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Smarter Working and Better Living

The English are Coming!

Monday Dec 1, 2008

Hi Guys,

I’m going to be in LA, San Francisco and San Diego from the 19th of December until New Years Day! If any of you guys who read my blog want to meet up for drinks, that would be so cool!

If so, you can send contact details to…

jevets01@gmail.com.

Let the good times roll! Dood!

:-) Read the rest of this entry »


The Art of the Yescapade

Sunday Nov 16, 2008

“Hey Steve, want to go for a drink?” “Uh, no thanks. I’m tired and I have some work to do anyway. Sorry!”

“Hey, we are having a get together next week, you should come!” “Oh, sorry, I can’t, I’m er, …busy that day.” “But I haven’t told you which day its happening!”  “Well, I mean I’m busy all week, I don’t think I could make it, I’m really sorry”

“Steve, we are going to London on Saturday for a day out. You should come”
“Ahh, I think there’s something I have to do Saturday, I just can’t remember what it is right now. Can I let you know later in the week? Cheers”

Ever found yourself saying any of the above? Of course you have, everyone gets invited to things they don’t want to or can’t attend for one reason or another. What’s more troubling however are those times when you find yourself taking a rain check when you have no real good reason to.

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Fuck It!

Monday Nov 3, 2008

Fuck It!

I like these two word a lot. I especially like the first word (who doesn’t?), but I like Fuck It in particular when they join forces - oh and I love it when they come with the exclamation mark!

I like Fuck It! because amongst other things Fuck It! represents an almighty letting go of what we had previously been clinging on to so tightly - typically in the face of overwhelming evidence that we are wrong about the Way Things Are. Notice I capitalised that last phrase, and I did so deliberately. It deserve capitalisation because The Way Things Are is pretty fucking fundamental. You can’t argue with The Way Things Are, it just is that way. Sure, things will change and the Way Things Are right now will become the way things were (deliberately uncapitalised), but the Way Things Are will still be, well, The Way Things Are!  You had better get used to it, because it’s all you have to work with. Fuck It! can help you to see that - actually Fuck It! is pretty much all you can say when you do see that!

The other reason I like the phrase Fuck It! is because it represents a Read the rest of this entry »


Adventures in Personal Outsourcing Pt. 3

Sunday Oct 5, 2008

This is the latest update of my Adventures in Personal Outsourcing series. The conclusion of my interactions with my Virtual Assistant that I found at Guru.com actually took place not long after my last post on this subject, but I have only gotten round to posting the update now. My Bad! Anyway, I can say that my experiment with Personal Outsourcing has been very good indeed. Apart from my initial difficulties in finding a VA that would do the work at other, more well know VA companies (notably YourManInIndia.com, and GetFriday.com), once I found Guru.com the offers from VA’s to do the work were plentiful. I chose a lady from India who agreed to post all of my books onto Amazon.co.uk for $25 or about £12.

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Memories are Made of This

Wednesday Oct 1, 2008

We will all get old, but one comforting thought you might have is that by then you should be able to look back on a life’s worth of memories. Memories of all those crazy things you got up to, the adventures you had, the achievements you worked hard for, the failures you suffered, the people you knew, the loves you won as well as those you lost - a vast and lifelong panorama of drama and adventure just waiting to be re-lived in your winter years.

But is this true? It seems to me that taken from the perspective of an Old You, life is all about making memories. It also seems to me that memories, or memorable events, seldom just arrive; you have to go out and claim them! Think about yourself at 90 and imagine what, so far, would that person have to look back on… Are you storing up an amazing and incredible legacy that can be looked back on with delight? Will the Old You truly be able to say “Yes! I have lived! And my word! How fantastic it all was!”

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Why Your Goals Will Die, And What to Do About It

Sunday Sep 21, 2008

We all have moments when we get inspired. Moments when we feel we can turn things around; really makes a change in our lives. In those moments we discover new goals that inspire and motivate us. We start planning how we can satisfy those goals and our future seems deliciously ripe with promise. Unfortunately, over time we tend to drift away from those goals. Something happens so that they just don’t seem to be as compelling anymore. They lose their shine and slowly, day-by-day we get pulled back to our everyday life and before we know it, the goals have died and we are back to the status quo. Why is this the case?

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Every Breath You Take - What the WWW knows about you

Tuesday Aug 26, 2008

In my other blog writing gig at Tastefully Driven Lifestyle Blog, I recently posted an article explaining how to find out what the Web knows about you and suggest a way to set about controlling that information. In the article I explain a DIY approach to identity management and a more extensive approach using a new startup called Garlik. Here’s a snippet from the article:

“In this day and age it’s becoming ever more important to manage the perceptions that others have of us. This is even more true in an age of ubiquitous media, social networking, insta-uploads, tagging and blogging. Before you know it, that heat of the moment comment or deed can be captured by someone’s digital camera or video and broadcast out to the whole world via, Facebook, twitter, or blog posts. And once it’s out there it’s out there for good. Understanding how much of ourselves is online for public viewing is itself difficult to determine - who has time to trawl all the social networking sites trying to track down any personal content we may have had ’shared’ to the world by our unwitting friends (or ‘witting’ [is that a word?] foes).”

Here is a link to the full post.