Since I quit my Sunday Life column I’ve been asked by many of you what tricks and techniques acquired along the way are still part of my life repertoire. As in, the things that actually worked and stuck. In all fairness, I’ve stuck to about 1/3 of the concepts I played with. Which is not a bad stat, really. I mean, there’s only so many techniques you can take on in a day! In a lifetime!

photo via trendhunter

Here are some of my favourites, which I reckon you might like to try…a new year on it’s way and all.

1. I go Pomodoro

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.

2. I use a virtual assistant

A VA is someone you hire online to help you with stuff you’re, quite frankly, over doing.

Join my 8-week I QUIT SUGAR reboot program kicking off January!

It’ll be easy + not-boring-at-all + it WILL work

I get a sense that a few of you are thinking they’d like clean up their insides after the year that was. And, of course, the indulgent I-can’t-cope-with-being-discplined-right-now-I’m-too-exhausted Christmas and New Year we’re about to give in to.

photo via Ellieblog

2011 was harrrrrd. And lots of stuff built up, don’t you think? We were also so very harsh on ourselves this year, frantically trying to cope and not really being mindful of how we were treating our bodies. So, we’re a little gunked up, addicted, heavy, stuck.

If this sounds like you, what do you reckon of this:

In January we’ll be kicking off a program for everyone keen to start the I Quit Sugar program as a New Year commitment. If you’ve been procrastinating about getting on board, now might be a good time.

This is how it will work:

* Simply buy the I Quit Sugar ebook for $15 here.

* Start any time in the first week or so of January. No stress. Once you’re ready.

* Each week I’ll answer your questions as they come up. Ask dumb ones. Smart ones. All cool.

* I’ll also be holding a webinar where you can fire off your wonderings at me. Anyone who’s already bought the book or started the program is free to join in, too.

Perhaps you’ve finished off at work? Perhaps you’ve done the shlepp back “home” to the parents and are a little bored? (Raining much in your neck?) Perhaps you’re dreading the mince pie/pudding/platters of lollies and Jatz onslaught and want to contribute a few edibles of your own…These might provided some inspiration. Jo and I have compiled a few All-Timers:

image via Scandi Foodie

pumpkin chia muffins

Oh, it’s just snacks, snacks and more snacks…whip up a batch of these for those “anyone want another Iced Vo Vo” moments. The full recipe is here.

This week in Sunday Life I anti-Christmas

Photo via twistedvintage.blogspot.com

Christmas is like cheap pizza – all cheesy, intoxicating promise, but somehow (so disappointingly!) winds up tasting like cardboard.

Actually, correction. Christmas is like cheap pizza to the violently lactose and gluten-intolerant – something everyone else seems to enjoy, while you get…tofu.

Why all the bah humbuggery? At the core of my festive deflation is the mass, crass, exhausting, relationship-compromising ritual of buying presents. Did you see that Black Friday footage from the US? The whole notion of massly, crassly buying up stuff for “loved ones” seems to send human nature to its most depraved base. And the fact that it’s such a far cry from the original premise of festive giving just deepens my malaise. As, I think, it does for so many.

Admittedly my family as a whole is particularly and notoriously awkward with the ritual of gift-giving. We always keep our receipts; invariably our Kris Kringle recipient feels guilty accepting anything isn’t wholly functional and necessary. Um, I just don’t think I’ll get maximum salad-making use out of the hand-carved bowl you paddled three days through shark-infested waters to some Solomon archipelago to purchase. I know, why don’t you just keep it?

Over the years, we’ve tried all kinds of consumerist-dodging approaches, but none have really hit the right tone. We’ve done Kris Kringle with an upper price limit of $20 (which pretty much gets you a Led Zeppelin CD from the discount bin). We went through a giving-a-goat-to-a-third-world-village phase. We spent lunch wondering whether said village ever got said goat, which was a bit of a cracker fizzler.  One year we all got a boxing bag from Mum and Dad. Not each. One to share between six. The next year it was one-sixth of a ping-pong table. The idea was to generate less “stuff”, a commons approach. Which would have been sound if we weren’t all adults living in different states.

So what’s the nourishing, satisfying, happy way to navigate one’s way through this? The thing is we humans actually do like giving. A bunch of studies show that one of the most effective way to get a happiness hit is to give away your money,

Three reasons why I’m sharing this.

1. My friend Johnny Abegg made the film, which won Best Food Film with The Chef’s Directory. Johnny is widely regarded as one of the best surfers in Byron. Just as an FYI. And he’s cosy with my friend Lizzy at Spell. Again, background.

2. The film is about Ben Shewry, chef/owner of Attica Restaurant in Melbourne, a joint that deserves every award it’s earned.

3. It’s a refreshing reminder that sometimes things can be simple and raw and real.

Enjoy…

If Ira says it, I believe it: it simply takes a lot of work to make good stuff.

If this topic comforts and gives you hope and fires you up because, “hey, it’s only hard work and anyone can do that”, then you might also like to know how long it took Bruce Springsteen to write Born to Run and Leonard Cohan to write Hallelujah.

Comforting for you today? Makes the process of “digging for your special thing” more enticing and doable?

Just this. From Steve Jobs in some random interview in 1995 (when he had hair, a beard and not-so-fat-wads-of-cash).

It cuts through to something we all need to know:

When you grow up you, tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that

 everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

And then again, a little later in the same interview…and frankly my favourite insight in a long time:

The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will… pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing.

It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

A quick notice…I know some of you have asked in the past to meet with me to brainstorm/get advice etc on all kinds of issues (thyroid disease, career, writing). Here, my dear friends, is your opportunity. I’m being auctioned up for lunch…to raise money for Wall of Hands, a really important charity I’ve been involved with for a few years now. BUT THE AUCTION CLOSES TODAY!

Bid here  to win…we’ll be dining at Sake Japanese restaurant in Sydney (one of the best!) some time next year (I can be flexible). Will be a joy to meet you. The auction ends today!!!

I’ve been cooking a little lately. Experimenting. And I’ve found a few things that I reckon will make very nice Christmas gifts. I’ve got some friends coming around over the weekend to whip up some of the below to hand to Good People Who’ve Done Good Things By Me in 2011. And boy have there have been a few. Got some ideas yourself…share below!

photo via Andrew Scrivani

I love this idea, which I’m modifying from Martha Rose Shulman.

 marinated goat cheese

For a 1-cup jar:

• 1 teaspoon mixed red, black and white peppercorns, lightly crushed
• 2 garlic cloves, peeled
• 2 bay leaves, broken into pieces
• A 3 ounce log of goat cheese (I buy mine from the local markets here. Martha used a round log, but you could do squares from a block…I did)
• 2 sprigs thyme
• 2 sprigs rosemary
• Extra virgin olive oil as needed

Whack peppercorns, garlic cloves and bay leaves in a clean, sterilized wide-mouthed jar. Pour in a film of olive oil.

Cut the goat cheese into rounds 1/2 inch thick (Martha uses unflavored dental floss to cut through the cheese!! Clever!!). Place one round in the jar and drizzle on some olive oil. Stack the remaining rounds, drizzling oil

…Well, a few things.

Straight up, I’ll be filing my final Sunday Life column this week.

Almost 130 experiments in how to make life better…you’d hope I’d have found an answer, hey?? I kinda have, but that’s for another time.

A publisher once said to me, “Never do a column for more than two years. The first year you find your feet, the second you find your voice and after that you repeat what you said in the first two years.” I tend to agree.

And as many of you who read this blog know, I’m not one to hang on to things. I like to move where my voice keeps fresh.

Photo by Elizaveta Porodina

So, from the New Year, I’ll be working on a bunch of new projects (TV and print), as well as ebooks.

Yes, ebooks.

I’ve been really rather thrilled with how rewarding ebook publishing is.

[For those new here, my ebook I Quit Sugar ebook went on sale about 8 weeks ago and has been hitting good spots around traps.]

Ebooks are a direct conversation. They help directly. They share authentically. They deliver what I want to share straight to where I want to connect.

Ebooks are new – according to Darren at Problogger, who is something of an international expert in this kind of thing, there are only about 20 or so bloggers making a living from ebooks here. So no one really knows where it will wind up. I’m the first “traditional” journalist to enter into it…I’ve been told.

Some general thoughts:

Media – and life in general – is moving faster than ever. Everything is speeding up. Flux is our permanent state now. I find this exciting.

They call my generation the bridging generation. We Gen Xers…we’ve had to bend and straddle and dance back and forth as we adjust from the ways of yore to, well, this new multifaceted, layered, messy, instant, constant, technology-based way.

I hand wrote my law essays at uni, but was the Tech Head in my office when the internet arrived while I was doing my newspaper cadetship at News Ltd.