25 Hours a Day!

it's hard to serve 2 masters

2012-03-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

Right now I'm working to accomplish 2 different goals. Both are bigger than anything I've done before, and both will be my first of their kind. In addition to my full-time job, my hobby-job, my family, and the rest of the daily grind, I'm trying to:

1.) Train for an Olympic length triathlon race at the end of May - a 1 mile swim, 28 mile bike ride, and 6.2 mile run. If I'm in top shape and push myself to my limits, I could probably finish in less than 3 hours. (that's my goal, anyway). Realistically, though, 3.5 hours is more likely.

I've run plenty of triathlons over the last couple years, but none has been longer than about 2:15, which is just about the time your body needs to start burning its own fat as a fuel for exercise. This will be my first event where I'm likely to "hit the wall" and have my body completely change fuel sources, and I'm both nervous about it and excited for the challenge. But most of all I want to be in good shape - ready both physically and mentally for whatever race-day might bring..

2.) Write and publish a book. I've been jotting down notes, snippets, and ideas about productivity and time management for quite awhile, and I set a goal for myself to compile, write & publish this as a book by the middle of 2012.

Unfortunately, it's hard to serve both masters. When I'm training, I'm thinking about writing my book. When I'm writing, I'm feeling guilty and stressed out about skipping a workout. Something's gotta give - I can't keep juggling all these balls in the air while simultaneously putting this much effort into both big projects, each of which is going to take 100% of my best effort over the next 3 months.

Looks like it's time for some soul searching over the next week or two...

- Chris Butterworth

scatterbrained? try single tasking

2012-03-06T06:10:00.000-08:00

I have ~~too many~~ lots of things to do at any given time. In fact, here's what's rattling around in my brain right now:

~~Finish and publish one of the half-written posts I have for this blog.~~
Write up (and publish) some of the thoughts I have for my real estate blog.
Start writing my monthly email newsletter.
Scan (and tag) into Evernote the pile of papers on the corner of my desk.
Follow up with the loan officer regarding a potential real estate purchase.
Book the free trip to San Francisco my wife & I got for sitting through that time share presentation.
Purchase season passes to Wet n Wild for the summer.
Respond to several emails.
Read (or at least skim) the scores of posts waiting for me in my feed reader.
Dozens of other smaller things to do.

Each day I have a block of time to work on this stuff in the morning, and another block of time in the evening after the kids to go bed. In addition, I have short snippets of time during the day - 3-5 minute stretches here & there while I wait for a report to run or for an email to be answered.

I find that whenever I look at the list as a whole, I get overwhelmed thinking about all of them, and I usually don't get much of anything done. However, when I single-task and focus on one item exclusively, I get it done and am able to move onto the next item.

The trick is to plan ahead. I review my list, either at night or first thing in the morning, so I know which items are critical, which will take a long block of time, and which ones I can work on during my 3-5 minute drills during the day. When the time is right, I pick a task and give it all my focus and energy until it's complete. Then I can cross it off my list and move onto the next one. In fact, I'm going to cross that top one off my list right now!

- Chris Butterworth

the process creates the results

2012-02-28T06:08:00.001-08:00

The process creates the results - in weight loss, and in just about everything else. Set up a system to make lots of sales calls, and you'll get lots of clients. Hit hundreds of forehands each day, or shoot hundreds of free throws, and your game will improve. Exercise everyday, and your weight will drop. (so will your heart rate, blood pressure, and cholestoral.) But it takes a consistent effort and may take longer than you thought. Here's my story:

I ran a 10-mile race last Thanksgiving. It was the longest I had ever run at one time, and the three months leading up to the race saw my highest training mileage ever. I'm a fairly thin guy with a fairly fast metabolism (yes, I'm lucky in this regard), and I had to eat a ton just to maintain my weight when I was running this much. Then, after the race, I took the month of December off, partly to rest & recover, and then due to the Holidays.

Unfortunately I didn't change my diet, and I ended up gaining 7 pounds in December. When I went back to the gym in early January, I weighed more than I ever had in my entire life! But I wasn't worried - once I started working out again the weight would fall right off, right?

Well, six weeks later I had only lost 1.5 pounds, and I was getting frustrated. It wasn't a body image thing - heck, most people would still call me thin. But my pants were a little tight, and I didn't like running while carrying an extra dumbbell's worth of weight! So I decided to get a little more aggressive with my diet. Here's my plan:

Eliminate all the grazing & sugar-snacks from my diet.
Reduce my lunch to be a more modest portion. Doesn't matter what I eat, or where it's from - just eat a little bit less than I normally do.
Continue to work out at a similar frequency and intensity.

By doing those three things, I should eliminate lots of calories from my daily intake, and the excess weight around my belly should quickly melt away. Here's what I eliminated:

Sunflower seeds (200 cal) - I normally graze on seeds in the mid-to-late morning while I work. But I've stopped.
Extra juice (200 cal) - I drink at my desk a mix of 8oz fruit juice with 24oz water, just because when it's plain water I find I don't drink enough of it. I've reduced the amount of fruit juice to 3-4oz per cup. This has eliminated 12-15oz of fruit juice from my daily intake.
Extra lunch (250 cal) - My smaller portions at lunch have eliminated some calories each day.
Afternoon soda (140 cal) - This is the thing I miss the most, but I haven't had a Coke or Dr Pepper in the last 9 days.
Afternoon candy (150 cal) - My office always has Red Vines, cookies, pretzels, or some other snack in the kitchen which made for some afternoon grazing. I've stopped eating these snacks.
Evening sode (140 cal), with 1 shot of bourbon (100 cal) - My "dessert" at home most nights is a bourbon & Coke - mmmmm. But I've laid off that as well.

Add it all up & I've eliminated 1,180 calories PER DAY from my diet. That's 8,260 over the course of a week! I figure I should drop those pesky 6-7 pounds in a week or two.

On top of all that, I also stepped up the intensity of my workouts. (I'm a very goal-driven person, and once I set up a goal I sometimes push harder than I should to achieve it.)

So what happened when I weighed myself at the gym yesterday morning? I was UP 3.5 pounds. 2 pounds heavier than I was at the end of December, and setting a new record for the heaviest my body has ever been. I even had to move the bottom weight on the scale to a new marker..

The only reason I can think of is that I added muscle mass. I added cross-fit workouts to my training regimine this year, in addition to running, biking and swimming. And last week was a cross-fit week. I did more squats, pull-ups, thrusters, and burpees than I can count, and I was insanely sore. Hopefully I burned off some fat & added some muscle; time will tell.

In the meantime, I know I have the right process in place, and it's just a matter of executing the process each day to see the results I'm looking for. Let's see what happens over the next few weeks (biking, swimming, and running)…

-Chris Butterworth

fun way to track your progress

2012-02-23T14:31:00.000-08:00

We all know you're supposed to track your progress towards your goals, and there are dozens of methods for doing so. Today I stumbled across one that was a little different than the others - an easy way to plot your distance on a map to see how far you've run, biked or swum!

Here's mine so far this year. (measurements as of today; click either picture to enlarge.)

Key:

Running - the radius of the green circle, centered at my house.

Biking - the radius of the red circle, centered at my house.

Swimming - the radius of the white circle, centered at the end of the Huntington Beach Pier in Southern California.

For me personally, this is a big motivator. Whenever I can see my progress, I want to go a little further each time, knowing the circles will grow! I wonder if I'll be able to swim all the way to Catalina Island by the end of the year, or if I'll run far enough to leave the State?

These circles are super easy to create over at a website called FreeMapTools.com. The only downside is I can't find a way to make them dynamic, where the circles get bigger automatically as I enter my new workout results. Maybe somebody out there will build a tool that does that.. Are you listening, RunKeeper? In the meantime, I'll just update this once in awhile to see how far I've gone.

ps - My RunKeeper results are public, so you're always welcome to see what I've been doing lately. Or better yet, join my street team. (not sure what to do with a street team yet, but I'm sure there's something for it...)

-Chris Butterworth

hard work beats talent...

2012-02-20T09:01:00.000-08:00

…when talent fails to work hard.

Rumor has it this was a slogan posted in the University of Arizona football team's locker room. (I cannot confirm the rumor is true, but I love the slogan whether it's true or not.)

Obviously, if both teams prepare & play their hardest, the team with the most talent should win. But that's not what happens; that's why they play the games. It's why a team of 'smaller' players from the middle of nowhere in Idaho (Boise State) is consistently ranked in the top 10, and why a small school in Indiana with an enrollment of less than 5,000 students (Butler University) has played in the National Championship game two years in a row. And we've all seen the clip of coach Jim Valvano running around the court like a crazy man after his little team from North Carolina State beat the Phi Slamma Jamma giants to become National Champions in 1983.

The story about the tortoise and the hare is a corollary to this slogan. If the hare doesn't get distracted, he wins, and by a large margin! But focus and hard work mean a lot, and it's why the tortoise has a chance.

It doesn't matter how much talent you have; if you're not working hard with laser-like focus, you're giving your opponent the advantage.

-Chris Butterworth

don't cheat yourself

2012-02-16T06:36:00.000-08:00

One of the things at the gym that drives me crazy is seeing people (not to be sexist but it's almost always women) on a fully inclined treadmill, jogging or speed-walking at a fast pace, and holding onto the bar for dear life! They look like they're water skiing behind a boat, wearing out their arms & back more than their legs.

That's cheating, and it really bugs me. Last spring I spent a lot of time on those fully-inclined treadmills, so I can tell you first hand how hard that is. I was training for a triathlon which was going to have lots of steep hills, and I wanted to be prepared. I could usually keep the pace between 3.0 and 3.5 - any faster and it would burn me up. And I was in GREAT shape at the time. I would be drenched in sweat, with my calves ready to explode, and trying to think of anything else except the pain my legs & lungs were in.

To see these women skiing themselves uphill at a significantly faster pace than I could do, while they're talking to each other & enjoying themselves, just doesn't add up.

If you're trying to burn extra calories by walking uphill, walk uphill! Using a tow-rope isn't burning calories. Heck, why not just wear Heely's & roll yourself evern faster?

The same holds true for any other activity. It's one thing to use every advantage possible when you're being rewarded for your results. But when you're goal is self improvement, you're only cheating yourself when you cheat.

-Chris Butterworth

happiness is...

2012-02-13T10:16:00.000-08:00

… "Your reality divided by your expectations."

- Warren Buffet

Maybe the most accurate quote ever.

And since it's a simple equation, you can increase your happiness by either increasing your reality or by reducing your expectations.

Reducing your expectations..? hmmmm. Easier said than done, but powerful stuff.

- Chris Butterworth

Evernote power-user tip - 8 useful keyboard shortcuts

2012-02-09T05:48:00.001-08:00

The faster you can make Evernote work, and the more it works just the way you want it to, the more valuable it becomes. Enter keyboard shortcuts - key combinations you can use so you don't have to slow down and reach for a mouse. Here are the 8 shortcuts I've been using most often:

1. tag list (ctrl + alt + t) - when inside a note, or when selecting a note (or multiple notes) from the notelist, this brings up a full list of tags. You can quickly add & remove tags from these notes.

2. bullet points (ctrl + shift + b) - probably half of my notes have bullet points. They help me organize my thoughts, and the tab / shift-tab work very well for indentation and un-indentation (I've found some of evernote's formatting to be a bit quirky.) It's a quick & easy way to group various thoughts and sub-thoughts together.

3. list view (ctrl + F5) - brings up your notes in list view, with the note preview pane at the bottom of the screen. Perfect for perusing a longer list of notes and/or sorting by a specific column.

4. snippet view (ctrl + F6) - brings up your notes in snippet view, with the note preview pane on the right of the screen. Perfect for perusing a shorter list of notes. I also like the preview pane in this view better for drafting & editing notes.

5. hide / unhide preview pane (ctrl + F11) - especially useful with the list view, this removes the preview pane altogether and gives you a full screen of your listed notes. Pressing it again toggles the preview pane back into view.

6. view notes from a specific tag (ctrl + shift + t) - from the notes list, this will bring up a drop-down list of all tags. Typing the first couple letters of the tag you want will quickly bring up that tag. Hit enter, and your screen displays only the notes within that tag.

7. print screen / screen clip (windows + prtscrn) - allows you to use the mouse to grab any part of the screen, and create a new note conatining that exact image as an image file. You can click to open, right click to save as, copy, etc.

8. copy screen clip (windows + prtscrn, then ctrl with mouse) - same as screen clipping above, except if you hold down the ctrl key while you clip, the screen clip will be copied to the clipboard, where it can be pasted anywhere - email (and then a blog post!), a different note, word / excel, paint, etc.

I find that with keyboard shortcuts, like a lot of other things in life, it's difficult to digest them all at once and completely change how you're using evernote. It's probably better to work on using one or two of them until you become fluent with them, then add another. lather, rinse, repeat, until eventually your hands don't leave the keyboard anymore!

-Chris Butterworth

mailing it in - blogging by email

2012-02-06T11:46:00.000-08:00

Faster & easier. I'm always on the lookout for ways to do things faster &/or easier. It looks like blogger offers an option to email a blog post to my blog. If that's true, I'll have one more option for publishing a blog post, especially from the field.

As it stands now I compose most of my posts in Evernote, whether on my mobile phone or my computer. Then, when I get to my computer, I log into blogger, copy & paste my post, and publish. But, sometimes the formatting needs a little massaging. And other times it's several hours before I'm at a computer. Heck, I might even wait until the next day rather than exerting myself with those 4-5 mouseclicks if it's late at night!

So, blogging via email could be useful, since I have access to email from almost anywhere / anytime.

The real question is, how will blogger handle this email? Only one way to find out.

Below is a bullet list with some of my questions:

My default email font is trebuchet, navy blue. Does blogger strip that & use my blog's default, or will this font render?
What will this bullet point list look like?
How about other changes to the font, such as bold, underline, italics, or a different color (red)?
And spacing - I'm double-spacing between paragraphs in this email; will blogger recognize that?

My next concern is regarding pictures - will blogger understand & include photos? I'm going to insert one photo into this email, directly below this sentence. It's a picture of me with my 2 kids, just before running the Turkey Trot a couple months ago.

photo above ^

ps - the photo is 1024 px wide - will blogger resize it to fit w/in the blog's column?

And finally, I'm going to attach a photo to the email. It's a picture of the choppy water at Lake Pleasant before a particularly cold triathlon last spring. Where will blogger insert that image, if it inserts it at all?

The bottom line is that faster & easier is a good thing, but it has to be functional as well. If this email-post looks ok, then I'll have one more arrow in my productivity quiver...

-Chris Butterworth

Scalable workouts make working out with a partner more fun

2012-02-02T06:21:00.000-08:00

Last weekend my wife & I worked out together. We're both frequent exercisers individually, but we have different bodies (obviously!) and tend to exercise differently. She's very flexible and has a stronger core and more definition than me - I don't think I could do 5 minutes of her 20 minute routine doing core work on the fitness ball. On the other hand, I'm stronger, more explosive, and have more endurance than her - she couldn't keep up with me in a run, bike, or swim.

So how did we workout together for 40 minutes? Crossfit.

We gathered up some of the exercise equipment from around the house - dumbbells, kettlebell, fitness ball, jump rope, pull-up bar, - and brought them into the room with the Versaclimber (best piece of equipment I ever bought!)

Next we set a timer for repeating 5-minute intervals. While one of us climbed, the other would hit the smaller equipment doing squats, lunges, push-ups, pull-ups, ab work, etc. Then we switched.

A few beeps of the timer later, and we had done 40 minutes of hard work without resting! It was a great workout, and it was great working out with Cheryl. I'm looking forward to making this a regular part of our weekends.

-Chris Butterworth

This one thing can make or break your day

2012-01-25T15:49:00.001-08:00

I've written about single tasking and single mindedness before - if you know what you're going to accomplish before you start, it's much easier to eliminate the pull of all those distractions. If you're just wandering through the motions, you might as well not even try...

from Seth Godin:

The first thing you do when you sit down at the computer

Let me guess: check the incoming. Check email or traffic stats or messages from your boss. Check the tweets you follow or the FB status of friends.

You've just surrendered not only a block of time but your freshest, best chance to start something new.

If you're a tech company or a marketer, your goal is to be the first thing people do when they start their day. If you're an artist, a leader or someone seeking to make a difference, the first thing you do should be to lay tracks to accomplish your goals, not to hear how others have reacted/responded/insisted to what happened yesterday.

I couldn't agree more.

-Chris Butterworth

running in the cold is hard

2012-01-19T06:09:00.000-08:00

It's been just about 2 years since I decided to get off the couch and get into shape. My goal at the time was to run a triathlon in May 2010.

In the winter-spring of 2010 I did most of my training at about lunchtime. In winter-spring of 2011 I was training in the mornings, but it was mostly at the gym. This is the first time I've been training outside, in the mornings, in the dark and the cold (43 degrees this morning), and I have to say, it sucks.

It's harder to get out of bed, and it's harder to get motivated for a good workout. I don't know why exactly, and I've been successful at getting my workouts done. But my body/mind doesn't want to - it takes a little extra push every step of the way. I have to push myself to get out of bed. I almost talk myself out of working out before I start. Then I try to talk myself into cutting my workout short. By the time I'm actually finished, I'm exhausted - and only partly from the workout!

Hopefully it gets easier as I do it more. Worst case - March isn't too far away, and the mornings will get warmer & sunnier..

-Chris Butterworth

can I upload audio?

2011-03-25T12:56:00.000-07:00

could I use blogger to host a podcast series?

I'd probably have to ftp the audio file to tpa & just link to it from here..

What's this all about?

2009-04-15T14:14:00.000-07:00

I write a lot, about several different topics, and I always seem to have too many thoughts in my head.

I have a full-time Real Estate blog: ThePhoenixAgents.com. (and of course my professional About Me page.)

I write for families dealing with Autism at HappyChucks.com (and another About Me page.)

This blog gives me a place to write about ideas which don't relate to either topic very well, or about concepts I haven't worked all the way through yet - sort of a rough draft area for ideas. It also gives me a place to catalog my ideas, so I know where to find them 6 months later!

what's it all about?

2009-03-30T14:21:00.000-07:00

What am I writing about on this blog? Is there enough to write something everyday?

Marketing - general practices

Marketing - real estate advice & specifics

Long-term planning (business, health, finance..) (generationally, as opposed to 10 years.)

Moving Mountains

Observations of people &/or organizations doing good &/or bad things

Technology (if/when it doesn't belong on TPA)

Personal Finance (without my own personal details)

Personal Health (without my own personal details)

Can I keep posts under 200 words?

What labels do I need?

Style - I want it to be very basic, especially to start with. Labels, Archives, links to About Me (AM pages on other sites) & my other sites. That's about it.

testing slideshow

2009-03-29T06:46:00.000-07:00

What if I wrote a post here & input a slide show?

How's this look?

My blogs

2009-03-28T08:17:00.000-07:00

This blog is a placeholder, as I think at some point in the future I may combine a couple/few other blogs into one. In the meantime, you can read me at:

http://thephoenixagents.com/ - all about Phoenix-area real estate, real estate in general, and other general musings.

http://www.happychucks.com/ - helping families navigate the Autism waters.