I have some great friends.  I consider them to be my safety rope in the Chaos.  They keep me from going it alone.  I have been fortunate to make some really good ones – both here on the blogiverse, and in my local area.

Good friends challenge you.  They encourage you to be a better person. More than that, they expend of themselves to see that you succeed.

Lani and I email each other on a regular basis. There are no topics off limit. As such, they remain fairly private – we are both very responsible about what we will and won’t put on the net for anonymous viewing. However, we thought it would be neat to motivate each other to make positive difference – and those types of movements are incredibly blog worthy.

Last week, over on Making Life Work for You, I talked about personal responsibility.  It was the first attempt at an idea Lani and I have been brainstorming over. When she mentioned it, I immediately thought of the conversation Liz and Dawud are having. It’s cool – you should check it out.

So, this is home base. Whenever Lani or I become inspired to post about something we learned (or relearned), we’ll post it and link back here. We invite you to join us.

I was on a roll this weekend.

• I had finished reading The Secret some time ago. While I don’t buy into all of it, there was some encouraging stuff in there. Being intentional about how my brain works, where my thoughts go, and what my energy is focused on has been very helpful.
• My inbox is still at under 10 messages. Talk about GTD. The lesson here is the fewer times you can touch something (email message) the more productive you can be. Get the email, process the email, file it or delete it. Don’t let it hang around.
• After reading a few of Lyman’s post on Simpleology, I decided to check it out. I dig it. Deliberate, paced, and fun. The Daily Praxis has been most helpful. And Mark’s delivery is very funny – I like funny.

These things are working. They may not work for everybody, but they (with my tweaks) are working for me.

Tweaks…that’s where my train got derailed.

I have decided I am going to start The Reading Chair here at Beautiful Chaos. Why?

• I like to read smart stuff. There are all kinds of people reading smart stuff. I make a little note to read whatever the recommendation is, lose the paper, spend a ton of time trying to find the recommendation.
• I like to tell you about the stuff I read but I want the posts all in one place. Remember, I am trying to streamline certain aspects of my life.

Well, in an effort to do this, I got lost in the tweaks.

• Wow, I must have this new plug in.
• Look at this neat format idea.
• My blog just would not survive without this.

Hours later, I am no closer to standing up The Reading Chair than I was 15 minutes into the endeavor. Stupid.

So, here is my daily affirmation.

• I like the way Beautiful Chaos looks.
• Beautiful Chaos serves its function as a blog.
• Beautiful Chaos is user friendly and aesthetically pleasing just the way it is.
• I will save mindless tweaking for my free time.

Time wasters. We all have them. This is one of mine and it is sickening. It must be eradicated. Sounds overly dramatic, I know – unless you see all the “to dos” yesterday that suffered from my lack of management.

Did something else this morning. I changed the way my email runs. I can’t turn Outlook off – it has my schedule on it and I have set up some alarms to keep me on track. But there is no doubt that real time email is this shiny thing that glitters and I find it impossible to resist – time waster. Solution – I turned off the “automatic send/receive.” Yes, I am experiencing withdraws. Yes, I am twitching a bit. No, I will not turn it back on. I hope.

And that is saying something in the world of Beautiful Chaos!

First – the things I did not do

1. Make a breakfast meeting – which I hate that I missed
2. Get my college enrollment letter in the mail – which I can do tomorrow

But – I did

1. Have lunch with a friend
2. Get my Constant Contact set up for Turn Around Tuesday
3. Got the Bryan County GOP website up (read “started) – come on, nobody’s surprised I am a conservative.
4. Got as far as I could get with the Top 2 Bottom Organizing webpage
5. My crowning achievement…MY FAVICON WORKS! After some direction from Jay, a lot of procrastination, and a link from Char…woo hoo!!

Sure – that’s only .714.  But if you take into consideration that I fixed my hair, brushed my teeth, and kept up with all the kids – that’s an even .800.

I am going to take a nap