The toughest nears its end

Howdy! Here I am on a bright Monday morning, enjoying my pomodoro technique counter and good music. It's been a crazy last few days and the madness continues in more exciting as I am announcing Legend Fighting Championship 2 this Thursday! Boy I am nervous and excited. Nervous because this is getting to be a bigger and bigger deal! Excited because, dude, announcer, mixed martial arts, need I say more?!
So check this out, you know how I love productivity and I'm going to refine, refine, refine my systems/process till it's perfect (ie. never) and guess what, in some ways I'm getting there. Right now, when I get a simple thought of something, I've made it dead easy for me to add it to my to do list inbox. Now that sounds great right? Wait till 9pm when I have to clear my inbox. Now one may think oh some of your ideas may not seem so interesting by then. To avoid myself from easily discarding ideas that may be a diamond in the rough, when processing my inbox, I tell myself I do not need to do any of these, even if it's a less-than-2-minutes task so I can at least process my inbox first. Now, after processing, I'm down with more new to do's in my list of things to achieve each day. The biggest issue is that this process has become so efficient that I out produce myself very often. Because many of my sudden ideas (eg. buy bananas) are good ideas that can be achieved, I end up never ever having an empty to do list! Not to mention my daily recurring tasks (eg. updating rootein.com) :P Sometimes, oddly, I look forward to 9pm just so I can do my daily routine work and get it out of the way heh.
So I've been having a tough time finding good background music to work with, I'm sick of Buddha Bar and have been trying all sorts of other stuff, from white noise, to rain water, to percussion music. They're good but none last as long as Buddha Bar did because after a couple of hours, the songs start to repeat and I notice and that's when I get bored of it :P Yes, I'm fussy.
So I went to go watch Chicago last week. Good stuff! Reminded me of my broadway experience while I was in New York. But I have to say Phantom of the Opera still wins for me. Hmm, actually, that'd be a good choice of songs to listen to while working *changes tracks*. Ahhh good stuff, love this sound track.
So the last 10 days has seen me go from having to wake up at 6:30am for an MC gig to stressing the crap out of myself for a recent one because it was to be a very formal gig. I realize the more and more I do it, the better I get at certain phrases one would say. Also, the gap between my English and Chinese MC is quite big really. I guess with English because I know how to be very formal, it comes easy, but with Chinese, some of the formal terms are so new to me, I literally just memorize the sound of the words and say it.... heh. Guess improve formal cantonese has to go on my to do list? :P
Alright, hitting the last 5 minutes of my focus session and I just want to say hey everyone we're hitting 50% of 2010! It's a good time to stop and go hmmmmmm? I know I did and it sure as hell helped a lot, at least I wake up every morning knowing what I need to do with myself and charge through my day immediately, I don't like sitting there while I'm refreshed going hmm? I've come to realize the best time to assign (and only assign) tasks is when your day is pretty much over and you're just assigning tasks for the next day. The reason is because I know I'm not going to do it now and I'm going to bed soon so I'll get some rest, so I'm happily to honestly assign a set of things to get done the next day. When I wake up, boom do do do do done! You should try that too, before we hit July, it's a good time to write out all the things you wanted to get done this year and tell yourself "I only need to start in July" and what may happen is that you want to give yourself a headstart and so you may start working at them at the end of June! Technically you're already late since we're in June! Not January! But this psychological trick does work, you feel ahead of the game. That ahead of the game feeling makes a biiiiiiiiiiig difference to your chance of achieving. I read an article about waking up early and how that ahead of the game feeling forces you to keep achieving because you want to stay ahead rather than just catch up. Sure I used to wake up at 6am and really feel that, but now my ahead of the game comes from simply being on task with my own schedule and workload :)
In 10 days, it'll be 1 July 2010! Let's rock it out!