Month: November 2008

Handling Financial Pressure

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Now, more than ever, a lot of people are faced with financial pressure. This is what a crisis should be about, anyway. Companies are cutting jobs, people are losing houses and the global economy seems to be falling down. I’m not going to talk about the reasons for this crisis, as I will try to better focus a little about the immediate reality and how I faced similar situations.

Being an entrepreneur is something that, among other interesting stuff, is giving you a lot of financial pressure. Getting from a monthly pay check (in exchange of some time spent in an office) to a complete reverse of the situation, when you have to take your money from the clients (if you do your job well and on time), huh, that’s quite a roller-coaster. It’s a serious comfort shake and it requires a lot of extra energy spent on the financial side. And it is not only your money that’s on the plate, you’ll need money for office rent, for utilities like electricity, internet access, for advertising and promotion and so on. Not to mention your employees or partners. You will have to manage a whole new level of cashing and spending. And believe me, this is a tremendous financial pressure.

When I started my own business, 10 years ago, I faced this like a train hitting a wall. Although I managed to do pretty well, in the first three years I barely knew where my pockets were. They were most of the time empty. Money didn’t have a chance to settle there. Even if I managed to do a decent living per month, there were increasing expenses that I had to face the next month. It was really tough. That was a time when I really had to learn a lot about handling financial pressure.

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Being Successful

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As strange as it might seem, success, one of the most popular concepts in our modern world, is the most difficult thing to understand for many people. Maybe that would be the main reason for not getting it at all? Maybe because the core definition of success is so foggy we have a hard time … Read more

Exclusive 25% Discount On Mariner Software Products For DragosRoua.com Readers

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OK, this is a commercial announcement and I’ll be very open and direct: as of today, you have 25% off for any Mariner Software products until December 31st 2008 via DragosRoua.com. Yes, you read it well, it’s 25% off for ALL Mariner Software products, not only the flagship product MacJournal. I’m so happy that we … Read more

Time Management For Mac OS: reviewing Slife

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I’ve been a GTDer for more than 2 years but I have never ceased to look for new and better ways to improve my working process. The other day I received a comment from one of my readers on the post Manage Your Time As You Manage Your Money. It was something about a new time management application for Mac (and Windows, meanwhile) for time management, called Slife. It was a free download and I gave it a try.

The application is somewhere in the same league as time tracking services like Wakoopa, but there are some subtle differences that make Slife a very interesting baby. So, what is this Slife doing anyway?

Well, it basically tracks your time spent on your computer, with a higher granularity than other applications, letting you know not only with which applications you are spending the most of your time, but also which documents or web pages your are visiting most often (attention, twitter users 😉 ). So you will end up with some sort of report of the most used applications during your working sessions. The reporting is done in real time, with a clear, iCal-like interface (click for larger picture).

Time Management With Slife

Did you see those little points and dashes? That’s where the granularity I spoke above takes place, if you click on one of those spots you will see the exact document on which you spent time, in my case, of course, twitter :-).

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Personal Milestones

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Do you have personal milestones? I do. By personal milestones I understand those times when you sit down and replace the “doing” in your life with the “seeing”. You stop doing whatever you planned to do and start to stare at your life. Right, just stare at whatever it comes to your focus and try … Read more

Micro-blogging, tumbling and blogging

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I’m sure many of you have read the post about Journaling versus Blogging, it was featured on a number of websites, including the German productivity blog imgriff. Somehow related to that post, I have to confess that recently I came across a number of similar patterns I tend to develop when it comes to blogging, and those patterns are grouping into new and interesting activities. In fact, there is much more than blogging, as the title of this post already told you. It seems that blogging as a process reached a certain level of maturity, which will naturally be followed by some sort of splitting into much more specialized activities.

Blogging in (r)evolution

Several years ago having a blog was a monolithic activity. Blogging in itself seemed like a one time / one player activity. You pick a topic, establish a posting routine, start writing and there you are, the next big thing of the blogosphere.

In the last two years this has dramatically changed. With the proliferation of social networking tools and with some very simple yet innovative services like twitter, tumblr or, in a different league, friend feed, the situation is completely different than 2 years ago. Blog networks written by armies of bloggers, solitary twitter heroes and companion tumblrs for every successful mainstream blog, all of these are just common sense nowadays.

What made this possible? And what seems to be the underlying reason for this?

Well, first of all, the expressivity of blogging in itself has reached the ceiling. There is some deep need for something different. The audience has been exposed enough time to this type of creativity. We all know now what a post is, what can you do in a comment, and how pingbacking works… It seems that the message is forced to change the medium here, trying to subtly evolve into new patterns and structures.

Second, it seems that blogging in itself has reached a certain level of formalism which made simpler for services like tumblr to streamline the blog to a thinner experience. You don’t need a truck to go from point A to point B, or, in terms of blogging, you don’t need a full blown blog to express yourself. All you need is the ability to post a picture, a quote, a sentence, or a link. You might think that this simplistic approach will not make history, but the web is just telling the other way around.

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Is Water A Super Computer?

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This is a movie I saw two weeks ago. It’s about one hour and 20 minutes long and it talks about unusual things about water. I got the link from one of my astrology groups where I’m subscribed, so I expected something beyond scientific. But most of the time in this movie, it’s the scientists that are speaking. And they’re speaking about stuff that we don’t know yet about water, even if we did walk on the moon or discover the atomic bomb (yes, they are talking about “heavy water” too, several times).

I’ll let you see the movie for now, and if you think like commenting upon it afterwards, you’re welcome. But if you don’t want to see it, I’ll outline what surprised me the most, and try to comment a little about it. So, without further ado, these are the key points in the movie:

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Law Of Attraction And Action

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Everybody talks about it. Everybody seems to know everything about it and I guess every second there is another post on some blog about The Law Of Attraction. I first heard about it when I saw The Secret, 2 years ago. I was touched by the movie and I was lucky enough to have already seen What The Bleep Do We Know, so I was somehow prepared for more. The movie had quite an impact on me. I do plan to write more about the movie later on, including about what I call the “too-sweet-for-me-layer-of-consumerism” that surrounds the much more difficult to ingest core of the film. But for now I’d like to share some of my opinions about The Law Of Attraction and what makes it really work for you. And that would be: Action.

First of all, The Law Of Attraction wasn’t discovered with The Secret. It was there all the time, only with different names. I guess every major religion had a way to convey this: “as above, so beneath”, “what’s inside is outside”, and so on. So it’s not a major breakthrough of the movie. The major breakthrough of the movie was the fact that was able to communicate it in a very simple way to a massive audience. That was the real hit behind The Secret.

Second, The Law Of Attraction works whether you are aware of it, or not. That’s pretty clear for you when you first understand it and then try to remember your life. It’s like somebody has lit a torch in front of you. It suddenly becomes clear. Your whole life revealed to you in such a simple and logical structure, that you could never use another way to describe it. It always works, whether you are aware of it or not.

What Is The Law Of Attraction?

It’s the fact that everything you think becomes reality. Everything you want becomes reality. Everything you intend becomes reality. It’s the proof that you are of divine essence, being able to create your own universe.

Everything you do, think or intend, has a vibration. Your body has a vibration. Your thoughts are carrying a vibration, and I mean the physical electromagnetic charges that are composing the synapses. Your brain works on 4 different brainwaves, from alertness to sleep. You communicate by using air vibrations called words. Everything around you is vibration, even if the scientific tools are sometimes too obtrusive to measure it, like in thoughts or intentions.

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