Adventures in home working » Me

Facebook

Steve Richards — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 23:06:30 +0000

I’m still not sure about Facebook, as a business tool – seems to be a bit of a time consumer so far, but I can see it’s appeal for kids. Taking a look at Grahams profile gave me a few ideas so at least I have a little content there now and random photo’s and Twitter updates make it a bit less stale. I particularly like the Virtual Bookshelf.

The Shangri-La Diet

Steve Richards — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 01:54:00 +0000

I came across this diet on a few blogs (the wonderful David Pollard and Kathy Sierra) by chance and was fascinated by its simplicity:

leave at least 2 hours between eating food with flavour. At least one hour after eating take some flavorless food (a glass of sugar water or a tablespoon of extra light Olive oil is recommended).

That’s it. More information on the diet is available in this New York Times article and there is an incredible forum that provides an incredible amount of advise and refinement. Seth Roberts discovered it.

My VERY simple version of how the diet works is that the brain associates flavour with calories, by ingesting calories without flavour this association is weakened and this reduces cravings.

I modified the diet a bit because I didn’t like the idea of a tablespoon of Olive oil. This is what I did:

Wake up at 7:00 AM and take 3 capsules of fish oil, 2 of evening primrose oil and 3g of protein tablets
Eat breakfast at 10:00
At 11:30 take 4 capsules of Flax seed oil and 3g of protein tablets
Eat lunch at 13:30
At 15:00 take 4 capsules of Fish oil and 3g of protein tablets
Each Tea at 16:30
At 18:30 take 4 capsules of Fish oil and 3g of protein tablets
Eat supper at 20:00

I have drunk a lot more water than usual as well, partly to take all the Tablets!

The effect after only 1 week on the diet has been pretty startling:

I no longer feel hungry
Cravings have virtually gone completely, I haven’t eaten anything at all between meals and no sweets or treats of any kind have passed my lips
I have lost 4 lbs with no effort
My concentration has improved dramatically
After 30 years of trying to stop biting my fingers, I noticed after 4 days that I had not bitten them once! – this is truly amazing. When I realized this the craving to bite did come back a little but it seems to be fading again
I seem to be sleeping better – no longer waking at 3:00AM

I have just ordered some olive oil capsules so that I can add a few extra calories of flavourless food and perhaps reduce the fish oil.

To follow the diet you don’t need to read the book, just follow the links above, however lots of people say that the book is really interesting because it provides a lot more detail into how Seth Roberts came up with the diet through self experimentation and the science behind it. If you want to buy the book it’s on Amazon here.

I’ll update this blog post every couple of weeks with progress reports.

Architecture Astronauts

Steve Richards — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 23:15:00 +0000

I love this article by Joel Spolsky which talks about the tendency of some architects to over abstract. I have spent many years as an architect, just as many as a systems integrator and quite a few as a developer, manager and project manager but I know what he’s talking about. I sometimes find myself doing the same thing. So every few months or so I make a point of reading his article just to remind myself not to fly too high!

Here are a few words from the introduction to tempt you into reading the whole thing:

When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending each other spreadsheets, and they realize that there’s a general pattern: sending files. That’s one level of abstraction already. Then they go up one more level: people send files, but web browsers also “send” requests for web pages. And when you think about it, calling a method on an object is like sending a message to an object! It’s the same thing again! Those are all sending operations, so our clever thinker invents a new, higher, broader abstraction called messaging, but now it’s getting really vague and nobody really knows what they’re talking about any more. Blah.

My normal workday

Steve Richards — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 22:55:09 +0000

As regular readers know I work from home and have a pretty structured workday, partly because of the demands of my job and partly as a coping strategy for a rare form of systemic arthritis that I suffer from. Having recently read a post titled Don’t take orders from your calendar on the Thinking Faster blog and also a whole raft of posts on attention deficit disorder in tech workers I thought it was about time to share how I structure my day to:

make sure I get plenty of exercise
make sure I find time to relax and meditate
make sure I keep up to date and contactable, without falling victim to attention deficit issues
make sure I achieve something significant each day/week, and don’t just fritter the day away in meetings and email and RSS
make sure I don’t over commit myself or get too stressed
make sure I don’t work too long

To get a good understanding of my day you need to get an overview of my week

Friday – I do a weekly review, what have I achieved, what new work has been added, how have priorities changed. I update my work tracking application OnTime to reflect all this.

Saturday and Sunday (when I get an odd minute) – I open up a group (called “to blog”) of tabs in my browser (Maxthon), each tab is a web page or document that I want to blog about, I then work through as many as I can, sometimes I will loose interest in a topic and close the tab, on Sunday night I will save all the open tabs back as a group I will have another go next week.

Sunday – Having reflected on my priorities over the weekend, I scan my project list and select 3 things I really want to achieve next week. I write these at the top of my white board, which is on the Office door, so I see it 20+ times a day.

Each evening – I scan through FeedDemon and open tabs in Maxthon for every feed that I want to read in more detail, I then save these as a group on my Tablet. I also write up on my Whiteboard (below my weeks priorities) the appointments I have the next day and the tasks I want to achieve that day.

Before I go to bed – I fill in my pain diary, this is a simple Excel spreadsheet which takes 2 minutes to fill in but records which joints or muscles have just been aching, which have hurt or have hurt so much that it has stopped me working, I also record how tired I have been, my ability to concentrate, how feverish I have been and how bad my head aches have been. I also record how hard I have worked, how many hours, how stressed and also how good I have been, diet, exercise, meditation, relaxation, meditation. Doing this gives me a graph which helps me to visualise how I am improving and where I need to work harder. It really works, over the last 4 months I have significantly reduced my symptoms through focusing on the stuff that helps and reducing the stuff that makes me worse.

First thing (8:30 – 10:00) – I check my Email, grab my Tablet and my Treo and go for a walk, like all Arthritis sufferers I get morning stiffness and more often than not a lot of pain in the mornings. I have trained myself over the years to walk through the pain, stop limping etc, after half an hour I am feeling much better. Half an hour is my half way point and I will stop at a local fitness trail by a lake and do some upper body exercises and then walk along the beach into town. During this walk I will either be on the phone or listening to podcasts. I generally listen to about 1.5 hours of podcasts a day and these are mainly technical conferences.

Breakfast (10:00 – 11:00) – I breakfast everyday at one of three beach side cafes, as I arrive I switch off the podcast and synch my email and go have a chat and order breakfast. When I come back my Tablet has started up and my Treo has synced up. I check email for new appointments, reschedules, emails I need to respond to or calls to make then I start reading. I read through the group of browser tabs that I saved from my desktop the night before, these contain web pages and documents. After I have read them I either delete them, save then for reference (using NetSnippets) or save them in another Maxthon group (for example “To Blog”). This is quiet time, I have no distractions and it lasts for about an hour. I often don’t read everything in which case the unread stuff gets carried over to the next day.

Walk home (11:00 – 11:15) – It’s a short walk home, I make any less urgent calls or continue to listen to a podcast.

Personal work time (11:30 – 13:00) – After unpacking, and doing a bit of house work, for example putting the washing in the drier) I am ready to spend 1.5 hours doing some serious work on my own. As I generally work with people in the USA or Australia I tend not to be interrupted until 13:00. Typically this work will involve the development of presentations, writing documents or doing analysis. Towards the end of this session RSI Guard (software that sits in the status bar) will kick in and tell me I need to take a break and do some stretching so I do that as I get ready for my first conference call of the day.

Conference calls (13:00 – 16:00) – During this window of 3 hours I tend to be in conference calls for 2 of them every day. These tend to be pretty complex with 4–5 participants and an accompanying web conference where we will work collaboratively, review, check on status or discuss several projects.

Lunch and Meditation (30 Mins) – Sometime between 13:00 and 15:00 I will try and find time to meditate for 20 minutes and to have a snack, usually fruit.

Family time (16:00 – 16:45) – Time for tea with the family and finishing off some household chores like putting the dry washing away

Take the kids somewhere (16:45 – 18:00) – depending on the day I normally take the kids swimming, shopping or for an evening walk to the park. We always walk, if it’s swimming I will sit in the pool side lounge and watch a video of a conference session like Microsoft’s PDC or LotusSphere or do some reviewing on my Tablet.

House work (18:00 – 18:30) – I tend to put the clothes away and listen to a Podcast while I am sorting, folding etc.

Catch up on email and scan RSS feeds (18:30 – 19:30) – I will check emails that have arrived since 16:00 and will then scan through all my RSS feeds and collect articles that I want to read tomorrow as a group in Maxthon.

Read (19:30 – 20:00) – I try to spend a bit of time relaxing before I finish work for the day and normally I read, sometimes a business or technology book, and sometimes a novel that I am working through ready for discussion at the local reading group run by the library at the end of the road.

TV Family time (20:00 – 22:00) – 5 nights a week my wife and I watch TV with our two older daughters, we enjoy the family time and because we have Tivo we can pause the programs and so have lots of discussion which greatly enhances the experience. Two nights a week the girls are out at clubs.

Reading in the bath (22:00 – 22:30) – I complete my pain diary, do a final sync of all of my computers and then I like to soak in a very hot bath and read, its good for my arthritis and helps me sleep, I get further help because I take muscle relaxants and pain killers.

The end of the holidays

Steve Richards — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 22:33:00 +0000

I had 10 days off over easter, and we walked every day, and had good weather most days. We didn’t travel very far afield but there are loads of great walks within 20 miles of my house. By the end of the holiday I was feeling great, a few aching muscles from over use but generally better than I have felt for 6 months. I spent my time walking, gardening, reading, cycling, cooking, cleaning and playing.

I have been back at work now for 2 days and the only change (as I work from home) is that I have been sitting down for an extra 6–7 hours a day, end result my hands, chest, ankles, knees, wrists and elbows are all pretty painful and I have had a headache for 2 days. The relationship between mobility and my arthritis could not be more striking, add in a bit of stress (none of that so far though, as its been an easy 2 days) and it’s even worse. In some ways it’s almost better not to have holidays, that way I would start to forget how great it feels not to be ill every day.

I just took a look at my – to read – list …

Steve Richards — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 04:24:00 +0000

and noticed how many of the books were in some way related to the mind …

There were plenty of books on other topics, but I think this year must be my “year of the mind”

Books and Magazines

Steve Richards — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 02:35:00 +0000

I read quite a bit, mainly my RSS feeds and related web articles which I print so I am not tied to my computer all day. But I also read plenty of books and magazines. In the Categories Me\Books and Me\Magazines I have listed the most recent just in case anyone was interested.

The reviews don’t appear in the main feed because they are all bulk posted and I didn’t want to clutter up the main page of my blog. If you want to see them you need to look at the appropriate categories.

Staying Fit & Weight-Less While Working At Home

Steve Richards — Sun, 05 Sep 2004 03:33:00 +0000

Home Business recently had an article on this topic and offered the following tips:

Find a professional. There are many experts that can help you plan an individualized diet and exercise program that will benefit you the most while suiting your preferences and lifestyle. Visit professional organizations’ web sites like those of the American Council on Exercise (www.acefitness.org) to search databases to locate certified personal trainers, group fitness instructors, clinical exercise specialists and lifestyle and weight management consultants, or the site of the American Dietetic Association (www.eatright.org/) to find food and nutrition professionals.

When possible, combine business and exercise. Walk to get office supplies or as you talk on your portable or cellular phone; ride a stationery bike while you read your mail; or invite another home business entrepreneur or customer for a game of tennis and afterwards have a business “power” lunch (low-cal, of course).

Plan your meals. Persons who plan their meals and snacks lose weight and eat healthier than those who just grab whatever food is nearby when they are hungry.

Make exercise a regular habit. Skip the cinnamon bun and coffee break and instead schedule short, regular exercise breaks during your work day to dance, stretch, run up and down steps, jump rope, walk your dog or any other activity that gets your heart pumping and that you enjoy. Encourage your family to join you in these activities.

Take the time to prepare and sit down to enjoy your meals. It is also a good opportunity to eat and converse with your family.

Eat breakfast. People who skip their morning meal compensate by overeating later on in the day.

Set up your own fitness “corner.” For inclement weather or for a quick exercise “break,” set up an area in or near your home office with a few free weights and one or two of your favorite pieces of fitness equipment. Find free or low-cost apparatus at garage sales.

Try to avoid eating and working at the same time. You want to be aware of what and how much you are eating.

Keep a log. Journal daily what you eat and when and how long you exercise, especially as you begin your program so you can monitor your progress. Reward yourself each week for sticking to your plan.

In my case I have:

- Stopped buying and keeping snacks in the Kitchen

- Keep a stepper in the Office

- Walk every morning to a beach side cafe for breakfast

- Walk every afternoon to the local supermarket for the food for my evening meal

- Often cycle to pick up office supplies

- use RSI GUARD on my PC to remind me to take a break

- if the weathers fine I use our 10′ trampoline in the garden

- try and swim 4-5 times a week in the afternoon