What glorious weather we have been having this week! Absolutely scorching. It was so hot down our road that the tar melted. However, I feel that was more down to the cheap job done on relaying it than on the temperatures. Once heavy vehicles started driving down it, they started ripping up big chunks of road that had stuck to their tyres. Now we are back to having a pot-holed road. Still, the council came out within a few days and coated the road in a fine grit, which has solved the tar problem, so at least we can now drive to our house.
The warm weather has been a great opportunity for us to catch up on some jobs in the garden. We’ve been trying to re-do the gravel in front of our shed lately. When we moved into the house, we thought it was more grass. However, over time we learnt that these were weeds, which started to die back in winter to reveal patches of gravel. So we weeded it and found the gravel. Unfortunately the weeds came back with a vengeance, so we decided to lift the gravel and replace the rubble sacks that had been down, with proper weed barrier sheets. We then found under the gravel a whole load of flag stones making a path. Its been like an archaeological dig. Anyway, we have been cleaning the gravel off, laying weed barrier and now we are almost done. Its been hard work with fitting it in with the weather and prior commitments, so its nice to have the job nearly finished. I hate having a half-finished job!
Now we’ve just got the remainder of the garden to de-weed and the garden furniture to sand and oil…. by then I suspect the weather will have passed and we will be back to glorious British rain!
The other thing I’ve been trying to get done, while the weather has been nice, is to build up my miles on my bike. Yesterday I got 12 miles in and my time was amazing (for me anyway). My best time ever and my longest distance for quite a while. Hopefully now I will get back to commuting into work once a week.
This week I’ve also been pondering the future of these Sunday Muse posts. Its taking up a lot of my time at the weekend, trying to get this post out. This is time that I am wondering whether would be better spent expanding on the rest of the site. Working a full-time job, having a life and working on this site is hard work. Whilst I have found these Sunday check-ins (or chickens?) very useful for me getting my thoughts down, the Sunday posts have started to become a bit of a chore. That’s not what this site is about. As the tag line says, it’s about “surviving life with a smile on your face”.
I don’t want to completely lose what this post is about though. I’d still like to share some of the reading I’ve been doing over the week and every now and again I’d like to put some thoughts together on the site and update you on what I’ve been up to.
The article and reading sharing can be sorted through my twitter account (@babblingeng) and I am thinking of setting up a Facebook page too.
As far as sharing my thoughts and activities, I could switch the Sunday Muse posts to monthly (in which case, do I need to change the name?) or I could just do sporadic posts as and when. I always think its nice though, to expect a regular post.
At the moment, I don’t know. I shall ponder this. If you have any thoughts on this then please feel free to get in touch, or add a comment below. Thank you.
This Weeks Reading
Your Time Is Money: What If You Were Worth $300 an hour – Tim Miles (DumbLittleMan)
This article presents a case study where mentally, the staff were given a raise to $300 an hour. Note, this was only a pretend raise. Not surprisingly an increase in performance was seen as everybody tried to prove that they were worth $300. Or so it would seem on face value. The only flaw in this is that they were aware of the experiment, so the experiment was not completely blind. However, it does appear to back up the theory, that I subscribe to, that employees should be made to feel valuable to the Company. Only then will you see the best of them. And that doesn’t have to be done through money – a good work environment is essential.
Proving The Skeptics Wrong – Seth Godin (Seth’s Blog)
Instead of working so hard to prove the skeptics wrong, it makes a lot more sense to delight the true believers
I love this approach. Basically, don’t focus on the negatives, switch it round to focus on the positive. Number 1 rule in life!
Why Far of Discomfort Might Be Ruining Your Life – Leo Babauta (ZenHabits)
A few tips for overcoming the resistances that stop us from doing things. Like getting up on a rainy day to cycle into work. Been there and its so easy to let yourself fall into bad habits, or fall out of good habits when you have an excuse to.
So, that may be it for a while as far as the Sunday Muse posts go, we shall see. If you want to keep up on articles that I’ve found interesting then follow my twitter account (@babblingeng). I shall still see you on Wednesday to carry on my Productivity Reboot.
