I just spent a few days ‘up north’ at my wife’s grandparents’ cottage. The kids love it up there, as do I. But there is no internet. I know this is not important to normal folk, but when you’re in the midst of posting about your LifeFocus cards it can be a bit rough. Here is Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and a wee bit of commentary.
There something extra motivating about posting the results of these cards. I am happy with my vitamin intake, even this early on in the process. It has taken me years and years trying to make sure I get proper nutrition in the morning, but taking vitamins never seemed to stick. Since I’ve been on medication for my sore back (from the car accident in Dec), it has turned into more of a routine. Cutting back on pain-killers and keeping on with multi-vitamins works fine for me. I just need to eat more fruit.
I also like the short diary-like sentences that remind me of the day. It’s like a Twitter journal. The accordion style in my wallet worked well for keeping track of how many glasses of water I drank, but I enjoyed creating a digital version at the end of the day much more.
This week I will explain some of my 10 choices, and hopefully create an editable PDF version for people to test along with me.
Well, it’s finally the Year of the Rat. I’ve been waiting 12 years for this. I want to take full advantage of the momentum and launch myself into the best year ever. Today is the first day of the rest of my life.
I have a brand new LifeFocus card made up, batch 6.3beta, and am going to test it here on this blog. Eventually I will get LifeFocusSystem.com up and running with the help of my friends Dré Labre and Jeff Cressman. We are going to create something bigger than all of us, we hope.
So this is my new card. I’m going to see how long I can push this one, and routinize 10 things I want to get out of my life. You can see that there is a balance of health, long term, short term, monetary, and creative goals.
The purpose of any LifeFocus System is to train yourself to remember to do the things you want to do. It is NOT a to do list. It does not cover your grocery list, or tell you who to call. It simply reminds you of the things you have identified as important. And it makes you accountable to record and track your progress. Since each card is the size of a business card (3.5″x2″), I like to print 7 together, fold them into an accordion, and carry a week at a time in my wallet.
Card Components:
TITLE:
I called my card Year of the Rat because that’s what I wanted to call it. I was born in 1972 and every 12 years my birth is celebrated by billions of people! It’s a great ego boost. Beside the title is a little space for an avatar, a small picture that represents you. I use a little chair that I drew in design school. To me this chair represents reflection, taking a break, listening, and balance.
TAGS:
This is a brand-new feature for the cards, and will mean more when the online version is brought to life. They are key words that reflect the types of LifeFocus items I am attempting to routinize.
NO.:
This is how many cards I have gone through. Today is day one, so it is the first card.
DATE:
This is the current date. Beside it are the days of the week (or more correctly, the first letter of the days of the week) to circle for your convenience.
TIMELINE:
I like to track my sleep patterns. Other people might want to track when or how long they do certain things (like practice the violin, write, jog, etc). The timeline starts at zero (midnight) and runs a full 24 hours to midnight the next day. Today I slept from 2am to 9am. So I put a small horizontal stroke through the 2nd dot, and another stroke through the 9th dot. Then I drew a longer vertical line to connect them. Beside the timeline I write “7hrs” so I wouldn’t have to add it up later.
LifeFocus Items:
There is enough space on the card for 10 different LifeFocus items, which are marked with a light-grey chevron (<) and the number to the far right of the text field. You do not need to fill every space, but it is not advised to exceed 10. Each LifeFocus item has a few sub-components.
Multi-box: This little grey box can be used to track the following:
Quantity - keep track of numbers. At the end of the day, hoe many glasses of water did you drink?
Yes/No - Use an “X” or a check-mark to indicate a task was completed or accomplished.
Percentages - Colour in half the box to indicate 50%, or a quarter of the box to indicate 25%
Notes (+):
This is a small space underneath the LifeFocus item to make a few notes. These will help to clarify things, give you some perspective, or just keep a (very) brief catalogue or diary of your progress.
LifeFocus Line Item:
This is the LifeFocus item itself. It is advised to write it in an ‘actionable’ fashion, in the great tradition of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Make sure that the item begins with a verb so that you know what action to take. Follow that by an (optional) qualifier or adjective. Then a noun, or the object/goal itself. Try to be as specific as possible given the small amount of space.
Tomorrow I’ll go into a bit more detail on my LifeFocus choices, and where/how you can download your OWN set of LifeFocus System cards (6.3beta) to test along with me. I will also be moving this little LFS party to the LifeFocusSystem.com blog, and just posting short highlights here.
To everyone looking for the Presidential Peace Cards (PS), my sincere apologies. I set the quantity to one by mistake and we sold out in seconds. I have a limited run of 25 original cards all set to go, so feel free to pick them up at a fantastic price of a buck-a-piece. Help support a future Vegetarian Astronaut President! Here’s a link to my daughter’s fresh sight, MadPrincess.org.
Yes, MadPrincess.org is now live, even though it’s a coding disaster. May as well have used Scotch Tape and chewing-gum for the table cells. Please don’t view source unless you’re a sadist. My daughter’s crazy idea of selling Presidential Peace Cards is now a reality. PS for Peace! Mad for President, 2040!
My daughter is turning 6 in a few months, and every day she amazes me. Today she was cutting pieces of cardboard and writing “PS” on them, then circling the letters with purple crayon. When it came time to clean up, I asked her to put them away. “What are these?” I asked. “Peace Cards,” she said. “What are they for?” “I’ll need them when I become President, to sell them for money.” Very interesting. I might sell some of these Peace Cards on my sight. Let me know if you’re interested. 1 card for $1.00.
Ack, what a frustrating day. I couldn’t even help our 80-some-year-old neighbor shovel her walk. I’m supposed to take it easy and be very careful with my back. Just let it heal. It’s not like I’m crippled, I just can’t really do anything that requires lifting, and shoveling snow… well… you get the drift.
Here’s my latest ramble. I’m going to start soliciting themes so as not to go on about nothing for nothing’s sake. But I do like learning what it takes to record these things. Six in a row is a record for me. The fist two were uploaded to Facebook exclusively, but I’ll add them here in a bit— just to satisfy the demand of course.
UPDATE: Wow. I hate YouTube for this. It takes .mov files and destroys the high-end of the audio and also manages to knock the entire audio track out of sync. Might switch to Vimeo.
UPDATE: I posted this yesterday, expecting this video to be processed and approved by Revver within an hour. Well, it’s now over 12 hours later and I’m beginning to question my choice of using Revver as a host. This is ridiculous. I just posted to YouTube. No revenue sharing, but it only took 10 minutes.
The video on this one is terrible, due to some processor problem on my MacBook. I think Twitterific was on while I was recording. Anyway, I then botched it even further by trying to add some goofy Quicktime effects. That didn’t work either. So I could either re-record this spontaneousness in a stilted fashion, or I could just post as is and let you at least HEAR the story. It is what it is folks. Did ZeFrank ever have these problems?
Obviously I need to update my About sections. On this site, and on everything else in the universe. How may ‘About’ sections do I have online? LinkedIn, Spock, Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Wordpress, just to name a few. MyBlogLog, Delicious, Upcoming.org, Doplr, Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku, Plaxo… the all have blurbs about me. And there are more: Ning, Mashable… It would be nice if there was just ONE place where I wrote all my details and it would be dispersed from there. Will OpenSocial take care of this for me?
In the meantime, if you want to know more about me, you can always visit my LinkedIn profile.
Tonight I work on the LifeFocus System blog a bit. Hopefully I’ll get enough of it together to launch today. I joined Thing-a-Day.com and thought I’d post about using the LifeFocus System cards for 29 days. I had so many other plans for tonight, but they have all been canceled due to bad weather. It’s just as well, since I’m finally feeling a headache come on after my big fall on Monday. This might have something to do with the fact that I only take the Tylenol 3’s before bed now. I don’t like to be in a lot of pain, but a little pain is good to know your limits.
I don’t want to be that lady in the Alleve commercial taking pain-killers and then running a marathon (with strangers happily calling out, “Hey Alleve!” like that was her name…). I want to know where it hurts and take care of it. I’ll be icing my back a bit today, but the chiropractic adjustment at noon did wonders. I finally let my chiropractor adjust my neck, which was a bit scary at first, but it sure felt good when it was over. I think my entire spine is finally straight for the first time in over a month, if not ever.
I’ll try to do a video later too, since I want to try to do one every day for a bit. Partially to document my accident recovery and partially to get used to being on camera. There’s something strange about it, but I find it interesting.
Note to self: Need to update site with all my contact information. I don’t think there’s even an email address published here…
