My Thirty Day Challenge Notes

Those of you who have visited this site before today know that the theme was quite different. Themes are page designs that provide the number of columns, fonts, colors, headers, footers, and various other page elements.

I had already decided to change the theme because the old one was giving me some widget trouble. I couldn’t easily set up an “Articles” page because that widget just wouldn’t work on the old theme.

I’ve been experimenting with themes because WordPress.org has so many to choose from, and I haven’t really settled on any except on my Debt Free or Bust theme.

I’m on the StomperNet newsletter email list and the list that sends the “Going Natural 2.0″ free video series. Video #3 is a gold mine!

I’m so glad I watched it before I changed any of my themes.

How the human eye works

Our eyes are magnificent structures highly evolved in protecting us from harm and directing us quickly to what we seek.

I’m not going to talk about rods and cones and all that stuff you had in 10th grade biology. I am going to tell how the way our eyes work contributes greatly to what our brains pay attention to.

Our eyes don’t just collect information for the brain to sort out. They actually filter information before it gets to our brains. Our eyes like pictures and maps to guide them along the correct path to what we need quickly and easily.

Our eyes can see two main things:

• fovea – which is the focused zone we see clear, colorful details in and takes up about 2% of our visual field
• periphery – the rest of our visual range, it’s blurred but sees contrast and movement extremely well

Here’s the kicker, what we see in the periphery is important to what our brains pick up as information worth processing. If the periphery is all the same and inanimate, we don’t give it much attention. If it has a lot of contrast and/or movement we pay much more attention to it. The military has known this for ages. That’s why they have camoflagge uniforms and special training to avoid being seen.

Something else about our eyes is they move constantly, even when we’re concentrating on reading or watching something. They are constantly scanning for things we need and want, and for danger that we need to run from or at least stay away from. They are constantly looking for visual cues and maps to guide us.

When we read our eyes are still moving more than we realize, and they become tired from all the movement.

One way to decrease the strain on our eyes is if the writer or designer breaks up information into packets our eyes can collect rapidly and send on to our brains for processing.

Scientists at the StomperNet labs determined that 5200 pixels = 1 eye mile on a computer screen. Reducing the number of pixels we see reduces eye strain and fatigue.

Why theme designs are important

Pages on websites or in books and other reading materials are easier for us to read if they have information set up in packets our eyes can quickly scan.

When information is broken up into bunches with contrasting headings and surrounded by white space, it’s much easier for our eyes to scan and find the information we want more quickly.

We tend to move our eyes about half as much as when pages are too busy with small print, no headings and little contrast. When our eyes are less tired and can locate what we want rapidly we are happy campers. We tend to pay more attention to pages that appeal to the way our eyes work.

More importantly, we tend to ignore what doesn’t appeal to the way our eyes work. Given the immediate choice of reading something that is busy and hard, or something in bunches and easy, we’ll opt for the easy stuff even if it isn’t better because it doesn’t make us so tired.

I also started using more subheadings, white space and indentations when I write posts. I hope it will make it easier for you to scan. Let’s face it, if I can’t get you to scan what I write I don’t have a prayer of getting you to read what I write.

I chose the new theme for this blog based more on contrast and bunching of information than on artwork and other features that appealed more to me in other ways. In the past, I really didn’t look at themes with so much contrast, but now I see how important contrast is. You will see all my sites change to higher contrast and easier reading formats.

I hope you’ll look at the new page and leave me comments about whether you think it’s easier to scan and more readable.

Here’s to being easier on your eyes!

written by joubess

• Off to find a Crimson Nintendo DS Lite…They’re selling like there’s no tomorrow! (For tomorrow). Merry Christmas everyone! #
• New post to this blog: http://debtfreeorbust.com/ I hope you’ll get a chance to read it. #
• New post on home office organization blog: http://home-office-organization.com/ I hope you’ll get a chance to read it. #
• Several posts to this blog since I last Twittered it: http://mythirtydaychallenge3rdyear.com/ #

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written by joubess

Those orange RSS buttons are all over everywhere on the web nowadays.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It works by allowing you to subscribe to a website or blog (feed) in an RSS reader just by clicking the button.

The technology is also what allows your anti-virus software and iTunes software to update automatically without you having to do anything to make it happen, other than keep up your subscriptions to your services.

What is an RSS Reader?

An RSS reader is a software program that allows you to subscribe to any feed by entering the feed web address (URL) into your reader of choice. Blogs, most news sites and some static websites have RSS feeds along with iTunes and sites offering subscription services of just about every flavor imaginable.

There are dozens of readers available online including:

• Bloglines
• Google Feedfetcher
• MagpieRSS (http://plagger.org/)
• Firefox Live Bookmarks
• Yahoo (to name a few)

You pick one and get a free account. Login to your account and start clicking the RSS buttons on the pages from which you want to receive a live feed.

You can download feeds to your computer, too.

Why should you use RSS?

New content is delivered to the reader automatically as it’s generated and you access it when you want to read, listen to, or watch your subscription content. It beats email because you go to it when you have the time rather than having it come to you in a sea of other email.

However, most RSS feeds are easily subscribed to by email, and those who really want to make it easy for you to get their feed offer an email subscription option. This leaves the choice of how you receive your content completely up to you, the user.

Where did RSS come from?

From what I’ve been able to gather, it was created somewhat simultaneously by David Winer (Berkmann Center for Internet and Society) and Netscape back in 1997, but wasn’t user-friendly until its release to the public in December 2000 as RSS 1.0. Since then, other formats for easily subscribing to site feeds have arrived on the scene, like Atom. RSS is getting to be the standard as time passes.

written by joubess

I’m about to start working on lesson two of Blog Mastermind. In lesson one and supporting materials, it’s pretty clear that seven blogs are way too many to keep up.

I’m going to finish my home office organization project and then sell that blog because I just don’t have enough passion to keep writing about it. I’m also selling my red beans and rice recipes blog. There are a lot of other people out their much more suited to those topics than I am. If any of you, my readers, are interested in those two topics, I will be learning how to value their current content soon, and I’ll be putting a sales price on them.

I haven’t decided what I’m doing with my Invader Zim Episodes blog. I have been able to post to it somewhat regularly, and I really do love the show. I only wish it came on more often.

The blogs I’ll be keeping and posting to regularly are:

• Debt Free or Bust
• Hurricane Katrina Pictures
• My Thirty Day Challenge 3.0 (this blog)
• On Being the Change I Wish to See

Four blogs are still too many to keep up with, but since this one and Debt Free or Bust are more personal journal blogs, I’ll only be working to produce pillar content for two blogs most of the time. That should be manageable.
Pillar content includes articles, reports, white papers, podcasts and videos.

I really want to do a couple of series articles on my Hurricane Katrina Pictures blog. There is a lot to write about the long-term consequences of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita from environmental damage to the human cost, and what such a disaster brought to light about poverty in America. I plan to get the first one written and published over winter break before tutoring gets going full force again in January.

written by joubess

I just finished reading Rich Schefren’s Attention Age Doctrine 2 free report. You can download it by clicking that link.

I believe Rich is right. The most valuable thing we have to spend today is our time. Time is now worth more than money. Getting our time in the form of our full, undivided attention is what is extremely valuable today. His thesis is we are all suffering from attention deficit, but it’s not a disorder. It is a lack of time to give our full attention to just about everyone and everything we do during our waking hours. We even sleep less so we have more of these partial attention hours.

The euphemism for it is multi-tasking, but in reality, it is not paying full attention to the multiple things we’re trying to get done at the same time. We need to stop buying the myth that we can multi-task successfully. Humans cannot multi-task in most areas of our lives successfully. We can invent machines that do things for us so we are free to perform another task, but we can’t actually write an article and talk on the phone at the same time without both the writing and conversation being negatively affected. We can’t cut the grass and play with the children at the same time. We can’t drive and read or watch TV at the same time, unless we’d like to cause an accident. We can’t perform experiments in the lab while attending meetings. We can usually walk and have a conversation at the same time, but we don’t walk much because it’s faster to drive. We can drive and have a conversation as long as that conversion isn’t a distracting or important one. Why? Because driving safely requires our full attention, and important conversations require our full attention.

Marketers of any kind who don’t realize this and change with this fact of modern life are going to find themselves shut out of peoples lives completely because we simply don’t have time for them anymore and we won’t tolerate their interruptions.

We all spend a great deal of effort guarding our precious time. We spend a lot of effort to limit the information overload we constantly experience. There is always too much to read, hear and see every day. We don’t want to spend a single second more than we have to on listening to, reading or watching advertising.

We have caller ID so we can block or ignore anyone we don’t want to spend the time to speak with (mostly telemarketers).

We have TiVO or DVR to save the TV shows we want to watch commercial-free, and we download subscription podcasts of our favorite radio shows to listen to them commercial-free because we don’t want to spend any of our time watching or listening to commercials. Commercials take up about 21 minutes of a 1-hour radio show. I have better things to do with that 21 minutes.

We have spam filters on our email accounts and pop-up blockers on our internet browsers. We have RSS feed readers so we can eliminate everything we don’t want to read accept that to which we subscribe. And if someone bores us or wastes our time, we may press the button to cancel that subscription in a heart-beat.

We drive through at fast food restaurants and eat while we’re driving. Some men shave while they drive. Some women apply make-up while they drive. Many of us talk on the phone while we drive. Being a distracted driver is dangerous no matter what the distraction, but we drive distracted anyway, and we add to the traffic problems in our cities with an increased number of accidents.

We cook meals while helping the children with homework. We have a conversation with our spouse while we empty the dishwasher just after we put a load of laundry into the washing machine. We read while we eat or while watching the news, or we ignore the TV news and read it online when we have a moment. We no longer watch much TV because it takes too much time. The shows we do watch are on our schedule or on our digital recording service.

Sitting down together as a family at the table for dinner is rare. It was the norm when I grew up.

It’s very hard for us to turn everything off, sit down together and talk to each other without an interruption. I don’t wonder why people have family problems or why friendships fall apart. Without attention to each other and effective communication, relationships fail.

Our work is less than our best if we don’t devote our full attention to each important work task. Sure, there are work tasks that don’t require our full attention, but the ones that do must receive it or suffer in quality. If that happens enough, we may lose our jobs to someone who can better manage to give his or her full attention to the tasks that require it.

I believe therapists make so much money because they provide the one thing we can’t seem to provide for ourselves, undivided attention for 50 minutes in a row.

Tutors make money because they provide uninterrupted attention for 55 – 60 minutes in a row on the subject in which the student is being tutored. Adults aren’t the only ones who are over-scheduled and stressed out. Our teens especially are negatively affected by an over-scheduled life. They enter adulthood already burned out.

Our attention is the most valuable thing we can give and get. So when someone takes the time to make you a gift or write you a letter (especially by hand) or send you a card in the mail or spends time talking with you one-on-one, think about how much attention that person was giving you. The item or act itself may not seem like much, but the attention they gave you is the greatest gift you can receive. Thus, we show someone how much we care about them by how much of our undivided attention we give to them.

When someone or something is really important to us, the most valuable thing we can give is our full, undivided attention to that person or thing.

Let’s filter out the distractions with all our tools and spend the time we do have fully engaged in whoever we’re with or whatever we’re doing that’s important to us. In simpler terms, we need to find the things in life that we say yes to, and eliminate everything that we say no to. And we need to stop feeling guilty about saying no. We need to turn down the rheostat on our lives. It will make everything in our lives better.

How does this tie in with my blogging efforts? I need to give my full, undivided attention for at least an hour or two each day to producing great content and marketing my blogs. If I don’t do that I won’t accomplish anything on creating an asset over time. By focusing for a relatively short period each day on two tasks, writing content and marketing it, it will pay off in a big way later. In 6 months I’ll have a significant amount of content and it will be consistently marketed. But if I remain unfocused and only write a little here and market a little there in a haphazard fashion, 6 months could go by without significant progress. I don’t want that to happen.

Does anyone or anything get our undivided attention? Yes, if we choose to give it.

written by joubess

I decided just a little while ago that Blog Mastermind is something that will help me increase my online income, improve my blogging and writing skills, and help me grow my blogs into real businesses. If you’re interested in a free report on earning a living blogging  you can download it here: Blog Profits Blueprint. It’s a pdf file and definitely worth the time to read it.

The thing that pushed me off the fence was the most recent video Yaro Starak released to promote Blog Mastermind. He reviews a student’s blog and makes suggestions for improving readability and for getting the blog from being stuck at a static number of subscribers to growing the number of subscribers again. It’s just under 20 minutes long and provides a wealth of information that anyone could use to improve his or her own blog without subscribing.

The thing that got me from a solid “no” to up on the fence was Yaro’s release of the free lesson, number 11. I watched the video and read along in the text and found a great deal of information that I am definitely interested in.

I’ve already paid for the Immediate Edge and Wealthy Affiliate for December, so I don’t have to decide which one I’ll drop for a couple of weeks. That will give me enough time to review the offerings of each program and make a thoughtful decision.

Tutoring is a little crazy right now because mid-term exams are coming up the week of December 17th, and many of my students are scheduling extra sessions along with regular sessions, so I have very little time over the next 11 days to do much else.

Since Blog Mastermind lessons are fairly compact (right about an hour), I feel I can manage one lesson a week or every few days even with such a busy tutoring schedule, depending on how often he sends new lessons. They come by email so you can’t skip ahead.

I’ll keep you updated on the lessons as they arrive. I won’t be divulging proprietary content, of course, but I will be writing about how the lessons are helping me improve my blogs and my income.

written by joubess