Use cloth bags for grocery shopping, or make sure you use all of your plastic bags as garbage bags.
Carry a cloth bag with you (I have one that stuffs inside itself, a retractable type), or leave a few in your car.
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Have a system for storing, selecting, cleaning and owning dress shirts.
The system is:
Hang up your shirts in the closet
Use only nice strong wooden or plastic (not the full plastic kind, but strong plastic with the metal hook) hangers
Have 11 shirts. 7 for each day of the week, and 4 for contingencies. But when choosing a shirt in the morning, every morning can be a contingency.
Have 3 white shirts, 1 gray shirt, 1 black shirt, 5 blue shirts, and 1 mint green shirt.
Wear them at least twice. If you are doing the proper thing, you can get at least these two wears out of one shirt.
The advantages to this are many:
- Less laundry
- Easy dressing in the morning
- Good unobtrusive fashion
- Shirts last longer
When you think about it, the only real thing you need on a pda is a calendar and a notebook/todo-list. These are things you absolutely need with you as you are out and about. When meeting someone, or when receiving an important call from work, it is essential that you successfully schedule things. The only way to do this is to have a planner with you at most times. But this does not need to be sync\’d with google calendar or anything. It just needs to be a calendar.
Similarly, for your soft landscape, you need a notebook to capture ideas and a to-do list so that you can get done what you need to get done when you are out and about.
Checking email, and twittering, and searching for donut shops nearby are all great things to be able to do, but for the most part they are not necessary. With better planning, you can do this kind of information gathering when sitting at your computer. But scheduling an appointment for work, and jotting down a great idea, or looking at your todolist can\’t be all taken care of simply through better planning, but instead require a ubiquitous kind of attention.
That being said, one can make the argument that neither the calendar nor the notebook are necessary either. With better planning, or simply by dealing with delayed gratification, wrongly made appointments can be changed, ideas can be written on napkins, or remembered later, or forgotten.
For systemsally, the basic level of functional I want to have out and about is the planner and the notebook. Interestingly, a paper notebook is way more functional than any smartphone\’s notebook feature. With a paper notebook you can write much more quickly, freely, and you can even draw and make mindmaps.
The system: Forgo the smartphone. Keep a cellular phone nearby (expect a system on this soon), for your telephone needs, but do not use anything digital when you are out and about. Instead, carry two moleskine large sized notebooks. One, the weekly planner, the other, a lined notebook. They are much more cumbersome physically than a smartphone, but infinitely less cumbersome mentally and psychically than a smartphone.
The advantages of this system are many:
- You don\’t lose a $200-400 investment if they get lost or stolen
- You drive much more safely because you don\’t have anything cool to play with
- You can be much more creative with your ideas, drawings, and lists
- It\’s classy
- You don\’t have the psychic burden of being connected all the time
- You are forced to be more organized when you do sit down at your portable gtd station at home or in the cafe
I\’m sure there\’s much more. Please leave your thoughts in the comments.
That’s right, my first recommendation is for email.
You probably already use it, you probably even like it (if you use gmail, otherwise you probably dread it), but I’m recommending it all the same. Email is free. Email is open both in format (no character limit, no formatting restrictions, text and pictures and links are all good) and in system (anyone can email anyone else, you’re not tied into one service like facebook or twitter).
In this age of facebook, and twitter, it is nice to have a simply inbox with private messages that you don’t have to reply to right away and people don’t know if you’ve read them or not. Like smacob and sally’s dialogue about blogging vs twitter , email is the victor in terms of allowing the writer/user an unrestricted workflow.
And who knew, that only 10 or 15 years after its introduction we’d be looking back at email as “last year’s model” and as a somewhat outmoded communication tool.
If you haven’t already, I recommend you check out email.
Use twitter, it isn’t all bad.
In fact, you can get more systems, in short form, from twitter.com/systemsally
System Sally recommends you use your public library more than you have in the past. There are newspapers, magazines, books, and free wifi available. Water fountains too.
The advantages to this are saving money and running into your friends
Wake up early on Sunday mornings.
The advantages of this are you can more fully enjoy the weekend if awake. You have less stress getting your work done that needs to be ready for the week. You can fall asleep early so the shock of getting up Monday is smaller.
There is a difference between believing something, and believing in something. Even a cursory glance at a dictionary reveals these two indepedent aspects of the definition of this word. The former it says “an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists.” The latter says “trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something.” I think people underestimate the real difference between these definitions. It’s not just that the words are in a different order, it’s the words require a different order of being. Let me be clear: believing something, as a religious function, is child’s play, but believing in something is a very tall order.
You can get someone to believe something simply by repeating it, or threatening them, or withholding other information. If I don’t tell you about the key I have in pocket, I could get you to believe that we’re locked out of the house. If no information is available, then believing something is just silly.
But you can’t get someone to believe in something just by repeating it or threatening them, or withholding information. Belief 1 is “accepting” but belief 2 actually requires an experience of truth, or faith. It gives power to that which you trust in, or have faith in. It gives power to you for having that relationship.
So, when someone says they “Believe in God,” does that mean they take as true and accept that this indeed exists, or does it mean, like you might say, “I believe in you Jimmy,” that God’s existence is taken as a given and there is an experience of trust.
For many then, the full picture is “I believe that God exists (an acceptance that this thing exists) and I believe in God (meaning I have faith in his power, and trust that he will serve me in the ways outlined in the contract passed down in my religion)”
For many others, there is no belief that God exists, and therefore no one to believe in. For others, God is another word for life, and so while they do not believe that a God exists, but they believe in life (they have faith in life to be ok in some grand sense, even if it is painful in a relative sense).
What’s my system for this sort of thing?
The system is this: Focus more on believing in yourself and the natural process of life than on trying to believe some fact about the universe. Adopting some belief about the world is really easy (and if a religion is incessantly stuffing down your throat, and you’re vulnerable to that sort of that, it’s way easier), and therefore less important in taking charge of your salvation (you like that word lilah!?). What is difficult is observing yourself and your life to a degree where you can actually notice patterns and begin to develop a real trust or faith in life itself. Believing in life (like “You can do it Life, I believe in you!”) is infinitely more productive, not to mention verifiable and solid, than having a belief about life.
So, when life has got you down, or if you subscribe to some belief system, see if you let that go and focus more on believing in life pure and simple. Believing something that doesn’t exist (God) exists will only serve to weaken your resolve. Where a lot of fundamentalist atheists and fundamentalist religious people neglect to recognize is that cultivating belief deeply and strongly in the life process itself (in other words, building a relationship with life) and admitting to yourself how that is a spiritual endeavor is immensely more powerful than trying so hard to adhere so strongly to a belief or deny so adamantly that life has meaning or purpose. Why don’t you investigate the life process deeply (working on believing in God/life) while letting go of beliefs about God/life.
This system has many advantages. Your belief about watermelon is different than the taste of watermelon. If you want to taste the watermelon, and you’re focused on understanding where the watermelon came from you may miss that yummy taste. And you still may get it wrong and end up at the wrong farm. Why not sit and enjoy the watermelon first (believe in God), and if you have any spare time go figure out where it came from (possibly discover belief that God exists)?
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