DO-based resolutions: DO more/less, start/stop DOing

Thinking about what I want 2008 to be like, it occurred to me that there’s some real actions I can take, or shouldn’t take, and that would be an easy way to keep it all manageable. The goal is to make the list more task/next-action oriented, and therefore easier to stick with. Here then, are a few things I’ll be doing more or less of, start or stop doing.

START DOING

1. Work out every day — starting small, then building the habit
2. Implement GTD fully — next actions, 2-minute rule, projects lists
3. Implement a 4 Hour Workweek “muse”
4. Blog regularly here

STOP DOING

1. Procrastinating

DO MORE OF

1. Reading business books
2. Eat healthy foods
3. Play with the kids
4. Go on dates with the wife
5. Visit with friends

DO LESS OF

1. Snacking on junk food
2. Surfing the web without a specific purpose
3. Taking on projects with little/no ROI

Have any others I should add, or care to weigh in on what you would DO? Let me know!

I’m a finalist “do it yourself allstar”!

I’m a finalist in the True Value “Do it Yourself Allstar” competition. My wife was nice enough to submit an entry for me. I made it to the top 20, and now it’s up to voters to get me in the top 4, and then I’ll be judged by a panel for the final decision. Winner gets $1,000 to use toward a project (I’ll use it to finish the inside of Max and Sally’s play-house), and gets a 2-hour consultation with Steve Watson, the guy from “Monster House” and who has a new show on HGTV called “Don’t Sweat It.”

Here’s the entry Jen sent in (click the link to vote!):

My husband took a couple months last summer and built the ultimate backyard playground and park for our kids! He had a treehouse as a child, and wanted to recapture the magic for our then-three year old son and newborn daughter. After collecting ideas and remembering his childhood club-house, he sat down in front of the computer with a mini CAD program, and laid out the components. The “house” sits 5 feet off the ground, and is designed with the same materials as our real house. It features a 7’ x 7’ play area with a sleeping nook above the porch. There is a 7’ tall deck (with a tube slide for getting down quickly) off the back of the house overlooking the pond in our backyard, and other “amenities” include another slide over a clatter-bridge, two swings, a tire swing, and a rock-climbing wall. Though the project took a full two months, our son helped swing the hammer a bit, and they both had a grand time building a place for the kids to retreat. His next project is to finish the inside of the house and build an “interctive” sandbox underneath so the kids can flex their imaginations in the shade. The pictures speak for themselves – and the kids love it! We now have the “neighborhood park” right in our back yard.

http://www.startrightstarthere.com/displayEntry.aspx?entrantId=82

Check it out and vote if you want!

In praise of Craigslist

Part of keeping my home office in working order has centered around trying to keep the surrounding area, you know, the house, in order. Like a lot of folks, we’ve accumulated a lot of stuff, and I challenged myself to do something about it.

So, I put up the biggest things in our basement for sale: The exercise equipment I never use, an electric piano I’ve never used, an exercise bike we just upgraded, the SIX DVD PLAYERS we have sitting around, unused (we went through a spell where we won a DVD player at every function we attended — weird), etc. I even sold the toddler bed that our son used until a year ago, and had become bedrock for toy-stack in the basement.

One of the keys to motivating myself to do all the posting, photo-taking, etc. involved in CL-ing properly was that I planned to buy a toy for myself (of course via CL) once I had enough money. And now that most of the above has sold, I just picked it up (at right): A Burley Canto recumbent bike!
Now I get to exercise on the bike trails around here and take the kids for some rides, all while looking like a complete goof (albeit a comfortable one).

Some links:

• Help-Key: How to Buy and Sell on Craigslist without being an idiot – No-nonsense tips, including “use common sense” and how to spot scams easily.
• Xinsight: Painless Selling on Craigslist – Great tips on setting up an account, taking photos, controlling your contact info, and helping folks find you easily. Great advice on terms: “All sales final. Cash and carry. First come first serve.”
  
• eHow: How to sell on Craigslist – Great how-to, focusing on common sense, neutral thinking and street smarts.
  
• Unclutterer: Lots of ideas to unclutter your life
• Get Rid Of Things: Clutter post – Great ideas for getting rid of the junk in your life

In praise of less praise

Laid-Off Dad refers to this interesting New York Magazine article on How Not to Talk to Your Kids, and sums it up nicely:

If you praise a kid’s intelligence, the article says, he’s likely to think you’re condescending to someone who you think has reached his peak. Whereas if you hold off on the flattery and instead urge him to keep trying, he’ll assume you respect his abilities and will stay motivated.

The article itself goes into more depth (five pages!), and sums it up in the middle:

“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

I was talking with my wife about this subject last night about our son — sometimes it seems that he just throws in the towel on things or has trouble going to the next activity. We usually just tell him “you’re smart, you can handle this” — and I’m going to try to break the old habit of just going for the “easy praise” and moving to encouraging the effort vs. the talent in his successes.

I mainly want my son to know that it’s okay — or even expected — that he work hard, and as the article’s author says, “the brain is a muscle that gets bigger when it has to think about something hard.” Work can be its own reward — I’d like to make sure he has fun trying instead of thinking he’s too smart to try (or worse, afraid to try lest he actually fail at something he’s not good at right away.