Give Away of the Day

A new feature on this site is the Give Away of the Day, which you will find near the bottom of the left-hand sidebar. Everyday a new piece of software will be featured which you can download entirely free of charge. Beware though - you can only download the software for free on the day that it is featured on the sidebar. You can still click through and download previous days' software - but you will have to pay the manufacturer's normal price.

These programs are not shareware and will not time expire, provided you activate them within the time scale shown.

Dieting at Christmas - Final Report

I concluded the Christmas period with a big New Year's Eve dinner on Sunday and a big family lunch on New Year's Day. This morning when I weighed myself I was 1 lb below my target weight for the day. This means that since writing my first "Dieting at Christmas" post on December 22nd I have lost 3 lbs. Is this some sort of a record for Christmas dieting? It certainly is for me!

Mind you, for yesterday's lunch I had to refuse the pre-lunch nibbles, take only small portions of the starter and main course, refuse the puds and do without supper that evening. But in fact I found that I enjoyed the party even more for not stuffing myself, and doing without the evening meal was no real hardship. I did enjoy breakfast this morning though!

So the rules I have in force today are:

1. No second helpings
2. No snacking (3 meals a day only)
3. No sweets
4. Small portions only

The result of being under target today is that I feel very virtuous and, what's more, I really appreciate the reward of being able to drop the "Skip one meal" rule. As I said when I first suggested the idea of this diet, it seems to be a nice blend of carrot and stick.

I occupied myself yesterday evening in place of supper by writing all the daily target weights into my diary, right up to the time when I achieve my overall target. It is rather a good feeling being able to say within a pound or too exactly what weight I will be on any given day this year. Completion date is AUGUST 31st - you can work out for yourself how much weight I am planning to lose by then!

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

Improve Your Memory

If one of your new year's resolutions is to improve your memory of people's names and details (and if it isn't, perhaps it should be), then one of my favourite little programs, QA-Coach can help you. I've been using it for about three years now as a way of learning such things as vocabulary, names of people I've met, details about my clients, current affairs, movie cast members, and anything else which I would like to be able to keep in my mind instead of having to look it up all the time.

It works by testing you with questions and answers. If you can remember the answer it asks you again less often, and if you can't remember it asks you more often. Basically the longer you have succeeded in remembering something, the longer it will be before it asks you the same question again. One of the reasons I particularly like this program rather than other more complicated memorising programs such as SuperMemo is that it really doesn't matter whether you use it every day or not. Another is that the initial learning intervals are less than a day, so you don't have to wait until the next day in order to re-learn the ones you got wrong.

I'm a great believer that the best programs (whether computer, diet, exercise, time-management or anything else) are the ones that do a good job as simply as possible. QA-Coach is an excellent example of just that.

My Top Seven New Year's Resolutions

Are you tired of making the same old New Year's resolutions year after year? Well, here's a selection of some new ones you may not have thought of before, and some old ones too:

1. Don't make any resolutions which you have made and failed to keep in previous years. If you failed to keep them before, you'll almost certainly fail to keep them this time too. Try some new ones! (There's one exception to this -see Resolution 7 below).

2. Make a list of the things you are not going to do this year. I'm not talking about thinks like giving up smoking or drinking. I mean giving up some of the commitments you have which are taking up your time and energy. Taking too much on is one of the best ways to cripple your endeavours, so making a resolution to do less can free you up for doing those things which you really want to do (see next resolution).

3. Decide on one thing you are going to do each month during the coming year. I'm not talking about big business goals here, just things you would really like to do "sometime" but have never got round to. Perhaps a place to visit, a book to read, a person to meet, a sport to try out, whatever. Have fun drawing up your list for the full twelve months.

4. Give yourself one big goal for the year. Something you are going to aim for and achieve whatever else happens. Maybe it will be a work goal, maybe a personal goal, but it needs to be the focal point for your entire year.

5. Pretend you are yourself in exactly one year's time and write a description of the year that has just passed (i.e. 2007). Put it away in a drawer and don't look at it until this time next year. Then you can see how much of what you wrote actually happened.

6. Resolve to look back on your day each evening and identify one thing which you did well, and one thing you will do differently next time.

7. The one exception to Resolution 1 is to lose weight (only if you need to of course!). Losing weight is like Mark Twain giving up smoking: "It's easy, I've done it hundreds of times". But what would you think of a diet by which you could lose weight by eating what you like, when you like and in what quantitities you like (well, most of the time anyway) - a diet in which you could just decide how many pounds you want to lose and it would transport you there effortlessly at the rate of one pound per week. Too good to be true? Maybe, maybe not. Learn about it here.

This article is taken from the latest issue of my newsletter

Most Popular Pages

During December the most popular articles/postings on this site have been:

1. Do It Tomorrow - Chapter One
2. Can I Improve on the "No S" Diet?
3. Structuring the Day
4. To Do Lists - How We Hate Them!

Dieting at Christmas - Part III

To my amazement this morning I was exactly on my target weight for the day. This was a much faster recovery than I was expecting. All I needed to get there was the first two rules: No Second Helpings and No Snacking, both of which remain in force. The next hurdle will be when the target weight drops on schedule by half a pound tomorrow. Nothing out of the ordinary after that until a large meal on New Year’s Eve and another large meal on New Year’s Day. And when I say “large” I mean LARGE!

This diet is truly proving itself to be both effective and extremely easy. In fact for most of the four and a half weeks since starting it, I have eaten perfectly normally without any rules in place at all. If I get through into the new year ok, I will write it up properly with the tips which I have picked up on the way so that other people can follow it if they wish.

To sum up, I have a rare feeling of confidence in this diet - both that I will have no trouble at all in keeping to it, and that it will enable me to lose the weight I want.

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

Dieting at Christmas - Part II

I managed to reach Christmas Day with no rules in place which meant that I was free to gorge myself as much as I pleased, which I took full advantage of. The result of all this was that I was 4 lbs over the day's target weight when I weighed in this morning.

There's another family lunch coming up today. The only rule in force at the moment is "No Second Helpings", so it's a fairly good bet that I will still be several pounds over the target tomorrow.

This is all fine. The rules will kick in progressively until I am back on target. The only question is just how many rules will come into force before that happens. If this diet can survive Christmas, it can survive anything!

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

What Don't I Want?

(This article is taken from the latest issue of my newsletter)

Strangely enough the question "How would you like this to be?" is a very difficult one for many people to answer. I used to find in the days when I worked for the Church of England that asking people what they would like their church to be like often produced nothing more than a puzzled stare. Yet if their Vicar did something they didn't like, they were only too quick to complain. So they may not have had a clear idea of what they wanted their church to be like, but they had a very clear idea indeed of what they didn't want it to be like!

We often find ourselves in much the same situation. We may have a vague sense of dissatisfaction with our job or our work, but we don't really know what we want to do in its place. We may have decided it's time to move from our present house, but we have very little idea of where we'd like to move to.

Often the first step to defining what we do want is to define what we don't want. This will help avoid the situation where we move jobs or houses or whatever, but find ourselves facing exactly the same problems as we did previously. Once we have decided what we don't want, we are in a much better position to decide what we do want.

For example someone might write down the following if asked what they don't want about their new job:

• I don't want to work excessively long hours
• I don't want to have to commute
• I don't want to waste my skills
• I don't want to have someone interfering with what I'm doing all the time

Once you've made this sort of list then it's much easier to ask yourself: "If I don't want to work excessively long hours, what do I want?"

In this way you can build up a much clearer picture of the direction in which you want to move.

Confidentially....

Sometimes it’s the little things which annoy one most. For me one is those confidentiality clauses which are often appended to the end of emails. If they want something to be confidential, why are they sending it by email for goodness sake? Email is about as confidential as sending it by postcard.

Anyway a prize example is the weekly email I get from our local cinema telling me about the forthcoming attractions. Our cinema is run by the local council so every one of these emails ends with the following message:

This e-mail message neither creates nor is intended to create a contract between Horsham District Council and the addressee or the addressee’s organisation. It is confidential to the Council and the addressee. If you receive this e-mail in error, please destroy it and delete it from your machine.

So I’m going to break confidentiality and tell you a secret:

Casino Royale is coming back to The Capitol in January.

What are those sirens I hear in the distance?

Old Articles

I have posted the following articles from my newsletter archive:

Countdown Scoring

The Real Reality Check

Finding Files

Dieting at Christmas

The Christmas season is now well under way chez Forster, and a great party on Wednesday evening has resulted in my being over the target weight for two days running. Accordingly I have now got two rules in force:

1. No second helpings
2. Three meals a day only (no snacking)

No great deprivation there yet then, but it will be interesting to see how far up the rules ladder I will get before the season of good cheer is over. The good cheer will be rather limited though as - due to a dodgy tooth - I have been put on a strong antibiotic. This means that I am on a third rule (not part of the diet): No alcohol!

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

Evernote 2.0 Beta

I'm just in the process of downloading the Beta of Evernote 2.0. It appears to have several important enhancements to Evernote 1.5. These include a note list, a way of searching category names (badly needed), a screen clipper (very useful), but still no reminder facility (see my previous post).

I'll report back once I've had a chance to assess it.

Using Outlook as an Alarm for Evernote

One of the disadvantages of the otherwise excellent Evernote note-taking software is that it does not have an alarm function. However you can work around this because it does produce an individual hyperlink for each of its notes. This link can then be dragged or copied to a variety of programs which do have alarms. The most obvious of these is Microsoft Outlook. I've already described here and here some of the ways in which links can be used in Outlook Tasks. This is another.

If you are an Evernote user, try dragging a note heading into the Task icon in the Outlook left-hand margin. What happens?

You will see that a Task box opens up with the link to the Evernote note shown as an icon. Click on the icon and you will be taken directly to the note (it will be the last note shown on the Evernote page).

You can now use the alarm function on the task box to bring the note link up whenever you wish.

Top 10 Tips for Keeping Your Life Moving

I had my last session for my last-but-one remaining coaching client yesterday, and he asked me what my Top Ten tips were to keep him on the “straight and narrow” in the future.

My answers were off the top of my head, but I think they are well worth repeating. So here are my top ten ways in which to keep your life moving in the direction you want.

1. Be clear about what your major life goals are. You can’t have direction in your life unless you know what that direction is. So be clear where you are going in the major areas of your life, such as work, family, etc. Ideally you just want one goal in each life area.
2. When you’ve decided what your major goals are, make a commitment to them. This consists of two parts: what you are going to do as a result of the commitment, and what you are going to stop doing as a result of the commitment. Of the two, the second is the more important and the one most frequently neglected.
3. Decide what the ideal structure of your day, week and year would be, and go all out to get it into place. You can’t balance your life effectively without structure, and it’s no good having a structure which you can’t keep up in the long term.
4. If you are starting a new business, remember that it must be financed properly. This includes working out what you need to live on during the two or three years before your business becomes profitable. During the first two or so years of a new business, you will put in a lot of work for very little immediate reward. If you are not prepared for this your business will almost certainly founder.
5. Always work on identifying the key actions that are going to make the real difference. You can faff around being busy as much as you like, but being busy in itself is not what brings success. Success comes from focussing on the actions that are going to take you and your business forward.
6. Keep moving. The biggest reason why people don’t get projects completed is because they fail to keep moving on them. A project is like a house plant. Water it daily and it will thrive. Neglect it and it will die.
7. When you give yourself a specific amount of time to work on something, keep to the allotted time to the minute. Stopping dead leaves you wanting more. Trailing on until you run out of ooomph means you have run out of ooomph.
8. Being able to estimate how long a project or a task is going to take is a very valuable skill, and one which very few people have. You can greatly improve your skills at this by writing down your estimate of how long you think a task or project will take, and then comparing your estimate with how long it actually does take.
9. If you are having difficulty getting started on something, then focus on the first step. Make the first step small enough so that you can easily do it. Once you’ve taken the first step, then it’s much easier to keep going.
10. Take time out to weed your commitments on a regular basis. Never forget that if you have more commitments than you can cope with, some of them (possibly all of them) are going to get done badly. If you take on a commitment which you don’t do properly, the time you do spend on it is wasted. You would be better off using that time on doing your most important commitments really well.

The One Minute Rule

There’s a great post by Gretchen Rubin on her blog “The Happiness Project” on her “one-minute rule”.

It’s very simple: I must do any task that can be finished in one minute. Hang up my coat, read a letter and toss it, fill in a form, answer an email, note down a citation, pick up my phone messages, file a paper, put a dish in the dishwasher, replenish the diaper supply by the changing table, put the magazines away…and so on.

If you live in chaos, most of the disorganisation isn’t caused by failing to do big things; it’s caused by failing to do thousands of tiny little things.

Structuring the Day

So how have I been getting on with structuring the day which I blogged about last week?

Well, I made a fairly basic mistake - one indeed which I am always warning other people about - I tried to establish too many new things in my life at once. Result: I found it impossible to keep to the structure.

My idea was to introduce the following:

Write my journal immediately on getting up in the morning AND go for a walk at noon each day AND meditate for 20 minutes at 6pm AND not turn my computer on till 9am in the morning AND turn my computer off at 6pm in the evening AND not have my computer on between 9am and 6pm at weekends.

The problem with trying to introduce all these at once is that I can't expect to impose a structure like that suddenly on my existing workload without encountering major problems. There's nothing wrong with the structure as such, but I have to allow my workload time to adjust, and my mind time to adjust too. Introducing one thing at a time would allow that to happen.

So which of the above changes will I establish first? I think turning the computer off at six would be my choice. I will concentrate on that for a bit, and when I've got that established I will introduce another change.

Diet Report

After several days on the "No Seconds" rule, my weight suddenly decided this morning to plunge to 3.5 lbs below my target weight for the day. I've no idea why - but one's weight never behaves as predictably as one would like. Anyway that means the "No Seconds" rule comes off and I am back to eating what I like, when I like and in what quantities I like. With Christmas getting closer and closer I am quite happy about being a few pounds under my target weight.

By the way my definition of "No Seconds" is "no second helpings", a much easier rule to keep than the "No S Diet" definition of only one plate of food during a meal.

So far I have been doing my composite diet for a week and a half during which I have lost 5 lbs. The only change I have made to my normal eating habits is to avoid eating second helpings for a few days. This must be about the easiest diet I have ever been on.

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

More on Outlook Tasks

In my last posting on the subject, I described how emails can be dragged into the text box on an Outlook Task. However it's not just emails that can be dragged into the text box. You can also drag website links and any sort of file that Windows Explorer lists. You can even drag tasks into the text box. So you can assemble in one place all the documents concerning a particular task or project. Be careful though if you intend to make changes to any of these documents because they are not links to the original documents but are stored as copies attached to the task box.

So far I have described what happens if you drag an email or other document into the text box on a Task. But what happens if you drag the document directly into the Task folder icon in the Outlook margin? You might like to try it now with an email.

What you get is a Task box with the text of the email.

Now try it with a Word document - drag one into the Tasks icon in the Outlook margin. Again you get a Task box with the file showing as an icon. But there is one big difference here - this is a live link to the original document. Any changes you make will be saved directly to the original.

How can you use this? Say for instance that you are writing a report or a book. You can drag the file into Tasks, and set the alarm to bring it up for you regularly each morning at a certain time. You can also attach to the Task any reference material in the form of web links or files that you might need. What more could you want? Get writing!

More on this subject soon.

Image Chef

Want some imaginative ways to display your message? Whether it's on your website, or in an email.

Have a look at Image Chef. It has some really good templates. I created the image at the left in about 5 seconds. Notice how the text is shadowed in the same way as the sign - and even weathered like it!

Images come in small, medium or large size (this is the large size).

You create your image in three steps: 1) Select the template; 2) Add your personalised message;3) Send as email or post to your blog using the tools on the site. It's all about as simple as it can be. Have fun!

You have been warned... again!

Just in case your productivity has recovered from Line Rider and Air Monkey, here is another little program to keep you from your work!

The Flight of the Hamsters