How To Make Yourself Do Anything
People that have read my time management book often ask me if I have advice about procrastination. I generally don't.
Strata recently pointed me to an excellent audio workshop on the topic. It's a 2.5 hour MP3 that you listen to. There is a 10-page PDF that you need to print out first because the audio program pauses for you to fill out the blanks in the sheet. Don't try to just follow along viewing the PDF on the screen; having it on paper is worth it.
Download it here: http://theownerscircle.com/seminar-download.html
LISA '06 Call For Papers
Bill LeFebvre, the con chair of LISA2006, has announced the call for papers.
Earlier in my career I had no thoughts of writing a paper for LISA. However, I had a manager that encouraged me to write a paper just to see what happened. It was the best bit of career advice I ever received. Writing papers got me noticed, helped my career, and lead to things like books (which leads to fame, fortune, and zillions of groupies... oh wait, that's what you get for being a member of the Rolling Stones. Oh well, it's really quite similar.)
So why don't you consider writing a paper? Is there something cool that you've invented that would impress other sysadmins?
The annual LISA conference is the meeting place of choice for system, network, security, and other computing administrators. Administrators of all specialties and levels of expertise meet at LISA to exchange ideas, sharpen skills, learn new techniques, debate current issues, and meet colleagues and friends.
The web site also includes instructions for people that would like to submit ideas for "invited talks."
Being Happy
The "Being Happy" chapter in The Practice of System and Network Administration talks a bit about Cognitive Therapy and a book called The Feeling Good Handbook. The London Times this Sunday had an article that shows that research in this area is alive and well.The man who's trying to do for happiness what Newton did for gravity has found it a scarce commodity in life. Seligman describes himself as a "walking nimbus cloud" who spent 50 years "enduring mostly wet weather in my soul".So what do you have to do to find happiness?
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Since its origins in a Leipzig laboratory 130 years ago, psychology has had little to say about goodness and contentment. Mostly psychologists have concerned themselves with weakness and misery. There are libraries full of theories about why we get sad, worried, and angry. It hasn't been respectable science to study what happens when lives go well. Positive experiences, such as joy, kindness, altruism and heroism, have mainly been ignored. For every 100 psychology papers dealing with anxiety or depression, only one concerns a positive trait.
