If you want to be in the drawing for a copy of the DVD that goes along with The Spark, please:

• Do something you’ve been putting off for a while
• Leave a comment saying what you did here or on the original post.

It’s that simple. From the comments I have received by midnight EST on Mar 4, 2010, I will randomly select a winner to receive the DVD.

I am a procrastinator. I don’t know if the cause lies in perfectionism, being overwhelmed, or just being unmotivated. The end result is the same: I put things off.

However, I have found the great boost of energy that comes from doing something I’ve been putting off.

A Challenge For You

Today, I’d like to challenge you to find this boost of energy too.

Take one thing that you have been putting off, and do it. I don’t care how large or small it is. Just do it.

The Reward

Here’s something to get you motivated: leave a comment on this post about what you did and I will randomly select one person to receive a copy of “The Spark: Fit, Firm and Fired Up” DVD (US format). (This is the companion video to The Spark) Make sure to leave a valid email address. Comments can be entered until midnight, EST on 4 Mar 2010.

I'm very excited, being the geek that I am, to show off the new theme and style for SimpleProducitivityBlog. It's the culmination of weeks of hard work, and learning a new programming language by example.

If you're reading this on the RSS feed or email (thank you for subscribing!) head over to Simple Productivity Blog for a look around.

As always, I am interested in what you have to say!

Photo by Wagner Machado Carlos Lemes

And it occurred to me that since I know that life can be different, I am no longer willing to settle for slogging.

I realized that I wanted to have a hand in how my life looks and works. I want to be the designer for my life. I want to decide how I spend my time, as much as possible, eliminating all the time and mind clutter that has been thrust upon me.

This blog’s unspoken purpose, to me, has always been to share ways to simplify my life and be as productive as possible. I simplify and practice productivity so I can get back to doing what I want to do.

I also realized that I read a lot of blogs that deal with Life Hacking, or tips to make things run smoother. I’ve been frustrated with this, thought, because no matter how many tips I followed, nothing substantially improved in my life. That’s because if my life isn’t working well underneath, no amount of hacks will help. This is kind of like a computer program: if you take a program that was written to be a calculator, no amount of bells and whistles sloppily added later are going to make it a good drawing program. It has to be designed that way.

With that in mind, I decided a little housecleaning and reorganization is going to be necessary.

What you can expect at SPB. I will still maintain my posting schedule. But included in the mix will be life design articles, life hack articles, and other miscellaneous things. Life hacks will be included because they are the icing on the cake, and really do play into getting back to what I want to do. However…

I will strive not to parrot life hacks that I see on other sites. Anything you see here are things that I actually do, unless stated otherwise.

I will show you how I am designing my life as it unfolds. This means the thought processes, the reasons, the actions, and the successes and failures. It will also bring more life design articles to your attention as I seek out further information.

I will still cover productivity topics, although probably not the nuts and bolts of specific systems that I have written in the past. Since I believe no one system will work for everyone, I will probably continue to dissect the methods to get them down to the principles that can be applied to life design.

The sister blog, LauraEarnest.com will be going away. The site itself will stay up until early 2010, but I won’t be producing new content. I was struggling to stay interested in writing the topics over there. I realized that all the topics I was interested in would morph into life design and life hacks.

I will continue to do book and product reviews, but these will be directly applicable to my life. If I have been asked to review a product, I will state that up front.

I hope you will enjoy this new adventure as much as I do!

Photo by fdecomite

I am sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused anyone, and I will work on monitoring the blog a bit closer to ensure outages won’t be so long in the future.

Thanks to everyone for participating. Please keep commenting on the articles here. It gives me ideas of what you would like to read about.

Comment on the post to be eligible for one of two sets of two FileIt Boxes.

Contest winners will be announced tomorrow.

Prize: a set of two File It Boxes, as reviewed on File It Box Review.

Number of Winners: One

How To Enter: Leave a comment on this post about something you would like to see covered on SimpleProductivityBlog. Make sure to leave a valid email address in the comment posting (which only I can see).

How the winners will be chosen: The contest will be open for one week, starting from 6:00 AM EDT on 4/18/2009 to midnight on April 24, 2009 EDT. All comments with email addresses will be put into a hat and two names will be drawn. Contest winners will be announced on a post on 4/25/2009, and winners will be contacted via email.