and if you fail at it...cool.

posted by bluematrix at 07/24/08 21:03 | link | comments (2)

you've never seen a people with as little time as westerners, even though we have homes filled with time and work-saving objects. 'time is money' the saying goes' and we even apply banking language to - talking about 'saving', 'investing' and 'wasting' time.

but the quest to spend time the way we do money is doomed to failure, because the time we experience bears little relation to time on a clock. our brain creates its own time, and it's this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions. In the space of an hour, we can accomplish a great deal — or very little.
inner time is linked to activity. to measure time, the brain uses circuits that are designed to monitor physical movement. inner time can run faster or slower depending upon how we move our bodies — as any tai chi master knows.

the brain’s inclination to distort time is one reason we so often feel we have too little of it. one in three americans feels rushed all the time. even the cleverest use of time-management techniques is powerless to augment the sum of minutes in our life (some 52 million, optimistically assuming a life expectancy of 100 years), so we squeeze as much as we can into each one.

go to the poor third world countries and ask, "Do you have a little time to talk?"  "The rest of my life," they'll say, and sit down and share themselves with you for the afternoon.
 
we should have more time than anybody, but we don't have any time at all.  we've defined freedom falsely as an outer thing, in terms of time, space and options.  americans think they're free if they have more options.  in fact we're paralyzed by them - with so many choices, we don't have to surrender to any one of them.  there's always another door to open.  we are pushed around by our options and kept busy fixing our time-saving appliances.

take a deep breath, tell yourself time is merely an invention, and slow the hell down.

posted by bluematrix at 07/16/08 22:18 | link | comments (4)

so today it's all about doors...

doors to perception

doors to reality

what's behind door #3?

is that a door or a reflection of a door? and how do i tell the difference?

its the same particle going thru both doors, depending on which one i'm looking at

its about the door you choose after the coin toss

is that a door or the light from the doorway hitting the wall just so in my bedroom?

or maybe its just an endoorphin opening a door in my brain allowing enzymes to be released

or a memory of the chamber of 32 doors off broadway

doorene tells me to shut up and rolls over

god closing the door but opening the window and letting some air in

knock knock knockin on heaven's door

i know, i'm a doork sometimes

the weird gargoyle door knocker staring back at me

the door as a segue from this moment to the next

the underwater doorway mural i did in jeffe's recording studio

is jim morrison really dead as doornail?

the open door policy of changing one form of matter (food) into another form (calories/energy) that allows this matter (me) to continue on its current iteration

the door that beckons me into that darkness filled with light

- i have my hand on the doorknob...

posted by bluematrix at 07/08/08 19:39 | link | comments (1)

the void. emptiness. its not what it seems. what is it about a taoist landscape painting that seems so refreshing to so many different kinds of people? the negative space, or whats not filled in. what is it about fresh snow, clean air, pure water? or good music? its about the space between the notes.

like silence after noise, or cool clear water on a hot stuffy afternoon, emptiness clears up the messy mind and charges the spiritual batteries.

many people are afraid of emptiness because they think of it as loneliness. so they fill everything in. they fill their calendars and their homes and their minds and their yards...and then thats when the loneliness sets in. quick, turn on the tv and make it go away. but it doesn't go away. it just gets pushed under the rug for awhile.

the tao te ching tells us in chapter 48, 'to attain knowledge, add things every day. to attain wisdom, remove things every day.'

when you get a great idea, and try to trace it back all the way to where it came from what do you eventually find? nothing. the void. emptiness.

in quantum field theories, the classical contrast between the solid particles and the space surrounding them is no longer valid. the quantum field is just a continuous medium present everywhere. in fact what we call 'matter' is just a disturbance of the perfect state of the field (the void), ripples on an otherwise still pond. einstein tells us, 'we may therefore regard matter as being constituted by the regions of space in which the field is extremely intense. there is no place in this new kind of physics for both field and matter, for the field is the only reality.'

eastern mystics have been saying this for thousands of years. the upanishads, a part of the holy hindu scriptures, tells us this underlying void (field) is not to be taken as mere nothingness, 'Joy, verily, that is the same as the Void. the Void, verily that is the same as Joy.' budhists call the ultimate reality Sunyata or 'emptiness' or 'void' which gives birth to all forms and phenomena.

this idea of an underlying quantum field is also central to the taoist notion of ch'i which literally means 'gas' or 'ether' and denotes the vital breath or energy animating the cosmos. it is tenuous and non-perceptable, present throughout space and can condense into solid objects. in the human body, the pathways of the ch'i are the basis of chinese medicine and the aim of acupuncture is to stimulate this flow. the flow of ch'i is also the basis of t'ai ch'i, the dance of the warrior. the confucist chang tsai says, 'when chi condenses, its visibility becomes apparent, when it disperses, it is no longer apparent. at the time of its condensation can one say otherwise that is but temporary? but then when it disperses can one say then it is non-existent? the great Void cannot but consist of chi.'

empty your mind and be still for a few moments. if you can.

posted by bluematrix at 06/30/08 23:06 | link | comments (2)

reading this really deep book by the author of zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, robert pirsig, called 'lila'. its got me thinking...

there is a battle forever going on within me. it is the battle of the intelligence of my mind and the intelligence of my cells.

sometimes, very rarely, in my darkest moments, the intelligence of my mind can't think of a good reason to live, but i go on anyways because the intelligence of my cells can't think of a good reason to die.

my cellular intelligence has been around for millions of years and it is not about to be put off by these recent intellectual patterns that is my current consciousness. my cells want immortality, they want to be passed on thru the generations to try and live forever. they're so old. they pay no attention to my mind. in their scale of time, my mind intelligence is something that just arrived a few moments ago, and will probably pass away in a few moments more.

these two intelligences co-exist but really don't interact much. the language of the cells has nothing directly to say to my mind nor my mind to my cells...they don't even speak the same language. everything 'i' am really is just software running on this current conglomeration of 'hardware' that is 'my' body. when i sleep, 'i' don't exist anymore than a software program exists inside a computer with the power off.

when mutation was the only means of genetic change, life sat around for 3 billion years, doing almost no changing at all. once they figured out how to break the barriers of mitosis and reproduce sexually, my cells have a been on a mission. sometimes the 'me' in this body can look at this cellular-based sex and find it all so intellectually base or funny or vulgar. but then as if by magic, lose all trace of funny and can experience it as high-octane attraction. my mind, sitting detached, aloof, and seemingly in control is suddenly rudely shoved aside by this other intelligence which is stronger than its own, and 'my' body slips into a kind of sexual cruise control. sometimes our morality filled minds are mystified at the things our bodies do without our permission... our cellular intelligence just laughs.

posted by bluematrix at 06/21/08 17:57 | link | comments (1)

the word inspire comes from the words 'in' and 'spirit'. wayne dyer tells us one way to become inspired is to place your thoughts on what it is you want to become - an artist, musician, trainer, etc. start reading magazines related to your chosen topic. start going to websites devoted to it. begin to picture yourself having the skills to do these things. lose the doubts, and picture yourself confident in your new skills. then begin acting as if you already had these skills. get out in front of yourself and take charge of your destiny at the same time you're cultivating inspiration. the better you can visualize it, the more inspired you will be.
 
dormant within you are forces you are probably completely unaware of, ready to collaborate with you, once you get the courage to act. and acting this way is not deception, it is a silent pact with you and the underlying force of the universe. you pull towards you what you constantly think about.
 
i remember reading when david bowie first started in the music biz, he was the typical poor musician, but he spent his money on expensive clothes and arrived in limosines and just exuded what he wanted to become - a rock star. and people just figured he had become that already by the way he acted and the things he surrounded himself with - and treated him accordingly.

when i first became interested in sailing, i thought i would get started by just looking at sailing magazines. i never noticed all of them in magazine racks before. then a month later on a photoshoot, the photographer told me of a lake not too far from here with a marina with good sized sailboats - i had no idea it was there or that there were big sailboats there. i pretended to be interested in buying one and soon i was out on the lake with one of the owners on his 30' sloop. later that winter a little cash fell into my lap about a year after i started focusing on sailboats, i had a 24' cabin cruiser and spent most of the weekends for the next 6 years sailing. i eventually obtained my American Sailing Association level 3 Charter's license which is a piece of paper that i can show and chartering companies will turn over the keys to sail boats up to 50' long to me. renting large catamarans in the bahamas, the keys and the caribbean, complete with queen size beds, a/c, galleys with microwaves, stereos, and little inflatable dinghys in tow behind came next.

one of the best books on self improvement ever written, 7 habits of highly effective people, has as one of its habits - begin with the end in mind. visualize being where you want to go, keep it fresh in your mind with little reminders, and you'll be surprised on how many little things pertaining to your vision start dropping into your life. the universe will provide for you - but it doesn't know what you want until you tell it.

posted by bluematrix at 06/14/08 07:43 | link | comments (2)