I’m one of those people who have been denying themselves, but in my defense, I didn’t realize it. Let me paint a quick picture, but I’ll warn you now that I’m not holding much back below, as it’s important to understand how we get into downward spirals in our lives. Though there is a happy ending – or will be. The lesson comes after the list of misery. The timeline is approximate, with a bit of jumping around.

The Spiralling Descent into Anti-Nirvana

If you’re not in the mood for this list, jump down past to learn what I learned.

1. Pre-9/11, I was contracting for IBM Canada and making reasonably good money, hot on the heels of a nice contract in Atlanta, Georgia. (Where I left a lot of my belongings behind, though that’s another story.)

2. IBM builds a big facility north of Toronto, Canada, and moves all of us, then starts letting some contracts and employees go, especially after 9/11.
3. Except that I’d already paid first and last on an apartment in a town called Kitchener (once called Berlin), twin city to Waterloo, which is the home of RIM and the Blackberry phones/ devices, not to mention Waterloo University – one of Bill Gates’ favorite places to hire from up here.
4. Post-9/11, some people who know me start treating me weirdly. I get angry and bitter, have to suffer through other people’s road rage, and $600/mth highway toll fees. Then my contract ends early instead of being extended by a year.
5. I start a spiralling descent for a period that lasts three years while living in Kitchener. But what saves me is my cat to keep me company, lots of theaters to watch movies in, and my long-time “sister” and her husband as my upstairs neighbors. I was suddenly poor and got ill over time but was otherwise oddly peaceful.
6. Despite finding time to finally write my short fiction and getting a computer book deal shortly after losing the IBM contract, computer contracts are not forthcoming. It takes me 5 years to realize that my anger probably sunk that career.
7. I have to start selling off my $25,000 worth of recording gear, including 9 guitars/ basses, 5 synths and other items at about thirty cents on the dollar. It’s a huge loss that contributes to later putting me into bankrupcty. I eventually have to give up my beloved green Subaru GT, which I’d saved money to buy out the lease with, but now have to pay off the recording gear debts with. There goes a potential career as a soundtrack composer.
8. At some point I lose my Internet connection and cell phone for non-payment of monthly fees. I have to stop blogging (2002). Even though I used to work for a Bell Canada division, I couldn’t convince them to give me another month for the phone so I could find work.
9. It becomes hard to get work, but my mother – kind woman that she is – puts me through a fast-track cooking school, only for me to “find” how racist a lot of restaurant owners are in that town. Much, much later, after I leave the town, I realize it was me, my intimidating frown. But in the meantime, I have to work doubly hard to find even dishwashing jobs. Are you depressed yet? Don’t be. I learned a lot, as is revealed below.
10. My brother eventually buys me a cell phone so that I can actually get calls for jobs. I cook and wash dishes for two years in about a dozen restaurants, for crap wages (and no tips), sometimes working up to 85 hours per week, not having time to eat, and getting sicker without realizing it. I live, believe it or not, on “Mr Noodle” and “Mr Freeze”, which of course triggers diabetic symptoms – fortunately on a borderline scale instead of full-fledged. Eventually my debts are too much, despite my parent’s help (totalling $20,000, for which I’m still trying to pay them), and I have to declare bankruptcy.
11. Truncating the timeline… I return to my home town (or the closest thing to it) as I have a chance at getting in to a Master’s and PhD, only to find politics – which I cannot cope with. I give up after 3 semesters and work for my mother, as well as start blogging again – thanks to a gift from my father of two computers and later an Internet connection.
12. Fast forward to now: I’m still not making as much as I made as a consultant, but it’s better than I did in Kitchener, barely surviving on about $1,000-1,200/mth in wages for most of that period. Though I have a bit more money, I’m still empty inside, still feel isolated – of my own making, again without realizing it.
13. Why? Because I’ve been denying myself many, many simple pleasures, and feeling that I have to stay where I am out of some misfounded obligation when it’s really not true. This is my sin: misunderstanding.
14. I want to move back to Toronto, but that doesn’t seem to be happening quite yet.
15. What’s the solution? Why the place that I was actually happy once of course. It’s a detour for now, but at the least will make me happy.

The Plan

Despite all that I went through while living in Kitchener, and despite the eery resemblance of my life to the happenings of a main character in a novella I wrote (Fall From Grace), I had a revelation tonight, just before falling asleep, that I brought all that three years of misery upon myself in layer after layer, due to my own misunderstandings about myself. And people around me just reflected my state of mind back onto to me.

I still felt very peaceful in those times, despite everything, I had numerous friends that I’d known for nearly a decade, and had the atmosphere of a mini-Toronto to boot.

Putting time limits on my goals only served to make me miserable, saying I had to do such and such by a certain time. I no longer believe in time in the same way I did for most of my life. And tonight was the culmination of my thoughts for the past three years since leaving Kitchener.

My plan: return there, then make it Toronto to make movies whenever. No time limits. Enjoy good friends and being able to easily see a movie in a theater (not possible where I am now) or walk to the Farmer’s Market, shoot some pool, babysit my “sister’s” four cats or what have you. Things that I simply can’t do right now, where I am, because of the location in town, and the state of this town’s transit system.

Moral

The moral of the story is multi-fold:

1. Sometimes you broker your own disasters and think it’s everyone else’s fault.
2. Sometimes, what you think you want isn’t really what you want or need.
3. Lots of money or little money, you can be happy independently of that.
4. Don’t punish yourself; forgive and let go, then rebuild.
5. Don’t set time limits on long-term goals based on meeting them by a certain age. You’ll just be miserable if you don’t do this.
6. As mystical as it might sound, it’s really just pragmatic not to worry about time long-term. Do what you have to do to get to your goals, but don’t deny yourself the simple pleasures of life.
7. It’s not failure if you need to take a detour in your goal plans, provided you’re still moving in the right general direction.

1. Learn what you know.
   What do you really know about the topic? You might know more than you think. Writing down your knowledge in point form (or in a brainstormed mind map) helps you to learn what you already know. This makes it easier to decide what you still have to learn.

2. Learn what you don’t know (i.e., decide what to learn).
   When I was in my twenties and wanted to be an actor, I started studying Lee Strasberg’s method acting by “living” a role to the best of my ability. I try to do the analogue with writing, when possible, especially on topics I’ll be writing about regularly. Now, maybe you don’t need to be an expert, but do you know what you need to learn for your immediate purposes? Whether you’re writing an article, a blog post, a term paper, a technical manual or just learning, decide on the scope of your learning. For example, if you’re learning a highly technical subject, you may need to prep your mind by browsing and surfing relevant websites before the actual learning. This task should be part of your scope as well.

3. Map out your project plan.
   No matter how little you have to learn, it’s still a project, and (mind)mapping what your tasks are makes them concrete in your mind. This plan should be an extension of the scope you determined in the last step. If your learning is going to be over a long-term, and/or if you will be learning multiple topics, a project plan just helps you balance everything without feeling overwhelmed. (I’ll get into more detail about using mindmapping to develop a project plan in the future.)

4. Choose your references.
   Now you’re implementing your project plan. One step should be to choose some references. If you have access to a suitable library, go for it. If not, use a good search engine online and bookmark some suitable references in your web browser. Be as thorough as you need to be, as these will be the soure of your new knowledge.

5. Summarize each reference.
   After selecting your references, read and summarize them fast. I’ll have a separate post in near the future on how to do this using mind maps. Basically, summarize each reference in a few articles. Make your own Cliff Notes, so to speak. For each paragraph in each reference, write only one or two sentences of summary. Stop yourself from going beyond that, and don’t edit your summaries. (You can always go back and re-read if you felt you missed something.)

6. Rewrite your summaries.
   To concretize your new knowledge, take your summaries for all references as a whole and write a short blog post or article, regardless of why you’re learning. Make sure that you use your own words. To insure that, try writing without looking at your summaries, if possible. This is the last and most important step.

I’ll try to expand on each step in separate posts in the near future. If you have any questions, feel free to drop a comment.

There are so many theories and claims out there about the human ability to multi-task or not, and I thought I’d put my thoughts out there. I’ve been a multi-tasker for at least 20 years, if not longer. Though there’s a right way to go about it, and it requires both organization and discipline. I have loads of the former but I struggle with the latter.

Instead of babbling theoretically, let me give you a concrete example. (My posts tend to be long and detailed, but I’ll try to be brief this time.) As of this month, if I can manage the workload, I know have enough writing/ blogging contracts to consider myself a full-time professional freelance writer and blogger. My own sites’ revenue is tiny, but that’s another story. Here’s the breakdown of my workload, in general terms:

• 13 blog posts daily for 5 blogs (shrunk from 7), on weekdays. [Though I I actually post them any day of the week that's suitable.]

• 1-3 large articles weekly. Fixed deadlines, research- intensive, potentially-stressful work because there’s a lot at stake. Retainer work for the foreseeable future.

My work is anonymous, so I’m not giving example links. If you know me, you already know where to find me. But let’s start with the blog posts. I’m now focusing on two topics, shrunk down last month from three. I needed to revise my daily writing focus because for every topic I wrote about, I had to do a minimum amount of reading/ scanning everyday, including weekends, just to keep up. Now, with two topics only, my aim is laser-focused.

The fact is, I can spend, say, 2 hours each day reading one topic and 1 hr for the other one. It usually ends up being an average of 4 hrs/day total because I cross- pollinate my interests by reading other blogs that are related to my topics but not focused.

Regardless, for the amount of reading I do, I can write one post or I can write ten for that reading session. I try to read the night before, write a bit of possible, then continue reading in the morning. Post ideas have usually brewed in my head overnight. While some people might call that “sleeping on it”, it’s actually a form of multi-tasking that takes very little effort. When I don’t do any reading the night before, the next day’s writing usually is very functional and technical, not as entertaining. [Though that's not to say every post has to be entertaining.]

And then there are the weekly articles I write. While they don’t pay as much as a print article might for the same amount of output, they still pay well. What’s more, I’m on retainer with them. For the foreseeable future, I have at least 2 every week. That means guaranteed income and some peace of mind as a freelancer. (Despite the stress of the actual work.)

The problem is that they are research-intensive, with topics that are sometimes new to me. If I don’t plan well, I sometimes end up working for $6/hr or less. On the other hand, if I apply multi-tasking at its best, I could make $30/hr on some (not all) of these articles.

So what do I need to do to maximize my hourly earnings potential? Answer: multi-task properly. What does this entail? Here is a short task list of my methodology:

• Day 1:

• Scope out the problem. Understand what the client needs.

• Write up my genral task list for a given article. I apply project management principles here, which I was partly trained in back in the corporate world in the late 1990s.

• Build a mindmap of all the elements of the project that I’ll need to address, including each section to be written and references I need to read and link to.

• Take a short break, maybe work on something else.

• Spend one hour scanning (not reading) some of the references I’ve been given, as well as building up a list of additional references.

• My mind has had at least an overnight period to absorb what needs to be done, in general. I may not yet have an “angle” for the article. However, I go the metaphysical route with this, due to long experience in writing, and let the angle present itself to me. I never force it. But if I don’t do Day 1’s scoping immediately, I cannot meet my tight deadlines of 7 days or less for each weekly article. If I have details 3 weeks beforehand, then I start scoping then.

• Spend an hour or two browsing and/or reading a few references from my list, just to be sure to prep my mind for acquiring knowledge about the topic.
• Cull the reference list, if possible.

• Depending on when I had details of an assignment, it may be weeks or up to two months before I actually start on a particular article. I have some articles that I’ve set researchers to working on for me three months ahead of time.

• In the meantime, multi-tasking has kicked in. While I’ve been working on other articles and on the blogs, the “background processes” in my mind have been quietly flagging any information I come upon in relation to the project at hand.

• So when I actually reading and making notes, I often find that each section of the article “writes itself” in my head, and I merely have to type it out, then add hyperlinks to supporting references.

• This is what I mean by multi-tasking. Let the background processes in your head work for you by feeding them info early. Now move on to other work in the meantime.
• However, if the article has not yet formed in my head by Day R1, I start reading indepth, taking notes, etc.
• I then write up a draft and let it “sit” overnight.
• This is followed up by an edit to both tighten the writing, add any unlinked references, and get the word count right.

Now, I’ve given “blogging” as an application of this form of multi-tasking. However, you can apply similar methods for any discipline where you have to juggle a lot of tasks that require a great deal of thought and/or research. I use a combination of mindmapping, learning methods, and project management (PM) because it works for me. Without the PM, I’d be a basket case, due to my workload.

The success of my version of multi-tasking for writing is faith- based. I stumbled upon this technique over the years, and it never fails me. Provided I actually trust it and have the discipline to use it. And that’s the hardest part for me.

To further my new topic direction on this site, I’ve put together an initial mind map representing the topics I’ll be discussing here, based both on my own knowledge and that of what I’m researching at the moment. Some of the topics overlap my Prosperity Project site (more on that later), Steve Pavlina, Life Hack, Life Hacker, and others. Keep in mind that I’ve been following these topics since approximately 1975, from even before I first laid hands on a computer in 1977, when my father had a sabbatical at Berkeley University. The techniques I’ll discuss often work from first principles, using pen and paper, but can be translated into digital form. I’ll mix the two together and, when appropriate, let you choose how you want to follow along.

My basic, over-arching agenda is this: to push that supposed 10% of our brains that we supposedly only use. I’ll be straightforward enough to say that I feel that I have achieved far beyond that, but want to go as far as possible, and essentially want to share my techniques. They’ll be here for you if you want to follow along. Anything you don’t follow, you can drop a comment or question, but I would expect you to also do your own research to keep up with me. If you want to push your knowledge and IQ, then come back often. (And challenge me, too.)

By the way, if you cannot view the above PNG topic map, here it is in PDF form. It’s just a placeholder for now, to give you an idea of the direction I’m going, and will be expanded upon later.

I’ve been fortunate to be involved in some education-related writing lately, and it reminded me of my own learning and teaching research of 30 years. I’ve been studying learning and memory techniques since my mid-teens. When I was a college teaching assistant, I spent even more time learning how we humans learn. This quest for knowledge has stuck with me, but until I started reading weblogs such as the inspirational Steve Pavlina, I didn’t realize that there was an online market for learning.

Learning goes well beyond just personal development. My angle is that efficient communication – which this weblog is still about – requires constant learning. That said, this site is now going to focus on learning techniques. I’ll say in advance that some of the topics I’ll discuss here will be fairly intense tutorials meant to expand your I.Q. And as diagrams are important for communication, and since I love to create them, you should see lots of diagrams here. All of the (future) diagrams are under a CC (Creative Commons) and you are welcome to reprint them on your website/ weblog provided you give attribution (i.e., at least a link back to this site.)

I’ll be adding a few ebooks to the mix, as I am able.