Random Thoughts

Today I'm starting something a little different, I'm keeping track of my excuses. There are so many times that I've tried to create new habits or start new things and fail for one reason or another. I almost always start this process by looking at my available free time, trying to optimize my schedule where I can, and then putting that schedule into a calendar with notifications. All this effort put forth and then when the rubber hits the road I just ignore the calendar and swipe away its notifications. I'm starting the same way I always do but I'm adding one more thing to it. I want to make myself write down why I didn't do a thing that I've scheduled for myself; I'm trying to outsmart my future self. I'm adding to this a list of things that I want to make sure I do like running a few times a week, writing (like this blog), connecting with friends, and yoga almost every day. To help me keep track of these excuse, I've set up a Google form that a...

I've been working on building a free site where anyone can register to be a mentor in specific topics and also find mentors in topics that interest them. I don't have a lot of free time to work on it but I've been slowly plugging away at it for a few months and hope to be able to launch it in the fall. If this sounds like something you'd be interested in being a part of let me know. I put up a small page a while ago at http://tetelearning.com .

I've been thinking about the way that I frame almost everything that I do. I use this everyday for things like prioritization, self-improvement, and motivation. I wanted to share this not because I think it is revolutionary in any way but because it helps me and I thought it might be helpful for others. I call this way of thinking "mind, body, and social" or MBS for short. Another note, I apologize if this is rather dry to read, I basically just wanted to get these thoughts written out and published so that other people could start using and criticizing it. What is mind, body, and social? The very basics of this is that I believe there are three aspects of every person. There is the mind which is most easily defined as the inner self, the body is the physical self, and the social which is the version of you that exists within the minds of other people. Each of these plays a role in how we interact with other people and how effective we are at improving the world aro...

Have you heard of IndieWebCamp.com yet? I hadn't heard about it until a couple weeks ago, but as soon as I started digging into what it is I really liked what is going on there. Basically, what you're looking at is the beginnings of a federated social web. It's the idea that blog posts and comments shouldn't belong to a single central company but that they should be built into the web's infrastructure. The best part is that it's already working. Let me take a moment to slow things down a bit and explain it as I understand it from the ground up. Facebook owns your account; I mean, it's your account but it belongs to them. If one day Facebook decided that they wanted to pack up their website and make a restaurant chain that serves cheeseburgers instead of crappy BuzzFeed listicles they could do that and you wouldn't have a Facebook anymore or a way to send messages to your friends. You might say, "So what? I'll start using Twitter, Google+, or ...

I wrote The Push-up Experiment  earlier and got enough responses asking about the nerdy parts that I'm now writing this one. So, buckle-up and hold on, this could be a long nerdy ride. Tools Here are the tools that I used with links: Google Drive Forms Sheets IFTTT Date & Time Channel Pushover Channel Daily Push-up Notification Pushover Collecting the Data Google Drive allows you to build surveys and send them out; it's called "Google Forms". Your drive options might look a little different than mine but here's the gist of it. Create a new form and make a question for it. For the push-up survey I simply asked "How many push-ups did you do?" and left it as a "Text" type question. When you do this it shows up as a simple text box on the survey and when opened on the phone brings up the keyboard. One other thing I did was only allow for numbers to be entered into the text box because obviously I can't do "abcxyz...

I've found that when I'm able to visualize progress it motivates me. I'm not a productivity expert or a psychologist but this makes a lot of sense and I figured I'd share it even if you've heard it before. Since March 28th, I've been doing push-ups and tracking the number of push-ups I achieve in a spreadsheet. Yes, I know this completely classifies me as a total nerd, but I'm OK with that; I'm writing a blog post about my push-up spreadsheet, I'm well aware of the overall nerdiness going on here. I won't get into the nirty-gritty about how I used IFTTT  to send me a Google Drive survey every morning on my phone reminding me to do push-ups as well as providing a convenient place to simply enter the numbers. I won't go into the details about how that survey automatically goes into a Drive sheet and the graph (pictured below) automatically updates with each response. No, I won't go into that because I'm afraid that you will think ...