Getting things done before 8 a.m.

8 a.m. sounds pretty early, doesn´t it? I imagine most people barely awake at this time when they have a day off. Now imagine me at 8 a.m. sitting at the breakfast table, just finished eating and saying „What´s next?“. This is such a great side effekt from getting up early. I get up, stumble into the bath room, make 45 min workout, do the dishes, prepare and have breakfast and everything before 8 a.m. – what a pleasure. The interesting part of it is that non of this takes much willpower at this time in the morning. My guess is that my weaker self is just not up yet! These times can be the most productively ones at my entire day. I just do. I don´t even thing of alternatives to do what I have to do. This is definitely worth getting up that early!

Intermezzo No. 1 – Books

This post is about one of the most intense relationships I ever had – the one between me and my books.

When I was s child I often felt like the adults around me knew a lot more than I would ever know. They always talked with their friends about things I couldn´t understand. One day I asked my parents where they got all the knowing from and they told me they learned most of it from books (and a little part in school). So for me there was built a strong bound from being intelligent and aducated to owning books. I literally started collecting them and felt great with this. I wished for books to christmas and my birthday and got nearly everything. As I grew older I began feeling sad for all the books I owned but never read but I went on telling me one day I sure would read them all. I imagened myself in the middle of all my great book, knowing each of them deeply and confidentially talking about them.

When I moved out I left some of my books at my mothers home telling myself I would get them to my home one day. In my home then I smoothed the books around the hole apartment. When I finally found this article I realised a quiet simple thing: I just had too much of them. I had been so concentrated on owning them I completely forgot to think about why I wanted the books. I assume at this point I owned up to 250 books. Then I decided I wanted to reduce the amount of books dramatically. I realised it is more important to know the books than to own them.

Here is what I did:

In the first step I seperated the books I had read from those I hadn´t and started working on the once I had read.

I took all the books I weren´t fully pleased with when I read them and donated these to the library. Then I took the once I really love and had read over and over again in the last year and put them on a different shelf. The books left where those I enjoyed reading but didn´t felt motivited to read agian. I asked myself which of these books I wouldn´t get in a public library and donated the rest.

The books I hadn´t read I seperated by topics and looked at the upcoming pattern. Topics I was most interested in concisted of more books then the ones I was moderate interested in. Then I asked myself when I am so interested in that topic, why haven´t I already read these books? Sometimes I had to admit that I felt like I should be interested in this topic but it didn´t seem to fit me. In other topics I´m still highly interested and the hole operation brought my focus back on it. The books I have lost the interest in where donated, whether read or unread. This seemed really content because I wouldn´t read these books anyway.

With the rest of the books I plan to move on like with the already read ones: I want to donate the ones I can get in every library and keep the ones which a rare. (And read them in the next months of course.)

So all in all I want to keep the books which are special to me and let go the ones who aren´t.

This might sound quiet easy but is actually hard work. I felt real emotional pain when I handed over some of the books I owned for years and planned to read every time I looked at the shelf. It helped a lot to write down these titels like saying to the books: You are not forgotten. I let you go now but when it is the right time I will come back lend you from a friend or a library and read you.

For me it felt like emotionally I lost 40 puonds in a month. I felt lighter, clearer and it makes me happy to look at my books. This is a new happyness because it is nearer to the picture I imagined when I was younger. I look at my books and can say: these ones I really know and love.

I set a rule to own not more than 50 books, not including my university related ones. This will make it a lot easy to move to another place! I could figure to change this rule in a few years to about 100 so this is definitely not a live chioce.

Getting up Early

Good morning guys!

Once again, I thought about getting up early. Since I started my challenge, I am really suprised how easy it is to get up early. So when I´m alone, I can´t think of a reason to stay in bed anymore. But when I´m at Basti´s house, I d0n´t feel comfortable waking everyone earlier than they planned to get up. So I once again changed my challenge to get up early whenever I´m alone. Today, we got up at 7 a.m. and I don´t feel that alert I would feel after getting up at 5:30 a.m.

An interesting thing I notices was that my feeling for time changed. When I now look at my watch and it says it 9 a.m. I think „Oh my god, this is late! And I haven´t done anything yet!“ (Well actually I did do something: I got up, took a shower, had breakfast with Basti and went over to my place. But that contains nothing I could strike from my to-do-list.)

Do you wonder how I get along with my sports-challenge? Oh yes, I know you do! Most people react like „Oh my god, every day? Isn´t this way to much?“ So I can tell you now: it isn´t. Wednesday I went swimming with Lydia and yesterday I pretend to do aerobic – I write „pretend“ because what I actually did was to use my stepper and waved my armes in a very uncharming way. This way I came to the conclusion if you don´t do it to hard you can exercise every day.

Second Day, First Change

I´m going to tell you about my third challenge: my learning challenge.

I set the rules to work on three subjects in which I´m going to write exams in the upcoming weeks for one and a half hour a day and work through the material of one older lesson each day. This might seem pretty simple because I´m having time off right now but I figured out didn´t fit my learning-typ. One reason is, that the exams in one of the subjects is more than 8 weeks ahead where as I´m going to write math in 10 days. It didn´t felt reasonable anymore to put in the same effort in the two subjects so I kicked one out. After math I will go on learning for that but not right now.

The other part I´m struggeling with is to set a strickt time for doing something. You will find the advantages of Timeboxing listed here. But to me it feels strange to close my folder when I didn´t finish a topic and I feel like I didn´t really „got something done“. But in the end I will give this concept a few more tries because it fits in well by making my day pretty planable.

My sports challenge is really challenging because every muscle in my body aches right now and it is just the second day!And I´m not shure whether this is going to change either XD

How to become a better person within 30 days

Hello everyone,

to share my experiences with people around the world and to improve my english skills, I decided to „restart“ blogging in english!

Who ever finds a mistake is officailly allowed to keep it!

In reference to the title, I want to tell you about my big plan to become a better person. Inspired by the blog of Steve Pavlina I want to start eight 30-Days-Challenges… today!

That means, starting 14.2.2011, the last day of all my challenges will be 15.3.2011. I´m planning to write a short summary every day to keep you informed of how I´m doing and WHAT I´m doing at the same time.

To begin with, I want to tell you about two of my challenges which I already nearly fullfilled. First one is to become an Early-Riser. Today, I got up at 7 a.m.. I know, this is nor terribly early but I planned it that way to get used to it so I officially complete this task for today. Tomorrow I will get up at 6:30 a.m. and so on until I am raising at 5:30 a.m. every morning for the remaining time of the challenge. I additionally set the rule for myself to not stay up after 10:30 p.m. to make it easier to get up at the right time the next morning

The second challenge is a more active one. I will do at least 45min of sports every day, including rainy days, weekends and so on. Huff. Possibly, this might be the hardest part of the hole challenge-thing but I´m totally confident that I will make it. Today, after getting up, I put on my joggingshoes and went jogging. Yeah, I know, it was freezing cold and I jogged over the hard stone of the streets. It wasn´t really a pleasure but it went o.k. . I tried to tell myself I was back in Denmark where I could run beside the dike and watch the sea.

Because I only went jogging for 20min so I would be back when Basti would rise I still have 25 min to do. I think I probably do some weight training at home.

So much for today and don´t miss to check out Steve Pavlina´s blog!

Internet

Ich hab im Moment keins. Und Alice kann mir da auch nicht helfen.

Aus welchem Grund auch immer ist in meiner neuen Wohnung kein Zugang zum Internet möglich. Ich überlege, zur Telekom zugehen, denn die könnten mir einen Anschluss legen. Fußfesseln und Nebenkosten inklusive. Muss ich mir überlegen, ob es mir das wert ist.

Bis dahin surfe ich, wenn ich bei Basti bin und sonst bin ich leider nur über mein Handy erreichbar.

Unitem of the Week – two

Als ich den Chanel 505 gegoogelt habe, wurde ich darauf aufmerksam gemacht, dass er genauso erfolgreich sei, wie seine Schwester, der 407er. Jaja, grün ist das neue rot. Und Lavendel das neue Katze, schon klar. Was hier als „zartes Mint-grün“ bezeichnet wird, ist meiner Meinung nach das klassische 80er chemie-grün, dass etwas an erbrochenes erinnert. Über Geschmack lässt sich streiten? Wieso tut es dann keiner? Diesen Sommer tragen alle Frauen brav giftig grüne Fingernägel und kommen sich dabei gar nicht komisch vor – bis sie sich nächsten Sommer ihre Urlaubsbilder ansehen werden…

Ein gutes hat er, wenn man ihn als „grünes“ Symbol auffasst. Ich bezeifle aber, dass dieser Nagellack irgendwie die Umwelt schont oder ohne Tiersxperimente hergestellt wurde.

Item of the Week – three

Seit neustem ist der 505 Nagellack von Chanel so in, dass er überall ausverfauft ist und man ihn nur noch überteuert auf Ebay bekommt. Nicht, dass ich sowas normaler weise mitbekommen würde. Nicht, dass ich normalerweise solche „Beauty-Sünden“ zu Hause hätte… Aber diesmal ist alles anders. Meine Mutter hat mir ein Fläschchen aus dem Urlaub auf Fuerte Ventura mitgebracht, wo sie das Baby für süße 16 Euro gekauft hat. Und ich muss sagen, er sieht schon verdammt gut aus! Nude look für jeden Tag, schön elegant. Blättert aber genauso schnell ab wie no name Produkte, das ist schade.

Item of the Week – two

Quadratisch, praktisch, gut – und das ganz ohne Kalorien!

Ich liebe diese kleine Wimpernzange, weil sie so schön handlich ist und nicht, wie die meisten anderen, wie ein modernes Folterinstrument aussieht. Trotz ihrer Winzigkeit lässt sie sich gut bediehnen und sorgt für einen shcönen Augenaufschlag. Und passt bequem in Jede Handtasche

Wimpernzange von Muji

Unitem of the Week – one

Eigentlich ärgere ich mich jeden Morgen, dass ich mir diesen Mascara gekauft habe. Ich dachte damals „Hey Ives Rocher, die machen doch auch so Bio/Öko-Sachen, das kann ja nicht schlecht sein!“ – doch, ist es.

Er verschmiert so sehr, dass man schon nach 3 Stunden wie der letzte freilebende Panda im Großraum Berlin aussieht. Aber auch kurz nach dem Auftragen ist das Ergebnis nicht toll, sondern eher unterdurchschnittlich schlecht. Dieser Mascara wird sofort in die Mülltonne wandern, wenn ich einen neuen habe!