Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

Tag Archives: Tuesday Tips

What a to do!

My new favorite To Do list.

So, yesterday I was telling you about the miracle of getting back to getting things done.

The bottom line, of course, is that you have to decide to do things.

But I am a big believer in To Do lists, and I have been on a perpetual quest for the one perfect To Do list software.  I’ve used the Task List in my Palm Pilot.  I’ve used my Blackberry (forget that one!).  I’ve used a word processor.  I’ve used a spreadsheet.  I’ve used Personal Brain–which is good for organizing information but not so good for a To Do list.  I’ve tried Remember the Milk and other online solutions.

Lately, I’ve been using followupthen.com to get emailed reminders, and I like it.  It’s a fast way to schedule follow ups, especially on anything that hits your email inbox.

But it’s not a To Do list.

Back when I was working, I made my own project management software using Microsoft Access.  It was pretty good.  But it wasn’t perfect.  Mostly because I didn’t invest the time to make it better.

Now, lo and behold!  Efficient To Do List from Efficient Software does almost everything I want a To Do List to do.

I can organize tasks by any hierarchy of categories I want.  I can set due dates and reminders.  I can sort by task, by category, by due date.  I can sort by priority. And I can check off things that are done and watch them disappear from the list.

Downsides are limited documentation and help features.  The priority list isn’t flexible enough for me.  I’ve invented a way around that.  Occasionally, assigning tasks to Groups (categories) is a bit slow.

Also, this is a Windows product.  Mac users may be out of luck.

Considering I paid less than $15 for it, I find all of those caveats acceptable.

And I am getting things done!

Maybe you can, too.

 

This is not original

But I’m adding my endorsement.

Today’s tip is about something I have resisted for a long time.

I believe I’ve written now and again about wanting to lose some weight and about how moving out of the City to car country has sent my weight climbing in the opposite direction.

For a long time, I resisted the idea that I would have to actually go on a diet.  I thought, maybe, if I could just motivate myself to get back into exercising that would be enough.

Diets don’t have a good reputation.  People keep falling off them.

They don’t have a lot of culinary appeal.  Maybe some of you like cottage cheese, but…. blech!

My sister, however, directed me to myfitnesspal, and it was a most excellent tip!

I am now, for the first time in my life counting calories.  I’ve been doing it for 9 weeks, and I have lost 10 pounds.

Not bad, huh?

Myfitnesspal makes it easy to track your food intake with thousands of entries in their database and an easy interface.

Now, I will say that nutritional content has been a secondary concern for me in the early stages of shedding these pounds, but just out of necessity, I am eating more fruits and vegetables.

1200 calories is an astonishingly small amount of food, you see, compared to the contemporary diet of most people in this day and age.  But, if you eat fruits and vegetables you can eat almost all day—thus, satisfying the “munchies” and still shedding pounds.

But what I like about myfitnesspal is that I can have chips and ice cream so long as I keep them within my calorie budget.  Plus, in an incentive to exercise, you can eat more if you track the calories you’ve burned.  (I’m walking for pizza is a thought that has crossed my mind more than once on the treadmill.)

I’ve got a ways to go, and I might hit a plateau, of course.  I might fail to keep it off.

But I set myfitnessplan goal to lose a pound a week, and I’ve done better than that just by religiously tracking what I eat.  I haven’t felt deprived—in fact, I’ve had ice cream every day.  I’ve never eaten detested “diet” foods, and it’s been remarkably easy.

So, I’m thanking my sister, my other fitness pal, for the tip, and I’m passing it on to you.

Five minutes

That’s all.

Got a goal you’re having trouble achieving?

See if a timer will help you.

Procrastination.

It’s hard work to write a novel, keep a house clean, make a painting. We don’t like to get started because it commits us to a long process. But most of us can face five minutes of anything.

So, start small.

Write for five minutes.  Dust for five minutes.  Paint for…well, ok, painting might need larger chunks of time.  There’s a lot of prep and a lot of clean-up.  But the principle is the same.

If you set a timer, you have an exit strategy.  You can begin already knowing that you don’t have to continue for the rest of your life.  No matter how horrible the task becomes, there is an end point.

I love timers.

Quite often, when they go off, I am interested and immersed in what I am doing, and I continue on beyond the beep, beep, beep.  But I don’t have to, and that can make all the difference between getting started on something or spending another half day on Facebook.  (Now, there’s another use for a timer.  Use it to limit those time-wasting activities!)

It doesn’t really matter what interval you use in setting the timer.  If you can face thirty minutes of housework, go for it.  The point is just to go into any task for which you are experiencing reluctance with an escape hatch.

Maybe, when the timer goes off, you’ll want to continue.  Maybe not.  Either way, you’re some number of minutes closer to your goal.

You can get timers in any dollar store, Radio Shack, grocery store.  It’s nice to have several actual physical timers that you can keep in strategic areas of the house and move around as necessary.

Until you lay in a supply, however, you can use this one:

E.ggtimer.com

Go ahead.

Start that novel.

Just five minutes.

Get in the river.

And let the river roll.

We’ve got such a linear society.

Enter kindergarten at the age of five.  Exit the school system 13, 17, 19 years later with an education (maybe) and a diploma (probably).  Get a job.  Work your way up the ladder.  Go to weddings in your youth, christenings in your middle age, and funerals in your elder years.

We’re sort of conditioned to know how things turn out.

Even the television that we watch tends to support the idea that things get solved within 42 minutes of air time plus commercials.

It can make us reluctant to embark on journeys where the destination is unclear.  Even scarier, there are journeys where we don’t even know if there is a destination.

It might be interesting to try approaching life like the explorers of old.

Henry Hudson didn’t know where the Hudson river came out.  He didn’t even know if it did.  He just set sail to see what he could see.

It’s amazing the things that happen if you just get in the river.

The current catches you.  You move along, sometimes through rapids, sometimes through shallows, but always advancing.  There are moments of great beauty and times when the current holds you up and moves you forward with unexpected support.  There are moments when the flood tide is against you and you wonder what possessed you to get started.

But it’s like the old story about the lady who resisted learning to play the piano in later life.

Do you know how old I will be when I finally learn?, she demanded.

Yes, came the answer.  Exactly the same age as you’ll be if you don’t.

So, today’s tip is to stop waiting to start.  We don’t always know how things come out.

Leap, and the net will appear.  ~ John Burroughs

Get in the river.

 

Creativity in everything

Make choices!

If I remember correctly, one of Jack Canfield’s tips in his book, The Success Principles is about making choices.  The point, I think, was to get in the habit of making choices rather than just going along with things.  If somebody asked you where you wanted to eat, Canfield suggested that you make a choice, advance an opinion, pick a restaurant rather than say, “I don’t care.”

Obviously, there will be times when you really don’t care where you eat.  You have more important things on your mind.  But making choices in small things helps you to make choices in big things.  You may remember that I’ve used this quote before from Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love.

Will you be a poet, or a scholar?
                I don’t mind.
Oh, it helps to mind.  Life is in the minding.

“Life is in the minding.”

I think, too, that creativity is in the minding.

This is a tip for me, especially, more, even, than you, because I think I am often guilty of trying to find the easiest way rather than the most creative.  But I am going to start asking myself more often if there is a more interesting way to do something.  Can I take a little more effort and arrange this furniture in a more pleasing pattern?  Is there something interesting I can do with these plants?  Other than stick them in the ground and hope that they grow?  What do I really want my new kitchen to look like?  How should it operate?  What gadgets are useful?  Or fun?

This is going to be a hard tip for me to follow.  I want things done easily.  Fast.  Inexpensively.

Creativity is, often, the opposite of all that.

I suspect, though, that practice helps.

And to that end, I’m going to see if I can’t do something interesting with my shoelaces.

Why don’t you take a look at that link, too?  And, when next we meet, we’ll compare patterns!

Here’s what I know

About writing what you know.

“Write what you know,” they say.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” you think.  “How boring.”

Many times, we write to escape what we conceive to be our hum-drum lives.  What is fiction, after all, but a child’s game of make-believe in which the writer gets to play all the parts?

No more “You be the sheriff, and I’ll be the bank robber.”

As a writer it’s, “I’ll be the sheriff, and I’ll be the bank robber.  And the Pinkerton detective and the Apache on the hill and the dance hall girl and the coyote, too.”

And that’s great.

Nobody said not to use your imagination.

But you can write with more confidence if you know something about the scenery of the West.  Because if you are drawing you description of tumbleweeds from Zane Grey novels, you are bordering on plagiarism, and you’re always going to wonder if you got it right.  If you’ve seen a tumbleweed tumbling, you will know.

Aside from the confidence issue, in addition to accuracy, you’re just going to write faster.  You’re not going to be stuck for details, because they are just part of your knowledge base.

And if you are missing details, you better acquire them.  Google is your friend. As is any book you’ve ever read, every book you haven’t read, anybody you talk to and anything you do.

There may be only One Plot, but the details to make it your own are legion.  And you know what they say.  God is in the details.

Work on your powers of observation and memory.  Work on your research skills.  Work on empathy and understanding.

There’s a great episode, ‘We Was Robbed‘ from Season Three  of NYPD Blue in which a detective is showing his would-be cop son the ropes.  He tells him a story about a near-disaster in which he almost shot a man coming out of a building with what appeared to be a gun until he remembered the building was a toy factory.  He says a cop should always know “people, places, the things they do, and the times they do them.”

It’s pretty good advice for a writer, too. 

Now, this!

Is a writing tip I think I can use.

Came across this piece a couple of months ago in the New York Times.  I love the Times.  There’s a reason people refer to it as the “paper of record.”  It’s going to be sad when the ease and ubiquity of online news pushes it out of business.  (I’m hoping it figures out a way to reinvent itself—but, if anybody on the publishing staff is listening, I really don’t think higher and higher price are the way to go.)

All that aside, however, this column by Aaron Hamburger was an Aha! moment for me.

The piece is about outlining.

If you’ve read anything about writing—or went to high school—I’m sure you’ve been taught about outlining.  You may even have used it.  Term papers and so on.

When you get into creative writing, people still recommend outlines.  Sometimes, they suggest 3×5 cards rather than Roman numerals.  If you’re in film or TV, you might have heard of storyboarding.  It’s kind of the same idea.

The problem for me is that I never know what any piece of work is about until I get done with the first draft.  I don’t know what’s going to happen.  The events are a mystery to me.  Often, the characters with which I start aren’t the characters with which I end.

Sometimes, I just have a line in my head.  Or one scene between a couple of people.

The idea that there are writers out there who know the whole arc of the story before they begin—that boggles my mind.  BOGGLES.  With extra G’s.

Consequently, I threw outlines out the window fairly early.

But this idea of outlining after you’ve finished the first draft…this is a good idea.

Reading Mr. Hamburger’s explanation was a light bulb.  Of course, it would be helpful.  Of course!

If there’s a surer way to spot a hole in something, I can’t imagine what it could be.  Depending on how you structure your outline and what information you put into it, I’m thinking it could shine a spotlight on all kinds of difficulties.  Plot, pacing, logic…you name it.

So, I think you should read the article.

Meanwhile, I’ll just be over here outlining my play.

(Oh!  And pick up a copy of the Times.  They still have a great crossword puzzle!)

Oblique strategies

Whack your brain

A few days ago—nine or ten—I blogged about A Whack on the Side of the Head. the nudge into more creative thinking by Roger von Oech.  Today’s tip is about another tool to feed your creativity.

Oblique Strategies

Oblique strategies started life as a deck of cards.  Not ordinary playing cards, but a little black box full of small cards printed with “Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas.”

Created in collaboration by Brian Eno, a musician, and Peter Schmidt, an artist, these cards present you with a question, a thought, a suggestion designed to help you look at a problem in a different way.

Some of the cards will seem disconnected from your problem.  Obscure.  Confusing.

Sometimes, those are the best cards.

Some of them will present you with an obvious solution.  (More like an obvious path, since they aren’t really solutions.)

The cards themselves don’t seem to be available anymore, except, sometimes, on eBay.

You could make your own.  The full text of the various editions of the cards, as well as more history about them, on this website. There are downloadable zipped versions available at the same place for generating random cards on your own PC.

Or you can generate a random oblique strategy online here.

These are not easy if you are used to linear thinking, but they will reward you, I think.

Give it a try.

Don’t tell the refrigerator

You bought a new car.*

Today’s tip is based purely on superstition.

I don’t give much credence to superstitions.  I quote from the Scottish Play (although I do tend to call it “The Scottish Play”), I walk under ladders, I’m fine with Friday the 13th and black cats.

And this particular superstition is not one I discovered for myself.

I got it out of the Reader’s Digest.

Thanks, Reader’s Digest.  (insert sarcastic growl here)

This is another one of those things where I would like to give credit where it is due, but I can’t remember who wrote the article.  I’m not even sure of the title, although I think it was the same as the headline and sub-head of this post.  That’s how I’ve always remembered it, anyway.

It was a humorous piece about how you can’t quite get ahead of the financial curve.  As soon as you buy a new car, the refrigerator breaks.  (Hence the advice not to tell the refrigerator.)

I don’t know about you, but I have noticed that this is true often enough to suggest, tentatively and with tongue only partly inserted in cheek, that you might want to be a little cautious.

Just recently, I decided we had enough in the remodeling account to replace some fogged windows here at Casa Lagarto and to finally get a tub for the bathroom where what was apparently a clawfoot tub had gotten up on its little clawfeet and walked out of the house with the former owner.

The result of that is that I am spending a fortune in co-payments for physical therapy on my shoulder.

Are the two things related?

Any rational person would say they are not.

I, usually, think of myself as a rational person.

In the middle of the night, giddy from lack of sleep (a frozen shoulder is extremely annoying in that way), I rather wish I’d somehow managed to do the tub and window research so that the left brain didn’t know what the right brain was doing.

So, that’s my tip.  I don’t really think you should lend it any weight.  But, hey!  You never know.

Stand up, stand up

Sitting may be hazardous to your health.

I saw a video clip the other day—and I don’t remember where or who—but the “expert” seemed to think that sitting was second only to smoking in terms of being a health hazard.

Now, health hazard information goes through phases.  Yesterday’s cholesterol-laden eggs are today’s source of good nutrition.  However, the sitting thing seems to have some common sense behind it.

Plus, anecdotal evidence.

(That’s me.  I’m telling you anecdotes.)

I left one of the most walker-friendly cities in the world to live in something that’s a cross between rural and suburbia.  Nobody walks anywhere.  This is because there is nothing you want to go to that is less than five miles away.

In general.

We do have an excellent pizza place only half a mile away.  The Park-and-Ride, when buses actually start to visit it, will be a mile and a half.  There’s a shopping center a little beyond that whose main claim to fame for me is a Subway restaurant.  Two miles in the other direction is a Kirkland’s, a Michael’s, a Kohl’s and, even more wonderful, a Dollar Tree.

But, quite often, the heat and humidity are just too high for a stroll to the store.

Back in the day, when I worked outside of my home office, I would walk to work, and I would walk (some) around work.  Now that I’ve “retired” to become a writer?  I walk nowhere.

I could ignore pop culture warnings, but it is clear to me that I have gained weight and lost energy.  I have aches and pains that have multiplied exponentially—far more than one would think likely in the mere three years since I made the transition from New York to Florida.

People have been advertising standing desks, with and without attached treadmills.  These seem like a good idea, but it doesn’t have to cost that much money.

Today, I am writing this blog post with my laptop on the counter and me standing in front of it.

My tip for this Tuesday is that you should do the same.

As often as possible.


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