The Pope's Advice on Getting Sermons Written

I was pleased to see that Pope Benedict recently gave exactly the same advice that I would have given to priests on how to prepare their Sunday sermons:

My advice is to begin early on Monday, for if one begins on Saturday it is too late, the preparation is hurried and perhaps inspiration is lacking, for one has other things on one’s mind. Therefore, I would say, already on Monday, simply read the Readings for the coming Sunday which perhaps seem very difficult: a little like those rocks at Massah and Meribah, where Moses said: “But how can water come from these rocks?”.

Then stop thinking about these Readings and allow the heart to digest them. Words are processed in the unconscious, and return a little more every day. Obviously, books should also be consulted, as far as possible. And with this interior process, day by day, one sees that a response gradually develops. These words gradually unfold, they become words for me. And since I am a contemporary, they also become words for others. I can then begin to express what I perhaps see in my own theological language in the language of others; the fundamental thought, however, remains the same for others and for myself.

Thus, it is possible to have a lasting and silent encounter with the Word that does not demand a lot of time, which perhaps we do not have. But save a little time: only in this way does a Sunday homily mature for others, but my own heart is also touched by the Lord’s Word. I am also in touch with a situation when perhaps I have little time available.

(Visit to Roman Major Seminary, February 17)

Essentially this is the principle of “little and often” which I have frequently written about. He also talked about the importance of having a structure to one’s day and having “depth activities” (my phrase) which enable the day to go well. “Serva ordinem et ordo servabit te” (Serve the order, and the order will serve you).

From Pipe-Dream to Project

How often do you get a great idea for something, but somehow it never translates itself into action? Why is it that some things which you’ve always meant to do have to wait until you “can get around to it”? What is the missing ingredient that transforms something from being a pipe dream into a viable project?

That missing ingredient is the question: “What needs to happen now?” If we fail to ask that question then our pipe dream is doomed to remain a pipe dream forever. Once we have asked that question and answered it then we have identified the first steps to arriving at the fulfillment of our idea.

The full form of the question is: “If I am to achieve X by such-and-such a date, what needs to happen now?”

Note that it’s essential to have a deadline. If you ask yourself “What needs to happen now if I’m to achieve X sometime in the future, but it doesn’t matter when?” Then the answer is obviously “Nothing!”

In fact the first step to getting moving on any project we have been putting off is to give ourselves a deadline. The deadline forces us to think in terms of getting things moving.

I often coach people who are trying the make the jump from a full-time job which they hate into running their own business. They frequently keep putting the necessary decisions off for a whole variety of reasons. The solution is to ask the question: “If I am going to be working in my own business by the end of the year, what needs to happen now?” And then keep asking it!

A lot of the time, people get stuck over a project like this because they can’t really believe that they are going to be able to carry it through. Self-doubt causes paralysis. So it’s important to face up to the uncertainty by further refining the question: “If I am going to be 90% certain that I will be working full-time in my own business by the end of the year, what needs to happen now?”

This really starts to pin you down to action. Your pipe dream starts to become a real project.

You will note that the question “What needs to happen now?” is impersonal. Putting it this way is a lot less threatening than asking “What do I need to do now?”

This applies just as much to our daily tasks. Try out mentally the difference between -

Personal:

“What do I need to do now?” “I need to write that report”, “I need to do the housework”, “I need to take some exercise”

Impersonal:

“What needs to happen now?” “That report needs writing”, “The housework needs doing”, “My body needs some exercise”.

You will probably find that the second set of question and answers provokes significantly less resistance in your mind.

Challenge

Identify a project that you have been meaning to get around to “sometime”. Give yourself a deadline by which you will have done it. What needs to happen now if you are to have project completed by the deadline?

How to Get Any Project Up and Running

Do you have lots of great ideas for projects but never get round to starting them?

Do you have a host of old projects that you got so far with and then ran out of steam?

Or do you find yourself saying things like “I really must do some more marketing, but I can never find the time”? (Translation: “I’m not doing the really important work because the less important work is more important!”)

I’m going to tell you a method now which will enable you to give any project your best shot. I can’t of course guarantee that your project will succeed, but at least if you use this method you won’t fail because you have let yourself down.

But be warned: you can only use it on one project at a time!

The basic idea is simplicity itself. You can keep any project moving powerfully forward if you take some action on it first thing every day.

Let’s analyse that a bit further. There are three elements:

1. Take some action
2. First thing
3. Every day

Let’s deal with each of those in more detail.

Take some action

You need to take some action, not just think about taking some action! It doesn’t matter how small the action is. The important thing is to get started. I’ve written before about how a simple phrase like “I’ll just get the file out” can be the trigger for getting into a difficult or daunting task.

How much action do you need to take? It doesn’t matter. Just as long as you take some action, it will keep the project alive. When people come to me with writer’s block, I usually set them the the target of writing for at least 10 minutes every day. Al Secunda in his book “The 15-second Principle” makes it even less — he says a minimum of 15 seconds work a day on any project will bring it to fruition.

Of course Al is not telling you to work for only 15 seconds. He is telling you to work for at least 15 seconds. Once you have succeeded in getting started, most days you will go on and do some significant work on the project. But even if you don’t do more than the minimum, you will have kept the project alive in your mind and you will find that you naturally get into the swing of it in the next day or so.

First thing

In my book “Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play” I give an exercise in which you are asked to select one task that you are going to do the next day. If you succeed, you then select a slightly more difficult task for the next day. If you fail, you select an easier one.

This sounds an incredibly easy exercise, but the truth is that most people find it almost impossible to keep it going for more than a few days. Yes, it’s rather a horrifying thought — most people are incapable of selecting just one new task a day and doing it without fail!

Your project is going to get lost in the same way unless you make sure that you do it first thing before doing anything else. You know exactly what will happen if you don’t do it first thing. You will find yourself late in the day saying: “It’s nearly time to stop work and I haven’t done a thing about that project yet. It’s not worth doing anything now. I’ll give it a really good go tomorrow.” Guess what happens tomorrow!

I have learnt the hard way that if I want to carry out some particular task every day over an extended period — such as writing, going for a run, whatever it may be — it has to be got under way before I have my breakfast, before I make a cup of tea, before I look at the newspaper. If you work in an office, then the task needs to be started before you check your e-mail, before you talk to your colleagues, before you listen to your voicemail. The second that you say “I must get started on that project, but I’ll just check whether there’s anything new in my in-box” you’ve lost the battle!

Once you’ve got going, you will find that most days there is a natural tendency to keep going. And if some days there isn’t, so what? As long as you’ve done something, you will find it is easier to do more the next day. And that brings me on to my next point.

Every day

When someone tells me that they are stuck on a project, the first question which I ask them is “When did you last do some work on it?” Invariably it turns out to have been weeks ago.

Once you stop working on something, it will start to die. Think of your projects as house plants which need watering daily. They don’t need a lot of water, but they do need some. If you forget to water them for one day it won’t be fatal, but forget to water them for several days in a row and they will start to wither. Yet sometimes even the most dead-looking plant will revive if you resume the daily watering. And so it is with projects. If you have a project in your life which is really stuck, try doing some work on it first thing every day and you will be amazed to see how it starts to move forward.

When I say “every day” I mean every working day. For some personal projects you may want to do seven days a week, but for most work projects five days a week is fine. There may be days during the week when you know you are not going to be able to do any work on the project. You might for instance be away at a business conference. The important thing is to identify these days in advance. And what’s the first thing you do when you get back into your office after your conference? Yes, you’ve got it!

On days which you haven’t identified in advance don’t accept any excuses from yourself. The most common justification that I hear is that an “emergency” came up. I’m not saying there aren’t occasional unforeseeable life-or-death situations in which you have to take immediate action to avoid a catastrophe. But be honest with yourself: how often does that really happen? Most of our so-called “emergencies” aren’t emergencies at all. They are simply situations which we have neglected so long that they have come back to bite us.

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So there you are, that’s it. Follow the principle of taking some action on your project first thing every day, and you will be amazed to see how the project comes to life and progresses almost like magic. But remember what I said at the beginning: you can only do this with one project at a time!

So how do you decide which project you are going to use this method on? Ask yourself some questions, such as:

What’s the project that I have been putting off longest?

What am I most stuck at?

What would make the greatest difference to my life and work?

What would really take my life or business forward if I took action on it?

Concentrating on one project at a time is a very good time management principle. You may remember that old music-hall turn, the Chinese spinning plates. The performer has a huge number of bamboo rods and the aim is to get a plate spinning on the end of each rod. A good performer can get thirty or more plates spinning at the same time. The way it is done is to get one plate spinning properly, then to move on to the next plate, then to the next. Go back to an earlier plate only when it starts to wobble.

It’s exactly the same in your life or business. Get one project up and running properly before you take on the next. That is far the best way to move forward.

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Reading this article won’t make the slightest bit of difference to your life unless you do something about it. What you need to do now is to decide on one project which you are going to do first thing tomorrow and every day thereafter until it is fully up and running. If you want to reinforce your decision, why not make a commitment in the Comments and make a note to report back in a few weeks to tell us how you got on!

Journalling Thoughts - II

Since writing a couple of days ago about changing my method of journalling, I’ve had a few further thoughts.

I suppose one of the reasons I would prefer to write in 10 minute bursts is simply that my attention span is limited. Thirty five minutes is a long time to be writing continuously without stopping to think. That is how long it took me to write the three pages that I have been doing up to now, and that is probably why I have found it difficult to keep going consistently. That amount of writing continuously has a lot of resistance attached to it.

I think splitting the journaling into ten minute bursts will work just fine. And what does it matter if I only do one or two bursts during the day, instead of all three? The aim is to get ideas for the blog and for life in general. This blog can’t exist without a constant flow of new ideas - and neither for that matter can I!

Mark Forster at the London Coaching Group

Date 27 March 2007
Event: Coaching for Creativity
Speaker: Mark Forster
Venue: CIPD, Manning House, 22 Carlisle Place, London SW1P 1JA

Description: The London Coaching Group is pleased to welcome all coaches and those interested in coaching to their monthly events. The meetings start at 6.15pm for networking with the speaker for the evening commencing at 6.45pm. The cost including refreshments is 10 pounds. Booking is essential to reserve your place.

Coaching for Creativity: how to expand your own creative horizons and those of your clients with Mark Forster

Creativity is one of the keys to having a life which is not confined to the ordinary. For example, it is far more satisfying in our business lives to be selling our own products, which we have developed ourselves, than to be selling someone else’s product. As coaches it is important to develop that distinctive edge that differentiates us from all the other coaches out there - and to help our clients to do the same in their professional field.

During the session you will (subject to time available):

• Learn to do what you like and make it profitable
• Learn to overcome resistance
• Practice saying yes to life
• Monitor how good you are feeling
• Learn about practices which will enhance your creativity
• See where your life has been leading you up to now
• Identify what has been holding you back
• Explore how decisions are made
• Explore how to make inspiration strike
• Learn how to live in the flow
• Examine the brakes on our creativity

Mark Forster is the author of the popular “Get Everything Done” website and blog www.markforster.net which specialises in time management and personal organisation. He is also the author of three books: Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play (Hodder 2000), How to Make Your Dreams Come True (Hodder 2002) and Do It Tomorrow (Hodder 2006).

He has now retired from coaching, but was formerly one of the Top Ten coaches in the United Kindom according to the Observer. His work has featured in many newspapers and magazines and he is frequently heard on the radio.

Register for this event

Journalling Thoughts

I am going to try a change in my journalling method. Instead of writing three pages of longhand, which takes me about 35 minutes, I am going to write in three bursts of ten minutes on my computer. I don’t intend that there should a gap of more than a minute or so between the writing bursts because what I am trying to achieve is a greater focus.

Of course the usual rules about journaling will apply. No going back or correcting. Keep writing and don’t think. And above all I must resist the temptation to think about how it might look if I published it in the blog. In any case I have absolutely no intention of publishing more than the occasional extract.

There’s quite a different dynamic between handwriting and writing on the computer. Some people say that one should write with the screen switched off so that you can’t look back and see what you have written. I think that’s taking it a bit to the extreme - on the few occasions that I have tried it I have found it rather disconcerting. It results in a lot of uncorrected mistakes of course, but also there is a sense of being in darkness, of wandering around without being able to see one’s way. The results aren’t too bad though once they have been edited. But I don’t really like doing it that way.

I prefer to type on a screen where I can see what I am writing. It helps me to keep some sort of shape and focus. The one thing that must be borne firmly in mind is that editing must be left until afterwards. If something comes out of the journalling which seems worth preserving, then it should be reshaped later, not at the time of writing. Writing and editing are two separate operations which should be carried out at two separate times.

I’m now wondering if be better to write several ten minute bursts throughout the day? A ten minute article or thought is just about the right length for a blog posting, and for a longer article one can always string several together.

"Do It Tomorrow" Amazon Rankings

When I looked this morning, the ranking on amazon.co.uk of my latest book “Do It Tomorrow”  was 512. Not a bad placing but it could be a lot better considering the results it has had on the lives of the people who have read it. There are ten customer reviews, all of which have 5 stars. And, unlike some authors have been rumoured to do, I neither wrote any of them myself nor got my friends to write them!

If you’ve read “Do It Tomorrow” and have benefited from it, then please do write a review on Amazon. I don’t know about you, but whenever I am thinking about buying a book I always read the reviews on Amazon even if I’m not going to buy the book from them. So they do make a lot of difference to the sales of the book.

And of course if you haven’t read the book, then you can order it here!

A Rest from the Diet

The diet has been getting more and more difficult over the last week. I had to miss a meal on both Thursday and Friday and in spite of this I had to miss another meal on Saturday. When on Sunday I found that I was still one pound above my target weight I decided enough was enough.

In similar circumstances I knew exactly what advice I would give to someone else, because I had given it to my wife a few weeks ago. “Take a week off from the diet. Weigh yourself again in a week’s time and start again from that weight.” My wife did exactly that and the diet has been going fine for her since then.

So in spite of the fact that it involves putting back the date on which I am scheduled to attain my “perfect” weight, I am going to do the same. I will forget about the diet and start again next Monday. I can’t complain really - I have lost 11 lbs in total - and reaching a plateau like this is a feature of almost every diet. All I’m doing is allowing my body to consolidate the gains so far and then I will be getting going again.

When I come to write the diet up finally, I will probably amend the rules to include a resting period like this in place of the final “no eating” rule.

Full details of the diet I am following can be found here.

Talk to Institute of Chartered Accountants

There is a very good summary of the talk which I gave to the Institute of Chartered Accountants (England and Wales) last month on Carol McLachlan (The Accounting Coach)’s blog.

Dieting Update

I wrote earlier this month that my diet had been getting more difficult. Now for the first time I’ve had to spend two days only eating one meal a day. I am exactly on my target weight, but it’s taking less food to keep me there.

However something entirely unexpected has occurred, and that is that I don’t feel hungry. None of the symptoms I associate with missing meals have manifested themselves - I don’t feel light-headed, I feel perfectly fit and strong, and I have no hunger pains.

It strikes me that there is a lot of difference between skipping meals when one has been eating indiscrimately, and skipping meals when one has been training oneself (as I have) to eat less over a period of some two and a half months. In particular, the last time I had anything sugary to eat was on 31 January, well over two weeks ago. That probably means that my blood sugar is far more stable than it would have been previously.

As I say, this is an entirely unexpected effect, but it does seem that the people who said that missing meals would slow my metabolism are correct. The only thing is that I now realise that this is a good thing. I can now maintain an even weight on much less food than before. That’s rather like finding a way to reduce a car’s petrol consumption without effecting its performance.

Full details of the diet I am following can be found here.

Site Statistics

As I have several times written before, Alexa is a useful tool for anyone who runs a website or is interested in websites - which probably includes most of my readers.

You’ve always been able to find out things on Alexa like the traffic rank of any site on a world-wide basis, sites which link into it, and the other sites most visited by the people who visit the site. Now they’ve added a couple of features (or perhaps they’ve just made them easier to find). One is a breakdown of where the readers of a site come from. Here is the breakdown relating to this site:

No great surprises there, though I would have expected the percentage of United States readers (18.6%) to be a little higher judging from the amount of correspondence I get from the US. Perhaps they just like communicating more than the Brits!

Another new feature is traffic rank by country. Here’s the ranking for this site:

It’s certainly very gratifying to find that this site is the 9,908th most popular in the United Kindom, and it’s great to see that it’s so popular in Spain too.

By the way, I used the very convenient screen clipper built into Evernote to extract the figures from the Alexa site.

The Top 10 Ways to Manage Your Time Successfully

This is a top ten list I sometimes use which focuses on techniques.

1. Don’t prioritise (i.e. decide which activities you are going to well and which you are going to do badly) — instead select which activities you are going to do properly and get rid of the rest.

2. Whenever you find yourself using words like “always” and “never” in connection with a problem (“The data sheets always go missing”, “I never seem to be able to remember the action I agree to take at meetings”, etc. etc.) there is something wrong with the system. Take the time to think through the system so you can put it right for good!

3. Remember Parkinson’s law - work expands to fill the time available for its completion. If you have too much to do, shorten your working hours. It sounds weird but it works!

4. Always cost meetings - and only hold/attend ones that provide more value than they cost.

5. You work more efficiently with definite scheduled cut-off points, e.g. breaks, end of work, timed bursts.

6. Always clear your in-tray (paper and email) completely every day - or, if you prefer, several times a day. If you have allowed a backlog to build up, ring- fence it and deal with it as a separate project.

7. Don’t just work at your job. Work on it as well. You should aim to spend at least 20% of your time planning, thinking and strategizing.

8. Schedule your leisure at least as hard as you schedule your work.

9. Never put off starting work on a major project because the deadline seems a long way off — little and often is the rule.

10. Remember every time you take on something new, you have to stop doing something old.

[This article appeared in the most recent issue of my newsletter]

The Role of Structure

Have you ever noticed how you can tell what type of driver someone is just by following their car for a few hundred yards? We pick up on all sorts of clues almost subconsciously. We note all sorts of things like their speed, the line they take on the road, how confident they are and whether they know the width of their car. We get a lot of clues too from the state of the car itself. If you see a dirty car in front of you with broken rear lamps, a loose bumper, and several dents being driven in the middle of the road, don’t you pull back a bit further than normal? You just know that it is only a matter of time before it hits something or somebody, and you have no intention of being the one on the receiving end!

In just the same way, we can tell almost immediately how organized someone is whom we are dealing with. We pick up the clues and even without consciously thinking about it we judge the person’s reliability. Do they call back when they say they are going to? Do they answer e-mails quickly? Do they miss deadlines? Do they turn up late for meetings? Do they always seem busy or rushed? We only need a few of these clues, and we have built up a picture – very quickly indeed.

The trouble is that if you are judging other people like this, then it’s a racing certainty that other people are doing exactly the same to you. You may not think it matters much that you forgot to return that phone call for a couple of days, or that you needed chasing up about the proposal you were writing, or that you appeared at a meeting hot and bothered five minutes late, but it’s exactly those things that your boss, your colleagues and your clients are judging you on. 

The question they are asking about you is already being answered. “Are they going to be someone who is easy to deal with, or someone who is going to need constant chasing and ultimately won’t be worth the bother?”

The organized person is equally easy to recognize when you deal with them. Your telephone calls are returned promptly. Your e-mails are answered by return. They follow up at appropriate intervals. They are on time at meetings and have actually read the preparatory papers. In short they do what they say they are going to do when they say they are going to do it. They are a pleasure to work with because you know you can rely on them.

The really annoying thing about an organized person is that their private life is usually as well-organized as their work. While the disorganized person is struggling over a huge backlog of work, the organized person is at the theatre or on the ski slopes!

The disorganized person has literally no idea how the organized person does it. It might as well be magic.

And indeed it is magic. But not the type of magic that you find in fairy tales. It is more like the type that stage magicians use. The type that when we’re told the secret we say “Oh, that’s how you do it!”

In principle, once you know how the trick is done you can do it yourself. Certainly for some tricks you might need a great deal of practice and training, but once you know the secret it has moved from the realm of the “impossible” to the “doable”.

So what is the secret that the organized person uses to do their “magic”?

One word: STRUCTURE

The typically disorganized person sits at their desk reacting to everything that comes to them. If a phone call comes in or a colleague talks to them or some new e-mails come in, they leave what they are doing to attend to the new stimulus. And they have hardly started on that before they are off on the next thing. It’s a constant bombardment of different things, all of which produce knee-jerk reactions. Because the disorganized person is always starting things but never finishing them, they have hundreds of loose ends which in their turn provide yet more distractions. They have no structure to their day, so they are basically attending to whatever is making the most noise at any given time.

The organized person deals with one thing at a time and leaves no loose ends. They use a mixture of routines and systems so that they know both how to tackle everything and also when to tackle it. If they are working on something and a distraction appears, they simply make a note to deal with it at the appropriate time and continue with what they were doing. The old saying “A place for everything and everything in its place” is the basis of how they work. They interpret that to include “a time for everything and everything in its time.”

So where do you fall on the Organized/Disorganized continuum? What would it take to move yourself nearer the Organized end? Remember being organized is not some magical quality which only certain very lucky people are born with. Anyone can be organized – because it’s “easy when you know how”. All you have to do is to look at your routines and systems and check that they are working. If they are not, improve them until they are. If you don’t have any routines and systems, start some!

Exercise:

To give you some practice in improving systems, here is a simplified description of the way a disorganized person typically approaches their e-mail:

Ten e-mails come in, and they deal with three and leave the rest “for later.” Another ten e-mails come in and they deal with three and leave the rest “for later”. Another ten e-mails come in and they deal with three and leave the rest for “later”. This scenario is repeated five times a day for a working week. At the end of the week they have dealt with 75 e-mails and have a backlog of 175 e-mails. They then spend several hours trying unsuccessfully to clear the backlog, while bemoaning that there aren’t enough hours in the day.

Your task is to design a better system for dealing with e-mails. How difficult do you think that is likely to be?

[The original version of this article was published in my newsletter in August 2004]

The Four Quadrants (A Different Version)

Those of you who are familiar with my materials will know that one of the subjects that I frequently write about is the resistance principle. This is the principle that the thing you should do first is what you are resisting the most.

I have often contrasted this with Steven Covey’s Quadrant 2 theory (from “First Things First”), in which the principle is to do what is important first.

Covey talks about four quadrants: 1) Important & Urgent, 2) Important & Not Urgent, 3) Urgent & Not Important and 4) Not Urgent & Not Important. According to Covey the problem most people have is with Quadrant 2, the important but not urgent. The reason they have a problem is because the important gets submerged under what is urgent.

Although I can see what Covey means, I have never really felt that his theory reflects how most people actually think when they are working. In my experience there are plenty of people who are just as capable of putting off something that is important and urgent as they are of putting off something that is important but not urgent. Frequently the same people will fill their days with stuff that is neither important nor urgent.

In other words the reason important things get forgotten is not because they get submerged by urgent things – though it may sometimes look like that.

As I have frequently said, prioritising by importance doesn’t work, because the question is not how important something is but whether it should be done at all. If it needs to be done, then it needs to be done and, all other things being equal, it doesn’t particularly matter what order it’s done in as long as it all gets done.

So I was pleased to read a book by Ken Blanchard (of One-Minute Manager fame) in which he says very much the same thing. The book is called The On-time, On-target Manager (One Minute Manager) In it, Blanchard gives a different quadrant from Covey’s. It’s one which in my opinion is much more geared to the way we actually think.

His quadrant is 1) Have to Do, Want to Do 2) Have to Do, Don’t Want to Do 3) Don’t Have to Do, Want to Do 4) Don’t Have to Do, Don’t Want to Do.

People don’t have any problem with Quadrants 1 and 4. If they have to do it and they want to do it, then they just get on with it. If they don’t have to do it and they don’t want to do it, then they just don’t do it. The problem lies with the other two quadrants.

What tends to happen is that people tend to do things in the order Quadrant 1), Quadrant 3) and only then Quadrant 2). The result is that a lot of things that don’t have to be done get done, while a lot of things that do have to be done don’t get done. Sound familiar?

The solution is to change it so that you do them in the order Quadrant 2), Quadrant 1) and forget about the other two quadrants.

To use this simple method of prioritising, write a list of all the things that you feel you must do, should do or could do. Then to the right of the items put two columns HAVE TO DO? and WANT TO DO? Then tick each item in the relevant columns. Challenge yourself fiercely about whether each item really needs to be done or not.

You then do the items which have a tick only in the first column. And only when you’ve finished them do you do the items which have ticks in both columns.

And then go home!

[The original version of this article was published in my newsletter in August 2004]

How to Finish Books Once You Start Them

A while ago I wrote about how to finish all the books you start. In the article I suggested that the best way was to have five “active” books going at the same time and to read them in rotation. There was nothing magical about the figure five, but it did allow for a good spread of different kinds of books.

However after some more experimentation I think I have found a better way - or at least one that works better for me. The new method is still based on having five active books but is more flexible and allows better for the way most of us read books.

What I am doing now is to keep my five active books in a pile. I have a strict rule that I am only allowed to read the active books, and no others. I can read any of these five books whenever I want to - I don’t have to read them in order. Whenever I finish a session with a book, I put that book back on the top of the pile. The result of this is that the book I looked at the longest amount of time ago is at the bottom of the pile.

If I decide that I want to start reading a book which is not in the pile, then I have either to wait until one of the active books is finished, or I have to make a conscious decision to stop reading one of the active books and take it out of the pile. If I decide to do this, it is always the book at the bottom of the pile that I remove.

So the decision to take on a new book before there is a vacancy boils down to the question “Do I want to read this book more than I want to read the book at the bottom of the pile?”

In practice I’ve found it’s very effective. It doesn’t ensure that every book I start gets finished. But what it has achieved is that I am finishing a lot more of the books I start than I was before. By forcing me to make a conscious decision to drop a book, it stops me just letting a book die of neglect.

Mind you, I still haven’t read Tristram Shandy!

Goal Monitoring

Although my idea of daily monitoring my Adsense income didn’t work out very well, yet my average daily income this month is currently $7.12 - vastly higher than my original aim.

So how come it’s risen so fast in spite of the fact that I abandoned the method I was experimenting with?

Basically I have just been using the four-step method of goal achievement which I have often written about in the past:

1. Define the goal enough to recognise it when you get there.
2. Know where you are now
3. Move in the direction you want to go in
4. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 until you reach the goal

These four steps sound as if they are far too simple. But they are not. Keeping to them is the basis of all successful goal achievement. If you think of times when you have failed to get to a goal, it will usually be because you have failed to keep to this four step sequence.

Learning Italian - Update

About a month ago I blogged that I was starting to learn Italian using the Pimsleur Italian Course. How have I got on?

I’ve just finished the first thirty lessons (which make up Part I of the Course). So I’m one third of the way through. I’ve found that the course is easy to do, very well thought out and produced, and that my retention of what has been taught has been very high. My fears of doing a course that was nearly totally based on the spoken language have proved ungrounded. Not seeing the words written down has not been the handicap that I expected, in fact quite the reverse.

However, I don’t imagine that by the time I have finished the course that I will have more than a very basic vocabulary, though I expect to be able to use what I do know very well. The real test will be when I go to Sicily shortly after I am scheduled to finish the course. In the meantime I must try and find some unfortunate Italian speakers to practise on!

Come and See Me Make a Fool of Myself

I have been foolish enough to accept an invitation to give a short workshop to the London Coaching Group on Coaching for Creativity on the evening of March 27th. This is a subject that I have never given a seminar on before.

Anyway I thought “in for a penny in for a pound” so I made the blurb for the event as ambitious as possible by adding in every single angle on the subject I could think of, and then some. Nothing like setting oneself a challenge!

During the session you will (subject to time available):

• Learn to do what you like and make it profitable
• Learn to overcome resistance
• Practice saying yes to life
• Monitor how good you are feeling
• Learn about practices which will enhance your creativity
• See where your life has been leading you up to now
• Identify what has been holding you back
• Explore how decisions are made
• Explore how to make inspiration strike
• Learn how to live in the flow
• Examine the brakes on our creativity

So I really am going to have to be creative to cover all this in less than two hours!

Maybe I’ll write some blog entries on these bullet points in order to get into practice.

Anyway if you can make it, I’d love to see you there. If you would like to attend, contact the organisers not me.

How Hard Has My Diet Been? One Month On

In a previous entry when I had been doing my new diet for just over a month (January 5th) I summed up how hard it had been. Now that I’ve been doing it for just over another month I thought it would be good to analyse how hard it had been again for comparison purpose. As of today, I have lost 10 lbs and have four rules in place: No Seconds; No Snacking; No Sweets and Small Portions.

I’m still finding it easy to keep to, in spite of the fact that I’m getting to the stage where in most diets one tends to plateau. As you’ll see below there is some evidence of that happening, but not so much as to pose problems.

So in the 34 days since the previous report:

• On 4 days I have had no rules in place at all; so I have been able to eat exactly what I like, when I like, in what quantities I like.
• On 30 days I haven’t been allowed second helpings.
• On 23 days I also haven’t been allowed to eat more than 3 meals a day.
• On 14 days I also haven’t been allowed to eat anything sweet.
• On 7 days I’ve also had to eat small portions
• On 1 day I also had to skip a meal.

If you compare these figures with the ones given for the first month, you will see that the diet has increased in difficulty - not so much though that it has been hard work to keep to. As in the first month, I’ve only had to skip one meal.

The good news is that I’ve now lost enough weight for it to be noticeable, both to myself and others. Still a long way to go though!

Web Design Tips for Beginners (like me!)

Here’s a couple of tips which you might find useful when you are trying to improve the look of your website:

Have you ever wanted to duplicate an effect on a website but didn’t know how to code it in html? You can find out the code for any page by using a facility on Internet Explorer. Simply go to the View menu and select Source. That will show you the complete code for the current page as a text file. A lot of people don’t know that menu item is there (I didn’t until recently myself) but it can save you hours.

If you ever want to match on-screen colours, there’s a very simple utility called Color Cop which will tell you the code for any colour you see on screen. You can use it to magnify the colours so that you can identify the individual pixels. What’s more it’s free!