Category Archives: productivity

preparing for snap decisions

Last week I was spending at least a couple of hours every day on the phone and on the internet trying to identify a job or consulting opportunities for our hoped-for destination in Florida. It wasn’t easy; if you’ve ever thought about moving to an area where you have only a tiny handful of connections you’ll know that it’s nowhere near as easy as searching in your home market. But it can be done.

So one company that’s been intermittently in touch with me called me up late Thursday and asked if I could fly out Sunday to meet with them first thing Monday morning. A little background - they had been slow to respond to me previously and I had seen no real signs that they were interested until they put my resume in front of a different department head. Suddenly they wanted me to fly out within 36 hours.

When I got the call, I froze. It was short notice, I hadn’t even considered mentioning it to Bubelah and it was Little Buddy’s third birthday. I stuttered out my first response - “Monday’s no good” - without thinking. The person I was supposed to interview with was leaving the country Tuesday morning. I had blown a great opportunity.

After a bit of reflection, I realized I’d made a serious mistake. Little Buddy might miss me on his birthday - but we also had planned a second birthday celebration for next weekend for people who couldn’t make it on a weekday (my parents, Bubelah’s parents and a few friends). His birthday would be a party attended by neighborhood kids only. I would be missed, I’m sure, but I realized that I had botched an attempt at securing a good job in a strange market; a job that would help me lay the foundations for a future consulting practice in my new home town.

Everything ended up alright in the end. I’m still flying down later this week. But I did learn a lesson: when you have a goal, and it’s important - not just to you, but to your family - seize it when it’s offered. I was lucky to get a second chance but I just as easily could have been unlucky. Life is full of second chances, but it’s better to assume you won’t get one.

photo credit: Joshua Davis (jdavis.info)

free time does not translate to massive productivity

Time Spiral
If you’ve ever thought that you could accomplish a lot more with your life if only you had a little more free time, you’re not alone. I did, too, and now I have that free time. For years I blamed exhaustion, or the “necessary” errands that consumed what little free time I did have. I thought now, when I was no longer chained to a desk, would be my time to accomplish all those things I always dreamed I would do. Yet when I look back over the past three years, the peak moments of productivity - personally and professionally - have seldom been the moments when I had the most free time. I am not now at my most productive, and understanding why has become my primary goal.

Over the past three years (2006-2008) I’ve been (almost) continually employed. During that time I’ve had three clients. Client A was a very short commute (less than half an hour), and what I’d call an “early office” - I made it in around 8:00 am most days and usually left by 4 or 4:30. Client B was a long commute (almost two hours each way), and while I seldom worked more than 8 hours in a day I did stay late on occasion. It was a “late office” - most of the people in my department drifted in around 9:30 or 10:00, so it was hard to justify arriving at 8 and leaving at 4. Client C was a short commute (by New York standards) of one hour, and the client was very flexible about the hours, not really caring if I arrived at 8 or at 10. It was very much a ROWE office.

In between those clients I’ve had two major periods of “free time” - first, when my daughter was born earlier this year and now, when I’m unemployed. I took off five weeks when Pumpkin was born, and I’ve been laid off for about five weeks now. Saying that I had free time when Pumpkin was born is, well, untrue. I had none. Even though my wife heroically dealt with Pumpkin most of the time, I became Little Buddy’s full-time parent. Still not potty-trained at the time, he kept me busy. We’ll take that time period out of the discussion because having a newborn and a two-year old at home with no help can keep two parents busy, even though you might not think so.

So when was I most productive while working? Client A was a horrific environment, with a no-wall cubicle farm, frequent last-minute meetings and a lot of work taking place on a trading desk. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Boiler Room,” that’s the environment I was working in. Client B was the exact opposite. They gave me a quiet cubicle on the opposite side of the floor from the rest of the department. They never had meetings, and email was the preferred method of communication. Client C was back to the Client A world - a huge conference room shared by 45 consultants, all talking on mobile phones, yelling back and forth to each other and sitting two feet apart. Today I am sitting at my quiet writing desk on the third floor of our townhouse, looking out over the large green space in front of our home. The only noise is the hissing of the baby monitor while my daughter sleeps, and the distant shouts of my son playing with his babysitter, who comes for a couple of hours in the morning.

Am I the most productive I’ve ever been, now that I have “free time”? I have a writing area, a babysitter, and no commute. I am free to pursue whatever activity I want to, within the limits of child care and cost. And yet I find that I was far more productive while working at Client B with four hours of commuting time than I have yet to be at home. Why?

Having so little free time while at Client B forced me to be organized and disciplined with my time while at home. It also made me focused at work, knowing that whatever tasks I could accomplish there would free up time at home. So when I finished client work, I was focused on writing outlines for blog posts or taking care of administrative tasks related to my consulting. I did not spend endless hours reading Sports Illustrated or The New York Times. I made good use of my time on the train by reading, and as any writer can tell you reading is the best inspiration. Although we only had one child at the time, we didn’t have a babysitter and I seldom had any real free time until 9 or 10 pm.

Yet my busiest time was a time of tremendous productivity for me. Most of the “most popular” posts you see to the right were written during that time. I was tired, and I felt like I had no free time, but everything got done that needed to get done. While at Clients A and C almost nothing got done. The oppressive work environment meant that I was less productive professionally. The noise and lack of space made it hard to accomplish anything. Because I took longer to do my work, I came home and started writing, and it wasn’t good. Because the commutes were short, I quit reading books and started listening to morning shock jock bits (this was before I discovered podcasts). My personal and professional productivity took a beating.

Now, with nothing but free time, you might expect I would be productive. I am not. I find that in a non-structured environment I have difficulty focusing on even the simplest tasks, which is surprising to me. I have trouble reading. I spend more time than I should with my kids. I cannot get organized about my computer time - I check email again and again throughout the day, which is a terrible idea. I twitter. If not for Leechblock I would spend half the day reading about our collapsing economy.

Some of us, despite what we like to think, need the structure of a job to be productive. Sometimes getting up and leaving the house forces you to be more productive whether you like it or not. I am not anxious to return to 9-to-5 work, but I have had to confront a simple fact: everything I thought I knew about organizing my time has to be thrown out the window. I have never been good about organization and productivity, because I was only organized and productive when forced to be by circumstance! I have to relearn so much to be as organized as I need to be; but right now I have all the free time in the world to do nothing but learn, so I have no excuses now. No long commutes, no bad work environments, no boring work to blame for “crushing my creativity.”

Stephen King says in his masterpiece “On Writing” that the most important part of writing is learning to close the door. He’s a brilliant writer (if you think of him only as a hack horror writer, try picking up one of his books sometime - they are as well-written as anything you’ll ever read). His point is that if you fail to close the door when writing, both figuratively and literally, you’ll never have a chance to succeed. It is too easy to let the world distract. Although he is talking about writing, he could just as easily be talking about cooking or exercising or almost any productive venture. We have too much to distract us, and too little time to do anything well if we fail to concentrate on what we are doing at that moment. The challenge is to learn that focus, and that’s what I’ll be trying to do (and trying to write about) as I continue my experiment with living away from the 9-to-5.

photo credit: gadl

what motivates you more: frugality or decluttering?

I love clutter

Bubelah doesn’t care for the word “frugal.” Her opinion is that it combines the virtues of being resourceful, buying quality items to avoid replacing them, and saving on unnecessary purchases with the vices of a poverty mindset and denying yourself too much in the present for a future that may or may not occur. I don’t have much trouble with the word, but considering I’ve just watched a large amount of the money I’ve saved over the years disappear into thin air during the recent market contortions, being frugal in order to save for the future is much less attractive than it seemed in the past.

I know all the arguments - the market always makes money over the long term, Social Security won’t be there for us and consumerism is sucking our brains out through our wallets. As someone who’s never been in debt other than a mortgage I’ve never needed to be frugal to “get back to zero.” As I child, I lived in a frugal household (woe was me) but since I’ve been an adult the sole purpose of frugality in my life has been to set aside money for the future, with the added benefit of avoiding the purchase of things I don’t need.

Now that we have a four-person family I’ve noticed that I avoid purchasing things more and more out of a desire to declutter. I am as much of a sucker for a cute toy or book for the kids as anyone, but the toy-strewn landscape of our basement and living room are serving as great deterrents these days. I sold dozens of books on eBay and gave hundreds more to my parents, friends and anyone who wanted them, but our bookcases are still stuffed full. I have a lot of clothes that I seldom wear. We have a far larger house than we absolutely NEED but as with any living space our stuff slowly creeps into every corner.

So frugality has yielded as a driving force in our lives to decluttering and some (but probably not enough) concern for the environment and how much trash we create. I’ll be honest: I don’t clip coupons. I probably should. We fail in frugality in many ways - we buy organic foods even when no real evidence exists that they are better. We have two cars when we could probably get by with one. I took the ferry to work instead of the subway because the New York subway is…well, the New York subway. I am comfortable in this market saving about 15%-20% of my earnings and then forgetting about the rest; we reduce spending to the point where we can contribute that level of savings and then forget about saving any more than that.

But now when I look at a big TV or a new book and think about buying it, the desire to avoid more clutter is much more of a decision factor than the desire to be frugal. Clutter keeps us from buying things we don’t need. That works for stuff, of course, but experiences (eating out, traveling, entertainment) are another matter; but even there the “clutter” builds up in your days. It has a temporal presence even if it doesn’t have a physical presence.

Frugality has its place. Most people need to be more frugal. I probably still need to be more frugal. And if you’re in debt, you definitely need to be more frugal: you don’t need a new pair of shoes or a flat screen TV. But for me, frugality is increasingly an afterthought to clutter, environmental concerns and the need to keep searching out wealth instead of finding new ways to squeeze out diminishing rates of return on savings.

photo credit: sindesign

how to work from home with small kids

bull.jpg

My consulting contract ended last Wednesday, right before the Thanksgiving holiday, and with no new contract lined up I’m working from home as a problogger. I’ve learned a few lessons about working at home with kids already. As of now my “work from home” has consisted of working on this blog, but I’ve started working heavily on my personal consulting site, updating my “real world” social media contacts at LinkedIn, Facebook, etc., and brainstorming about wealthstreams. As you can see from the photo, I have some incentive to stay away from corporate consulting world - the blue bottle is sitting where I worked. Charming, eh?

In the four-day “intro to working from home” I’ve had, I’ve learned to:

  1. Stay focused on the task at hand … but if you can’t focus, put it aside. Since I have two small kids running around (well, one running and one crawling), staying focused on work is a challenge. Childproofing the house is a challenge for one kid, but once you have two it’s impossible to have age-appropriate childproofing everywhere. If I can’t stay focused on work because Little Buddy’s playing with the gas stove, then I ditch work until he’s taking a nap. I’ve already completely botched a few tasks I worked on from jumping up and chasing the kids, and I would have been better off waiting until later to complete those tasks.
  2. Keep schedules. Your work can be flexible - kids can’t. Little Buddy likes to go to sleep between 7 and 8 in the evening, so I have that time blocked out. Knowing that the 7 to 8 time period is not going to be productive is much more helpful than putting him to sleep at 6 one day, 9 the next, 7 the next. I can prepare my schedules, and he gets comfort from keeping his.
  3. Don’t feel guilty about working. I felt guilty the first day I was home even thinking about how I was going to organize working from home. I’m so accustomed to the “Papa-gets-home-and-plays-with-the-kids-30-minutes-on-weekdays and Papa-plays-all-weekend” mentality that I had to take a step back and remember that if I treat every day from now on like a Saturday the kids will be exhausted and I’ll never do ANY work.
  4. Don’t feel guilty about playing. I also felt bad on Sunday morning that I was getting some work done while the kids were playing quietly. I had no reason to feel bad - they were enjoying themselves - but when their attention turned to me, I put aside my “guilt” about “wasting time playing” and jumped into playtime - because it’s not a waste and there’s nothing to feel guilty about!
  5. The 9-to-5 mentality has to disappear, fast. If you’ve worked in a 40 (or 60 or 80 or worse) hour per week company, your world has a black-and-white divider between work time and “life” time (unless you’re an unlucky person with a Blackberry). On day two I suddenly said to myself “hey, if I want to go for a run at 2 pm that’s fine.” And later that evening I felt like working at 9 pm, and did. I know that might seem obvious, but for a Generation Xer brought up in the Baby Boomers’ face-time world, it is a shock.
  6. Keeping organized is more important than ever. If you need to be able to jump to work for an hour while the kids are miraculously both sleeping, you can’t spend the first 20 minutes figuring out what to do. Keeping organized - in a simple, efficient way - is critical.
  7. …and keeping the house organized is more important than ever, too. You can’t waste time trying to find Pumpkin’s binky and Little Buddy’s sippy. Organizing and cleaning the house before we go to sleep is a lot easier with two of us at home, and having all the kiddie stuff ready to go first thing in the morning makes the A.M. hours much more productive (well, that and a coffee pot with a timer).
  8. LeechBlock (or something similar) is an essential productivity tool for the news junkie. If you don’t use Firefox, skip this step and go download Firefox! LeechBlock is a great add-on for someone like me who just can’t stay away from the Times and CNN and other news sites. I know reading the news should take about 15 minutes every day - scan the headlines and move on. I have a problem, though, and even though the election’s done I still struggle with “taking a break” by reading the news. I have LeechBlock set to allow me 1 hour (and that’s still too much) per 24 hours on all of the news sites I read, combined - then it blocks me.
  9. Make sure you don’t skimp on things you need to work. Our laptop fizzled and died last week, and although we have a hearty desktop computer that I can use, it’s not in an area separate from the living area and kitchen - the kids head right over for us when we sit down at the desktop. Having a laptop and a desk upstairs, removed from the common areas of the house, was important so I bought a new one. And before anyone thinks they don’t have enough room, my dad used to sit at a tiny desk in a closet when we were kids and lived in a tiny apartment. It’s not fair to make the kids behave like they are in an office - separate work and play areas.
  10. Mindless entertainment is an even worse idea than it was before. I enjoy coming home from a long day and commute and plopping down in front of the TV as much as the next person. It was a waste of time then, but it’s a HUGE waste of time now. If you watch 2 hours of TV per night (and let’s be honest… when I watch a two-hour movie it’s usually bookended by a “few minutes” of programming before and after) you are spending 14 hours per 7 day week. That’s more than a third of your old 40-hour-per-week schedule. Three hours per day and you might as well forget about working from home.
  11. The Distractors (email, Twitter, digg, StumbleUpon, friendfeed and on and on) are suddenly a huge presence in my life. My corporate clients blocked personal email and many social media sites - a corporate LeechBlock, I guess. Now I can check email once every 5 minutes. And I have been. And I need it to stop. A lot of productivity gurus recommend checking email once or twice a day, and I’ll aim for the same. Twitter is another tough one - but the simple fix there is to follow people who have something interesting or provocative to say. Digg? It’s the Web equivalent of sitcoms, I think. StumbleUpon? Channel surfing - maybe you’ll find something interesting, but if you don’t after 10 minutes better shut it off. Keep the “fun sites” under control, or you’re no better off than a TV-aholic.
  12. Managing finances becomes a critical task. My blog income, while increasing, has been a small percentage of my consulting income. I tended to just pile it into a separate checking account and forget about it. Now that it will be my primary business, I need to manage my income and concentrate on increasing it. Realistically it’s time for me to think about setting up an LLC, too.
  13. Don’t be a jerk boss. You’ve probably met this guy in your career. Stays late, works too much, gets grumpy for no reason, and acts like a jerk all the time. If you are your own boss, don’t be a jerk. Create a positive work environment, for yourself. Make your own results-oriented workplace, and don’t force yourself to do busy work. Make time for the kids - think of them as employees who need to be kept happy for a productive workplace.
  14. Get out once in a while. In the wintertime it’s easy to stay home. All day. Every day. After slogging back and forth to Manhattan from New Jersey for five years I don’t have much desire to get out. The cold doesn’t encourage you to get out, either. Yet every member of the family needs to get out of the house from time to time. Little Buddy and I went to the store a couple of days ago, and his enthusiasm at such a dull outing reminded me that we need to keep going out.
  15. Holidays and weekends don’t mean much anymore. If you’re a 9-to-5 worker, a holiday - or a weekend - is a well-deserved chance to do NOTHING. If you are working from home, it’s only a chance to do nothing if something’s going on (you have visitors, or you’re traveling). I reminded myself Sunday that I wasn’t getting on the ferry Monday morning - there was no excuse not to get to work!
  16. Don’t dump all childcare duties on your spouse - but don’t doubleteam the kids, either. Bubelah and I have been absolutely terrible from day one at doubleteaming the kids. Even when we just had Little Buddy we would both hover in the room when he wanted to play, eat, poop - whatever. As a two-kid couple, we’ve learned a little bit more about seizing the moment - one parent can watch both kids while the other accomplishes something. If you eternally split “watching” duties, one parent to one kid, you’ll never manage to do anything during the day. In the first few days I’ve stayed home, we’ve done a better job than ever of splitting up - one of us goes and works out while the other watches the kids, or one of us watches both kids while the other works on the computer.

Let’s face facts:

  • Working is hard.
  • Working from home is hard - you need discipline and focus.
  • Working from home with a child is tough - that poop won’t wait for the client call to finish.
  • Working from home with two children is tougher - telling one “hey, be quiet, I have to put your sister to sleep” works about 1% of the time.
  • Working is hard.

Yet I’ve found that I can work from home by managing my time and remembering my priorities - and so far I’m loving it. This is my second stint problogging and it’s already off to a much better start, so I’ll hope that I can keep giving positive updates. Let me know your tips if you’ve been in a similar situation!

the big social media post

Conversations Silhouettes by Kirsty Pargeter
I’m not entirely sold on the “social media” thing, but I’m trying it all out. I give almost every new service that drifts across my radar a shot. I love StumbleUpon and del.icio.us; I’m less sold on the value of some of the other services. That having been said, I recognize Twitter’s reach and FriendFeed’s potential.

If you have any interest, here are my social media links:

Plurk
Twitter
HelloTxt
Tumblr
StumbleUpon
Digg
del.icio.us
Friendfeed
Technorati
YouTube (nothing there yet - I plan to start putting vids up, though)
Flickr

I’d also recommend pfbuzz and tip’d where I’m also operating under - surprise - bripblap.

photo credit: b_d_solis

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learning to let go, part 2

I talked about learning to let go before, in the context of letting go of stuff. It’s easy to get attached to stuff. People keep the tchotke from their wedding, that special mug from the first time they visited Cleveland and the wedding program of their 8th-best friend. But the hardest thing to let go, at least for people with a frugal or wealth-building mindset, is money.

Life can be viewed as a deprivation, a drunken orgy or a celebration. Some people choose to view life as a grim struggle against impossible odds; the point of the game is to grab at a tiny handhold and survive against the storm. Others view it as a party without end - credit cards a-flingin’, debt a-massin’ and a good time to be had by all until last call. And finally, the best view: a measured balance between saving, spending, thrift and indulgence.


photo credit: James Jordan

I struggle with spending money for vacations. We haven’t taken a non-family vacation in 3 years now. We are planning on hitting the Poconos for a week in about a month, and it took me a few minutes to adjust to the idea that yes, we need to spend some money that’s not being spent on the holy grails: retirement, savings, investments, da future.

Everybody has to strike a balance, of course. But there’s certainly a point at which all of us need to recognize that inflation, history, the weak market, the changing forces of history and pure chance can destroy savings. Money spent on things that are useful and durable or experiences that are uplifting is not money wasted. If you buy an asset you will use for years, or take a reasonable vacation you will love for years, it is worth it. Value your span of days by the level of enjoyment, not by cost.

getting one thing done

As part of my 6-posts-in-one-day assault, I thought I would address my latest productivity attempt. I find that I am an excellent list-maker and sorter, but I have the usual trouble getting things done. I have decided recently that the focus has to be on getting one thing done per day. Pick a random item from your to-do list (I use Vitalist) and do it. Put no pressure on yourself to get more than one item done.

This concept isn’t original with me. Zen Habits has the big rocks concept, but it’s a concept that predates Zen Habits. Nonetheless, it is powerful. I get overwhelmed by lists. The last few days, I have picked one item off the list - no matter how trivial - and told myself, get this one done today. Everything else can slide.

It works.

The Rock
photo credit: Fr Antunes

6 ways to become famous

About a month ago, before I started problogging, I was walking in midtown Manhattan when I saw a strange sight: a young woman walking down the street singing at the top of her lungs. She was not particularly striking, but she looked about the same as most of the current pop stars if you took off the celebrity- makeup-artist applied makeup. Her voice was quite good; I’m not a fan of R&B music but she was belting it out well enough that I could appreciate the quality of her voice. I like music, and I listen to a lot of it in a lot of different genres. She wasn’t bad.

On the other hand, she looked crazy as hell. If you aren’t familiar with the modus operandi on New York city streets, here it is: if you see someone doing something crazy you just move on. You don’t stare, you don’t alter your walking path; you treat the guy screaming about the Queen of England’s control of the drug trade like you’d treat a lamppost - you just keep going. To notice is the cardinal sin. But I noticed. Maybe she was crazy, maybe she was just happy and didn’t care and maybe - just maybe - she was taking a chance on walking through Manhattan, a place lousy with movie stars and agents and whatnot (we were near the MTV studios, for example) and putting her voice out there where someone might here it.

I like this idea and choose to believe that’s why she was singing. Maybe that’s the key to being famous - being oblivious to the embarrassment. Was Britney embarrassed putting on that schoolgirl’s uniform for “One More Time?” That’s possibly a bad example… she doesn’t appear to have the embarrassement gene - but that’s one way to get famous: have no shame. Here are six more ways to get famous:

  1. Work hard. A lot of overnight success is the result of years of hard work. George Clooney spent 10 years acting in bad shows like “Facts of Life” and “Roseanne” before hitting the semi-big time as part of an ensemble cast in ER. His first movie role (The Peacemaker) was a bomb. He kept at it and today, of course, he can snore on camera for 90 minutes and have a hit.
  2. Get noticed. Look at Paul Potts. Take a shot by singing opera in a pop music contest. Get out there and do something different.
  3. Go off-road. Robert Kiyosaki said investing in index funds and worrying about debt were the marks of a poor person’s mentality. Whether you agree with him or not, it did get him noticed. Take a position different enough from the norm - and defend it well - and people will notice.
  4. Be successful. Warren Buffet is a clever guy, but let’s face it - the reason we listen to him is not his sparkling wit or his charming personality (both of which he has), but the fact that he is the richest man on the planet. If you succeed in your field, people will notice.
  5. Aim for a good hook up. Whether it’s landing the rock star hubby or the rock star agent, making sure you make the connections may make up for a lot. Johnny Depp got his start in acting while he was a struggling rock musician because his wife, a makeup artist, had a famous client who told Johnny he’d hook him up for acting gigs if the music wasn’t working out for him. That client? Nicholas Cage.
  6. Trust in yourself. If you want people to notice YOU, love yourself. If you project confidence, happiness, intensity and success people will love that. Take Kurt Cobain. He was obviously a guy in a lot of personal pain. Yet at the same time, when you heard him sing you heard a titan; he projected a massive, overwhelming personality through his music that made him a star. It never made up for the struggle in his personal life, true, but it was clear he knew what he was doing musically.

So if you want to be famous, be a little crazy. Sing out loud, introduce yourself to the friend of a friend of a friend who knows a producer, write a book. Not everyone wants (or needs) to be famous, but fame’s just like anything else in this life; if you want it badly enough and work hard enough to get it, you have a good chance at it. Just don’t forget your buddy Steve.

Creative Commons License photo credit: dtcchc

brutal honesty

strangling statues

What is brutal honesty? Can you afford to be brutally honest? And what is the alternative to brutal honesty?I see this phrase from time to time and wonder when it first came about. The phrase ‘brutal honesty’ is actually a very clever juxtaposition of two very different things. Look at the dictionary definitions:

bru·tal [broot-l] –adjective
1. savage; cruel; inhuman
2. crude; coarse
3. harsh; ferocious
4. taxing, demanding, or exhausting
5. irrational; unreasoning.
6. of or pertaining to lower animals.

hon·es·ty [on-uh-stee] –noun, plural -ties.
1. the quality or fact of being honest; uprightness and fairness.
2. truthfulness, sincerity, or frankness.
3. freedom from deceit or fraud.

So using those definitions, let me just associate a bit here: savage uprightness, crude sincerity, exhausting frankness, unreasoning freedom from deceit. Each one of them has a highly negative meaning to me.

So when should you be brutally honest? If you’re trying to confront someone with a substance abuse problem? If you’re telling Jane that dress just doesn’t match her eyes? If you’re telling Junior there is no Santa Claus?

Brutality is an act of violence. If I am being brutally honest, I am assaulting your beliefs in some way. I would probably guess that this happens very frequently when people confront others over:

1. Money
2. Relationships
3. Substance abuse
4. Lifestyle habits (overweight, etc.)
5. Illness or injury
6. Psychological problems

#6 is probably an area best left alone since I’m not a psychiatric professional, and I will only speak to the other five. Taking money as an example, when is brutal honesty necessary? If you have a friend who is spending like crazy, running up a significant credit card debt, should you tell them to stop? Should you be brutally honest and tell them “you have a low-paying job, too much debt and you’ll never be able to buy a house or retire or live like a normal person until you get your spending under control”? That depends on your relationship with the person, but my guess is that brutal honesty is almost always met with hostility and seldom achieves its goals.

I personally hate people being brutally honest with me. And I hate being brutally honest with others. Probably tells you something about me, doesn’t it?

(photo by victoriapeckham)

learning how to let go

When you look at a mug, do you see a mug? Or do you see a gift from grandma, a souvenir from that charming bistro in Paris, the cup that your daughter used for her hot chocolate when she was little? Whether you see just a mug or an object that emits memories probably makes a big difference in the level of clutter in your life.

Here are a few key points about sentimental attachments to “stuff.”

1. Stuff is not memory-magnetic. If you still own a childhood teddy that your father gave you, you probably tell people it has “memories attached to it.” It doesn’t. If the bear is given away to the neighbor’s kid tomorrow, your memories will not disappear.

2. Stuff packed away in boxes is not sentimental. I have a couple of keepsakes, knickknacks, doodads, etc. I have my Star Wars baseball-style cards from my childhood. They are in a box in the garage. If someone threw them away tomorrow, I wouldn’t notice for years. If you pack something away in a box and never take it out, you aren’t sentimental about it.

3. Some of the things you keep are not attracting good memories. If you have something that makes you sad, but you hang on to it because you feel it had some significance in your life, you aren’t doing yourself any favors.

4. You can’t take it with you. I guarantee that within 100 years either your stuff or you will be gone. You’re leaving your stuff behind sooner or later, my friend.

I like my stuff. I like my childhood toys. But I don’t like clutter. Something has to give at some point. That collection of Star Wars cards is one more shoebox packed in one more big cardboard box taking just a little more storage space out of the garage and making me grumble that we have nowhere to store the megaboxes of diapers. So what to do?

1. Be brutal. Throw out stuff. You may be tempted to put it in a pile ‘for donation’ or ‘for the neighbors’ or ‘for my future grandchildren.’ Unless you go directly to the Salvation Army right after assembling a pile of unneeded memorabilia, toss it. I know that’s not the environmentally sound thing to do, but we are on a mission, my comrades.

2. Be honest. If you have a sentimental coffee cup, fine. If you have three… OK. If you have 16, you might want to winnow down a bit. You don’t need 16 coffee cups.

3. Take pictures. If there’s something you don’t need, but you want to remember it, take a picture. Put it in a screensaver. You’ll see it, the memory will trigger but you’ll still have less clutter.

4. Sell it. If you can move promptly - see rule #1 - sell your stuff. You may love that 1964 “I Love Lyndon” coffee mug but face it - wouldn’t you rather have the $8 it could fetch on eBay?

5. Just refuse it, baby! The next time you go on a trip to Cabo Wabo, don’t get the “I partied with Sammy Hagar” memorial tequila shooters. Take some pictures instead.

6. Put it in circulation. I have about a dozen nesting dolls I brought home from Russia. I treated them like they were holding the Hope Diamond for a while. Then I suddenly realized that Little Buddy would get a lot of fun out of them. I have a twinge thinking about them breaking, but then again it’s not like I’m going to forget I lived in Russia. If you have wedding china, use it! If you have an antique chair, sit in it!

I am a sentimentalist. I fall somewhere in the middle of the scale between Mr. Spock (emotionless rejection of all sentimentality) and people who keep their cremated pets in urns. I do, however, try to eliminate the least sentimental pieces I own, and more importantly to minimize the new ‘stuff’ I buy during ‘a moment.’ Learning to let go isn’t easy - but we have to do it.

how to write gooder

When you’ve been blogging for ages, like I have - I’m a veteran since July of ’07, the golden age of blogging - you get a fair amount of traffic in and out for links. I got one yesterday, though, that really caught my attention. Hunter Nuttall has a post up mentioning my blog: “The 10 Most Readable Blogs (That I Like)“. What made this an unusual post was that it compared me with a few bloggers you may have heard of … Leo Babuta? Seth Godin? Steve Pavlina? and I came out on top. I love the writing everyone on the list does - look at it and you’ll see why. Being listed #1 made my day.

moleskine

Now before I get too excited I have to admit that this is just a readability test Hunter did - not a “quality of content” test or anything of that nature. I think it goes without saying that those guys are a lot more influential than I. However, as someone who has dithered around with writing for years, hearing that my writing is “readable” is a comforting and validating compliment, so I appreciate the time Hunter took to consider his blogroll and have me come out on top.

I am a gasbag. If you meet me in person, I’m one of those people who can get on a roll and pontificate on everything from the Jets’ offensive line woes (letting Kendall go caused at least 4 losses this year) to minutiae of Soviet history to investing strategy to ‘passive income‘ to the Pioneer anomaly (which is making me lose sleep these days) …. you get the picture. But at the same time I really like the mental discipline of taking my verbal spew and funneling it into print; it’s a challenge to take my wanderings and tighten them up into a normal train of thought on e-paper.

So thanks to Hunter’s post, I decided to highlight a few of the posts I wrote on writing when I started Brip Blap, before many people were reading or commenting - hopefully at least one of them might be of interest:

I also want to ask if everyone who reads who enjoys writing could recommend one author or one book who has influenced you stylistically. Not someone whose stories you liked - I love Tolkien’s books, for example, but I’m not really trying to copy his style. On the other hand, I’m not really a big horror fan, and other than “The Stand” I’m not a huge fan of his books, but I make a conscious effort to imitate Stephen King’s writing style. Who influences your writing style - or to think of it another way, whose writing would you read regardless of subject? I am open to suggestions!

PS If anyone feels like nominating me for a bloggie, hint, hint, I sure would appreciate it.

high quantity versus high quality

I suddenly realized a few days ago what, for me, is the simplest way to define frugality and the various spend-less-than-you-earn philosophies. It is: live in a high-quality way rather than a high-quantity way. Here are just a few examples:

High Quality: You spend a month looking for the best deal on a suit. You read Consumer Reports, you consider what would be a durable suit with timeless fashion, and you go and try on several before deciding which one to purchase.
High Quantity: You buy a super-fashionable, brand name suit because you saw a really, really cool picture of Brad Pitt wearing one.

High Quality: You buy somewhat expensive organic fruits and vegetables and enjoy flavorful salads.
High Quantity: You buy cheap iceberg lettuce and round red objects referred to as ‘imported tomatoes’. You throw it all when it goes bad and you haven’t eaten half of it.

High Quality: You go out to the best restaurant in town for a special occasion with your spouse/significant other/etc. and order a nice wine, good seafood, a pleasant dessert. The evening is worth talking about for weeks, and you don’t feel any more desire to go out for a while.
High Quantity: You eat at a chain restaurant. You skimp on drinks and entrees, decide dessert is too expensive. Then you decide you didn’t like it too much so you and your date eat out again the next weekend, trying to have a good time.

High Quality: You buy a new car, carefully maintain it and drive it for 10 years.
High Quantity: You buy a used car to save money, but don’t bother with maintenance and replace it four years later.

High Quality: You get unlimited videos from a rental service like Netflix or Blockbuster for a month. You watch any movie you want from the peace and quiet of your own home.
High Quantity: You go to one movie at the theater, and spend the whole movie wondering why a parent would bring their 2-year-old to see Alien Vs. Predator (I am not joking).

High Quality: You go on vacation and get an inexpensive hotel, then spend your money on going out and enjoying yourselves.
High Quantity: You go on vacation and get an expensive hotel, then have to watch your purchases while you are gone from the hotel 13 hours per day.

High Quality: You buy an ergonomic, solid wood desk for your computer and use it for the rest of your life.
High Quantity: You buy the cheapest desk you can from Wal-Mart, then replace it once every two years when the pressed sawdust construction finally unpresses itself.

Simply put, make sure that you get your money’s worth. I have always had the bad habit of buying something cheap instead of spending money to buy something that will last. I’m trying to think more like a high quality person and less like a high quantity person every day, though. It’s not easy, but that’s a good first test to apply to any purchase.

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