Stillness of the Night

After the last two days I'm so happy to relax with a cup of tea and write to you, although I apologize I'm a little mentally weary this evening.

So to get down to what I want to talk about tonight: Internships!

to graduate it is required of me to take part in an internship during the summer semester, and this is the time of year to begin looking. So my goal starting after my exams next week is to do the following:

1. Research: I need to know what is out there in order to know where I want to work and where I will receive the best education and experience for my money.

2. Emails: after narrowing down the field I will compose emails to the companies I would like to work for and hopefully go in over break for interviews, or at the least face to face meetings.

3. Resume: I will also have to revamp my resume to appeal to the specific potential employers.

I am hoping to complete each of these goals before going home for break, or by the 17th depending on work schedule.

I also wanted to take sometime today and talk about how all the stress from last night turned out. I had a very productive day with assignments going smoothly for the most part. I had a few things change unexpectedly with assignments but thankfully in my favor. All this made for a very fulfilling day. So as Ben suggested I'm going to celebrate the small victories.

So that's all for today I think

"witty sign off phrase here"

-Bethany

oh also if anyone has ideas for internships in the Mount Pleasant, Lansing, or Ann Arbor that would be awesome! I'm looking for a small business preferably a coffee shop or specialty restaurant.

okay really bye now :)

Close your eyes and hang on to your ass with both hands!

I've just made a very large and PUBLIC commitment (here).  I've got just enough time to meet the commitment, but it'll be balls-to-the-wall for the next three weeks. I've completed the outline upon which will be built the Manifesto, Toolbox, and essays that are punctuating the re-launch.  Good progress, but still... YIKES!

1. Focus
• Take on only one major challenge at a time
• Minimize to eliminate anxiety and overwhelm
• How to find what's most important to you
2. Define
• Setting your sights: A specific outcome
• Specify to eliminate ambiguity, excuses, drifting
3. Make a Plan
• Intense, time-limited research
• (like I did with Think Traffic and ViperChill)
• Use free resources to get a broad overview (blogs, Wikipedia, etc.)
• Work forward and backwards - how do you get where you want to go?
• What milestones might you expect to see?
• Make a brief, rough written guide
• Make a minimalist checklist - what's the bare minimum needed to start?
• Don't buy something to get started, unless 100% necessary (it won't be)
• Your aim is to make it to your first milestone
• What are the first two actions?
• What obstacles do you expect?  How will you handle them?
4. Taking Action
• This is where most people flounder (but... having the previous steps in place make taking action immeasurably easier)
• First Action:  Do it NOW.  Really, actually NOW.
• Next Action:  Do it NOW, too.  Then figure out what the next two actions are.
• Having trouble getting going?  Break it down, down, down
5. Be Accountable
• Most people need a check against laziness
• Methods:  journal (private, public), partner, community, advocate (spouse, friend, etc.)
• What have _I_ used for accountability?
6. Everything is an experiment: how to fail successfully
• Failure preceeds success 99 times out of 100
• Paradigm shift:  Failure and success in an experiment
• Everything is an experiment.  That is, an opportunity to learn.
7. Organize - Minimize - Optimize:  The Blueprint
• A quick summary of all of the above 

Miles to go before I sleep

So today went fairly well with meeting the goals I set yesterday. I did watch about 15 minutes of television this morning while having breakfast and getting ready but it didn't hamper my productivity so I'm not going to feel to bad about it. The rest of the day went well with not watching television. I have also been doing pretty well with my social networking sites today, for the most part sticking to my goal. In fact I used them to a productive advantage today! My friend Corey helped my find sources for my paper (he knows a lot more about that subject than I do), he posted links to my wall VERY helpful.

But today was not all sunshine and productive roses, I'm behind currently due to my lack of ability to turn down social situations. I went to the bar for about two hours that could have been spent finishing and perfecting my speech due tomorrow and other such projects for school. So I feel a little bad about this, but It was nice to get out of the house and wasn't totally unproductive as the conversation was stimulating and thought provoking, and even gave me good ideas for my speech.

As a result however I will be up late finishing this, and I could really have used the sleep tonight. Tomorrow is going to be a long one with two presentations due as well as spending a large chunk of my day outside passing out hot chocolate in the name of secularism. It will be fun but exhausting! I'm looking forward to tomorrow night and the rest it will bring....

so until then...

dftba (don't forget to be awesome)

-Bethany :)

Procrastination and Headaches!

Today should have been way more productive than it was. I'm not going to make any excuses as to why I didn't get enough done but I do want to analyze why I'm doing these things and hopefully by doing this I will be better able to prevent it. Things I do that make me way less productive.

1. Procrastination: I put this down first because in nearly every aspect of my life this is the biggest problem I have. I put almost everything off, and even when I do it I know that I shouldn't so hopefully by admitting I have a problem it will be a first step in fixing it.

2. Headaches: Today I had a pretty bad headache...these stop me in my tracks and are most definitely a huge production killer. The worst part is that they are stress related so the more stressed I get the worse they get, which of course makes me more stressed. Hopefully by trying to lower my stress level I am able to either eliminate headaches or drastically cut down on there presence. One way I can lighten my stress load is to not procrastinate so much.

3. Distractions: I have a horrible habit of using distractions as a way to procrastinate, and a lot of the time I can convince myself that this is being productive.

To try and fix these things I am going to do the following tomorrow: not watch television and only spend 10 minutes at a time on social websites at a time, with at least an hour in between sessions. I will try this for tomorrow and if it goes well I'll continue to the next day. Hopefully by taking small steps I will be able to increase productivity and decrease the negative things in my life. Also I will update again tomorrow to let you all know how it goes.

until then stay classy

-Bethany :)

Better Late than Never!

Alright so I was planning on doing this when Ben made the site...then I didn't (procrastination is one of my biggest problems). So here it goes!

1. Ben this is a great idea and potentially just the kick in the pants I need to motivate myself!
2. I want to use this blog to help keep myself more accountable. I have found making promises to myself is not very affective.
3. things I want to do to be accountable!
A. write on here once a week
B. try and keep track of my business thoughts (if its dumb I still want to write it down) then I would like to post it here to see what you all think. It might be a way to spark discussion and inspire each other!
C. More things to come. (I'm very tired right now, I definitely have more to say)

okay now that all thats out of the way here is my first post!

So I was sitting in Kaya reading and watching the lovely people do there jobs. As I read/people watched I noticed a women run up to the front grab one of those hot coffee sleeves and run back to where she was sitting. This got me to thinking why are they two separate things? wouldn't be simple to just have them joined as one thing? or make the cups thicker?

With this one thought I realized I might be onto a real idea! and began to plan how you would make and sell cups like these. I then went home after my class to do some research only to find that there are a tone of different companies that make and sell cups just like what I had thought of.

So my first big Idea was a bust....BUT it sort of changed my way of thinking about things. It made me realize that event though this particular idea had already been done it doesn't meant that all my ideas will have already be done. For the first time I saw a need and immediately thought of a way to fix it. That is why I'm here and its what all this is for so I'm happy to see myself changing the way I see the world, and who knows maybe my next idea will make millions.

well that's all for today folks thanks for reading! :)
-Bethany

Gearing up for the big launches!

I'm making preparations for re-launching Simple Challenges and launching a new site. Details to come soon!

Far behind, but still in the race

I've checked off only three of the 12 items on my to-do list for Thursday. Sigh. Did I take on too many things for one day, or do I just suck at managing my time and attention?

As Bethany would say, "only time will tell."

Big deal, though. I'm not going anywhere except back to work today. This process is all about growth and adaptation, and I'm certainly doing those things!

Still need to make my first dollar, though.

When writer's block strikes...

I was down to the wire on getting today's post out on simplechallenges.com and I could not get anything good to come out.  Everything I wrote sounded... dumb.  Non-creative.  Not helpful or useful or adding value to the world in any way.

What did I do?  I took my own advice and just wrote about just doing.

There's never enough time to get frozen in inaction.  Whatever you want to do, just do it now.

'Night.

Wooo!

Record day on Simple Challenges - two days running! Must be doing something right :-)

Nap time, then back to work.

'night

God I'm Tired.

In pushing toward my goals, I'm making an intense up-front investment time and energy.  I'm not allowing myself to slack off.

But it's not always so simple.

Sunday was fantastic.  I was wildly productive and driven.

Monday, yesterday, was brutal.  I'm not sure exactly why yet, but I was 50% brain-dead all day.  I overslept on two(!) naps and got almost nothing done.

Today is shaping up well, but I'm still tired.  Maybe I'm just hitting growing pains as I go from being a turd to being a professional writer and entrepreneur.

Here's what I'm doing to figure all of this out and remain on track:

1) I'm tracking my sleep again.

I didn't do this for quite a while, allowing little blips here and there to take their course.  I can see now that I need to get back to being more disciplined about keeping my regular nap schedule.  30 minutes every 6 hours.  I know it works, cuz I've worked it before.

2) I'm tracking my progress every day.

I made a Gantt-style Excel sheet, printed it, and hung it above my desk.  It has a timeline of when everything needs to be done, and in what order, to achieve my 3 objectives.

As a reminder, partly to myself, they are:

- Write here and on Simple Challanges every single day without fail.
- Launch advertising for Study Faster Now by, well... yesterday.  Make that today, now.
- Launch one new niche-oriented product by Nov. 19

Everything else is secondary to these goals right now.


Anyway, this is technically yesterday's "daily" update.  I missed a day by a few hours, but I can't take the pressure off - I just need to learn to work with it (for once in my life...).  No excuses.  They make poor currency.