Archive for the ‘Simplify Your Life’ Category
January 10th
In the continued spirit of post-holiday reorganizing (I won’t say “resolutions”), here’s an interesting dieting tactic: Put your money where your mouth is. No, really.
Economist Richard McKenzie recently described a rather unusual incentive that he gave himself to lose weight. He signed a formal contract with a friend that required him to pay her $500 unless lost nine pounds within the next 10 weeks.
“After signing the contract, I was amazed at how the looming $500 payment affected my behavior,” McKenzie wrote. “While on my diet, I judged practically everything I ate in terms of how much it would ultimately cost me.”
(In the end, he lost 14 pounds.)
January 7th
Karen’s on vacation this week, so I’ll be posting some of the material that she’s prepared. To get started, here are some simple, inexpensive tips that she collected to help skin look and feel better:
1. Discard old, used beauty products. People may transfer bacteria from their fingers to pots of face cream and makeup, possibly leading to the growth of micro-organisms.
2. Stop smoking – some dermatologists believe it promotes wrinkles and prematurely ages the skin.
3. More sleep, less stress – psychological stress may impair the skin’s barrier function, which keeps bacteria out and water in.
4. Wear sunscreen – Sunscreen, besides protecting from skin cancer, may inhibit sun-induced changes to the skin’s texture. Look for sunscreens that contain zinc oxide.
5. Wash your face at night. Doctors say that skin picks up environmental debris during the day. Washing every evening gives the skin a rest form exposure to possible irritants.
December 28th
The Times Square Alliance is hosting a rather unconventional event this afternoon in preparation for New Year’s Eve: Good Riddance Day, “a chance to, literally, throw out your bad memories.” From noon to 1 pm, New Yorkers are invited to travel to Times Square and get rid of anything that they feel is too burdensome to keep—old love letters, fashion mistakes, incriminating documents…
If you can’t make it to the event, you can fill out an online form and let the world know what you’d like to part with in 2008 (messages will be displayed at the event).
What do you need to get rid of?
December 19th
Last week’s New Yorker had a fascinating article about how a simple medical checklist is transforming the complex, high stakes arena of intensive care. One of the most common complications in intensive care are so-called line infections, or contaminations of the synthetic tubes that doctors insert into patients’ veins in order to administer fluid, medication, or nutrients. Line infections occur in eighty thousand people each year in the U.S. alone, writes the author, Atul Gawande, and they are fatal between 5% and 28% of the time.
In 2001, a Baltimore doctor named Peter Pronovost designed a five-step checklist to help prevent line infections. The list is shockingly straightforward; doctors are instructed to:
(1) wash their hands with soap, (2) clean the patient’s skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic, (3) put sterile drapes over the entire patient, (4) wear a sterile mask, hat, gown, and gloves, and (5) put a sterile dressing over the catheter site once the line is in.
The final step? Instructing hospital nurses to ask doctors whether or not any lines need to be removed each day. In the hospitals where Pronovost’s checklists have been implemented, they have made a remarkable difference. (In one hospital, the line infection rate dropped from 11% to 0 over the course of a single year.) The success, Pronovost speculates, is not just about mundane memory recall, but about making explicit “the minimum, expected steps in complex procedures.”
In the face of such intricacy, it’s amazing how simple life can be.
December 14th
A Berkeley based customer recently pointed out that her Trinote is compatible with the Getting Things Done system: “I maintain my to-do list elsewhere and use the calendar for scheduled events.”
The Getting Things Done, or GTD, system is David Allen’s celebrated productivity and time management system; according to Allen’s website, it “transforms personal overwhelm and overload into an integrated system of stress-free productivity” (sounds pretty good, right?). I’ve never read the book, but the simplicity of the system is definitely attractive. Here’s how Wikipedia explains it:
GTD rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks. What distinguishes GTD from other time- or action-management systems is the idea of grouping tasks by the context (defined as a place or set of available resources) in which they are to be performed.
Do you use the GTD system with your Quo Vadis planner? Let us know in the comments!
December 13th
This year, I reclaimed the holiday spirit. The secret? I changed. I shifted from concentrating on everything that had to be done into enjoying whatever I decided to do. Holiday time is meant to make us happy and appreciative; not crushed, stressed and feeling inadequate.
For the past decade, growing worse every year, the holiday season becomes another burden of more things to do and less time to do them. By the end of the month I feel exhausted and resentful.
I decided the best way to enjoy the season was to do it week by week, leisurely and slowly. If people have discovered the benefits of slow food, then we can apply some of those same ideas to savoring the holidays.
Tired of the frenzied commercialism? Avoid the lines at the big box stores and try shopping in your neighborhood. You’ll get personal service from the shopkeeper, who will take the time to help you find what you need. It’s slower, but more satisfying.
December 3rd
I moved into a new apartment over the weekend—a cozy, ramshackle townhouse near the waterfront in Red Hook, Brooklyn that’s larger than anywhere I’ve ever lived since I left my parents’ house to go to college. Moving is always stressful, but I’ve learned my lesson over the years, and this time I hired a professional moving company to help me cart over all of my stuff. I was very organized about it, too, diligently labeling my boxes according to their contents. After we’d loaded the truck, I sat back, congratulating myself for having figured everything out. But when we got to my new place, I quickly realized that the process wasn’t going to be as smooth on the other end: rather than simply labeling my boxes according to where they’d go in the house (kitchen, bathroom, basement), I’d scribbled out a list of their contents that wasn’t meaningful to anyone but me. “Modernist, medieval”—those were books, and they went downstairs. “Dictionaries and reference material” went upstairs, in my office; ditto for the “cables and cords.” I ended up having to inspect each box before the movers took it inside so I could tell them where to put it. (Not the end of the world, of course, but hardly what I’d foreseen when I spent so much time labeling them in the first place!)
There is evidently such a thing as too much organization.
November 25th
One of the ways we say Quo Vadis agendas can help you is by eliminating clutter and chaos in your week.
Timothy Ferris, an entrepreneur from Long Island and the author of the best-seller, “The Four-Hour Work Week” takes pretty much the same view about time management. He believes a lot of this clutter begins with distractions like email and is ruthless about eliminating it. He is also a proponent of out-sourcing what we don’t need to do ourselves.
After reading Mr. Ferris’ book, Jason Hoffman, a founder of Joyent, a company that designs web-based software, encouraged his employees to cut out instant messaging and concentrate on one thing at a time rather than multi-tasking. He urged them to severely restrict email use and conduct business the old-fashioned wy, by telephone.
“All of a sudden,” Mr. Hoffman said of the results, “their evenings are free. All of a sudden Monday doesn’t seem so overwhelming.”
November 9th
Writers, it would seem, have cornered the market on time management angst: we postpone starting new projects, we worry that we aren’t writing quickly enough, and once we’ve finally finished, we wonder if we’ll ever be able to repeat the accomplishment.
In my opinion, the best productivity “secrets” are the simplest ones—and also the most difficult to follow. So I wanted to share one of the writing tips that I found online the other day; it’s advice we’ve all heard before, but it’s well worth internalizing:
Complete your most important (big, hairy, audacious task) first. Whichever activity you are dreading the most is probably the one you need to complete first thing in the morning.
Words to live (and write) by…
November 8th
Geralin Thomas, the president of Metropolitan Organizing, is a big fan of Quo Vadis’ Minister planner. She is currently featured on Fine Living, a site dedicated to enjoying life and living it well.
When time permits, go to Fine Living and click on “Everyday.” Scroll to “The Essentials” to read her column, “Your Calendar is Your Friend.” Geralin shares some excellent time management and time saving tips.
Also, please check for details on the show, “Time Make Over,” which premiers this month on Fine Living Network. Geralin will appear in Episodes 103 and 104 (The Shedrick and the Damare families, both based in North Carolina.)
