Rants and Ruminations

On working from home:

I have been doing a good amount of webdesign and social marketing from home lately.  But, for some reason, I never really had a dedicated area in which to work.  It’s not that I didn’t have the space.  I have two extra bedrooms in my house that were available to use.  I just never thought that having that spot to dedicate to work would make that much of a difference.  I was working in my living room and was being fairly productive.  Well, this past weekend the wife and I remodeled our smaller spare room into an office for me.  What an absolute difference it has made.  Just to be able to go in there and shut the door and not have to deal with the normal distractions of life.  It also allows me to keep “regular” office hours.  This has been huge for me and allowed me to really focus my efforts and plan my projects and billable appropriately.  So, for all you people who work from home.  Get yourself a dedicated space to do your work that is mostly free from distractions and you will see your productivity improve almost immediately!

On losing a little weight:

I decided it was time for me to get dedicated about getting a little healthier and shed a few pounds that have overstayed their welcome.  The plan is 3-fold: an interval training running program 3 days a week, strength training on the bowflex the other three days, and adjust the way I have been eating.  The last part, for me, is going to be especially hard.  I have the curse of absolutely loving food.  Not necessarily eating but I love the taste of well prepared food.  Being an addictive personality to begin with I tend to overdo the amount of good, tasty food that I eat.  It doesn’t help at all that I love to cook and try to make new dishes with unique flavor combinations.  The key to this was going to be eating smaller portions more often. Normally I eat, maybe, twice a day and I would eat a healthy portion of grub.  Now I am trying to eat 5 times a day and to target certain types od food for certain meals.  For example I want to make sure and have some protien for breakfast. I also need to add a snack (fruit) between breakfast and lunch, a sensible lunch (grilled chicken sandwich or grilled chicken salad here), another fruit snack, and a reasonably sized dinner.  One helping only.

So far so good this week on the food end.  I am doing it and I am full all of the time.  So we’ll see if I have the discipline to keep it up.  The running is a whole other story!  That is HARD.  I’m gonna keep it up but it isn’t going to be easy!

I know it will bore the people that actually read this blog but I am gonna keep updating progress here just to keep myself focused and on target.