I Had it Coming, Apparently

If I'm recalling correctly I got through the entire fall and winter without a single cold or flu incident this year. Now that it is spring time I'm on my third round, and this last one has been a real doozy. This one I guess you call a cold because of all the nasal and cough symptoms, but the fever that won't stay down, the chills, the sweats and all that make me want to call it the flu. Whatever it is I feel like I haven't slid by this year after all. I've made up for it this spring, and the bulk of it this round.

I have to remain grateful though. When I was teaching I used to get this knock you on your back for the good part of a week kind of flu stuff at least a couple times per year. I haven't had anything like this in several years, and I never get it with the regularity I did when teaching. So I guess when I look at the long haul my immune system is likely doing its job. So I hope those of you outside soaking up the springtime sun enjoy it a bit more than usual on my behalf.

Merlin Mann and the 43 Folders

I can't believe that I'm writing more on Merlin. I am fascinated with his site 43 Folders. I am growing to really love this guy's nerdy, offbeat and tenacious approach to getting organized. I've posted before about finding the ideas that David Allen outlines in his book Getting Things Done very useful. But there is a formality about it that seems to be aimed at business folks that just isn't nearly as fun as Merlin Mann's quirky take on productivity.

What's to Love

• He talks about all the struggles and foibles of chasing after the latest "hacks" (shortcuts or approaches). He is a quirky guy who uses catchy slang and has a predilection for wearing gas station coats and hip glasses.
• Merlin has a young daughter, which makes his quest for a reasonably organized life all the more realistic for all of us who are parents.
  
• His goal is not productivity for productivity's sake or aimed at the common theme in the productivity literature on getting wealthy or becoming powerful. He does talk about how to make more money more easily and how to become more influential, but it is not because money is the priority. Any focus on money is in service of living a full, meaningful, enjoyable life where you can focus on the things that matter most to you.
  
• It is productivity in service of living a meaningful, enjoyable life.
  
• Humor is sprinkled liberally throughout the site. For some, this could be a downside if your sense of humor is not a match with his. But I think for most folks, it makes his site approachable. You learn about how to be more productive, but it feels like you're playing when you're learning about it.
  
• There are tons of very practical recommendations on everything from filing accouterments to the best pens to easy to use software that fits in with his approach. We even bought a little flip video camera based on his recommendation.
• There are multiple ways to enjoy the content. Throughout the site you can find links to other useful sites, to books that look at things more in depth, to The Merlin Show, where Merlin interviews different folks about their approaches to creativity and productivity. There are also videos of full blown presentation. Some of those I wish showed a little more of him, and a bit less of his presentation slides, but they are still good.
  
• He has All Time Most Popular Posts and Classics links right at the top of the home page, so that new visitors can immediately dive in to the most powerful concepts (or the funniest stuff).
  

What's Not to Love

About my only gripe really isn't much of a gripe. I just wish there were even more content being added since I'm getting so much out of it. This seems a bit like criticizing a delicious meal because it makes you want to eat more.

PS I hate the way this Blogger software messes up the spacing after you make a bulleted or numbered list. Not sure if this is a Mac only problem. I am on Fire Fox. Anyone else run into this problem? I'll have to check on our PC to see if it looks the same there. Anyway, I am hoping that this is one of the things that gets taken care of with my site refresh, getting a blog hosted on my own domain. Don't worry I'll make sure there are links from the current site so you can keep in touch.

Enjoy Parenting Again, Again

It is hard to believe, but it has been about seven years since my friends Amy and Reese designed my Enjoy Parenting Again logo and my website. They did it back when I started up teaching parenting classes again, toward the end of my graduate work at Lewis & Clark in Counseling Psychology. Over the years since Amy and Reese first got me launched Erin did the maintenance on the site for me, attaching new PDFs to the resources page and updating the speaking events page periodically to show what was coming up and where I had completed events. She even created new navigation buttons when I added new pages or links (for this blog for instance). Maybe not so hard for web design folks, but working 50 hour plus at the time, and doing that site maintenance for me after wrapping work in the evenings was challenging and appreciated.

Well Erin recently got a new job, and the software she had used to maintain the site is gone along with her commute to Hillsboro (thankfully) and her old laptop. The inability to keep my site up to date is about the only downside of her new job. So I explored some web design software options to see if I could maintain the site as it is. After making my way through more trials than you can shake a stick at, none of them look like they'll do what I'm looking for properly. The template based ones like iWeb and RapidWeaver just don't have a look that fits with the feel I'm after for the site. The more powerful ones that can create the sort of look I'm after, like Dreamweaver, are more complicated than I'm able to allocate time for to learn the software.

So the next step is meeting with a web designer next week to explore options to make the changes needed to give me control of the maintenance, while at least keeping up the current look, and maybe giving it a refresh.

So keep checking back. In a few weeks, there will definitely be new info on the site—I'm looking forward to being able to post pieces as soon as I've written them—and there just might be a new look if the price seems reasonable. I'm hoping that Chigo over at Dogpaw is going to be able to help me out.

Useful Site / Email Ninja Skills

Time for a next installment on Getting Things Done (GTD). It is becoming increasingly clear that one of the top challenges of our age is sifting through information to mine out what we need. How do you sort through all the junk and marginally useful info to get to the handful of gold? How do you face all piles of paper, or the heap in your inbox to end up with practical, useful information that you can find at the moment it is required?

There are many sites that discuss the GTD principles and share tips and tricks for making life's stuff * easier to handle. But the one I've come across that is the most fun and that is most useful for me so far is 43folders.com. What I like in addition to keen advice by Merlin Mann, a productivity expert in his own right, is that the site takes a community approach where people chime in and share their personal takes on how to implement the principles. The great thing is that though people are able to post, the site still is nice to look at, unlike a lot of bulletin board themed sites. It also appears that there must be some sort of editing process, because I've not yet run into anything that seems off topic or distracting. There is a lot of humor used to keep things light and playful, but be warned, at times it can be a bit crass, if funny. Nothing beyond what you'd see at a PG movie though.

Email is one topic that gets a lot of play on 43folders since it has become a primary means of communication, and a source of a huge amount of our information. So how do you become an email Ninja who can effectively take care of business, and not end up with a very organized maze of folders where your need info gets placed, never to be seen again? This article Five Fast Email Productivity Tips is a good place to begin. My guess is that many of you will end up following links until you've bumped into the areas you most want to go more smoothly. Don't forget to come back and visit Awareness * Connection. In fact, go ahead and put that on your "Soon" next action list.

* David Allen defines "stuff" in GTD as anything that you have allowed into your physical or psychological world that you haven't yet figured out how and when to take action on, or with.

Setting up for Sleep Success

Time Magazine has a nice little article on children and sleep that touches on the results of a few studies. It starts off with the results of a new study by Valérie Simard of Hôpital de Sacré-Coeur in Montréal, which looked at the link between parent bedtime behaviors and sleep disturbances in children during infancy and early childhood. The study was published by the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. The gist of it is that you should be wary of of doing things to help your child fall asleep, or fall back asleep, that require your presence for more than several minutes.

If kids begin to rely on you being there in order to fall asleep, they never quite get the hang of what it is like to drift off to sleep on their own. Once the sleep associations are formed they can be challenging to alter, as many parents have found. Dr. Taveras of Harvard Medical School put it this way, "Parents and pediatricians should keep in mind that children have to develop the capacity to regulate their own sleep early in life and self-soothe themselves during the night." The article goes on to discuss the relationship of too little sleep with obesity and also touches on other night time practices that work against you and your child in the long run.

This makes sense to me. My experience as a clinician who works with families is that sleeping with the child to get them to sleep can be very pleasant and can promote bonding. The problem is that it doesn't solve, and actually merely postpones the issue of when the child will master the skill of transitioning from drowsy to asleep when on their own. Parents who do choose a family sleeping arrangement should prepare themselves for the eventuality that they will need to help their child clear this hurdle.

One argument for the family sleeping arrangement that I often hear presented is that in many societies past and present everyone slept in the same bed or in the same very small sleeping quarters. The missing piece from the argument, in my mind though, is that in those societies, that sort of sleeping arrangement continues throughout the entirety of childhood. And there's the rub. Parents in those cultures and societies don't/didn't face having to train a young child to sleep on their own after years of being used to the company of their parents and siblings in close proximity. Parents in our society almost always eventually do have to face that developmental challenge. There are many other factors to consider and I think both arrangements have their pros and cons. I do know though that I've had many parents in my office who wish they'd been advised about this downside before they'd made their decision.

Here is a link to a previous post on the link between adequate sleep and not only cognitive abilities in the short run, but to IQ.

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Getting Things Done: Taxes & Root Canals

Taxes are finally complete, sent off through cyberspace and satisfyingly checked off my Getting Things Done (GTD) list**. Getting tax stuff done with a lot less stress is one of many examples of how tedious chore type stuff has gone more smoothly for me since I've been using the system...and I have to say, I don't tend to be much of a personal organization "system" type of guy. If I'm able to use it productively, that means that most people would be successful with it. Anyway, getting taxes for the season wrapped up and turned in always feels good no matter what the news turns out to be. Completing taxes happens to be one of the year's bigger "closed loops" for me, as David Allen would put it. And I know from what clients and friends report that I am not the only one who finds it a biggie. Allen describes "loops" as those unfinished tasks, chores, plans, etc. that take up our mental RAM when we haven't taken the time to mentally download them into our system, with the next physical action to be taken identified (the key to having your mental RAM free for creativity, better decision making, and just enjoying yourself).

A couple days ago Erin, my wife, told me that she ended up with both our accountant appointment and her root canal slated for the same day. Instead of Ben Franklin's familiar quip "death and taxes" being the only certainties in life, it's "dental work and taxes". Seems equally true, doesn't it? And maybe one notch less depressing. Anyway, her day was not one most of us would be looking forward to on own calendars. She ended up having a pretty good day all in all, though she did say there was a bit of shoe shopping toward the end of the day for self-soothing purposes. Though I'm sure that the shoes helped, I think something else was going on with her good mood after a day of serious dentistry and reckoning with Uncle Sam. And I think it illustrates a truth that's worth reflecting on. It's based on a tidbit I learned about years ago from from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (there will be a spelling test at the end of this post) the expert on the major part that flow experiences contribute to our overall happiness. The tidbit is that getting an unpleasant chore done tends to leave us relaxed and with a sense of happiness, whereas engaging in some sort of passive entertainment like watching television leaves us on average in a lower mood by the time we're done. In fact with television (again, on average) the more of it we watch, the worse we feel. Getting something out of the way on the other hand just feels good. By the way, Csikszentmihalyi's info is based, among other sources, on his now famous study where he hooked grad students up with beepers and paged them throughout the day reminding them to record their moods in real time during their normal activities.

Somehow this post that was just supposed to be a quick quip on "dental work and taxes" has become my intro post for Getting Things Done as well, as a tidbit about flow. I guess it is good to get it out there since I think most of my clients, as well as the small contingency of readers of Awareness * Connection around the globe, would find that GTD helps with making life a bit smoother right away. And "a bit smoother right away", is a phrase that is pretty central to the work I do with most clients. If you often find yourself feel stressed out about what you have coming up, I think you stand a good chance of reducing your stress level a good deal by experimenting with GTD and adopting the pieces that fit for you.***


Extras
**I do my work on a Mac so I use an Omni Group version of Getting Things Done called Omni Focus, but on David Allen's site, he sells Windows compatible versions of his system on software. The same version is also compatible with Macs. It is worth noting that Getting Things Done can be done in any medium. You could do it on 4 x 6 cards, in a Moleskine notebook or on a fridge with sticky notes. But as with many other tasks the computer lends itself to your system being a bit more lean and clean. The only downside being that you'll want to back up your data regularly. I just visited Allen's website and he now has detailed tips available (whitepapers) about using Outlook, Entourage and Lotus Notes effectively with the Getting Things Done system. His empire seems to be steadily growing. Looks like his system is working for him anyway.
***I don't work for or with David Allen. I'm genuinely enthusiastic about the effectiveness of the system. No kickbacks. Wouldn't be ethical to combine an arrangement like that with therapy...not that Mr. Allen has ever had such an arrangement with me on his GTD list.
****Okay, quick. How do you spell the name of the author of Flow? 'Told ya it'd be here.

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Other Therapists Respond to In Treatment

A comment on the original post provided a link to an L.A. Times article where therapists respond to the content of the In Treatment that is worth sharing here. Along with some positive responses in the article there are a number of complaints about the way that psychotherapy is portrayed. Prominent examples of what they dislike are lack of professional boundaries and the therapist's life being as stereotypically chaotic as the lives of his patients. My take is that this is to be expected. Whether in the ER, the coroner's lab or on the beat with a cop, portrayals of any field are going to be more dramatic by definition. If real life were just as interesting as the stories (in this case in the form of television) we turn to for entertainment, television, movies and plays would be pulling in a lot less business. Admittedly they are condensed and spiced up a bit. Whether it is jazzed up to the point of being less than worthwhile viewing, I'll leave to readers to decide for themselves.

I will agree with some of the therapists in the article below, that my clinical supervisor, whom I pay out of pocket since I'm in private practice, I find infinitely more helpful than the supervisor is portrayed in the first Friday episode. Though again our sessions probably would not make for very good cable TV. Not without a good amount of editing anyway.

In any case here is the link to the LA Times article on In Treatment.