A world city

I spent most of Yesterday in London; now often referred to as a world city.

It's not difficult to understand why it should have attracted this name when you visit London. Simply travelling on the tube network one hears voices and languages from many nations. Walking past a building sight you may hear Polish, or Swahili or French or..well you get the idea.

The fine buildings, the bustle of people, the frantic activity of travellers stuffing themselves (me included) onto crowded underground train carriages all seem to indicate a vibrate economy rich in colour and culture. It is invigorating, uplifting and wearing all at the same time. It's not hard to understand how some people would live nowhere else.

I had the opportunity to view parts of London from one of the towers at Canary Wharf. The views presented were stunning and the photograph here hardly does them justice.

And yet, at the end of a busy day in London it was the fields of recently cropped wheat seen through a train window that lifted my spirits the most. As I travelled west, the warm colours of the evening sun lent a golden glow to fields of grass and stubble alike. It was the sense of space opening up and a view towards the horizon that restored my sense of calm.

So like all things, balance seems to be key to a healthy mind. From busy to quiet, from grey to colour, from noisy to peaceful.  Balance is all.

What will you do when you reach 30 or 40 or 50

I remember very well when I was 18 years old being utterly incapable of imagining what I would be like when I reached the age of 30.

I think like many 18 year olds I thought life would be almost over by the time I reached that milestone. All I knew was that I wanted to be a millionaire by then and 12 years seemed like more than enough time to make that happen.

In spite of my best efforts, I was not a millionaire by 30 (nor even now) but my life was very different to that lived by my naïve 18 year old self.

We tend to use these decade marker years as times for reflection and a life assessment. But why wait?

As I approach the 50 marker I'm getting the life appraisal in early. What have I done well? What have I achieved or given? What do I still wish to do?

If you are 28 (or 38) what did you say you would do by the time you were 30 (or 40)? Has it happened? Will it happen?

Get your decade based life appraisal in early and make some fundamental, positive shifts in your life now.

Why wait? Take action today and start doing what you said you would have done.

Have fun with it and shake up others people's perceptions of who you are too.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Sometimes tools can help you perform better

If you want to make changes in your life you'll want all the help you can get.

There is a lot of help available out there. From personal coaches and trainer to gadgets and gizmos that promise to make life easier than ever.

Today I'll pass over the personal therapy stuff and tell you about just one tool that I use everyday to make me more effective in the areas I choose to work.

Note taking/Scrapbooking on your computer

How often do you find an article on a web site and bookmark to read later or keep for the information only to be unable to find it after the event?

Perhaps you have meetings with people and collect their business card only to be unable to find the card at the time you need it. This used to happen to me too. Then I found a program called Evernote.

Evernote is a web based program that also work locally on your PC or smartphone. It allows you to clip text or pictures from web pages and add useful tags to the data. It can also store documents in PDF and pictures in JPG formats also with tags.

Now so far, so dull. So what you may say, I've got notebooks and a photo album big deal.

Imagine now that you meet a new contact for the first time, you exchange business cards. Now instead of slipping the card into your wallet or purse you take a picture of it and email it to your Evernote account. You tag it with words related to the situation, perhaps location, nature of business or product, who introduced you and more if you choose.

Search by tags

Now all that information is sent to your Evernote account and is searchable by the tags. You can choose to send it to a notebook within your account by adding @notebookname to the subject line. Tags are added by use #tagword.

At first nothing much changes about how you work but gradually you generate a bigger database of data and finding those elusive bits of information gets much easier. You can search by tag, by word, by date or even by using Optical character recognition that Evernote has built in.

Reads handwriting

Now things get even more interesting, you may have made some notes during the meeting. Take a picture of the notes and send it to Evernote. Use tags to define it. Evernote search will even try to recognise the words you write longhand (and generally does a pretty good job).

There are hundreds of uses for Evernote  but here are some that I find useful almost everyday.

Take a picture of every business card you collect. Tag it and send it to Evernote.

Do your children make lots of lovely drawing that you hate to throw away (but that clutter the home)? No problem. Use the @ function to send a picture from your smartphone to an Evernote notebook tagged with the child's name. (Make sure you download the Evernote application to your phone too. It sometimes slow to load because of local data rates but it can be a real life saver when you need THAT bit of information.)

Use it to store login names/passwords for your accounts (Evernote data is encrypted). Be careful about this on a shared PC though.

Clip articles, recipes, holiday locations and more by using the web clipper function that integrates with Firefox and Chrome web browser. Clip the whole page or just the selected text and tag it as you do so.

Use it as an area to store your daily todo list.

Use it to store important PDF documents that you need to refer to wherever you happen to be.

Create a notebook and call it "things I want". Next time you see that certain something on Amazon or elsewhere, tag it and send it the Evernote notebook.

Use it to collect information on articles or blog posts you want to write. Goodbye shoebox of clippings.

Photograph your store receipts and fuel purchase receipts to make expense claims and money tracking much easier.

Upload important travel documents before you go. (Evernote can be accessed by an computer with a web browser.)

Take a picture of your passport and you'll always have it available on Evernote should the actual item be lost or stolen.

Store and tag inspiring quotes for the next time you have to give a talk or wedding speech.

Share a notebook securely with a co-worker so that you can work collaboratively online.

 Make audio visual notes by using the Web Cam facility.

Record audio notes from your smart phone and upload to Evernote.

If you have GPS on your smartphone notes can be sorted by latitude and longitude. Would that be useful to budding Estate Agents and Letting Agents?

User the Ink note feature to sketch and idea on screen  and then email the note to a fellow worker or friend.

Notes can be easily shared with others by email. Genius for those who work with others whose memory is not as good as yours. (or perhaps they have never heard of Evernote)

The basic version of Evernote is free with a maximum monthly upload limit but there is a paid for version too that allows more data and a wider variety of document types to be uploaded.

I have no doubt you'll find your own fantastic ways to use Evernote. Why note share them here as a comment?

Start the week differently

Do this on the night before your new work week or early in the morning of the first day.

Grab a  fresh sheet of paper (A4/Letter or larger).

Turn it sideways (landscape).

Now just start writing any tasks that need to be done in the coming week.

Don't bother to try and prioritise work over home life or near term over long term goals; just get them down on the page.

Write it with a pen, not computer, it just works better.

Once the first flurry of activities are down, sit back take a breather. Trawl back through your mind for any other tasks. (Not aspirations like I want to be a successful dancer, just simple solid tasks.)

Done? OK.

Now work through the list.

Strike things through when you have done them.

Put a tick by them if you started but could not complete (perhaps you needed input from someone else.)

When you are wondering what to do next in your day, refer to the list.

At the end of the day check to see if any tasks carry forward to the next day, start a new sheet of paper.

If you don't have a work system you use today, I guarantee this will double your effectiveness.

If you already use a system perhaps the simplicity of this method will make you even more effective.

I don't have a name for this method; perhaps you can invent one and let me know.

Blogging has been rather light

I suppose it's true for nearly everyone, the best of intentions can be pushed aside by other events.

As a sage somewhere once said "Life is what happens while you're busy planning what will happen next".

And so it goes...

Me challenging myself!

How ever I'm setting myself a new challenge, a blog post a day for 30 days (or more). let's see how it goes.

Rainbow-relaxation hypnotic recording for you to listen to

Rainbow-relaxation

Here is track that will have you relaxing deeply in no time at all.
Please let me know how you get on with it!

Alcohol-moderation2012-Free Hypnotherapy audio

Alcohol-moderation2012

I created this hypnotherapy track a while ago for those people who would like to moderate their alcohol intake rather than stop completely.

Clicking on the link will take you to the Soundcloud player page.

I have recently re-edited the track for you to use. Try listen with headphones whilst sat in a comfortable chair.

Use the track daily for 5-7 days and notice what changes you make to your habit.

A summer rainbow

This picture is from Saturday evening when the setting sun coincided with a rain storm to produce a wonderful double rainbow.

The picture hardly does it justice, it was spectacular.

Friday foto - Superwide, hi-res view of Street and Glastonbury Tor

I drove along Collard Hill in Somerset today and stopped to take pictures. Here is the result of 6 pictures being stitched together. You can see the large warehouse roof that belongs to Clarks shoes in Street and of course the famous Glastonbury Tor in the distance.

I wish it had been a little clearer.

Zoom in and enjoy!

Yeovil Saturday night, cinema, closed shops, closed eateries

For a variety of reasons we found ourselves able to take a night out in Yeovil on a Saturday. Fantastic. "Let's go to the cinema" says she. "Great idea" I say, it's been a long time since we went.

A quick check online shows a few films that look interesting. Good.

Taxi to cinema. Chaos inside. Huge queue, ticket desk closed, what the hell is going on? In what is I presume a cost cutting measure, you can buy tickets from the snack desk or the ATM but not at the ticket counter. Not great, but tickets purchased, we rejoin the queue. We are going to see 'Rock of Ages'. I wish I had read the reviews...

If you like stage musicals maybe this is your thing. I thought it was going to be an updated version of Spinal Tap. I was very, very wrong. It's a string of '80s rock tunes (so far so good) held together with some dodgy acting and awful dance scenes. It's the first film I can recall walking out on in a long time; but we did. (The huge queue of people were waiting to see the Westlife tour film. It had to be better than Rock of Ages.)

OK we said, "Lets go eat..."

Where?

Umm..not too many choices in Yeovil town centre actually. OK Let's try the Green Room, we had heard nice things about it. "Table for 2?" I enquire. "Sorry we stop serving at 9pm" (it's 10 minutes  past nine).

Alright, what about Mulberrys say I. Same story. Kitchen closed at 9pm. What a bloody farce. Does nobody want to eat after 9pm? Spanish visitors (notoriously late eaters) to Yeovil must think we are in the dark ages. Even Burger King was closed. As we walked to the taxi rank I took the picture below; it was around 9.30pm.

Yes it's raining but there there was virtually nobody on the streets of Yeovil.

9.30pm Saturday 23rd June, Middle Street, Yeovil AKA Ghost Town

So off to the Indian restaurant then. A decent meal was had at the Mem Saab at the bottom of Silver Street.

Now the question, what is happening to Yeovil? Shops are closing right through Middle Street and into the town centre. The only restaurants that can be bothered/can justify staying open past 9pm on a SATURDAY NIGHT are Chinese or Indian; why?

Have we locals forgotten how to work? Our first taxi driver was Romanian our second was (I think) Polish.

It rather feels like a long and terminal slide into irrelevance and this is coming from someone who chose to live here and has done so for 10 years. It's not good and it's getting worse. Sorry.