Book Review: Do More Better

Do More Better by Tim Challies

So maybe I’ll just use my blog as a place for my book reviews.  You’ll get very… personal and somewhat self-absorbed reviews.  My reviews are written for personal edification, but maybe they can help someone else as well?

I’ve go to say, this is an excellent book. It’s my second time reading through it. And while I have some vague systems in place still from the last time I read the book, I am far from being an expert in productivity. So far from it, that I had to read it again.

I have a new job, and unlike working nights where my responsibilities were to just do whatever I needed to as it happened, my new job is quite different. My new job requires balancing multiple projects, training everyone department-wide, updating and writing new policies & procedures, being the driving force in an IV room remodel, and… well, this new job requires a very different set of skills. I am excellent at being a night shift pharmacist, but after a month of being responsible for our sterile compounding, I’ve found myself feeling a bit overwhelmed.

Enter this book. As I mentioned, I’ve read it before and found it to be very useful. The basic premises of it are to define your roles in life so that you may know what it is you should be doing. From there, he helps to further breakdown and define your roles, and then why are you doing them? The answer is ultimately for the glory of God, but why do I do what I do? Why do you do what you do?  The way he has you break down your various roles (mine are Personal, Family, Church, Pharmacy, and Social), and then duties within those roles.

From there, he helps set up a task manager (focusing on Todoist), a calendar (focusing on Google Calendar), and information management (focusing on Evernote). I chose Todist, Google Calendar, and Microsoft OneNote. His descriptions are specific for each of the programs, but I had no problem setting up OneNote in place of Evernote; I’m sure you can use the task manager and calendar of your choice.

Overall, this is a very short book. It give stringent examples, but is open to say that they are just examples.  He makes it clear that setting up your own system should be adapted to fit your own roles and responsibilities, and should not be set in concrete.  Everything he suggests comes across as a suggestion, and adaptable over time.  I easily got the book read and everything set up in a single day (granted in a single day off from work with the kids in school).  Tim Challies has a way with taking information and putting it into understandable and concise words. It’s a short book at only 120 pages, but the amount of useful processes it contains, are more useful than most any book I’ve ever read on productivity.

My brain is already relaxing from having an external system for capturing and processing information.

☆☆☆☆☆

 

Book Review: God’s Battle Plan for the Mind

Tags

Books, Meditation, Puritan

God’s Battle Plan for the Mind: The Puritan Practice of Biblical Meditation, by David W. Saxton 

Might as well do a book review, right?  I mean, I do book reviews on everything I read for my own personal edification and memory.  I’ll share some of them.

Overall, God’s Battle Plan for the Mind a good book. He begins by explaining not just the importance of Christian meditation, but bolsters his argument by diving into a multitude of Puritan authors and preachers and their insistence of it’s importance.  Christian meditation is a practice that is nearly lost in modern times.  Christian meditation is such a lost part of the Christian walk, that the Christian who presents himself as “one who meditates” is generally regarded as mixing Buddhism into their walk.  Yet Christian meditation is nothing like Buddhist practices.  Christian meditation does not turn inward to watch breath, or a repeated mantra, but upon something outside himself-specifically the nature and character of God.

He does a good job of going through quite a few Puritan authors, looking at what they called Christians of their time to do. And to be honest, it’s really a completely different concept of a Christian walk than we have today.

We are distracted today by cell phones and Facebook and any TV show in all of history in multiple languages all within a couple of clicks from right where we are. On the couch, in bed, at the airport, at work. So we have all of that distraction, and we fail to focus on the thing-the One Thing- that will make all the difference in our lives, which is Christ.

The book is useful, in that it identifies the problem (Christians no longer meditate), and then provides a plan to teach modern distracted Christians how to move forward and recover this practice.  He provides some definitions of what Biblical Meditation is and is not, as well as the difference between occasional and deliberate meditation.

One of the most helpful chapters is regarding what it is we can meditate on.  Not just random bible verses but bible verses, nature, and the character and nature of God.

And then of course, the benefits of meditation.  The stakes of meditation are high, and the Christian who does not meditate, is likely not a Christian at all.  This is simply a logical conclusion-if we never consider who God is, what he does for us, the way He acts… well, what are we meditating on?  The best beers?  The best tv show?  How to get more money? These are things that may be worthy to consider, but if we don’t focus our thoughts on the most powerful being in the universe, what does that say about how we consider ourselves?

Overall, I have to say, this was a good book. Helpful. I can see much more clearly how empty we are without Biblical Christian meditation, and why it would be better to put down some distractions and look to Him instead.

Star Rating: ☆☆☆☆

I Have a Blog?

So… Long time no post. I’m going to just post a short little blurb primarily as an experiment. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I write almost every day, but I rarely share anything. I’ve been thinking about posting more often; it wouldn’t be that hard to do. 

I use Day One for journaling.  It’s my favorite app for doing this, since it records location and weather as you go. I love being able to look at map and see all the places I’ve been, and it wouldn’t be that hard to just cut and paste. 

Anyway, I just thought I’d post this morning to see if I remembered my password, if the blog itself actually worked, and so just wee what happened. New things are afoot in our household, which are exciting and will change our dynamics significantly. 

So maybe I’ll see you again soon?  Here’s a picture of Daisy to make you day a little better in any case. 

My Favorite Place

Tags

Alley Spring, Flowers, Haiku, Mill, Spring, Travel

Alley Mill and Spring is my favorite place in the world. I’ve visited it in summer and autumn, but never this early in spring.  I got that chance this week as I returned from dropping Benny off in  Nevada, Missouri. 

I write almost every day for myself and I even write myself a lot of (most bad) haikus. I use Day One and even though I can publish with them, I just don’t like their format as well. I want to post more, but it takes extra effort to get it over to WordPress. Please enjoy. 

                

gentle cool breeze blows 

rushing water sounds like peace 

Alley in the spring 

On Journaling, Part 2: Digital versus Paper

Tags

Digital Journaling, Drosoft, Journal with a Blog, Journaling, Journaling 101, Memoires app

I spent a lot of time pondering the question of what I should do about the whole digital revolution and my journaling. What to do? Digital media is so much more readily retrievable. One copy online can be read across the earth, whereas a handwritten tome can only be found at one location. Digital can provide a more rich experience… Add photographs, sound, video, links to maps and even automatically record the current weather. But I have decided that I don’t want to go that route. I tried it for awhile, and still do it a bit. But generally I do not.

The Benefits of Digital Journaling
Basically the benefits of digital journaling are recorded above. It is extremely easy to do. I can type faster than write by hand. (It’s easier to read, too!)  I can use my home computer or my tablet or even my phone and immediately have access to all of my pictures and videos. Just cut and paste and there they are. And as far as sharing, talk about  easy! I just click a button and upload it to a blog or Facebook. I actually did that with a recent blog post here. I typed out a personal journal entry, added pictures and realized that several of my friends and family would like to see it. So I sent it here.

The Problems With Digital Journaling
The problems with journaling digitally is technology. It changes so fast. What format do you record it on? CD ROM? Somewhere “in the cloud”? On your hard drive? And what format? Doc? Html? Txt? That sounds like an easy question, but 20 years ago if I had saved it all to floppy disk and then wanted to retrieve it another 20 years from now (or even have it retrievable)… will that be possible? We will drop technology for the next thing that’s slightly better and never look back (unless we wrote about it in our journal and want to look back at how pitifully bad our technology was in 1993 and 1998 and 2008 and 2014). So where do we record it? I’m pretty sure doc files will be around the rest of my life, but who really knows? Plus there’s privacy. If you want it truly private you can’t put it online.  Do you really want all of your thoughts out there for everyone? Or just for those close to you? If I want everyone to read it, I’ll post a blog, but otherwise I’ll just write it down. And then don’t get me started on cross platform. Is it that hard to make a really great journaling app that is readily usable across Android, Windows, Mac, and iOS? Not that there are no options. There’s MS Word and Google docs and Evernote. But those just don’t do I for me.
Secondly, it’s impersonal… or at least less personal. Chances are you aren’t reading what I wrote on the same device that I wrote it on. Yet with paper and pen, you are. It is tangible. You can touch what I held in my hands. You get to see the scratch marks on the cover, and the spilled ink, and the line across the page from where the dog jumped on my lap as I wrote. That is just not there with digital.

The Problems With Journaling on Paper
The biggest problem? There’s no back up. I’ve told my wife that if the house catches on fire, go after the journals first. (After the people and animals, duh). I usually keep my current journal on the kitchen table and there’s always a bit of a panic when a child spills a drink. Also, it takes more time to handwrite something. Yeah, those are the cons. (What? No pictures? Nope… That’s not a con, that’s a pro).

The Benefits of Journaling on Paper
Tangibility is pretty huge. But more so, writing is a better media. We think differently when we handwrite then when we type. We use different processes in our brains. It does something to our thoughts and memories when we back up what were thinking with moving our arms and hands to record it with a pen.
And the written word is a far superior means of communication than multimedia. Again, YouTube makes us dumber, and reading makes us smarter. We process things very differently. We engage our minds on a much higher level we read versus looking at a picture or watching a video. And writing these things requires us to think and engage our minds. It certainly isn’t that those things can be beneficial, but writing in a longer form is a more engaging, more effective means of communication.
Case in point: have you ever been to a movie, and you walked out and everyone talked but how great it was but you hated it because you read the book? Why did that happen? Because the written form was a much better experience than the movie with its wonderful actors and cinematography and special effects. With the written form you got into the characters’ minds, received more full descriptions of places and reasons behind everything going on.
So pictures aren’t bad, but they do not provide a better experience. Just a much more convenient and quickly shareable experience.

My Experience With Digital Journaling
I tried moving my journal over to all digital, but I just couldn’t satisfy what I wanted. I got me a new Android tablet (an Asus Transformer TF101) with a camera and a bluetooth keyboard. And I couldn’t find an app I liked. One where I could flip through page to page. I did find Evernote and I used that some, but soon realized that if I made an edit, it changed the date of the entry. Dates are extremely important for me. I tried a dozen different apps, but none I really cared for… except one.

The best journaling app I found for Android is Memoires from Drosoft. It is just a great little program. I love it because it is simple to use, easily incorporates photos, backs up to Dropbox, and automatically adds date, time, weather, moon phase, and maps of location when writing. I can share entries to other apps like Evernote or WordPress.

I also have created a private blog on WordPress.  If the general public tries to access it, then they a request for a password.  But as you can see with all the variety of blogs out there, blogging software is a pretty decent way to record thoughts and add pictures as well.  But again-there are issues regarding recording this.  It is saved on a server owned by someone else in another state or country.  What happens if the company that owns the information goes belly up?

So my system for digital journaling is to use my paper journal as the home base. I have always sequentially numbered my pages, (and the books themselves) so my digital entry gets a page number just like it’s another page and I record it. I do this in Memoires. I also created a private blog (I named it Blogodan) and upload it there as well. I use the category as the current journal I’m in. So the entry I made on 10/25/13 recorded on page 3557 was titled “3558: Wednesday, October 25, 2013”, with the category “Journal 21”. I recorded on page 3557 of my written journal “3558: MEMOIRES/BLOGODAN ENTRY 10/25/2013”. It links the two together and helps it to flow. I know if I go to Blogodan and want to see what was going on around that rogue entry, I can just find Journal 21 and page 3557 or so.

So there you go. I still journal digitally, just not that often. I did this last weekend on our camping trip because I wanted to save a few pictures with a map and a record of the weather. Yes I could have done that by hand… printing off pictures, cutting them out and pasting them scrapbook style, but sometimes it’s just easier to put get it all down.

Essentially, I record by handwriting the day-to-day events, and reserve digital entries for times when I want to record more quickly, and quickly add photos.

Next I want to describe the “system” I just now with two notebooks.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.  Would anyone care for hearing reviews on some of the journaling apps I’ve tried?  Have you found a better way to journal online?  What interest brought you here today?