Here's the best advice I've heard lately

From a page on the columbia.edu website: Read Strunk and White, Elements of Style. Again. My kind patron, Joe Coppick, and I got into a friendly Facebook war about Strunk and White last year, but regardless, I think I'm gonna keep on using an active voice, engaging in solid parallelism and omitting needless words until they pry the last dried up pen from my dead and wizened claws.

Oooh. I just really like this: A brief guide to life.

The brief guide:

less TV, more reading

less shopping, more outdoors

less clutter, more space

less rush, more slowness

less consuming, more creating

less junk, more real food

less busywork, more impact

less driving, more walking

Read more: breathe. | zen habits

GTD the Erica way

I've been sharpening up my systems for getting stuff done lately and thought I'd share a little bit of the latest iteration of my productivity system because I think it's cool, especially for people who, like me, have lots of thoughts and ideas and only a little teeny bit of RAM those thoughts in at any given second.

I like the bucket approach of GTD - essentially one bucket to rule all thoughts. That bucket, in my case, is a handy dandy voice recorder that avoids the little slips of paper that are a/my bane and b/my utter downfall. The voice recorder captures everything: phone numbers, ideas, books to read, grocery items, even the atta-girls I file in a list I refer to when I need a pick-me-up (lots of writers keep those lists. It can be a lonely, thankless profession). To make the voice recorder capture system work well, I download the notes every morning as I'm planning my day.

My to-dos (sorted by tags like @computer, @errands, @house) and someday/maybes live in .txt documents on my computer which I can open or reactivate with hotkeys. To that list, I've added, on a 'Let's see how this goes basis', a gotta-do list, which essentially holds the stuff that needs to happen today. Items on the gotta-do list need to have time-limits to a/create urgency and b/avoid the pitfalls of  Parkinson's Law which states that any task will expand to fill whatever time's allotted to it. Leave it open ended and you can find yourself spending all day on one stinking 300-word profile. For me, the most important attribute of the gotta-do list is that I actually plan it for the next day so I can hit the ground running, ideally with a writing project, before delving into email or other web-based delights.

The one challenge I'm finding right now is syncing my lists from my laptop to netbook and back. So far, I'm just being strict with myself and sticking to one computer or the other rather than moving back and forth. An online solution would fix this, but it wouldn't be as fast as calling up my .txt docs and I don't always have online access and am not anxious for my system to break down when I lack it.

For projects, I use system I developed while working at the South County Spotlight: a flip steno pad with the name of the project highlighted in the upper left corner of the page. The power of paper is that I can easily scan through projects for next tasks and write down ancillary notes and tasks and put x's next to the tasks I've completed and o's next to what I couldn't accomplish for whatever reason, , creating a record of what has and hasn't happened. When the project's done, I just tear out the paper, and stash it with whatever notes and paper the project generated. On my computer, meanwhile, I use the same project name on the associated folder so all project collateral is easy to locate for later reference.

What's your system? Drop a line/comment/tweet and let me know.

Learning to love myself, one plate at a time

It's an August Sunday morning and I'm in a strange house – the kind that was built in the 1800's but remodeled in the 1970's to bring in more of the blue Portland light through wood-framed skylights and bay windows. There's a pot of steel-cut oats bubbling on the stove, hot tea steeping and a pan of eggs getting ready to be an omelet. I text my friend Kyle, who's upstairs, "Hungry?".

This is me now. Six months ago, I couldn't really have fathomed cooking well in my own kitchen, much less taking the show on the road.

For years, I've known my diet was out of control. I'm a skinny, active bitch, so the only implications were internal - mood, health, aging. But even if no one could see it really, it was there, this thing where I knew what was good for me and not and I wasn't remotely acting on it.

Instead, I happily ate crap. Or I spurned eating because I felt like I needed to work and the idea of stopping made me anxious. The idea of self-care seemed indulgent. And while I didn't want to take care of myself, give me people to cook for and everything changed - garden feasts for 30? No problemo. I've always been able to do for others, to dote on them and to nurture them in ways I'd couldn't do for myself.

But then, back in July, everything changed. My doctor told me that I had to take some pills and spend six weeks eating a certain way to get rid of a candida infection. I took the prescription and filled it. And then decided to wait, wait for the cake we had in honor of my mother, wait past a couple of weeks of meals out that I didn't want to have to manage so closely.

One day, though, I didn't have any excuses left. I still wasn't ready but I had the bottle of pills - a 21-day course - and I popped the first one and thought to myself "Well, here goes."

Three weeks later, maybe I should be feeling different. I couldn't maintain the diet in the carb-free mode required because I was losing too much weight, so suddenly I went from the ultra-strict candida diet to a version where I merely was eating sanely and conscientiously. And that struck me as fine, too, even if the initial purpose of the diet was somewhat mitigated. After all, I reasoned, maybe a sane diet is just as good as a crash diet for restoring health.

Probably, I figure, it's better.

I keep eating this way because it's healthy - lots of vegetables, meat, whole grains and no preservatives or processed food to speak of — and because it intrigues me. Mostly I do it because it feels like a superpower to pass up the sugar and cheese that I always assumed I could never live without. Without them, I get to experience the subtlety of the food I eat, the textures and the colors. I get to notice what it's like to feel my feelings when I don't grab a slice of cake or cheese dip or a vat of macaroni and cheese to drown my sorrows. And I have to eat even when my grief tells me it's not hungry.

I'm investing time and money into myself to eat well. I'm no longer eating as an afterthought, cobbling together calories by the seat of my pants when it occurs to me that I'm on the edge of another round of low blood sugar, but rather having to think my meal plans through, early in the day. I have to eat more than just once or twice because my meals are no longer as calorically dense as they once were. The salads I eat are as big as my head and a project to eat. But I find myself looking forward to that project.

It is, I admit, a weird hobby.

I ran across a book at the store today: Women Food and God. Not anything too special, but its thesis intrigued me - that how we relate to life and what we believe about the nature of God is mirrored by how we relate to the food on our plates.

How I relate to food has changed radically in the last few weeks. It shifted more or less easily. And that makes me wonder: what changed in me or my life that made it possible to relate to food with more care, to love myself through what's on my plate? What made it possible for me to start taking time to nurture myself after years of refusing to do so?

How and why have I changed?

One more thing to keep me on my game

Having written for lots and lots of life coaches over the years, I'm probably a wee bit more cynical about life coaches than the typical coaching neophyte — particularly when the phrase "Law of Attraction" crops up. And still, when life coach Silver Rose's newsletter arrives in my box, I always crack it open with a bit of anticipation.

Her words often remind me to sharpen my game, especially in the worry department. One trick I use is to let worry or anxiety be a trigger for me to refocus on a scene (hearing it, feeling it, seeing it) that represents a best possible outcome diametric to my worry.

Click here to check out Silver Rose's Blog and sign up for her newsletter