April Groves shared her thoughts on how mundane tasks often tend to produce seemingly unrelated benefits. I love this post – Whether, as April suggests, it is the ordinary act of house cleaning (okay, not so ordinary in my house) which inspires healthy eating or the simple ritual of applying make-up which increases productivity, random tasks can work to produce surprising results. (I can’t leave this last “make-up thing” without warning April that when her odometer nears a significant roll-over milestone as mine is, the task of “putting on one’s face” becomes about as simple as engineering a space station).
April is right, though – We needn’t surrender our lives and our work to a constant state of entropy. And yes, you naysayers, there is a real estate connection in all of this. I think it is safe to say that we all from time to time find ourselves either on a low boil or losing steam. We all periodically risk burn-out. Let’s call it Business Block, and sometimes the answer isn’t to do more of what got you into this place, but to recognize your motivating triggers. I have my own mechanisms for harnessing the energy to refocus. I make chicken soup – Using the Suzuki method. No defined recipe, but just a lot of seemingly unrelated stuff from the pantry which sounds good and I intuitively know will make me hungry again.
Dress for Success
I remember my elementary school dress code. Skirts or dresses for the girls were required. The argument was that we would be more inclined to learn if we dressed the part; sloppy appearances would translate to sloppy attitudes and shorter attention spans. Today, many light years later, this is just silly. Blue jeans don’t symbolize a day off – Ask any Microsoft employee. For me, they symbolize “no appointments” and therefore a “back office day”. My most productive back office days come courtesy of Abercrombie and Fitch. Unfortunately, Steve’s “back office day” uniform involves a pair of hideous day-glo orange shorts which, ironically, work the same magic for me. They send me running for the office.
Blogging
Some days there is just no wind in Read more
curtain. The characters were told to ignore him — by the guy behind the curtain. 
fuzzies returned to the land of bulls and bears. Confidence was bolstered.
Cathy and I watched The Path to 9/11 on television tonight. I had forgotten that we were in Metro New York for the Turn of the Millennium. My father lives in Connecticut, and we went there that year for New Year’s Day. The photo you see is my son crawling all over a bronze statue of a stock broker in Liberty Park, directly across from what was then the Merrill Lynch Building — on December 30, 1999.
My life is a series of Post It notes. They are stuck to my computer screen, they clutter my desk, and they litter my backyard when a light wind kicks up in the vicinity of my patio table. They can be found in the floor of my car, at the bottom of my purse and, more than occasionally, on the foreheads of my children.