I wanted to share a specific example of how i was recently able to make it fun.

My goal was to walk Cosmo, my dog, everyday. The first few days were tolerable, but after four days, i had little motivation left to get outside with him. The problem, of course, was that it wasn’t any fun for me.

Cosmo is very hyper and energetic, so when i would take him out, it was a constant tug of war. I suppose this is in part due to the fact that he was never really trained (which is another goal i am working on as part of this).

It was then the fifth night, and i had skipped taking him for a walk during the day. I had established a nightly routine of bike riding. It is quite enjoyable to ride as fast as i want and wherever on the streets—the suburbs are dead at night.

Cosmo knew that i was getting ready to go out and ran and got his leash (something i taught him, he is doing quite well with it). It was difficult not to succumb to his whines and sad eyes, so i thought, why not bring him along?

I attached an active reflector to his collar and ditched the lease. The reflector served two purposes: so i could see where he went, and so—if any actually came—cars could see him, too. Though, i rarely see anyone after 23 or so around here.

He was free to run and roam where he wanted, and i simply rode my bike behind him.

After he tires himself out i bring him back inside and then go out again for a real workout on my bike. He could never keep up with how fast i ride.

After hours of wandering, hopelessly lost in the forest’s early morning, he thought it best to rest. For the marked time, he built up a fire—small, but a great reprieve in the vast cold. Thereby he sat, holding the hands well nigh in the flames. After a tide he let it die down and set a tin cup filled with snow into the coals. He was lost, but not without tea.

From the jacket he withdrew his red, leather bound journal and slowly ran the fingers over the streaming, vein-like crinkles in its surface. He flipped it open and began to write new words therein.

It’s winter now, but all of my thoughts are on the coming spring.

After stones and stones have fallen, the snow will rise up to the earth shadowing clouds—whence it came. Thereafter will life too rise up from its seasonal slumber. There will be new mothers and children. There will be deep greens and pink squinting eyes. Life will bloom.

Too weak to withstand the winter winds, some will die, and the allmother will call them back—whence they came.

And so winter is a time to keenly gaze within. I look inside myself and ask what lies therein: will i—too? Will i run strongly beneath the spring’s white and blue, and among its green? Will i stumble into black, unseen?

His watery eyes fell down and starred at the nigh empty cup resting in the lap. He raised the tin to the lips and tipped the head back. The last—now cold—drops of tea trickled into the mouth. He set the cup on ground beside him and wondered about the words.

Suddenly, breaking the flow of anxious thoughts, he rubbed the eyes, breathed quickly in, then out, and determinedly stood up. He stowed away the journal and kicked the coals around, killing what of the fire lingered.

Therefrom he went, and each step he walked was made with the sureness of a stone. He wayfared the span of hundreds of tree lengths, finally stopping where the trees were not—a frozen lake.

He stood at the edge of the rotting, wooden dock, which bravely stuck itself deeply into the fog. He pulled the journal again from the jacket and threw it into the snow that blanketed the ice. The deep red sept like blood thereinto. He took off his shoes and slid his feet forward to the edge. The toes curled thereover, squeezing so hard that they unkythed into the cold white below.

Swiftly he flailed his arms back, bent the numb knees, and pushed each limb against what it could. Lost no more, he flew into the heavy, gray sky.

But here i stand—and i choose to overcome it all. In winter i will not fall.

Possibly the most important aspect to accomplishing the things you set out to do—and thus becoming productive—is your attitude and how you view your goals.

It is hard for me to have the motivation to do the nasty, boring, dreadful things, like cleaning out my closet or mowing the lawn. I would rather be doing other things—those just do not sound like any fun!

So to get those things done—to become productive and motivate yourself—you must make the activities fun and change your attitude theretowards.

For me, fun usually means a puzzle or a challenge. Mowing the lawn is actually enjoyable when i make it into a challenge: what is the shortest distance i can travel, and what is that path? To solve that i wrote a program that outputs a coordinate-based route. The next challenge is to memorize it, so i do not need the print out.

Challenges like this could be done real-time, as well: i am now very good at mowing my name into the lawn.

Sometimes before you can figure out how to make something fun, you must just do it—once. Doing it just once—a first time—also forces you to focus on what is now.

I recently realized that my diet has been quite poor after leaving university, and so i started to plan out how i would change it. I researched a lot about nutrition and started making a plan of what i would incorporate into my daily diet—so many vegetables, fruits, and so.

But that is where my fatal error occurred—one that i realized has constantly held me back in all of my endeavors for self improvement: losing focus on what is now, immediately in front of me.

Radically changing my diet in a matter of days is not a realistic goal—i realized that i would probably fail this. So i instead went to the kitchen with a new recipe i discovered in my research and cooked a meal. I also made it fun by learning a bit about the chemistry behind what i would be cooking.

There, now i have already begun to improve my diet. Instead of planning out a fantasy, dream diet, i did what i could in that very moment to improve it. Then i said to myself that i would do this once a day. Once i am consistently able to do this from day to day, i will increase the frequency.

I can continue to improve my diet forever, now. I can continue to set small, manageable—yet challenging—goals.

This is not to discourage planning, but instead to make the plans realistic. You must be careful, though, of not making the goals too easy, or not progressing. You know when something would be too easy for you. Remember, make it a puzzle or challenge—whatever motivates you to get it done.

So just try something once. See what you can do now. Last night i told myself i wanted to start flossing my teeth regularly again—so i went and flossed.

If you want to change something, try changing it now.

After i cooked that meal i smiled. I had accomplished something i set out to! It was a good feeling.

Congratulate yourself once you have made something fun, and done it just once. You did it! You are the only person who can make you happy, so just smile, knowing you are not on your way, you are there. You have just been productive. Keep it up.

What is one thing you would like to change? Maybe it is to take your dog for a walk more often. So get out the leash, see how many paces it is to the park and back, and smile.

Make it fun, do it just once, and smile.

After stones and stones have fallen, the snow will rise up to the earth shadowing clouds—whence it came.  Thereafter will life too rise up from its seasonal slumber. There will be new mothers and children. There will be deep greens and pink squinting eyes. Life will bloom.

Too weak to withstand the winter winds, some will die, and the allmother will call them back—whence they came.

And so winter is a time to keenly gaze within. I look myself inside and ask what lies therein: will i—too? Will i run strongly beneath the white and blue, and among the green? Will i stumble into black, unseen?

The playwrights of the heavens died when i looked up with searing eyes and saw them not. I myself must shape what is for me to come.

Now blows the wind, stinging the cheeks and making the nose raw. In the cold white the feet are numb, the hands unfeeling. But here i stand—and i choose to overcome it all. In winter i will not fall.

into greens and reds
tumbled two small grogglemeds
they groggled and groogled
and did what grogglemeds usually do
then there were three more
that came after the two

and soon five and seven, eleven and thirteen,
from every hill in the land were grogglemeds seen

a great din arose, for the grogglemed is a noisy thing
as each and every grogglemed began to sing

“we are the grogglemeds,
tumbling into greens and reds
together we stand, divided by none
except, of course, ourselves, and one”

(WordPress has some frustrating formatting.. the indentations that i originally had were lost and i can’t seem to make them show up here. All well)

Einmal gab es keinen Frosch
then hopped the frog into life.
Next Elin—the daughter of spring,
—med körsbär och en gyllene ring,
gathered the frog and the unfrog,
mashed them together—
and they became one.

So then there was one,
and before that none,
and mashed together—
well that makes one!

More and more frogs would come,
—the amount equal to the first and second’s sum.

And Elin kept on gathering
the newest and the one therebefore,
and mashing and smashing,
until her hands grew sore.

So after none, and one, and two and three,
came five and six—no! eight and thirteen.

There was a whole mess of them,
precisely equal to zweihundertundzehn,
but drop that last zero, i just had to rhyme,
that very last line.

She scooped up the mushy mess,
the guts of twenty one frogs—no less,
and plopped the gooey, blue and black squish,
into a black cauldron, to cook an oh so delicious dish.

Along came a man dressed entirely in black.
He approached the madness, tapped Elin on the back
“Could i have a taste? It smells quite nice”
“Well of course you can, go right ahead!”
Elin, with a mischievous grin, said.

And so the man bent over towards the soup,
so to ladle a gigantic spoonful of the gloop.
But just as he did so, Elin pushed him into the pot,
she giggled and laughed
—but the man dressed entirely in black did not.

“Finally, it’s done, let there be a feast!”
“No, no, no, how horrible, you beast!”
was the call of a another man with a plain brown hat
“You can’t eat another human being, i won’t tolerate that!”
“But he was italian”, Elin pleaded,
“surely a worthless piece of meat!”
With a change of mind the man took a seat,
“Ah, italian, i see! Let us eat!”

A great technique for organizing that i have been implementing for about a year now is color codes. The colors allow one to quickly identify what something is.

The way i first started using it was in school with my classes. I used a colored folder and spiral bound notebook for each of my classes. The cover of the notebook matched the color of the folder. Each color corresponded to a class, such as green for calculus, and yellow for english. For even faster identification, i colored with a highlighter the top parts of the notebooks, so when held vertically and looking down thereupon, i could identify which it was for, without seeing the cover.

The idea is pretty simple, and can be extended to many different things.

The problem is that when i quickly scan over the desktop’s surface in front of me, it is not easy to tell what is there—work or play. If these two things were separated, my mind might be more at ease, taking the burden of determining the data before me away, allowing me to actually focus on the moment.

is it redundant to say organization nazi?

On my desk i see two different types of papers that i have written on. There is a spiral bound notebook with swedish words defined in english and german—a list i have been building from watching swedish films (notice how it is influencing my orthography—also my syntax, see: swedish syntax, and compare to modern english and german constructions in relation to older english forms); and there are pages with sundry ways with words: thoughts on life, what type of shoes i should get for my trip to sweden, that i need to ask Robert something—and so on.

The first type is what i call work—or maybe the yield of productivity.

The other i would say is play, for the papers caught my thoughts as i entertained myself watching movies or whatever i did in the day.

The work came from following through with a plan scribbled on the papers from play.

Now just make them distinct.

A while ago when i used spiral notebooks and folders for my classes, i color coded. Math had a green folder, and i used a green hilighter to make the edges of the pages of the green-covered spiral bound notebook also green, also used for math. So in this way i looked into my backpack at giant colors. Math, as stated, was green, english was usually blue, and german, yellow. Then i had some floating papers, which were idea papers, like the play mentioned above, and some papers for classes that really didn’t give out many, like yoga—i did not feel the need to have an entire folder for my 3 yoga papers.

So there i had distinction between the categories of my papers–exemplified in my organization for classes, such as between german, calculus, english, and yoga. But i did not have a distinction between a paper created as work, like a word hoard (but still fun to make), or random musings of the day.

But i feel now that even my idea papers should be categorized and made distinct from the work. No more floating papers, and sub-folder organization must also change to make distinctions therefor.

So i will be talking later in coming days and weeks how this is working out.

Well—he knew nothing about himself. But that’s not really correct, i suppose. He knew what he liked to do, and what he often did—despite what he wished he would instead do. Discipline he found difficult. Or maybe it was that he found it difficult to accept himself. That he was already disciplined, but could not accept it, and always strove for more.

I watched him on the patio, seated, slouching in a chair, smoking a corn cob pipe, faster than he thought he should. He puffed and puffed away, thoughts swirling like the smoke above him in the air. Thoughts about the future, and to where he would go. About this he wondered; about this he worried.

He stood up as if on a ship—but not yet accustomed thereto. His legs were weary and he almost fell. He was somewhat drunk. The dog behind him wagged his tail and searched longingly for approval—so he thought. The wag of the tail was quickly back and forth, not the slow thumping of true happiness—so he thought.

So he thought—maybe the dog is quite like himself. Back and forth he wags the tail, searching for approval.

I walked up to him, leaving my hiding place behind the brush. He was not startled—his awareness was dulled.

I pulled down my hood and sat in the opposing chair at the cold, metal table. Such an uncomfortable sitting arrangement—who would ever build an uncomfortable place? An unhappy person. An uncreative person.

I asked him, “What do you want with me? I am here now, ask now.”

there are people at all hours
all of ours are gone,
they can’t move,
solidified into what is around them