January 20, 2010
fitness, goals, writing
1 Comment
I’ve been reviewing my work Screw Skinny, Get Fit and I realize that I’ve been messing around on this project for too long. I need a big, huge deadline that’ll embarrass me if I don’t meet it to get my lazy butt in gear about this thing.
So, here’s the deal.
I’m going to be offering ScrewSkinny for sale in PDF or PRC (that means you can read it on a Kindle, or in Mobipocket) starting April 1, 2010. I haven’t set a price yet, but it’s going to be under $10. If I get another big contract, I’m just gonna have to give up some knitting time. This is gonna happen no matter who else wants my literary excellence.
This book is not for the athlete. It’s for someone who is sedentary who wants to build or maintain health and fitness. If you have an active, outdoor lifestyle, you’re all good and don’t need this. It’s for someone who’d rather knit or play WoW. Yes, there is a strong geek focus.
I discuss levels of ability, including handicaps of various sorts, and explain why The Perfect Workout is nonsense.
September 1, 2009
goals
2 Comments
I’ve gained more weight than I’m happy with. I’ve not been as active as I should be, and I’ve been doing a lot of snacking on bread in spite of the bentos.
So, back to No-S, and getting in at least a small workout every weekday. That’s sustainable and non-invasive and doesn’t have the Forbidden Food Fallacy. I recognize allergies and medical conditions are one thing. I don’t have that problem. My problem is a simple problem of mindless snacking, especially in the evenings. No-S solves that problem quite well. If it hurts when you do that, stop doing that. Simple. (Y’all know simple and easy aren’t necessarily the same? Yeah, figured you did!)
For exercise, I can: Go for a walk, put in a swim, do a shovelglove session, do a weights workout at the gym or do bodyweight exercises. Any of those counts, and I’m allowed to follow whim as long as I am doing something. I can go hard or not as I like. It’s the consistency I’m worried about rather than any progress issue.
My goal here is habits rather than progress. That’ll take care of itself, but going hammer and tongs at fitness and lifestyle goals doesn’t work. I know it. And still I keep trying to do it. Why I keep doing it when it doesn’t work, I don’t know. Well, yeah, I do. I’m an intensity junkie. That’s dandy for some things, but it’s not serving me here.
So the goal itself is consistent habits. I may eschew even weighing myself. Eat three full meals a day (if you don’t snack, the meals need to be comfortably substantial to get the right amount of food), and have a treat on weekends or holidays if I want them. I won’t track what I eat or the calorie content, but simply eat three single-plate (or bento box) meals a day. Honestly? My meals are pretty decently healthy, so it’s not really a concern. It’s all that nibbling that’s the real problem.
I won’t track my fitness progress other than whether or not a workout happened out every weekday. Right now my real problem is that I get all excited about a goal and get all into it and then burn out. That’s not serving me.
The point here is that I’m spending far too much mental energy on problems that could be solved simply with consistent moderate habits. Goodness knows it worked with housekeeping. My house is adequately neat and I do not spend my life cleaning house. So I expect it’ll do nearly as well with my body as well.
May 1, 2009
Freelancing, bento, fitness, goals
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I swam my 1500 today. That’s a challenge still, and took me about 45 minutes1. But that’s okay. Come June, I don’t think that’ll be a challenge any more!
I’m even using a cute widdle fishie ticker. Ain’t that sweet? I note, however, that the progress bar is hardly to scale.
Apparently an aquafitness class counts as 2,000 yards. I think they’re figuring a certain fitness level2 takes about an hour to swim 2000, so that’s how it’s figured. Fair enough. Plenty of people find lap swimming mind-numbing. I don’t, but that’s because that’s my time to work out plots for stories, plan how to pitch projects or plan classes.
In fact, I spent most of today’s workout working up a proposal to try to teach a bento class that the gym where I work. It’s a community/rec center more than a classical gym, even if the exercise equipment is really good. They have all sorts of fun classes, so if I can figure out a structure for it and pitch it right, they might let me. I was figuring an end of summer-type deal where I have the class and give away to each student a cheap bento box (you can get ‘em for a buck through Ichibankan), a colorful bandana and some cute chopsticks as well as a few lessons on how to make and arrange some basic bento food. I’d have a handout with some basics, a list of local stores that sell good Asian food and some places where people can buy bento boxes.
For the local gym, the pitch would have to be the “healthy lunch for your kids” thing, I think. There’s also the frugality hook. But I’m going to have to figure out a way to pitch it as not particularly time-consuming. The way I do it, it really isn’t, but you can go overboard with the cute.
I’ve had the idea for this class in the back of my mind since I started bein’ a bum, but it’s fleshed out a lot more in my mind lately, and I have a considerably better idea of who to talk to for getting this class on the program as well as how the class really ought to be structured.
1Go ahead, competitive swimmers. Laugh it up.
2Hmm, close to my own, now that I do the math.
March 19, 2009
Work From Home Course, goals
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The next lesson won’t be until next Wednesday, but I really feel this needs to be said and soon about the course.
You probably won’t follow through on this. Chances are good you’ll quit. Either you’ll decide that the insecurity is too much to take, you’ll look yourself in the face and realize that you need a boss to tell you what to do and when to do it, or you’ll get discouraged and disgusted and think I was “lucky” or am blowing smoke about this. I doubt that more than one in a couple of hundred have the requisite character traits and skills to make self-employment a genuinely viable option.
Thing is, it’s not necessarily about self-discipline. Certainly not in my case, as I’m hardly a self-disciplined person. It wasn’t self-discipline, it was desperation. I had a secure job with the best boss I’ve ever had, fantastic benefits and cool people to work with. And the idea of spending the rest of my life in an office, even in what was genuinely a great working environment, made me gag. I was willing to crash and burn hard if only I could say that I made a real, genuine, honest effort to be my own boss. If you’re desperate and there’s Just No Other Way to bring in money, you might very well succeed. “Root hog, or die!” has spelled the success of more than one entrepreneur! But, I wouldn’t risk a nickel that anyone reading this will actually do it.
This is not something you can do because you’re looking for the easy way to do something. If you are out of a job and you’re not combing the want ads for work, pounding the pavement and knocking on doors and willing to turn your hand to anything honest, if you turn down jobs that aren’t “good enough”, skip it. Stop reading. This isn’t going to do you a bit of good. You have to have a passion to work – either for the idea, or because you don’t want your kids to go hungry. If you’re thinking, “Oh it might be nice if…” or “I could pick up a little money doing…” you’re not coming from the place that will really work. You need all the focus of “I WANT” that you did when you were two. You have to be on fire to make this work. Though, sometimes that fire can be banked coals…
To give you an idea of what I mean, I’ll give you a little story.
My family goes to Virginia Beach every summer. We’ve been doing it since I was a small child. So, this was our week at the beach. I was sitting on the balcony about sunrise, with the bright orange disc beginning to push over the edge of the water, lighting a glistening golden path between myself and the horizon. It was a clear morning with a gentle, rhythmic surf, and weight of the damp, bone-soothing heat you get on Southern beaches in August. I had a cup of coffee at my elbow, laptop in my lap, writing an email to a client while my family slept behind the sliding glass door.
My father came out on the balcony with his laptop and a cup of coffee[1]. He opened up the machine, looked over at me, nodded to my computer and grinned, commenting, “That’s been a lifelong dream, hasn’t it?”
Yes, it was something I’d wanted and worked for from childhood. That’s passion.
[1] Yep, I’m second generation work from home. Part of my unsuitability for offices was probably a result of specific training!
Intro to Work From Home Course
A Fair Warning About the Course
February 20, 2009
Freelancing, goals
No Comments
Yesterday, I commented that I’d been told about a blocking add-in for Firefox called Leechblock. You enter the sites you think you shouldn’t visit and when (or for how long). I mentioned that I was going to do an experiment and see what happens.
I’m gonna be honest, I’ve only been doing it for a morning and the results are already embarrassing. I’ve discovered that for a woman in my profession, I permit myself to context switch far, far too often! See, context switching kills concentration, and what does a writer do most of all, boys and girls? Right.
While I didn’t get a whole day’s worth of work done in a quarter of the time, I certainly did get a lot more done than I ordinarily would if I were hanging out on LJ, Tribe, Twitter, and Facebook all day – jumping online between paragraphs. I’ll probably finish up the day a little early, but I’ve got a project that’s been hanging fire for weeks that I’m going to get to, anyway. It’s not paying work, but might turn into paying work, and if I’m gonna set myself strict office hours, I suppose I’m allowed to work on projects when I’m done with my paying work, right?
I have also been using Rescuetime to analyze my computer usage and have discovered that what they call time-wasters are actually often genuine research for me. I’ve also found that I’m spending considerably less time on email than I’d estimated – less than an hour a day. That shocked me, but I realized I won’t have a clear picture until someone starts a heated discussion on PolyFamilies again!
February 19, 2009
goals
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A friend of mine on LJ1 turned me on to a Firefox plugin of epic usefulness – Leechblock. It prevents you from accessing sites that, in your judgement, are timewasters during specified periods of time. It’s not like a nanny software that blocks sites forever, but gives you the option of limiting time on a specific site or banning those sites from being accessed during certain hours. If you’re really worried about self control, you can also choose to set it to prevent you from accessing options until the banned time is over.
Now part of my job really kind of is to screw around on the net. Most of my clients want me to write for the web, so I have to be aware of web trends, understand what makes a good blog post or not, and other things of that nature. Not only that, but I do use the Internet for research.2 However, when you’ve hit refresh for the fiftieth time in an hour on Livejournal, are grinding your teeth at the stupidity Facebook’s latest TOS fiasco, or have posted that you’re clipping your toenails on Twitter, things have gone a bit far.
I consider myself reasonably self-disciplined. I meet deadlines. I finish my to-do list for work. I manage to scrounge enough money to keep me from having to get a “real job” and that really does take some self-motivation. But I’m going to try an experiment. For the next week, I’m going to block some sites from my browser during office hours3 with an hour break for lunch and see what it does to my productivity and client base.
I’m guessin’ we’re gonna see some positive results. Whatcha think?
1 (Thanks sheelangig!)
2You’d be amazed at how inexpensive a single PDF download of an article from a technical or medical journal can be sometimes!
3 6:30-3:30 is usual for me to work.
December 17, 2008
Freelancing, goals
No Comments
I’ve had people comment from time to time that they don’t have the self-discipline to work from home or be self-employed.
Ironically, it’s not unusual for me to get this comment from people I consider more self-disciplined than I am1.
I think that it has a lot to do with one’s view of “should” v. “want to”. I like working from home and having the freedom that I do a whole lot. I might be a good writer, but to explain how much I like it would be difficult. I don’t know, necessarily, how much self-discipline it takes to do what you passionately want. In fact, I’d say it doesn’t take all that much discipline, really.
That’s something I think we often miss in our lives. We don’t separate out what we think we should be doing or should want from what we passionately want with all our hearts and souls.
Does this mean we should necessarily make our livings from our passions? No, not really. When you can, it’s really cool. I’m not gonna lie about that. Thing is, it looks a lot more virtuous than it is. When you wake up excited about doing something, and that something is your job, you look all focused and motivated and virtuous and disciplined. Friends, going into a toy store and grabbing everything in sight is about as far from disciplined as you can get!
I’m going to be taking a trip down to visit my family soon. I’m taking the train at least in part so I can work on the way down. I love being able to do that. It’s hard to describe the kick I get out of it. The kick I get out of sitting here in my writin’ chair listening to Dire Straits (playing Money for Nothing, ironically enough), and working on a project for a client feels so very good. I used to dream of being able to do exactly this when I was a kid. I’d read science fiction stories about people with hand computers (and remember these were written when computers were as big as a bedroom!) able to access datanets anywhere, write stuff, do work and go anywhere while they were doing it.
I wanted that so badly. It’s part of why I wanted to be a writer in the first place. When I was a kid, it was the only portable profession I knew about. Being a computer professional wasn’t yet all that portable — as I well knew when I watched my father leave the house as I got up to get ready for school. But I’d take my notebook into the woods behind my friend Mindy’s house, write, and fantasize about the day when I’d be making a living doing that.
When you want something that badly, when you dream about something so much that it stops being a dream but just an internalized part of you waking and sleeping, discipline isn’t the issue any more. It’s just… what you do.
1 I actually consider myself pretty undisciplined, really. I’m just pig-headed.
October 28, 2008
Freelancing, fitness, goals
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I just plain did not feel like swimming today. Not sure why, but since the goal is to do cardio on Tuesdays, I just did something else that I think I am going to start referring to as my Tu’penny Upright Cardio[1]: 20 minutes on the elliptical. Anything to keep myself amused and motivated. I wanted to share this with the gym, but since I work there I figured I’d be a little more professional about it. With my luck, someone there reads this and I’m gonna hear it next time I’m there.
I’m beginning to feel like a dork for driving to work when I work in the gym. I live a half a mile from the place. Thing is, I go there at 0-my-god-it’s-early and I’m not sure that walking there in the dark is exactly being Ms. Safety – even if I do live in a small and not too terribly crime-ridden town. Still, driving a half a mile that I’m physically capable of walking quite comfortably offends my sensibilities. Besides, I kinda like getting in that little extra bit of walking. God knows why, but I’ll walk to get somewhere and rather like doing it, but rarely just “take a walk”. When the snow starts getting nasty here, I probably will start walking to the gym cause I hate driving in snow, the sidewalks are safe, I have good boots and I figure that people tend not to be arsed to get out in bad weather to commit crimes. I should probably look up that last and see if there’s any stats on it rather than bet my safety on idle speculation, huh?
I have some work to finish today, which is good. I also really need to sit my butt down and make a specific reading plan for my school. While I love a self-directed study, it is self-directed, which means I have to plan what I’m doing. I’m just not at home to doing it frantically right before the deadline. I could throw something adequate together and it’d probably look better than a lot of what my advisor gets. There are advantages to studying and writing for a living! But, the idea is to turn in stuff that’s as good as anything I’d hand a client. ‘Cause, well, you know… The whole Proud as Lucifer thing.
In the interests of trying to start leaning Parkour[2] I’ve been making a point to jump more often. You know, down a minimal amount of steps, over small obstacles. Mostly at this point I really am trying to get my courage back about my knee. Two years out of ACL repair surgery is plenty. The knee is as strong as it is ever going to get, I lift weights, so the supporting muscles are fine. I jumped off the stepstool we use at the gym because our files are too high for the short people. It’s goofy. It’s small. But I’m starting from nothing. Goofy and small works. Also been practicing my rolls, but that’s just fun. I did forget to ask if the gym stocked mats for the third floor where the basketball courts and stuff are. The aerobics room has ‘em, but I’ll want room. I suppose I can always drag ‘em upstairs.
[1] My usual cardio is lying down, for longer duration and at a slightly slower pace. Do I really have to draw you guys a picture?
[2] And you kids in the peanut gallery can stop laughing at a fat old lady even attempting it!
October 1, 2008
Freelancing, fitness, goals, writing
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I’ve got more work than I know what to do with… Well, okay, that’s not quite fair. I have a lot of work, but I know what to do with it. Finish it on time. See, not that complex!
When I quit working for an employer, I had several income streams figured out, and I approached it with the idea I’d do most anything legal and reasonable to bring in some cash. Clean houses, babysit, be a Virtual Assistant, have a phone advice line, temp… I didn’t care as long as I was working for myself. As wonderful as the job I left was (and I really did work with some great people in a fantastic environment), I Just Don’t Like Office Work. I didn’t leave to flee the Job from Hell, but because I needed a change and needed to be working for myself.
I am actually a little surprised that writing has become a big enough part of my income (most of it, these days) that I’m not thinking so much in terms of finding multiple income streams doing radically different things as I am thinking in terms of being a full-time freelance writer. Not all of my income is from writing. I teach computer applications, too. But, I’m almost at the point where I could quit that if I wanted to and only write.
Here’s the cool part. The teaching? I’m doing that because it’s fun. How cool is that? I wouldn’t give it up. If I had a J.K. Rowling-style success at fiction (and none of my income comes from fiction), I’d still want to teach. I don’t think I’d love it full time like I do writing nearly full time. I’d burn out. But a few classes a month? Bring it on!
I’m feeling slow today. I can’t believe I got my lazy butt to the gym this morning. You know those workouts when you’re having a great time, the blood is pumping and you feel like a God? Yeah, well, today wasn’t one of ‘em. The best I can say is that I did what I planned I would do. I saw a woman in the gym today that was monster strong. I saw her at the squat rack with an empty bar and though, “No way did she get muscle development on her legs like that squatting 45lbs!”
I was right. That was her warmup set. She was doing pyramids and when I left she was squatting something like 155lbs. (She was teeny, too. ‘Bout my height, but with very little body fat). I commented to a trainer there, “Someday.”
“Yeah, she’s really strong,” quoth he.
It made me feel good, because he knew immediately I was envying the strength more than anything. You have no idea how much I enjoy being in a gym where strength and fitness in women is considered a great goal without pushing skinny, skinny, skinny all the time.
September 16, 2008
Freelancing, goals, writing
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I’m up between 4:30 and 5:15 most weekday mornings. No, not claiming some early morning virtue here. I do that for three reasons. A couple of mornings a week, I open the local gym before my workout. The rest of the time, I figure I might as well have my body used to getting up that early. Since I’m up, it’s easiest just to get that workout out of the way then so I don’t have it hanging over my head all day.
The biggest reason is sheer laziness. Yep, laziness. If I have an article to write for a client, it takes me about a quarter of the time if I do it before noon that it would take me if I tried to do it after noon. It’s weird that the difference in how well my brain works and when is so dramatic, but it is.
Since I work to the job instead of by the hour, getting up and getting going right away is the most cost-effective way for me to work.
Not everyone is a morning person, of course. There are people whose brains simply do not turn on until late afternoon.
The question I have is: Do you know when your brain is sharpest and do you schedule your life in harmony with that? Do you know what environmental factors help this?
For instance, my brain is sharpest after a really hard workout. Yet, I used to date a guy who found that heavy physical labor sapped his mental capacity, so he rarely chose to exercise anywhere near time to do work requiring clear thought.
This isn’t just for self-employed people by the way. When I used to work in an office, I tried to schedule the “brain” tasks for before lunch and routine stuff for after lunch. I also learned that coming home from an office to try to do webdev type work after dinner Just Wasn’t Going to Happen. I think that one of the reasons that the freelance writing profession is overwhelmingly represented by night owls has a lot to do with the fact that it was the night owls who were able to work a day job and work at night until they were established as writers. That this happened to ole up-with-the-chickens Noël is a bit of luck and a whole bunch of audacity.
Do you know your own rhythm?
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