Jun 26 2007
I grew up with a large orchard and I still love growing my own fruit. I don’t have room for many trees so I have them growing in metal dustbins all the way down the drive at the side of the house.
This month I’m picking cherries every day – I have 3 cropping trees this year, with another one that should start to crop next year!
Jul 25 2006
I am on holiday this week and all 4 kids are doing activities (film and video, drama and sports club) so Debbie and I are able to spend from about 10:00 – 16:00 on our own just relaxing in and around our home town – St Anne’s on Sea. At home I like nothing more than a mix of long walks along the coast (east to Lytham and West to Blackpool), simple Cafe food, cycling, meditation and reading and the last few weeks the weather has been superb, with glorious sun with a warm breeze. When the kids get home it’s time for swimming and beach games – perfect.
4 days into this relaxing routine and it’s also noticeable that my arthritis pain is fading fast, a few years ago and after a weeks holiday it would be gone completely, now it never goes completely but relaxation and many hours of exercise definitely still has a very beneficial effect.
Apr 28 2006
Kathy has yet another amazing post on her Creating Passionate Users site about the fact that animals love exercise, and she questions why we don’t. Well whilst I think its a great article with wonderful pictures of her horses if she came around to my house and saw my four girls bouncing on the trampoline she would see a lot of parallels with her horses. Some of us love exercise too, and its not just the kids round here who love the trampoline, the beach, the sand dunes, the tennis courts, the swimming pool and their bikes!
Apr 25 2006
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:
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.
Apr 25 2006
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.
Nov 21 2005
My youngest daughters (twins) have been studying smoking, Tessa has just finished her anti-smoking poster, which I wanted to share with you:
Don’t smoke because people out there have died.
Just because of cigarettes and people suffered from lots of illnesses.
So you will get illnesses.
Children can get Asthma if smoke is around them.
So after you have read this bit of information
Please stop.
Please.
Jun 29 2005
I am still on a journey of discovery to try and “find what I love doing”, I am fairly content in my work, find it interesting and challenging, but I don’t feel I make a difference, at home I spend most of the time with my family – which is great – but very internal focused. I would like both work and home life to change over time to be more community centred and to feel that I am giving something back to the world and that I live in a more natural and sustainable way. My relatively poor health is currently the excuse I hide behind that stops me taking the risk associated with change.
I do however continue to be on the lookout for advise in this area and I recently cam across these two articles, one by Steve Jobs – You’ve got to find what you love and the other my Dave Pollard ‘Business’ Advice for Young Adults (and Their Parents & Teachers). Check them out if you ever think about your work or worry about how you are preparing your kids to help them make good choices about their future work choices.
May 15 2005
As I work from home I tend to make sure I do my share of the housework. My normal daily jobs include:
Well Debbie and I have been finding our respective daily tasks a bit of a grind, so on Friday we decided that we would swap jobs every weekend. So this weekend I have been:
it’s been a great success, I have loved not having to do my jobs, and really enjoyed my new weekend jobs. By Sunday I had change the routine and made it a lot more organised and peaceful and had written up (stephie laminated for me) a crib sheet that tells me all of the kids favorite meals, vegetables, fruit, drinks etc, as with 4 kids I am always forgetting Hopefully a weeks break from them will mean I enjoy these tasks every weekend, as they say “a change is as good as a rest”.
May 08 2005
I have thought for a long time that going paperless was a good strategy. Now I know why, Microsoft has posted 3 great videos that demonstrate the dangers of office stationary. They really are worth watching, preferably with the family as they are very funny. Another tip, make sure you watch them through a few times watching the background characters as well for best effect!
First up, the Elastic Band next the Paper Cut and finally the Bad Pen
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