Sarah Wilson

So, this week I’ve packed up and racked off to Bali for “annual leave” (are such things relevant when you work for yourself?). I’ve vowed not to work. So I’m posting in advance a short best-of series. I’ve been on this experiment…trying different tricks and meeting various gurus for just over a year. Some work. Some don’t. Some are legit. Some need to start practicing what they preach a little more!! Which have worked? Well… part two of the best-of series…. plus an entirely gratuitous shot of a VERY handsome man. Because it’s a Thursday!

1.  The Pomodoro Technique works. It really does. I use it every week to write my Sunday Life column. Sprint, pause, sprint, pause.

Developed in the 90s by an Italian efficiency enthusiast, it’s recently experienced a surge of popularity. It’s stupidly simple. You pick a task and take one of those kitschly 90s red tomato kitchen timers and set it to 25 minutes. Next, churn through your task, ignoring distractions, not stopping to make tea or stare at the ceiling. Rest for 5 minutes and repeat the cycle three more times, after which you rest for a good half hour and grab lunch or read emails. The aim is to work to these 30-minute cycles daily, building up the self-discipline muscle. Read more here.

* I love instapaper. I can’t imagine life before it. I divide all my reading into different folders. There’s also an iphone app, too!

It works like this. You’re wasting time online and stumble upon an interesting blog post or New York Times article. You can’t read it now; you’re meant to be finalising a spreadsheet or something….What to do? Glad you asked. Once you’ve installed Instapaper (three easy online steps, or thereabouts), you simply click a “Read Later” button on your Bookmarks menu and your article is filed in a special folder in cyberspace. For perusal at a more languid juncture. Get more here.

* Only answering emails twice a day. I’m not so good at this one. But I HIGHLY recommend trying this etox technique, even just for a week. It reshapes your thinking.

So, step one, on Monday I set up a perky auto-reply that essentially tells email to rack off, while putting the kybosh on my own addictive patterns. If you were to email me today you’d be greeted with this: Hello! Email is wasting my time and creative energy. For the sake of efficiency and wellbeing I now check me emails twice daily only, at 10am and 4pm. It’s urgent? Call me on… For more…here!

The lovely Clare Lancaster at Women in Business posted this interview with Gwen Bell, one of Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Tech, 2010. It touches on some really great points, including how to get mindful for the day…. for everyone out there feeling like they’re doing too much, which is sooooo a theme this month. Too much, all layered up, swamped, drowning….and not doing things with heart and care.

Don’t know about you, but I’m BUSTING to come home to myself.

Last month Gwen unplugged, she did a digital sabbatical – no blogging, tweeting, Facebook or email for 31 days. Clare spoke to her about it and got some really lovely, poignant answers. For the whole interview go to Women in Business, a site for chicks doing it online. PS Clare is a GREAT web strategist, offering e-courses on how to build an e-businesses…e-hah!

And bear in mind this: Gwen experienced her most profitable month during her sabbatical.

Gwen on: how when you grow up you have to enforce your own breaks…

When we were students, someone enforced breaks. You’re taking the summer off. You’re taking the winter break off. School is closed during those months. Load up on library books and prepare for self-study. Because the library will be closed, too.

I think our entrepreneurial selves are like students, without those enforced weeks off.

We all saw the gendered election worm last night…what was interesting was that, compared with previous election debates the worm tracked far more positively than normal. Plus, the pink worm (women) was, overall, more positive than the blue (men).

When Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott started sledging the other, both worms took a dive into the dirt. Ditto when they spoke negatively about…anything.

Which begs: do we really  believe a positive approach wins, or are we simply seeking happy-happy-joy-joy-ness, at the expense of balanced critical thought? You’ve probably noticed the whole positive psychology spiel that dominates so much discourse these days. You attract what you put out there, and all that jazz. It would appear we’re all seeking a sunnier approach against a backdrop of a confusing, cluttered life.

Every Thursday I post a list of things I like. I’m not paid to say these things. I just think you might find them useful. Today, it’s all about oils, ain’t it!

There is a lot of misinformation about oil, as something to ingest, but also as a beauty product. Know this: oils don’t make you oily. Quite the opposite, in fact. Soaps, for instance, are made of oil. Oils nourish. Oils carry toxins from your cells. Oils clean.

I follow Ayurvedic thinking when it comes to oils. This style of healing uses oils to heal a number of ailments, particularly those that stem from a Vatta disposition. Vatta is a personality tendency characterised by flightiness, agitation, an inability to focus, excitement, sleep problems, digestion issues. I’m VERY Vatta. But even those of us who aren’t Vatta-dominant experience the craziness of out of control Vatta because our culture if very Vatta. Fast food, fast traffic, fast timetables, chaotic schedules…it’s knocking our Vatta about. And one some of the best ways to calm Vatta involve oils. Oils are heavy and grounding. They coax Vatta back down to earth, like Miss Jane pulling Mr Squiggle back down to the ground.

1. If you’re interested in learning more about the Ayurvedic take on oils and Vatta behaviour, Deepak Chopra’s Perfect Health (you can buy direct on the right there) is a good start.

I think I’m going to start a series of posts of recommendations. Stuff that works for me, that I use/eat/refer to/get inspired by. I’ve had a number of emails asking me to share this kind of thing. Let’s make it a Thursday thing for a while. Yes.

Just as a note, if you’re looking for this stuff later, it will be filed on the “recommendations” page.

So, this week: what I use when my gut is playing up. I have a litany of stomach issues, many stemming from my auto-immune issues, some from just being an over-eater. It’s been called IBS over the years. I just don’t buy the IBS thing. Nobody just has a cranky gut. As in, it’s just cranky for the fun of it. There’s always something else behind it – a stress issue, an adrenal issue, a sugar addiction, an overly acidic system. Or, in my case, all of the above.

Now, I was going to apologise to anyone who’s eating. But if you’re reading this, you’re probably in my same boat – more interested in finding fixes for your pain than dancing around polite euphemisms. So…. shit, poo, week, diarrhea, squirts, farts… let’s get it out there.

Here’s my arsenal for my various crappy stomach states. Of course, I’m not prescribing anything here. I’m just saying, after much experimenting, the below tricks have come to work for me:

1. For when you’re bloated and gassy like Michelin Man: Mintec. These are capsules filled with peppermint oil that you can buy over the counter at all pharmacies and health food shops.

This week I eat mindfully

Now here’s a thought: what if all those folk who take photos of their every meal and post them on their blog/Twitter/Facebook were actually onto something? I’m sure you’ve seen them about. I was at lunch recently and watched a table of six whip out their iphones as their food arrived, repositioning the Maldon salt pot artfully and angling the lighting all Petrina Tinsley-like.  In a flurry of thumbs they then tweeted the images on to their cyber followers replete, no doubt, with foodie-ese captions (“River Café-inspired mascarpone-stuffed chook with intriguing heirloom tomato smear”; “Well, if those toffee shards don’t take me straight back to 1992!”).

I’ve previously found such faddish behaviour bewildering. But this week I discerned a point to it all. Fastidiously honouring your food in this way is mindfulness in action.

This week I give gifts

There’s this thing I do in cab queues at airports. I don’t find it weird. Although you might. When I get to the front of the queue I sing out to the crowd to ask if anyone would like to share a cab to Bondi (which is where I live). Or Downtown (when I visit New York). Or Rundle Mall (when I find myself that way). At first people are affronted by such an invasion of “stranger distance”. But then they soften. Especially when I offer to pay.

Of course, the practice is efficient (it shortens the cab queue for all concerned), and saves carbon emissions in it’s own modest way. But mostly I do it because it feels good. And a bit daring. And, golly, if this world doesn’t need an injection of daring from time to time!

Seth Godin does the same. Seth is one of the most prolific marketing experts in the world. He’s written 100-plus books, invented genius online businesses well ahead of the curve, has a blog following of 500,000 and is responsible for terms such as “permission marketing”, “idea viruses” and “purple cows”. And, truthfully, I think he’s the most authentically impressive person I’ve ever interviewed. And not just because he shares my penchant for cab queue bombing.

I’ve come to accept very recently that it is our personal responsibility to be our own information gatekeepers. Everyone around me is constantly complaining how they’re overloaded. They can’t keep up with email. Their iphone is driving them mental. Blah blah blah. It’s time, I think, we realised that the greatest challenge our generation faces is controlling how we receive information. This much we know: we WILL continue to be flooded. Unless we install our own boundaries. No one else will do it for us.

The new wisdom is knowing this. The new status is being in control of it.  The new power is having firm boundaries. Like, for instance, standing tall and proud and declaring you only check email twice a day. Or boldly deciding you work a four-day week. Or not taking your phone out with you when you have dinner with someone you wish to explore intimacy with. I’ve experimented with all this. And more.

To this end another nifty little tip for stemming the tide of group work emails onto one’s phone, from timesonline.

This week I share how I take Thursdays off. I call it a Clear Day. A day for floating…

If you were to put your ear to the ground and listen carefully, this is what the Zeitgeist would rumble back at you: right now, in 2010, we’re feeling like little canoes thundering down a gorge. Every iota of us wants to paddle over to one of the placid little pools that we glimpse in our flurry downstream. So we can get our breath and check we’re heading down the right river. But we keep getting swooped into the current (nagging emails, to-do detritus), don’t we. Or thrown a series of rapids (late parking fees to pay, kids’ tuba lessons). And so the calm pool of reflection eludes us.

You know, it’s not so much that we yearn less work or less responsibilities. Self-help types often get this wrong. Mostly, if you listen to the hum and drum of the collective, we yearn more space between the work and responsibilities, from which to prioritise and appreciate.

Ideas are the new gossip. I like this. The Times recently wrote about how Brainy is Suddenly Chic and the “new vogue for intellectual pursuits” as a way of accessing happiness.

More and more we’re becoming interested in sharing concepts and being truly informed.  Not so much to wear the badge “Hi, I’m Informed”, but to connect with other people’s thinking and experience.

To this end, a few experiences that you might like to sign up for. Sometimes life is improved by simply signing up. Committing, sitting, absorbing.

1.  Get Motivated with a Daniel Pink Webinar. Daniel is author of Drive, the New York Times bestseller. I’ve read it.  It’s all about how the new way to motivate to tap into creativity, and to access the new flow. Very fresh. So….The Australian Businesswomen’s Network is holding a free lunchtime webinar with him next Thursday at 12.00pm. It’s free, you just have to register and be at a computer to listen in on the day.

PS these webinars are supremely well run and incredible to be part of. I did last month’s Seth Godin webinar. A community of more than 500 people are Australia listening and tweeting comments…a nice little community experience. Try it!

2. Think big with TED Sydney. Have you checked out TED? Ooooh, you should. The VERY best thinkers around the world – in technology, entertainment and design – congregrate to talk, each for 18 minutes…under the banner “ideas worth spreading”. My favourite is Jill Bolte Taylors‘ account of having a stroke, explained in spiritual, metaphysical terms. I cry ever time I see it.

And so TED comes to Sydney Saturday 22 May at the CarriageWorks. There will be a live audience and anyone can go…some people will be able to participate as a member of the live Bay 17 audience. Here’s where you would apply to be within that group.

TEDxSydney we are on the lookout for merit, moxie & diversity. Applications close on 12 April 2010 … and we’ll be letting people know one way or the other via email on 19 April.

3. Intelligence Squared Debate with Annabel Crabb: These debates are held in Sydney and Melbourne on a regular basis and are webcast at SMH and podcast on Radio National. Pretty much an old school debate with great big minds…including one of my favourite writers, Annabel Crabb. The next one in Sydney is April 13: The Senate is still unrepresentative swill