Simplifying Holiday Meals
I love traditional holiday meals. Not necessarily because of the traditions themselves, although they are meaningful, but because no one expects innovation. And no innovation means simple, because I've done it all before. As part of my move to deliberate living I have moved away from complex meals that stress me out to the point where I can't enjoy the holiday. So that means simplicity, repeatability and more enjoyment. With the American Thanksgiving and the winter holidays coming up, I thought I would share with you how I have simplified the big Thanksgiving dinner we have at our house.
A Day in the Life
People can learn by rote, or being instructed. But those that retain the information the longest are the ones who can apply it to their own perspective. As a teacher the things I found students retained were the things that they could relate to or customize to their own. The same thing applies out of school. A reader recently contacted me to learn about my typical day so that she could see if anything I did could help her structure her own. Rather than send her an overly-long email, I decided to make it a post with the hopes it might help other people too.
Tips: Highlight Alternate Rows In Excel…By Formula
I work in IT. As a function of my job, I know a lot of little tips and tricks for many programs. Excel is one of my go-to programs, but I rarely use it for numbers - I generate code and do a lot of data work with it instead. I recently had a long list of information to print out as reference material. It contained several columns, and I wanted a quick way to follow the information across the printed row without having to use an external guide.
What’s in My Weekly Review And Plan
In writing, there are two types of people: planners and pantsers. Planners outline everything and have a plan, and pantsers fly by the seat of their pants. Both produce novels; however the pantsers end up having to go back and straighten out all of the little plot issues and character problems after the fact. It's like planning after you've already done the work.Personal life is also much like this: there are planners and there are pantsers. The difference with life and time, though, is that you can't go back and change what happened in a week if it exploded in your face. I have long thought that planning is the way to make sure that I'm not wasting precious time having to rework and retry things after the fact. Today we will look at both my work and personal weekly review and plan, along with the whys…
5 Things My Dog Taught Me About Weight Loss
One of the aspects of deliberate living I have struggled with is getting healthier. For a long time I gave in to the negative habits I fall back on when stressed, namely stress eating and reading as a means of escape. The end result of this, after years of this behavior, is that I am packing extra poundage and I'm not as strong as I once was. Deliberate living doesn't mean I get the easy choices. I am choosing instead to act in a way that will move me towards health, and that means weight loss. I've learned some lessons along the way, especially from our late dog.
What’s in My Daily Plan and Review
One of my coworkers was recently complaining that she never knew what she had to do during a given day and that her days always seemed to be taken up by things that landed on her desk that day. She had big projects and wasn't making any progress but wasn't sure exactly where her time was going.A simple daily plan and review can answer all these questions. By learning how to craft a two-step routine, you can know what is coming at you during a day, what you spent your time on, and figure out where to get the time to work on projects.
Garbage In, Garbage Out…How a Programming Term Applies to Everyday Life
In programming, we have a term: GIGO. It stands for Garbage In, Garbage Out. It is particularly apt in my professional field because too often clients expect us to take mangled data and buff it into usable format, without any guidance or structure. GIGO. GIGO isn't just in data, though. I find it really does play a lot into the rest of my life.
Why I Keep My Work And Life In Separate Notebooks
There are a lot of productivity systems out there that insist that you have to keep everything in one place. There is a solid logic behind this stance: one place means you never have to decide where to put things, and you never have to figure out where to look. One life, one system.But there is another side too. There are just as good reasons to maintain separate systems for work and non-work parts of your life. Today I will go over my reasons for maintaining two separate systems.
