A wheel of life aims to highlight the areas of your life that you need to give more attention (or areas where you need to give less) so you can work towards a balanced life. I like the approach because it is a simple graphical representation, so I started using the method on a monthly basis to track progress on my goals.
Photograph by PatCastaldo
I started giving scores based on how I felt about each area, but thought this was too variable, so started counting up the number of times I worked on tasks in each area. Although this was tricky to track it did give unambiguous figures to plot. However, on reviewing after a few months, I realised I was measuring the wrong thing; I was plotting how many times I worked in each area not by what I achieved, for example I could spend a lot of time sorting out my address book, but it isn’t as satisfying that I was developing relationships as much as if I had a long telephone call with a friend .
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Tips for using wheel of life exercise
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Posted on 31st August 2010 64 views
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Every month one of my most popular posts is Ask advice: how to label keyboard keys so in response to this interest I’ve put together a list of different keyboard key related items you can buy.
Clothing
Popularity: 4% [?]
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39 keyboard key purchases
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Posted on 21st August 2010 909 views
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One of the benefits of web 2.0 is being social and there is an increasing number of sites enabling you to interact with people local to you or with similar interest. Plus with the increased ownership of smart phones you can interact almost anywhere (I’m looking forward to trying it on a yacht off the south coast of Great Britain later in the summer with my new HTC Desire).
The facility I use the most is Twitter as it is integrated into FireFox using the Echofon add in. It is also the easiest to follow on my Desire. However, as most of my school and university friends use Facebook it is usually an interesting read, when I log in.
The site I’m most grateful for is Bookmooch. It has enabled me to clear out books knowing they are going to a good home and also to get many books off my wishlist. I love getting books in the post 
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Places where I’m social
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Posted on 24th June 2010 180 views
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In a simplistic view, habits define your life. They are the little things that you do each day without thinking and enable you to focus on other things. Think how much less time you would have if you had to focus on breathing, driving or typing. Therefore it is essential that your habits connect with your goals, otherwise you are going to find it very difficult to meet them and it will frequently feel that you are fighting against yourself.
Recognising the ‘bad’ habits
The difficulty with habits is, by their nature of being a subconscious activity, is you don’t always recognise them as habits; and certainly in my life I’ve recently noticed several ‘bad’ habits have formed without me even realising.
“He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual.”
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Why are ‘bad’ habits so easy to form?
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Posted on 15th June 2010 328 views
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IÂ hotdesk. Every morning I start with a desk and monitor, and at the end of the day I pack everything away. This means it’s easy to keep a clear desk as there is no time for items to build up; or does it?
I used to work with someone who kept a perfect clear desk. Although he worked on several projects his desk usually contained his notebook, pen and mug. I loved the space, but by the end of the day mine usually contains significantly more. To help identify my problem, I kept a record, over four weeks, of what was on my desk at the end of the day.
In total, there were 35 different items on my list, with the 14 most frequent offenders being shown in the graph above. Some of the other items were:
- keys
- web cam
- bottle of ink
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14 things that delay me leaving work
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Posted on 10th June 2010 261 views
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It’s the start of a bank holiday weekend and I’m sat in the Chococo cafe drinking a hot chocolate float and testing out my new technology.
Yes, I’ve moved with the times and got myself an internet enabled mobile phone. It’s HTC Desire so I’ve downloaded the Android Wordpress app which means I can write posts and respond to comments away from a computer.
Is it going to change things? I don’t know. I hope it will enable me to keep in touch better as I didn’t send text messages on my old phone and now I can reply to email. If I’m better at writing blog posts that’s an additional benefit.
I’ve still got away to go before I understand what this phone is capable of, but hopefully I’ve got blog on the go sorted.
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Sitting in one of my favourite places…
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Posted on 29th May 2010 408 views
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Recently it has become increasingly clear of the importance of my goal to have multiple sources of income including passive income as my main income stream maybe threatened.
I’ve been tracking the sources and level of my income since the beginning of April 2009 and the results are interesting, and slightly scary.
Sources of income
In the last 12 months I’ve had 5 sources of income:
- salary / maternity pay
- interest
- dividends
- selling investments
- gifts
This is slightly more than I estimated in April 2009 when I suggested my sources of income were salary (maternity pay), interest and from my blog. You will notice that blog is not on my list as I am waiting to receive my next payment.
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Review of income (March 2010)
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Posted on 9th April 2010 624 views
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There are times when you feel overwhelmed with tasks; everything is urgent. So what do you do? How do you choose what task to work on? You could choose the task with the nearest deadline, the one you like the best or the one you are being nagged to complete the most.
I’ve just finished a busy time at work and I’ve frequently felt overwhelmed with my urgent tasks as we approached the end of the financial year. Most days my AutoFocus system works wonderfully, but at times times my mind is so preoccupied with urgent tasks the thought of using that list just adds to my bewilderment.
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Dealing with short term urgent tasks
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Posted on 1st April 2010 1,034 views
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I’ve been wanting to change my hosting company for some time and after a year or so, I eventually signed up with a new hosting company, 5quid host.
However, I didn’t move my blog. The main reasons were the impact of moving the url away from my ISP and thinking it would be better to move this blog when I’d decided on its own domain. But the biggest reason was procrastination; it appeared to be such a big task, so instead I started planning.
Then life gave me a wake up call. My ISP’s server went down. Unfortunately as the engineers looked into it, they discovered bigger problems and ended up upgrading the servers with a different version of php and once they were running again, my blog was no longer accessible. I tried a few tweaks, but still nothing.
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Life lesson from losing my blog for a week
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Posted on 19th March 2010 853 views
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Over a year ago I asked for advice on how to keep a daily log and I used a lot of the suggestions when I started my own log. I kept my log from August to October 2008, a few days before I left work on maternity leave. I also started a log at home while I was on maternity leave (yes, it seems particularly odd to me that I did this with a new baby as well).
Before returning to work in November 2009 I reviewed my previous logs to see what worked and what didn’t and thought I’d share my thoughts.
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Review of my daily log
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Posted on 3rd March 2010 1,003 views
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