Motivation (sometimes)

Motivation can be a real bitch sometimes. We all find ourselves at one time or another having a drive to get things done. In the same way, we can also find ourselves equally incapable of simple tasks. Take tonight. I had high hopes of learning how to set up the website, but it just pretty much fell through. I ended up getting frustrated because I'm basically exhausted right now, so it was easy to lose my concentration and screw up what I was doing. I finally figured out a way to at least get rid of all the template crap that was on the page, but now it looks terrible. It will need work, but once it is good to go I'll already have all the links there. In the meantime I can start dumping content onto subpages and then go from there. Which brings me back to my point on motivation. You can't give up just because you don't feel motivated. Sometimes you have to circle back around, take a little break and work on something else, and then come back to it. Notice I said WORK on something else. If you're trying to get something done and it isn't happening, don't go fuck around on YouTube for ten minutes. Those ten minutes will quickly grow to two hours, and then where are you? Nowhere. So go to something else that you need to work on that might be related, which in turn might actually lead you off on a tangent that will, if you're lucky enough, lead you back to where you were trying to get for the first place. While you're off doing something else, your brain is still thinking about what you were just doing because it's not done. It's not tied up nice and neat and filed away. It lurks. It demands your attention, even if it is only grabbing the attention of your subconscious. At some point though, if you just keep at it, you'll find the motivation you need to get it done.

Organizing - to file or not to file?

I have been brainstorming a number of topics for the podcast and the YouTube channel, and I keep coming back to the importance of organization. Case in point - I've created folders and subfolders in Google drive, a set of to do lists in Wunderlist, and a section of my organizer for brainstorming. It may seem like a bit of overkill, but the bottom line is that there is a method to the madness. Everything has its place. If everything didn't have its place, everything would end up being lost because you wouldn't be able to find it. Or would you? Take the Google approach, for example. If we're looking for something on the web, we search for it. Everything is in different locations from a data standpoint, a URL standpoint, a web structure standpoint, but at the same time it is all in one place. OUT THERE. We search for it, and Google goes and crawls the web for us, bringing back whatever we need. Email is this way for me. I put all of my emails in one place. I don't subdivide them into folders. I have one huge archive of deleted emails. When I need to find something, I figure out keywords that will return the items I need. Sometimes I need to refine the searches, but it is a system that works for me. Google Drive, on the other hand, doesn't work for me unless it is organized. My desktop of my computer? Everything is everywhere. My 'documents' folder? Drastic improvement. I tend to be selective about what is organized. Why is this? This is one of the topics I'm researching now, and I'm hoping to figure out best practices depending on scenarios. Do I think there is a 'one size fits all' solution? Not necessarily. But there might be an over-arching structure that would work across scenarios. In the meantime, I guess I'll keep on organizing one way for one thing, and another for another.

A New Start?

I have been brainstorming a number of ideas around getting the blog up and running again.  I think I would like to look at podcast options, to really see how far I can take some of these ideas I have around efficiency, productivity, and happiness.  I'm not looking at making a Tim Ferriss clone but rather looking at what makes Everyman, and any man, choose their respective path in life.  I know my path, and yet I also feel like I should perhaps be on a different path.  To that end, I'm looking at creating a site around some of the concepts I have been reading about, and hopefully I will be able to reach out to individuals who are successful in their respective walks of life, to figure out how things should be.  Even more, to figure if there's a way things SHOULD be, or only what we make of them.  We spend so much time trying to create an ideal 'us' that perhaps we are just spending time moving in the wrong direction.

So pull up a chair, stay a while, and see what happens.  This is the seed.  We'll see where this idea grows to, and how big it gets before it needs to be pruned or before we need to just spray some weed killer on it.