A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-free Play
Neil Fiore, Ph.D.
Okay, I admit that I have a small problem. It’s no big thing honestly. I’ve been trying to start/work on/finish a little software project of mine for some time and it’s getting nowhere. I’m interested in learning the Rails web development framework, I have all the books, I’ve made countless notes on what I need to do, I’ve started working on it once before and didn’t get anywhere with it, I want to work on it but I always end up doing something else instead.
I’ve read The Now Habit from cover to cover and I think that only time will tell if what Neil Fiore says will work. It’s a book that you would need to dip back into from time to time to ensure that you are still on track.
What Neil says to do is to not imagine starting a marathon and immediately aim for the finish line. No. Then you would start to have negative thoughts about the miles and miles that stretch ahead. You would start to think that it’s just an impossible task and that you were foolish to think that you could complete it. Instead what you should do is aim for the next 10 or 20 feet, aim to cover that, then the next 10 or 20 feet. Feel a sense of accomplishment over the shorter distances.
A lot of what he describes is common sense, but you only really see it as such when it is laid down in black and white. You should look forward and become excited about starting something new rather than worry about the enormity of the task.
Who knows if the methods described in the book will actually work. I’m reading Getting Things Done next and I can see that these will be two books that I’ll constantly reference over the next few months.
Yes, I thought that I was dreaming. I woke up and I could still hear the wardrobe doors rattling and I thought that I imagined it all. I got up out of bed and had a walk around, thinking that if it had been a quake that people would be congregating in the streets. I looked around, expecting to see signs that the earth had moved. Pictures askew on the walls, a CD toppled from its shelf, the crystals in a chandelier tinkling. Nothing. Nothing to show that my little semi-detached penthouse flat had survived an earthquake. I went back to bed. I did think about checking the internets or switching on the TV but decided to get back in bed. Maybe Radio Five Live would mention it so I switched my bedside radio on and they were discussing something about healthcare for a few minutes. Then another presenter joined in and asked if anyone in the studio had felt the earth move. They hadn’t, so he started reading all the text messages that people had sent into the radio station. More or less the entire country had felt something at 0:57am this morning.
So it seems that to switch to O2 for my broadband I now have to be without the internets for between 4 to 6 days.
O2 say that Pipex have put a cancellation notice on the line, so the MAC code, that Pipex sent 3 times, is completely useless. The chap I spoke to said that both internet connections have to be up and running before the switch over could occur. That’s when you would only get between half an hour and an hours downtime. What has to happen now is that the line has to be completely dead before O2 can reconnect the intertubes.
When I phoned Pipex the other week they said that it may be because they were doing some maintenance on my line which should have been completed on Monday. They said that they would then issue me with another MAC code which I could give to O2.
Let’s hope that this new MAC code doesn’t mean that I have to wait another 25 days before my Pipex connection ends. He did say he would credit my account with £10 for the inconvenience. That isn’t much of a consolation if I’m without the internet for 6 days. Especially when I work from home.
I had recorded The Bridge, a documentary that was shown on More 4 a few weeks ago, yesterday. It’s about The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco which has become the most popular suicide destination in the world.
All the way through I kept thinking, “How are they doing this?”. The film shows people climbing over the guard rail and jumping. “That must be stunt people.” But if the act of jumping will kill you then no stunt men, or women, would do it. “It must be CGI then?” Nope.
I think that we get so used to watching ‘re-enactments’ in documentaries that it becomes the norm. “So, they just hired an actor who looks like the person that the bereaved are describing?” Not so in the case of The Bridge. It was pretty harrowing to watch as it was. Until you realise how it was made.
Best Actor: Sam Riley (Control)
Best Actress: Anamaria Marinca (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days)
Best Music Score: Jonny Greenwood (There Will Be Blood)
Best Foreign Language Film: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel)
Best Director: David Cronenberg (Eastern Promises)
Best Film: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik)
Last Wednesday I requested my MAC code from my current ISP Pipex. They said that I should receive it within the next 5 working days, which was fine. I have to switch my phone line back to BT before I can switch ISP’s anyway.
On Saturday I received a letter in the post containing my MAC code. Great, I’m all set and ready to switch to someone else. On Monday I received exactly the same letter in the post containing my MAC code. No problem obviously a cock-up (a technical computer term) with their system. Today I received another letter exactly the same as the other two with the same date and the same MAC code.
No company, no matter what the size or IT infrastructure should be sending out 3 letters like that. Imagine the wasted time and cost to do something like that.
If you are with Pipex for anything… run far and run fast. After saying that, I haven’t left their clutches yet!
Yes, the update I’ve been waiting for. The update that I bought the Apple TV for. Being able to rent HD movies to watch on my new TV… and I’m a little disappointed.
I did hear that rental downloads wouldn’t happen in the UK until later this year. So that killed my reason for buying the unit in the first place. To be honest I was expecting quite a lot from those lumbering giants the movie studios. Rentals are available in the US why not the UK? Surely all they have to agree is a price. The same release rules will have to apply. The same rental conditions will apply because they’ll already be set in the software upgrade. So I just can’t see what the problem is! Then again it’s these huge monolithic companies who are still stuck in their old ways.
Apart from the no rentals thing it’s not a bad upgrade and free at that. The UI has changed, you can browse the iTunes store and download podcasts directly. Strangely they don’t show when you look at the contents of your unit within iTunes on the iMac. So when the two sync you won’t get the shows that have been download directly to the Apple TV. I did think that you could subscribe to a podcast, the same way that you can on iTunes, but it just seems that you can flag a show as a favourite. All this does is add it to a list, you would then have to select each episode for download manually.
It’s a step in the right direction. I’ve set the video output to 1080p so that it matches the TV, but it looks like we’ll have to wait for movie rentals. I’ll just keep watching video podcasts.
The Now Habit
Postal Deposits
The Golden Gate Bridge
Apple TV
