You know, this 7 Habits stuff is hard.  It isn’t easy to sit there and write out what you value, what things mean to yourself, or a personal mission statement.  It sounds easy.  But really examining what it means to you is very difficult.  No wonder they don’t teach this stuff in schools.  It’s too hard for the teachers to understand.

I also suppose that if you don’t have the fall back position of a religion to tell you what you should think and be, that it could be harder for you to come up with the answers.  Yet I think you will have better answers for coming up with them yourself rather than just cribbing something from religion or someone else’s belief system.

This reminds me of when I was on Jury Duty.  One of the attorneys asked if we thought consensus would be better reached by having everyone on the Jury being the same, instead of diverse.  My answer was “It may not be an easy consensus, but it will be a better consensus” for having the diverse Jury.  Same thing with your life.  It may not be easy to plan your life yourself, but you will have a better life for it.

Yesterday I decided I had had it with being quarantined so I went back downstairs.  I still have a bit of a cough, but otherwise I feel much better.  I got to sleep in my own bed again.  Of course, this also means I am headed back into work today.  I feel ambivalent about work, but I am out of sick leave and really don’t want to use up anymore of my vacation leave.

So I am now reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  I have heard about this book for a long time, but I always resisted reading it.  I’m not sure why I was resisting it, as it is a very good book, and I agree with much of the content within it.  The reason I finally picked it up was because I have started to use a FranklinCovey planner (yes, a paper planner).  I was intrigued by some of the pages within it that have you identify your values and write a personal mission statement, so I decided to pick up the book.

I woke up on Thursday with a sore throat and a fever. I decided to not go into work and went to the doctor. They ran tests for Strep, Flu, and Mono. All came back negative. So I’ve been home the past few days (might explain some of the work on the blog).

Because Amy and the kids just got over being sick, I didn’t want to infect them with whatever I had. So my dad came up and helped install our old window AC unit in our bonus room (which is not connected to the duct work for the heat pump). I’ve since quarantined myself up here. It’s very boring, as there is no TV. Thankfully there is Hulu.  I got to watch the new Robotech: Shadow Chronicles movie.   Pretty cool.

I just hope I get over this soon and can rejoin my family.  I really miss getting to hang out with them.  Amy is having to do too much of the chores right now.  She never gets a break.

Well, I’ve been playing around with the blog a little today. You might have noticed I changed themes to TypoXp 2.0, with a few modifications by me to display tags. I like the theme quite a bit, despite the age of it. Considering that I would like to modify it somewhat, this is a good thing, as I don’t have to worry about trying to add my modifications into an update of it.

This is a test of the dragonlab blog publishing system. Had this been a real post there would have been content here ->

So I picked up a Nintendo DSi today. It is a very nice machine compared to the original DS. And the Opera based DSi web browser rocks.

Yes, I am blogging this from the DSi.

Jury Duty, that’s what.  No futher comments about that experience, other than I am glad it is over.

Amy just got over having the flu.  Care Bear has the flu now.  It is heart rending to see a 3 year old with the flu.  If I am lucky I won’t catch the flu, and can return to work tomorrow.  I took some time off to take care of the kids while Amy was sick.

So I have been doing a lot of reading and searching on the web on organization and time management.  I’ve read Getting Things Done, and have figured out it’s just not for me.  While searching on the internet I ran across Mark Forster.  I started doing some of the things I found on his website and my productivity increased.  More importantly, my stress level has gone way done.

Mark is beta-testing a new time management system right now, called AutoFocus.  While the concepts in AutoFocus are interesting, I have been reading his book “Do It Tomorrow“.  I have been implementing some pieces of DIT, and I have to say it is actually working for me (something that GTD failed horribly to do).  I really like the ideas in it, as well as the fact that he expects you to be a person, instead of a superman.

Highly recommended.

Well, as cool as it was to have the web on my phone, I have canceled the service.  We mostly use the messaging, which I retained.  I also dropped the number of minutes on the plan, as we rarely make any actual voice calls.  By doing this, I cut my cell phone bill in half, saving around $70 a month.

Of course, this also means I no longer have email on my phone, but I do still have the messaging which my wife and I use all the time.