The New Rules of Engagement
11/01/2018 09:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
izmeinaIzzie does New Year’s Resolutions a little bit different than most folks.
Several years ago an old Scrooge ritual of sitting down at the end of every day and accounting for every single silver sickle spent that day got tweeked a bit
Taking advantage of a common feature of most diaries, I also added the activities corresponding to each hour in the appointment section and smily or grumpy faces to correspond to my mood at the time.
Not being a lawyer, I was quite content with 30 minute increments
So this exercise was basically a ten minute reflection on the day.
Instead of the usual thing that folks do of creating a budget and a to do list, this was more a record of the reality than wishful thinking.
Some diaries have more space than others. 2016 was a big fat juicy diary recycled from 2011 and there was even space to add 3 things to be happy about, 1 grumpy moment, 1 thing achieved and 1 thing learnt
It did not take long to realise that most of the misery moments were spent rushing or clock watching, waiting or looking for things and most of the happy ones were spent reading or lurking at cafes reading or sitting at a beach watching the sunset and listening to the waves
Waiting in itself is not a problem. Quite happy to get to a bus stop early and have ten extra minutes of reading but once the bus is due that is unproductive zombie time and once it is five minutes late that is when the jitters begin. It's a twilight zone of not knowing what's going on and being unable to concentrate on doing anything else just in case the bus turns up
Last year one very big flag was the ridiculous amount of grumpy time spent sitting at the Big Mac waiting for spinning beach balls to get the hell out of the way so that I could squiggle or lurk on Twitter or do online courses.
There were also far too many 1am bed times. This bad habit started in November due to the Nanowrimo rule of no online time until the daily quota of 2,000 words was reached.
Of course that has always been the rule every November since 2009 but all that was before joining Twitter in December 2016
So based on actual data rather than a whole lot of wishful thinking, figured it would be a good idea to make some new ground rules for the new year.
A really gorgeous Summer Solstice day spent visiting several sacred sites, watching the sunset at Cottesloe Beach where there were spectacular cloud formations like layers of pancakes which turned orange, red and bright pink and getting lots of stuff squiggled in the little green book was totally tainted and trashed by an attempt to post online at 11.30pm
It took more than 30 minutes to even get to the Dreamwidth posting page and even Scrivener was a bit suss that evening.
Of course those 30 minutes felt like 30 hours and before long the idea of writing about a most magical day was well and truly the last thing on the serpent mind. Of course it was completely irrational to become so grumpy and miserable over the by now almost completely predicable unpredictability of the Big Mac.
That was the sign to take back control and not to let real world experiences take second place to virtual reality.
Time to put the Big Mac on notice and Twitter on time outs.
Also noticed that sorting and housekeeping around the Lair were too likely to get forgotten if going online around 8pm instead of 9pm. Because of course the plan of turning it off at 9pm and going downstairs to do stuff does not usually work out that well in reality.
So now Mondays and Fridays with the occasional Wednesday are a Big Mac free diet.
An 11pm bed time has proved so far to be too ambitious so making do with midnight for the moment.
These new rules of course are totally in conflict with the other goal of writing >200 words per day every day on Scrivener and increasing by 100 words per month. The point of this is less about the words themselves which can be any old rubbish - usually rants about how useless and slow the Big Mac is being lately but more about getting in the habit of writing every day
So had to come up with a compromise. One A4 page a day in the bright shiny new journal would be an acceptable substitute but then with the proper keyboard days, catching up on Dreamwidth posts, emails and replies to comments and such would usually more than sufficiently make up the word count for the offline days.
I still get to play with Twitter on the Tweet Stone and tablet when out and about and of course the two daily Duolingo lessons. Old ones when online and new ones when offline (since old ones aren’t available in the free version of the app)
Spent some time today juggling the two gadgets trying to get Dianne Feinstein’s Dossier transcripts on to the tablet. It seems that the transcript was not available to folks outside the USA but I don’t have VPN installed on the tablet. It is on the phone but that thing is far too poky to read it on that screen and I could not be bothered yet to reinstall on Firefox because too often it gets nuked during the regular sweep outs.
Saving it on Google Drive did not work because the phone version is too old and theres’ not sufficient space to update even though there is a big fat 12gb available on the added memory card
In the end was able to send the thing as an email attachment.
In the meantime, there are some Twitter lawyers out there already posting and commenting on the juicy stuff like they have also done with “Fire and Fury”
In the meantime, must make an effort to see the new movie about the Washington Post and the Pentagon Papers. The spooks and the White House must so long for the good old days when it was so damned hard to leak juicy classified stuff.
Which reminds the Izzie, the Washington Post is the gift that keeps on giving.
Got a stash of promo codes that get you behind the WALL for 30 days.
Anyone who wants one month’s fix of FAKE NEWS, please reply and I will send a code in a private message
So so happy to have subscribed way back in June because the price has gone up so much since then. Almost as much as Bitcoin. But Fake News is more fun.
Several years ago an old Scrooge ritual of sitting down at the end of every day and accounting for every single silver sickle spent that day got tweeked a bit
Taking advantage of a common feature of most diaries, I also added the activities corresponding to each hour in the appointment section and smily or grumpy faces to correspond to my mood at the time.
Not being a lawyer, I was quite content with 30 minute increments
So this exercise was basically a ten minute reflection on the day.
Instead of the usual thing that folks do of creating a budget and a to do list, this was more a record of the reality than wishful thinking.
Some diaries have more space than others. 2016 was a big fat juicy diary recycled from 2011 and there was even space to add 3 things to be happy about, 1 grumpy moment, 1 thing achieved and 1 thing learnt
It did not take long to realise that most of the misery moments were spent rushing or clock watching, waiting or looking for things and most of the happy ones were spent reading or lurking at cafes reading or sitting at a beach watching the sunset and listening to the waves
Waiting in itself is not a problem. Quite happy to get to a bus stop early and have ten extra minutes of reading but once the bus is due that is unproductive zombie time and once it is five minutes late that is when the jitters begin. It's a twilight zone of not knowing what's going on and being unable to concentrate on doing anything else just in case the bus turns up
Last year one very big flag was the ridiculous amount of grumpy time spent sitting at the Big Mac waiting for spinning beach balls to get the hell out of the way so that I could squiggle or lurk on Twitter or do online courses.
There were also far too many 1am bed times. This bad habit started in November due to the Nanowrimo rule of no online time until the daily quota of 2,000 words was reached.
Of course that has always been the rule every November since 2009 but all that was before joining Twitter in December 2016
So based on actual data rather than a whole lot of wishful thinking, figured it would be a good idea to make some new ground rules for the new year.
A really gorgeous Summer Solstice day spent visiting several sacred sites, watching the sunset at Cottesloe Beach where there were spectacular cloud formations like layers of pancakes which turned orange, red and bright pink and getting lots of stuff squiggled in the little green book was totally tainted and trashed by an attempt to post online at 11.30pm
It took more than 30 minutes to even get to the Dreamwidth posting page and even Scrivener was a bit suss that evening.
Of course those 30 minutes felt like 30 hours and before long the idea of writing about a most magical day was well and truly the last thing on the serpent mind. Of course it was completely irrational to become so grumpy and miserable over the by now almost completely predicable unpredictability of the Big Mac.
That was the sign to take back control and not to let real world experiences take second place to virtual reality.
Time to put the Big Mac on notice and Twitter on time outs.
Also noticed that sorting and housekeeping around the Lair were too likely to get forgotten if going online around 8pm instead of 9pm. Because of course the plan of turning it off at 9pm and going downstairs to do stuff does not usually work out that well in reality.
So now Mondays and Fridays with the occasional Wednesday are a Big Mac free diet.
An 11pm bed time has proved so far to be too ambitious so making do with midnight for the moment.
These new rules of course are totally in conflict with the other goal of writing >200 words per day every day on Scrivener and increasing by 100 words per month. The point of this is less about the words themselves which can be any old rubbish - usually rants about how useless and slow the Big Mac is being lately but more about getting in the habit of writing every day
So had to come up with a compromise. One A4 page a day in the bright shiny new journal would be an acceptable substitute but then with the proper keyboard days, catching up on Dreamwidth posts, emails and replies to comments and such would usually more than sufficiently make up the word count for the offline days.
I still get to play with Twitter on the Tweet Stone and tablet when out and about and of course the two daily Duolingo lessons. Old ones when online and new ones when offline (since old ones aren’t available in the free version of the app)
Spent some time today juggling the two gadgets trying to get Dianne Feinstein’s Dossier transcripts on to the tablet. It seems that the transcript was not available to folks outside the USA but I don’t have VPN installed on the tablet. It is on the phone but that thing is far too poky to read it on that screen and I could not be bothered yet to reinstall on Firefox because too often it gets nuked during the regular sweep outs.
Saving it on Google Drive did not work because the phone version is too old and theres’ not sufficient space to update even though there is a big fat 12gb available on the added memory card
In the end was able to send the thing as an email attachment.
In the meantime, there are some Twitter lawyers out there already posting and commenting on the juicy stuff like they have also done with “Fire and Fury”
In the meantime, must make an effort to see the new movie about the Washington Post and the Pentagon Papers. The spooks and the White House must so long for the good old days when it was so damned hard to leak juicy classified stuff.
Which reminds the Izzie, the Washington Post is the gift that keeps on giving.
Got a stash of promo codes that get you behind the WALL for 30 days.
Anyone who wants one month’s fix of FAKE NEWS, please reply and I will send a code in a private message
So so happy to have subscribed way back in June because the price has gone up so much since then. Almost as much as Bitcoin. But Fake News is more fun.
