I Get It

Malcolm Gladwell wrote in Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours or approximately 10 years to get really good at something. I'm pretty hard headed, so it might take me an extra 5,000 hours. But I think I'm starting to get it now.

You have to understand first of all that sometimes my brain amazes me. The other day I punched in the number of an old high school friend...even though I'd last dialed that number in 1992. And sometimes my brain disappoints me, like when I forget what I came into the kitchen to get even though it's just a few steps away from the living room.

Finally "getting it" also means that I'm not arguing with myself that I oughta know this already. It means accepting that for me it sometimes takes a little bit more effort. Or a lot.

I get that I have to write everything down or it may not stick in my brain.

I get that I need to have a combination of a distraction and a focal point to get repetitive tasks done. Hello Podcast!

I get that I miss interpersonal cues. For me to get a message I either have to have all my active listening skills set to "ON" or have someone hit me over the head with a 2x4. The good news is that after 15000 hours of practice I'm getting better at this. The bad news is that it's still work, and it probably always will be.

I get that sometimes I have trouble stopping myself. Those are the days when it's better to go shopping at the flea market than at the mall.

I get that adding people to my mix increases my stamina and enthusiasm. If Aunt Polly asked me to whitewash the fence by myself I'd totally pull a Tom Sawyer and try to get out of it. Well, sorta.* But if I'm working with someone else I'm like the energizer bunny and just keep going and going.

I get that I have no concept of time. Not only does everything have to go on my calendar, I have to set every single reminder option so that time doesn't get away from me.

Most of all, after 15,000 hours of turning on my ears and using my calendar and grocery shopping list and doing a load of laundry a day and checking for my keys every time I walk through a door ... I get that this is who I am and that I'm really good at being me. You see, along with the distraction comes some really cool creativity and amazing energy. Since everything new draws my attention I've had the chance to meet all kinds of really cool people and do some really neat things. I am so thankful that I've been able to remain positive through everything. Even though I haven't always been thrilled with every thing that has come my way, things really work out once you rub a little persistence, creativity, and positive energy on it.

And I finally get it.

*I couldn't exactly do like Tom and collect marbles and a dead cat while my friends whitewashed the fence. But I might tweet about it

Where am I?

Have you ever been completely mentally “away?” Not just daydreaming, but mentally fully immersed in a completely different situation? This happens to me a lot. My understanding is that this is why what my brain does is called Attention Deficit Disorder . It’s not that I can’t maintain focus, it’s that I have a disorder that makes it difficult for me to switch between a deep focus when intermittent focus is needed or switch out of intermittent mode when I need to be focusing deeply on something, like you know, my next blog post.
Something that has helped me understand this brain mechanism better is meditation. Apparently there are two basic kinds of meditation – I’m going to call them the orange and nitrogen because I have no idea what they’re really called.

The Orange:

In this form of meditation you take a single item, like an orange or a raisin or an action (your breath) and you focus everything on that. You consider the folds and the valleys and the color and the stem and every single thing related to that orange. You train your mind to exclude all other stimuli so that you can deeply concentrate on the scent and the weight and the texture of that orange. Just like a muddy stream settling after a storm, gradually all the sediment in your mind settles and you’re completely clear. It’s amazingly powerful and I’ve finished this kind of a meditation feeling as though I’ve awaken from the deepest most refreshing sleep.

Nitrogen:

In this form of meditation you focus on everything in and around you. It helps me to think of nitrogen – it’s everywhere in our environment, and as a gas it gets into our bloodstream and our lungs and fills every space that we move in. When meditating like this you keep yourself grounded in the here and now, becoming deeply aware of all of your thoughts and your feelings and all the sights and sounds around you. I have deep trouble doing this. For whatever reason I start out focusing on the mundane activities of life around me and the next thing I know my mind is a million miles away. I pull it back and bring my focus back to the spaces that nitrogen has crept into and I’m gone again, thinking about how I need to add fertilizer to my plants. My personal theory is that I’m already uncommonly aware of the things around me, and as such this kind of meditation doesn’t help my brain settle.

So what’s my point?

Anchors help me. As I write this I have a printed sheet of paper across the room with my top three priorities on it. As my mind wanders off my gaze lights on my priority list and it narrows my focus back onto my priorities. At home I’ve taken a slightly different tack: rather than have a priority list tacked to the wall, I remove the distractions. The TV set is tucked into a back room and I keep the computers closed up unless I specifically need them for a task. My phone ringer and calendar reminders are on, but text message notifications are off. I know where my mind goes, and I’m learning how to direct it where I want it to go.

All the ways to reach me

I figured I should write a quick post with a list of all the ways and places to find me.

This blog:  Phera's Focus http://pherafocus.blogspot.com

Podcasting at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/phera

My Facebook Fan Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Phera/140641690464

Twitter:  http://twitter.com/phera

Call/text me at (909) 90-PHERA

And last but not least, Email phera at ymail dot com (Replace the "at" with "@" and the "dot" with "." I'm just trying to keep a little of the spam out of my mail box!)

Laundry Warning Light

A lot of things have indicators to let you know that you're almost out.  For example, the receipt roll at stores generally has a pink bar pattern as you get to the end of the roll.  Your smoke detector is really good about letting you know when batteries run low.  Our cars even have a light that comes on when we start running low on gas.  Wouldn't it be cool if we had something like that at our houses to let us know we were low on certain supplies?  

Here are a couple of ways to build in your own "low supply indicators"

• Laundry:  Check each family member's sock and underwear drawer to see what their supply looks like.  Make sure that you have fewer pairs of underwear and/or socks than anyone else.  Designate (or buy) a particular pair of underwear as your "laundry light" pair and make sure to always put it on the bottom of the underwear stack.  When you pull that one out of the drawer, you know you need to do laundry!  If you've got fewer pairs than anyone else in the family, they'll never run short on shorts again because you were able to step in and take action before they ran out.  
• Toilet Paper/Paper Towels: Put a square of red masking tape or write "BUY MORE" on a roll almost at the end of the stack. When that roll comes out of the pantry add toilet paper or paper towels to the shopping list.  

I'm going to check around the house this week to see what other items lend themselves to "Low Supply" warnings.  Any ideas?

The Power of Autopilot

When our son was three he used to go to a daycare that was on my way to work.  One Saturday morning as I was on that road headed to the grocery store I found myself pulling into the daycare parking lot.  It took me a minute to realize that a) I didn't have my child with me. b) It wasn't even a weekday.  When we do things on a daily basis, we learn how to do it so well we eventually start doing it on autopilot.  In my case, I seem to turn the autopilot on and zone out so fast it isn't even funny.  This can be hard to deal with when the autopilot decides that we should log on, cycle through facebook, IM's, email, and youtube instead of paying a bill.  Whoosh!  There went an hour.  

The good news is that we can make out ADD brains tendency to cruise on autopilot work for us.  There's a couple of ways that you can do this:  

1. Work with a focused friend.  This is by far my favorite way to get things done.  When I'm talking to a friend it's easy to clean up the muckiest messes and come up with the greatest ideas.  This seems to work best for me in person and over the phone - I haven't yet been motivated by text messages, IM, or twitter.  I'm hoping to try Skype cleaning to see if that works as well as an in person visit.  I'll keep you posted on that. 
2. Distraction.  I know you're probably going "Wait a second! Stop!  I read this because I'm trying to figure out *not* to be distracted, and here you are telling me to distract myself to get things done?  Explain yourself, Phera!"  Here's what happens to me:  My mind wanders when I'm sorting socks, doing dishes, sweeping up, or any of the zillion mindless things that have to be done around the house.  I find it really helpful to have some sort of an anchor to keep my mind from wandering.  This can be a cleaning podcast or watching a movie while I do laundry, even a really good radio station.  I think of this directed distraction as as kind of trellis - I can do anything around the trellis that I want to, but in the end I'm growing up towards the sun. 
3. Repetition.  By far my least favorite method, I'm including this because it works.  Yes.  If you do something enough times, it becomes a habit and you'll do it without even thinking about it.  Why isn't this my favorite? Well, it's really really really hard to do a routine enough times to make it a habit.  Once again, this is where the cleaning podcasts come in really handy.  It's easier to start small, so I'd recommend a short 15 minute routine to begin:  AM Basics or PM Perkup are good 15 minute routines to start off with.

My advice for the day?  Accept that your brain will sometimes want to do things that drive you nuts, and work with your strengths, not against them. 

Monkey Mind

I heard this term for the first time today and I'm wondering where it has been all my life. Mind monkey or Monkey mind is a Buddhist term meaning "unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable".  Yup, that's my mind.

The article I read went on to talk about ways to meditate and still the mind, but as my mind wandered (yes, it does that frequently) I realized that I had accidentally found one of the most powerful ways to calm my mind:  my podcasts.  Simply put, from the minute I decide to record a new podcast, my mind settles down.  I start to figure out the best way to get the job done and how long each sub task will take.  While I'm recording I'm totally focused on what I'm doing, and I'm narrating the task to you, my listeners, so much so that occasionally I lose track of what I'm saying as I focus on what I'm doing.  Thank you so much for helping me conquer monkey mind.  If it weren't for the encouragement of my listeners I don't think that I would have recorded past that first year.

Thankful 2010

A good friend of ours sent my husband the perfect sweater for Christmas.  You know, the one that is dressy enough to wear to church, casual enough to pair with jeans, not too loud, but not too boring.  He's worn it twice since Christmas.  Yesterday I realized I still hadn't sent her a thank you card.

Today I sat down with my card box and pen and started to write my thank you notes.  An hour later I realized that I was still going strong. It was humbling to realize how much had happened in the last month that we were grateful for.

Let me back up just a tad.  My husband lost his job in November 2009.  Even though there are some positive effects of the job loss (I get to see him now!), for the most part this has resulted in a major rise in our stress levels and a change in our financial situation.  No more eating out, a serious crimp on gift giving, deep discussions over every financial outlay.  We've tried not to focus on the negative, but it was a very different holiday season for us. 

The interesting thing has been that instead of spending our holiday season shopping, we spent it with friends and family.  Instead of going out to the cineplex or renting movies, we broke out the board games. In fact, except for the minor discomfort of not having gifts to give our extended group of friends and family, this was one of the best holidays we've had.  It sort of snuck up on us, too.  It wasn't until this week when I was writing thank you cards that I fully appreciated the value of the people in my holiday.  I'm going to rectify this oversight by making a conscious effort to be more grateful on a daily basis in 2010.  

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some more thank you cards to write.  

Four Inches of Ice

Four Inches of Ice or Do It Now

A friend got stuck pulling out of her driveway so this afternoon my husband and I went over there to clean up the drive.  The driveway hadn't been cleared when the snow was light and fluffy, so instead of a quick 1/2 hour job he was out there for about four hours.  In addition to the snow that was packed down near the garage, the accumulation from the plows had built up at the foot of the drive.  He ended up having to take a mattock to break up the four inch deep ice that stretched across the base of the drive.  I was really amazed to see how something that started out so light and beautiful and airy became so dark and dense when we let it lie.

Moral of the story?  Don't wait for the sun to come out and melt away your troubles - start working on them now before they get worse.

Step Away From the Computer

They say that writing it down makes it easier to do, so here goes nothing:

Step Away From the Computer

I have stuff to get done today.  It's the first Monday of 2010 and it's a paperwork week.

• I generally use this week to get the old files boxed up and out of the way and put the new files in.  
• Medical reimbursements have to get sent in
• It's usually easiest to get the tax paperwork receipts set aside while I'm doing paperwork
• Property taxes are due soon, now is a good time to get those notices in order

That's it for me.  Really.  Step away from your computer now and tell me what you got done today.  

Bouncing

I feel like I'm bouncing all over the place, which is fun, but not very good when it comes to getting things done.  It's 2010, it's time to focus.  I need to get back to blogging and podcasting on a regular basis.

It's too easy to get caught in analysis paralysis, so I'm skipping that step.  This blog may not be as focused as I'd like, but if it helps me to focus in real life, it has served its purpose.