Polyphasic Sleep Journal #3 - What You'll Need

Polyphasic Sleep Journal #3

Things that you will need for polyphasic sleep (that you didn't think of):

While these observations may not apply to everyone, they are things I found useful and they also point to the practice of thinking broadly about a change. This is meant to be both practically useful and thought-provoking.

Have your clothes out the night before – when you take your showers at night or in the morning, have your clothes ready in advance. I know this may be easier for some than others, but even if the clothes that you have ready are only for your "extra" morning phase, and you put your real clothes on later save yourself the time of rifling through your closet in a dark fog. To extend Ben Franklins famous statement, I'll add that a minute saved is a minute created.  Granted, this is only true when saving a minute can be done without haste, but that applies here. I have found that having my clothes out the night before not only saves me time in the morning but it is a signal and reminder to myself and the world that I'm doing things in advance (moving the action upstream) and those are vitally important to me. 

Have a flashlight handy – I use a yellow Eveready model, because it has a broad top and is easy to balance on a table surface without rolling away. Also, the fact that it sits up vertically makes it seem more like something that is waiting for me on purpose like a tool, as opposed to just yet another thing laying on the table. 

Have slip on shoes available – in my polyphasic sleep scenario, I have chosen to go to bed at a regular time and to wake up exceptionally early. This means that I'm walking around the house in the wee hours when my wife and kids are asleep. I'm a "shoe person" that wears shoes pretty much always, even in the house. This is mostly personal preference but as a 40-year-old (is that the reason?) I find that standing barefoot or in sock feet on hard surfaces or for extended periods (I work standing up)... hurts.   so, walking around the house wearing shoes on hardwood floors, and up and down steps is fairly obnoxious. I wear slip on shoes with soles. So when I walk around the house are up and downstairs I slip them off and walk in my socks but when I stand to make my breakfast or work, they are on. 

Have a book ready – I'm currently reading the Monk who sold his Ferrari. A gift from a friend that is very focused on self-improvement. I'm not a very fast reader, and typically make virtually zero time for books other than nonfiction business books, but having time to read alone in the morning has been awesome. Guilt free, because I'm working within time that I literally "made" for myself with my foray into the Everyman 2 sleep project. 

Dirty Dishes – As business owners and parents, and with my wife homeschooling our kids, we don't get a lot of time together and my wife has been tired and frustrated on some days that are particularly trying (you know what I mean, parents). So last night we got pizza and watched a show on TV as a family indulgence and together time. Everybody was tired so we went to bed without cleaning up the kitchen. As it turns I don't mind doing the dishes so much when I'm in the morning zone and I can do it alone and peacefully.  While I didn't plan this in advance, I know that as I type this at 5:24am, that my wife will be very pleasantly surprised when she awakens to a clean kitchen.  Win.

To make this one clearer, the way that I'm actually making this happen is that I'm simply going to be aware that I have this time and I will leverage it, sometimes, to facilitate being spontaneous the prior our next day, or to do something nice for somebody else. Or maybe to write a blog post when I haven't for a long time. 

If you're not sure what polyphasic sleep or Every man 2 is, check out my page on trying Everyman 2.

How do you change when you've tried it all?

Audacious goals, I'm thinking.  

I have the same goal types that everyone does:

Fitness

Finance

House

Relationship

Personal

(The rest are really only subtypes of the above... yes?)

So here I am in lateish November with a few abandoned projects on this blog.  My 30 day plan to get organized with Toodledo crashed.  I've since started using another tool, but abandoned it also, tentatively, if you can abandon tentatively.

So, now what?

I set some bigass goals.

Now what?  All I have to do is keep them.  What that really means is somehow avoiding the seemingly inevitable pitfalls that have beset progress in the past.  How do you really make it different this time?

October GTD and Toodledo #??

Blamo.  Total crash.  For me, at least in my current state in life, this was unsustainable.

Sorry if I crashed on expectations.  I started with the honest intent of doing this for 30 days, the idea being that most plans have problems and 30 days would be enough to overcome some, find solutions and prove it all out to be worthy.  No can do.

This isn't a condemnation of Toodledo or GTD, just a flat out statement that it didn't work for me.

I'm using a different tool now I'm I'm hesitating to make this all about the tool, because it's probably about the person.  Most things are.

I'm going to go back and put a spoiler alert on the posts and start something new.

Building a life strategy

This isn't a manual for how to do it because I don't have one.  It is a personal conversation (or brain dump) about the process and how I get things together.

I've always believed that goals are important.  I've been taught this and once you understand the idea it seems obvious - how can you be happy if you don't know what you want?  Maybe it's right, maybe not.  Do you have to know the answer to this question to move forward?  I typically think there are few things that you really must have 100% nailed down before you can do other useful things, but maybe this is one of them.

In my attempts to find my happy, I usually think in a diagram and I start on the right with HAPPY.

Inevitably, this leads upstream really really far.  Each of the 'happy with' bubbles does this:

You can see that if these are drawn together, it quickly becomes an unmanageable level of bubbles.  I already didn't draw all of them.  How to make sense of so much stuff and boil it down into simple actions?

April - GTD and Toodledo #13: Just Get Things Done

Ironically, when I need GTD the most, it's the easiest to fall off the wagon.

David Allen says one of the best things about GTD is that it's easy to get back on the wagon - which is good, because it's also easy to fall off, and even as the originator of this particular wagon, he falls off and gets back on all the time.  I learned this in a great intro-level video of a talk David gave at google.  Here's the video of David Allen at Google.

So, I fell off and got back on, a few times, in recent days.  As I have noticed, I learn the most when I iterate through problems, and this 30 day project has forced me to remain continuous in my resolve to find a way when I am in the gap between iterations of 'on'.  So, I tried something new.  I was working on some content for a client that does Iceland Excursions and I thought that maybe I could do the right thing at a client level and continue to refine my process without the mass of my entire workload to deal with.  It seems to be working.

Here's a tiny version of what it my 'working' screen looks like:

Key observations:
- More projects, fewer actions.  When I scan, I realized that my mind attempts to comprehend the top level items, so 5 items is as distracting as 5 projects - even though 5 projects might mean 25 actions.  Hmmmm.

- Most things actually ARE projects, so this is natural when you do it.

- Sorting by Tag puts all the 'super projects,' or in my case, clients, together.

- Because I can sort subtasks, I can reorder things as I see fit

- I have projects that never end, like doing web promotion for things like Iceland Excursions where tasks flow through, but the project never ends.  Truly, this is like exercise and eating, where I could have discreet projects that DO end, but I like this method.  It allows me to tick things off and feel advancement, add things to the end of the list and keep an eye on overall workload.

- I can put PROJECT-LEVEL waiting, someday/maybe, and reference items in this system.  In the tiny graphic above, I have a project at the top with several waiting items and reference items.  They are neatly sequestered where I need them, not taking up me-level overhead.

I think it's starting to come together.  If you just found this post, please visit the whole series; 30 days of Getting things done and Toodledo.com.