Category: tactics

Day In Your Ideal Life

Ah, your ideal life. I hear this and what comes to mind is being white in suburbia in the 1950’s. Skinny black tie and possibly a pocket protector. Everybody is blond and blue-eyed, part of a four-person nuclear family with a dog, has barbecues with the neighbours, waves to the paperboy, and lives in a grainy black and white world. There’s a little Timmy thrown in there somewhere, too.

Ah, your ideal life. Your ideal life. The above was when things were run by rodents, and if that IS your ideal life then… mazel tov. Go get ’em, chinchilla tiger. Since it most likely isn’t, then I’d like to ask you to think about this concept. I’d like to ask you, but I won’t.

Now I will.

Think about your ideal life. From the time you wake up (what do you hear? who is next to you? what do you smell? what is outside your window? how large is the jail cell?), to the time you go to bed, step yourself through an ideal day. What are you wearing? What are you NOT wearing? What animals do you talk to? What people do you pet? Which cut of rare meat do you shove down your pie hole? How early in the morning do you get drunk? How many Twilight fan fiction stories are you co-authoring.

What are we after? Details! (When do we want them? Now!) If there is an event or period of day that you can identify in this day in your ideal life, describe every sense – you’ll be surprised what you can perceive; when I played chess as a youth, there was always this distinct smell.

From here, well, now you have a vision of yourself. Not just a painted picture you can frame, but an awesome and exciting virtual reality of your own creation. And now, well, go get ’em, gopher tiger. Sounds easy, yes no?

I’m getting this from watching more material by life coach Martha Beck. I’ve noticed she likes scarves and marmosets. More interestingly, I’ve noticed how well her models and specific actions for taking someone from good to great (this is the job of a life coach, versus the job of a therapist, who takes someone from broken to good) addresses well-researched western and eastern philosophies, including newer-fangled things like ‘The Secret‘ with a proviso. She is refreshing to watch, partially because she doesn’t take herself too seriously.

Where it takes me is to reassuring myself in the direction I’ve taken ScrumOfOne, at least for myself, where the focus is on determining the WHAT, the Product Owner stuff, before working on the HOW, the ScrumMaster stuff. This echoes how Scrum is done (by Sprint 1, anyhow). More on this shift in focus in a later post.

Bag It, Barter It, Better It

The blog title brought a strange sense of levity to me, like a cool, lavender breeze combing away how some things on my to-do list are such a freakin’ drag – ugghghhgghgh! (Yes, that spelling is accurate.)

I got this from life coach Martha Beck (she is damn fun to watch, FYI), and Oprah.com‘s covered it, so that right there is validation for this being a pill of goodness for your wretched little wonderfully fulfilling life.

What you do is take a thing on your to-do list, something you don’t like all too much, preferably something that, when you look at it, makes you sneer with the disgust that matches the subsequent churning in the gut of your gut, producing a little cloud of taupe emotions. You get the picture.

Look this item on your to-do list dead in the eyes. Then tell yourself:

I don’t have to do this. I choose to do this.

Whoa! What’s that? Choice? Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus choice. Unless, of course, that item on your to-do list is something like “remove the plastic bag wrapped around my head”, at which point you have larger issues, and, yes, you have to do this, for your physiological survival to get more things done from your to-do list. From here, decide to bag it, barter it, or better it.

Bagging it means totally scrapping it. To heck with it. Proclaim it unnecessary and heave a sigh of relief as you cross it off that list (some of us get a huge kick out of that simple act of crossing stuff out). This might not always be the best option, but isn’t it nice to contemplate it? What would happen if you don’t do this thing, realistically? Can you handle this? I bet you can. If you can’t, then there’s always…

Bartering it means, well, trading in some way. Can you pay somebody else to do it? Can you get somebody else to do it, and in exchange, you’ll make them an ice cream sundae? With sprinkles and everything? This is an option – you don’t have to do it yourself. Of course, maybe you do, in which case…

Bettering it means – ok, all these words are pretty self-extra-planetaryexplanatory. What can you do beforehand, afterwards, and/or during the completion of the to-do item that’ll just make the whole experience more palatable? Can you eat an ice cream sundae beforehand, snack on Long Island Iced Tea during, then do a victory lap with root beer floats?

You have things on that to-do list. How you do them is up to you. Remember, Virginia, you have choices.

How To Be An Animal

My sweetheart recently got me a book: How To Be A Man, A Guide to Style and Behavior for the Modern Gentleman by Glenn O’Brien. She knows I’m into this stuff, and found me a winner. (MUSHY ALERT!) Of course, I’ve already found me a winner.

The third chapter (they’re all bite-sizedly enjoyable) is entitled ‘How To Be An Animal’, wherein he mentions a very small set of things we as animals should get down, one of which is…

Getting enough sleep is essential. If God meant us to wake up at a certain time, he would have given our brains an alarm clock. (Oh wait, he did.) Sure you can get by on less sleep, but perchance to dream?

This is another sleep post (hm, exactly 11 months later). At least I’m more conscious (ha!) of how much less energetic I’ve been on the train rides back home as of late, and how I’m more often opting in to being an American that runs on Dunkin’. Entonces, ¡no mas! Time to bust this habit by creating a new habit to get at least 7 hours of sleep 4 times a week.

Sad to get to this point? Sure. And this is as good a time as ever to be a better animal.

Always Be Outputting

‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ by Tim Ferriss has the following for a quote:

Lifestyle design is based on massive action.

Once you find out what this thing is that you want to always be, or always be doing, every day, that thing that brings you joy and excitement and inner peace and gets you feeling comfortable in your own body at all times, once you get to this perfect flow, just sit on your ass.

Just kidding. Go be active in this state. Of course, you won’t have to remind yourself, since you’ll want to be engaging in your new found freedom, you’ll want to be creating and connecting. Until then, until you’ve reached this ideal lifestyle for you, you are… designing your lifestyle. And what better way to get there than to… rehearse? Act it out! ‘The Secret’ by Rhonda Byrne talks about essentially playing ‘Make Believe’, which in this context is a full-contact, no-holds-barred version of visualizing. So, start creating. Keep creating. Don’t stop believing creating. If you’re an engineer like me, and you enjoy abstract things like system diagrams, then there’s always gotta be an arrow pouring out of the block that is the system of you.

Outputting takes time and energy and focus. The opportunity cost is inputting. This is reading stuff, watching stuff, and generally ingesting stuff that is not directly related to outputting. Want more time to create? Spend less time watching ‘How I Met Your Mother’ on Netflix and reading the New York Times. (You come up with your own version, this one is for me.) Thus, I announce a media fast, for myself. No reading fun blogs or news, very little Facebooking, no Netflix. This’ll give me the chi to work on this blog, creating music, and otherwise working on my Sprint Backlog. Reduce input… increase output. Makes sense, right? (Yes, to ‘output’ feels clumsy to reuse as a verb, but I feel it is generic and abstract enough to cover whatever lifestyle we’re ultimately after; plus, it lends itself to an easy opposite to deal with, ‘input’, unlike to ‘create’. “Spend more time creating and less time… destroying.” Nope. Misses the point.)

What I’ve noticed via continued output, specifically sticking to the discipline of cranking out two posts a week for this blog, is that I find this is getting easier. I feel like my blogging skill is becoming refined. I’m finding my voice. When I started this, I worried I’d run out of things to say; however, through continually outputting, I’ve found I’m evolving this idea of ScrumOfOne. This activity feels better to me, which I take as a good sign.

Always Be Outputting – think of this as your personal version of Always Be Closing.

Death And Manure And A Microphone

I’ve recently been getting into Alan Watts, an English philosopher who has a lot of Eastern-styled wisdom to share to Western audiences. And he does it so well since he’s studied both, having written books on Zen and having been an Episcopal priest. And then he’s got that British accent, so, c’mon, anything you say with a British accent is basically truth. He’s essentially unstoppable, with a lot of his lectures on YouTube.

One quote of his that recently caught my fascination was the following:

Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death. To observe skulls and skeletons and wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up – never! That is a very gloomy thing for contemplation, but it’s like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You’ll get wonderful things out of that.

David DeAngelo talks about this in one of the deeper sections of his DVD program, ‘On Being A Man’. By embracing the fact that your own death can happen, doesn’t that give you another view on life? Doesn’t that re-prioritize what you plan on doing today? All that stuff you’re worried about or that annoys you on a day-to-day basis, kinda small potatoes in comparison, no? It’s small stuff. Or, as my former supervisor would put it:

Don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s all small stuff.

Thus, I went to RadioShack and bought a microphone.