OK,

Finished a couple of books and added a few now.

No More Mondays – Dan Miller

You, Staying Young – Dr Oz

How Life Imitates Chess – Garrry Kasparov

Writing Down the Bones – Natalie Goldberg

Wherever You Go There You Are – Jon Kabat-Zinn

Listening to:

The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle

———-

Do you read a book at a time or have several going at once like me?

Bringing Down the House

No More Mondays

A New Earth

And many more, but I’ll add them later.

In a reading cycle, not much of a writing cycle at the moment.  Big stack of books and audiobooks on CD to go through.

I have a tendency to stay up late, which then makes me sleep late. Over a long vacation, I can get my sleep wake schedule completely turned around. In a recent post I mentioned that on my last big vacation in Florida, I miraculously started waking up early, and was able to become a morning person. This Christmas vacation, I slowly evolved into the night owl again. Faced with having to go back to work, I needed to shift back to a reasonable schedule. Really, there are only two choices:

1. Go to sleep earlier. This one usually means I lie in bed for a couple hours trying to sleep, sometimes tossing an turning all night. Or,
2. Bite the bullet, and set the alarm for early and face a day or two of tiredness. Also, if you are like me, you can easily hit snooze or just turn off the alarm and sleep in.

Since I realized this situation a few days before having to go back to work, and since New Years Eve was my last night of freedom, I chose to start getting up earlier gradually. It worked for me.

What would you choose? Any other ideas?

Somehow, back in July on a trip to St. George Island, FL. I became a morning person. I don’t know if it was the time change, or just wanting to get out on the beach before it got too hot, but I started bouncing out of bed at sunrise. What really amazed me was that when I got back from vacation, I started waking up at 5AM without an alarm clock. I think job stress may have been a factor, but after a few days of this early rising, I decided to start running every morning, and it has been working for me ever since.

It is almost time for the mornings to get chilly, and we’re about to go back to standard time, so I wonder what that will do to the early rising routine. No matter what, we’re planning to keep the early morning runs a part of the daily routine. There are just too many good reasons to get out there first thing and run.

We have a winnah!

Whew! That was a lot of work. I will have more to say about this project later, but for now, I’ll just relax and enjoy the feeling of having accomplished a worthwhile goal slightly ahead of schedule.

Now I’m on the hook to do the NaNoWriMo in November, where you write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Check out NaNoWriMo.org

Ok, I’ll be less available the month of June because I’m writing a 20,000 word screenplay in less than 30 days.

This will of course require daily action, writing at least 667 words per day.

I’m up to over 3400, so I’m almost a day ahead of schedule so far.

Wish me luck.

It’s amazing how something as simple as Daylight Savings Time can disrupt your daily habits, but that is exactly what happened with me and my daily running habit. I had been doing a run a day, for several months until the time change hit. At that point, with the extra daylight hours in the evenings, my running schedule became even more flexible, and I found more excuses to skip a day. Spring could also be a good excuse, with the temps getting into the 80′s here in Birmingham I would postpone a noon time run until late afternoon, but then something would come up in the afternoon to cause a skip.

I would say that to make a daily habit stick, you really have to work to make it a mindless routine. For me, too many options can make skipping too easy.

I’ve read Herbert Benson’s book, The Breakout Principle (Scribner, 2003), and decided to search the web for a good article to summarize the concept for me. I found a great article about the principle by Clarence Bass at http://www.cbass.com/Breakout.htm:

Harvard Medical School professor Herbert Benson, author of the landmark bestseller The Relaxation Response, has been doing research in this area for more than three decades. His latest book, The Breakout Principle (Scribner, 2003), written with William Proctor, explains how relaxation or backing off can trigger a powerful biological switch that increases mental function, enhances creativity and productivity—and maximizes athletic performance.

Four Stages

“The process begins with a hard mental or physical struggle,” Benson and Proctor write. For the businessperson or student, this may be a concentrated period of study and research. For the athlete, it may be planning and executing a demanding training cycle.

“Pulling the Breakout trigger” is the second stage, directly following the struggle. Benson calls this event “letting go,” or “backing off,” or “releasing” your mind from the work mode. As we’ll see momentarily, Benson has demonstrated measurable changes in the body that occur when the trigger is pulled.

The third stage is the “Breakout proper, coupled with a peak experience.” The Breakout, which is always accompanied by a “greater sense is well-being and relaxation,” may be a creative insight or a personal best by an athlete. “Inevitably,” the authors write, “the peak will involve something unexpected—a surprise that produces unanticipated new ideas or higher levels of performance.”

The fourth and final stage involves a “new-normal state—including ongoing improved performance and mind-body patterns.” This stage, of course, provides the platform for the next big idea or performance.

So, if you have been working hard at something, it may be time to relax and allow the Breakout Principle kick in. I could also apply this to running, where after several hard runs, you may have a “Breakout” after taking a nice, slow recovery run. Give this a try and see if you don’t go to the next level with whatever you are working on.

I have been running daily for months, and usually listen to something on my iPod to pass the time. I’ve recently found trance music to be an easy way to run about 10% faster than usual without any additional effort. Trance music is known for having a tempo between 130 and 160 bpm, which is about the heart rate range I like to run. It must be something about the match in tempo with my heart rate that makes me run about 1 to 2 minutes/mile faster than when I listen to something like an audiobook. I found a nice podcast of trance music on iTunes by searching for Trance. Now I have a weekly 2 hour set of new music to run with.

I would also bet that you could use this music at work to really crank out some widgets when necessary. I’ll try and report on this in the future.

Extreme Planning by Mike Griffiths spells out the common sense idea that project planning for software development is not just a big plan up front that never changes, but more of an iterative process that evolves as the solution is developed. Software development projects are difficult to accurately schedule up front, because there are too many unknowns, and every software development project is different. But, over time, you can iterate to a more detailed plan as more is known. This article gives some good advice for planning a software development project. (Registration with Gantthead.com is required, but free!)