Today my new Samsung 226BW arrived, which pretty much ends my spending on gadgets for the foreseeable future. Setting it up wasn’t quite as easy as I’d hoped since my video card (an ATI Mobility Radeon X1400) refused to provide it’s native resolution of 1680 x 1050 using an analog connection. After three hours I resorted to the digital connection and it worked first time.
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This is something I’m having a real problem with right now. For a while I go without television, or at least I think I do, and feel quite good about myself. Then I suddenly find myself sitting in-front of the tv one evening whilst trying to do some work on one of my projects. Inevitably I get next to nothing done and end up feeling more than a little frustrated with myself.
It’s not like I don’t have a lot of things to do. Since starting down the road towards Getting Things Done I have realised just how many things are on my list. That doesn’t worry me, which is how it should be, but when I waste an evening without even realising it I end up frustrated and annoyed with myself. Both of these feelings are counter-productive.
So what should I do? Here are a couple of ideas I’ve had:
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I recently read a book entitled ‘Coach Yourself: It’s Your Life, What Are You Going to Do with It?‘ by Anthony Grant. It’s an interesting read, especially if you’re one of those people who, like me, always talks about making big changes in your life and never really gets around to it.
There’s a reason I never got around to it, I know that now. If you’d asked me then I would have talked about it not being the right time, it needed more thought or other complications in my life meant it was difficult for me to do something like that right now. The classic excuse was that I was just too busy. It’s not just me, I have heard this sort of excuse from colleagues time and time again. I think we all know it’s an excuse but we’re all playing the game to make ourselves feel better.
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Being self-employed, and in the fortunate position of being able to work from home quite a lot, I have often considered what other opportunities there are for working outside of the office. Working from home is fine especially if you have a dedicated office space (which for me is the loft). But what if you don’t have somewhere away from the other tenants of the house, or there are times when you just need to get out? Getting out can be important for home workers that don’t want to go out of their minds.
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Another major update to the site, this time involving the move across to using WordPress. When I first created the site (properly) I used it as a project for learning PHP as well as a few dynamic html techniques. The blog-type format was fun to write and taught me a lot of things that I now use in my day-to-day work on other projects.
But, in terms of a fully functional blog site I was never going to be able to reproduce something with this level of technical ability without some serious time commitments. And it’s not like anyone was going to pay me to do it either!
So far I’m very impressed with WordPress, and its plug-in framework means it can easily be expanded to suit other needs. I think that when I come across a client who wants a blog-style site then this is where I’ll be starting in future. It’s easy to set up, well supported and I can save the innovation for the unique features they require!
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