DevYou

I’ve just stumbled upon an intriguing website called Sandy. Sandy is an email-based “virtual assistant.” It (er, she) sends you reminders based on commands you email to it (um, her). Says Sandy:

Working with me is as simple as sending me email. There’s nothing to download, install, or configure. I live in your address book alongside everyone else you know and email.

Examples of commands you might send Sandy’s way are:

• Remind me to move my car in 10 minutes
• Remind me about my meeting with Bob on 12/10/07
• Remind me about my Yoga class on Tuesday, 8-9am @weekly

You can receive your email reminders via SMS and Sandy can add items to your calendar too (if you so choose).

Though I think this is a clever and appealing idea, I’m not sure it will work with my productivity flow since I maintain an empty inbox and very intentionally avoid managing tasks with email. (Tasks originating from emails go to my GTD list.)

However, though it may not be a perfect fit for me, I can see where it would work great for other folks. It would be especially handy, I think, paired with an iPhone. You could shoot Sandy a command anytime, anywhere, and receive her reminders via SMS, all in one handy, highly mobile place.

Link: Sandy

Thank you very much for reading DevYou. It’s a pleasure writing for you. For all of you in the US, have a great Thanksgiving!

At times of extreme stress — and I mean extreme stress — I find it incredibly difficult to break away from the stress and relax. This is obviously problematic. Sustaining severe stress is bad for your body, and it almost never helps resolve the situation at hand that’s causing the stress in the first place.

Mindful breathing techniques often help, but today I stumbled upon an interesting article called 3 doors to instant relaxation on lifehack that details three relaxation techniques I’d never seen before. Each technique centers on one of the senses: vision, hearing, and taste. For example:

Door 1 is your eyes. Plug your ears (if you have ear plugs, good, if not use fingers). Let your eyes, lazily, slowly drift across any surface near you. Don’t read or identify what you are looking at. Instead, try to just look at the colours and shapes. Is it constant or is there change happening. Can you see definite lines and transitions or are shades blended and fuzzy. If you use only your eyes in this way for a minute or two, you can effectively stop the escalation of stress. You will quickly return to a more normal state of mind and then you can deal with whatever is stressing you.

Intriguing stuff. Next time I’m severely stressed, I’m going to try one or all of these.

(Link: 3 Doors to Instant Relaxation)

A few months ago I moved to a new city a couple of states away. When I moved, I put almost all of my worldly possessions into a big storage unit. To the new city, I took only what would fit in the back seat and trunk of my compact sedan and I shipped a few moving boxes ahead. Other than that, everything remained behind in storage.

Much of that mini-mountain of stuff I’ve been dragging with me from home to home, city to city, each time I moved over the last few decades. It’s quite a bit of stuff!

So now since I’ve moved, I’ve been living with relatively few possessions. (By American standards anyway, and certainly far fewer possessions than I surrounded myself with in my last home.)

The experience has been eye opening.

My day to day life with this minimal subset of possessions is as rich and full as it ever was when I had all my possessions around me. During these months, I’ve discovered I didn’t have with me some thing I needed or wanted only a mere handful of times. So the question arises: If I can go without all that stuff and be as content as when it’s around, then why do I own all that stuff? Are most of those possessions then just unnecessary complications? Are the experiential insights I’m having now keys to further simplifying my life?

Eventually I’ll return to retrieve my belongings. But when I do, I believe this time away from them will make parting with the things I don’t really need or that don’t have special sentimental value easier than it was before. When I was packing them all away into storage, I intended to simplify, and I did manage to part with some things, but still each and every thing that went into storage seemed like something I couldn’t bear to part with. My experience now is teaching me to question this lingering attachment.

One last, unrelated thing: Recently, Walking the Black Dog featured a moving, thought-provoking post called Removing the arrow. In it the author discusses, in an extremely personal way, difficulties and depression that has arisen from family relationships, and he shares his insights and questions as well as discussing the value of asking, a la Albert Ellis, “Why Not?” and the Buddhist parable from which the post’s title is derived. Highly recommended.

I have a fever and a sore throat so I’ll keep this post short. However, that (mildly) bad new aside, I have excellent news: Leo Babauta’s E-Book, Zen to Done: The Ultimate Simple Productivity System is now available! Woo!

Zen To Done takes some of the best aspects of a few popular productivity systems (GTD, Stephen Covey and others) and combines them with the mandate of simplicity. It makes things as simple as possible, and no more.

(Zen to Done: The Ultimate Simple Productivity System)

Psychology Today has a great article about using physical activity to boost mood and ward off depression. According to the article, mounting evidence shows that exercise is as effective in the treatment of mild to moderate depression as any other treatment.

Right now, mental health experts are carefully building a scientific dossier on exercise as therapy for depression. Already, mounting evidence indicates that regular activity combats depression on many fronts…

Read the full article on the Psychology Today website, then get out there and exercise. If you’ve had trouble starting an exercise habit before, you might also like to read 4 Simple Steps to Start the Exercise Habit on Zen Habits.

Music is a powerful shaper of moods, and while we each may listen to music for a variety of reasons (pure enjoyment, intellectual satisfaction, emotional catharsis, sentimental reasons, and so on), listening to specific pieces to intentionally create specific moods within ourselves is a great way to regulate our moods and thoughts, to guide us to better interior states.

An excellent example of this type of music is composed by Chuck Wild under the artist name Liquid Mind. His latest album, “RELAX: A Liquid Mind Experience” is currently #1 on the Canada iTunes Top 10 New Age Charts, in the top 20 on Billboard New Age sales chart, and is a veritable feast of gentle, relaxing music. Wild describes Liquid Mind music as ‘“sedative” healing music, designed to alleviate anxiety and induce deep relaxation.’

And indeed it is. I’ve been listening to RELAX for the last week, and Wild is that rare artist who creates from the too-oft antiseptic washes of synthesized sound that comprise lesser new age music, rich sonic landscapes that are simultaneously engaging, warm, and deeply relaxing. Perhaps part of the explanation of why Wild’s music is more engaging than other new age artists lies in his musical background as a composer; he “draws from classical and pop influences as varying as Beethoven and Brian Eno, Bartok and Rachmaninoff, Duruflé and Brahms.”

Wild composed the early Liquid Mind music “to help himself deal with the anxiety of long work hours, and also for friends and family dealing with the stress of life-threatening illnesses like cancer and HIV” and the tagline of the Liquid Mind website is “Musical Healthcare.” It is, according to Wild, “soothing, healing relaxation music, a perfect musical background for sleep or pre-sleep, massage, meditation, healing, yoga, pilates, reiki, shiatsu, tai chi or reflexology.”

Though Wild specifically mentions sleep and pre-sleep, I’ve also found this album particularly helpful post-sleep, odd as that may sound. I often awake in an agitated state with a zillion thoughts loudly clamoring for attention in my mind. Listening to RELAX first thing in the morning helps put me on a calmer, more even footing to begin the day.

I highly recommend this album to any of my readers who are seeking relaxing music for any reason. To purchase or learn more, visit Amazon.com, the iTunes store, or the Liquid Mind website.

I have too many projects. It’s true. I have so many projects on my projects list that I couldn’t possibly get them all done in the next few years. At age 21 or even 31 that wouldn’t have bothered me quite as much as it does now at 41. I hope to live a good long while, but even then, the number of years I have left to complete projects is finite and growing smaller with every passing year.

I’ve tried tackling just one project at a time and pouring all my energy into that one focused goal, but — though that sounds logical and efficient — it has never worked out very well. On the other extreme, having too many projects doesn’t work out either. A few projects get done, but there’s a lingering unpleasantness around all the projects that are laying fallow. So, somewhere between the two extremes is the best number of projects. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know what that magic number (or more likely, the magic range of numbers), but I do know that I’m on the high side, and it’s not working well.

Today, on his blog Zen Habits, Leo has an excellent article on striking that elusive balance between too many and too few projects, based on his Haiku Productivity principles.

This application of Haiku Productivity may be one of the most useful and powerful (along with the two I mentioned above), transforming your ability to get projects done from one of juggling to one of focused completion.

How about you? Do you have too many projects? Too few? Or perhaps you’ve found the magic number of projects that works best for you. Feel free to leave a comment, and, as always, thanks for reading!