This is my first post. I’m going to intentionally leave the title as “Hello world!” and see how that goes.

Today is Friday, and it has been quiet around the office. This is always a welcome break from the action that affords me the opportunity to focus in on some of those highly important, yet completely non-urgent quadrant two tasks (such as build my personal website!)

In case you’re not familiar, quadrant two refers to Covey’s time management matrix, which is explained rather well in this article.

Friday has become special to me in a new way recently. It’s become a day of reflection. As the aging and busy brain buzzes along, there aren’t a ton of extra resources to devote to documenting my biography mentally. (Read: I can’t remember a damn thing!) I’m not really a journal writer, but I love the idea of keeping a record of what happens in my life.

So every Friday at 4:30, I say to my team:

“Congrats on another exciting week! Please post your major wins and elaborate on their impact.”

And then occasionally, I’ll chime in with…

You may be asking yourself, “Why is this Wes guy so annoying about making us post our major wins each week?” Well the reason is this: I’m trying to give you more major wins to post about. Everybody knows the old cliche “practice makes perfect.” Research has shown that if we practice scanning our lives for victories, no matter how big or small, we will get better at identifying the opportunities that lead to those victories. This will inevitably lead to more victories in our lives. This is how we create our own “good luck!”

I’m excited about this website, which of course will serve as a tool for documenting my biography in a much more reliable way than just hoping I remember stuff.

I’ve learned that except for in rare cases, the human brain isn’t really all that good at remembering the innumerable details of our lives – at least not ACCURATELY. The brain is more of a tool for predicting the future based on what it deems the most important bits and pieces of past experiences. Unless you’re one of those rare humans with an eidetic or photographic memory, there are much more appropriate tools for remembering things exactly as they were.

Some of my personal favorites include

• Evernote – ideas, SOP’s, checklists, and other documentation can be stored in evernote quite easily. They are then accessible from any of my computers or mobile devices. I can even share folders with my team and collaborate on notes.
• Facebook – photos, videos, commentary, and just about any other relevant or completely irrelevant thing you can think of. I started using facebook heavily to share photos of my kids growing up with my Mom and other family members out of state. It’s a bit of a pain to go back and find a specific memory, but it has definitely become a substantial tome containing thousands and thousands of mementos from the past 10 years of my life.
• Youtube – admittedly, I have not been as active this year as I have in the past, but posting videos and setting them to “unlisted” allows me to share them with my family via email, without them coming up in search results and being viewed by the rest of the world. To me, videos are much more intimate than photos, and I typically don’t wish to share home videos with every single person on my facebook friends list. I’m sure they appreciate that. It has become a New Year’s Eve tradition to watch home movies in our youtube year in review.
• This blog – I plan to use this website as a central place for sharing and compiling my reflections, expressions, ideas, and ramblings.

Now let’s go do something worth remembering 🙂

Have a great weekend!