Tag Archives: Needs

Motivation

Somehow I might not have noticed that I was lacking motivation.

fax

My job was hard the last few month, when I had some hard problems to sit and learn over, and that made me feel I wasn’t making any progress anymore. And my job motivated me most of the last year, so this was a big hit. Then I also made some mistakes, costing my company some money – made me feel even worse. Then I didn’t see my friends in a loooong time. I used up all the nice content in form of videogames and movies. Then my girlfriend tends to work a lot – also on weekends. And some few time ago, one of my cats died.

That was when I felt a big depression overcoming me. I seemed to have some kind of mid-life-crisis. Since then I made some corrections in my life, that all should help my motivation.

1.) ToDo lists: I need those to feel that I make progress and to not loose track of what I was doing. It also makes me feel good when I can check something off.

2.) Music. The iPhone 3G originally made me listen to music again after me having lost interest in it before. Sadly, synching with iTunes isn’t perfect and took a long time and when I more often heard songs I didn’t like while riding my bike to work, I switched to podcasts instead. Those podcasts are fine, but they’re all information and no emotion. After getting the iPhone4, I realized that through the clicker headphones you could easily get rid of songs you didn’t want and through the bigger capacity, I could have overall more songs on the device, giving more food to the genius lists. This also made me rediscover all the good old stuff and keeps my emotions slightly more packed with power.

3.) Friends. I visited an old friend of mine living 5 hours away from here – and it really pushed me. Then through the iPhone4 and Meebo, I’m back online on ICQ, which I dropped when beginning to work one year ago. Through this, I got back to being contacted for sit-ins and usual silly conversation, which made me feel better.

4.) Project: I try write more on the blog – it somehow frees my mind. I also try to work a bit on the ToDo Tool I wanted to do a while back – one should have some cool project instead of sad SOA stuff. You should have a project that you like – even if ou don’t have too much time to put in that.

5.) Job: The job always threatens my peace of mind. If there’s a big problem piling up or something that’s really hard to grasp, I’m feeling bad. But there problems are solved now, god bless it.

Somehow this post is incomplete, butI guess the crisis is over. Thanks to everyone including you dear reader who leaves a comment from time to time ;-)

Creative Commons License photo credit: anomalous4

Shopping is Work

Pure Minimalism

I was shopping clothes with my girlfriend the last three weekends. For me shopping isn’t fun. I hate getting off my clothes, dragging over a lot of stuff that doesn’t fit. I sweat a lot when its hot and I’m changing clothes. And this all takes a lot of time.

Therefore I developed a kind of shopping that doesn’t cost much time. Firstly, I’m getting a lot of clothes online and send the unfitting 80% back. I’ll do this two or three times and I never invest much time in picking the stuff. My girlfriend tells me whether the clothes fit or not and my selfvision is impaired when it comes to clothing.

This usually helps getting shirts and shoes. For the rest, I acually need to go shopping. I always know what kind of clothes I need to buy, and I don’t look for anything else. When I’m in the shop, I pick the 3-10 bestlooking things and try them. My girlfriend again helps me watching for errors in my vision and then I just buy that stuff.

My girlfriend uses a different approarch: she likes shopping. She looks for everything she likes, and shopping usually takes 6+ hours. She also asks me if I like the clothes, but doesn’t take my advice seriously. Things like these will happen dozens of times a day:

She: “What do you think?”

Me (big eyes): “Whoa! I really love it … you definitely should buy it! Amazing!”

She: “Mhmm. Nah.”

Results and Costs

Well, I could go to much more detail here, but all I want to say is that the results (the stuff you bought and the fun you had buying it) and the costs (time and money) matter at the end of the day.This is the same equotation for work. Think of work. The results count, it counts if you have fun in your job and it counts how much money you spend and how much time it costed.

For me, the fun in shopping is always nonexistant. As I don’t have money problems I also value time higher than money. So I try to get best best stuff as fast as possible. I would rather work than go shopping as my work is more fun.

Optimize Shopping

This equotation doesn’t only count for shopping for clothes, but for all kinds of acquisitions. And shopping for everything that matters for you should be optimized, as that way you can save time and money and spare yourself from a lot of frustration. I already told you how I tried to optimize shopping for clothes. Optimizing your weekly shopping for food and the regular goods is another kind of work that should be optimized for everyone’s life, as its just another load of work you’ll have to do for your whole life.

I’ll usually do my weekly shopping once per week by car. I use an iPhone list of things to buy with me, where items can be ticked off and the whole list can be reused every week. Therefore, I only need to add items I never bought before and can just untick the things I need this week, leaving the ones ticked that I don’t need again this week. When I’m at the cheap supermarket, I’ll try to get everything as fast as I can, not looking for the other distractions and superflous offers I could find. After that I’ll get the rest of the things I didn’t get at the cheap store in the more expensive supermarket, where I also only go for the things I really need. This helps me getting this done fast, going only once per week saves a lot of time. I don’t buy more than the planned amount of sweets too, which is good for my weight.

The time invested could also be invested in work. Therefore, I see these shopping trips as work.

Big investments

Big investments need to be done with a completely other way of buying. I think about everything where you sign a contract as a big investment, be that a mobile plan, a flat you rent or a car you buy. When I watch the TV show where people want to rent or buy houses and flats, I cannot but slap my head each time I see it. Some estate agent presents two different houses or flats to their clients, and in about 80% of the cases the people just take one of the objects. What people in these shows don’t seem to get: Buying a house or a flat is a life changing investment. You’ll live there a long time, and your whole perception of your life is influenced by this. Additionally, the prices are often much too high.

If you’re doing a big investment, I will always pay off if you research for a long time about what it is and what are the alternatives of your purchase. Don’t shop big things like clothes.

It took my girlfriend and me one year of research and about 50 visits in flats and houses till we got a lucky chance to buy a very nice and big flat and get a cheap loan from one of the about 7 banks we asked and played off against each other. It will be paid off in about 15 years, is about 20% cheaper than the usual rent of such a flat is a retirement provision that we don’t have to buy additionally. Its 10 minutes away from both of our workplaces and its damn beautiful.

Creative Commons License photo credit: Thomas Hawk

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Do you need a Smartphone? Or just want one?

Well, I just thought about whether I should buy an iPhone 4 or an Android based system and decided for the iPhone. But when I listened to other people for their thoughts about this, I often see that they don’t really need a smartphone.

Nesting Dolls
So, before you think about which model to buy, try to figure our what you need that for. Do you want it to call people and send text messages? To wake you up in the morning and listen to music? Take a picture from time to time? Then don’t buy a smartphone – the much cheaper Sony Walkman models or some phones from Nokia will be just fine for you. Do you spend your time on the workplace PC or at home where your PC is constantly running? No need for a smartphone.

A smartphone needs a more expensive priced mobile plan and is very expensive in general. So if you need a smartphone, accept that it will be expensive. Therefore, you should plan ahead what you are going to do with the small computer in your pocket – and if you only find reasons like “oh well I’ll surf the web on the busride”, then I believe you should better buy a book.

Smartphones have the capability to be your mobile data center – and I think this is the main use case. Besides, having mobile E-Mail and other means of communications at hand, like IM or Twitter, is the second biggest use case. After that, you may not forget that a smartphone should replace your MP3-player, your notebook, your calendar, your shopping-lists, the books you carry around and in a very fortunate situation even the netbook you only take with you to do exactly what a smartphone can do for you.

Creative Commons License photo credit: andyi

A Waste of Time – How (Not) to Reach Your Goals

Recently, I’ve made some progress on the browsergame I’m writing and told a friend of mine about that – a friend who always has been enthusiastic about games, online and offline.  He told me:

Isn’t that a waste of time?

I was quite shocked, as I think that I can’t use my private time much wiser than by training the skills I’m earning my money with, having fun on a project I like and maybe get something out of it at the end that I might like to play myself and maybe even get some money via advertising, to come up for the server costs. So the answer is clearly: no, it’s not a waste of time. But it got me thinking what a waste of time is in my eyes. To answer this question, I must first address this question:

What is meaningful?

My first definition is: Wasting time means that you do something meaningless instead of something meaningful.

Meaningful would be something, that you had to do anyways or that gives you something in the long term. This includes learning for your job, acting to reach or keep your desired familiy situation (dating, learn to know new people – or spending time with your family), working to develop your economic measures and grow your character.

Not meaningful would be something that gives you nothing in the long term. Watching TV, playing games, consuming drugs / alcohol / cigarettes, surfing the web, listening music, comsume sports in the media, sleeping (longer than 8 hours), watching funny stuff on YouTube, relaxing on the couch, … the list goes on.

Hobbies

Hobbies are a special thing here – basically because everyone will constantly tell you that some of those “WasteOfTime”-activities just are important for them, as the person is not fullfilled or not happy without them.

Using time on a hobby for some time of the day makes you happy and fullfilled in the long term – so if you would count computergaming or watching a certain TV series as a hobby, I’d say its meaningful – for a certain amount of time, where its not procrastination of other things, that are really important or that would have to be done anyways.

If you don’t do the other stuff, that would bring you forward, hobbies are a waste of time. Especially the behavioural pattern of acting out this hobby is addictive – as usual for World of Warcraft-playing or online addiction nowadays – then I would clearly brand this as waste of time.

What helps me and others in doing meaningful stuff is the Getting Things Done-methods, that clearly stress your long-term-goals. After formulating them, you should try to do one task that is connected with your goal every day – which makes sure you evolve. (btw.: At Abelssoft we”re developing a ToDo-application that will also help you developing your goals, I’ll update you on this one as there’s still a lot of development to be done)

Bonus: the Time Eater

My definition is of course only a subjective view on this topic – even if I think its pretty nicely thought out. In spire of this, for some people, the most useful activity is giving in into some drive, like being lazy, eating or watching TV or gaming or taking drugs all day. THAT is clearly a waste of time in my eyes.

Especially the TV set earns an honorable mention here: is a time-eating machine. Most people burn time in their TV – and a TV set already is declared as a necessity of life by law! And as I already said in a former acticle I wrote in german: Time is the stuff that life is made of. Its the most precious good there is. With time, you can have fun, generate money, live your dreams. So don’t burn it in the TV-oven. Some also use the TV in a meaningful way, but that usually means watching the news – which doesn’t take long anways.

Final Thoughts

Make a list. Define who you want to be, which character traits you want to develop or get rid of, define which kind of social (family?) situation you want, which goods you want to have (car? home?), what you want to reach (professionally, skills, achievements) and put all this on this list. These are your goals. Try to do one thing that gets you into this directions every day, before you give in to your drives. It might take years, but you will see success sooner than you think.

All the little things & This year of my life

(This is kindof a double post, as I’ve not posted real stuff for some time)

Its very impressive how our life shapes with all the little things we learn. And its all those little things we change in our lives that makes everything a whole new experience. You think I’m on drugs? Nope, I ain’t!

The most time of my life, I’ve been a logical person who had difficulties in understanding human nature and human behaviour. As a logical person, I advocated that no man should ever lie in no situation, and the world would be a better place. Teachers laughted, schoolmates laughted, some tried to persuade me that this just isn’t true. I only trusted upon my logical view of things and nobody could change my perception. Guess what? The human race would be long eradicated by a nuclear war if no man could lie.

Poldi at the window

These were the times when I trusted my own beliefs most, even when people told me something else. It was a very long stage of my life, but I finally made the next level: trying to understand, why people have another opinion, “try out” for some time if this opinion works for me and then accepting or rejecting that opinion/position/view.

For example: I have always had long hair and split ends. Guess that I didn’t understand that I need to use conditioner to make that go away. My opinion was: chemical stuff can’t help my health or the health of my hair. And I was wrong. When I began using conditioner, the split ends were getting better.

So many things just seem like utter nonsense when you see how people behave sometimes. Like watching casting shows in TV. Like smoking. Like going drinking and dancing in a discotheque. Like making music. I even thought listening to music was a strange behaviour when I was about 14 years old. But after some time, you try things out, and some work for you while others don’t. I began liking music and going out to parties for example, but I never liked smoking even if I tried. Well and then after some time, you even try to understand women – a hopeless attempt, some men might think – but even there you can make progress if you really try to understand their point of view.

What I changed this year

Its just that I have a little bit of free time for the first time in about one year – therefore I’m writing this post. And I’m reflecting on what I changed this very year. Change is usually something people don’t like, because their instincts tell them that change is dangerous and that they should just keep everything as it is, because it won’t get worse that way – that is good for survival, the instinct implies. This instinct is called fear. A small interlude from Dune:

I must not fear.
 Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

If you understand that you can choose what you want to change, if you conquer this instinct, you’ll recognize that every change that you do is a positive change in the end. Otherwise you wouldn’t have accepted it … or you just undo it and change back.

And I changed a lot of little things this year. My dear. I hope you my dear reader can reflect the changes you went through this year too. If you want, you should also make a small blog post about what happend this year in your life, because I’d really like to read that. I came to the point where I can say that I love changes – and hearing about them. So this year:

  • I began my diploma thesis on 01.01.2009 and over the course of the year, I needed to unclutter my life to be able to get it done. Some would call this lifehacking. I just stopped playing computer games. Boom. 30% more time. I stopped organizing my week and began organizing my day. Boom. 100% more things got done. I began struturing my online information-digestion through feeds and twitter. Boom. Learning stuff while keeping yourself informed in the shortest time possible. All impressive changes, and needed ones, if you want to use time more effectively.
  • I found a job at the local software company Abelssoft. My salary is fine and didn’t need a car to get to work – again a lot of money saved. My colleagues are very nice and I like working with them – and I also like the work itself, which is a very important matter in being happy, I believe. I also just learned a new programming language (C# .NET) and Abelssoft paid a certificate that measures this skill. Thanks again! You can follow @Abelssoft on Twitter, and this is the website (german verison here).
  • I bought a flat with my girlfriend. A big one. In the times of economic crisis and a drop in (bank) interests, it seemed the smartest thing from a economic perspective. But if you think about the non-economic perspective, its a way more binding statement towards my girlfriend, than a marriage would be. And I’m very happy about my decision. Believe me, the flat is completely new, big and I feel superb when I’m there.
  • I left the church. That means approximately +400€ per year. Nice. I never really believes in god anyways, and if I did, I don’t think Jesus would love me more if I paid the church’s fees.
  • Now for some more little things which changed in my information-digestion: Feedly. After learning what feeds are and how to use them via the Firefox-addon Brief, I just switched to Google Reader to be able to synchronize my feeds (and mainly let those that I have already read not show up anymore) with my iPhone feed-reader. Now that I use Google Reader which in my opinion has a cluttered and unintuitive interface, I found the Feedly-firefox plugin, that lets my feeds look like a newspaper. Hooray, the times of dead paper are gone – and with this kind of interface, maybe I can teach my girlfriend to use feeds someday too.
  • I began listening to podcasts on the bike. Used music before, but riding bike is pretty boring, and I more like listening to music while I’m cleaning up or doing the dishes or something. Fould the following podcasts (both german) to be very interesting: Z and Bitsundso.
  • Another small thing that impact my personal life more than I would have ever imagined: the iPhone. I learned how to use this device as personal organizer (respectively main calendar), ToDo-list, shopping list, feedreader, client for all social networks I use (Twitter, Facebook, Xing, StudiVZ), TV-guide, online-banking-client (damn, I can do bank transfers everywhere with this thing!), (video) camera, instant messenger, radio, podcast-player, music player, navigation-device, pdf-document-reader, voice recorder, gaming device (did you know we have Command and Conquer, Duke Nukem, Need for Speed and many more really good things?), weather information service, eBay-client (which works better and more intuitive than the actual ebay-website), wireless USB-stick, translator, YouTube-client and even TV-reciever (okay, I don’t get too many channels with it). And I can use it as telephone too. You wouldn’t believe it! In one tiny device. All very usable. Thats definitely an upgrade for my personal management.

So I hope your lives got some upgrades too, I’m very pleased with mine this year. For the next year, I’ll have a small list of goals that I want to get done (and that I just entered in my ToDo’s goals section):

  • Try getting more professional at my job.
  • Buy some stuff, so the new flat isn’t all that empty.
  • Write some more blog posts.
  • Main point: I’ll try meeting more friends – I kinda lost sight of them this year and definitely have to change that. But from now on, I’ll have at least my weekends free to tackle that.
  • Play more pen and paper role-playing-games. I miss that, was always fun.
  • Go on vacation with my girl.
  • Get a private server-machine running 24/7. Needs to be low-energy-comsuming and not too expensive. And needs to be silent.
  • Set up a new blog. This wordpress thingy here is too slow, the design isn’t what I want now, and I plain hate PHP. Whats your pick for another blogging platform?
  • Buy a playstation 3 – the Wii has too many bad games, I want more good stuff. And a blueray player too.
  • Pay back the money my parents borrowed me.
  • Upgrade iPhone when there’s time. If you’ll jailbreak, its more time investment, so you gotta plan wisely.

Feel free to answer with your own changes from this year or your plans for next year. Expect to hear more from me more regularly, like every week. Or something like that. Over and out for this week.