Browsing Date Archive: 2006 January

Protean IDE, an IDE for Blitz Basic has gone free today, along with a source code release. It’s a shame that development fizzled out towards the end, but it was a heavy duty IDE that towered over the original Blitz editor. It’s use of the .NET framework seemed to put a lot of people off, which is unfortunate because it was a nicely written piece of kit that benefitted from .NET.

One of my favourite features was the plugin engine, and although I never released any “proper” plugins, I wrote a few quick and dirty ones. Perhaps now development has ceased I’ll finally get around to cleaning up and releasing something of use.

A good IDE can really improve productivity when programming, and Protean made a real difference to how I worked with Blitz (and probably kept me using it). Cheers for all your hard work over the years, Rob, and best of luck with your future endeavours!

I recently completed two weeks of jury duty, and it was certainly an eye opener. I’ll admit to being a fan of CSI, so seeing how evidence is used in real court was fascinating. Naturally I didn’t get a cryptic murder mystery, but what I saw was still very different to what I’m used to.

One thing I wasn’t prepared for was the amount of sitting around. I brought a book, but I’d read it before the day was even halfway through. Thankfully, once you’re assigned to a case things get more interesting, but it’s still a pain to be sat in the lobby for six hours waiting for your name to be called.

It’s definately an experience, and even though I didn’t relish the idea of being locked in a room with eleven strangers to debate matters of law, it was actually quite enjoyable.

So, my thirty day trial of affirmations is now over. How did things go?

What was it all about?

My “experiment” was to use positive affirmations on a daily basis, to see if they made a difference in my life. The initial idea was to repeat my affirmations once in the morning when I woke up, and then again at night just before I went to bed. I started with six affirmations, most of which were inspired by content on bmindful.com.

What went wrong?

The first week went well, but I noticed something of a slow down in week two. I tweaked my affirmations to make them shorter and easier to remember, and I also increased my exposure to them by carrying them around on a small card in my wallet. I found the article “Creating Effective Affirmations” at bmindful particularly useful when rewriting my affirmations.

What went right?

As I touched on in But I Can’t!, sometimes I will mentally talk myself out of a situation through a negative self voice. I’ve found that using daily positive affirmations has stopped me from using this negative voice, and I’ve often found myself overriding my negativity with my new affirmations.

It’s refreshing to be in a situation that would normally cause anxiety, and to hear your “inner voice” repeating positive affirmations instead of negative ones, and needless to say it makes a difference to mood and productivity.

I found that shorter affirmations worked best, so I modified my original six accordingly. I also found that more focussed affirmations worked better, so I kept each affirmation focussed on a single subject. The increased exposure was also quite effective, especially as some affirmations tend to stick better than others.

Was it worth doing?

Undoubtedly, yes. I’m sticking with these affirmations for the foreseeable future. Whilst they haven’t completely transformed my life, they’ve made a noticeable improvement. As with everything I do, I’ll continue tweaking my system to get the best results.

If you’re thinking of using positive affirmations in your life, I can highly recommend “bmindful.com“. It has a selection of well written articles about affirmations, and also has a list of affirmations that you can add to your own custom list.

If you like this article, you’ll like my other site, philnewton.net. It’s dedicated to productivity, time management and other personal development tips.