

One of the benefits of insomnia (maybe the only benefit) is that you get to see some lovely dawns.
I snapped these this morning around 07:30. The rainbow was complete shortly before the sun rose. The phone camera doesn’t do it justice at all.

Today I’m trying out the WordPress app on my HTC Desire running Android 2.2. If this works well who knows what it might lead to?
There’s a Media button down here, let’s see how that works…
… well I can add pictures or videos from the gallery or direct from the camera; but I’m not sure where in the post it will place them.
Ok, that’s all for now. I’ll try submitting the post, let me know what you think.
It’s been a while since I posted on productivity, perhaps I should have written this post some time ago.
Every been stuck on a project? Had something that needed doing; but just couldn’t seem to get around to it?
Most of us face this sort of procrastination from time to time and it can be very difficult to get a project moving once it’s run aground. However one technique you can use to get a project going again is to work on the project’s Next Action.
The Next Action is the very next thing that needs to be done to move a project forwards. Sometimes I think I have a good idea of what the Next Action for a project might be; but when I look closer my Next Action is actually something very vague and not actually actionable at all. This is a sure fire way of ensuring a project doesn’t make any progress at all.
Let’s look at an example. Suppose I have a ‘project’ (a.k.a ‘dream’) to buy a house in the country. I kind of know that the next action for this project is to check my financial standing to see what I could afford.
Well months and years go by and I’ve still got this dream to buy a house in the country; but why am I no further forward with the project? It’s because my Next Action, ‘check my financial status’ or ‘see what I can afford’ isn’t an action at all – it’s some sort of nebulous fuzzy idea designed to make me feel like I’ve control of the project whilst not providing anything actionable.
When I find a stuck project like this I take my fuzzy Next Action and begin to break it down into something more concrete:
- What should I do to check my financial status?
- How can I see what I can afford?
From this comes something a bit more tangible:
- See mortgage advisor to find out what I can afford
- Get current property valued
Finally some real Next Actions can be written down:
- Call Bill at "Mortgages For You" to make appointment
- Call surveyor to get property valued.
If there’s a lot of resistance to doing something you might have to set very find grain Next Actions. Remember that every journey starts with a single step.
Maybe you have some tips and techniques for setting Next Actions for your projects. Please don’t forget to share them in the comments.
Willie O’Dea, Willie O’Dea,
No longer head,
Of the defense ministry,
Willie O’Dea, oh Willie O’Dea,
Now you’re just a back bench TD
Willie O’Dea, Willie O’Dea
The remarks you made,
Were defamatory,
Willie O’Dea, oh Willie O’Dea,
Now your life’s a calamity.
The End.

I’ve done a few reviews of Goalpro versions over the years and so I was interested to find out just what the new GoalPro 7 had to offer.I used to be a daily user of GoalPro up until version 6. It managed all my work and life goals and I was a great piece of software in those days, even if the user interface was a little unusual.
Since then I feel that the software has completely lost it’s way, and version 7.0 only reinforces this view. So many of the brilliant features of earlier versions seem to have been dropped from this version in an effort to "streamline" (aka "dumb down") goal setting. These include:
- Infinite number of sub-goals. I don’t know what the limit is; but youcan bet someone will hit it.
- A full scheduling calendar. I used to be able to drag tasks from the task list and drop them on the day and time I was going to work on them. That functionality has been dropped.
- Specifying the number of support items required. I found this essential as a check that I had all the required support in place. If I knew a goal needed 6 tasks; but I’d only assigned 5, then I knew I had t revisit that goal and work out what was missing. This really helped prevent things from falling through the cracks.
- The scratch pad. Again this was really useful for brainstorming a goal and then creating tasks and goals from the resulting list. Another loss.
- Outlook sync. I could keep my goals and tasks scheduled in Outlook by syncing the two products. This was invaluable in a business environment with group collaboration – when someone on the team wanted a piece of my time they could see at a glance what aspects of the projects I was working on and when. In version 7.0 I’d have to do all that scheduling manually.
Goalpro 7 seems to have reduced the product to the barest minimum amount of functionality required for a Goal setting program. The user interface has been tidied up a good bit; but at the sacrifice of most of the features that made this software very useful. A great dissapointment.
Rated 1/5 on Feb 7 2010