Mind Pilot – Take Self Control

I said in my last block of posts that I thought I would go on for a while yet, as I wasn’t feeling tired, but I am now really starting to sag. As far as daily targets go, I’ve done more than enough, and I’m pretty sure that the amount of content I have produced today is a personal best. I’m just going to see if I have enough energy to complete any of the possible posts I listed above, or whether it is time to pack it in for the night. I don’t want to produce that much more, as I want to record that I can easily beat one day next week! The next time I have a go, I want to be writing stuff for my main website, not this blog, but who knows, maybe there’s enough stuff I could cover here to make a Mind Pilot a viable website in its own right. That’s not really the intention for now, the key aim is that by publishing a blog about my thoughts, I am able to keep on a more even keel and ultimately get more done.

If this website is going to pay for itself, then I need to look at how that might work, as it would inevitably mean taking some form of advertising. The easiest way to do this would be just to run adverts from Google, as these are selected automatically according to the content of the page. There are various other self-improvement programmes out there which might offer a commission for referrals, in much the same way that my main website effectively acts as a travel agent. However, some of these programmes are less reputable than others. This leads me on to one of the posts on the above list, which relates to blogs and other websites which promise to tell you how to make a fortune on the Internet. Do they really offer useful information, or are they just trying to get you to sign up to an expensive e-book or newsletter subscription?

22:45

• Check-in — I can’t really give myself a tick for this, as I really haven’t had a proper focus for each day yet this year. I have just got up and got on with whatever I felt like doing. Clearly, there is plenty of room for improvement here — no tick.
• Fuel — I’m not sure how healthy Weetabix are — they are at least whole-grain, but there was no fruit, and what kind of breakfast starts at 2 p.m? Having said that, now that I’m putting up all these posts on this blog, I really don’t think I can let myself get up so late in the future, not if people I know are reading this! With such a late breakfast, I never had lunch, and as I’ve said above, dinner was pizza and chips, but I did at least wash it down with a Diet Coke and have some peas and sweetcorn with it. I took my medication at 10, but one of the side-effects is that this makes me hungry, so I have been having a bit of chocolate on the side, but this is at least the 86% Cocoa stuff, which is supposed to be a lot more healthy than milk chocolate. On balance, I think I’ll give myself the tick here, but I should really be having the five portions of fruit and veg.
• Maintenance — considering that I didn’t sit down at the computer until 2:45, to leave for a jog at four was pretty good going — tick.
• Takeoff — clearly, no tick.
• Cruise — concentration has been excellent, tick.
• In-flight entertainment — it is now 11 p.m., and I have just about been at my desk for the same length of time that might be expected of a typical office worker. As I said above, I should unwind with a bit of TV before going to sleep, but I had a massive TV session yesterday, so that wouldn’t count as a tick. Sod the routine, I might well just watch a bit of Family Guy anyway! Although I have kept myself to myself most of the day, the time I did spend online was dedicated towards actually meeting people, and I made some good plans for next week and the one after, so that would qualify for the tick.
• Land — When I have got back into a decent routine, then I’d really want to be heading to bed at 10 during the week, but I’d be a bit more flexible on a weekend. But right now, the routine has gone out of the window, and there’s no point in going to bed when I’m not tired. So for now, the jury is out on this one, but I am going to keep on blogging for a while yet.

As far as the weekly activities go, the only one I could take so far is tidying the kitchen, and I did also take the rubbish out on Wednesday. This is the first time I’ve attempted to do an update on the Mind Pilot routine since October last year, so I haven’t set the other seven tasks for the week. It would be a bit hard on myself to just give myself a fresh seven, I think there are a number of things I’ve done this week which were quite important, but I don’t need to list those here. Why I do need to make sure of is that now I have put the Mind Pilot routine up online, I get back into the driving seat as such I make sure I follow it. I’m not going to promise I get all 100 points right for next week, but I should at least be ready to have a go. You might be wondering why I would want to bother going to what seems like such an extremely detailed routine, but why I have been so lousy at following it. All I can say is that this is something that has worked for me in the past, but which is very easy to allow to lapse. By devoting all of my time today on updating this blog, I have been able to remind myself of how many different strategies I have for managing my chaotic brain, and I’m sure that things will go a lot better next week when I start putting more of these strategies into action.

(23:16 – a straight hour)

I can’t remember exactly when I first came up with the Mind Pilot concept, but I think it was some time in 2006. The exact routine has changed slightly since then, but the basic principle stays the same, namely to run each day as if it were a flight. I’m still a long way from getting this perfect — in fact since I started, I don’t think I’ve ever given myself a tick for every single box, but here’s to trying:

The main grid has seven focus points for each of the seven days a week, giving a potential score of 49. A bonus of two is then added for having a complete score either vertically (for the day) or horizontally (for the activity), potentially giving another 28 points, and two more are added for getting the ‘full house’ of 49. Added to this are seven weekly tasks which do not change (one point each), and seven variable tasks, which must be set before the start of each week (two points each). This gives a potential total of 100 points:

Daily Mind Pilot routine:

• Check-in — where are we going? Decide what the priorities are for the day (should really be done the night before).
• Fuel — eat a healthy breakfast (plenty of fruit), lunch and early evening meal. Drink no more than four units of alcohol.
• Maintenance — keep body and mind in good shape by engaging in vigourous exercise (at least 20 minutes running, 45 minutes cycling, 30 lengths swimming etc) at least five times each week. It makes sense to do this every day during the working week, and make it part of the daily routine. Mornings are better, as the positive effects can then be felt throughout the day, and exercising later on is not supposed to be so good for inducing sleep.
• Take off — get up at a sensible time (this sounds easy if you have an office to go to, it is much harder when self-employed and subject to low energy and mood swings) — current aim is to at least be out of bed at nine. Switch on computer and clear first 1000 words of good quality web content.
• Cruise — concentrate through the workday, staying off-line where necessary, respond to issues as they arise and continue with content, site updates etc.
• In-flight entertainment — even if the day starts late, or the workload seems massive, always find time for something enjoyable each day. This should change for one day to the next — watching TV or DVD might be fine for one-day, but it isn’t acceptable on two consecutive days. Solitary exercise doesn’t count either, but the game a five aside football would fulfil the criteria for this and for ‘maintenance’.
• Land — wind down at the end of each day. Anyone running a home based business knows how easy it is to work late in the evening, especially when everybody else has gone to bed, but it is still essential to allow a gap between finishing work and going to bed, otherwise your head will just be full of work-related thoughts. Ideally, I think this gap should be at least an hour, but I am a frequent offender here. For people to take medication which affects their sleeping patterns, then it is best to take this at the same time each day, and perhaps to start winding down from this time.

Weekly activities:

• Task list update — doublecheck that the most urgent and important tasks have been completed properly.
• Clear out e-mail.
• Financial update — file receipts, etc.
• Wash clothes and make sure they are dried properly, ironed if necessary and put away.
• Tidy bedroom.
• Tidy office.
• Tidy kitchen and take out rubbish on Wednesday morning.

Well, for a day with such a late start, I’ve really made extremely good progress. I’m starting to see that my specialist was right when he said that I would be to cope without medication for ADHD if I put my mind to it. I need to do something about all these late starts, but I think it is fair to say that my concentration today has been second to none. In fact, my concentration has been far better than you might expect out of a typical office worker — I have kept my online sessions brief, and when done, I have unplugged the modem each time. Most importantly, when I have got up and gone away from my desk, I’ve also made sure that my modem has stayed unplugged, as this ensures that when I return, I just get on with the work that needs doing, and avoid needless messing around.

This doesn’t mean that I have completely blocked off all contact with the outside world — quite the opposite. Instead of just flitting around from one website to the next (how much time can that waste?), or reading people’s Facebook updates, I’ve actually decided to try and physically get in touch with people I haven’t seen for ages, and I think I’ve made about 10 such requests. That’s what all the social networking site should really be for — actually seen people in the flesh, not just catching up on idle gossip online!

As far as progress is concerned, I try to do a minimum of 1000 words each day, although I do like to make sure that goes on my main website. Today, I’m already over 5000 words, but all of this is going on Mind Pilot. Theoretically, if I’m creating content that is told like a story (like this particular post), I can produce just over 2000 words in an hour, so if there was ever a voice recognition ‘marathon,’ it might be to aim for 26,000 words in one-day! I don’t think I’m going for that any time soon — in fact I think my best day so far is around 5000, so if I can get up to 6 or 7000 today, that would be really impressive, especially with such a late start. Even though I’m not doing anything that has a direct commercial value, I’m not so concerned. I’ll freely admit that I obsess about my own personal productivity, but I don’t think it always has to be defined monetarily. I’ll feel that the day has been useful if I have at least managed to extract something from my head and stick it down into a format that is useful for somebody somewhere. The downside of this is that I don’t spend anything like as much time on other creative activities such as drawing (either by hand or in graphics programmes like Flash), painting or photography. Even when I do take photos, I very rarely actually take them off the memory card and process them on the computer. I’m even less likely to then get photos printed — but here’s another comment I have made on this blog that I think will make me much more likely to take action in the future.

Outside, there is still a bit of noise from people moving between pubs, and some idiot has just set a car alarm of, but I’m not then let that distract me too much. Of course, I’ve commented on it, but as I’ve said before, I’m trying to make this blog a conversation, rather than something more formal and if you are sitting having a chat with a friend, and a car alarm went off in front of you, one of you would mention it wouldn’t you?

I have still got six of the 10 possible blog posts I mentioned earlier on that I would do to get on with, and if I completed all of them, I think that would really be quite something for the day. Regardless of that, I think I can tick most of the boxes that the Mind Pilot routine ‘ requires’ — I think that will be post number 11:

I know this website might be more about mood swings, but I’ll have to admit that my cooking standards have been a bit bipolar lately as well. Last night, I thought I was being well disciplined when I took a pizza and chips out of the freezer, and then decided to put them back and cook a stirfry, but it really did end up as one of the most disgusting concoctions (voice recognition says comic options — if only it was that funny) I’ve ever made. Unfortunately, I already had a bit of a headache when I started looking, so I was feeling extremely rough after I finished. I’m not sure exactly what I did to make it so bad, but I will certainly remember to never use frozen mini carrots in a stir-fry again — they had absolutely no flavour.

On the other hand, on Wednesday night I cooked pasta dish, which I was extremely proud of. I named it ‘Pasta Toulouse’ after the French ‘ville rose’ (pink City), and I guess it was a bit of an answer to spaghetti Bolognese, which does after all take its name from the redbrick city of Bologna, which I’m visiting next month! Whereas last night’s meal was almost toxic, Wednesday’s meal is what I would call nutritionally balanced — i.e. it had some very healthy ingredients (lashings of garlic, red onion, whole wheat pasta and harvest brown garlic bread) and some not so healthy (bacon, crème fraîche). Fortunately, Wednesday night was when I had agreed to cook for three guests, so at least I presented the best of my culinary skills to them.

Concurrently, this is often the way I am with my moods — most of the time when I’m out meeting people, I am confident an upbeat, and it is only when I’m with a select bunch of people I really know that I might discuss some of my more darker or downbeat moods. Hopefully, by having this website, I can make more people aware that there are two very different sides of my personality, and that I am far from alone in being this way. In the meantime, here’s to healthy eating and looking on the brighter side of life!

(21:38) — 4 1/2 posts in just under an hour , that’s enough for now.

(21:21) One thing I always wonder about when writing blog posts like this is just who exactly is going to read them? The bottom line is that I have absolutely no idea who could end up here, and in certain ways I don’t even really want to know. Some of the stuff here is quite personal, but I have decided that it is better out than in, so does it actually matter who might be reading?

One thing I’d like to keep is the conversational style that I get when using voice recognition, but oddly enough, I really hate to work on this if I think there is anyone else in the background. My housemate is home right now, but she’s upstairs, so I’m not too worried there, but there’s no way I could see myself sharing an office and using voice recognition, even when working on my other website, where the content is purely travel related, and nothing like so personal.

Meanwhile, there are people walking past my front door all the time, as it is Friday night, and I’m on a street with six pubs. Would I rather be out in one of them at the moment enjoying a drink, or some might say, drowning my sorrows? Well, if I had been more organised in the week, perhaps I would be, but I’m not really too bothered as next week is already looking extremely busy. Would I like to randomly go out to one of the pubs, and just start a conversation with whoever I met at the bar? I do that sometimes at my local, but as it is an Irish pub, and this is the weekend before St Patrick’s Day, I know it will be an extremely tight squeeze in at night, just as it is on any other Friday night, I really don’t enjoy that. Last week, I picked a pub at random, but it didn’t take too long for the conversation to degenerate down to the person standing next to me using the phrase ‘ I’m not racist but’, and we all know where that ends up.

So actually, I’d rather have a conversation with his blog, even though I have no idea who I’m talking to. But if you have read this far, please drop a comment and say hi!

As I was saying in an earlier blog post this afternoon, I would much rather share any ideas I have, rather than keep them to myself just in case somebody else might ’steal’ them. I think that a lot of people grossly overestimate the value of the ideas they have, and in my experience an idea is worth next to nothing if it isn’t acted on. As it happens, the one idea I did have which has made me money was never really that original; all it did was take an existing idea which appears in print in many places, and put it on the Internet.

I have one particular idea for a new website which I keep on telling people I’m going to launch, but I don’t think that anyone would take from me, because it is going require a significant amount of passion and detail subject knowledge to make it happen. For now, this idea is to stay on the back burner whilst I keep my main website afloat.

But what about other ideas I have for future projects, some of which don’t really have that much to do with the Internet? What if an idea is just a quick sketch or a design or in many cases as I find, just a play on words? I’d far rather flesh out a very brief description of what I’m thinking about in no more than one page, and stick it up on the Internet somewhere. If I should happen to meet someone, whether in person or online, who expresses an interest in something similar, then I can always point them in that direction. In the meantime, I always have plenty on my plate to get on with.

(21:17) after complaining before, I’m now wanting the voice recognition and a warning to come up, so I can take a break, or at least go online or just do a bit of sketching in Flash. But for the time being, I have flagged up 10 potential blog posts that I could do, and I have just done one of them, so I think I’m going to be here for a little bit longer. Well, I restarted the session after dinner at 8:40, and I’ve now gone on for 40 minutes, so I think I’ll do another 20.

Earlier this week, I drew up a list of the small steps which might need to be taken to transfer from a lethargic mildly depressed state to having enough energy to go out on a bike ride. Now I’m thinking about how I ought to set up the house so it is as easy as possible to go out on a bike ride, or take part in any other exercise activity.

• Put the bike in the front room. Thankfully, this has already been done, and it is a great help. The bike used to be in a shed at the back of the house — how easy it was to open a backdoor and retreat back inside without even getting to touch the bike! If seeing is achieving, then the front room is the ideal place, as this is also where I have my office. Unfortunately, there is a lot of junk around the place where I usually hang my bike up, so that needs to be moved.
• Get some pictures up and on computer screen, in notebooks etc, to remind myself how much I enjoy cycling. Include pictures of some of the great places I have been cycling (especially Nevis, Zermatt, Grosse Scheidegg, Cotswolds, Scotland), and places where I’d like to go — especially places which are easily accessible in a day trip from here. These images should be part of a sequence of motivational images, which could also feature business goals, travel plans etc.
• Keep the house tidy — tidy house = tidy mind = get more done = easier to leave work and get exercising.
•  Sort out alarm clocks and getting up routine — if I’m up early enough in the day, it is so much easier to go out exercising first thing, and to enjoy the buzz that gives me for the rest of the day.
• Have kit ready — even if on many days it is perfectly fine to reuse cycling kit from the last trip, it is always nice to have fresh gear clean and ready if I want it.
• Hang cycling shirts up in bedroom — this is a great reminder, although perhaps I should now use the picture hooks for their original purpose and put up some cycling related pictures on them.
• Keep it up — once I get into a really good routine of regular daily exercise, it is so much easier to stay there. This really isn’t rocket science!

Friday 19:56

Last night, I took a pizza and chips from the freezer, but then decided to go healthy and cook a stir-fry, but unfortunately that ended up as a total disaster. So tonight, I have played it safe and gone for the pizza and chips. This will make this a short session, especially as I will have to turn the chips halfway through, but that is an easy excuse to just mess around online whilst I’m waiting. Spending 20 minutes on random websites would be no great loss, especially considering how much time I wasted in bed this morning, but I have a momentum from when I came back from my job and I really want to keep this going. I said that I would start to promote this blog when it got to 100 posts, and I’m up to 34 now, so that’s halfway there — sorry, no it isn’t, it’s one third of the way, but as I’m doing this with voice recognition, I’m not going to go back and correct that!

I said I was apprehensive about doing the London to Paris bike ride, so instead I decided to start small and sign up for a bike ride in the Peak District with the British Heart Foundation. This is only 29 miles, but the registration fee is just £10, and there is no minimum requirement for sponsorship. My pizza and chips might not be all that healthy, but at least I’m keeping my sugar intake down tonight with a Diet Coke, but I really do hate the stuff. I think I bought it on some ridiculous special offer where it was cheaper to buy two multipacks that was to buy just the one, so I guess I’ll be lumbered with it for a while. In the meantime, I’ll be back to the regular stuff tomorrow.

Now, where was I? There goes the first alarm, off to turn the chips, back in a minute. [20:05]

20:07

Well, those chips really do smell good (voice recognition took that down as smouldered, I hope that isn’t a premonition for me allowing them to burn by getting the timing settings wrong, or concentrating so hard on the computer that I don’t hear the oven alarm in the background!). I remember going to a chippy in Warwick used to regularly tell me that fish and chips were at least the most healthy takeaway food, or should that be the least unhealthy takeaway food? I would go out to the local chippy — I’m sure fish is much more healthy than pizza, with all those omega-3 oils, but their standards have really gone down lately, and the other one is a 15 minute walk away, and I don’t have the car any more (voice recognition says avocado, is it trying to give me a health hint?) more to drive there.

Back to the notebook:

(20:13) I’m sure that alarm would go off any moment now, but before I been given a chance to get going, NaturallySpeaking tells me that I’m up to the limit of what it is able to recognise in one session. This must be total nonsense — I have barely done a quarter of an hour worth of dictation, and even now I just pasted in a few notes from a previous block of text, there is no way that they should take things over the limit. Reminder to myself — see if I can adjust voice recognition settings to allow for longer dictation time. Anyway, there goes the alarm (20:14)\\.

//(20:42) Just before I left for dinner, the microphone stand started coming apart, but I have put it back together again, and I hope that with a bit of tightening it won’t trouble me again. The microphone itself has proved to be extremely resilient, having been dropped several times. That’s what I expect from quality German engineering — I’m not sure where the stand came from, but I won’t make any pre-judgements there. Voice recognition certainly has its trials and tribulations, but once you get used to it, it is way more efficient than typing, and there’s no way I would even consider doing a blog like this if it wasn’t for voice recognition software. In many ways, this whole thing feels like a bit of a one-way conversation with a completely unknown audience, but I do like the fact that I can essentially just ramble along and say what I think, and I hope that this makes enough sense to keep future readers interested. Now as I said before, back to the notebook:

I have a growing list of people to get back in touch with Facebook — the idea of meeting up with one Facebook contact each day that I mentioned earlier on a week would certainly keep me really busy, but I don’t think I’d have enough time left to get any serious work done. I’d love to see if somebody else has tried a similar project. Anyway, A is for Aldo, Ankit — and that’s just in east London, so now I can see my diary getting very busy once I actually pin people down to a meeting. Maybe I could interview people for this blog — I know that most Internet entrepreneurs have a very interesting take on personal development issues, it is only natural that people who don’t fit in to a normal office environment will end up running their own businesses, and what better way to do this than to run your own website in your own time?

Well, that’s about it for this particular session — I have made loads of other notes, but they all qualify for posts in their own right, some here, some elsewhere. Here’s the titles I plan to add on this blog:

• Preparing the house for an exercise mentality.
• Is it best to share ideas or keep them to yourself?
• Where did it all go wrong on Thursday? / general notebook update for Wednesday evening and Thursday
• Food swings
• Trainers or concert tickets — which is a better way to spend £75?
• Thought about twitter
• The diverse world of Internet publishing.
• ’Linkansen’
• Thoughts on Top 30 revenue earning websites and ‘I’m following the dream’ type blogs.
• A one-way conversation with who?

Right, that’s quite a good list. Potentially 10 more posts this evening, but I think I’ll also end up moving off into other arenas, and maybe having a bit of a drawing session. I know that I need to update the template for this blog, but my other two blogs could be neatened up quite a bit as well. I think it’s finally time to get our logo sorted, that’s one that I’ve been procrastinating on for years.

Well, I might as well start at the top: (tbc – next post)

Coming back from my jog, I filled in an enquiry form about the London to Paris bike ride, which I’d had my notice-board as a reminder for several weeks. Having looked into the details, I’m in two minds about doing this sort of thing. Of course, it would be a wonderful challenge to do, and a great way of meeting like-minded people. And it goes without saying that the big issue foundation is always a very good cause to raise money for. But I’m a little bit apprehensive about the amount of money that needs to be raised — £1300 by 20th May, and I’m also not sure if I will be a will to get full medical clearance and insurance for this kind of event, considering that I’m still having many days of extremely low energy, and that my most recent hospitalisation was just four months ago.

Of course, I can make this a self-fulfilling prophecy — if I say I’m not capable, then I won’t take any further, if I sign up and immediately start worrying about the amount of training I’ll have to do, or the amount of money I’ll have to raise, then I will never get anywhere near either target. If I decide that I’m going to go all out and do it, then I could theoretically pull out all the stops and make it happen — but there would be no point in even considering this without discussing it with my doctor first. I’m all for a challenge (and have done 100 miles in a day three times before — just not on consecutive days), but I think this one is a little bit daunting for now — perhaps I should try and find some one-day cycling challenges within the UK, and complete one of those first. If that goes well, there is always the London to Berlin cycling challenge for next year.

Well, at least the thought of this ride has got me thinking more about getting back my bike — my main bike needs to have its rear wheel sorted out, but I have the racer in the back garden which I can use in the meantime. What can I do now to make sure I have the motivation tomorrow to go out for a decent bike ride? Of course, I’ve already broken down the steps necessary to move from a lethargic state to getting started on a bike ride, but what if I’m just too busy working to be able to switch off and get out? My mind turns to the ‘think bike’ road safety signs, and wonders what else I can do to make the home environment more geared up towards chucking me out, rather than staying put!

See — preparing house for exercise mentality (separate post to follow)

I also remind myself of the simple anagram love/velo (velo is French for bicycle, and we all know how much the French love their cycling, not to mention their romance is well). A picture springs up a continuation of this play on words to make ‘lovelo’, with the two o’s as bike wheels, and the v as a heart, which could perhaps extend upwards to make the seat. That might be something to play around with later — it is always so much easier to come up with a very quick concept sketch than it is to have a completed drawing; ideas, rather than final presentation, have always been my strong point, and I still hope that one day I will be to find someone to work with who can instantly (well, reasonably quickly at least) turn my ideas into finished presentations. In the meantime, I just have to accept the fact that I probably have to come up with 10 ideas before one even makes it to the drawing board, and even when I start sketching anything out, however simple, I tend to go round and round in circles so many times. This has always been my great frustration, but I was thinking earlier on that the Internet can give incredible opportunities to partner up like-minded people.

I have no idea how many people will read this blog post — at the moment, I know that it will be very few, because I don’t even intend to start seriously promoting this blog until I have at least 100 posts, and until I’m a little bit more stable in my daily routine. However, once a few people do start reading it, who knows what possibilities might arise, especially as this blog is aimed at like-minded creative people. It could just take one person to take one particular idea from one post and run with it, or I might just find myself that by laying out a simple idea in text form I am able to quickly translate it into a finished project.

You might be asking just exactly what I mean what I’m talking about projects based on just one word, but that is always a starting point for a brand, a website, a project, an advertising campaign, a building, or just about anything else that has to be created. If I just look around the notes I made in 10 minutes after having a shower, I can see several other words I wrote down or quick sketches that I made that might also be turned into projects in some form at some stage.

A lot of people say that you should keep things yourself, and as I say this, the computer tells me I have reached the maximum amount I can dictate before the memory is full. So maybe I shouldn’t just blurt out everything in one go.

Next instalment to follow later.