Why I Subscribe to Podcasts

As far as I see it, there are two types of people: those who think they can multitask and those who know better. With minor exceptions, multitasking breaks focus and slows productivity. This is one of those exceptions. 

You can call it a habit, a goal, a standard or crazy, but I try to walk at least 10,000 steps--about five miles--every day. In the past month I have done this 28 of 31 days. As I walk I listen to podcasts. I subscribe to several and they fall into three categories. 

News 

About half the walk is an audio version of the PBS News Hour. Once a week, I satisfy my inner science geek with This Week in Science. These and a couple others remind me that there is an

outside world. 

Personal Growth

I pick up an assortment of personal

growth podcasts doing interviews or offering ideas. Some of these lead to books to read, either in full or through a Blinkist summary. If I'm not hooked in the first couple minutes, I'm on to the next topic. 

Other 

This category covers hobbies and entertainment. 

Why

By playing these podcasts while I walk, I can get a briefing on current events, pick up some useful ideas and catch a few messages about my hobbies while allocating the time to health and exercise. I generally play the podcasts at 1.5 speed, as fast as possible without distorting voices. 

Truthfully, this time is for the exercise. The podcasts are scanned for potential interests but not rigorously studied. Over the past few years that I've done this, the News Hour has dutifully reported the Dow Jones Industrial Average over 1000 times and I couldn't guess it within 10% or even define it accurately. I guess I was right--I can't multitask, but it does make walking those miles more pleasant. 

Your Turn

What podcasts do you follow and why? Are you giving them your full attention?

What Are Your Favorite Books

I am currently reading Become An Idea Machine Because Ideas are the Currency of the 21st Century by Claudia Azula Altucher. The book offers prompts and challenges you to come up with ten ideas based on the prompt. The thought is to get in the habit of having and writing down ten ideas each day. Here was today's prompt.

Tell Me Your Favorite 10 Books Of All Time And One Thing You Learned From Each

This assignment was framed to be as broad as possible. I focused on books I recommend, many of them easy reading with significant impact on me. Here are my choices. 

Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl.  The power of choice to cope with anything. 

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch.  It's never too late to pursue your dreams. 

Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-free Productivity  by David Allen the systematic process of doing. 

Success Principles by Jack Canfield.  Take 100% responsibility for your life and dozens of other valuable life lessons. 

Good to Great by Jim Collins. Among several other ideas it reveals the value of a stop doing list. From this comes my own advice to get out of your own way. 

The Automatic Millionaire  by David Bach which teaches the latte factor, the long term cost of habitual spending. If you are looking for something specific to stop doing, this may help. 

Notes From A Friend  by Anthony Robbins. Robbins.  Robbins offers a wide variety of formats and many life changing ideas. This quick read introduces some of his most important ideas including the power of decisions. 

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker. Thus book points out several ways wealthy people think differently from others including think "and" not "either ... or ..."  

The Richest Man in Babylon by George S Clason. This old book teaches  the basics of personal finance. 

Eat That Frog  by Brian Tracy. Another small book full of great ideas including the one which gives the book its title -- eat the big frog first. That is, start your day by tackling your biggest, highest payoff activity. 

The point of the Idea Machine is to

generate tons of ideas, not stop at ten. So, what books would you add and why?

Podcast Review:This Week in Science

This Week In Science offers a weekly collection of science news for a general audience. As the name suggests, it focuses on current headlines, not in-depth reporting. You can catch live broadcasts each week at twis.org or catch it later off a podcast feed. Think audiovisual Time Magazine or Newsweek committed to science.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Book Review - Better Than Before

Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

By Gretchen Rubin

There are tons of self improvement books out, and countless articles on the Internet--my own extremecommonsense.net among them. This book stands out from the piles because it boils valuable ideas to a couple useful models and offers guidance to applying them to your life.

The bulk of the book organizes and details 21 strategies for implementing habits to change your life. The first few are universal and obvious -- once the author has pointed them out. Others work for some people and not others. Taken together, they offer a solid toolkit for changing habits, one of the most important skills you can have for self improvement.

Taking the Long View

There are two ways to lose weight. 

Option 1: diet. All diets work if you commit to them because they all restrict calories. The bad news is you cannot keep the weight off without option 2.

Option 2: change your life style. Your life style caused you to put on weight and unless you change will do so again. So, let's focus on changing life style to produce a result that is attainable and sustainable. This can be done by a continuous series of conscious choices or by changing your habits. 

Weight loss programs try to address this and ensure your continued patronage by selling their food, services snd systems as long term solutions. As long as you consciously follow the program, you can maintain the weight. The problem is that conscious effort is an effort. 

In his book 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done, Peter Bregman told how he lost weight by identifying sugar as his biggest problem and eliminating that. This was his version of a lifestyle change through conscious choice. In effect, he developed a stop doing list with one item on it. 

In her recently released book Better Than Before - Mastering the Habits of our Everyday Lives, Gretchen Rubin offers an assortment of strategies for eliminating bad habits and installing good ones. Since habits put your life on autopilot, they become the definition of the lifestyle change you seek. She starts with four strategies. Let's consider each in terms of eating more wisely and exercising more. 

Foundation Change what is easily accessible so supporting the desired habit is easier than falling back into the old one. Get the unhealthy food out of the house. Put your walking shoes next to the bed so you put them on and go for a walk first thing each day.

Scheduling Put the daily walk on your calendar along with anything else that contributes to your desired lifestyle. Depending on your diet, this may mean scheduling when you eat. 

Accountability Find a partner who knows the change you seek and will check in on your progress regularly. Another variation of this is posting results in progress to Facebook, Twitter, or other social media. 

Monitoring Keep a record of food eaten, exercise completed, and weight. Most diet programs build this in and your computer or phone have apps as well. There are    also activity trackers built in to everything from phones to shoes to watches. These will even post out to Facebook for you. 

These strategies work whether they are supporting the development of a habit or supporting the achievement of a goal. You can and should use as many of them as you can when installing a new habit. I used all of these, and more, when I did this three years ago.  

I still believe that focusing on a goal makes sense, but it helps to correctly define the goal, to recognize its price and understand the motivation behind it. Let's look at an example. 

On a recent trip to the East Coast, I drove a few hundred miles of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It is a beautiful road, designed to get traffic from one part of the state to another quickly and safely. Exits are several miles apart, so if your destination is between two exits you must pick the exit before or after. If you are in the wrong lane when the exit comes up, too bad. Why weren't you paying attention to the signs two miles back?

My Personal Story

On October 29, 2011, I committed to losing 28 pounds over a period of four months by walking ten hours a week and changing my eating habits. During that 4 months, I walked about 700 miles, ate smaller portions, and eliminated the worst of my eating practices. I attained my target weight of 150 pounds. 

Over 3 years later, I've sustained that weight. The scale still reports 150 pounds. I avoid really bad food choices most of the time and try to make better choices every time I can. My walking habit has logged over 7000 miles. 

Summary

Reaching a target weight is a great accomplishment but unless you're doing it to win a bet it's a milestone, not your final goal. Your real goal is to maintain the weight you desire. To do that, you need to develop habits that support a new lifestyle. Like preparing to get off the turnpike, this calls for planning ahead. Your chances of success improve dramatically if you adopt habits that contribute to your success. 

One Step at a Time

Some decisions really are no-brainers. If you carry around an Android or IPhone, and exercise even semi-regularly, using Charity Miles may be one of them.

What is Charity Miles?


Here's how the organization describes itself on the charitymiles.org website.

Charity Miles is a free iPhone and Android app that enables people to earn corporate sponsorships for charity while walking, running or biking. We are supported by awesome companies like Humana, Johnson & Johnson, Timex Sports and Kenneth Cole.

I have used the iPhone version of this app for some time and could not recommend it until the latest release fixed some annoying problems. Since they are solved, there is no reason to list them. By using it to record your exercise, you direct a small charitable donation to any of over 30 worthwhile causes.

If you like, and only if you like, you can post your result to Facebook or Twitter. Here is one tweet I sent:

I ran 4.6 @CharityMiles for @Habitat_org. Thanks to #JNJ for sponsoring me. #NationalRunningDay #GlobalMoms globalmomsrelay.org

This is a bit misleading since I walked rather than ran these 4.6 miles. Even so, this looks like a good deal.

I do something I would be doing anyway.

A reputable corporation gets acknowledged for its charitable program.

A worthwhile charity of my choosing gets a small contribution based on the miles I walk.

In 2010, I set a goal to lose 40 pounds. It took me six months to achieve that goal and most of that success came from recording what I ate and what exercise I did. Since then I have logged over 7000 miles and worn out more than one pair of walking shoes. Charity Miles doesn't keep this kind of record, but it does make you conscious of your activity. Make a difference in your life and the lives of others by installing this app and counting your miles for a good cause.

Charity Miles is available to download for free in the iPhone and Android app stores.

Avoiding The Trap

In my last article, I told the story of how I (barely) avoided a credit card phishing exploit because I became suspicious while I cooperatively gave my card number to an anonymous voicemail system out to scam me. While I managed to avoid significant damage, this is neither the standard I aspire to nor one I recommend for you. This time, in the spirit of continuous improvement,!let's consider how to do better by avoiding the trap.

What Happened?

The short version is that I received a text message appearing to be from my bank claiming that my card had been locked and telling me to call an 800 number. The full story us here: http://www.extremecommonsense.net/2015/05/you-can-be-too-careful_17.html?m=1

Scammers depend on greed, fear, and psychology so we feel compelled to act quickly and stupidly. In my credit card example, I fell for the bait and started giving my information in moments, mostly out of fear. I needed to slow down a little and think. By answering a few key questions, I could have done that.

Key Questions

We tend to speed up, not slow down, when we feel threatened. If the threat is real, this is a survival skill. If not , it may be a trap. We control this by asking appropriate questions.

How urgent is this?

In my example, I got a Saturday evening text message that my credit card had been locked. Even if true, I wouldn't use the card for 14 hours at the earliest. If someone had tried to tamper with my account, the bank had parked it into a safe condition. There was nothing urgent in this. It just felt urgent.

Who Sent the Message?

On the surface this looked like a customer service notice from the bank. It could be, and actually was, from a scam artist. Since this wasn't urgent, I should have taken the time to be sure.

How Can I Be Sure?

There are two basic strategies available. First, check everything you can. Second, contact the bank directly, either through a prearranged number or their approved email address. Let's look at both.

In the previous article, I described oddities in the text of the message. There was no indication what account was involved. The language, though grammatically correct, was capitalized oddly.

This was a text message which revealed a real US phone number in my area code. While this is plausible, using Whitepages to do a reverse number lookup identified it as a mobile phone.

Finally, what about the number to call? It is possible to do a reverse lookup on an 800 number but even a legitimate number may say only that it is a U.S. phone. Even so, no harm in trying.

What Am I Being Asked to Do?

For the moment, let's ignore that you're being asked to call an unknown number, by a text message of unknown origin, and focus exclusively on the conversation that would follow.

In my case, an automated voice mail identified itself as the bank's activation service. Since the card was already active, this should have raised an alarm. It no doubt picked up what it could about me from caller ID and asked for my full card number, then the expiration date. When it asked for the PIN I (finally) got suspicious and stopped. This was too much information, not enough confirmation.

So, What Instead?

There are several ways to check with the bank safely. What I did was call the number the bank printed on the card. This led to s human customer service representative who asked for only the last four digits on the card and a prearranged question. Record that phone number so you have it if the card is lost or stolen. I asked them to replace the card.

By contrast, when the new card arrived I went through the real validation process. The system asked for the last four digits of the card and considered that enough since I had called from the phone number it had on file for me.

Other Options

Your second option is to email the abuse group at your bank. If you don't have the address you can search for it online. Include as much information as you can. You'll get an automated confirmation at once and a followup later. This is fine if things aren't really urgent.

If you have a smartphone, odds are they offer a custom app to connect you to your account. You can use this to check the status of your card. It may also offer a secure messaging service to safely inquire in more detail.

Finally, you can go to a bank website from a browser. Just use URLs the bank gave you in advance. Never follow a link from an email or text message.

How Is This Possible?

The message was convincing only because it used the name of my bank. The 800 number I called also identified itself using the name of my bank. Since it came as a text message, they apparently had my bank and my phone number.

Where would that information have been available? I can't be sure. Late in 2013, I made a credit card purchase at Target, which days later discovered and closed a data breach. I replaced the card after that, but not the bank.

Summary

My experience with this has led to one simple rule: if you get a message that suggests a problem may exist, find a way to check it out without using numbers or links the measage provided. Beyond that, have multiple ways you can reach a bank quickly if an alarm is raised.

Sent from my IPhone