random update on my life: classes, time management, Wii

Here’s what I’m up to lately:

I’m taking a class over at Third Hand Works called the “True Discipline of Time Management” and it is awesome. I think any description of it is going to sound hopelessly woo-woo, but I’ll try: it’s about understanding your relationship with time. Not somebody else’s relationship with time (like David Allen’s, ahem), but yours. Like, how do you tick? Self-observation. Reflection. Introspection. Investigation. Creative discovery. Etc.

And then, from this place of self-knowledge, you start to play with scheduling patterns that ACTUALLY work for you. I am blown away because I didn’t think any structure at all would ever work for me. But it comes down to understanding in what ways structure helps me, when it doesn’t, what kind of structure works, and understanding a lot of other things about how I tick and what I need.

Here are some neat links that have come out of the class:

• Heatmapping - how you are more productive at different times of the day. I discovered that even though I generally stay up late, I actually am a lot more productive in the morning. Interesting…
• Transition Anxiety – I am not completely “polychronic”, but I definitely relate to the idea of transition anxiety – often my activities just bleed one into the next. Which is part of why I stay up late sometimes – I just don’t want to stop doing what I’m doing.

What I love about this approach is that it’s about self-discovery, rather than self-putting-in-a-box. And it goes along with my other class that I’m taking right now which is…

How to have healthy relationships. Yes. I need it. If you know me, you know why I need it, and if you don’t, well, just trust me, I do.

What turns out though is that boundaries are boundaries are boundaries. The skills I’m learning about self-observation and self-care and transitions in my Time Disciples class are similar (if, uh, involving less crying into my pillow) to the skills I’m learning in my relationship class. It always comes back to knowing yourself, knowing your needs, valuing them, and taking care of them as a basic foundation. And, about letting go. And making choices.

It’s all the same stuff. Which is awesome. Because it makes everything I learn in one area kind of transferable to another area.

I love that.

The last learning-type “thing” I’m doing right now is that I hired a tutor to help me with PHP. I’m really excited by this because I finally have someone I can ask all those pesky questions like, “Is this really the best way to structure this app?” and “Should I use PEAR or the Zend Framework or write my own controller?” and “How do I avoid having any horrible security holes vulnerable to SQL injection attacks?” and the like. It’s AWESOME. And it was an EFFORTLESS hiring experience, which I am so grateful for. I put an ad on craigslist and he emailed me. We meet once a week at a coffeeshop. I am SO STOKED.

Which you can probably tell from all the capital letters. OK. Taking a breath now.

It’s just that I had all these projects that were sort of stalled because of my lack-of-time-management-skills issue and my lack-of-PHP-skills issue, and now I am actually making some progress. Slow, but, you know, measurable. Yee-haw!

Oh, and uh…I got a Wii.

And got slightly addicted to Lego Star Wars. And modded my DDR mat a bit with some cardboard so it would lay flat…here I am halfway through the project:

I added extra squares under the arrows so you can tell with your feet where you are. It’s based on this awesome tutorial which is much more serious and uses wood and vinyl, but I thought this would be a start. It definitely improves things.

And last but not least, I got a snazzy new little camera! It’s a little smaller than my old one, has image stabalization, and is a gorgeous shade of brown, but mostly I got it so I could use an Eye-Fi card (my other camera took Compact Flash and Eye-Fi is SD). Eye-fi uploads your photos to your computer wirelessly. (It’s completely worth it.) My new camera is a Canon SD1100IS. It’s purty:

And that’s the summary. OH wait, I’ve also been doing some Bookmooching and some Swaptreeing as part of a decluttering jag. OK. That’s really it.

Well, OK, and filing my taxes and writing my procedure manual. But you don’t want to hear about that. =)

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