inspiration

Went for first proper bike ride in ages today. Well I say proper; because it was so long since I'd been out we only did 15 miles. Didn't cycle much last year due to a combination of CB's bad knees and my OU commitments. CB's knees are much better now. Her doctor told her it was her weight putting too much stress on them, and she has done as she was told and lost weight. She's gone from being big like me (size 24/26) to being a 16/18. She's lost 80 lb in 8 months by careful eating and lots of exercise. And so I see with my own eyes that it can be done.

One thing I have to get back is control, not just of my eating but of other bits of my life. If things go wrong and I feel disorganised and running around getting nowhere fast and everything's too much, then that is liable to trigger me back down into uncontrolled eating too.

So that is what I am working on for now, being controlled and organised instead of panicked, bingeing and chaotic. I have started to revive my gtd processes; I have all my open loops in 'in' and will be processing them tomorrow. The weekly review will return. And I am going to get back to belly dancing this week.

rare outbreak of efficiency

It is totally unheard of for me to book holidays more than a few weeks in advance. Or at least, it used to be. But now we have to juggle the only times we can go away (when school and university holidays coincide, which is not always) with the facts I want to go to summer school, that this is 'our year' for going to Ireland in the summer (we do it alternate summers), that part of my work programme for the whole year is being set up soon and I have a new colleague with school age kids (= competition for prime holiday dates), decisions had to be made. So this morning I emailed my boss and booked holidays in May (half term), July (summer school + ireland) and October (post-exam holiday).¹

My gran died last year, and left a small amount of money for each of her many grandchildren. We decided to spend ours on a really nice holiday, so we've booked a log cabin in a forest in Scotland. I booked that this morning, too.

OK now I'm off back to re-GTD-ing my office. I've thrown out or filed lots of piles of paper, now I have to crank through the paper I've kept.

1. I realise that if you are American this seems like a lot. Actually I get 6 weeks (ie 30 days if I was full time) paid holidays (vacation) a year, plus 8 days bank holidays. This is generous by UK standards but not unusually so.

robbing Peter to pay the wool shop

Yarn buying is a necessity of life, much like book buying. This month I am skinter even than usual, as I have had to pay Mr Branson several hundred pounds I have not yet got back from work. But I'm not letting that stop me from buying yarn, even if it means shuffling money out of the paying-bills-joint-account before going shopping. Yesterday I got some horribly expensive but gorgeous Rowan aran silk to crochet a little bolero, to wear with my posh frock to a weddin, plus some normal wool to knit the sleevless jumper with vest that O wants. Also I have some recycled sari silk yarn on order, to make a bag for a leaving present for an friend.

My current crochet project is about half way through, and I really wish I'd taken it along to the cinema this afternoon, as I sat through Spiderman3 with O. There was probably just about enough light, and it would've passed the time. O loved every minute of course (except the soppy bits). So yes I am obsessed with crochet. I am behind with my studies and in danger of developing RSI but hey it makes me happy.

Actually I think my mood is lifting a bit, and I've got my 43 things routines going again, having let them slide for a while. I am doing small bursts of studying and am on top of my work. Even better, when work was getting all a bit much a couple of weeks ago, I managed to talk to my new boss about it before things went critical. Baby steps as ever.

briefly

• Lost a bit last week and got back to my pre-London weight
• I need to give more priority to getting my exercise it, apart from the belly dancing it's slipping already
  
• Have decided to move my GTD weekly review day to Monday, I think it will work better for me
• I am at last doing my 29th thing - at the moment I have a sleeveless jumper (for O, black with white star on front) and a scarf (for me, thick wool in peaty colours) on the go

another week another gain

Blurgh inspite of my good intentions, a combination of London and TOTM has given me a gain of 3 lb this week. Oh well at least I will be mainly at home for the next few weeks so can get back to trying to learn how to eat like a normal person.

And Friday wouldn't be Friday without my GTD review. In some ways I find the weekly review the hardest part (well apart from actually doing the work) and am still playing around with how I do it. At the moment I

• make a cup of tea
• process anything outstanding in my in-tray
• pull out all my @action files and my project files, open up my email folders and 43things
• get out last week's project/review list
• look at my diary for the week/s ahead
• work through my paper & email folders, checking for things done and things outstanding
• synchronise my main diary (sunbird) with my paper diary and the family calendar
• list my ongoing projects and note the 'next action', highlighting the things I really need to move on in the coming week
• make sure the reminders are put in the proper place in the system - eg putting a bill in my tickler file so it 'pops up' when I need to pay it, noting it on a post-it and sticking it to the right list (eg calls)
  
• put all my folders away again
• have another cup of tea

One thing I know I need to work on is my longer term planning. I'm getting pretty good at next actioning stuff but many projects also needs some work on planning them out. That's something I'm going to work on this week.

And because I know how fascintating all this gtdness is, here are some photos to go with it:



More stationery news: I am currently in love with the Paperchase's stripey range.

procrastination central

because I have so much work and study to catch up on that I get all panicked when I think about starting, here's a nice picture of the last 25 books I read

on not getting things done

Well my widgets remain beautifully organised but unfortunately somewhat uncranked. I have several projects that I keep pushing back and pushing back. I need to get them moving else I will be in serious trouble but seem unable to overcome my ostrich-itis about them. These are not things that will take a seriously long time, but they are things I have allowed myself to become scared of.

Doing my weekly gtd review has helped a bit. I have realised that I have progressed many things well, so I am not in fact a total failure. I am hoping this perspective will help get me over the hump and back cranking my widgets come Monday morning. I have re-arranged my working patterns so that instead of smearing my part-time work over a full week, I work only on 3 days a week. I thought this would make it easier to concentrate on doing the right things on the right days - work on work days, study on non-work days. So far it's not working out that well but I will keep going at it.

Weight-wise, I have lost another 1.5 lb this week whoo etc. I have eaten sensibly/normally 5 days out of 7, making a change from bingeing 5 days out of 7. I'm still tracking my food on WW site but not worrying about staying within points - I think I need another few weeks of adjusting back to eating normally before starting to cut back more. Maybe when I stop losing weight, it will be time to try and stick to my points. I've done most of the exercise I aimed for - belly dance and aquarobics but not pilates (not my fault, class was cancelled).


The current cornerstones of my healthy(er) eating are smoothies (the lazy girl's way to eat fruit, whizzed up with low fat pro-biotic yoghurt & sugar-free cranberry juice), houmous (home made, way nicer than shop bought houmous which is often foul) , pitta bread (to eat houmous with)p & oatcakes. I am trying to be organised - making a batch of houmous at the weekend, and when I make smoothies I make enough for 2 or 3 at a time, not running out of itta bread or oatcakes, that kind of thing.

Next week is a bit worrying - me & O are having a half-term trip to That London and will mostly be eating out. I need to think about how I can handle that sensibly.

sell out

My MSOffice-free computer experiment has been only half successful. I have had to revert to Word & Excel. I share too many layout-heavy documents with word users, that Open Office probbaly could cope with if I had the time and patience to fiddle about with templates and the like, but I don't. Similarly with spreadsheets, I can barely work excel so any extra level of complexity is beyond me when it comes to dealing with spreadsheets.

I haven't, tho, been sucked back into Outlook. I used to be a 'heavy user' - as well as email, I used the calendar and tasks and synched it all with my phone. But I love Thunderbird, I think it's an ace email client. The associated calendar, Sunbird, is fairly rudimentary but as I've gone analogue in my new GTD-ism, I can cope with that for now. So not a complete sell-out.

We had a good weekend, quite busy - on Saturday we went swimming, to see a puppet show and out for pizza with friends, on Sunday I went cycling and R took O and some friends to run about in the outdoors for a few hours. Now back to work boo hoo and still trying to eat normally too. It is not going too bad, although I'm thinking that maybe buying a big box of dried dates wasn't such a good idea ... just becausee it's fruit doesn't mean it's all good ...

weekly review

oh not more gtd dronings? Yep, fraid so. The weekly review is a key gtd thing, and a generally good idea. So I'm hoping planning to do it each Friday, which ties in nicely with my weighing myself schedule too, then I can review my eating and WL week at the same time. I've dusted down my 43 things list to use as a collection bucket for some of my personal projects (particularly those of the 'someday/maybe' variety), and gone through adding next actions to the things I want to move on (oh and put it in my side bar too hurrah for java script thingummies). Then I've dropped those next actions into my @actions system and made folders for the projects that need them.

I haven't weighed myself today, as I only did it a couple of days ago, but Friday will be my regular weighing day. Eating has gone OK the past 3 days, I have been over my points but I'm not that bothered about that for now. The important thing is I have been eating real food (fruit and veg and pulses omg) and drinking water & green tea (instead of 6 cans of Diet Dr Pepper a day). So far, so good, so keep on going. Tomorrow morning I'll have a swim while O has his swimming lesson, I have a bike ride arranged for Sunday and I've arranged to take friend along to belly dancing so I have to stay for 2 hours instead of 1.

And my OU books have started to arrive hurrah!

one more thing

one of my new favourite things is Freecycle. You've got stuff you don't need anymore, someone else wants stuff, they come and collect stuff from you. Hurrah, less consumerism and less stuff in landfill. When I gtd-ed my office I found a pile of stuff I've offloaded on freecycle. I've got some great stuff from there too, best of all a new bed¹ for O which he loves (we were going to buy one but then it showed up for free yay). Go on, try it, it's like ebay but for free.


1. We bought the mattress new, tho. Ickety ick to used mattresses.

exceptions to the rule

My motto is "never do today what you can put off till tomorrow", but I make an exception for stationery shopping. I feel about stationery like normal women are supposed to feel about shoes - somewhere out there is the one, the magic item, that will make me organised and productive and beautiful and sexy. Getting into GTD has given me a fantastic excuse for indulging my passion. I have lovely new intrays and files and folders and best off all, brand new today, a lovely box for keeping my 43folders in (thanks to 43folders wiki for the tip - there is no room in my tiny office for another filing cabinet so a box for my folders is great).

The 2 things I like best about GTD are:

1. he tells you how to set up a simple system to organise your stuff. All my systems break down because they are too complicated or things drop through the cracks. I think this new system might work for me, I particularly like the whole tickler file thing, I feel like I might finally be managing my paper.
2. the emphasis on next actions. For someone who prevaricates and panics and procrastinates like I do, focusing on the next thing I have to physically do makes sense. It also chimes in with stuff I worked on during CBT sessions in the past.

The book has a quote which I love, so I have made it into a motivational poster incorporating my spiritual beliefs:

It is easier to act yourself into a better way of feeling than to feel yourself ino a better way of action

O.H. Mowrer

catching up

Christmas was great, it was really nice to spend the day with all of my family, plus we went to visit friends who moved to Brum last year. Owen got totally spoilt with mounds of presents, including Marvin's Mind Blowing Magic. He spent New Year's Eve performing street magic for friends and neighbours.

All back to work and school now boo and also waiting for the course materials to arrive to start my next OU courses. In preparation for which I have signed up to the cult of Getting Things Done. I've read the holy book, I've set up the sacred 43folders and now I'm ready to start cranking those blessed widgets. I'm going for a mainly anologue implementation to start with (square cut folders, A4 paper, post-its), we'll see how it goes.

Eating is double plus ungood right now, bingeing like feck. Next action: read "Overcoming Binge Eating"