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Welcome back and if you came by to make a comment some of my comments get moderated but I'll get it moderated within a day unless I'm on vacation.
I've got a new plugin that enables you to subscribe to comments to see if anybody comments on your comment. You'd hate for THEM to have the last word wouldn't you? I’ve been running a lot lately. I started running and training using the Couch to 5k training method back on Sept. 12, 2009. Up until that point I’d never really run all that much.
Work wasn’t worth a damn. It was a job but honestly, with the computer system as busted as it was (and when your automated re-order system doesn’t work and you’re in retail things go downhill fast), it wasn’t a career any more. It was a way to get paid for the first long time in years. Yes. There had been periods of ennui before, but this was new and appeared to be chronic.
I started running to run. I wasn’t consciously running away from work. I wasn’t running towards anything. I was just running. Today while I was running at the end of my mini-vacation I was thinking about going back to work. I got more tense with every step. I have a headache right now. I’m pretty sure it’s a tension headache about returning to work.
Honestly tomorrow I go back to work and I’d rather run. Not because  of the work but because of the weather. This is part of my job frustration this winter. I have to travel, by car, for work and I travel a LOT. Tomorrow I’m supposed to drive to Omaha… the weather forecast is for an ice-storm that lasts at least one day and maybe two.
It’s the first day back from vacation and I have to go to work. I get that… the problem is that I’m not going to be able to do the travelling I need to do and that will stress me. It will also stress my boss and that will stress me. Now, the obvious option is I telecommute. I can totally do my job from home a day or two safely and efficiently… and my boss will accuse me of ditching work and just wanting to stay home. That part stresses me too.
So. I get to go back to work. I’m tired of this winter. It’s an additional stress on top of an already stressful year. I’m just not in the mood. Winter has to get the heck out of here. It’s starting to stress me out.
Oh, and the running? It’s still going really well. I need to train FOR something and I haven’t nailed that down yet but I’m still going. No standing still.
Let that long tail wag! It started with TechCrunch then went to TalkingStory and then here. I’m pretty far out there so if you haven’t seen this topic covered already I’d be surprised. I’d also recommend you go read the source material that inspired this one.
I’ll break it down into Use Daily, Use Weekly, and Mean to Use But Forget. I almost included a “Can’t imagine a use for” or “Never use” but that just seemed mean. I’m going to include things I use for work and personally.
Daily:
- Android Phone – I switched from Blackberry to Android the day it came out for Verizon and was in love immediately. Personally and professionally it’s changed my work flow completely. The syncing with the Googleverse made using it immediately easy and seamless on and offline. I couldn’t imagine using a different phone. Just like TechCrunch‘ commented on it’s seamless integration with Google Voice was a huge plus. The transcription of voicemails to text messages and e-mails, even when not perfect, and it rarely is, is a huge time saver. Aiming it at whatever phone number I want to aim it at is a huge plus as well.
- Gmail – I really don’t understand how anybody would use anything other than Gmail for their mail. I use it to grab my work e-mail from the work servers and still act as if it were coming from our work domain when I send mail. My bosses don’t know I’m not using their godaddy web-interface, they just know that I can find any e-mail they’ve ever sent me in seconds. They believe I’m very organized. I just know how incredibly useful the search function is on Gmail. The huge mailbox size is also a huge help. While my work mailbox could fill up (It doesn’t due to Gmail gobbling the e-mail out of it) my Gmail box doesn’t. Co-workers get full e-mail boxes. I don’t.
 Kindle – Technically a kindle2, but that’s splitting hairs. The e-book reader from amazon has changed the way I read in the less than a year that I’ve had it. For one thing I read a lot more often now and a bigger variety of books. Now that they’ve added PDF support to it I have an even larger selection of reading material to choose from. I can carry enough books for months of reading in my backpack on a work trip. I can get more books while I’m in my hotel room without having to get out of bed. I can bookmark, annotate, search, highlight, and mark-up a book from within the kindle and nobody accuses me of tearing up a book. - iPod nano (and itunes)
 – I know I finally sold out completely and don’t just refer to it as an mp3 player. The features of the iPod and itunes together, and it’s the magic of the two of them together that I love mind you. One of the things I like personally about the iPod is that it works with the Nike+ site and the iPod doo-dad that helps me with my running. No other mp3 player does that for me. Audiobooks, audible.com, and podcasts are what I primarily use the iPod for. I have music on it, but I’m mostly a spoken word person and itunes is excellent at grabbing my podcasts and managing them for me on the iPod.
- Dropbox – This one is surprising to me when everybody doesn’t use it. It’s a small program that sits in my taskbar and syncs some folders I aim it at with a site on the web. I can then choose to make those folders on the site public, private, or share them with only certain people. The default is to make them private. I recently went from a Macbook Pro to a PC Laptop and it was the easiest transition I’ve ever made. I had all my work stuff in a folder in Dropbox already (called “Workrap” respectfully enough lol.) Now, imagine if you have multiple computers… you install Dropbox on all of them, log onto them with the same account and suddenly your “Workrap” folder is on all your computers and if you update a file at work it’s automatically updated on your home computer and on your laptop as soon as they get on the internet. If you update it while you’re offline, when you get online it’ll sync up just fine. Seriously changed my workflow. Using another person’s computer? Log onto dropbox online without installing anything and get the file you want to show them and you’re set.
- Evernote – My brain. I’m not exaggerating. I store everything on Evernote. It’s similar to Dropbox in that it’s “in the cloud” and I can keep things synced across multiple computers and my phone. I store all my information in there. Online, offline, on my phone. If I need to find Mom’s Gumbo recipe and I’m in the grocery store I fire up Evernote on my phone and grab it. If I’m on my laptop and someone calls I automatically open Evernote as my capture device.
- OpenOffice.org – I haven’t paid for Microsoft Office since the early 90s when I bought Works. I’ve used the free open source alternative for Word, Calc, and Presentations. I love OpenOffice, couldn’t be without it.
- Laptop – I use it every day but I don’t love it. I loved my Macbook Pro but it wasn’t working out for me at work. I found myself running in parallels all the time for stuff so I’m back to Windows. Now, I prefer Windows 7 to Vista, but it’s hard to come back to a PC after being a Mac user.
Weekly:
- Google Docs – I should use this one more than I do. I use it weekly to save work documents that I get e-mailed to me by my boss. I open them with Google Docs to make sure there’s a copy out there in the cloud as well. Since I’ve started using Dropbox I’ve used Google Docs less and less. I use it primarily when I’m on the net tracking something a lot and don’t want to wait for OpenOffice to open up. I track my fitness stuff on Google Docs but other than that and the one work document that’s about all I use it for.
- Wordpress & Blogger – I’d like to say I use these two blogging platforms more often than weekly, but I’ve been a little slow lately. I’m getting better, but I love my blogging and both platforms offer something that makes me keep them both.
- Digital Camera – I love my Canon Powershot. It’s not the biggest, fastest, most megapixels thing out there but it fits in my pocket and allows me to get the shots some of my friends with fancier cameras can’t or don’t get because their camera takes too long to prep for the shot. I enjoy taking pictures, and while I took fewer this year than previous years it wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy it as much as it was because I wasn’t as happy. Work was/is affecting my quality of life and one of the measures of how happy I am is how many pictures I take. The quiet months are unhappy months. I know, more than you wanted to know, but it’s an interesting observation nonetheless.
Mean to Use But Forget:
- Pandora – I love this music streaming service but I always forget it. Then I’ll remember it for a few days and then it falls off the radar again for another couple months.
- Stanza – I’ve gotten so hopped up on using the kindle that I really like reading e-books now but sometimes I have my laptop and not my kindle and I sort of stare at the wall wondering what to do next. It’s only later that I remember I have Stanza on my laptop which will allow me to read many e-book formats. (It also converts between formats so I can get some things on the kindle that I couldn’t before.)
- Windows Widgets – I keep meaning to turn them back on but I forget. Then I remember and turn them on for a while and then turn them back off. I want to like them but can’t find it in me to stick with them. I’ll try them every month or so.
So, what technology do you use to make your job/life easier.
It all started with a twitter post (I don’t like saying “tweet”) by Rosa Say over on @MwAloha:
Sweet liberty  The 12 Days of Christmas hula w/the 12 Aloha Virtues of MWA ~ Day 10 and the Virtue of FREEDOM: http://ow.ly/SkEM
There they are… those two words together in one sentence and I couldn’t figure out what the difference between them was. I know there IS a difference between them. I just don’t know what it is really. Freedom and Liberty.
There is a lot of talk about Freedom lately. That word’s on the rise while Liberty is on the wan. Nobody talks about Liberty any more but they used to use it more. “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happyness.” (sic) must be the most recognizable use of Liberty that every US Citizen knows. (I intentionally didn’t use “American” because well… Brazilians are American as are Peruvians and those dastardly Canadians! (KIDDING Canadia!) and they may not be as familiar with our Declaration of Independence as we are. There’s more to America than just the USA.)
I can’t imagine the founding fathers saying “Life, Freedom, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It’s not because I don’t have a good imagination. I do. I use it constantly when doing daily affirmations.
What does one do when there’s a question about word meanings? One hits the dictionary.
LIBERTY: (from dictionary.com)
1. freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control.
2. freedom from external or foreign rule; independence.
3. freedom from control, interference, obligation, restriction, hampering conditions, etc.; power or right of doing, thinking, speaking, etc., according to choice.
4. freedom from captivity, confinement, or physical restraint:The prisoner soon regained his liberty.
FREEDOM: (from dictionary.com)
1. the state of being free or at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint: He won his freedom after a retrial.
2. exemption from external control, interference, regulation, etc.
3. the power to determine action without restraint.
4. political or national independence.
You see the problem. Both words use each other to define each other. But liberty is most often defined as a freedom FROM something. It’s almost as if it can’t exist in a vacuum. One can’t simply BE liberty (obviously, it’s not a verb). But one enjoys Liberty when one is liberated and one is most often thought of as liberated FROM something, be it oppressors, insanely high tax burdens, or despotic governments.
I think the most telling thing about us not using liberty as much as we use freedom nowadays in the US is that we’re pretty much liberated already. We’re one of the most free countries in the world, (please leave Homeland Security and the Patriot Act out of any comments as exhibits to the contrary not because they infringe on our basic liberties, but because this isn’t a political blog. I know. I know.) When we in the US talk about Liberty we talk about it happening in other places. We say that we “liberated Baghdad” and that sort of thing. We’ve been known to “Liberate Hostages.” We appear to have, in our national psyche come to a point where we see ourselves as liberated (Remember the Women’s LIB movement? that was our last big use of Liberty) more than before and now we’re ready to go out there, enjoy and protect our freedoms while we liberate those around us so that they can enjoy THEIR freedoms.
One can’t be free until they have been liberated however, and our liberties, our freedoms, are to be both enjoyed and protected. There were loads of inspirational quotes about both words but I think the most telling thing about them is that we, as a country, don’t seem to feel, collectively, that we need liberating right now. I hope that it remains true that we remain liberated and free.
Thank you Rosa for prompting me to write this, and formalize it. I’ve said before I get a lot of thinking done while I run, but I’m most organized in my thinking when I write things down. If I can nail an squirming, wriggling idea down by writing it down and clarifying it I’m better off in keeping it straight in my head.
The Chinese New Year isn’t for a while yet, but I’m going to stick with the Tiger imagery anyway.
I’m reading The Spark right now, a book that I will review in much more detail later. It will be a weekend post since I agreed to do book reviews on weekend posts. One of the primary themes of the book is that lifestyle changes, whether they be fitness changes, dietary changes, business changes, motivational changes, any kind of personal, internal change, is best made incrementally with a string of small victories building to a larger change. The pyramids aren’t climbed in one step. They’re made up of many steps that are, by themselves doable goals that lead to something magnificent.
So, towards that end 2010’s goals are going to be many, short and medium length goals, that will set up a chain of successes leading to a bigger over all destination of larger success. The advantage is if there is a set-back it’s not a set-back on the huge, overall goal. It’s a set-back on one tiny portion of the goal. That’s not as soul-crushing as blowing a giant goal. As someone who quit smoking 5 times before having one stick I know what it’s like to slip once and blow the whole kit and kaboodle!
When I quit smoking (6/15/2005) I didn’t quit forever. I quit cold-turkey and quit for the rest of the drive home. Then I quit until the following morning. That next morning I quit until lunch. (I didn’t smoke in between those quits, those were just my goals… like getting a first down rather than going for touch down every play.) You can see the pattern. Mentally staring down the barrel of a forever quit was too daunting. I’ve said before I’m a sprinter, not a marathoner and that is still true today, even when I run (Not that I’m a sprinter either as it turns out. I raced a 16 year old a while back at the campgrounds and he beat me like an old rug. I should have tripped him. He’s young. He’d heal!) So I’m going to follow The Spark’s advice and make a chain of small achievable goals.
Just because a goal is small and achievable doesn’t mean it’s a gimme goal. We recently had an Ownership Thinking workshop at my work and someone set forth as our first goal to do something that was not only 70% complete all ready it wasn’t something we could fail on. It was an assignment. There was no challenge to it. It was a gimme goal and it didn’t mean anything when we accomplished it. It was like having every team member get a trophy after a game where nobody kept score. We didn’t care about it as a first step in the Ownership Thinking program because it was as much an accomplishment or challenge as putting on our socks. That’s not what I’m talking about by small goals. (Things improved after that by the way.)
My Goals for 2010 follow, in no particular order:
- Minimum 10 Minutes of cardio every day with no days off. (Yes it’s low, but it’s doable and constant and I will do more most days. Do YOU do this much a day outside of basal movement?)
- Finish SparkPeople’s 28-day bootcamp that starts January 3, 2010.
- Run a 5k road race in spring in under 30 minutes.
- Run a 10k road race in the fall. (Time to be determined when I know what’s reasonable)
- Make at least two positive blog posts a week in any of the three blogs I’m currently maintaining. (simplerich.com, simplerunner, and my fitness blog over on SparkPeople.)
- Hit and maintain a healthy BMI by February and keep it through the year. (BMI = Body Mass Index)
You’ll notice an absence or work related goals on there. That’s no entirely an accident. I’ve asked my managers, I have 11 of them now rather than 8. I got three more stores to manage last week. I’ve asked them to get me a list of their goals for the month and year. I’ve also asked them to let me know what areas we as a company most need improvement, what areas I can help them the most, and what they would do if a) They owned their store and what they would change on the first day it was theirs, and b) what they would change tomorrow if there were no rule or policy against it. I’m going to use these to formulate my goals this year. It’s going to be a somewhat bottom up approach to managing this year, but I’m going to try it and see what happens. I’ll still be their manager obviously, but I’m definitely not going to be the only one driving this ship this year. I’ve got to do my job differently than the way I have been. I’ve got too many stores for me to continue doing it the way I was doing it. I finally realized the reason I was so burning out was that I was trying to manage the 8 stores I had the same way I was doing things when I had 5 stores and it was just too overwhelming. Then add to it the insane policy changes and I’m not alone in thinking they’re insane but there you have it… Anyway. Things had to change.
So, my goals that you see here are mostly about me and my fitness. My assumption is, if I take care of those things that work will take care of itself. That’s not as sloughing off work as it sounds. I just believe that I need these things to get me out of the death spiral I was in most of last year with work when I focused on work more than anything else and it wasn’t a healthy balance at all. By the end of the year I would have said “Thank you” if I’d lost my job. I’d have handed my boss the keys and hugged him in appreciation. I would have changed my phone number and never missed those calls again. That is NOT a healthy place for someone to be who is as high up as I am in the company. Attitudes are contagious and it was exhausting to try and be upbeat and positive when all I wanted to do was go home and lay under the covers and hope it all would just go away. I don’t feel like that now. But I did.
 So, by focusing outside the spiral, by taking my eyes off the thing that was making me crazy I’m going to work on non-work goals as a primary focus and let work be my job again for a while and not my life. Because you know… as lives go… it wasn’t terribly rewarding there for a while. I think it will be better now that I’m remembering it’s a job, not a wife or husband. It’s a career, not the way I define who I am. I’m not my job. That’s I guess my only work related goal in 2010. Remember that my job is not me.
You’re wondering what this has to do with Tigers. Tiger’s symbolically are representative of Power, Generosity, Illumination, and Energy and my goal in 2010 is to exemplify as many of those as I can in my personal and work life. To me personally the tiger is all about movement, and the energy of a coiled spring or the pent energy of a crouching tiger about to unfold into a long, lithe orange and black missile aimed at something. Their muscles ripple under their coat as they run and their eyes are fixed on their prize as they tear across the landscape. 2010 I want to have that kind of energy, that kind of feel to it. I envision 2010 as the year I reaffirm myself as interested in myself and developing myself and not just trying to go through the motions.
 In running there’s an expression called “Hitting the wall.” What it means is your body has used up it’s supplies of glycogen. Glycogen is what the body goes to for energy when it’s primary energy source is depleted. If you’re out of glycogen you’re running on empty and it feels like you can’t go on. You’re exhausted in every sense of the word at that point. Obviously, it’s not desirable. In marathons it happens much more than in short races, typically around the 20 mile mark (32km) according to wikipedia.
So, hitting the wall could be described as when you’ve run as far as you can, exhausting all your energy that you have readily available to you and what’s left is primarily will-power and the body consuming and destroying itself. Yeah. You don’t want to exist in that state very long if you can help it. Ideally you’d like to avoid ever getting to that point.
Why am I talking about this here and not over on my running blog? Because I recently hit the wall professionally. The day after posting that I was inundated with e-mails and messages on twitter (I don’t like the word “tweets.”) and phone calls from internet friends and people I’ve met in person. I deeply appreciated it. SparkPeople, the fitness site I’m using to track my food and fitness ran an article that was especially timely called, appropriately enough, “Hitting That Big Ole Wall.” The article outlined 5 steps, ways to deal with hitting the wall. These apply to running, as well they might since the article was written by an Olympic marathoner.
1. Just keep going.
2. Don’t think.
3. Bribe yourself.
4. Word watch (watch for negative thinking/self-talk)
5. Negotiate with yourself. (different from 3, go read the article. It’s short and good.)
The three that I most want to focus on are 1, 2, and 4. In running I know to do 1. When I’m tired or running for time. I know to just keep putting one foot in front of the other. I also know that in the grand scheme of things my plodding along doesn’t matter. But what’s important when running for time is that I continue to put one foot in front of the other. That’s true at work sometimes too. When the fire is out. It’s important to keep moving. Don’t stop. Don’t dwell on it.
 That brings me to number two. I’ve been doing this job for a while. I know what needs to be done. I know that some of the changes we’re making aren’t changes I myself would make if I were in charge. The thing is… I’m NOT in charge. This isn’t the time to obsess on every possible bad outcome. This is time to put one foot in front of the other and get through this. Right now, until this passes it’s time to soldier on. Yes there will be problems, but they won’t be made better by my paralyzing myself with what-ifs or should haves. It’s time to Keep Calm and Carry On.
Lastly for what I’m going to talk about is the word watching. That’s a big one for me. I’ll catch myself speaking in absolutes and using words like “always” and “never.” And those two words are always bad to use and never absolutely true. (See what I did there? Yeah. I know, it’s less clever if I point it out. It’s Christmas, cut me some slack would you?) This is important though. If you do all three of the things in here at once wrongly. You quit moving, over think, and engage in negative self-talk then nobody wins. I lose as my job performance tanks. My employees know that there’s something wrong in the state of Denmark and my boss now has one more thing to worry about, whether or not I’m about to quit on him out of frustration.
And here’s the thing. Ultimately all of this boils down to that doesn’t it? Am I going to quit over it? I can afford to. That is an amazingly liberating thing actually. If I couldn’t afford to walk away I’d be feeling trapped in addition to all the other things that are going on and that would stink. I recommend everybody save two ways. Long term retirement savings and short term emergency fund savings, and once that’s funded start putting away some “Screw you I quit!” money. Surprisingly I can afford to quit and knowing that makes it my choice to stay not me staying because I have to. If I choose to stay I can’t get as mad at The Man for messing with me because I always have the trump card of Cartman’s “Screw you guys, I’m goin’ home!” That fact alone makes it more tolerable.
So, are things rosy on the work front? No. They’re still pretty abysmal actually. I think some pretty terrible decisions are being made and some insanely difficult policies are being put into place that will absolutely cost us a fortune, reduce productivity, sales, and profit. I think the people making these decisions are being given very bad information by people they trust. I think that the situation will in no way be made better by my quitting. I believe if I stay I may be able to moderate the insanity a little bit and make things better for those with whom I work.
I believe I will have weeks, and months (It’s been about six months that I knew all this was coming and it comes to a head on the 28th finally hence my meltdown. I kept hoping it would stop or I’d wake up but it’s about to happen for reals.) where I’m Keeping Calm and Carrying On. But I also know that there will be weeks and months where there is light at the end of the tunnel. I believe that there is a chance to pull the stupid out of the fire and hammer it into something useful.
 How’s it go that the Chinese ideogram for crisis has two roots, danger and opportunity or something like that? (Turns out this isn’t entirely true, or evidently even partially true. Don’t let it be said I don’t try and do some fact-checking on this thing.) Well. I’ve made up my mind to treat this like a run for a while. One foot in front of the other, head up, eyes on the distance, not looking at my feet, and keep on keeping on. I’ve built another savings goal over on smartypig.com that comes due in July. If things aren’t better then I’ll have enough for me and my room mate to go on a very long Alaska cruise. Not sure if he’ll want to go or not. I haven’t asked him. If not then I’ll be able to be gone for twice as long. Either way. I win. So. I’ve got a goal. One foot in front of the other until July and re-evaluate then. My hope is that I’m not in glycogen-debt for that amount of time and I just wind up with a nice vacation fund.
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