The school of human science
Filed under: Personal Develoment —
Posted: 5:53 am
31 March 2008
One of the thins that I am looking at now is stuff regarding personal development and the reason for this is that however good you are or however good you THINK you are; the bottom line is you can do better. This is an area that I find interesting as I have found that there are quite literally thousands of sites out there wanting to give you advise on how to be "better" so which one’s do you believe? Well for my part what I have done is looked at common themes throughout each of these sites and taken these on their own merits and looked at whether these can benefit me.
My current endeavour is to become an "early riser". I have two reasons for this; the first is that I personally believe that by rising at 5:30am I will have a huge amount of time that then becomes available to me to use for business things, personal stuff and eventually to get back out cycling again. Now I understand that 5.30am sounds early and I mean REALLY early but when you think about it really isn’t that early as most people will get up at around 7-7.30 so maybe it’s not THAT early after all. Secondly is one of belief that it can be done. The reason for this is that my other half’s nephew has recently joined that army and one of things that they do is they train all day from 5.30am through til when they get to bed at around 12am now my reaction was to think he would look like death by the end of 4 weeks and to be honest half way into it he did. But his parents went to see him at the weekend and he looks good, better that ever so this proves that it can be done and I can see what the benefit it would be for myself. So here we are Day 1 and feeling pretty bright and breezy, a little tired but definitely feeling good about it. So how do we do this? Well below is an extract from a blog for Scott Young who considering his age is a very enlightened young man:
How to Build Energy Into Your Mornings
Here are a few things I’ve found helpful to reduce the transition period from being asleep to becoming fully alert. Not only does speeding up this wake-up process save time, it makes waking up less of a struggle. A few tips:
- Light. Your body’s natural clock is tuned to the amount of light. Turn on all the lights in your room right after waking up. Getting bright lights can help trick your body into thinking it is time to get out of bed.
- Exercise. Put something physical right at the start of your morning. In the summer, I did a quick morning run and found it helpful in shaking off any sleepiness. Considering the outside temperature hovers around -30 C, I’ve stuck to doing a few pushups in my room. The exercise gets your heart pumping and snaps you out of a groggy state.
- The 10-Minute Rule. If you want to stick with a consistent wake-up time, practice the ten-minute rule. This means you commit to staying awake for at least the next ten minutes. Once you get over that initial period, the temptation to go back to bed is usually gone.
- Active Work. Start your day with work that actively uses your mind. Creative activities like writing, drawing, programming or designing work better than passive activities like reading. By focusing your mind early you can stay focused and brush off any unwanted drowsiness.
- Don’t Skip Breakfast. Wake up early enough to get something to eat. Skipping meals throw your metabolism out of balance, causing you to gain fat and lose energy. Skipping breakfast also means your blood sugar will be low in the morning and energy levels down.
- Commit to a Sleep Schedule. The obvious solution to combat sleepiness is to get more rest at night. Carrying a sleep debt throughout the week with the hopes of paying it off on the weekend is a bad strategy. Instead, compress your work into the morning hours so you can get the 6-8 hours you need each night.
- Turn Up the Volume. I’ve found listening to music or audio books helpful in keeping myself awake during the morning. Best of all, if you put on an audio book from your favourite speaker, you can get some encouragement to start your day.
This is the plan that I am currently following and it is not a one-off opinion this is a similar theme that is echoed around all of the blogs that I have looked at. I have tried just getting up early as I did throughout last year as I have always like to get up early and do some cycling but throughout that time I always struggled with getting up sometimes sleeping through the alarm. So this is my plan and I will keep you all posted on how it goes.
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The enemy within…..
Filed under: Business, IT Support, Microsoft, Security —
Posted: 12:21 am
27 March 2008
Following on from the recent security theme I would like to carry this on a little further and discuss an aspect of security in business that may not always be so obvious to everyone. Most individuals will be aware of the threat that the Internet poses to business as well as the threat that is posed by wireless networks. However what are great deal of businesses do not understand is that the greatest threat is not always what lies without but in fact it is what lies within. It is a known fact that a number of employee’s that leave businesses go on to work for other companies but a number of these individuals go on to start their own business. Either way these, soon to be former, employee’s have access to key information about you business and more importantly your clients. In the past it has been difficult for this information to be transported out of the business without being easily spotted however with the rise in USB storage devices transport of this data has become much simpler and moreover much more discreet. So what can you do to stop this, the simplest way is to block USB storage devices and CD/DVD writers to all but the most trusted users. In order to achieve this you could buy some software to handle endpoint security such as GFI EndPoint Security but for up to 25 computers this costs in excess of £400 which is beyond the reach of most small businesses. So what can small businesses do to protect themselves; well the answer is through a group policy on the server restrictions can be placed on users or groups of users and I will explain how.
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Better safe than sorry (part 2)
Filed under: Business, Mobile, Security — Tags: encryption, it security, notebook security, Security —
Posted: 2:03 pm
22 March 2008
Yesterday I wrote about encrypting data on your notebook computer when you are carrying data around. Within that posting I mentioned TrueCrypt as a program which can be used for this task so for those of you that are interested in it, I mean who wouldn’t as it’s open source, here’s a brief tutorial. (more…)
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