Where does it all come from?

Over the last day or so I’ve been spring cleaning my office. I
hate clutter, but somehow it still accumulates faster than I can
I can cope with it!

What happened to the fabled paperless office?

So far I’ve filled two huge garbage sacks and I’ve only done half
the room! And it doesn’t seem to me to be too long ago that I did
the same thing.

The trouble with tidying is that in order to get a good result,
you have to make things a lot worse first.

You can’t clear a cupboard by just opening the doors and looking
in – you have to take everything out and assess the worth of each
item.

The result is that until the process is complete, your room looks
like a tornado has singled you out.

I know I don’t work efficiently in a messy environment, but don’t
have the self-discipline to straighten things away as I go. I
really envy people who are able to keep a clear desk – but I know
that for me, out of sight is out of mind. The moment I put
something in a pending folder I forget about it entirely. So I
have to keep all current jobs in front of me and only file them
away when they are done.

But as we all know, some jobs never get done and the list of ones
needing attention just keeps growing.

I don’t know what the answer is, but every three or four months I
have to have a blitz or mentally I grind to a halt!

And once a year, like now, I need to physically go through
everything in every file, on every shelf and in every cupboard to
weed out the junk and start afresh.

It is a soul-destroying task that never fails to leave me feeling
depressed, but I know it is worth it in the long run because this
act of penance seems to allow my creativity to start flowing
freely again.

Look out world – an uncluttered Avis is about to be unleashed!

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I’m a great lover of USB memory sticks. You may know them as
flash drives or thumb drives.

Whatever you call them, they are incredibly useful things.

And they are getting cheaper and cheaper for more and more memory
capacity.

I bought a couple of 4Gb ones today for about $9 each. And if I’d
shopped around, I’m sure I could have found cheaper.

To me, they are useful because I can have one dedicated to saving
all the files I need for one specific thing. So, if I’m creating
a new product, I can save everything onto that one memory stick
and then know where everything is. I don’t have to go hunting all
over my hard drive for files in all kinds of random places.

I know I could probably do the same with folders on my hard
drive, but it is so much more convenient to be able to unplug all
my data from one computer and plug it in to another.

But now that my little collection of memory sticks is growing, I
have hit on an unexpected problem – remembering what is on each
one.

There is no simple way to label the darned things!

The are all different shapes and sizes, and are made out of
different materials. Some will take a small stick on label, but
others, like the ones I bought yesterday, are made out of a kind
of roughened plastic that my sticky labels won’t stick to.

Has anyone solved the problem – or is it just me who is getting
the wrong end of the wrong stick?

Update: Since I wrote the above, it has been drawn to my attention that there are some fake 64Gb memory sticks being sold on unscrupulous websites. I don’t need that kind of memory myself, but if you do, be careful who you buy them from if you buy online.

Security: Another thing that has been raised is the potential security problem if you happen to mislay your memory stick.

We all know about stupid politicians and civil servants who lose their laptops on trains and from their cars, but at least most of those laptops are passwod protected to some degree. Most USB memory sticks are far less secure. It is only a matter of time before a senior government person lets his flash drive, with all the country’s nuclear secrets accidentally fall out of his pocket!

If you are concerned that your data might fall into the wrong hands if you lose your flash drive, there is a pretty good solution – and it is free!

You can download a program called TrueCrypt from http://www.truecrypt.com to make the data of any USB memory stick encrypted behind a password of your choosing. It has to be a new stick though, because the process will format the drive and destroy any data already on it.

Just make sure you pick a password that you can remember – and that other people will not be able to guess!

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I’m generally a pretty positive kind of guy. (Despite the
occasional rant). And on top of that I’ve been making my living
as an Internet marketer for long enough to know that it isn’t a
fluke. But I still get depressed by the constant outflow of
negativity I constantly read.

You can’t spend more than five minutes on any Internet marketing
forum lately without being subjected to a dozen or more people
moaning and griping that nothing works, that Internet marketing
is an illusion or that people who teach the methods that work for
them are scammers.

Sometimes I actually find myself believing all that crap.

Every now and again, in an unguarded moment, I sit here reading
how hard all this is and how impossible it is to make sales, and
my stomach does a back flip. Have I pinned my family’s future and
security on smoke and mirrors?

Once in a while I suffer a moment’s panic that I’ve fallen for a
line and that my world will come crashing down on me – and all
those people who are constantly bleating on and on about failure
and how making money online can’t be done will laugh and point
and say ‘I told you so!’

Then I look at my PayPal account and the moment passes.

I don’t know why some people seem to be programmed to fail. Maybe
they are not – maybe it is just that they are terrified to
succeed because to do so would force them to shift their world
view.

I do know that the constant negativity can be highly corrosive –
if it even causes me to have doubts, goodness knows what it does
to someone who hasn’t yet learned how to succeed!

The answer is, of course, to avoid places where those people hang
out – including almost every forum I’ve ever been on. But that
would be to cut off my nose to spite my face. I like forums and
learn a huge amount from them.

And once in a while I like to try to inject a bit of out and out
positivity into some of the threads, to show people that it can
be done and that this funny old Internet business isn’t as bad as
they are making out.

That’s not to say that it is easy. Oh no. But it IS possible

“Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our
imaginations, our possibilities become limitless.” Jamie
Paolinetti.

It usually falls on deaf ears, but we do what we can!

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