Why not Make it Happen?

THE MAN IN THE ARENA
                                          Excerpt from the speech "Citizenship In A Republic"
                                          delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France on 23 April, 1910 by Theodore Roosevelt

VAK Learning Styles Self-Assessment Questionnaire.

Thank you to Swinburne University Of Technology for developing this Self-Assessment Questionnaire

The Age of Perfectionism. Here is what we are doing that will amaze future humans.....

MARKETING LACKS EMPATHY.

So much marketing these days concentrates on everything except the connection with the other end of the relationship. Marketing is a relationship and if you are doing it wrongly people won't be listening properly - or at all! Always start with the connection in mind and go from there.

Replace the word 'Happiness' with anything (work, money, relationships etc)... the buck stops with you...

And another good quote from someone's Tumblr about how so much of life is opposite... I remember my Father-in-law saying it was the questions not the answers in life.

Possible Approaches to help Clients Make Decisions.

School Graffiti

Learn in Education, New York and News

March 22, 2013 at 3:00 AM

Murals and Math: One School's Solution to Graffiti

My work as a public artist is specific to the discovery and interpretation of connections between people and culture through interactive, participatory visual art. For the last four years, Green School math teacher Nathan Affield and I have teamed up to create murals that combine art and mathematics to empower students and connect them to their communities in Brooklyn, New York. These projects build lasting relationships and help students realize their strengths.

Our first project took place in the school with two mapping projects that are permanently installed in our school’s hallways. Based on the sustainability principles of the school, the students went out in their community to collect visual data on what was culturally, environmentally, and personally sustainable in their neighborhoods. They mapped out the neighborhoods using zoomed in abstractions, noting the collected data with symbols.

In 2011, Affield and I created a project where a math class surveyed the whole school on how they were feeling, what color that feeling represented, where that feeling fell on a scale between one and 10, and what time of day the data was recorded. The students then aggregated and color-coded the data to create a 150 histogram covering the back wall of the school. In a line graph organized by the time of day and negative space that color–codes the students’ grades, one gets a full day glimpse into the emotions of the students at any given point of the day. At first glance, the mural looks like an abstract, colorful cityscape.  It is only when the mural is “read”, that the data can be understood.

Histogram of Emotion

In 2012, we brought the students outside the classroom and into the community where they teamed up with seniors from the local senior center to graph out weather patterns from 1930 to a projection of the future. In class, students had been studying mathematical modeling and how to use evidence to defend a claim. With daily high temperature data from NOAA, two-dimensional graphing techniques and their knowledge of central tendency, students collaborated to reposition their two-dimensional graphs into a single three-dimensional line graph modeling the past weather cycles that they used as evidence to base their climate change claims. They worked with seniors—some who remembered the historical weather patterns the students had graphed—and passerbys, creating lasting connections among each other and the community.

Weather Mural

This year we will be visualizing the number Pi on another wall on Graham Avenue in East Williamsburg. The design involves replacing the infinite digits of Pi with color-coded blocks and viewing the irrational number as a shape. For the first time, students will see the negative space of Pi and search for patterns. To focus students on the concept of infinity, we chose to use the Fibonacci or Golden Spiral, representing another irrational number, Phi, as the framework for the visualization. As the space in the spiral gets smaller, the bars of the number shorten. When you first look at the image, you might see a shell pattern or a cityscape. Only upon investigation, will you know that it is a representation of Pi.

Mockup of Visualization of Pi

The act of painting murals is empowering. Once a student makes a mark on a wall, it becomes his or hers. When you walk down the busy street of Graham Ave, almost every wall is covered in random tags. We help the students create public art that means something and has significance. Students living in Brooklyn need this kind of connection to their communities because when the students invest in their communities, the communities invest in them. These murals are also made for the neighborhood. The results are not only beautiful images, but also sparked conversations.

The Kickstarter campaign we created has been a wild success, attaining its goal within 48 hours, which has more than doubled in four days. Money beyond the goal will be invested back into the community to create more public art in the neighborhood. Artist Ellie Balk will manage a grant and call for local artists to create another mural in the neighborhood. A scholarship program for students will also be set up. People still wanting to support this project should know that their investment will go directly to the enrichment of students and their community. Consider backing an educational and culturally enriching project.

What not to do on Facebook

Confronting ideas...

Really like this graphic presentation as well....

Great Way to Promote a Book.

Be brave and do it.

Personal Stats for Australians - try it out....

In a Word... Meditate.

I find meditation one of the hardest things to do. I have tried at my desk, in a class, with tutorials, workshops, one-on-one. I am sharing this with you as I like to think I can vicariously enjoy someone else benefitting from all the good things people get out of meditating.

Your Customer is King

Beware how your presentation sounds.....

What is Social Design?

A Good Design Glossary to Decode the Jargon

After last year's Social Impact Design Summit, we began to work on one popular request: to compile a glossary of social impact design terminology. In the emerging field of social impact design, we've seen important discussions and efforts hamstrung, sidetracked, or misunderstood due to the lack of a unifying vocabulary. This glossary sheds light on the redundancy of certain words and phrases, and we hope it also sheds light on the fact that many leaders and practitioners are using different terms to describe almost identical processes and approaches. Despite arguments over “correct” terminology, we are all speaking the same language. 

We're eager to improve and expand this glossary, and welcome any and all corrections, edits, and additions. In particular, we ask for your help in identifying entities and individuals associated with each term as part of our larger effort to map the field. Please email glossary@publicinterestdesign.org. The glossary can also be viewed at publicinterestdesign.org/glossary.

Illustration by Jessica de Jesus

The Benefits of Optimism Are Real EMILY ESFAHANI SMITHMAR 1 2013, 8:38 AM ET

A positive outlook is the most important predictor of resilience. It's not just Hollywood magic.

20th Century Fox

One of the most memorable scenes of the Oscar-nominated film Silver Linings Playbook revolves around Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, a novel that does not end well, to put it mildly.

Patrizio Solitano Jr. (Bradley Cooper) has come home after an eight-month stint being treated for bipolar disorder at a psychiatric hospital, where he was sentenced to go after he nearly beat his wife's lover to death. Home from the hospital, living under his parents' charge, Pat has lost his wife, his job, and his house. But he tries to put the pieces of his life back together. He exercises, maintains an upbeat lifestyle, and tries to better his mind by reading through the novels that his estranged wife Nikki, a high school English teacher, assigns her students. 

Pat takes up a personal motto, excelsior -- Latin for "ever upward." He tells his state-appointed therapist, "I hate my illness and I want to control it. This is what I believe to be true: You have to do everything you can and if you stay positive you have a shot at a silver lining."

For many years, psychologists, following Freud, thought that people simply needed to express their anger and anxiety -- blow off some steam -- to be happier. But this is wrong.

Which is why the Hemingway novel, which is part of Nikki's syllabus, is such a buzz kill. When he gets to the last pages, and discovers that it ends grimly with death, he slams the book shut, throws it through a glass window of his parents' house, and storms into their room in the middle of the night, saying:

This whole time you're rooting for this Hemingway guy to survive the war and to be with the woman that he loves, Catherine Barkley... And he does, he does, he survives the war after getting blown up. He survives it and he escapes to Switzerland with Catherine. You think he ends it there? No! She dies, dad! I mean, the world's hard enough as it is, guys. Can't someone say, hey let's be positive? Let's have a good ending to the story?

Another best picture nominee, Life of Pi, employs a similar device. Pi finds himself aboard a lifeboat with a ferocious Bengal tiger in the aftermath of a shipwreck that has his entire family. Lost at sea in the Pacific Ocean for 227 days -- starved, desperate, and forced into a game of survival with the tiger -- Pi pushes forward, even though he, like Pat, has lost everything. Pi says, "You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better."

Pi's resilience is incredible once you realize what happens on board the lifeboat and how Pi copes with the tragedy that he witnesses and endures. There's more to the story than the boy and the tiger. Though what really happened is terrible, Pi chooses to tell a different story. His parallels what really happened, but is beautiful not bleak, transcendent not nihilistic.

"Which story do you prefer?" he asks at the end.

***

This questions turns out to matter a great deal if you are trying to figure out who grows after trauma and who gets swallowed up by it, a question that each movie addresses and that psychologists have been grappling with for years. Think back to the last time you experienced a loss, setback, or hardship. Did you respond by venting, ruminating, and dwelling on the disappointment, or did you look for a faint flash of meaning through all of the darkness -- a silver lining of some sort? How quickly did you bounce back -- how resilient are you?

The New Yorker's Richard Brody criticized Silver Linings Playbook for its sentimentality and "faith-based view of mental illness and, overall, of emotional redemption." The New York Times' A.O. Scott made a similar, if predictable, criticism of Life of Pi: "The novelist and the older Pi are eager...to repress the darker implications of the story, as if the presence of cruelty and senseless death might be too much for anyone to handle...Insisting on the benevolence of the universe in the way thatLife of Pi does can feel more like a result of delusion or deceit than of earnest devotion."

But these criticisms miss the point. First, they fail to understand why these two strange and idiosyncratic movies, both based on novels, resonated with so many millions of people. Their themes of resilience speak to each of us -- and there is a reason for that. The key insight of each movie is, whether their creators realized it or not, grounded in a growing body of scientific research, which Brody and Scott overlook.

Positive emotions can, the researchers concluded, undo the effects of a stressful negative experience.

Far from being delusional or faith-based, having a positive outlook in difficult circumstances is not only an important predictor of resilience -- how quickly people recover from adversity -- but it is the most important predictor of it. People who are resilient tend to be more positive and optimistic compared to less-resilient folks; they are better able to regulate their emotions; and they are able to maintain their optimism through the most trying circumstances.

This is what Dr. Dennis Charney, the dean of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, found when he examined approximately 750 Vietnam war veterans who were held as prisoners of war for six to eight years. Tortured and kept in solitary confinement, these 750 men were remarkably resilient. Unlike many fellow veterans, they did not develop depression or posttraumatic stress disorder after their release, even though they endured extreme stress. What was their secret? After extensive interviews and tests, Charney found ten characteristics that set them apart. The top one was optimism. The second was altruism. Humor and having a meaning in life -- or something to live for -- were also important.

For many years, psychologists, following Freud, thought that people simply needed to express their anger and anxiety -- blow off some steam -- to be happier. But this is wrong. Researchers, for example, asked people who were mildly-to-moderately depressed to dwell on their depression for eight minutes. The researchers found that such ruminating caused the depressed people to become significantly more depressed and for a longer period of time than people who simply distracted themselves thinking about something else. Senseless suffering -- suffering that lacks a silver lining -- viciously leads to more depression.

Counter-intuitively, another study found that facing down adversity by venting -- hitting a punching bag or being vengeful toward someone who makes you angry -- actually leads to people feeling far worse, not better. Actually, doing nothing at all in response to anger was more effective than expressing the anger in these destructive ways.

Even more effective than doing nothing is channeling your depression toward a productive, positive goal, as Pat and Pi do. James Pennebaker, a psychological researcher at the University of Texas in Austin, has found that people who find meaning in adversity are ultimately healthier in the long run than those who do not. In a study, he asked people to write about the darkest, most traumatic experience of their lives for four days in a row for a period of 15 minutes each day.

Analyzing their writing, Pennebaker noticed that the people who benefited most from the exercise were trying to derive meaning from the trauma. They were probing into the causes and consequences of the adversity and, as a result, eventually grew wiser about it. A year later, their medical records showed that the meaning-makers went to the doctor and hospital fewer times than people in the control condition, who wrote about a non-traumatic event. People who used the exercise to vent, by contrast, received no health benefits. Interestingly, when Pennebaker had other research subjects express their emotions through song or dance, the health benefits did not appear. There was something unique and special about the stories people told themselves. Those stories helped people find a silver lining in their adversity.

***

Barbara Fredrickson, a psychological researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has looked more closely at the relationship between being positive and resilience. Her research shows how important one is for the other.

The Weinstein Company

For starters, having a positive mood makes people more resilient physically. In one study, research subjects were outfitted with a device that measured their heart activity. After their baseline heart activity was recorded, they were presented with a stressful task: Each was asked to quickly prepare and deliver a speech on why he or she is a good friend. They were told that the speech would be videotaped and evaluated.

Heart rates rapidly increased. Arteries constricted. Blood pressure shot up.

Then, participants were shown a short video clip that either evoked negative emotions (like sadness), positive emotions (like happiness), or a neutral condition of no emotions. The participants were also told that if they were shown a video clip "by chance" that they were off the hook: They did not have to give the speech after all. That meant that their anxiety would start to subside as the video clips started.

Here was the interesting finding: The heart activity of the participants who viewed the positive clips returned to normal much quicker than their peers who were shown the negative or neutral clips. Positive emotions can, the researchers concluded, undo the effects of a stressful negative experience. The researchers found that the most resilient people were also more positive in day-to-day life.

It turns out that resilient people are good at transforming negative feelings into positive ones. For instance, one of the major findings of Fredrickson's studies was that resilient people took a different attitude toward the speech task than non-resilient people. They viewed the task as a challenge and opportunity for growth rather than as a threat. In other words, they found the silver lining.

With that in mind, the researchers wondered if they could inject some positivity into the non-resilient people to make them more resilient. They primed both types of people to approach the task either positive or negatively. The researchers told some people to see the task as a threat and they told others to see it as a challenge. What they found is good news for resilient and non-resilient people alike.

Resilient people who saw the task as a challenge did fine, as predicted. So did, interestingly, resilient people who were told to view the task as a threat. Resilient people, no matter how they approached the task, had the same cardiovascular recovery rate.

The people who benefitted from the priming were non-resilient people. Those who were told to approach the task as an opportunity rather than a threat suddenly started looking like high resilient people in their cardiovascular measures. They bounced back quicker than they otherwise would have.

Resilient people are good at bouncing back because they are emotionally complex. In each of Fredrickson's studies, resilient people experience the same level of frustration and anxiety as the less resilient participants. Their physiological and emotional spikes were equally high. This is important. It reveals that resilient people are not Pollyannas, deluding themselves with positivity. They just let go of the negativity, worry less, and shift their attention to the positive more quickly.

Resilient people also respond to adversity by appealing to a wider range of emotions. In another study, for instance, participants were asked to write short essays about the most important problem that they were facing in their lives. While resilient people reported the same amount of anxiety as less resilient people in the essays, they also revealed more happiness, interest, and eagerness toward the problem. For resilient people, high levels of positive emotions exist side-by-side with negative emotions. Think of how Pi responds to his seemingly hopeless situation aboard the boat: "I tell you, if you were in such dire straits as I was, you too would elevate your thoughts. The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar."

When your mind starts soaring, you notice more and more positive things. This unleashes an upward spiral of positive emotions that opens people up to new ways of thinking and seeing the world -- to new ways forward. This is yet another reason why positive people are resilient. They see opportunities that negative people don't. Negativity, for adaptive reasons, puts you in defense mode, narrows your field of vision, and shuts you off to new possibilities since they're seen as risks.

RELATED STORY

There's More to Life Than Being Happy

This calls to mind one of the best scenes from Silver Linings Playbook,in which a bad situation nearly consumes Pat. He is at a diner with Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), when he hears "Ma Cherie Amour" playing in his head  -- the song that was playing when he found his estranged wife naked in the shower with another man -- and has a traumatic flashback.

Tiffany helps him work past the episode: "You gonna go your whole life scared of that song? It's just a song. Don't make it a monster... There's no song playing. There's no song. Breathe, count backwards from ten. That's it." He recovers and their interaction sets the stage for the rest of the movie. 

Like Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook is about how we can tame our inner demons with hope and a positive outlook on life. By finding meaning and love in terrible circumstances, as Pi and Pat do, they overcome their suffering and, in the process, reveal how uplifting silver linings can be.

Amazing TED talk about a musician using Social Media

Dream Big - and the tools to help you do it....

Go to: http://bettyvision.com/home

Dare you to Go do It - Make it happen

Authenticity

GIRLS

by Sarah on MARCH 12, 2013 in SPIRITUALITY

I don’t know how
I got it in my head
If it was something I heard
Or something I read
Or all the glossy pictures
In the magazines
That convinced me
I had to be
So pretty
And perfect
So happy that
My cheeks hurt
Well screw that
Cause I’ve learned
The most important thing
I get to be me
Regardless of my company
I won’t change a thing
To make you think
That I’m more
Than what you see
I choose
Transparency
Authenticity
And embracing
Creativity
If you’ve got a freak flag?
I say fly it
If you’re different?
Then don’t hide it
The world’s got enough
People
Putting on a show
It’s too exhausting
And soul-sucking
Pretending to be
Something you’re not
If you were born
Awkward or skinny?
Own it
Then move on
Look inside yourself
And cultivate
Kindness
Love
And peace
Fill your mind
With knowledge
Seek out similarities
Anyone can be cynical
Just like gossip it’s
A short-term fix
An attempt to create
A bond with someone
And avoid discovering
What your true purpose is
So be bold
And brave
And wave your freak flag
Mine is fucking huge
And don’t waste time
Trying to be pretty
Or perfect
Whatever you do

The answer to my question why people spend time looking out over mountains.....

Thanks Peter Harris for forwarding these words of Robb Sagendorph.

ART

New Linkedin Connection Map

Linkedin now offers a service to generate connection maps - it's quite interesting

Outside the Box

Want more visitors to your blog? Use this simple five-letter word. By: Dennis Bailey

Everybody wants to get more website traffic and more visitors to their blog, right? Want to know an easy way to do it?

It's a simple five-letter word, but I'm not going to use it here. Why? Because when I used it in an earlier blog post, along with a picture of a certain person who also shall remain nameless, my blog exploded with thousands of hits in a single day, nearly 10,000 visits in less than a month. If I use these words again, I'm afraid I'll get the same result – people all over the world who are eagerly searching for those words or phrases will end up on my site, clogging my daily metrics. And for reasons I'll get into I'd just as soon avoid this.

Forgive me for being circumspect, but here's what happened. There's this big story going on in Maine right now involving – I don't even want to use the word. A woman has been arrested who supposedly operated a certain kind of dance studio (the five-letter word that rhymes with "roomba") but in reality offered something entirely different to her paying clients, something more intimate and illicit. Are you with me?

So a controversy has ensued, not only over the woman's arrest and her, ahem, "business partner," but also the clients who frequented her establishment. The police have been slowly releasing the names of the customers, every other week, and they've been showing up in local newspapers.

So, since I offer crisis management services, I wrote a simple blog post about the predicament these gentlemen find themselves in and speculated about whether there is anything that could be done to mitigate the publicity and their embarrassment. (Short answer: not much.) I included a somewhat exotic picture of the woman on my blog and her name in the caption.

Then the fun started. Visits to my blog exploded, going from a few dozen per day to over 1,000. Everybody it seemed was searching for information (and pictures) about this case, from all over the world. She's become an Internet sensation. Her photos are all over the web. There's even a site dedicated to the case with a countdown clock for when the next list of gentleman callers are due to be released.

It's getting out of hand. Lots of people are interested in this case, to an almost creepy degree. How do I know? Well, it isn't hard to check the IP address to see who's landing on my site and what pages they're looking at. Many of the IP addresses are company names presumably where the viewer works, or should be working instead of cruising the internet for sexy photos.

Here's just a sampling of some of the businesses whose employees, for one reason or another, are apparently "researching" this case:

• Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield
• Cisco Systems, Inc.
• Penn State College of Medicine
• The Proctor and Gamble Company
• Oregon State System of Higher Education
• US House of Representatives
• General Motors Corporation
• Central Intelligence Agency
• The Hertz Corporation
• Northrop Grumman Corp.
• Microsoft Corp.
• Homeland Security

And these are just a few of the US firms landing on my site. There are many more from countries all around the world. (And I've left out some of the local businesses and law firms to spare them the embarrassment. You know who you are. Stop it.)

Now, I should be happy that all these big-name companies are coming to my blog, right? They're at least discovering my firm and what I do (besides posting pictures of nekked women). Attracting viewers by being topical and controversial is certainly a way for a blog to go viral. There's actually a name for it – it's called "newsjacking," piggybacking on a hot news item by writing a blog post or press release that generates a spike in the number of viewers.
The problem is, so far at least, all this attention hasn't resulted in a single "quality lead," the whole purpose of a business blog. Despite all the brand name companies coming to my site, they're here for the pictures, not to do business with Savvy. The number of monthly visitors to my blog has certainly increased, but the conversion rate is next to nothing.
So that's the moral of this story. If all you want to do is increase your website traffic and bring in lots of new visitors, use that simple five letter word or print the woman's name in question and her picture. But be careful what you wish for. And you better hurry. With all the other websites and blogs popping up devoted to this topic, it's getting crowded out there, which is why I think that my website traffic is slowing falling back to normal.
And sometimes normal is good.

make it happen

socialnetworking4creatives: Social networking for creative peopleOk I'm no...

socialnetworking4creatives:
Social networking for creative people


Ok I'm no...: Social networking for creative people Ok I'm not amazing with the internet and I've got loads to learn but over the las...

Is this the Age of Mass Intelligence

I preferred one of the letters about this article than the article at www.moreintelligentlife.com/story/age-mass-intelligence/

Stop Procrastinating and Start Something

7 Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Start Something

by PATRICK on MARCH 8, 2013

“Secret of Adulthood: Don’t worry about finishing, worry about starting. Over and over and over.” – Gretchen Rubin author of The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

I would say it is common knowledge that the hardest part of accomplishing something often is just starting that item. But can that really be common knowledge? If we all knew that we accomplish more if we just started something, wouldn’t we be more likely to just start? However, the truth is that many dreams, goals, or even daily tasks never get realized or completed because we didn’t start them.

If I looked at a list of things I want or need to accomplish in the near future, that list would include very important items like prepare a certain fee bill for my day job, begin a meditation habit, complete the Couch to 5k program, call my insurance company about a claim I need to file, think of more blog topics, etc. The first four of those I keep putting off, not starting on any of them. The last one, well, I work on that one every day. Then there are just the simple day-to-day things that you couldn’t almost start and finish in one fell swoop, like putting away an item of clutter or throwing something away, where if you just started you would almost certainly be finished.

Why is it so hard to start something in the first place? According to Dr. Piers Steel, author of The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done, it is human nature – we are wired to procrastinate. He explains that theory quite well in the book. You or I could easily look at most of the people around us or even perhaps within ourselves and come to the conclusion that people must be wired to procrastinate, as it seems like nearly everyone does. In fact, Dr. Steel suggests that approximately 95% of people procrastinate. Wow!

But is there a difference between procrastinating and just not starting something? I would argue that there is. I think that procrastinating occurs in the face of something that we have to do. If you think back to the list of things that I want or need to do, the fee bill is something I have to do if I want paid for my time. Why I am putting it off? Because it is tedious and almost mind-numbing to prepare and it isn’t urgent. However, I would rather be done with it. What about starting a mediation habit? That is something I want to do (I could argue that I need to do it to realize all of the benefits, but for now I will call it a want). It is easier to make up excuses, such as lack of time or choosing to do other things, because I can put it off indefinitely, not just until a later time. I think that the difference there is important in dealing with how to tackle these each problem.

Some Ways to Start Something.

1. Start small. Leo Babauta of Zen Habits suggests starting a new habit small, as little as two minutes per day. This is a good strategy because anyone can find such a small amount of time and build on it. This works for physical items like building endurance and will work for productivity and non-physical items for the same reason. This is the strategy that I will be using to start that mediation routine – this weekend!

2. Just do it. This is easier said than done, otherwise we wouldn’t be discussing how to start something. However, the most effective way to move forward is by taking the first step, even if you are not prepared or don’t know where you are going.

This blog was born that way. I know that I wanted to start a blog to share my thoughts and experiences and connect with like-minded people. I had been buying up domain names for awhile to have the correct one for the “right idea”. Well, the “right idea” never seemed to come (or, probably more accurately, the elusive “right time” never came). Recently I read Be a Free Range Human: Escape the 9-5, Create a Life You Love and Still Pay the Bills by Marianne Cantwell, which was very good. In that book, the author suggests starting a “Play Project” and just jumping in to that project. This blog was my Play Project, and I am so glad that I started it, but it took that first step to get going (even before writing this post I was dragging my feet, but I took the first step and it is my longest and most thorough post yet).

3. Set a deadline and schedule it. Put it on your calendar and make it happen. Even if you put off starting until closer to your deadline, if you are committed to starting by that deadline, you likely will do so. That is how this particular post came about. I had been brainstorming ideas for my next post, but had a deadline of Friday to write and publish that post. Here it is Friday, I started to write and soon you will be reading this. Knowing myself, I may have waited until the weekend and then been caught up with other obligations, but I scheduled that I needed to do this post and followed through.

A Couple Steps to Deal With Procrastination.

“Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off til tomorrow what you can do today.” – Lord Chesterfield

1. Commit to doing it today. To-do lists work for some people, and for others they become an insurmountable list of things that will never get done. If a standard to-do list works for you, well you probably aren’t reading this. If it doesn’t, cut the list down. This is not an original strategy, but it works. Put 3-5 things on your list each morning that you need to get done that day. These should be items that you know you would be the most likely to put off, which coincidentally would also be the items you would more like to get behind you. That fee bill is on my list today. By keeping the list manageable, you are more likely to accomplish those tasks because you are making them a priority.

2. Find someone to hold you accountable. If you are finding yourself procrastinating too often, ask a friend or partner to hold you accountable. Tell them what you want to accomplish on a given day and report back later with what you actually accomplished. Better yet, share to-do lists and make a competition around who can finish more items off of his or her list.

This works with starting something too, but I didn’t want to discuss it in both places. One of the main purposes of this blog is to discover how to live better and have others learn and share with me. Some items that I post about are items that a new step for me (i.e., unplugging). It helps me to know that I put my commitment out there. It helped me follow through on the National Day of Unplugging and it will help me tomorrow when I start small and meditate for two minutes.

3. Partner with technology. You probably have a smartphone. Use it to for motivation and to be more accountable. I personally use, and enjoy, Carrot, but there are others available. Remember, just don’t get caught up in too much screen time.

4. If it takes less than X minutes, do it now. Do you walk past that clutter you keep meaning to put away, or sometimes ignore something you knocked over? I’ve been known to do both as well as ignore other seemingly trivial things that could be addressed very quickly. Well if takes less than a minute or two, just address it immediately. There are multiple variations of this rule (1, 2, 5, etc. minutes), but I left it blank above because you should do what works for you. I like the one-minute rule a lot and find that when I remind myself to follow it I get a lot more little things done.

 What about you? Do you have trouble with starting things? procrastinating? Why? What do you do to get around those issues?

Twit

Infographic: A Funny & Useful Guide For Decoding ‘Twitter Language’

By Loke Shi Ying, 07 Mar 2013

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Advertising news website ADZAG.CO has created a Twictionary—a hilarious guide to Twitter jargons for the average social media marketer.

Whether to make fun of stereotypes found on Twitter, or just mirroring common tweeting habits, the Twictionary has a rather comprehensive list of Twitter-related word—including words like Dweet, Tantrum, Tweet Cred, Tweetup, and Twypo, just to name a few.

View the the infographic below: