A Meaningful Life

In person peoples views are far more open and authentic, even more so than the openness of their blog entries. This is simply because the risks are lower. That’s all it is, the risks. The risks are:

• looking bad (dumb, stupid, ignorant etc)
• offending others (customers, minority groups etc)
• being logged on the electronic record for all history.

There’s probably a bigger list but this is enough for this post. So the driver of this self censorship is reputation risk at the surface of it. Deeper though, the driver is survival. Everything stems from survival. Surviving and being happy are foundations of human behaviour and action.

Society demands some censorship to prevent laws, morals and ethics being crushed by authenticity. The reality is everyone sensors themselves when they write. If you wrote everything that little voice in your head said you would be an extreme blogger, the basejumper of blogging. 1 in 1000 posts would kill you. You would be popular, unpopular and extremely interesting all at the same time. That sort of volatility would make you feel really alive, but it might just kill you as well.

That little voice in your head full of unprintable ideas, likes and dislikes is the volatile version of what ends up as sensibly censored blog posts and musings.

I find that when a list is used for planning my day I get a lot more done. The most unproductive days in my life are random unplanned ones. However at the same time they create expectation about how much I should have done once the day was over versus the actual outcome. This can lead to disappointment and the worst emotion of all, guilt.

The To Do List Hot Tip

I was taught a great tip that when I heard it it was like an epiphany. Mark the items on you list that you plan NOT to do in the immediate future. Yes it works, it takes all that expectation and guilt away leaving only those items on your list that you will honestly have a chance of attending to in the immediate future. It’s so simple and perfect.

My derivative version of this tip

I just have a short list on my desktop of the things I’d like to get done today. I’m into simplicity and order. I guess it is one of the reasons I like Japanese gardens. The rest of my to do’s are in our Trac system for work related ones or in a Google Docs spreadsheet for all my home and family things.

It doesn’t have to be on paper

I like mental lists. On weekends a paper list feels like a list of chores, something that has power over me. Mental lists are better in my opinion. I’ll go over it several times a day. “Ok, what’s next, if i do ‘x’ now then ‘y’ will take half as long” etc.

Saturday night I got a call from a friend. “Let’s go fishing”, he said. I knew I had a lot to do around home on Sunday so this invite compelled me to get a mental list together of how I could make that day a success. I was going to have to pack a lot into 16 hours. So I did my mental list. Go fishing, clean the house, do some hard landscaping and swim with the kids. It might not sound like much but the landscaping was a lot of work. I got it all done but best of all I did extra things like putting the washing away and going for another swim/spa before bed. I bet if they were on my list I wouldn’t have got to it or if I didn’t quite get to do them I would have been disappointed.

Side Note: There’s nothing more satisfying than packing a lot into a day. I liken it to the difference between being in the stands at a football game versus being on the field playing in the game. The difference is participating fully in life.

You MUST have fun things on your lists

If your list is about stuff you have to do and don’t really want to do your doomed to fail completing things on your list when planned. Fun things on your list bring balance to the list. After all, it is your life you are doing!

Cool Hunting points out Japans forever-ahead-of-the-curve answer to the reusable shopping bag. Far less likely to lead to social death when you use them to take stuff to BBQ’s. Who will print the first version with Elvis on the side? Even a Sudoku puzzle? Hit Ponoko , spec it and it could be you!

Are we being too quick to ‘damn’ the ‘dams’? Is it better for the environment if we humans produce 1,000,000 water tanks and the required pipes, pumps, controls and labour or alternately build a 1,000,000 person supplying dam using the utility approach?

I got to thinking about this today whilst looking into water tanks. My collegue Peter Cooper at Saasu.com suggested maybe we should look at more localized dams. I think this is actually quite sensible if sites are available. Don’t think for a second that I don’t like water tanks. My gut feeling is telling me I should have one. I’d just like to be certain (thinking more like an engineer) that the distributed environmental impact of producing water tanks is actually less than the centralised environmental impact of the utility approach of dam building. Any ideas so I can make a decision?

Went to my old home town and saw family, some fast Red Bull Pylon Planes and met some very cool customers of Saasu.com. See my post on the Saasu.com blog about business travel. Perth is in a buzz thanks to the mining boom.