uber.la

Summer is hotter than ever. In Texas we have had more days over 100 degrees than under. How do you stay motivated to get out there and do it when it's so DANG HOT?

In that spirit I also want to be brief in this mid-quarter, heat of the moment, update. Here is my BIG GOAL update for August.

1. Simplify my mental tag cloud: My focus has been very solid. My concerns are when I spend a day focused on writing content and building graphics that don't lead to income. At the moment the consulting work is harder to come by. My pipeline is not full.
Action: ROI (return on interactive work), I need to focus on what helps pay the bills not what floats my boat.

2 and 3. Control, filter and capture & Share my personal growth and journey: Uber.la has benefited from my acceleration on these goals. And I feel my work has been rewarded with over 4k per month visitors to my various blogging efforts and my nearly 7k Twitter followers. They aren't coming for nuthin. The more value you provide the more people will continue to listen.

4. Velocity and Agility: My focus is as good as I can remember. I have been using Hyper-focusing to GTD. Staying on a task through the burn/boredom level and getting it done.

5. Stress and Overwhelm Release: While there are still too many variables up in the air with income and finding the next team to join, I have not been allowing the process to get me down. I have not been needing as much coffee in the afternoon. I have not be gravitating towards naps, for the most part, and am enjoying still having energy and focus to burn into the deep 3's and 4's of the afternoon. (My usual slump time is 3ish.)

6. Spiritual simplification: my spiritual life is rich and full. Perhaps my improvement here could come from stepping away from the computer-as-creative-partner and getting back into the guitar, actually playing guitar. Get back into walks in the woods, or get the mountain bike tuned up. The heat is stifling at the moment, but swimming is always an option. And I have made trips to the stores to get the goggles and snorkel and fins that will help me do more types of swimming. So I could easily add this in. But as far as spiritual, well… my daily meditation has been fairly random. Perhaps I do the old 30-days-without-fail, in order to build a habit.

7. Open My Processes: I have been invited to 4 new community efforts. 1. I am now the social media chair on the board of directors of the Austin Interactive Marketing Association. 2. I have been invited to teach several tracks to a professional entrepreneur class in the coming months. 3. I was invited by Whurley to be the Get Real Officer on his crowd-sourcing plans for the city of Austin web site development, called OpenAustin.org; 4. I was asked to be a guest editor of inSocialmedia.com. I'd say from these gifts and the continued traffic and comment success on my blog that I am doing a good job of putting myself out there.

8. Spirit: Here's how I described it in my previous post, "I'm going to call this GOAL to the carpet and LABEL it as BIG. When I am creating music I am pretty sure that I am executing at my highest level."

So two weeks ago I took my family to California and played a live show at the Orange County Fair. That's pretty ACTIVE!

I could be doing more. I have two projects in the works that I am not making too much progress on. But my AC is busted in my music studio (whine) and I have not found the right repair shop to come fix it. Even though it's a GE, the GE service guy says they don't work on those kind of units. It's called a High Wall Split System. I have a different guy coming out next week.

9. Health and Fitness: a new break out category to serve up my procrastination and successes with getting on with the workout and losing a few pounds in the process. What I can say is I have upped my tennis play to 3 times a week. And I have no problem playing for 2.5 hours in the early evening heat so my actual fitness is fine. It's the weight that's less than fine.

Several things I have done more recently: I stopped eating any added sugar for a month. (No noticeable change, but I really liked how easy it was to say no to sugary deserts.) And I had an amazing breakthrough (two actually) with the back pain. First the big one: I was having some crippling, late night wake-up pains on my right upper and mid-back. My trapezius muscle on the right side was in constant pain. Here's what I learned last week after returning from California and having no back pain.

Once I returned to the pool with my family my pain returned with a vengeance. Hello! I was being really hurt by the twenty or so one-armed throws of my son into the deep end of the pool. "Like a 60-pound shot put," a friend said yesterday.

Overall aches and pains due to tennis. The days following on of these 2+ hour matches I am often struggling with stiffness and pains and require a small ibuprofen regimen over the next 24 hours. What I learned from a massage therapist who works on a lot of professional tennis players at Andy Roddick's academy is this. All tennis players deal with ongoing pain. Twenty-year old tennis players have personal trainers (hey maybe that would help me…) physical therapists and massage therapists to get them through their workouts and practice sessions. And what this woman told me was they all have pain management issues.

So my icing, heating, using ibuprofen, getting massage is similar to what the tennis players do when it is their full-time job. And last night I played another Men's league tennis match and smoked my opponent 6-3, 6-0. A nice, very nice, finish to the week. Not that winning is everything. But a trouncing is pretty fun. [Oops. Back to balance work for me.]

UberGoal: Do better. I'm awake. Happy. Working on stuff I love with people I care about. My family is happy and I am happy. It could be better, but it's pretty good right now.

Next Right Action: Persistence and accountability in all goals. Tangible results and tracking of exercise program.

That's the best I can do.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/big-goals-AUG

Related Information:

• Review, Reset, Action: the BIG GOALS of 2009 (Being Accountable for Our Own Actions)
• Puttin Up the BIG GOALS of 2009 – Mid-Year Update in Progress
• Getting Things Done Primer – It’s All About Doing It, not THINKING About Doing It
• Lifehacker post: Motivate Yourself to Achieve Goals by Putting Them Online
• InfoStream Strategies

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