I love AutoFocus!

11:00 AM 11/27/10

I love AutoFocus and closed lists!

I'm reading Mark Forster's web page, and he has something called AutoFocus. He also uses something called closed lists. I love closed lists. Here is what you do.

When I write a to-do list, I never look at it again. I can't stand it. Looking at the list causes too much anxiety. The list is impossibly long. The more I try to do, and the more I think about it, the longer the list becomes. I keep adding things to it. It is infinite. It never ends. As soon as I start thinking of things to do, then there are infinity things to do. It's impossible. I can't even imagine where to start. And I *KNOW* that the list will never get done.

So you close off the first page of your list. You're going to look at that same page, over and over again, for days and days and days. You add other pages after it, but you don't worry about them. You keep writing new stuff at the end of the list, on the next page in the book, and then the next page after that, but who cares about all that new stuff. You're still stuck looking at the same first page over and over again.

If something is urgent and it has to be done, then, of course, do it. He says, use common sense, if you absolutely have to do something now, then do it of course. But this long, neverending, infinite list is the stuff that doesn't really have a deadline. It's stuff you want to do, but nobody is forcing you to do it. The IRS will come to your house and arrest you if you don't pay your taxes, but they won't do anything if you, for instance, never get around to that project of eating a healthier diet. Nobody will arrest you if you just don't bother to do that. So it gets put on the infinite to-do list.

You read this same first page every day.

I also took his suggestion of writing down a group of three, and only three, things that you absolutely will do today. They were three small things and I did get them done, yesterday. It was: fill out as much of a job application as I can (but there will be a few questions that are hard to answer, like, what is somebody's name or phone number that I've forgotten and I have to go find it); go take a picture of a contaminated item that I am thinking of throwing away, but I still have to touch-test it to see how bad my reaction to it is; and the last item was, mail off a letter to order something that I wanted to buy where I had to pay with a check. (That was 'Harvey Putter and the Ridiculous Premise.') They were three small things and I actualy did them yesterday.

Any small thing that gets done is better than zero. Usually, I do zero things. If I do *one* thing, that's better than zero.

Today, I was forced awake early in the morning, after not having slept very well. I don't sleep well, because of the drug residues, and because I am being attacked, and because my thin little foam cushion isn't very soft. (I don't mind the foam cushion very much if it has clean paper on it and if I'm not reacting to any chemicals. The drug reaction is the worst thing disrupting my sleep. I don't have control over the attackers though.) So I started my morning routine of lying awake, wishing I could get up and do something, wishing I could go back to sleep, tossing and turning, not being able to sleep, talking to the voices in my head, eating some leftovers from the fridge, taking a small fragment of a caffeine pill, taking another small fragment a little while later (and I don't have a coffeemaker anymore - it's on the infinite to-do list because there are some problems I was trying to solve first), and then, eventually, getting awake enough to start moving around.

So I picked up the notebook where I had written the infinite to-do list yesterday. Or I should say, where I STARTED writing the infinite to-do list.

I reread the first page. The items were familiar because I had already looked at them several times yesterday. It's the same list and it isn't getting bigger.

I noticed that there were several things that were too big or too vague. Some of those things had been suggestions from 'the voices,' because the voices always add things to my to-do list and they always add comments while I'm writing or talking to anyone.

If I'm 'searching for something to say' in a silence, that means that the voices are about to force me to say something that they want me to say. I am starting to believe that there is *no such thing* as 'searching for something to say' in a silence. There is only comfortable silence. I am starting to believe that 'uncomfortable silence' or 'awkward silence' does not exist. The awkwardness is fake and it means that 'they' are trying to force you to say something fake. It's like they're a radio station and they are required to avoid any 'dead air,' silence on the radio. Sometimes awkward silences are the time when you are supposed to feel close to somebody. You're supposed to feel comfortable and happy and at peace with them. Sometimes you're supposed to touch them.

Anyway, I expanded a few of the 'too big' items by writing a few of the necessary steps, or questions about them (What? How? Why?). I have one favorite item on the list and the autofocus seems to be on it. I'm starting to want to do that one particular thing. I had already decided on this a couple days ago anyway. I'm not sure if that is the item that's been chosen or not, but it's seeming that way. I wanted to set up the bookkeeping table again and start keeping track of my money.

What happened?

I taught myself bookkeeping, first by reading web pages, and later, by buying a Schaum's Outline and doing the whole book. I actually finished it! This is a huge achievement. I never finish anything. I dropped out of school. But I finished the Schaum's Outline of bookkeeping. And I started doing it for real, as though I was a small business. My life is a business. I had already read other books about money, years ago, like 'Your Money or Your Life.'

I had a contamination incident in my apartment. For a few weeks, the new apartment's carpet wasn't contaminated. But there were a few incidents of people walking in and breaking the rules. The landlady and the maintenance guy would walk right up the stairs, but you have to leave your shoes at the bottom of the stairs, because that's where I kept the shoes that were contaminated from having touched the floor of my car. I would walk barefoot up the stairs at first. I can't do that anymore, because now there are footprints going up the stairs, and I will have an ephedra reaction when I walk on those footprints.

The ephedra got up the stairs after a few incidents. Then it got walked around the floor of the whole apartment. I had my bookkeeping books on the floor in the family room. I had a bunch of papers and books spread out in one small place. They eventually touched some of the footprints on the carpet. After touching one thing and another, I got ephedra all over the books and papers. It only takes a couple molecules to have a severe reaction. So I would become extremely uncomfortable while trying to do the bookkeeping.

Every book that I buy eventually becomes contaminated, just like every piece of clothing I buy. So nowadays, everything I buy, I view it as disposable. I see everything as eventually going into the trash. So I don't buy unique items, sentimental items, or expensive items. The clothing is $0.29 Goodwill clothes, and I throw them away when they get contaminated. I wear the same thing again and again then eventually throw it away. Books are more expensive, and I try to avoid buying books, but every now and then, I can't resist buying some book. The Schaum's Outlines are a 'teaching' book, so after I learn what's in them, after I learn how to *do* something, it's okay to throw the book away because it's in my head now. I don't WANT to throw them away, but if I have to, it's no big deal. They are not unique books. It IS a waste of money, and I want to stop all of the contamination completely. But that's on my infinite to-do list. And I don't have control over the things that the murderers do. There is so much waste caused by the murderers. I'd have been able to get a lot more done if my sleep wasn't disrupted.

Anyway, the 'closed list' is what I'm enjoying about this experiment. I see the same things again and again, the same first page of the list. I'm not overwhelmed by the infinite list, but yet, my mind is reassured because when I think of something else, I can still add it to the end of the list, and I feel safe knowing that it's there and it's written down and I won't forget it. It's getting some of my attention just by being written down. And I scan that part of the list, the end, where the new stuff is, but I don't focus on it and I don't try to do it. I just look to see if anything urgent is in there.

I tried making a 'project workbook' a couple of times in the past. I got a three-ring binder and I used looseleaf pages and I wrote a separate page for each big project. Then I was supposed to write notes, and break it down into steps, and put dates for completion, and that kind of thing, in each separate 'chapter' of the workbook. I did that, but it was overwhelming. I liked writing the projects into the book, but I still couldn't bring myself to do any of them. There might still be a need to write down large complex projects someplace, but I still always need a 'to do list' made of small things instead of large complex things.

I have a big complex project: move out of this apartment, move out of ALL toxic apartments, move away from anyplace that uses pesticides. I strongly suspect that this latest outbreak of severe chronic fatigue was caused by the pesticides. We have these harmless little black and orange stinkbugs, and there were hundreds of them trying to get in the windows and crawling up the sides of the house. I'm not afraid of them. They've never stung me or bitten me. I don't think they do anything at all. Every year, a few times a year, the maintenance people will spray the apartment with pesticides. It happened at my other apartment too. I requested to my previous landlord that he NOT spray INSIDE my apartment, and he agreed not to. Every time they've sprayed, I've gotten deathly sick not just for weeks, but months. I don't think they sprayed inside my apartment this time, I think they only sprayed outside, but if it's just NEAR my apartment I get deathly ill for months. I'm pretty sure that's what happened this time. I was doing pretty well and then all of a sudden I was horrible. And it's right about when the stinkbugs appeared and they started spraying.

I HATE PESTICIDES. Pesticides cause face, jaw, tooth, and skull deformities, and other bone deformities. I believe that Weston Price didn't know the whole story. He thought it was only caused by nutritional deficiencies, but I believe that toxic environments in the modern life are one of the major causes of the deformities. Not the only cause, but a big one. The people on the Weston Price website know about it, though, and there are some articles about it, like the story about the deformed whitetail deer in Montana.

(*Disclaimer. There are things in the so-called 'Weston Price Diet' that are not safe. Nobody explains, for instance, that eating bone marrow will cause you to have the most severe food poisoning you've ever had in your life, that you'll be vomiting and passing out and fainting and it will go on for hours and hours, that you will feel the most terrible feelings you've ever felt because you are eating the hormones that come out of the bones whenever you have a severe injury, so you will feel the same sensations that you feel when you are severely injured, and the hormones act like a drug - nobody gave any kind of warning about that. I'm sure that eating other internal organs would do the same thing. I'm pretty sure that the native Americans were hoaxing him when they claimed that they ate the adrenal glands of the moose, and that if you ate a bunch of adrenaline, you'd drop dead, or you'd WISH you were dead, either way. People claim to eat bone marrow, but they might have some other way of cooking it, and whatever they're doing, it must destroy all the drug-like hormones that were in the marrow that I ate. And I only ate a little fragment of it. And there was no warning that the vapors from the cooked marrow would fill up the fridge and then land on all the other food and drinks, so that you would start vomiting again anytime you ate or drank anything out of the fridge. Once again, an obscure, esoteric, unknown warning that they never gave. I am now the world's expert on residues and vapors, whether I want to be or not, because nobody else seems to be talking about this on the internet. Anyway, if you try anything from the Weston Price diet, like internal organs, then try only a tiny piece, and then wait, like, twenty minutes, to see if you start vomiting or passing out or having hormone-drug effects. Everybody else believes that food poisoning is caused by bacteria and parasites, and they believe that's the only kind of food poisoning that exists, and nobody else knows about the poisoning from eating the hormones of the body.*)

Anyway, off topic. Back to the to-do list. Building a shield is on my to-do list too. I want to find out what I care most about when I'm blocked from being controlled by the murderers. What would I want to do if they couldn't tell me what to do?

I'm going to post this now.