Mind Pilot – Take Self Control

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.

6 p.m.

Wow, I’m feeling full of energy and super motivated — why has it taken me so long to get going today?

One method of ensuring I get up that has sometimes worked is to literally use a barrage of alarm clocks, so even if I skip one, another will go off shortly afterwards. Unfortunately, easy though this may sound, it is so easy to stop doing this — if I’m feeling tired at the end of one day, it is unlikely that I will remember to set the clocks for the next, so the cycle is easily broken. A few months ago, I bought some more alarm clocks from IKEA at the grand price of 59p each, but within a couple of weeks they were several hours away from the correct time — so far out that I wasn’t even sure if they were losing gaining time. I don’t know if this is down to the batteries or the clocks, but I have another two alarm clocks in front of me which I hope will be more accurate this time!

Right, now let’s look at all the notes I have scrawled down after taking a shower — this actually took just 10 minutes, but I suspect it will take a lot longer to type up:

Quick pat on the back time — I said that I needed to go to the pharmacy and go for a jog at the same time. I left at four (okay a little bit late, but that was all time well spent catching up with social contacts on Facebook), and found out that the pharmacy already had sorted out my prescription as part of its automated repeat service, so for once I’m actually ahead of myself when it comes to organisation. I then carried on to Memorial Park, and included a bit of sprinting before limping off with a blister on my left foot. I think it’s time for some new trainers, but that’s another conversation to follow shortly.

I haven’t sorted out anything social for this weekend, but I’m not really too bothered, and might well use the time for a major work catch up, as I have been so lousy over the last two weeks. Next week is looking much busier — I will be busy in London on Monday and Thursday, have the pub quiz on Wednesday and should be going to Cambridge for the weekend. Maybe we could do more pub quizzes, as the one we do in Leamington is only once every fortnight.

If there’s one thing I will admit to upsetting about, it is the amount of content I write, and how long it takes me to do it. I don’t really feel like I have done a proper day’s work unless I’ve created a bare minimum of 1000 words of usable content for my main website. Usually I go for 2 to 3000 — this might seem like a lot, but a lot of it is very repetitive, and as I use voice recognition, I can sometimes create text almost as quickly as I speak. Looking back on what I have produced over the last 20 minutes, I’m reminded that voice recognition is even faster when it is being used to tell a story, rather than to write out a list, or to create more specific text, as is often the case on my main website, as I need to list lots of different place names, which it can easily get wrong. My personal best so far is around 2300 words in one hour, but I’ve already done 900 words in 20 minutes, so I think it is time to smash that previous record.

I hope the text both above and below this point continues to make perfectly good sense — although I’m going for a bit of verbal diarrhoea here, there’s no point in writing total nonsense, as I want readers to come back to this blog, not be scared away! I’m also trying to make corrections as I go along, but do please forgive any I miss.

So what am I going to write about next? Sorry to disappoint, but I think it is time I switched back to my other website, I’m sure I’ll have more for Mind Pilot later on today.

A couple of weeks ago, I noted that I had 365 so-called friends on Facebook — one for each and every day of the year. Why do I say so-called friends? If you’ve watched the movie ‘Fight Club’, you will be aware of the concept of the singleserving friend — somebody who you just meet once, and with whom you have to go through the usual rigmarole are talking about where you live, what you do, your family etc, whilst always maintaining an air of pleasantness, so avoiding anything too deep or controversial. Thanks to social networking websites like Facebook, we can now even have zero serving friends — people we have never even met, but who know quite a few of our mutual contacts, and who want to put it in their larger network.

I’d quite like the idea of meeting up with one person every single day of the year, but somehow I just don’t see that happening. Maybe it would be a good social exercise to try and meet up with one ‘Facebook friend’ (i.e. someone who I wouldn’t get in touch with by other means such as e-mail or mobile) each week, and see what happens. On the other hand, I’m still slightly nervy about just how much information people can get about you if they want to start digging. Still, this website is here now, and it is here for a reason, so as I continue to write, I hope more people out there come to read.

1:10 pm

As I’m putting up this morning’s posts, I hear myself ask how this blog might come across if things are going really well, and my posts just seem like gloating. What a stupid question! That’s why I called this website ‘Mind Pilot’! Right now, I might not feel like I’m in a position to give other people that many success tips, but if I can consistently keep myself in good spirits, why shouldn’t I? The idea of this website isn’t too spread a whole load of misery about how difficult life is — in fact, most of the time, it is quite the opposite. The aim is to show how a few simple steps can help even the most chaotic minds to stay positive and to stay in focus.

Of course, there is going to be some turbulence along the way, but even if I am having a relatively smooth ride, I hope I can share enough tips to help other people experience the same.

1 PM

Well, I’d produced some good content, even if it was just for this blog, rather than for my main website, and I decided to go online at last, but for what? An hour and a half has passed, and what do I have to show for it? Actually, there was a potentially useful e-mail request from another blogger who wants to do an interview with me. I’m not sure how useful the interview itself will be, but any opportunity to get more links into my website will have to be a good thing. Why don’t I go around asking people I know for more links, for anyone out there who doesn’t know how the Internet works, having inward links pointing at your website is very useful for staying up in the search engines.

So I have tried to thread my blogs together, and I guess I’m approaching that time were Mind Pilot will be wide open for anyone to read, which is quite a daunting prospect. I’m not quite ready yet for the possibility of anyone I know to go crawling round this website reading up about my ups and downs, but it will happen sooner or later. In the meantime, I just want my blogs to be properly indexed, so people can find them on all the different blog feed websites and leave comments if they want to. This all seems like so much effort to set up, and of course I’d much rather be getting on with writing stuff. So actually, that time online wasn’t too bad after all, I think I will come back to this more technical stuff later on.

Looking back over this blog, I’m sorry for the large gaps between posts, and for the fact that posts tend to come together in clumps. As of yesterday, I seem to have gained a lot more momentum to keep this blog up to date, mainly because by putting all my thoughts down in an open diary, I feel much more committed to stay focused and get things done.

I won’t make any false promises — over the next few days, I’ll probably make at least five posts each day, but when this calms down, I think a more realistic target would be to make at least one post each week, rather than to expect a daily post, which I know is unrealistic. I might also dig out some diary notes and fill in a little bit more about what’s been going on in the months in between the gaps, but I think it is far more likely that I will keep this up to date with fresh goings-on.