Simplifying Technology or saving time for the right reasons

Quite often I’ll refer to myself as a being a reluctant geek and a walking contradiction. I’m a tech because I have a natural ability for it, not because its my passion, and I’m a walking contradiction because I would be happiest living in a Yurt, off-grid, by the water somewhere outside of town rather than in a technology charged environment. Its not that I dont like computers or technology but in the 20 plus years that I’ve been doing it for a living I have seen it go from being an idea of positivity to a reality of negativity.

What do I mean by that?

Two things best demonstrate my point.

The first being, computers were supposed to save us all a lot of time and make things easier for us at work. Instead of being able to do a weeks work in three days and have more time for living, for family, friends and all the good things in life, we are no expected to do two weeks work in one. As a result were working longer AND harder than ever before.

The second is, when was the last time you heard someone sing the praises of their PC for making things easier and less stressful? It doesn’t happen. As a rule people are frustrated by their computers, not empowered. The constant need to upgrade and replace and invest in overwhelms the useful little things we can use out computers for.

There are a hundred little tools and pieces of software out there that we can use to enhance our life and make tasks easier, and of those I am a big fan. What I don’t like is the fact that almost without exception these tools are employed, not to give us time, but to take time away. We take time away from one task purely to let us fit in another one.

Remember when we used to be in the middle of something and if people asked us to do something else we could just ask them to wait? Remember when if we weren’t in we were just out? Nowadays we try to multi-task like the very computers that sap our energy all day. Now if you phone someone and they’re not in, they’re reachable on their cell or pager. As a result we are all working all the time, its almost impossible to unhook, to disconnect and switch off.

So what’s the point, and how does this fit into the whole simplification theme?

Well tonight I made a decision, just before I sat down to write this as a matter of fact.

I love all these little tools that make my life easier but like everyone else I’ve used them to make my life busier. Well no more. If I find a piece of software that allows me to do an hours work in half an hour then I’ll use it but I will keep that half hour that I saved to myself. No more doing two days work in one, to hell with that. Life is too short to work myself into an early grave or live a life or all work and no play.

I don’t want to be more productive but I do want to produce the same amount in less time. Clients get their work done in less time for the same money so they don’t lose anything. I get paid the same amount so I don’t lose anything. And in the end I get more time to spend doing the things I really enjoy in my life.

Now doesn’t that sound more like the kind of life that computers were supposed to bring us?

My 100 Things, lets the challenge begin

My 100 Things Challenge

Beyond reading about the very basic idea of the 100 thing challenge, in which you prune yourself down to owning just 100 things (that you use exclusively), I have done absolutely no research. Instead I chose to write my own methodology and rules to my 100 Things Challenge, after all it is mine. If you want to know how I’m planning to do it read on.

If you would rather read how it all started, or compare the two methods, then take a look at David Michael Bruno’s website. I have purposely not looked at this site beyond the basic concept because I want to save that until the end.

It may prove a little masochistic if it turns out I could have saved myself hours of time and effort but its not about following someone elses rules, its about creating my own. Not that I’m egotistical enough to think I can do a way better job than anyone else but because our circumstances, principles and ideals are unlikely to be identical.

Making my own rules encourages me to follow it through.

Its true that I may be making things harder, or even easier, on myself this way, but I can live with that.

NEXT WEEK>  The My Rules

My transformation

My life has changed hugely over the last four years.

While it is by no means complete I wanted to share with you some details of my journey and some of the turning points.

For the longest time I was unhappy. Not miserable or depressed but just not happy, not contented with my lot in life and how it was turning out.

I didn’t know where my life was heading and I certainly didn’t feel like I was the one at the helm. Half the time I felt I was free-falling through life. Things would rush at me at a million miles an hours and I would do my best to cope with them or fend them off. The rest of the time I was happy to coast along following some other leader and letting them make all the decision.

Because I thought this was how it was supposed to be.

I honestly did not know any better.

Sure I had friends who had their shit together and I’d met loads of people who seemed to be in control and knew where they were going. I figured I would get to that in time, it just takes some of us longer right?

Wrong

Fast forward to now and I have a part time job paying full time wages that I love. I know exactly where my life is going and how it will be.

While it hasn’t happened overnight I will be the first to accept responsibility for that. I could have it all now but I don’t and that’s also down to me. But that will change. Just as the other changes came around fairly quickly, so will this.

NEXT> My way of thinking

It’s no longer about the money, and its great!

Image by poonomo via Flickr

For most of my life I worried about money.

In my younger days there was always more money than month. No matter how hard I tried not spend, it was just always like that. I would say all the time how I never wanted to be rich as long as I could pay the bills, keep a roof over my head and food on the table then I would be ok.

So that’s all I ever did. Only sometimes I wanted stuff, so sometimes the bills didn’t get paid, or they got paid late.

Then one day learned what is probably the most important lesson of my whole life.

‘Whatever you believe in life becomes the truth,
your true belief will make it so.’

I believed that I wanted just enough money, so I had just enough money.

I believed that I always had to watch my pennies, so I always had to watch my pennies.

After learning this lesson, I stopped all my negative or detrimental beliefs about money, and everything else for that matter.

I stopped thinking more money was bad and let go of the modesty that spawned the just-enough-is-enough mentality.

I stopped counting my pennies and started having more money almost right away.

Now when I go shopping if I have the money for something I want, I buy it. I dont spend hours shopping for the best value, I don’t hum and haw trying to justify the expense, if I want it I get it.

Its about how you think, and how those thoughts, if you truly believe them will have an impact your life. That impact can be positive, generated by positive thoughts or they can be negative, as mine used to be. This truth goes for anything in your life, not just money.

And ever since I stopped worrying about the money I haven’t had to.

Let there be dark

Image by ralphunden via Flickr

My simple choices

Until now I had never made a resolution at New Years, ever.

Partly because everyone I knew without exception broke theirs within a week of making them, and partly because I was lazy. I couldn’t be bothered to put that much thought into something that was doomed to failure.

So what’s difference this year?

In short, timing.

Recently I’ve been cutting down on my procrastination by not putting off decisions to do things. Going raw was one such decision. I was planning on waiting until I had used the groceries I had just bought, then I realised that if I did that I would just put it off until some other excuse came up.

There is also the fact that I am simplifying everything, which makes the choices on what to resolve much simpler. I also want to try a little experiment.

Instead of making New Years Resolutions I will be making a services of Choices. The idea is the same but choices are something that I make and stick to all the time. Resolutions seem to be thing destined to be forgotten or inevitably broken.

So for now, here is the list of my New Years Choices each of which will be explained in more detail in the coming weeks.

1. To weigh  myself weekly and post my weight, body fat and total body water over at theuncookeddiet.com.
2. To follow a 100% raw diet (with the caveat that I can leave my diet only to convenience others, I don’t want people who invite me out for dinner to have to panic at the thought of preparing an uncooked meal)
3. 100 Things
4. 100 Mile UnCooked Diet
5. No more being bored
6. No more procrastination
7. Write often
8. Read often
9. Write letters

That’s about it for Choices at the moment, as I said earlier I will go into a bit more detail over the coming weeks on the whys and the wherefores of each Choice. But for now, Happy New Year to you all. If you want to share your Resolutions or try making Choices of your own, please don’t be shy, I’d love to know what you want to change about your life or habits and why.

A new commitment…

Santa was kind enough to bring me some funky bathroom scales for Christmas which show me that I have apparently lost another 8lbs since becoming 95% raw, not bad at all.

So I have decided to do make some changes for 2010.

To start will I will commit to being 100% raw. The biggest impact of that will be no more Large Double Doubles from Tim Hortons on the way to service calls. To be honest I have found that the caffiene is actually starting to affect me like never before. Previously I could have a coffee at 10pm and be asleep at 10:30pm. Now if I have a coffee after 7pm I am up until 2am unable to sleep. Perhaps all the stuff that my body has cleared out is giving caffeine better access to my system. Which means the good stuff is getting into my system too, and that’s good.

I will also have a New Years Day weigh in and post my Weight, % Body Fat and Body Water over at theuncookeddiet.com.

I will weigh in every Friday and post the results so that anyone can see them. This public accountability should help me with any commitment issues I might have.

I will also blog about how hard/easy it is, the kind of foods I get to eat and any physical or emotional detox issues I might have.

The reason behind all this transparency is that I want to give anyone interested in becoming a raw foodist an honest blow by blow account of just what’s involved and just how successful and simple it can be.

So there, I’ve said it, now I have to do it, right?

simplifying me, my goals

As the title of my blog suggests I have decided to trim the fat from my life, to remove the clutter and the chaos that has haunted me for as long as I can remember.

The goal?

Clarity… peace… tranquility… serenity… a calmness and sense of order that I have never had.

My life has always seemed pretty hectic. At times bordering on free-fall, everything rushing at me at 100 miles an hour and me doing my best to cope with or avoid whatever came my way.

In order to make this “mammoth” task more manageable I have decided to break it down into separate tasks.

Simplifying my life

• I want my life to be simple, it sounds so easy doesn’t it?
• I want my life to be organised, not rocket science, you would think?
• I want to work in real life the way I do in my visions of how I want to work.

Simplifying my home

• I want to like where I live, at the moment I don’t. I bought the place out of necessity and it shows.
• I want to live in a Yurt or a Strawbale home, NOT a box made out of 2×4s.
• I want to be out of town and off grid. A far cry from the street front utility hog that I can hardly bring myself to call home.

Simplifying me

• I’m a geek who in six short years became a pack rat. If its light shiny and expensive and I don’t have it yet, I want it!
• I have collected way too much stuff in way too short an amount of time.
• The Solution? 100 Things.

Simplifying food

• I gave up milk and felt better for it. Not because I was lactose intolerant or anything but because I read an article and it made sense.
• I don’t agree with modern farming practices, growth hormones and antibiotics have no place in the food chain. So I gave up meat.
• I wanted to simplify things and what better way than not cooking, so I became a raw foodist, raw vegan, whatever you call it, I don’t cook my food and I don’t eat meat, fish, eggs or dairy.

Simplifying blogging

• I’ve always enjoyed writing, so I want to find a way to run a number of blogs at the same time, I know, once you start its addictive isn’t it?
• While I don’t see myself making a living doing any one thing in the future, I want to have money coming in from numerous sources, including writing for an online audience.
• Putting all my eggs into one basket has never been my style, mostly out of confidence issues but also because I love the undeniable safety net that it gives me. Running multiple blogs gives me just that.

So there you have it, as it stands at the moment. This is my mission. No more procrastination, no more planning.

Planning isn’t doing after all.

Eureka, by jove I think I’ve found it!

When I first switched to my raw diet it was a great excuse to go out and buy a lot of stuff. Stuff that I’ve never needed before and stuff that I probably still didn’t need but was shiny and could be slipped in under the radar in the guise of “kitchen stuff”.

One such under-the-radar purchase was my ice cream maker. I love ice-cream, I mean who doesn’t right? I also added the conviction that my son could use it to make himself ice cream. My son, by the way, is the same son who was told at the age of 4 by me that if the ice cream van was playing his music, it meant he had run out of ice cream.

Now before you go getting your panties in a bunch it didn’t mean he went without ice cream, it just meant he went into the house and got a freeze pop off his mother and only had proper ice cream as a treat.

Anyways back to the purpose of this post.

I bought my ice cream maker, unpacked it, set it up, tried to use it, cleaned it up, read the instructions, put the bit in the freezer that needs to be frozen for the thing to work, and tried again.

My first effort at raw ice cream was, shall we say less than stellar. It resulted in a block of what can only be described as pick ice forming in the machine that had to left to thaw in order to remove the contents of the bowl, from the bowl.

But last night, I made, the most delicious Pecan Chocolate Raw Ice Cream ever.

I planned to follow a this recipe from the very talented (and very cute) Karen Knowler, who is my new raw food hero, but realised as soon as I passed the point of no return that I didn’t have all the ingredients. Necessity being the mother of invention and improvisation its second cousin twice removed, here is what I came up with.

2 Cup Pecan Nuts
4 Cups Water
4 Medjool Dates
6 Tbsp Dark Agave Nectar
4 Tbsp Hot Chocolate Powder

Blended everything then poured it into the ice cream maker and 35 minutes later I had the best, guilt free, ice cream ever.

Now I know the recipe is not technically a raw one on account of the Hot Chocolate Powder but damn the ice cream is good.

Next time I make it I will have the proper ingredients and follow Karen’s recipe to the letter. I will also endeavour never to reach the point of no return again.

The point of no return – in the kitchen

I keep promising myself that I will learn from my mistakes. But sometimes I don’t. So the best thing I can do is share them with you and hope that at least someone else can learn from them.

One such mistake is reaching the “point of no return” when un-cooking or trying out new recipes in the kitchen.

Typically the point of no return comes when I get half way through putting the ingredients into the blender only to find out I’m missing some key fruits or I dont have enough of something. Invariably I either end up rushing out several times to get the necessary things, thats right I have been known to make the same mistake more than once in the same recipe, or trying to make do and ending up with a whole bunch of waste.

I even went out and bought those little glass bowls you see on cooking shows on TV so I can pre organise my ingredients and have everything ready before I start.

But then I forget to use them.

But not anymore.

This post is my pledge, before all who stumble across it, to make these mistakes no more.

From this day forward I will get all my ingredients ready before going anywhere near the blender or the food processor. If I measure things out and find I am lacking I will continue measuring and noting any more shortages before going to the store to get the things I need. What’s more, I will walk to store in order to help me get the message.

So thats my affirmation, I wont make the same mistakes again. If I’m short on ingredients, because I’ve only measured them into bowls I can choose to abandon the whole thing and put everything back, complete measuring then walk to the store and get the missing bits or search my Evernote recipe notebook for recipes that contain ingredients I do have.

Sounds simple enough doesn’t it?