Daily Journal - April 13, 2017

I keep seeing headlines that "Military Strike on North Korea is Imminent." This is pretty f'n scary.


Reading Derren Brown's book ...  He is a magician/illusionist from the UK. I'm in the middle of a chapter on hypnosis. It's very interesting. He put forward the hypnotic suggestion structure:

"As you X, so you Y"

Busy, stressed at work.

Up today at 5 am.

Thought about Goals/Habits -

Hip pain

For men only why you should always leave the toilet set up

Persuasion

Getting Doctor to give me a note

Today I needed to get a note from my doctor to get a stand-up desk at work. So instead of just asking him I engage him in conversation about what he thinks of standing vs. sitting. After this discussion I ask if I could get a note for a stand-up desk and he says "yes."

Woman on the escalator

A woman was standing on the left side of the escalator as I was running to make a train at Penn station. As I passed I said "It's less rude to stand to the left

10 lbs in 10 weeks.

I've decided that I want to lose some weight. 10 lbs sounds good. I've been having trouble losing weight.  So I've gone public on twitter.

How to Prioritize When You Have Too Much To Do?

Prioritizing is sorting.

If you know how to sort a list in alphabetical order you know how to prioritize.

Except you're not ordering by something that exists.

So the real question is "What's my MIT (Most Important Task)?" and then do it.

If you could assign a value to each task then all you'd have to do is sort by that value. If there was a tie then you could flip a coin to choose.

Another question could be if you were a robot what would be the program or steps to determine your MIT.

Another issue might be even if you knew your MIT, would you do it or would you have "demand resistance" against it.

According to Google "Demand resistance can be defined as an unconscious chronic negative response to demands, real or perceived, internal or external. It means that the individual does not react well to any demands or expectations for how they should behave."

So I have a new task "Research Demand Resistance."  I found the term Demand Resistance from the review of the book The Procrastination Formula.

So the goal is to have a number of variables associated with a task. The apply some math to the variables and sort it by the result.

Simple methods

• Do small tasks before large tasks

Daily Journal - April 23, 2017

Up at 11 am today, but had 6ww earlier and fell back asleep. She took the dog for a walk.

Blood Sugar was 102 which is good for me but I want it to be lower.

Blood pressure 132/84 after a full cup of Bulletproof Coffee and heart rate at 68.

Sitting on an exercise ball and trying to stand 10 minutes of every hour.

Excel Diet

Yesterday we had 5 people over for pizza and to watch the NY Rangers vs. Montreal Canadien hockey playoff game. Rangers won and move on to second round of the playoffs.

Weight this morning was 170.6. I had vodka, pizza, 3 - 4 small slices, fruit salad, ice cream, brownies.

Today is second time I'm behind my 1 pound a week goal so I have to tighten up what I'm eating today. The key to the diet is the "A" from "MEAT" acronym which I wrote about in this Excel Diet Infographic. And how to create in infographic if you're interested.

Library books

I've had these books out for awhile and haven't been able to get to them.

Media

I watched the following videos.

Daily 5 Minute Journal July 16 2017

My last post was on April 30th, 2017 almost 2 1/2 months ago. I'm not sure why I haven't posted recently.

Some things to cover in this post:

• Book Creator
• Books I'm working on
• Weight Loss
• Kindle book
• Work
• Bulletproof Coffee
• Twitter List
• Lab visit with my son

Book Creator

I've been working on a tool I currently call Book Creator. I didn't specifically go to create it. It sort of happened in a bottoms up fashion like most of the things I do. 

Bottom's up vs. Top Down

I'm a bottoms-up type of person. I'm good at starting small and then improving something instead of planning out what I want and then fill in the details.

Book Creator is a tool that assists with creating a book using an FTAD (Finish Then Add Details) method. It is also embedded in the Listi.net list creation tool.

The tool allows me to easily write multiple non-fiction books that in theory are always ready for consumption. The book must be in the format of :

101 Ways to Get a Job.

Now, say if I only have 3 ways then the book title and content automatically adjusts. All ideas I have goes into a backlog and from there I can easily order or pick the idea to write on. Once I've finished the article or blog post I can add it to one or more of the books I'm working on. The book automatically adjusts:

• The Cover Page increases to 102 Ways to Get a Job
• The title on each page changes
• The Table of contents is automatically updated
• The footer on each page is automatically updated
• The book can be easily converted to Microsoft Word format (this still needs some work)

This probably wasn't clear due to the Curse of Knowledge, so I'll  make a video to better explain this concept.

Below is an example page from the book.

Books I'm working on

Persuasion

Weight Loss
Kindle book
Work
Bulletproof Coffee
Twitter List
Lab visit with my son

Street art

Street art

Daily 5 Minute Journal August 5, 2017

Juggling

I juggled last night at Bryant Park. Did some club passing with Joe and we did pretty well, a woman who is 49.  Talked with Alice, Iggy.  Asked Jeff if he wanted to pass but he said "no."  Worked on 5 balls, 4 balls, clubs. I juggled clubs around 180 tosses. Taught 2 kids but they were impatient and couldn't do it.   There was another guy who was learning that I tried to help and some uncoordinated guy who needs to practice.

Weight

Still struggling to get below 160. I did it once but I'm wondering if it was a scale issue. Weighed myself a number of times yesterday and got many different numbers, but I'll use 161.4 here is my latest chart. 

Goals

My goals continue to elude me. I'm trying to come up with goals for August 2017 and for the year 2017.  I do have a book http://MyGoals.87sc.com.

I was shocked at the number of sheets I had on goals in time-monitor.

1. Goals at work
2. Actions to goals
3. Three Goals Three Tasks
4. Action to goal
5. Year by Year Goals
6. Daily Goals
7. Goal Analysis
8. Monthly Goals2
9. Commitment not Goal
10. Goal Sheet - Zig Ziglar
11. Health goal of the month
12. Goal Qs
13. 10 Life Goals
14. Goal Analysis2
15. Goals at home and work
16. Monthly Goals
17. Goals
18. Goal Questions
19. Book to Goal
20. PURGE of Goals

This needs to be organized better.

It might be time to really work on STS (Smart Task Selection). I found a way to track my location via an IP address at http://ipinfo.io.

Twitter

I'm getting more people liking my stuff on twitter. I've changed my name on twitter to Al Berg from Alec Berg. as to not be mistaken for the writer by the same name from Seinfeld.

I've created a list of my tweets on twitter organized which is called 69 Pieces of My Twitter Wisdom.

I've had a couple of tweets that got more followers and I'm up to 72,783.



Popular Tweet Stats

Here is link https://t.co/XycAsM8zfC

— Al Berg 🇺🇸 (@alecberg) August 2, 2017

On average, Black women in this country make only 63 cents relative to every dollar white men are paid. #BlackWomensEqualPay

— Kamala Harris (@SenKamalaHarris) July 31, 2017

@ScottAdamsSays head buried in newspaper pretending like he doesn't know this crazy chick (me) pic.twitter.com/MT5JYOlzbD

— Kristina Basham (@kristina_basham) July 29, 2017

I'm working on getting my first book published on Kindle.

You can view it at https://t.co/pOrkwtxJJi#Diet #WeightLoss #Health #Excel pic.twitter.com/3JKobwMYX7

— Al Berg 🇺🇸 (@alecberg) July 12, 2017

Work

This week at work I've started completing the automation of my software to create PowerPoint slides. This is pretty cool, that I can set a command and have it run on a server in Excel. Though some work is still needed as it's not good at say asking "Are you alive?" and getting back a response, yet. Also, the process can get busy running something. Also, I have to deal with msgbox's and how to handle errors that occur.

I didn't get it to run my data verification process. Have also started on the idea of having a process that help do manual and automated tasks.

Most tasks have components of both automation and manual steps. I'm trying to find a way to better manage this process. For example, the data verification will run on two files looking for issues with the data. If it finds them a person must look at the data and create an event that will allow the automated process to continue.

I recently finished my mid-year review and I don't think I'm doing as well as I'd like. My new boss has pointed out that I'm the only one that knows VBA more than once. This is definately a risk I need to mitigate.

One way to mitigate this is to make the process so easy and useful that the value of VBA skills is seen as useful.

Books/Writing

I continue to work on books but this has stagnated a little bit. I need to do some more proof reading and then getting the book to Kindle. I'm not sure I like the way I write as it's missing something. The books are all available for free on-line write now. If you go to http://w2fo.com/showlist2.asp?parent=49304.

I also need to work on my book covers.

Books I'm Reading

I'm reading a book called The Like Switch  that well I like.  I've also downloaded too many free books from Kindle.

Time Tracking

This once and always is a problem I'd like to solve as I have to track and enter my time at work. I'd like to be able to answer some very basic question on how I spent my time and analyze if it was spent wisely.

• What did I work on?
• How much time?
• What problems did I have?
• What is wasting my time (meetings)?
• Where could I be more productive
• How is time broken down by report?
• How is time broken down by part of process
• Automating
• Research
• Testing
• Documenting
• Following procedures
• Support