Daily Movement

Jeffrey Phillips writes in Thinking Faster: Getting Unstuck of a few ways to get started again after you’ve accomplished a lot and are unmotivated to start again.

The same thing happens to me and i’ve likened it to a mini-burnout. Every few weeks after making some good progress, I just don’t want to do the next step. The most angst about being unmotivated is when I know what the next step is, I know what needs to be done, and I just don’t want to do it, but I feel that I need to do it. That’s an internal tension that persists.

Sometimes it clears by playing a mini-hookey going a walk and change of environment to get coffee, for instance. Sometimes it requires me to pass the baton to someone else telling them, “I’m burned, can you work on this for me?” Sometimes it requires a manager to tell me that it’s urgent to get the next step done which motivates by adrenaline.

There are no easy or sure fixes for me. I just have to patiently wait the period out.

I think the tipping point has been reached today. The web has been successfully spammed. – google returns 90% or more useless information when searching.

I’m trying to find a keyboard tray that can be attached to a glass table top – i.e. not using screws. I was able to find one by Fellowes, but most of the rest of google results were just spam, i.e. product listings from commerce sites.

To end on a positive note, social tagging, such as http://del.icio.us has a high signal to noise ratio, but it doesn’t have everything under the sun. This is where it’s at.

Addendum 2005-Jul-20:

I wound up purchasing a swing arm keyboard tray from Amazon, but it is really meant to be drilled into the under-the-desk surface. If mounted on glass surface with the double-sided tape, it eventually slides off due to the torquing of the keyboard. I wound up drilling holes in the metal side supports of the glass table, so i was able to use it after all.

Takeaway advice from this is it is more practical to have a wooden desktop.

Went to Ikea’s sales-tax free sale, but wound up leaving without buying anything. There a couple of good reasons for this:

• Ikea doesn’t allow rain checks so if you can’t find what you wanted, you just have to come back again (and again and again …).
• Believe it or not, TJ Maxx has the same quality of furniture at reasonable prices. You are paying a premium for the Ikea brand and hype.

and less practically,

• Ikea is overexposed and overhyped… I like the Fight Club scene where the main character considers the addiction to Ikea furniture as an evil. And we know what he winds up doing… in the movie anyway.
• It’s the Ikea color scheme:

  “To create a neutral color scheme in a room, use a range of “un-colors” like brown, beiges, gray, taupes, and whites.”
  – Furnishing your first home

To add, Costco doesn’t have the best prices or service.

• You can find sale items at walgreen’s for instance or safeway that are lower than Costco’s never-sale items.
• You have to wait in lines that look like an airport terminal traffic jam.
• You have to pay in cash or whatever disadvantaged credit card that is trying to peddle market share (first discover, now American Express).
• You have to pay $40/year just to be able to walk in and look around.
• You wind up buying mass quantities because they don’t have anything smaller than 1 gallon of olive oil, or because you dread having to stand in line for 30 minutes to just buy a couple of items.