Month: July 2017

You know, when we talk about Financial Freedom, or freedom from your employer, freedom to do the things you want to do in pursuing your happiness and goals and dreams, there are so many lessons in there.

But it dawned on me this morning, that there are freedoms in working for yourself that I was not aware of. If you had told me about them I would have said that sounds very logical, but it didn’t dawn on me until today.

This morning I woke up, and like all people I have my ups and downs, my cycles, that’s part of life. I realized that my morning is not my most productive time for my activities that take thought in contemplation. I’m much more inclined to do hands-on stuff in the morning. I’m much more apt to be successful if I do activity first thing in the morning. But when you work for somebody else you don’t get that option. You do what they want when they tell you to do it. Sometimes you get lucky enough to have some control over your day and how you manage it.

That was my lesson for today that I learned. Freedom includes freedom to be yourself. Freedom to manage your day in a way that suits where you are at that moment.

Johnny Renaissance log July 19th, 2017.

I’m trying out something new, will several things in fact. One of them is this log.

It was inspired by a friend and brother of mine, Michael Lowrey , so I’ve had the idea to  do personal or daily logs before , mine were of the verbal type. A Captain’s Log, as it were.

Another thing I’m trying, or really keeping track of as I try it, are the calendaring types. We all have different personalities, and these personalities dictate how we interact with the world; how we learn; how we create; and how we maximize our own personal peak efficiency.

As the old adage goes, one size does not fit all. So what works for you, may not work for me. I’ve tried many different techniques of tracking time and to-do lists. I’ve come up with a great one, but I’m still in the alpha process of creating that software tool. But like many people are found out before me, sometimes nothing beats pen and paper. Over the last two years there has been a Wellspring of manual logging techniques and books. A simple Google search will show you that there are many different types of planners and loggers. You can even buy notebooks that are specifically made for this now.

My ideal is a hybrid between an online and offline solution. I use the computer, mobile devices, the cloud, all to help me with my memory and my notification systems. But actual execution, for some reason, seems to work best for me when I write pen to paper. So my latest attempt is to actually use a calendar in system that I keep track on a day-to-day basis on a printed calendar sheet. I can already tell after only one day that this is probably not going to be the system for me. Problem

One reason is because I’ve tried this many times, and I didn’t stick with it, so that’s a huge indicator. The under indicator is because after one day I’m already seeing flaws in, it is not an optimized way of doing things. And when one item slips on your calendar it’s a significant amount of effort to move everything else on your calendar, even if it’s just one day.

Previous to this I was using index cards. One of the reasons why I know the index card system worked for me is that I have a massive amount of index cards that I’ve been using for my daily items spanning back the last year. The fact that I stuck with it for so long, is one of the key indicators that it was a working system.

I think one of the failures in that system was the lack of synchronicity between my online and offline list. So back to that I guess. We’ll see how well it works.