Back again... or "vanilla sugar"

As everything is settled again after my move in September I'd like to revive my blog this evening. Ok, to be honest, it took quite a long while to get everything going again. It's now end of November and I just drilled the last two holes in the wall in order to install my oversized pinboard on Friday.

I thought, as a "first" post I'd share my experience of self-made vanilla sugar with you: as Christmas time comes along with baking sessions (not too many, as I am not a baking-queen ;-)) I bought two vanilla pods some weeks ago. This evening I put some sugar in a small glass and opened the pods to get the pulp out. I mixed it with the sugar and it really looks like vanilla sugar right now. And it smells soooooo delicious. Moreover, the whole kitchen is now smelling after vanilla. :-)
I am really looking forward to producing the first "Vanillekipferl" with home-made vanilla sugar.

The greatest justice we face everyday....

... is that everybody's day has 24 hours. These were the introductory words to the short seminar about "timemanagement" I attended yesterday with some of my colleagues.

The seminar leader pointed out, as you only have 24 hours everyday you can't really manage your time - you only can manage your tasks you have to or want to do during your time. So it is all about task- or even better: selfmanagement!

For me the whole gist was that I have to organise my business and private todos, obligations, wanna-dos, etc. in a way that they conform with my personal values, with my aims and visions I have for my life. Sounds pretty easy, doesn't it? ;-)

Among other things, she recommended a book of Stephen Covey who is one of the founders of FranklinCovey; it is called "The 7 habits of highly effective people". It is not intended to change things quickly but to spark thinking about the whole subject.
She also pointed out the Eisenhower-method (you can easily google it) or the 72-hour-rule. The latter is really interesting; it says that for everything one really wants to do i.e. for an aim or a vision (e.g. running a marathon or even start running at all) one should make the very first step in the next 72 hours. With this rule you don't clutter your mind with things you may do "someday" and you quickly get feedback if you should stick to your aim or abolish it.

So I just ordered the book of the 7 habits online and now I am going to enjoy the sun and the blue sky outside - another essential aspect in selfmanagement: get your mind, body and soul in balance. :-)

I am excited to read what YOU think about the whole selfmanagement thing, how to cope with your tasks, stay in balance, ... so please feel free to comment.

So delicious

Call me old-fashioned! ;-) I just discovered managing my bookmarks on the web a few days ago. Now I have an account at delicious (formerly know as: del.icio.us) to manage my private bookmarks and of course to share some public ones; maybe you want to have a look at wombat on del.icio.us.
I just installed the firefox plugin for delicious and I am quite surprised how well it integrates - I think I do not need the firefox' internal bookmarking functionality any longer.

Selfmanagement or "Getting things done..."

Yesterday a colleague of mine told me about a really interesting blog entry . It is on "Getting things done" (GTD), a selfmanagement methodology.
First I thougt "ok, yet another self- and timemanagement method" but today I had enough time to have a closer look to GTD. Now I think I'll try to integrate some of the concepts in my personal planning acitivities just to figure out if the concept helps to make my everyday life more efficient.

Just installed chandler on my xubuntu. Chandler is a free GTD tool that can be used on your desktop as well as via a web interface, too.
By the way: if you experience problems while installing it on your xubuntu machine because chandler is asking for libicu36 - here. it is.

How about you? Do you follow any methodology to manage yourself/your time? What pros and cons did you experience?