This posts for you...

Well, after reading Erin's blog, I figured I must be one of the blogs she reads that posts infrequently. So, Erin, here's a post just for you!

I started re-reading the Getting Things Done book a couple of days ago. The book is structured so that he gives kind of an overview of the GTD philosophy, then he goes into the "coaching" phase where he walks you through the steps of implementing the GTD process. I remembered the introductory stuff being kind of dry and hard to chew through, but it seems more exciting to me this time around. Maybe it's because I'm more motivated this time around, I don't know. But I have high hopes that I can get myself more organized this time around.

Lori has had a rough day today. She attended an IEP (Individual Education Plan) meeting with the school district about Megan. While there, they reported the results of Megan's latest round of testing, and the results were pretty disappointing. On the one hand, the school district is finally taking us seriously, and have accepted the diagnosis of Autism. That's great, in that we have a good chance of finally getting the services that we have been insisting that she needs. However, it's also quite scary, because they are taking us seriously. It brings back some of the fears that we have had for her for a couple of years. Normally I would have gone to the meeting with Lori, but Megan was sick, so we couldn't send her over to a friends house while we both went to the meeting. Lori is the most familiar with Megan's needs, so I came home from work early, and Lori went to the meeting. The disappointing thing about the meeting, is that because Megan will be attending the new school being built behind our house, the district doesn't quite know exactly what services they will be able to provide. So, the actual details of the IEP are still up in the air. We did get an agreement that those services will be specified before the school year starts. In the mean time, we have a lot of work to do to get her ready for kindergarten.

On a lighter note, I have a funny story. A few months ago, I got an MP3 player. I picked one that could play movies and display photos too. I brought it in to work, where my friend Evan promptly began to fiddle with it. He discovered some image file that we thought had something to do with the splash screen that displayed when the player was turned on. He replaced the image with something he threw together in the GIMP. But, we were wrong, and it didn't seem to have any effect at all. Over the course of the next couple of months, I forgot that we had done anything to that image at all. Anyway, today I was upgrading software so that I could take advantage of playlist support on the player, and when I connected the device to windows media player, this dialog appeared. I nearly fell out of my chair!

Sad little things that make us human...

I found this movie while browsing a time management site I hit every once in a while when I come to the realization that I really need to get more organized. This feeling usually comes to me when I run up against some deadline or another for something that I should have been working on but for some reason avoided. This has been a pattern throughout my life. In college, I could get away with it by pulling an all-nighter the night before my deadline and somehow pull it all together just in time. I was young then, and going all night without sleep didn't seem to affect me as much as it does now. I'd delude myself with the excuse "I work best to a deadline," but I wasn't really working to a deadline. That implies that I'd actually done more than just thought about the fact that I needed to do something.

Anyway, the movie is hilarious and sad all at the same time. Sad, because I have to admit that I am a champion procrastinator. I've been working at it for a VERY long time, I'd say since I was 10. The things zeFrank talks about in the video strike very close to home. I mean, I feel the time crunch because I'm up against a deadline, so I go browse a time management blog? Huh? I've found myself looking at mono spaced fonts for use in my text editors... Oh, an text editors? How many does one really need?!? I have at least 10 installed on my computers (not including notepad and word pad which come pre-installed on windows machines). I've even procrastinated going to bed, you can ask my wife. No, I don't mean that I stayed up way too late (though I do that too). I mean I'm completely exhausted. Ready for bed. All I have to do is get up off the couch, go brush my teeth, and crawl into bed. And I think "I'll just 'rest' my eyes for a few minutes." Then I wake up at 3:30 am, freezing because I don't have a blanket covering me. That's what I mean by procrastinating going to bed. Pretty sad.

OK, so why do I mention this? Well, I'm tired. I'm tired of feeling like I have to scramble every time some deadline rolls around. I'm keeping up, but I feel like I'm hanging on by my fingernails, and I'm not enjoying it. A year ago, I had Lori pick me up a book called Getting Things Done with the intention of applying it's process for keeping on top of tasks. I haven't used it. I keep putting it off because of the setup time that it will take. Well, no more. I hate posting somewhere and saying "I'm gonna do this." But if I don't, then I don't progress, there's no accountability (not that there's much on my personal blog site that is read infrequently by only one person that I know of). So, I am going to implement the "GTD" method. I also purchased a book off Amazon.com earlier this week about procrastination, called The Now Habit. I'll probably be talking quite a bit about both of these in my blog over the next few weeks (just a warning). Anyway, enjoy the movie. All seriousness aside, it is pretty funny.

NOTE: I had a movie embedded in this post, but apparently, shortly after I put the post up, the link broke. So, here's the wiki page on ZeFrank's page with the transcript of the video and a link to the video.