Everyday Bliss

From: http://www.psychologytoday.com/rss/pto-20030823-000001.html

There are many ways to avoid success in life, but the most sure-fire just might be procrastination. Procrastinators sabotage themselves. They put obstacles in their own path. They actually choose paths that hurt their performance.

<snip to the good stuff>

1. It’s not trivial, although as a culture we don’t take it seriously as a problem. It represents a profound problem of self-regulation. And there may be more of it in the U.S. than in other countries because we are so nice; we don’t call people on their excuses ("my grandmother died last week") even when we don’t believe them.

Maryam’s Note: Oh yeah, we’ve all done that one! ‘Fess up now, when was the last time your dog ate your homework? Or your annual report?

3. Procrastination is not a problem of time management or of planning. Procrastinators are not different in their ability to estimate time, although they are more optimistic than others. "Telling someone who procrastinates to buy a weekly planner is like telling someone with chronic depression to …

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So, what’s this about "Pulling The Spoon"?  It all goes back to I was a young woman in my first college apartment, in an old creaky house with bad plumbing and worse lighting. Growing up with parents who had been through the Great Depression, we learned to "make-do" with what we had and fix broken things rather than buying something new.

In my apartment bathroom, there was a single bare bulb with a high pull chain I had to stand on a chair to reach. I was deathly afraid of putting my hand on one of the resident cockroaches while groping around in the dark, so devised an easy door-switch by rigging up a string attached to the pull-chain of the overhead light, fed through a loop of brass wire fixed to the wall molding near the door and ending in a bowknot around one of my heavy soup spoons. When I came to the door of my bathroom, I simply pulled on the spoon to turn on the light.

When my Mother first saw this contraption and heard me instruct her to ‘pull the spoon’, she went into hysterics and didn’t stop laughing for days.

I earned the title "Maven of Make-Do" and ‘pulling the spoon’ became family slang for a creative invention that saved time, money and personal sanity. It is to these values that I am in part, dedicated. What ideas can YOU suggest to help others find a better way to do something, easier way of getting it done or a great free resource that will help others maximize their time and resources? Here are a few of mine:

Call your entire extended family or give a large format class with a FREE telephone bridgeline:  http://freeconference.com/ 

2/23/06 Update: I’ve been testing a new service and now feel confident enough to recommend it, with a few reservations: www.nocostconference.com 

Pros: Free bridgeline, free recording and (the best thing of all) a Web Dashboard from which you may selectively MUTE overly-gabby callers, "Make Moderator" a Speaker who should have called in with the Moderator PIN but didn’t, and other control functions. (yay!) Very helpful staff who appear to truly be concerned with your experience…even as a freebie user. Online forums in which bewilderment is addressed with aplomb and there is no such thing as a stupid question.

Wahoo! Yeehah! And similar huzzahs of joy. Truly, a teleclass leader’s best friend. We use this line in addition to Audio Acrobat to record classes at The Certified Energy Coach Program

Cons: Occasionally you hear the dreaded "This call is no longer being recorded" or "You are now muted" for no apparent reason, and when you know you’ve not pushed any buttons. Relax, and just push the key to unmute yourself or start recording again (or click the corresponding web dashboard link). Also, while NoCostCon is using .wav files to record, the files are very large and feature hellishly long download times…but then and again, it IS free. Remember to select the SECOND option on the lefthand side of the page at www.nocostconference.com for a free conference with "Web Control Dashboard". Enjoy!

Get your website up to speed with this suite of FREE Search Engine Optimization Tools: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/

It’s funky and extremely yellow, but if you need to have a ready-to-send email autoresponder on standby 24 hours a day, it’s also fairly fully functioned and FREE: http://www.freeautobot.com/

Just can’t find the word to fill out your newsletter, poem or book? Look in the FREE Thesaurus: http://thesaurus.reference.com/

Need to find out something from the people you serve? Try the cool FREE surveys (you can customize like crazy) at Perseus: http://express.perseus.com/perseus/asp/login.aspx

Raining/snowing out? Too lazy to get up and go to the library? Books, Music and hey, EVEN MOVIES! (even some scary-funny government sponsored training films – yikes!) can be found at the Internet Archive online library: http://www.archive.org/index.php

And of course, my own Energy Modder’s Demo CD is available FREE too, WITH access to our FREE monthly Energy Coaching Telegatherings "The Energies of Transformation". This month, we have ace BSFF expert Joan Hitlin on "How To Be Your Own Best Self-Therapist" – get the Free CD and join us this month!: http://quantumflow.com/demo_cd.html

ENJOY! Love from "Mavis, The Maven Of Make-Do"