Jorg's Brain Log

It takes 3 times as long to turn a bad habit into a good one, as it does to develop a bad habit. With that in mind, I’ve got to start on transforming some bad habits, because there are only 309 days left.

Last friday I subscribed myself to a new gym, which is suited for my life style at the moment. Because I’m living a pretty mobile lifestyle at the moment, traveling a lot, and sleeping at different places through the week, it would be best to have a gym with several locations through the Netherlands. Fit For Free has many gym’s in the Netherlands and now that I’m a member I can go to 24 different locations for some intense fitness and cardio workouts!

Now that the physical is covered and I can go work with the weights again, it’s time to look at another bad habit; my eating habits! As I’ve got a very slow metabolism and that I’m pretty sensitive to sugar, it’s time to really start with changing the way I eat. In the past I always changed my eating pattern by turning 180 degrees. Too many times this has been a failure. So now it’s time to approach it another way. 

1. Only light soft drinks! 

2. No more bread!

In the last few weeks I’ve been busy reconstructing the way I work. In the past I probably was too much volume oriented. Working more and more hours to get my pile of tasks finished in time, and it became harder and harder to accomplish this.

How to change such a line upwards? I looked at how tasks were born and were they came from, and it was an interesting experience to see how tasks develop and how you put them on your pile. All in all, I learned a lot about myself and the way I work (professional, private, family wise). And in the coming time I try to write some posts about this new way of thinking and working. But first let’s start with the first part. Where do tasks come from?

First of all, let’s define a task:

Any piece of work that is undertaken or attempted

That’s pretty clear! I wake up in the morning and tell myself to get up. Sometimes this task is done successfully, sometimes not and I need to attempt it several times before this task is complete. Noticing that I’m thirsty, I give myself the task to walk to the refrigerator and get myself a drink. Calling a new customer to ask about our last ICT work done at his place. Planning a new appointment with a colleague to discuss the latest problems and setbacks in his project. All are tasks, and of course the focus is on the last two.

Many tasks are done without really thinking of them as a regular task as you know them from work. But in the end everything we do is a task; a reaction to information input. Not all information input results in a reaction (task). You can do 2 things with information you get; archive and react.

Some people will argue with me that you can also forget (delete) information you receive. As I’m a firm believer of the fact that every piece of information your body receives is stored forever in your memory, the information you get is archived maybe in a way so you may remember it easily in the conscious brain or maybe somewhat deeper in the unconscious brain. Easily meaning the name of your (girl)friend (I hope!), or very deep stored  in the unconscious brain there is also one of the number plates you saw on the highway while driving.

We can blame information input partly (more on this later) as the main source of our busy task lists, we need to filter out the noise to make sure we don’t get an information overload. Before we can filter out the noise we need to know where information input is coming from. In short, we get our information from our senses; everybody remembers and knows the list of five senses we were learned at school:
- Sight
- Hearing
- Touch
- Smell
- Taste

If you want to get technical we can continue to talk about senses more scientifically like: chemoreception, photoreception, mechanoreception and thermoception. Or also include on the already 5 mentioned senses, the less known list of additional six interoceptive senses: pain, balance, joint motion and acceleration, sense of time, temperature differences and direction. But that’s not the really the scope of this post.

In a next post I’ll tell you which of the senses matter most to our information overload and we go into more detail where the information overload is coming from.

313 is the number of days until my 33th birthday. For years I already set some goals to reach at the age of 32. So let´s see how far we can come with these goals before I get 33. I already talked about this stuff at the beginning when I setup my blog for the first time.

It´s been quiet on my blog for a long time for self written and new articles. Too much going on and to busy with some other important stuff that had to be dealt with. Finally I found the structure and time again to write.

First thing I wanted to do, was to make blogging easier as it already was. My old website ran on wordpress and a self hosted website that took time to maintain. Because of the many hours you had to put in wordpress to maintain it and keep it up to date technically, I finally decided to get back to blogger. Blogger catched up my needs for blogging, so why not use this nice free Google service to get ahead. Only thing to manage is importing my old posts into blogger. But that is not as important as starting again.

As I´m still very active on the internet, I know mostly use Friend feed to aggregate all my interests and web work. I already put them on my old website as some badges, but on my new blogger website it even got a more primary role, besides the blog posts from me themselves.

So much to talk about and to catch up, but as it´s already way past midnight it´s now time to say goodnight!