Adam’s Peace

Sorry for the delay in posting this. Statistically, most of you should be reading this on Tuesday, even though it was posted on Monday (for me).

We have all been given the advice that we need to write lists down. Some of us have followed the advice, and some of us haven’t. Of those who have, some of us have made it a habit, and some of us haven’t. Well, this post is for those who have made list-writing a habit, or are working on making it a habit. It is also targeted at those who are on the computer for most of the day, such as programmers, pro bloggers, or people with no life, like myself. It especially comes in handy for people who are often at different computers throughout the day.

The tool? To-do lists on Google’s customized home page. They’re quick to implement, and easy to use. They also go with you wherever you can log into Google. Unfortunately, they don’t work offline, but if you have a very fancy phone and a cellular plan that gives you unlimited internet connectivity, then you really could have the list anywhere. (If you have a phone that is that fancy, though, then why bother with the high expenses of the cell plan? Just use the built-in to-do list and task scheduler.)

Now, you may be wondering what is so special about Google’s to-do lists. Really, nothing unusual… They’re just lists of things that you enter, and you can remove any item whenever you want. You can also give them different priorities, with the standard high, medium, and low flags.

The beauty comes in when you want to keep track of different lists. You can have as many different lists as you want, although it takes a little bit of back-tracking to do this. Personally, I have five different lists, keeping track of my long term goals, medium range goals, short term goals, weekly tasks, and a list of daily items. For instance, I have three goals on my long term goals; to make Trina (my wife) wondrously happy, to bring peace to everybody, and to popularize my grandfather’s art. My medium range goals are things that I plan on working on for more than a few months, to graduate college, start a business, and work on different habits that form the core of my character. Short term goals are items that may take a couple of months, such as passing a certain class, or reaching a certain number of readers. Of course, weekly and daily tasks change on the day and week, with items being added nightly and being removed nearly hourly on the daily list, and items being removed daily and being added on the weekend on the weekly list.

To add a task, first you need an account with Google. Fortunately, this is free, and Google doesn’t send spam. Once you have an account, go to google.com, and view your customized home page. Chances are, there will be a few news items, and other sundry oddities… Keep the ones that you want and remove the others. From here, click on the link to “Add Stuff,” and enter “To-do list” into the search bar. When you click on the “Search Homepage Content” button, the to-do list at the top is the one that I personally use (it looks cleaner, and you can change its color scheme). Once you have added it, click the link to go “Back to homepage” and repeat the process for each list that you want to add.

Now comes the fun part… the customization. On each list, click on the down arrow icon, and select “Edit settings.” Give it a different name, depending on what the list is for, and select its color, and you’re done. To add items, simply click in the text box and start typing. When you’re done describing the item, hit enter, and the items appears below. To change its priority, click on the priority flag twice, and select the priority that you want. To remove it, click on the “X” icon… It doesn’t warn you that the item will be removed, so only click that icon if you don’t want to see it any more.

It really is a simple, easy tool that lets you keep multiple lists on the same page. With Google’s mastery of AJAX, the list responds as quickly as if you were running a personal management program on your own computer, but you can access the information no matter where you go. It truly is a great tool, and I recommend it to anyone who spends a lot of their time on many different computers.

There are several different aspects of your life, which we generally group into our home life, our work, our spirituality, and our play time / time to relax. That is a paradigm which has worked very well for most people for a very long time, where we have four basic, distinct ‘lives’ that we work through.

Unfortunately, we really only have one life. Everything that we do when we’re taking on one role also affects our other roles.

For instance, if you get in a fight with your spouse, you work will be affected, and the more severe or uncommon the fight, the more that your work will change. You could suddenly find a burst of motivation from that fight, but more often than not, your work will suffer dramatically. If you injure yourself while playing a sport, it will affect your mobility, and every other aspect of your life. Oddly enough, there are plenty of people who have actually been able to separate their spiritual lives from the rest of their life. Don’t ask me how they did it, though.

The division of our lives into four distinct groups comes from the different schedules that we all keep. Our work life is seemingly the most separate from the other aspects, simply because we usually have a very rigid, predictable schedule for when we work, yet it takes about a third of each weekday, about half of our waking hours, for several years. That certainly is a huge chunk of our lives to completely sever from the rest of our life. Our home life also consists of when we’re asleep, so about eight hours just don’t count. One has to be conscious of experiences to actually be experiencing something. Our play time is usually relegated to a couple of hours every few days, and the more stressed out that we become, the less often we take the time to play. Again, spirituality seems to take a back seat, getting only one day per week, or only fifty-two days out of the year, and even then, our actual observance tends to be restricted to an hour or so during that one day. If you only worked for fifty-two hours each year, how much would you get paid?

So, the challenge that I’m going to work on is to mix my different distinct ‘lives’ together. I’ll be mixing work and play (programming can be fun, if you are creative with your comments… just keep the code legible. ). I’ll be mixing home life and play, as well as throwing in a couple of home responsibilities into the down times at work. All throughout, I’ll also be keeping a spiritual mindset, meditating for half an hour before bed, working on hard questions while exercising, and throwing a bit of my own brand of spirituality into my play time. Also, since I’m a consultant, I am not tied to a clock nearly as rigidly as many of my other peers, which means that I have more time to mix things up.

Since the human mind loves to organize things, though, I’ll still need to keep to some sort of schedule. Rather than an hourly schedule, though, I’ll be working from a daily schedule. I’ll have tasks for each day of the week, and each day will be devoted to certain types of activities, rather than having each hour be different, yet every day remains the same. As far as the blog is concerned, I’ll have Mondays be devoted to personal improvement, where I post articles such as this one. Tuesdays, expect to find me looking elsewhere for information, such as an upcoming article that shows some insight that I have received from reading one of Kara-Leah’s short stories. Wednesdays, I come back to the self to work on inner peace. Thursdays, I’ll be going back out to the world at large, talking about either financial matters or blogging matters. Fridays, I’ll round out the week with a meditation technique, or perhaps a deeply philosophical discussion. Saturdays and Sundays are reserved for the more mundane aspects of blogging, such as code maintenance and adding modules, plugins, and widgets. If I update on the weekend, expect it to be a simple site update, letting you know of a new feature to try out.

I’ll be working on categorizing the days, rather than the hours, for the next four weeks as I test it out. I’ll keep everyone notified of the results as I go along. Until then, I need a catch phrase.