My Journey Out of Procrastination: Perfectionism, Starting, and Stopping [en]

In addition to the five principles I described in my earlier post, two more really important things to understand regarding procrastination are:

  • how perfectionism ties in with it
  • how having trouble starting and trouble stopping are two sides of the same problem.

So, perfectionism. I think the link between procrastination and perfectionism is perceived by most people, but it remains a superficial understanding. Like procrastination, perfectionism is not something you get rid of by just “accepting you’re not perfect” or “lowering your standards”. It’s not that simple.

Perfectionism is often rooted in deep-seated fears of the sky falling on your head if somebody says something negative about you or what you’ve done. Just willing away this emotional component will sadly not be enough to free oneself, in most cases. So, just like procrastination, one’s tendancy to go for perfection perfection perfection needs to be treated gently and with understanding. Where does it come from? Do I really believe that people can love me and appreciate what I do even if it’s (I’m) not perfect? (Don’t answer that question too quickly… The answer is often “no” if you’re really honest with yourself.) What small experiences can I do to show and teach myself that the sky will not fall on my head if I don’t do things perfectly?

It’s also important to understand that one of the things perfectionism does is make mountains out of molehills: if your standards for what you want to accomplish are very high, it’s discouraging. You think about decorating your flat to make it the perfectly decorated place of your dreams, and before you’ve even finished imagining it you’re already discouraged and don’t have any energy to even get started. This is where tricks like breaking up big projects (or aspirations) into smaller pieces can come in handy. (For example, I’ll accept that my flat isn’t decorated, and take the small step of putting up one picture on the wall, even though that won’t make it “perfectly decorated”.)

When I was a teenager, I understood rather quickly that my desire to do things “well” was getting in the way of my simply doing them. In a way, I’d say I’m a reformed perfectionist: I’ve long ago decided that I’d rather do things imperfectly than not do them (I have a “just do it even if it’s crap” mode). I also learned that what I considered “crap” was often considered by others to be “great” — like that time when I wrote a quick and dirty page on what I’d done at a job, mainly for myself, and sent it off to my brother who was working at the same company, who then (to my horror) forwarded it to the manager, manager who then (to my utmost disbelief) got back to me praising the professionalism of my crappy document.

In some cases, you might discover that perfectionism is not the real problem, but a “constructed” problem designed to achieve a goal like help you procrastinate. It might sound a bit crazy, but sometimes causality doesn’t really go in the direction we imagine.

Starting and stopping are a good example of this. Almost all people who procrastinate will at some point say something like “Oh, my problem is just starting — once I’ve started, then there’s no stopping me, I’ll do what I set out to do. I just really need to find a way to get started.” I said the exact same thing. Then one day I realised (I had a little help for that) that the real problem I faced was not that I couldn’t start things, but that once I was started, I just couldn’t stop.

I’m a little obsessive, and once I’m doing something, I get completely absorbed in it, don’t see time go by, forget to eat, forget to feel, forget to breathe (!), lose myself. It’s clearly one of the things that helped me develop RSI all those years ago, but that’s not the only problem. It’s that although I’m being productive, I’m “not there”, I’m out of touch with myself, and I’m not really enjoying it, except in a kind of manic, compulsive way. This is not flow, by the way — it’s something else and it’s not healthy.

So in a way, I have a very good reason not to want to start things. I have a very good reason for procrastinating — it’s my healthy reaction against behaviour that makes me lose myself.

The way out, therefore, is to learn to stop. If you know you can stop, then you are free to start. FlyLady understood this very well, and this is why the “you can do anything for 15 minutes” mantra works so well. Trust me, learning to stop is not easy. Once you’re finally doing something and getting into it, stopping after 30 minutes (or whatever time you’ve set) is going to feel very counterproductive. But remember where the real problem is here: if you don’t make the effort to stop, you’re cheating yourself (specially if you coaxed yourself into starting because there was a clear time limit to how much time you’d spend on the task) and it will make it even more difficult to start next time. I find the way FlyLady puts it in her “How to Declutter” page pretty inspiring:

Decide how often you are going to declutter a zone. Do a little every day – use a timer. But be warned – this can become compulsive! Once you get started you will want to clean like a banshee! Don’t burn yourself out! Only do small amount at a time. The house did not get dirty overnight and it will not get clean overnight. When you set the timer you can only do two sessions at a time. This goal may seem unattainable right now, but you can do it in little pieces. In a couple of months, the whole house will be decluttered.

So, concentrate on stopping things, rather than on starting them. Set time limits. Flip the problem on its head, and you should soon see things changing.

L'importance du temps structuré [fr]

[en] I've realised that I feel better when my time is at least somewhat structured, so I need to figure out how to manage my "free time" (when there is lots of it, like during this staycation/holistay) a bit differently than "not plan anything and see what I feel like doing".

Ces derniers mois, et je dirais même cette dernière année, j’ai fait des progrès énormes en ce qui concerne la gestion de mon temps. Par cela, je veux dire que j’ai cessé de courir, cessé d’être aussi stressée, cessé de jouer toujours toujours toujours les pompiers. J’ai une vision assez claire, sur le court terme, de ce que je dois faire, je le fais, et en grande partie grâce au fait que j’ai maintenant un bureau séparé de mon appartement, j’ai aussi récupéré mes soirées, mes week-ends, et même des mini-vacances au chalet.

Bref, ça va plutôt bien et je suis très contente de moi.

Par contre, je remarque pendant cette période des fêtes, où j’ai décidé de lever le pied et de prendre des “vacances à la maison”, que si j’ai bien réussi à trouver un équilibre durant ma vie “travaillée”, ce n’est pas si simple pour le temps de loisir. J’avais d’ailleurs déjà constaté ça, à plus petite échelle, lors d’un ou deux week-ends très très tranquilles.

Je me rends donc compte que j’ai besoin de structurer mon temps (jusqu’à un certain point!) pour me sentir bien. Ça ne veut pas dire que je dois faire en sorte d’avoir un “programme” qui remplit ma vie du début à la fin, mais les longues journées de “libre” qui se suivent, ce n’est pas top non plus.

Tiens, c’était déjà pas top durant les longues vacances d’été interminables quand j’étais enfant.

J’ai aussi appris à quel point il est important pour moi d’avoir un minimum de routine dans mes journées.

Du coup, je réalise que j’ai besoin de gérer légèrement autrement mon temps de loisir, et de m’éloigner un peu du “je ne planifie rien et regarde d’un moment à l’autre ce que j’ai ‘envie’ de faire” — ça marche pour une journée (le week-end) mais pas pour bien plus longtemps que ça.

Solution? Pas encore tout à fait trouvée, mais j’y réfléchis, c’est la première étape!

Blog de voyage de Muriel [fr]

[en] As the editor for ebookers.ch's travel blog, I contribute there regularly. I have cross-posted some of my more personal articles here for safe-keeping.

Cet article a été initialement publié sur le blog de voyage ebookers.ch (voir l’original).

Si vous aimez les récits de voyage, je vous invite à lire le blog de voyage de ma cousine Muriel, en vadrouille entre la Sibérie et l’Inde pour un long voyage plein d’images (elle est photographe). De beaux articles émouvants écrits avec humour — même si elle a eu des aventures pas tristes, dont une qui l’a retrouvée ligotée et baillonnée en pleine forêt après s’être fait détrousser, fusils au poing — et illustrés de ses très belles photos.

Ça vous parle? Filez donc lire les mots qui accompagnent ces images.

Crédit photo: Muriel Rochat, avec permission.

Ecrire en 2D [fr]

[en] I write a weekly column for Les Quotidiennes, which I republish here on CTTS for safekeeping.

Chroniques du monde connecté: cet article a été initialement publié dans Les Quotidiennes (voir l’original).

Ecrire en 2D, oui, vous avez bien lu. Mais n’est-ce pas ce qu’on fait toujours? Une feuille, ou un écran, ça a bien une hauteur et une largeur, c’est-à-dire deux dimensions.

Certes, certes. Mais je ne parle pas ici des dimensions du support: je parle de celles du texte. Du texte? Oui, voyez-vous, un texte, ça commence en haut, ça finit en bas, et entre les deux on suit les mots alignés bien sagement. Un texte, c’est au fond une longue ligne qui se replie un peu sur elle-même pour des questions logistiques. Une dimension. Un début, une fin, et un chemin bien précis pour aller d’un bout à l’autre.

L’écriture en deux dimensions, c’est celle de l’hypertexte. Le nom l’indique bien, d’ailleurs: c’est un texte qui va au-delà (préfixe “hyper-“) des contraintes linéaires unidimensionnelles du texte classique (tout comme un hypercube est un cube qui pousse au-delà des 3 dimensions qu’on attribue généralement à celui-ci).

Assez de maths et d’étymologie: l’hypertexte, c’est le texte du web, et peut-être déjà celui des aventures dont vous êtes le héros qui ont égayé une partie de mon adolescence.

Un texte sur le web, ce n’est pas quelque chose dans lequel on est enfermé de la première à la dernière lettre. C’est parsemé de liens, autant de portes de sortie vers d’autres mondes et d’autres mots, d’autres textes pour comprendre mieux, expliquer plus, explorer plus loin.

Et quand on écrit un texte en deux dimensions, on n’aligne pas les mots de la même façon que pour un texte en une dimension. C’est ce qui distingue ceux qui écrivent pour le web et ceux qui écrivent pour le papier.

Ajouter des liens dans un texte, ça change la façon d’écrire. Et pour qui a passé sa vie à écrire en une dimension, c’est un art qui ne s’apprend pas du jour au lendemain.

My Journey Out of Procrastination: Five Principles [en]

When you’re trapped in the procrastination rut, solutions coming from those who are out of it just seem inapplicable. “Just do it,” for example.

I think I’ve recently pulled myself out of the rut for good (fingers crossed), and before I forget what it is like to live with the heavy black cloud of “things I should have taken care of last week/month/year” over my head, here are a few thoughts on what helped me build a life for myself where my invoices are sent, my bills are paid, my deadlines are met, and I actually have guilt-free week-ends and evenings.

It wasn’t always like that. Actually, for most of my life, it wasn’t like that.

Changing, like most changes, has been a gradual process. I know that (for me, at least) one of the thick roots of my procrastination lies in a very archaic urge of mine to not be alone, to not do things alone. I rarely found it hard to do things (even the washing-up) if I had company, and I understood at some point that putting things off until I got myself in an unmanageable mess was in a way something I did to either force myself to ask others for help, or manipulate them into helping me out.

I think it was really important for me to understand this, because unfortunately, freeing oneself of life-threatening procrastination is not just a question of tricks and methods, but also about understanding what role such a behaviour plays in one’s “life ecosystem”, and what can be done to replace it. In my case, it included being proactive about asking for assistance or company, making sure I was having enough of a social life, and sorting out a few personal issue I’m not going to dive in here.

That being said, I learned five important principles throughout my journey that are worth sharing.

The first is that radical change will not work. If you tend to live in a messy home, it’s not spring-cleaning once every three years which will change that. Going from living in a messy home to living in a more or less ordered home is a lifestyle change. It’s like quitting smoking or starting to exercise regularly, or eating more healthily. Reading GTD, spending two days setting up your system, and “sticking to it”, will not be enough (though I’m a great fan of GTD). Be aware that you’re in for a long process, which will probably take years (it took years for me, in any case — maybe even half my lifetime). This means that you need to start by making small changes to the way you do things, instead of aiming for a revollution.

The second is to not do it alone. By that, I mean involve others to support you. Things I’ve done include buddy working, asking a friend to come over to help me clean the flat, or having my brother literally hold my hand during three months whilst I started getting my finances back in order. If it’s easier to do with somebody just sitting next to you, then ask somebody to do just that. I remember one of my first experiences of this was being on the phone with a friend, and we both had a horrible awful pile of dirty dishes to deal with. We both decided to hang up, do it now, and call again an hour later when it was done. Somehow, it felt easier to be doing the dishes when I knew my friend was doing the same thing in another country.

The third is that backlog and process both need to be dealt with. When you procrastinate, you start off in the worst of places: not only do you not have a healthy “lifestyle” process in place for dealing with things (you let them wait until it’s so urgent the only thing left to do is to call in the firemen), but you also have a (sometimes huge) backlog of “stuff” that needs dealing with. Be patient with yourself. Also, understand that there’s no point in just dealing with the backlog if you’re not fixing the process. GTD is mainly about the process. “Do it now” is also just about the process.

The fourth is to find pleasure in the doing. One component in my procrastination is that I’m overly goal-focused. One thing I had to learn to do was to enjoy doing things, and not just enjoy having done them. Life is now, even when you’re doing the dishes or cleaning the flat or paying bills. What can be done to make the process more pleasant? Well, there are things like listening to music or focusing on the task at hand in a zen-like way, but it’s also possible to keep in mind that by paying my bills now, I’m being kind to myself and treating myself well (by keeping myself out of future trouble). It helped me to realise that I really didn’t mind doing the dishes for friends when I was invited — it was doing them for myself that sucked. It wasn’t about the dishes: it was about doing stuff for myself. (Which opens a whole new can of worms: is it easy to treat yourself kindly?) When I started doing my dishes as if I were my own best friend that I loved, things started changing.

The fifth is to know your boundaries and enforce them (aka “say no”). When there is too much to do that you can’t keep up, it means that you’ve been accepting or taking on too much. This is a major chapter in itself (and as I’m getting increasingly better at setting limits and saying no when needed, I’m starting to realize how hopelessly bad most people are at this). If you catch up on the backlog, set up a good process, but keep on piling up your plate with more than you can eat, there’s no way out. Again, this principle opens up potential cans of worms: why is it difficult to say no? Fear of rejection or angering the other are not to be taken lightly. “Just understanding” this is often not enough, as the root of such behaviour is often emotional and needs to be treated with respect. (You’ll probably have noticed: you won’t get much out of yourself — or anyone — if you don’t treat emotional components of problems with respect.)

I think that before diving into any “method” to change one’s procrastinative habits, it’s worth pondering on all five of these principles and trying to keep them in mind whilst going on with one’s life: change will be successful only if you pay attention to them all. This is, in my opinion, where GTD on its own fails at “solving the problem”: it’s mainly about the process (part of the third principle here). You can get started implementing GTD, but if the deeper roots of your procrastination are not dealt with, you will simply fail at implementing GTD properly enough for it to be “the solution”, just like I did. Not that implementing GTD isn’t useful: it was a very important step for me, and helped me a lot (it changed my life, clearly), but it was not enough to free me from procrastination.

Another element I’d like to add, in case it comes handy to somebody, is that I noticed at some point that when I am under stress, I tend to feel down, and when I feel down, I tend to find it difficult to do things, and therefore procrastinate. Figuring out this vicious circle was a really important milestone for me. Of course, it then took many months of careful observation of myself to reach the point where I could go “Oh! I’m feeling down and crappy, am I stressed? What’s stressing me? Oh, let me deal with that now so I can climb out of the pit!” — and now, it never even gets to that stage (or very rarely) because I catch it even earlier and nip it in the bud.

Triggers and Dopamine [en]

[fr] Deux idées importantes concernant la façon dont on fonctionne, particulièrement pour ce qui est de nos habitudes: les déclencheurs, qui appellent un comportement stéréotypé ou enregistré (une bonne ou mauvaise habitude), et la dopamine, qui lance plutôt l'appel du "reviens-y" que du plaisir, et qui s'active face à la nouveauté (ce qui explique que nos comportements un peu obsessionnels ou addictifs ne se soldent pas forcément par plus de plaisir).

As I have slowed down my work life for the end-of-year celebrations, I’m taking more time to read and write, something I want to keep going throughout 2010 and beyond.

These last days I’ve stumbled upon two interesting ideas that I’m adding to my understanding of how we change and why we do what we do — a subject of endless fascination for me.

The first is triggers and their importance in forming habits. I had never really thought of this until I looked at the new website 6 Changes. The idea here is that a habit is linked to something that triggers it. For example, feeling down and reaching for the fridge or the remote. Or putting your pyjamas on and brushing your teeth. Or getting up from a meal and doing the dishes.

In a way, this is something that FlyLady teaches you to put in practice by establishing morning and evening routines. (See the “Baby Steps” page on FlyLady for more similarity with what Leo explains in 6 Changes.) Creating routines is a way to have a series of habits where each one triggers the next.

I’m now keeping an eye open for triggers (think “API hooks” or “CSS classes” for the geeks out there) that I can build on to put in place new habits or replace undesirable ones.

I have a (minor) problem when I watch TV series, for example: I tend to watch one episode after the next more or less until I drop — I find it very hard to just watch one or two and be done with it. So I thought: “what could be the trigger here?” Obviously, the end credits of an episode. So, what I’ve decided to do now is pause the DVD, remove my headphones, get up and go to the kitchen or the bathroom when the end credits roll. Then I can go and watch the next episode if I want. See the idea? Clearly, I’m not building a new daily habit here, but using the idea of the trigger, a small first step, and incremental change to modify an undesired behaviour. Next step will be adding something more to “pause the DVD, remove headphones, get up” once that habit is established, which goes in the direction of helping me not dive mechanically back into my season, however fascinating it may be.

The second is the role of dopamine in relation to novelty. Dopamine is in fact not the “pleasure” drug, but more the “gimme more” one — it’s activated when we’re faced with novelty, and encourages us to come seeking it again. I’m not sure how I’m going to apply this to my daily life, but for me it’s important to understand that craving for something is not necessarily linked to pleasure in getting the something in question. In my opinion it explains why we can get stuck in compulsive behaviours (checking e-mail or iPhone being the most obvious) which do not make us really happy when we indulge in them — on the contrary, I know that I often end up feeling a bit empty when I’m stuck in a compulsion circle.

I find the last paragraph of the HuffPost article linked above very wise:

Given all of this, what can we do to prevent ourselves from becoming novelty-seeking zombies? The first thing is to simply become mindful of one’s use of media and devices. I find that one of the best things to do is to institute regular vacations from email. It usually takes a couple of days for the itch to check my email every five minutes to go away, and watching it happen reminds me just how obsessed I can become, but it also shows that it’s possible to lead a perfectly normal and fulfilling life without constant email access. Once we see that we can live without constant access to our devices, we can start trying to exert some control over device use in our daily lives. Evolution gave us the ability to overcome our urges, but we have to have the will to employ this control. One bit of good news is that we can improve our self-control with practice […].

Russell Poldrack

I think the most important thing that Russell says here is that technology is basically putting us in a position where we have to grow as human beings if we do not want to be slaves to our impulses. This is true in general, but once more, technology is magnifying and making apparent issues which are already there, but which might not have been that visible until now.

I Hate FTP [en]

[fr] Je hais le FTP. Donnez-moi un accès SSH et screen sur le serveur, et me voilà heureuse.

Ever since I discovered the magical combination of SSH + screen, I have come to loathe FTP. Although some of you will cringe at the idea, I like working directly on the server. No stray copies lying around, dated I-don’t-know-what. No chance of mistakenly overwriting your last set of changes.

Screen is a terminal multiplexer (just learned the term). What you do, basically, is climb inside it when you’re on the server, and do everything from there. The advantage is that:

  • when you disconnect your SSH connection, screen keeps running, so your workspace is how you left it next time you come in
  • you can have multiple “screens” (ie, terminal windows) you can easily switch around, so you can have your IRC channel running in one screen, be editing a file in another, etc. (basically, multi-tasking like you would do with windows in a graphical environment).

I learnt shell commands as I went along. Those I use the most are:

  • wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip to download (instantly!) the latest version of WordPress directly on the server
  • unzip latest.zip to unzip it, still directly on the server
  • mv wp old-200910 to archive an old installation of wordpress (or move other files around)
  • cp -Rf plugins/* ../../wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ to copy all my plugins to the freshly unzipped install of WordPress
  • nano wp-config-sample.php to add my settings to the file and save it as wp-config.php

These are just a few examples. Once you know these commands and have them at the tip of your fingers, how fast you work is only limited by how fast you can type them. And you’re doing things directly on the web server. You’re not stuck looking at the “real world” (= the server) through the imperfect lens of an FTP client, waiting for uploads to happen (or downloads), paying attention not to overwrite stuff, having everything ready on your computer before pressing the magic button and hoping everything will be all right, because otherwise you’re in for another bout of download, edit, upload…

Some of my clients have WordPress installations on servers with no shell access. Obviously, I don’t have as much practice doing things the FTP way, but I swear it takes me 5 times as much time to do things with no SSH access. When you know how to use it, the command-line is wickedly fast.

The only situation where I actually do like FTP is when I’m using CSSEdit, because coupled to an FTP client, I can be editing my CSS file with the added power of the programme on my Mac, and have it upload and update the file on the server each time I hit save. Because yes, it’s nicer to write CSS in CSSEdit than in nano.

But for managing files and moving them around and minor edits… I’m much happier sitting on my server inside my screen.

Bloguer en français ou en anglais? [fr]

[en] I write a weekly column for Les Quotidiennes, which I republish here on CTTS for safekeeping.

Chroniques du monde connecté: cet article a été initialement publié dans Les Quotidiennes (voir l’original).

Les blogueurs qui se lancent se demandent souvent dans quelle langue il vaut mieux bloguer, pour autant qu’il en aient plus d’une à disposition. Dans notre région, le choix à faire est généralement entre le français, langue maternelle, et l’anglais, langue internationale.

On se dit que bloguer en anglais permettra de toucher un plus grand public.

Parce que oui, bloguer, c’est en général pour être lu. On cherche un peu de reconnaissance, ou à établir son expertise dans un domaine qui nous passionne. Alors bien sûr, c’est légitime, on veut mettre toutes les chances de notre côté. Et on se demande à juste titre dans quelle langue écrire.

En fait, écrire en anglais est probablement une fausse bonne idée, surtout si l’on ne cherche pas à tout prix à atteindre un public international: plus la mare est grande, plus il y a de gros poissons dedans. La concurrence sera plus rude dans une langue majoritaire que dans une langue minoritaire. Plus facile, donc, de faire son trou dans une langue qui n’est pas déjà saturée de blogs sur le sujet qui nous tient à coeur, particulièrement si l’on est plus habile avec.

Le blogueur, même populaire, n’atteindra toujours qu’une infime fraction des lecteurs potentiels dans la langue qu’il utilise. Ce n’est pas la taille de la mare qui est le facteur limitant, mais bien le nombre de poissons qui nagent dedans.

Reste qu’on peut toujours décider de rejeter les frontières linguistiques en mélangeant plusieurs langues sur un blog… mais ça c’est une autre histoire

Agenda: La conférence internationale Lift, portant sur des sujets mêlant technologie et société, et qui a lieu chaque année a Genève (5-7 mai 2010) offre jusqu’au 26 décembre son billet d’entrée à moitié prix. Ne manquez pas de vous y inscrire sans tarder si ce thème vous interpelle.

WPML to Make Your WordPress Site Multilingual [en]

[fr] A tester absolument si vous devez mettre en place un site multilingue: le plugin WPML pour WordPress.

I’ve been wanting to play with the WPML WordPress plugin for a while now, and I finally took the plunge today and updated my professional site to the latest version of WordPress, as well as WPML. (Sadly, the content still needs a major overhaul.)

Until now, I had built it using two separate WordPress installations, one in English, one in French, linked together by my quick-and-dirty plugin Bunny’s Language Linker (which, in the light of today’s experiment, I will be retiring from rather inactive development — Basic Bilingual remains, though, and still very much makes sense).

Here’s a summary of what I did:

  • backed up my database
  • upgraded both WordPress blogs to the latest version and exported their content
  • removed the automatic language redirection based on browser language preferences to make sure it wouldn’t interfere (I want to find a way to insert it back in, help appreciated)
  • added and activated the WPML plugin on the English installation
  • went through the settings after activating advanced mode
  • translated widget text and site tagline
  • manually imported content from the French site (import failed due to PHP on my server not being compiled with ctype_digit()), but it was only a dozen pages — it’s easy to specify language and of which English page a new one is a translation of, if any)

Setting up WPML

I did encounter some grief:

  • when selecting the “different languages in directories” I kept getting an error message which didn’t make much sense to me; tip: if that happens, make sure that your site and pages all work fine (in my case, I had to reset permalink structure because it had got lost somewhere on the way — even though the settings didn’t change)
  • I’m using a theme with an existing .mo file for French, so I selected that option (to figure out what the textdomain is, look through a theme file to see what the second argument to the gettext calls is — they look like __("Text here", "text domain here")) but it seems that all the strings for my theme still appear in the “string translation” pane
  • initially the strings for my widgets and site tagline weren’t appearing in the “string translation” pane — you have to click the “Save options and rescan strings” button for that, even if you haven’t changed any settings (that was not exactly obvious to me)

Here’s what I still need to fix:

  • the rewrite rules are set to hide the “language directory” part of the URL when browsing the site in the default language — I want to change this as explained in this forum post
  • reimplement automatic language detection
  • set up a custom language switcher that looks more like “Français | English” somewhere at the top right of the page

And honestly, once that is settle, WPML is as close as it gets to my dream multilingual plugin for WordPress!

6 Changes For 2010 — and My Objectives [en]

[fr] 6 Changes est un site qui vous encorage à mettre en place 6 nouvelles habitudes (ou à éliminer des anciennes) pour 2010, plutôt que de vous acharner sur de "bonnes résolutions" qui font long feu. L'auteur du site propose une méthode très progressive pour effectuer ces changements, et qui est complètement en ligne avec ce que je prêche à droite et à gauche: commencer très petit et modeste plutôt que de viser les grandes révolutions.

Nathalie just pointed me to the website 6 Changes, which I’ve quickly read through, and which is very very good. It’s an antidote to the failure of New Year Resolutions. It’s very FlyLady-ish in spirit (read my post “The Wisdom of Small Changes“) and is completely in line with many conversations I’ve had lately about changing things in one’s life.

From the site’s Quick Start Guide (the author is Leo Babauta of Zen Habits):

Here’s a quick overview of this site and how it will help you.

  1. About this site. What is 6Changes.com? Choose 6 habits for 2010, and I’ll help you form them.
  2. The 6 Changes Method. Here’s the method that you’ll use to form each of the 6 habits.
  3. Suggest habits. Which six will you choose? Some recommendations.
  4. The Importance of Public Accountability. Why it’s one of the foundations of the method, and how to do it.
  5. What’s a Trigger & Why Is It So Important? Another key to the method.
  6. Why You Should Do Only One Habit at a Time. Answers one of the most common questions people have about the method.
  7. How to Be Patient as Your Habit Develops. It’s not easy to do it this slowly, but here’s how it works and how to do it.
  8. The Problem With New Year’s Resolutions. Actually, a number of problems. And how this method will solve them.
  9. The Art of the Start of a Habit. Why starting is so hard and how this method overcomes it.
  10. How to Kick a Bad Habit. Suggested method that has worked for me in the past.
  11. How to Form the Exercise Habit. One of a series of planned posts about how to apply the method.

I’ve never been a New Year Resolutions person, because I understood early on that they didn’t work. Over the last years (and especially the last) I’ve really learnt that dramatic change rarely works, and how important habits are. I have to say FlyLady really helped with that.

I had a few objectives for 2009, though:

  • get my finances back on track (being up-to-date with bills, earning enough to live on, starting to pay off debt)
  • get my flat back under control (it’s now “visitor-ready” at all times even though it’s far from perfect, and I’m housecleaning almost every week)
  • have a healthier lifestyle (I’m not sure this was a conscious decision at the beginning of the year, but I’ve reclaimed my evenings, week-ends, and lunch breaks, continued to pay attention to what I eat, and started exercising almost daily)

So, what do I want to achieve by the end of 2010?

  • decorate my flat (I’ve been living in it for nearly 10 years!)
  • improve the “packaging” of my professional services (that’s the “selling myself” department)
  • save up enough money and time to go on a “big trip” somewhere (India, most probably)
  • move beyond weekly planning.

Now, can I translate those into 6 changes? I’m going to think about it seriously.