What are five things I can start doing to improve my fight against procrastination?

1. Expense my broadband access and cell phone service charges to work.
2. Shop for groceries more consistently.
3. View or return my NetFlix rentals more quickly.
4. Spend less time browsing the internet without a goal in mind.
5. Discover and implement one project each for putting the iWork applications to use. I think I already have some ideas in mind (thanks to Crista on this).

In conjunction with my recent post, I’ve got some lists to create. I’m going to use this as an excuse to create a new category I’ve wanted to for a while, called 5ives. The idea is taken from Merlin Mann’s 5ives.com site. The idea is simple, ask a question, give 5 answers.

So, here is the first question. What are five things I know I like to do right now. I’m going to be vague in answering right now, I figure I can then use the answers for more questions later.

1. Reading books, especially on cognitive-behavorial therapy.
2. Working on computers.
3. Spending time with my girlfriend Crista.
4. Engaging in divergent thinking.
5. Improving my ability to relax to break obsessional thinking patterns and decrease my anxiety level.

Just wanted to rant a second about a pet peeve of mine. Web app designers, listen up. OK, that’s melodramatic, barely any read here, but I just want to vent.

Do not ever use an email address in place of a username for system login. Yes, email addresses are easy to remember. Yes, many people only have a small amount, or one only. Yes, they are unique. But let’s face it, spam is a problem. Many people use one-to-one email systems like sneakemail or spamgourmet to prevent leakage of their real address to spammers. I rely heavily on the free sneakemail service, and therefor have addresses like 123dkjds at sneakemail.com with all my accounts. This poses a problem when I try to log into a site that uses my email address as my username. I can easily remember my username, or a variation of it. However, I cannot remember 123dkjds at sneakemail.com. As a result, I either have to check the login every time, or store all my logins in my browser form management tools. Am I OK with my browser remembering my login to some random comments forum? Yes. Do I want my Amazon login stored? No way.

One possible way out is to edit my keychain entries to hold my web form logins to sensitive sites, but manually edit the password field to hold a bogus password such as the number 1. Forms that use a typical password entry without javascript simply replace each password character with an ‘*’, so the single character would be easy to identify. It’s annoying because then Safari will also prompt me to resave the login info, to which I’ll always have to click “Not now”. I suppose that’s a minor annoyance.

Lately I’ve become quite aware of how intentionally restricted I allow my life to be. I don’t go to new places as often as I’d like (though don’t consider this an open invite), and am too often worried or consumed with anxiety. Like I’ve said before, it’s getting better. This isn’t meant as a “woe is me” complaint, but rather, a launching point for interesting observation. The short of it is, I can be quite uptight! An uncomfortable spot for sure, but certainly not horrible or awful.

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