Self Help Is A Form Of Entertainment

I had more or less stopped reading Steve Pavlina's stuff from just about the time I started this blog.  Whatever else you think about his writing, it is a little repetitive.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Repeating the familiar with a new twist is the stock in trade of large parts of the entertainment business.  Sometimes even the new twist is dispensed with.  But I realised that I had forgotten some of the stuff that I had found valuable, and missed the bits that infuriated me.   So I had a look at what he had posted recently and went through and bookmarked some stuff to read in spare moments.

Lessons from the Germany Brazil Game

So I sat down hoping for an exciting game.  Germany usually plays according to its national stereotype of being well planned and well organised.  Brazil has a reputation for being more mercurial and creative, able to produce goals apparently out of nowhere.  Which approach would prevail.  I had an inkling that it would be the Brazilians who would come out on top.  My reasoning was that at the end of the day anybody can train hard and plan, but what Brazil does is somehow magical and would transcend the workaday.

Getting The Most Out Of Twitter

I recently wrote about how I have discovered that Twitter is not a good promotional tool for my blogging.  I enjoy using it and want to keep on using it, but I can't justify the amount of time I spend on it.  In fact I think I would probably enjoy it more if I spent less time on it.  It is so easy to simply log on and see what is going on that I do so every couple of hours.

Short Term Productivity Tactics

My current situation is that I want to create a company that I can sell in about 10 years for a largish lump sum to fund my retirement.  That is the real priority, but I have a fairly urgent need to pay the bills in the short term.  The plan had been for my job to do that but when I lost it I decided it made more sense to earn short term cash as a consultant.

Pomodoro Technique

I have been vaguely aware of the pomodoro technique for a while.  I didn't look into it because I thought it was something I already did.  I have for many years now used something rather similar to it that I devised myself so I didn't really pay it any attention.

But I was on the new Lifehacker UK site a couple of weeks ago and it offered up a 2 minute video on the subject.  I could risk that amount of time so I gave it a try.

How To Be A Straight A Student - Steve Pavlina

Steve Pavlina is a human like the rest of us and only has a limited number of good ideas.  One of those is the simple, obvious but often overlooked one that life is easier if you are disciplined and organised about how you go about it.  This is something we all know at some level.  Paying off your credit card on time is cheaper than forgetting it.  Doing a shopping list before you go to the shop minimises the time you spend in it and maximises the usefulness of what you end up leaving with.  Steve is particularly creative at coming up with great examples of this general principle and producing highly readable blog posts from them.   A good one is his description of how he became a straight A student.

Is Twitter Any Use?

I love Twitter and can happily spend hours on it.  I visit the site every day for at least a few minutes and I am rather worried that it might be the single biggest thing I do with my time after actually working.  I enjoy reading the amazing range of stuff people put up on it and often laugh out loud.  It is certainly a better source of news and comment than the mainstream media.  I regard it as generally a good thing and I am very happy that it exists.  I follow a couple of thousand people - I know some people regard this is as problem but I find that getting loads of tweets from all over the place is the best way to enjoy it.