Working On Me

Most people receive their income these days on a monthly basis, but it seems that as soon as the money arrives, everyone is lining up to take a chunk of it. At the front of the queue is the cost of your housing – the mortgage repayment or the rent. Then there are the utility bills, groceries and the general living expenses, and people tend to think of what is left at the end as ‘their’ money. In other words, you stand at the back of the money line and have to be grateful for whatever is left, if anything.

But the money was earned by you, was paid to you. Why should you have the last call on it? What I'm suggesting is that you move yourself to the front of the money line. The first call on your money is the 10% of your income you set aside for yourself. Everything else has to take its turn, because that 10% is yours. Set up an automatic transfer with your bank so that this money is transferred to an interest-bearing account as soon as your monthly earnings arrive at the bank. Then, everyone else can have their chunk afterwards.

Of course, you still need to live within your means, so effectively you are now surviving on only 90% of your income. But you should be able to do it quite easily. In the past, you have been content to just wait your turn and take what is left. If there is an expense that you have to think about, then too often you will have decided there is enough money and just incurred it,. The result has been that you have probably never been able to accumulate significant savings. But by putting yourself first in the money line, you limit your ability to spend on unnecessary (or even frivolous) immediate wants.

There was a time when receipt of any gift would prompt an immediate, hand written note of thanks from the recipient. Etiquette books continue to recommend this practice, but very few people nowadays go beyond an oral thank you or – at most – an email. In a world where a note of thanks in the mail is rare, it becomes far more valued and more powerful. When we receive a note of appreciation, just as when we receive a compliment, we start looking for ways to do more for the person. Whilst this is, of course, not a reason for writing thank you notes – these should be motivated by genuine gratitude – it is a useful side effect.

So your friend has given you a small gift. How do you go about writing a thank you note? The first job is to get something to write on. You can find pre-printed ‘thank you cards’, but ordinary writing paper is fine. If you like, you can use a correspondence card, a plain index card or even a picture postcard. Next, you will need something to write with. Tradionalists insist on a fountain pen, but any pen will do. Use blue or black ink. Save your green and purple pens for more frivolous purposes; a thank you note needs to look serious and sincere. Now you can write, following these steps:

1. Salutation. Dear Michael,
2. Express thanks. Thank you for the Nelson Mandela biography.
3. Praise choice and/or anticipate use. Mandela is a personal hero of mine and I am looking forward to learning more about him. I’ll take the book on holiday with me next week.
4. Anticipate next contact. I’ll give you a call when I get back from the beach and we can meet for a drink.
5. Sign off. Best wishes, Ray.

Sometimes, though, you receive a gift that you don’t like. You still need to write a note. Remember, you are showing appreciation of the act of giving, not the gift itself. Look at this example and identify the same five steps:

Dear Aunt Julia,

Thank you for the extraordinary china elephant. We have put it on the hall table, and I am sure it will be a talking point when people call on us. I’ll see you at Christmas, as usual.

Love to you and to Uncle Bill.

Ray

You might receive money as a gift. If you do, you should make no reference to the amount in your letter, simply referring to ‘your generous gift’. In step 3, you should indicate what you have spent it on, or what you intend to spend it on. Don’t give a detailed accounting, though. If you plan to pool it with other cash gifts, you can say something like: ‘We are adding it to our savings toward a house deposit.’

Sometimes, your thanks will be for something intangible. For instance, you might have stayed at a friend’s house or been treated to a meal. Again, the five step approach covers it:

Dear Andrea,

Thank you for your hospitality at the weekend. It was great to be at the conference within an hour of waking up rather than suffering hours of motorway traffic early in the morning. I really enjoyed catching up with you and your news the evening before. I’ll give you a call in a couple of weeks.

Best wishes,

Ray

Note that each of these letters will fit on a single small page. However temping the opportunity, do not digress into personal news or other matters in your letter. This digression will detract from your core purpose, which is to express appreciation for the gift. If there is anything else to say, do it is a separate letter, call or email.

Your note should be written and posted within a week of receiving the gift, although in the case of wedding gifts, you can take a little longer. But a late thank you note is far better than none at all and you should not apologise in the letter about any lateness: the letter is about their kindness, not your faults.

Once you start writing these thank you notes, you’ll look forward to the warm feeling you get when you write one. Your recipients will delight in giving you more, knowing their gifts will be appreciated.

A friend of mine - like me, a freelancer - emailed me last week with a hilarious update on his new project, which sounded terribly familiar. Here's how he described it:

1. Comply with client request to not scope, plan or initiate properly at all
2. Leap straight into delivery
3. Frantically try to backfill with plans and governance whilst delivering at speed of light to cope with all the things you said would happen but weren’t willing to walk away from when client said "we don’t need that here" and "planning is that stuff that gets in the way of doing”, bleeding profusely from the ears/eyes/arms, and threatening to reboot the client’s etch-a-sketch...
4. Go home and swear next time you’ll make them do it properly
5. Repeat from 1 on very next project ad infinitum

He concluded: "I’m stupid, but not so stupid I don’t KNOW I’m stupid." I can put it no better than this. Why do we keep doing it?

Excel lets you hide worksheets within a workbook, which can be handy if – for instance – you want to conceal the workings of your spreadsheets, or want to keep the user interface clean and simple.

Fortunately, you can also unhide these sheets, but ONLY ONE AT A TIME. This can be a major frustration if you need to do this a lot, particularly since the command is buried a couple of levels down in the menu structure.

One of the most popular offerings on my the business website I run with my partner at grbps is an Excel add-in that rectifies this problem and allows you to hide and unhide multiple sheets with ease from a simple form.

You can download the add-in here. Save it wherever you like (preferably in the add-ins folder, but it doesn't really matter) and then browse to the file from Tools-Addins in Excel and your new toolbar will be available.

There is also an article you can read containing the source code which makes the add-in work. You can read it for free here.

Recently, I’ve been noticing a backlash against the trend to do everything on electronic platforms, and it mirrors some of the decisions I’ve been making as well. Last year, for instance, I put away my IPAQ in favour of paper organisational solutions.

Here are six applications we all undertake every day that work better with the traditional paper and pen solutions than with electronic tools.

1. The task list. Web Worker Daily has an inspirational post on this subject. I have found that the paper task list is simply a more effective way to organise my work. I use a form of Bill Westerman’s great GSD system. My GSD book is portable, works anywhere, has never crashed and doesn’t need a help file.

2. The daily schedule. I use a Moleskine pocket diary, in which I use a pencil to note my various appointments, meetings and plans. I can quickly skip to any date and make changes easily whenever I like. When people in the corporate world invite me to meetings in Outlook, I write them in my paper diary when I accept the invitation. Other than that, the only syncing I need to do is to pick up my diary and put it in my pocket when I go out.

3. Meeting notes. For a while, I used Microsoft OneNote but despite the wonderful flexibility of the application, the truth is it still isn’t anywhere near as flexible as writing my own notes in a book or on paper. When I use paper, I can draw pictures, and highlight relationships between ideas without even thinking about it. Yes, OneNote can do that too, but while I’m thinking about the key and mouse actions to make that happen, I’m not concentrating on what’s happening in the meeting.

4. Mind maps. There are lots of PC mind mapping applications. I quite like MindManager. But after you’ve created a few mind maps on a computer, you start to notice they all look the same. They’re nice and shiny and professional looking, of course, but they aren’t memorable in the way a hand-drawn one is. When you draw a bad picture of a factory on your paper mind map, it’s more memorable that the perfect clipart one on screen. When your map ends up asymmetrical because you overestimated how far a topic would take you, it’s more memorable. The imperfections of the paper design create memory hooks that the perfect computer versions just don’t.

5. Your journal. I’ve written about the value I get from keeping a daily record of my life before, and I just can’t imagine doing this in any way other than in a book with a fountain pen. I write more slowly than I can type, and this allows me to record rather more fully-formed ideas that those my keyboard produces. The journal can accompany me anywhere and I can access it quickly in situations in which I’d hesitate to open a laptop. It’s lighter, too.

6. Personal letters and greeting cards. Compare the experience of receiving a hand-written note or card in the mail with that of receiving an e-mail or an e-card. Someone took the trouble not just to click a few keys, but to write you a personal message, put it in an envelope which they then addressed, stamped and posted. Is that not a more valuable affirmation of your relationship than a few on-screen dancing bunnies?

Now that my fortieth birthday has passed, I feel entitled to buy and read 'The Oldie'.This month the Bishop of Reading has contributed an article called 'Change your life. Do nothing'. In it, he decries the bustle and activity of modern life and advocates the regular devotion of time to sitting silently and becoming attuned to things deep within us and outside of us.

Overstimulation is a given in the new century. Television, the internet and the radio compete for our attention while the ubiquitous mobile phone and email account ring, chime and buzz to demand our immediate attention. In all of this noise, is our internal voice ignored or shouted down?

I am off to find a comfortable chair. 

Often, it can be hard to sustain writing in a diary. Perhaps you get suddenly busy and lose any possibility of spare time, or perhaps it seems that nothing interesting is going on. Maybe you just forget to write a few days in a row and then the momentum is lost. There are ways to guard against this:

1. Try to develop the habit of writing at the same time every day, say first thing in the morning, or last thing at night. If you’re working, could you devote a few minutes to this in your lunch break?
2. Don’t beat yourself up about making an entry every day; if circumstances mean just one or two entries a week, that’s fine. You can increase or decrease the frequency of entries as you like.
3. Unless your PC is always with you and ready to go, use pen and paper, and keep them with you all the time if you can so you can snatch writing opportunities as they arise.
4. Use a plain paper book rather than a pre-printed diary, because you might want to write a lot some days, a little on others and sometimes nothing at all.
5. If you get stuck with nothing to write, just write yourself a question, take a breath and write down some answers to it. I’ve included some prompt questions to get you started at the end of this post.
6. Think what it would be like if you had started a year ago. Imagine all the detail you would be able to go back and read.
7. If you do lapse for a period, don’t consider the whole thing a failure. When you’re ready, simply turn to a new page, write the date and start going again.

Look forward to the time when you will be able to look back and find out what you were doing and how you were feeling a year ago or ten years ago. What memories you are preserving for your future, or for your children.

Diary prompts

• How am I feeling right now and why?
• What was the best thing that happened today?
• What is worrying me?
• How will I spend the coming weekend?
• What ambition have I had for a long time?
• Who are the people that matter to me and why?
• What is my earliest memory?
• Where have I travelled and what did I see or do there?
• If I could do anything with my life, what would I do?
• If I won or inherited a fortune, what would I do with it?
• What values do I want my children to hold?
• How will I celebrate my next major birthday?
• What would my ideal holiday be like?

Life for must of us happens very quickly. Often we do not have time to assimilate events and experiences, but simply allow ourselves to be carried from one episode to the next. Holidays and special times pass in an instant. But a month, even a week after they are finished, how much of their detail is forgotten?

Keeping a diary is something most of us will have tried once or twice when we were younger. For many people, a childhood diary is the start of a record they continue to keep throughout adulthood, but for others interest wanes fairly quickly, perhaps before the first full week passes. So why should you add to your already full schedule by making time to keep a diary? Well, some of the benefits you might derive are listed below.

1. You create a permanent log of certain events, such as when you had a particular business idea, when your child lost his first tooth, or how much you paid for that antique chair. When you start writing, you won’t know how useful this might be in the future, but it will be.
2. By writing, you get to filter events and feelings and your brain gets a chance to process them properly, a chance that otherwise it rarely gets. Without this opportunity, it is difficult to fully appreciate what is going on in your life and what it means.
3. You are able over time to check progress towards a goal or other long-term changes in your life. When trying out one of the ideas in this book, for instance, you can log your progress and reactions as you go and later look back to see the long term change.
4. Your handwriting quality and/or speed will improve if you use a pen; your keyboard skills will improve if you use a PC.
5. Writing can help you solve problems in your life. The act of writing is slower then the act of thinking, so you have to slow down and be more careful in your approach. Opportunities and ideas you would otherwise have missed can flow in this environment.

People sometimes find it difficult to start a diary, and there is a certain amount of self consciousness involved that you will need to get past. The best advice is probably to trick yourself into it. Decide that you’re not actually going to write about yourself, but simply record some random thoughts and ideas, perhaps with a view to improving your writing, trying out a new pen, or keyboard, or word processor. Maintain this ‘random writing’ for a few days and without every trying or meaning to you will simply start writing about what is happening to you or around you and how you feel about it. And then you’re off.