The Complete Self

Why on earth did I hold out for an iPhone 4G?

I recently ditched my Samsung Net10 phone. It just couldn’t keep up with where I wanted to go with my business and social life. Seriously. When I traveled (which I have done a lot of recently) I would tote along my phone, Netbook, GPS, digital voice recorder, HD Flip Cam and my iPod. I’m not saying I was living in the days of horse and buggies, but I did bring a bunch of stuff around with me.

What now? I spent the last 10 hours, 3 minutes

Since about the age of 15 or so, I have considered myself a night owl. I would stay up or out late and get up late. I even carried that into adulthood. I would stay up until 1:00AM or 1:30AM working on websites, video production, etc.

However, over the last several months I have been contemplating changing my life. Not that my life was bad or I was miserable, I just wanted to raise my standards.

Around April 27th, 2009 I heard of a program about changing your daily routine. I almost immediately decided to follow this simple program on how to become more productive with my day. At the time I was waking up at about 8:00AM or 8:30AM and my wife and children were up an hour or so before me. I worked late every night and was feeling disconnected with my wife and kids – at least to the extent that I was feeling “out of the loop” in their daily routine. I wanted to contribute to the morning routine. Several changes have happened since then and I want to tell you how it happened…

I do a lot of my work remotely. The freedom of being officeless is great. My office is wherever I have a link to the internet – or not. I can develop products and ideas on paper to. Since I have freed myself from a work location, I have been able to spend even more time with my children.

We recently pulled my daughter out of half day childcare to watch her on our own every day.

**Open this post to watch both videos**

I have several songs rolling around in my head. It seems that every week I have another one that pops in there – most I just discard or forget. It is only the catchy ones that stick. If I am the songwriter and I can’t get them to even stick in my head, how much harder it could be for someone else.

For the last several years my wife and I have struggled with syncing our calendars – especially when scheduling appointments for each other. This is mostly one-way with Fiona scheduling things for me – aka hair cut, doctor, chiropractor, kid’s going to doctor, etc.

I found by designating two hours a week for Fiona to freely schedule whatever she needs me to do works amazingly well. For me it is Monday at noon and Wednesday at 3:30. So whatever she needs to schedule for me she doesn’t have to check – if I am in town I’m available for HER those times.