The Life Half Full

In recent weeks I’ve been doing my level best to apply the wondrous lessons from the Yoda of self-improvement  - Leo from Zen Habits - if you’ve not already surfed on by, be sure to check him out if you have any interest in bettering yourself.

I’m currently trying to apply his theory about creating a morning routine, and alongside it an evening routine too. 

It’s a part of a wider game plan to work on only one habit a month, allowing myself to make that habit second nature before moving on to the next one.  Hey - if it works, I’ll have changed 12 things about myself by 2009 which will be a marked improvement over any previous years!

Part of the extra challenge for me is that I’ve always been a self-proclaimed ‘night-owl’, claiming insomnia (although I’m sure any real sufferers of that affliction would tell me I was nowhere near it).  However I am now determined to become an early riser, and having a morning routine to stick to gives me many reasons to do so.  The productivity benefits of this will be huge - one good example is that it’s giving me time to write this blog - something that’s been on my ’someday/maybe’ list for quite a while now.  Even if I never wrote another post, I’ve got further with setting this up than most of my other projects in life!

 So far I’ve had mixed success.  You can see my progress as shown on Joes Goals in the graph below.  By the way, Joe’s Goals is a great little service for tracking goals simply and effectively if you like that kind of technological thing.

As you can see, so far I’ve had mixed success (including today) - as per the title of my post it either happens or it doesn’t.  I’ve been very careful to not slip into the habit of claiming a slightly earlier wake up time as ‘almost’ success.  I know that’s a slippery slope to go down.  I either do it, or I don’t.  This kind of thinking is critical if I’m going to make this stick.

Another reflection of forming this habit is that (duh) getting up earlier is easier if I go to bed and go to sleep earlier!  I know, I know - Marley Mastermind (specialised subject - stating the flaming obvious!)  However I truly always thought that my problem was getting up early.  It’s really not.  Here’s some things I think have helped

• Telling myself to stop doing things in the day.  They’ll wait until tomorrow and I’ll be rested
• Don’t drink caffeine after Noon.
• Switch the laptop off at least an hour before bed
• Drink something soothing like Ovaltine at bedtime (how old am I?!?)
• Write a journal before bed - gets the thoughts whizzing round my head out.
• Plan to be in bed very early.  Then you can do some of the things above and get to sleep early.
• Prepare as much as possible (lunch, iron a shirt, pack bags etc) for the morning.  then you wont worry about it.

I’m sure there’s many, many more and I may add to these as the month goes through.

Until then, wish me luck and let me know if you’ve got any tips, or even if you’ve set yourself a challenge for January.

Filling life up, day by day….

Marley

What a miserable title to start off with, but I’m a firm believer that:-

1. It’s better to be honest with yourself about where you are
2. The only way is up is a nice feeling (and a great song too if you were born in the ’80s)
3. There are very few people in this world who could not ask that question of themselves, even if only for a short period of their lives or about one little project or idea.

Let’s face it, no-one is perfect. Plans don’t always work out as we wanted them to. Sometimes we put things right straightaway, sometimes we don’t. I believe a greater measure of mankind is our ability to pick ourselves up after failure and put things right - putting the Hornby train back on the rails in how I saw it as a child.

So why, when I look back did it take me ten seconds as a kid to get things moving again when they went off track, and yet as an adult it feels like it takes much longer to correct my life plan?

Well I don’t know how typical I am, but if I just look back at roughly the decades of my life….

• Pre-teens - Spent most of my time adjusting Hornby train sets - good skills shown here!
• Teens - Realised that showing a modicum of interest and intelligence at school meant I found success and teachers were pleased. Started finding success in love too. Life’s pretty rosy.
• 20’s - Saw that I’d have to work at this life lark a bit but that’s OK. Found much early success (the low hanging fruit of the corporate orchard I guess), and a few knockbacks too. Love life started getting serious too. Sucessful footballers and musicians are younger than me though.
• Early 30’s - Hmmm - knockbacks increasing at work - the slope gets steeper. Decide that love life and settling down might be more important. Hmmm… that feels a bit boring. Spend too much money to try and keep relationships interesting AND serious. Try to hang on to friendships and work harder to keep from falling back down the slippery slope. Managers at work are younger than me. Worry about being halfway through my allotted ‘three score and ten’.

Wow - I really am NOT looking forward to my 40’s at this rate. Does it ever get any easier? What happened to my lifes ambitions? Why am I not an astronaut / touring with the Rolling Stones / a millionaire playboy / lending money to Bill Gates? All of these seemed perfectly realistic dreams at some point?

Now hang on a minute. On the flip side, I’ve had a pretty damn good time through some of these years (what I can remember of it!), I’ve got a lot of friends, some great contacts at work, I’ve learned a lot and I’m still fit, healthy and alive.

I think the important question is what am I doing with it all?

In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Dr Stephen Covey calls this type of thinking a ‘paradigm shift’. Undoubtedly these thoughts are the catalyst for starting to put things right. However what I failed to realise on first reading was that just as the gradual changes in my life took me away from my goals (vague as they were), you can’t just say one day ‘I’ve had a paradigm shift’ and from then on everything is perfect. It takes a succession of paradigm shifts to start to undo the years of failure and lack of focus - the good news is that it putting things right can be done!

It’s easy if it’s something tangible, important to our survival and right in front of us. It’s harder if it’s something intangible, if its only a potential benefit to our happiness or ’self-actualisation’ and if it’s inside us.

The rest of this blog is dedicated to thinking about how we can do this, how I and others have done some things that have helped.

It will touch on improvements that can be made in your work habits, your love-life and dating, your spiritual well-being, organising yourself, your friendships, your health and fitness and anything else I (or you) can think of that might be of use!

Filling life up, day by day….

Marley