It's been awfully quiet here in last two weeks. Mostly because it was awfully busy pretty much everywhere else. Being a single parent, even for a short and definite period of time is pretty demanding task. Now when my wife is back from the trip overseas, I do not spend my mornings and evening in various skating rinks, I am slowly catching up on everything that got backlogged, delayd and so on. Starting with my project and progressing slowly through my reading list, lot's of downloaded podcasts and LBNL (last but not least) the blog.

To speed up the catching up process, I am going to use excellent method from Steve Pavlina - the 30 day challenge. If you do not know http://www.stevepavlina.com/, put aside an hour or two from your browsing time and check the content - it is worth it.

The 30 day method in a nutshell, is:

" ... concept I borrowed from the shareware industry, where you can download a trial version of a piece of software and try it out risk-free for 30 days before you’re required to buy the full version."

How this applies to personal development is a psychological trick that removes the barrier of overwhelming challenge. Rather than committing yourself to something really hard - like going to the gym every day, you take on the "shareware trial" and agree that you will try to exercise just for 30 days and after that time you can stop, and still claim full success. There are two possible outcomes: either you discover that you really hate exercise and will indeed stop - and still feel great because you have achieved your goal. Or you will find out that being active makes you actually feel much better, that time spent in gym is no big deal and will move on exercising ... read more on Steve's blog. I can confirm that this approach works for me - I tried it this summer and really liked doing it (and no, it was NOT about exercise ;-)).

But back to the challenge: I am going to try post a blog entry daily for next 30 days, starting from November 17th until (pretty much) Christmas. I think I have enough ideas :-) for the trial - and will start with the Firefox extensions. Rather than doing a yet-another-list of Firefox extensions, I am going to concentrate on personal experience from working with that extension: what I believe is great about it, what is missing and make some suggestions for improvements or new features. Any bets how it will end ?