Saying No At Work

Working as a W2 employee at a demanding job is a pain in the ass, especially when there's no one to offload the work to when it piles up. The best way to deal with this phenomenon is to have a list of things that you're working on, keep track of how long everything takes you and tell your boss: I'm working from the top of the list down. If something is more important tell your boss to put it at the top of the list and you'll switch to doing that but the list is the list and if your boss wants to pile things on at the last minute you can tell him to put it at the top of the list but the list is what you're working on and you're going to ignore everything else. It's a bit like how job scheduling in a computer works. There are 100 things to do every once and a while a scheduler figures out the order they should be attended to and they are given their particular time slice. Of course switching projects constantly doesn't help productivity so the analogy isn't perfect.

Skype is cool

I just tried Skype today. Very cool. The next big revolution on the Internet, as big as Google, Napster, Email, Usenet. skype me! username is: abelardlindsay

How to Specialize and Be Excellent

Specializing, finding your nitch and being good at what you do is a hard thing for most people. For others, due to chance, or talent, it's easy. If it was easy to enter a field that anybody could be good at and make a lot of money 1000 people would have been there yesterday, just like during the dot com bubble when everybody who could hack html was making great money. Today's real estate bubble is the same. Anyone who can calculate amortization and take ridiculous risks is making great money. Of course, when the washout happens the posers get wiped out and the professionals remain.

To find out where you are a professional at, to get to the right place, to fit in and be productive you have to experiment with a lot of different things. Try this, that, etc. Some of it might be hard but don't give up. Hard things are what keep everybody but the motivated out. Just follow Aristotle's famous dictum "Excellence in all things" and it will eventually work out. If you can't be excellent in something find something that you can be excellent in. Keep searching till you find it.

Hack Yourself

This is as good of a self-improvment manifesto as I've read in a while Hack Yourself. I like the "Imagine the person you want to be and become that person" part. I think that's what most psych books lack. They tell you how to tread water but not to figure out which direction to swim.

Mark Cuban on Doing...

The Sport Of Business, is an interesting blog entry by Mark Cuban.
some excerpts:

The edge is knowing that while everyone else is talking about nonsense like the will to win, and how they know they can be successful, you are preparing yourself to compete so that you will be successful.

I’m not going to go to dinner with you just to chat. I’m not going to give you a call to see how you are. Unless you want to talk business. Other guys play fantasy sports. I fire the synapses to get an edge.


The edge is knowing that people think your crazy, and they are right, but you don’t care what they think.

That final one is really resonant with me. It's the one thing that I've learned from business people I've met who were very sucessful. They say they are successful because they were crazy. They took big risks and implemented their dreams.

Conflicts and Too Much Thinking

The more energy one devotes to a conflict, the more energy is taken away from other areas of effort. For instance, if one spends too much time focusing in on an anxiety causing situation the amount of time being spent thinking about other more productive things is going to be lessened. Sometimes its important to focus in on a problem and fix it but often times too much thinking leads to little productive and ultimately despair. The challenge is finding the right balance between paying too much attention and not paying enough.

Connecting with people

I've found that through the years I've spent a lot of time getting to know lots of different people. The best I can say for my efforts is that I think I'm missing something on some level with regards to how I communicate with and understand people. I usually have nice conversations, maybe even see the person multiple times just going to and fro. I rarely however want to make the effort to keep up the relationship. Somehow it just doesn't seem important to me to maintain ongoing relationships with more than a small circle of friends. I guess I might benefit from developing better relationships but I can't figure out what the missing element is. Perhaps its because I'm introverted, however I like chatting, and find it easy to talk to people at parties.

Doing something different

The good thing about doing different things is that life feels longer. That's because, when one does different things, one's memories of the previous days don't all blend together. I find the best way to do this is by keeping a mind map of all the things I like to do using Freemind and every once and a while I'll role some dice using a dice roller to pick something to do. If I roll something I really don't want to do then I force myself to make something new to do. For me, at least it's better than getting stuck in the same old routine. Note: Make sure the die you roll has as many sides as you have things you'd like to do so the result doesn't skew toward the middle.

Geocaching: Good, Clean, Cheap Fun

For $100 one can buy a discount GPS and start GeoCaching. What's Geocaching? I'll explain it by telling you how to do it. To get started, go to the website GeoCaching.Com and put in the coordinates read from a GPS. The website will present a list of "caches" and their coordinates. These are usually tupperware containers or altoids tins full of largely worthless trinkets. You then follow your GPS to the coordinates of the cache and look for it till you've found it. You then sign the logbook and put the cache back where you've found it.

That's not the main attraction of it though. The fun of geocaching is that in the quest to find these caches, one will visit places in the local neighborhood that are very interesting. These places are ones that most people who live near them probably don't even know exist. I went to an interesting cemetery, a hard to get to point at the end of an artificial harbor, a haunted hospital, a lake I didn't know about and a whole lot of great views. I also bumped into other geocachers looking for the same caches. The best thing about Geocaching is that, after the initial GPS investment, it's pretty cheap. It also gets you outside and to interesting places. For those who've forgotten: Outside is that place that you go in between Work, Home and Costco.