Webby Clare

Thoughts and other writings by Clare Conroy

Graphing how you spend your time

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I stumbled across the fantastic Spousenomics blog today (and immediately subscribed to the RSS feed). One of my favourite posts was the one on graphing your marriage, which included this picture…

The x-axis is how much time you spend on things, and the y-axis is how important each of those things are.

While the idea of considering what’s important and what you spend time on isn’t particularly new, being a visual person I really like the idea of graphing it like this. And of course you can do this for a range of different aspects of your life – not just marriage/relationships. I haven’t put pen to paper to graph my life (or my almost-marriage), but after giving it some thought today I’m pretty sure that there will be a number of things in the top left and bottom right corners…

Which of your lives is real?

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So I looked to my right, where my real life was, MacBook, Apple Sac for it, personal phone, diary of ideas, Escape From Cubicle Nation, and then looked straight forward where my fake life was, a crappy lap top with blackberry in tow.

You know when you identify with something so strongly it almost makes a ‘thud’ when it hits you? This post from Escape from Cubicle Nation had just that effect…

The Road to Self-Renewal

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On the bus on the way to work yesterday I listened to a great Social Innovations Conversations podcast featuring Tom Tierney (“Pursuing Social Enterprise, Making a Difference“). In his speech, Tom recounts the strength and insight that he gained from conversations with John Gardner and quotes from ‘The Road to Self-Renewal’, a speech John Gardner delivered in 1993. I was inspired to track down a complete copy of the speech (which you can find here) and I think it’s definitely worth a read…

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

Remember, you’ll be dead soon…

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Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

~ Steve Jobs

(via suzanne.z)

The Transformational Twenties

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Depending on your specific circumstances and your outlook, this standing-at-the-crossroads time can appear as any number of things: an emergency, requiring prompt action, an impasse, a pinch, a predicament, a failure OR a possibility, a milestone and an opportunity. It is a period that can last a day, a week or more than a decade.

(via @startingbloc)