December Update

Videos and Podcasts Consumed

I got really into the work of Vinay Gupta.

• Plausible Utopias
• Time to Stop Pretending
• Surviving the Event 
• Transcending Politics
• One Network, One World
• London Real Interview
• Vision of a Rural Future

Saw the most brilliant economic talk of my life, by Mark Blyth, so I also got into him.

• "Austerity -- The History of a Dangerous Idea"
• Are the Populists Threatening Democracy?
• Global Trumpism

Also, I listened to one of the best On Being Podcasts I have heard

• The Myth of Closure 

Lastly, there was this video, which makes me really glad I have made exercise a habit.

• WHY Exercise is so Underrated (Brain Power & Movement Link)

I probably should have things to write about my mind, body, and spirit, but I don't.  It's been a bit of a blah month.  On the other hand, I have started writing again.  Here are the pieces I've written this month:

• How to Accomplish Anything (A General Process)
• Of Mentors and Movements
• So . . . If There is a Trade War With China? 

Each of these were relatively hard for me to write.  I don't want it to be ever said that I am a natural writer. 

Procrastination Chronicles Index

Procrastination Chronicles #1: Weed Eater
Procrastination Chronicles #2: E-mail
Procrastination Chronicles #3: Dealing with a Bunch of Crap
Procrastination Chronicles #4: Mowing the Lawn
Procrastination Chronicles #5: War and Peace
Procrastination Chronicles #6: Cleaning out the Car
Procrastination Chronicles #7: Programming Via Poker
Procrastination Chronicles #8: Cleaning the Front of the House
Procrastination Chronicles # 9: Dishes, Always Dishes
Procrastination Chronicles # 10: Reading Walden
Procrastination Chronicles # 11: A Paper (Zuuuummba!)
Procrastination Chronicles #12 : Improvised Workout  
Procrastination Chronicles #13 : Tax Papers

How to Accomplish Anything (a General Process)

Get into the habit

In my experience, it is best practice to start a habit by doing a small amount of work, in fact a laughably small amount of work as an every day minimum.   For example, to start back writing, I started with the goal of writing one sentence a day.  That's it.  And you know what?  I still sometimes was fighting myself to start.   But once you have started, you have made a giant leap.  As is pointed out on All Japanese All the Time (AJATT), "1 isn’t just slightly bigger than 0. 1 is infinitely bigger than 0. "

You've got to start somewhere.  

Track.  

Next, engineer follow-up and follow-through.  One method is Seinfield's trick where you take a calendar and mark each day you follow your goal, eventually forming a chain.  You get a little attached to the chain, and a little more so the longer it grows.

I don't print out a calendar, however. I simply make my own chart by turning a piece of lined paper on it's side.  Each line becomes a day, and in this way I can make a chart tracking as many habits as I'd like. It looks a little like this:

Here's a sample chart of the goals I tracked over a 10-day span. I must admit it was the best 10-day span I have had as of the time of this writing; I have never had a perfect week, nor have I needed one in order to watch this improve my life greatly.

If you have some burning life-focus that you just can't seem to get started I would use the Seinfield trick.  I find a chart is better for tracking several goals in a general course of self-improvement.

Procrastinate Your Evaluation, Not Your Action

When I was a speech coach, one of the keys to my success was to take the pressure off the novices.  Specifically in the event extemporaneous speaking, I instituted a rule that a student wasn't allowed to say whether or not they thought they were good at the event until they had given 20 practice speeches.

You can apply some version of this to whatever it is you are working on.  At first, your focus should be on building the habit.  You could set a time in the future that you will allow yourself to evaluate (this Ted Talk is an illustration of why 20 hours is usually sufficient.  But even better is to allow yourself the luxury of growing slowly while maintaining faith in the knowledge that you will improve.  

When Inspiration Strikes, Do More

This step more or less will probably happen on it's own, but it might be worth a few words to encourage it further.  

Before you started you project, you were still filling your days somehow.  While, yes, it is possible to squeeze more out of time, at some point you will eventually have to push something away.  That's your real test.  Once you've allowed inspiration to guide you past some distraction, you can safely say that you have formed a habit.  Keep going, keep tracking, and one day you may look up and notice you're where you wanted to be when you started dreaming and setting goals.

Everything Else is Optimization

There are a lot of bloggers who gain eyeballs (and ad revenue/book sales) by in effect saying "Look how great I am, and look how fast I can learn anything!"  From my own experience I can say that it can be very discouraging to consume too much of that.   It's a kind of pornography of other people's productivity.  I would look to them when my passion was at its highest, but then as my passion waned, their examples would only lead me to see my efforts as a failure. Eventually I realized that these amazing, better-than-you-and-me life-hackers are really only talking about optimization.  Oh . . . they can learn a language in 3 months?  Cool. However, I probably can't do that because 1) I don't want to move to another country, 2) I don't want to study 8 hours a day and 3) I'm probably not as talented as them (also, read the fine print, so to speak, about what they are willing to count as a "successful mission").

Another example is exercise.  I have at times only lifted one day a week. On the plus side, this protocol allowed me to optimize for muscle growth and cycling my diet. However, it made it too easy to get out of the exercise habit. When I wanted to start back exercising, I set up my tracking for every day and broke up exercises so it was possible to exercise everyday without soreness.  Optimal?  I don't care; I'm building back up a habit.

It is certainly good to read up from time to time about techniques for things you are working on.  It can show a healthy interest in the subject.  But my advice is to not give up on the system you are tracking while you are experimenting with new techniques.  For example, if you have been learning a foreign language by going through a certain number of flashcards a day and then you learn about a whole new philosophy of language learning involving just talking to natives (ie wasting their time so that you may benefit), I would recommend that you keep up with your flashcard discipline and experiment with the new moves.  In this way you absolutely prevent being a wannabe. Whether acting optimally or not, you are always a work in progress. Which is what you should be.

November Update

Body

I have gotten much better about exercising every day.  Again, mostly walking.  I hold the following conversion: a set of push-ups followed by 40 jumping jacks cancels out 15 minutes of walking.  To count as a day of exercise, I have to walk for an hour, or it's equivalent.

Mind

I altered my path in learning Spanish.  I have been using a version Iverson's word list method and learning 100 words a week in Spanish. I am going for systematic coverage because I know this will be a useful language for the rest of my life.  I don't think I recommend this to other people as a learning method, but I'm just being honest about what I am doing.  I really don't like not-knowing words that much.

I also got a bit side-tracked learning a bit of Mandrian Chinese.  It started as a way to help me with my studies of the Tao Te Ching, but grew to be very, very interesting.  With that said, I am done with beginner gains and felt the pull of intermediate hell, so by the end of the month I was able to shelf the book on Chinese characters for now.  More energy for writing and Spanish.

Podcasts and Videos Consumed

Shrinking the Technosphere KunstlerCast 282

Peak Moment
Food, Community and Our Place on Earth
Ecovillages — A Leading Edge for Sustainability

2017 . . . The Year of Making?

I had made some half-hearted attempts to start toward "wood working" last year, but nothing came of it.  The main hang-up was some time before my half-start I had heard about this great system of modular design, and that was really all I was interesting in learning about when I set my goal to have "intermediate skill" in woodworking -- I wanted to be able to build bookshelves and work benches and the like.  However, I had lost the name of the system and could not find relocate where I had read about it in spite of several attempts.

Well, I finally stumbled upon the term, and I think I may never be looking back.

It is called Grid Beam.  I am going to make a winter Solstice gift for myself out of the book How to Build With Grid Beam.  With that I should be able to gumption-up to get my projects started, including, I think, a windmill.

There's an old video which gives some context for the process, and there are just so many thought-and-emotion provoking images of what is possible to made 3-D lived spaces.


Bonus

Jacob at Early Retirement Extreme on bootstrapping tools.  This is something I am very interested in as I keep moving to be a resilient Renaissance Man, but it is for more motivating to build some *big* stuff first.  And so that's where I will start.

Monthly Update -- October

Mind

The biggest thing is still working on Spanish.  Early in the month, I started working more on watching videos in Spanish.

I must confess I've down less reading in Spanish and more listening to Spanish and vocabulary study.  I certainly will not be hitting a million words by New Years.  That would have wrecked my life.

Spirit

I saw once again how easy it is go too hard after a goal.  To me the largest part of "spirit" is balance.  October gives some of the truly perfect days of the year, and to not enjoy them borders on a sin.

Body

A great deal of walking.  Usually listening to Spanish audio recorded while I watch videos.

Spanish Audio Content

Just trying to make a more immersive environment for Spanish, and I really to to improve language -- quickly, slowly, however it happens.  I plan to add to this list

Musica

• Latino 90s Pop Mix
• Rock en español 80 y 90

News/talking heads

• Radio España (Rtve)
• IMER (Mexican Public Radio)

Religious

• Santa Biblia

When I get some, I check out these podcasts.

Making Room for More Spanish

Getting better at Spanish is a big deal to me.  But, so is living a balanced, happy life.

I have a lot of things I am trying to do: being a good husband, lose weight, cut my spending so that working a half day makes sense, landscape.  So my language-learning time has limits.  Thus I have decided to move Esperanto to the back-burner (ie maintain the cards in Anki, but not add any new ones).  I will give the time saved to Spanish.

I love Esperanto and look forward to learning it to the point I can journal in it in the future, but Spanish is the more practical language, and I love it just as well, maybe better.

One move I am making is to give Spanish the prime real estate of my bookmarks on my browser.  I am removing the Esperanto sites for now.

So away goes my table of Esperanto Correlatives (God, the correlatives in Esperanto are so brilliant, once you understand the code.)

Also away goes CRI online in Esperanto, great source of small news articles.

They will come back up when Esperanto is my focus again.

Monthly Update -- September

Spirit

I have began meditating again.  I usually set a timer to meditate, with my most normal time being 3 minutes.  I find that usually to be a big help calming my "monkey mind" -- though meditation is an endeavor where the mileage most likely varies from person to person.

I've started back listening to On Being Podcasts while entering grades and other parts of routine clerical work.

• The Buddha in the World
• Stress and the Balance Within

Also I watched this Peak Moment video and listened to it like a podcast.

Mind

I am working on moving all of my historical dates that I want to remember from the disappointing Memrise over to Anki.  (mmm. . . note to self: I need to back up these Anki files).

For the first half of the month, I was adding on to my Esperanto deck in Anki on average a few sentences a day and trying to write a sentence in Esperanto every day.

Then I read a history of Spanish Civilization, in Spanish, and I just caught fire, and decided to go for learning Spanish hard.

My current stats for the Spanish Challenge.

242,100 of 1,000,000 words read9 hrs, 30 min of 100 hours of television/video0 of 20 hours of conversation practice

Body

Not a lot here.  Hopefully I have better stuff to report next month.

Continued Esperanto . . . after Spanish

I'm working on this million word challenge for Spanish for now.  I fully admit I might get off the pace and not be able to get there by the end of the year.  But no worries, because I'm going to continue on with Spanish into the new year, and, really, the plan is to always maintain Spanish.

To make more time for Spanish, I am only going to maintain my Anki decks in Esperanto, but not do any additional reading or sentence-adding.  However, at some point next year, I plan to put in some work on Esperanto.  I found a great youtube channel, Evildea.  It has videos in Esperanto with English subtitles.  I can watch those videos for good comprehensible input and record the sound and listen to whilst going on walks, etc.  Also, in response to something I wrote on a youtube channel, someone wrote me back about this course they had put together.  I will look at it when I am dusting back off the language.

Knocking off "fluent reading in Esperanto" as a goal is at this point a matter of dozens of hours, not hundreds.

A Million Words Before 2017?

My free time was pretty consumed for a while getting my "investment" house sold off.  (Now I feel a lot better for when the financial system has it's next crisis -- one that I bet shows 2008 was just a warm up act).

Oh well, only so much time can be dedicated to "prepping," and I'm already at nearing the top end of what I want to do with it for now.  My time instead channeled into foreign languages.  I started hitting the Esperanto pretty hard on the 'ol Anki deck, and I saw a chart on the correlatives that blew my mind and help me get my understanding to the next level.  

I also pulled down some books in Spanish to start the ball rolling again on my 1,000,000 word goal.  And as is often the case, just starting was all it took to lead to a productivity explosion.  I just feel in love with what I was reading and that enthusiasm transferred to all of Spanish.  I really have come a long way over all of these years of working on Spanish off and on (the worst way to learn a language).  There are a lot of texts where I can figure out my missing words by reading around them and using context. . . and learning the vocabulary under those circumstances is just a joy.  

I did some calculations and if I read a little over 8,300 words a day, I can hit my million word goal in Spanish by the end of the year.  And sure, I will be able to cross a goal off my list, but more importantly, I know I'll be much better at something I love by taking this challenge.  If I do hit the reading goal by Jan 1st, I still will devote the next year to Spanish, taking on composition and conversation, and reading old books in Spanish -- I am a sucker for the classics.  

While I have really enjoyed using New Years as a way to kick off a new skill, I don't think I will this year.  It'll be more work on Spanish.  I've reached a point of proficiency that I have basically fallen in love with it.

Update:  Nope.  I'm not going to get there by the beginning of 2017.

Sketch of a Future Protocol

Watched an interesting interview that got me thinking . . . 

I am still committed to following a CRON (Calorie-Restriction Optimal Nutrition) diet until I hit 170 pounds.  But after that I am going to try to pursue the following diet/workout protocol:

Saturday -- skip lunch and stretch fast into the evening.  Resistance train in the evening.  Eat a bunch of ice cream and protein.

Sunday -- Eat a bunch.  Party.  Enjoy all tasty-tasty junk our society has come up with.

Monday through Friday -- some kind of low cal regime.  Perhaps just continuing what I am currently doing, but I am open to experimentation (but not to unduly inconveniencing my wife).

My reasoning behind staying with CRON is that I am trying to achieve anti-cancer hormonal changes, which may very well be a product of lowering my metabolism. 

I also plan on going on a two-day water fast at some point, during a school break.  Again, for the anti-cancer properties.  I am working under the assumption that bigger moves have to be made to set up systems than to maintain them. 

And I openly admit that losing my grandfather and father within a year and a half has me spooked.  

A Future Blogging Plan

Working on my rental to sale is just kicking my butt.  I have not had much of that "summer off" that you'd think I'd have as a teacher -- you know, sipping pina coladas   But this is the last hurdle to clear from me living the way I want nearly every day for the forseeable future.  

After that, I think I might be more active on the web, perhaps twitter and reddit. 

After my dad died I went down to blogging once a month as a kind of update.  This school year, I am thinking of doing more of a log of what I am doing, and trying to engaged in answering people's questions and getting in the back and forth of human life. 

I am doing this to see if I can help 100,000 people to manage time better.

Super-Simple Aquaponics

I have as one my goals making an aquaponic system.  I realized a while ago that I was going to cheat at this one anyway -- make a small aquaponic system to figure some stuff out (mostly getting to know what I don't know) and then if that went well enough, either make a bigger system, or even just buy a bigger one.

Well, it doesn't get any simpler than this:




If I wasn't working on my rental house to get it ready to sale I would probably manifest a version of this by the end of tomorrow. (For example, I saw some plastic milk jugs left as trash by a park I visited today. I would make the planters out of them. As it is, I just have a random bucket of water serving as a potential bird bath.

Grocerie Cost, Week 3

$13.  And that is including some items that will last for a few weeks, like green tea bags and a bigger bottle of apple cider vinegar.

I think I am getting the hang of this.

Grocherie Costs, Week 2

Since last week I overspent, I had a goal coming into this week of staying below $16.  Well, I stayed below $11.

I bought butter (the biggest cost item), some more black beans, frozen peas, eggs, and my experiment item for the week: apple cider vinegar.

From last weeks haul I still have my lentils uncooked, half a can of tomato sauce, a head of broccoli, about half the bag of black beans, and half the loaf of bread in the freezer.  The menu for my dinners next week will be "asian" fried rice with peas and brocolli and the other night will be my famous spaghetti.  If called upon to make a third dinner, it will be eggs, with oatmeal made with my homegrown peaches that I have frozen.

Looks I am going to be taking the full poverty plunge for lunches, however, and eating lentils and rice for my lunches.

Groceries Goal: Under $21 a Week

Early Retirement Extreme in a nutshell: your biggest expenses are 1) housing 2) transportation and 3) food.  Through some intelligent planning, and adding skills, you can drastically cut these big 3 and watch your savings rate soar above 50% to something like 75%+, or you can take my route and be semi-retired at much earlier age than most would think possible.

I am trying to challenge myself to make all of my meals $1 or less.  This means my meals will be home-cooked and mostly meatless, though eggs are still going to play a major role, and cheeses will will certainly show up.  That makes the weekly benchmark $21.  This week I messed up a bit and spent $26.  I wanted to try out making a vegetable lasagna and black bean burgers from scratch, so my curiosity made me buy more than I am going to use this week.  I'm not completely certain I'll be able to keep next week's purchases down to $16 to make up for the overage, but even if I don't, that still puts all of my eating in the range of one "nice" meal out (paying for my wife as well, and don't forget the tip!)

Internet Fast Completed

It was only a week, but I think it was good enough.  Toward the end of the school year, I was on a loop with the kind of "itch scratching" websites that it seems most people use to run out the clock -- news, reddit, espn, the like.

A guest on a Tim Ferris podcast once said something like "I realized I was getting a bunch of little dopamine hits, but I wasn't learning anything."

Life is better with real projects to work on, my favorite have actions in the real, physical world.  With those projects, however, it is easy to get exhausted, and so then the rest feels better, often with interesting intellectual sidelines to be working on.  Those truly interesting sidelines are not be found in the little bites of popular internet sites, but still in book-length material.

And that's what I got back in touch with during this internet fast:  big projects, good books (ie good art).

Internet Fast

I think I am going to go on a fast from the internet for a week -- at least fast from my computer; I'll look at the weather app on my phone and it might flash the titles of my e-mails when I swipe the phone.

With the school year over, I need to not get into a screen-funk.

Woodworking Journal: Fixing Common Mistakes

I am liking the "Wood Whisperers" channel quite a bit.  It has been good guidance through the first part of my journey.

Push-Up Goal Update

I am pulling up a little short on my overfeeding every weekend until the end of the school year -- I got sick of chocking back that much food -- especially protein powder.

So hopefully I built up enough infrastructure, because it is now on to grease the groove.  Just a week of practice has made me feel comfortable with what kind of motion I need -- in the elbows and forearm.  Also, much like when I did squats, figuring out how breathing works seems to be a big help in increasing reps.

I shoot for "perfect practice" of the technique and then I spend time after a set visualizing the technique -- because, after all, the theory here is that I am training the nervous system as much as building muscular endurance.

Woodworking: a Sketching of some Projects

It turned out that with a little effort rewording I could make all of these start with the letter "b." These are all things I could make use of.

Birdhouses
Bookcases
Box (to be an outdoor haybox)
Bench -- new work bench
Backgammon board
Bad-ass tool holders so I can go "death to drawers."

The New Chapter

Yesterday was an emotional day.

It started with the burial of my uncle's ashes at the foot of my grandfather's grave.  After that brief ceremony, my wife and I went to the yearly debate and acting picnic, where I gave an introduction speech for each debate senior before they gave there good-bye speech.

After that, I went to my mothers and finally got around to looking through my grandfather's tools.  It will be an honor working on projects with those.

One chapter is closed, and another begins.

Woodworking. My First Step: Knowledge.

I am going to try to chronicle my process of learning how to make stuff with wood.

The first step to woodworking is some knowledge.  To the Google!

I just looked up what tools I need to get started.

First, Youtube.




Yes, Youtube.  It is a friend of mine.  Seeing faces makes me feel less alone, in the same way that people watch insipid shows like the Today Show.

But, reading is on balance more efficient for general goal nerdery.  They are easier to scan through, and much easier to make notes off.

Here is one article.  Here is another.  

The hierarchy of learning often goes like this:

• real experience 
• reading
• videos

But, and a huge but, motivation and inspiration are elastic.  Watching a lot of videos is infinitely better than doing no reading.  And that is what people often do with reading they should do.  So, yeah, Youtube can be a fantastic resource.

A  concern at this information gathering step is to avoid getting stuck in a paralysis of analysis, but that is what to-do lists and reverse Sabbaths are for.

Chinese Characters

In the process of writing my own translation of the Tao Te Ching, I have developed a liking for Chinese characters.

I a list of ten thousand things to do, but I get much joy from following my interests.  At the very least, I want to learn some radicals, including stroke order so I can write them, and then the characters found in the Tao Te Ching.  Easy enough if proceed slowly and wisely, step by step.  Some easy radicals:

Playing With Speed Reading

What's a personal development blog without eventually talking about speed reading?  As my life affords me more time to play, I have been playing with speed reading using spreeder.

I do best reading between 450 and 500 words, with 2 words displayed at a time.  This is still better the average for someone word-reading, but no where near the whiz-bang 1,000+ words a minute that seems to be the dream of people who get into speed reading.  And that kind of speed, while maintaining comprehension, is probably a myth.  Going at 1,000 words a minute, I can get the "gist" of the text, but I can save more time with the following:  1) being strategic enough to know what I have to read, 2) scanning through a text to find the parts I need, or 3) reading the first sentences of paragraphs only (occasionally the last sentence as well). 

For any reading that you want to really get the language at the level of, you know, what the sentences are actually saying, I would recommend not pushing the reading these kinds of software over 500 words a minute.  

But there is a another problem.  Because the internet now sucks, even finding material that is easy to copy and paste into speed reading software is a challenge.  If I have to go around every few paragraphs to avoid ads, and if the side bars get into text out of order, it makes for a screwed-up experience.  Again, I can just do better with scanning techniques.  

I find the best things to put through speed reading software are the same things on my best of the free internet list.  

And when I think about it, it makes sense.  These are the sites where there is the most good content, rather than bullshit.  Thoreau said : "Read not the Times.  Read the Eternities." The best of the internet still affords you that ability,  But it is getting harder and harder to find.

So this is my best speed reading tip: avoid the bullshit.  Don't even read it.  Don't even be on a site that has the temptation.  Hell, be on the internet less.  The internet becomes more and more click-bait, and you are much better off not reading most of it, no matter how fast it is thrown at your eyes.

Push Up Strategy

I am going to make an earnest run at the push up goal.  I will do it in two steps.

Step One.  For the rest of the school year I am on the following protocol:

On Saturday, I work out with an Escalating Density routine.  The sets I am alternating are push-ups and kettle bell swings.  Starting right after the workout, I immediately start drastic overfeeding to get some hypertrophy.  A real winner is ice cream mixed with a scoop of whey protein.  For the entire day I go into a binge mode and eat something between 4,000 and 6,000 calories.

Sunday, I stack this up with seeing my grandmother for lunch and eating dinner at my mother's.  I eat more like 3,000 calories on Sunday.

Monday through Friday, I don't eat breakfast and for lunch I have two spoons of extra light tasting olive oil.  This being the Shangri-La Diet.  Around 3:30 I try to eat something very high in fiber and then I try to basically "be reasonable" with dinner -- leading to somewhere between 1,200 and 1,600 calories consumed on those days. 

The strategy here is build up some muscular infrastructure for more push ups.

Step Two: During the summer, I will be greasing the groove for push ups.  Most days, I'll stay in with the heat and organize my days into hours, doing some push ups each hour.  On the days that I need to rest from push ups, I could walk to the Bizzell library at OU in the morning and hang out there.

Also, I have a lot of weight to lose (*sigh, again*) and so I will be doing the Shangri-La lunch of two spoons of extra-light tasting olive oil every day and eat a nutrient-dense, yet restricted-calorie diet.  (I may take Sunday lightly "off" because I of the family visits, but I'm not looking to hit those really high calorie marks that I was looking for in step one.)

If I don't reach the goal of a set of 100 push ups by the end of summer, I will probably need to take a break from push ups, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there.  But I think I have a good chance of getting to 100 push ups this summer.

The Next Few Goals

I actually have found that I am not very good at predicting what order I will accomplish my goals.   Nonetheless, it does help to have a game plan.   And, after all, this is the whole point of the blog.

Here are the goals I am going to work on heavily this summer

• Do 100 push-ups in one go
• Be able to read smoothly in Spanish
• Be able to read smoothly in a 3rd language (it will be Esperanto)
• Learn intermediate woodworking skills

The last one is a somewhat interesting case.  I am going to try to buy a good deal of the tools I need while I am on contract for full days.  Next year, with me working half days, I'll, clearly, be making less, so I will be heavily economizing.  I might try to cut my expenses so far that I will be able to say I have at least proved the concept of

• Make active stream of income that pays my side of bills in 8 hours weekly work

Because I have recently realized there is a loophole in the way that goal is worded.  I do not have to stop working each week when I reach 8 hours; I just have to have bills low enough that I can pay those bills in 8 hours a week.

I think it is possible to get there.  I plan to walk to work most days, cook all the meals on the days I am to take care of dinner, downgrade my phone, and all around go on lock-down with my spending.  The fact that I am free of any debt also really helps.

Best Posts Before 2015

Around the turn of the year I wrote a post about the best posts of 2015.  This made me realize that I need a similar compilation for the posts before 2015.


As a whole, this group majors heavily in the problem of beating procrastination.

First, Use a Timer to Get More out of Your Time
Beat Procrastination by . . .  Starting
Procrastination Chronicles #3: Dealing with a Bunch of Crap
Three Times as Much as Average . . . Or More?
Nested Time Box Games
Procrastination Chronicles #1: Weed Eater
How I'm so Cheap: Eat the Weeds
Beginning Toward Squat Goal: Grease the Groove
No to Diet Sodas
Two Lessons at the End of a Mini-Retirement

Walden . . . Underground

I know that my most loyal reader has dreamed before about a cabin in the woods, a place to draw nourishment off nature and solitude.

In that spirit, I did a post on my blog about sustainability about underground houses.

April was the Month of Memory

As debate winds down, I have been catching up on life.  First dishes -- yeah, always dishes, then the lawn and garden, and now as I hack away at school work, I am also working again on language learning.  I am working on Spanish and Esperanto.

I am trying to learn from my experiences and pace myself with Anki to avoid burnout.  So I have set a limit a maximum of ten new cards per language, per day.  If I can't get around to do enough reading to find words or sentences to meet that limit, that is no problem.  My bigger worry is feeling so overloaded that I start to push back from what can and should be play time.

With Esperanto, I want to be able to read and write in it.  With Spanish, I want to be essentially bilingual.  I plan on working on my Spanish in all phases -- reading, listening, speaking, and even writing for the long haul.  With that said, I can afford to pace myself.  The good news i s that the materials I need are all around me, and the people I would need to converse with are around if I can just get a little more over my shyness.   

But for now a bookworm I remain.  I will read, read, read in Spanish, listen and watch some, and look up a few words.

If I had to guess, I would say that I will be able to "read smoothly" in Esperanto by the end of the summer, and will have finished my million word challenge in Spanish, and thus be able to count that as well.

I also starting working on a project which I think will improve my interior life immeasurably: memorizing poetry.  My eventual goal is to have a poem memorized for every day of the year, like a love poem for Valentines, a lot nature poem in March, that sort of thing. I plan on working on this slowly as well, shooting for a a few lines a day.  I'll go from there to learn 12 poems, one for every month, and then fill that in to 52, so I can have a poem for every week. . . And then, one day, after low-grade effort over a tremendous amount of days, I will know 366, so that I can have a poem for each day, even on a leap-year.

I have two poems that I have worked on in the past and am going to start back with:
If by Rudyard Kipling and
Me Imperturbe by Walt Whitman.

Different Kinds of Push Ups

Push ups are one of my interests.

State Title

One more item off the list: I coached a state champion.

The event was Public Forum debate, which is a team event with two partners.  The young man on that team is someone who I have coached since he was in eight grade.  He's seen me at my best, and he's seen me at my worst.  And it is a joy to be connected to him and his partner by this championship moment.

Procrastination Chronicles #13 : Tax Papers

On the path to greatness, there will be 100 overcomings.

I will chronicle my attempts to overcome procrastination.  My technique is to start small, really small.

My favorite post in the series is #3 Dealing with a Bunch of Crap.

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Since I have started paying taxes, I do not believe I have ever paid them this late.  

If the taxes get as far as spring break, I usually end up dealing with it during the break.  This year we went on a vacation to New York on spring break, so that pushed takes all the way into April.  

If my papers and other affairs were in any way organized this probably would not be much of a problem.  As it was, the fear of the papers grew in my mind.  And dread works best when it is ill-defined.  So . . . What was I afraid of?  Missing the paper on how much interest I've paid on the rental? Having to have my W-2 reprinted in the administrative center?  Being audited and thrown in jail?  Looking like an idiot to my wife at the tax place?  I had not really thought through what I was afraid of or even that I was afraid.  It just moved out of my mind quickly, but grew stronger with every time I realized that "Oh shoot, we need to do our taxes."  

I imagine that everyone has a kind of force field that makes it hard to get tasks done that they have already procrastinated, and the rub is that with each time the task comes to mind and yet doesn't get done . . . the force field . . . just . . .gets . . . stronger.  (This conception of a force field is based on Aaron Swartz's essay on productivity.)  

So my force field was strong and after staying up late to avoid the task, sleeping in to avoid the task, making eggs to avoid the task and even doing the dishes to avoid the task, I turned to the task near panic, promising myself that I would get cream soda later in the day (much better if I had some pre-warding materials on hand, but, alas, we were low).  I set a timer for 20 minutes, just picturing my entire day wasted looking through papers, and then -- oh gosh -- I'd never get to all the other things I needed to do . . . and some of those things flooded my mind.

With the timer going, I made a few hesitant steps, setting up different piles for what I was going through, clearing the space on a tv tray to make room for one pile, pacing a bit in another room for a bit because it was too much for me.  I couldn't believe I had set up an appointment with the accountant for 2:00 pm.  I just knew I wasn,t going to be ready by then, or if I ended up being ready, it would be nothing but a day of torture.  

Of course by the end of 20 minutes I had found all the papers I needed.  The rest of the day went smoothly and I got many things done.  

Update -- March

NYC

Going to New York was the easiest goal left on my goal list.  Just buy some tickets and go.

My wife and I had a great time.  We crashed in Brooklyn with my most loyal reader (shout out!) and most of our days took a subway in to Manhattan for shows, museums, and to see the Statue of Liberty from Battery Park.

I probably would have preferred to simply stay in Brooklyn and have done some urban hiking, but it was a vacation, and that is probably a bit too much like what I do here in Norman.

Body and Mind

I work too much.  I have taken to think of this as work sickness.  I have concluded that the stress and the time spent doing what I do is too damaging to my body.  Also, I don't have enough time to pursue my intellectual interests.

My house is paid off.  I don't need to work this hard.  So next year I wont.  I plan on only working half days.  This should be a glorious period for my mind and body.

It needs to be for my body.  After a month of debate stress and now doing double meals to get the most out of New York, I weigh the most I ever have.

The thing is that I trust the notes I have made on weight loss in the last two month of updates.  I think I know how to lose the weight.  I just don't think I could with my life spinning as fast as its been.  I'm not saying that another person couldn't, just not me.

Spirit

Embracing my spirit feels even easier with the world coming alive.

Since the last spring, as the grief mounted more and more, I became a wanderer.  This year it feels like I will live more and more within the system of my garden.  My grounds may be humble, but there is enough to do in them to engage all of my spring and fall days.

Update -- February 2016

Financial

On February 12th, I cut a check to pay off the mortgage, a great birthday present to myself.  I am completely free of financial debts.

Body

My focus is on habits.  I have four habits I am trying to form.

First, is the affirmation I mentioned last month.

Second, I am attempting to be mindful of my food cravings.  What I mean is expressed in this charming Ted-x video:


I am trying to think to myself "I am noticing that I am craving X," and to also to do the same with justifications I come up with.

I buy the reasoning behind the results of this practitioner.  In general, and about most things, to paraphrase Ellen Langer most of us are not awake, and we are not awake enough to even know we are not awake.   I think there is much to the saying "mindless eating." And when we don't even know we have cravings we certainly cannot beat them. Willpower does not work; some kind of deeper awareness is needed.

Third, I try to eat a tremendous amount of fiber for lunch.  I go for a large salad and then some other fiber, such as bell peppers, lentil soup, or the like.  This helps keep hunger in line.  As does, my forth habit . . .

Fourth, I am trying to drink "a lot" of water.  I have switched my coffee cup into a water cup, and I compulsively drink water throughout the day.


Spirit

I got back into listening to On Being Podcasts.  It has been wonderful while I have worked my way from buried after 5 straight weeks of 80-hour-plus weeks caused by debate to now . . . ah, all clear

Before enjoying On Being in this way I had to get past that overwhelmed feeling a bit and use tricks (like this and even this) to get the ball rolling, but as those sticky overly-procrastinated items got done and I was feeling state of zen and flow in my work, adding in On Being Podcasts have been a great addition to a very enjoyable work time.  I am enjoying the 2012 Vintage.

Also regarding spirit, I have taken to walks during what is technically my work day.  My "planning" period blends into my lunch, so I have taken to going to parks on days too lovely to be at school all day.  I get in a little thinking, and just being in beautiful places.

From these moments of pure presence I can feel how close the spring is.

On my birthday -- the 12th -- I planted my potatoes.  This has become one of the rituals of my home, and it becomes my personal beginning of the spring of my spirit.

Update -- January 2016

Body

I have taken to writing affirmations on index cards when I wake up.  Even if there is no other value to the affirmations, they work to help me wake up.  The affirmation relevant to my body is "I will eat healthily."

Spirit

For my spirit, I write the affirmation, "I will add value."  A nice reminder to do my bit to repair the world every day.

Mind

With so many hours of work, not much going on with the mind at home.  I am reading Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.  But that is a bleary-eyed activity before I go to bed.

Productivity

I read this write-up of several productivity techniques put together into one system.  I highly recommend it.