I recently to decided to call it quits on one of my favorite hobbies and activities…blogging regularly about being more productive on the Linux desktop. It was a long, hard decision to make, but I really think that it was the right thing to do. Here are just a few reasons that I decided to hang it up:

It was taking up a lot of mental RAM that I wanted to use elsewhere. When you run a semi-professional blog, there’s always a certain pressure to post at least semi-frequently and to stay on top of the news in your field. As it turned out, keeping tabs on all the great software releases for Linux and the latest developments on the desktop was taking up a lot of my mental cycles…mental cycles I ultimately decided I’d rather be using thinking about some things that just more important to me right now…like my Master’s thesis. I was thinking about my blog way more than I really wanted to.

The amount of time I was spending on the project was time I really needed to be spending doing other things. Don’t get me wrong…I love writing about Linux and connecting with the community through blogging, and I derived an immense sense of satisfaction from it. But RSS feeds, post planning and writing, and site maintenance were taking up time that I ultimately concluded would be better spent on activities more vital to the spiritual, emotional, and physical health of myself and my family. On a good week, my blog took up about four hours of time…that’s now been translated into about 3 hours of exercise per week with my wife, and an extra hour of reading material that pertains to my career field.

That kind of actvity just didn’t fit in with my life plan or lifestyle anymore. At one point, I was looking at working in technology/web business as part of my career plan. That has since changed. My life circumstances are different now…when I started blogging, I was working part-time at a pizza place and finishing up my under-graduate courses. Now, I’m entrenched in very time-consuming graduate work, working in my chosen career field, and planning for a baby. As much as I enjoyed what I was doing while it lasted, I’m now just as happy to being using that time to better prepare myself for my job, or work on the nursery with my wife.

All this isn’t to say I’ve given up my hobby completely…I’ve just removed all pressure from myself for it to be anything but a hobby. It’s now something I do as I have time, when I feel like, no pressure at all. To that end I placed my branded Linux blog on indefinite hiatus (who knows, maybe I’ll be able and willing to take it back up in a year or two) and moved all of my blogging activities (Linux and otherwise) to my personal blog.

Have you ever had to cut something substantial and important to you from your regular activities? How did you decided to call it quits? Share in the forums.

Photo Credit: cosmonautirussi

I have spent a long time being more than a little envious of people who could add drawings to their notes. One of the masters of this craft, Mike Rohde, has coined the term “sketchnotes” to describe this art. The main source of this envy was that I assumed that some people were simply born to be able to think visually, had a natural artistic talent, or somehow were blessed with the right genetic combination to express this skill. In other words, I never thought I would be able to do so well even if I was to try to learn.

Furthermore, I had built up such high expectations for the quality of my work, my skill level, and how others would view it. I set a high enough barrier to entry to ensure that I never would. This did not stop me from always being on the search for ways to improve my notetaking. As a matter of fact, the initial seed idea for work.life.creativity was generated by my looking for a good forum to ask people such questions.

About a month ago, Mike Rohde announced his involvement with a company called VizThink and their Visual Note-taking 101 webinar. I was immediately interested and signed up as soon as I could. Boy am I glad I did. It was one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had. Here is what I learned:

• I learned that everyone can draw, myself included – “I’m not a visual person” is what I, and a lot of people say, when approached with such things. There is a great quote from the book The Back of The Napkin by Dan Roam. “If you were able to walk into this room without falling down…” you are enough of a visual person to get this stuff.
• I learned a lot about the false barriers we (perhaps intentionally) put up for ourselves. – By setting the bar so high (“I want to be able to draw just like Mike Rohde.”), I ensured I would never even try to start. The fact is, I’m not that good and it is just fine, because I like and understand it. The sketchnotes are for me to draw greater recall from the meeting or presentation. Who cares if they are any good.
• I learned about the freedom we give up as we grow older. – There was a great quote by Pablo Picasso early on in the webinar: “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” If you think back to your childhood, you drew stuff all the time. Crayons on coloring books way outside the lines. You didn’t care about how it looked, the selection of colors, or what other people thought. You just drew.

Most importantly, I learned the single most exiting thing I have in a long time: Look at the picture above. I can draw! I just had to learn how to give myself the permission to do so.

As we all know, life is about being our best in every role of our lives. So performing on the job is not the only important endeavor we should be concerned about.

Some of you young people out there are probably not as concerned about this as I am, but I am reaching the age where I need to focus a little less on living it up…and more on taking care of myself.

Health is an important part of our quality of life.

For many, it is enough to just get a 30 minute jog in and be happy with it. But if you are like me, you want to track progress. These days, the choices in terms of tools are vast. Again, your choice probably comes down to your preference of paper or something electronic.

There are forms that you can add to your paper planner that help you track everything from your nutrition to your jogging stats. You can even keep up with your resistance training by tracking your lifting.

There are also web based apps that will help you manage your health. My big cardio activity is cycling. We Endure is my tool of choice at this time.  It allows me to keep up with distance, total time, and calculates my average speed and time per minute.  We Endure helps me as I work toward my goal of averaging 100 miles in the saddle per week.

Mobile applications are available also for BlackBerry and the iPhone.  Most of these apps are used to track diet and nutrition.

The whole idea is this. We feel it is good to be able to track how we are performing on the job by keeping solid metrics. It only makes sense to track our performance as we manage our health with similar metrics.

What tools do you use as you work toward a healthier you?

Let’s discuss.

Last Saturday while waiting for lunch at the local Sonic Drive-In, I did a tiny bit of journaling about something that was on my mind at the moment. For whatever reason, I was thinking about the concept of value and what it means in terms of my day-to-day actions and activities. I suppose it arose out of my having just completed my normal Saturday morning routine, which consists of taking a trunk-load of garbage to the Cheatham County dump and filling up my car with gas for the week. Sometimes all these routines and chores just make me feel like I’m playing Whac-A-Mole: as soon as one chore is completed, there’s another one to be marked off in it’s place. Soon enough, the same chore comes back. But to what end? You know how it is: you have to clean the house again, do the laundry, mow the lawn, pay taxes, get a haircut, go grocery shopping, go to the gym, pay the bills, etc.

My point is not to bemoan the repetitive nature of these tasks, since many can be automated or outsourced (for a fee, of course) but I want to focus on whether any real value is created in doing them, whether that value is for me or for anyone else. And this is really directed at so-called “tasks” like catching up on Lost episodes or things that seemingly have value like organizing all your index cards. All too often I find myself filling up my time with “junk food” reading, whether it’s pointless magazines or websites or RSS feeds, things that don’t really add value to my life. Sure, there’s a place for all that, but if that’s all you do, you’re not doing much of value.

Personally, I’m trying to form the habit of asking myself, before I do anything, whether it’s on the job, at home, or elsewhere: “What value am I bringing to the world by doing this? Is what I’m doing bringing value to my life? My career? My family? How does it impact my relationships on a spiritual level, be it with God or those around me?” It’s interesting food for thought that has the potential to lead to a much richer, more productive, more creative life. It helps me find perspective when it feels like I’m just “doing chores.” It also helps weed out the unnecessary time-sinks.

Have you considered what kind of value you’re creating with what you do? What’s been the result? Please share over in the forums.

This post will attempt to be short and to the point for reasons that will become obvious in a few sentences. I recently came across a link to a post on Marty Nemko’s Website. It asked a simple question – Do you talk too much?. He provides a few basic questions to see if you fit into that category and tips to, well, learn how to shut up.

The Verdict for me? Guilty!

Everyone who knows me knows I can be, um, shall we say “wordy”. The post certainly made me a bit more mindful of this.

That said, It also got me to thinking a bit further on this idea. One of the things that I think makes Twitter so magical is the restraint of having 140 characters at a time to express oneself. It literally forces you to think about not only what your are going to say but also how to express that idea in as simple and brief a way as possible.

How do we incorporate Twitter style restraints into our daily lives? I know there are many times I could say the same amount of information in 140 characters that I often tend to do in 140 paragraphs. Perhaps one way to conquer the “blah, blah, blah” is to, before speaking, think about how you would tweet the same thing. 

See, there I go again, blathering on like some village idiot. Enough already. Perhaps there are other ways to make Twitter like restraints work for the better in the real world. Have some ideas? Come share them in the forums.

Jason mentioned a really interesting idea in the forum last week, on the use of the term “initiatives” rather than a Someday/Maybe list. This really got us thinking, and I for one jumped on the idea. In fact I have been thinking about it all weekend.

I believe that part of the difficulty in achieving some of our long-term goals is in how we label them, and how they get prioritized in our day-to-day thinking. Or perhaps that should read “if they get prioritized” in day-to-day thinking…

I have a tracking system set up for the goals and projects that I intend to implement this week, this month, and this year – but I have been remiss in tracking the longer-term goals. The Someday/Maybes get left out of reviews sometimes, simply because they are “maybes”.

Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.

That is dangerous thinking, and certainly not conducive to making progress. This year one of my commitments to myself is to be more detailed in my thinking during periodic reviews and take more notes. This is something that really suffered last year, and I can see where things were falling through the cracks.

Like Jason says:

“I do not really divide my initiatives between current stuff and the “someday/maybe”.  The reason is that I do not want to let my dreams to ever get out of sight.  Each time I do my weekly review, I can see all of the stuff I need to do, and the stuff I want to do.”

Just thinking about something as a concrete Initiative gives it far more reality than thinking about a vague “someday”. What say you? Join the discussion thread.

Happy 2009 to everyone reading our little blog here. We are planning some big things this year at work.life.creativity, and we sincerely that you will all be part of it!

I have decided to do something in 2009 that I have never done before: set some concrete goals for the year. They live in most of the aspects of my life: Family, Spiritual, Career, and Development.

I have always said that ‘I sure would like to do X this year’ or ‘learn Y’, but I have never formalized them into concrete goals. This year I decided to sit down and come up with at least one goal in each of the main areas of my life.

One of the most important things to recall when you create a goal for yourself (and obviously, this does not have to be a New Year’s thing) is to create S.M.A.R.T. goals.

S.M.A.R.T. goals are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Timely

Specific goals are always going to have a much higher chance of success than any generalized version that you can come up with. When setting your goals, think about what you are trying to achieve with your goal, and use that as the basis of your final goal statement.

Measurable goals are needed so that you know exactly when you have attained your goal. You can have any number of measurable steps within each goal, but you have to have some identifiable steps that can be measured.

Attainable goals will help your mindset regarding your goal by making you break down the achievements on the way to completing your goal. By planning your steps to goal achievement wisely and creating time frames to completing those steps, you will make any goal on your list attainable.

Realistic goals will always allow you to keep on task to completion. If your goal is far too absurd to be completed, what motivation do you have to try to attain it? NONE! So make your goals something that you want to complete, as well as something that you can complete.

Timely goals are essential so that you have a time frame to work in. If you do not attach a time frame to a goal then there is no urgency to get it completed. By setting a time frame, you get your mind to start mapping out the steps you will need to take to achieve it.

One other thing that I think is very important to successful completion of any goal you have is to WRITE IT DOWN somewhere, anywhere, that you are going to see it. If you don’t you will never remember the exact goal that you are trying to achieve. You also need to look at your goals everyday if possible. This will always keep you thinking about what you need to complete your goal.

As I said, this is the first year that I have attempted to set goals for myself. I am pretty pleased with the goals that I have set thus far, and may be adding some during the year.

My Goals for 2009:

• Read the entire Bible in 2009 (Spiritual)
• Start a daily journal (Development)
• Become proficient in Linux Operating System (Career)
• Some family goals that are personal

I am still trying to come up with some metrics for the linux proficiency, but I think that it is going to revolve around attaining or at least passing practice test for a linux certification. I am still investigating the options for that one.

As I said, this exercise is not a New Year’s thing. You should remember these steps whenever you want to set a goal in any facet of your life.

I hope that this helps because reading over the S.M.A.R.T. goals ideas really helped me when setting my goals.

What is your process for setting goals? What are some of your goals for this month? This quarter? This year? Let’s discuss them in our forums.

Michael