Author: Lynn

  • Aren’t these just affirmations?

    Aren’t these just affirmations?

    Sure. Affirmations are messages to ourselves advocating things we want, repeated many times. That’s exactly what we’re doing. But 21st century technology gives us tools to do it really, really well. The idea was first introduced by a French psychologist named Emile Coue in the 1920’s. What has changed a great deal in 80-plus years…

  • How to rotate text ads with The Quote gadget

    How to rotate text ads with The Quote gadget

    This technique uses a gadget called The Quote to display one- or two-sentence ads to yourself throughout the day. The Quote is a great tool for displaying advertising concepts that are more verbal than visual. Like the Photos gadget, it lets us use the power of repetition – one of the tools advertisers use on…

  • How to rotate picture ads with the Google Photos gadget

    How to rotate picture ads with the Google Photos gadget

    This is the article the whole gadget series has been building up to. As I said before, The Google Photos gadget is my favorite method for delivering ads to myself. It’s designed to display a slide show of images on your desktop, from whatever source you choose, and rotate them as frequently as you want.…

  • How to use Google Sidebar and Gadgets

    How to use Google Sidebar and Gadgets

    In the last article in this series I showed you how to install Google Desktop so we could get the very cool Google Sidebar, which is the container for the even cooler Google Gadgets. This article describes how to configure the Sidebar, how to use Gadgets, and how to customize your Sidebar by getting more…

  • Motivate yourself with an image collection

    Motivate yourself with an image collection

    Collages are a very low-tech/high return method of advertising to ourselves. I think one reason they are so effective is that the time you devote to cutting and pasting your collage is a moving meditation on your goal. Collages also employ the basic principles that many of our methods are based on: * Find images…

  • How to install Google Desktop

    How to install Google Desktop

    Google’s widget engine is buried inside a larger application called Google Desktop. Google Desktop is an application whose primary purpose is to index every document, photo and email message on your computer, and make that material searchable for you. Regardless of whether you think making all of your documents searchable is a good idea, I…

  • Widgets and gadgets and klips (oh my!)

    Widgets and gadgets and klips (oh my!)

    Desktop widgets and gadgets are really useful for personal advertising because they can display your ads in your peripheral vision while you are working. One of best methods I’ve discovered for advertising to myself is to set up a widget with a little slideshow of rotating pictures and position it in the corner of my…

  • Rotate your ads with a screensaver slideshow

    Rotate your ads with a screensaver slideshow

    We are wired to notice when the visual landscape changes, since that shift may be providing information about something that is coming to eat us. In the natural world, change often equals danger. Once we have determined that everything is OK, we no longer need to pay as much attention to our surroundings until something…

  • Refrigerator makeover update: who could say no to that face?

    Refrigerator makeover update: who could say no to that face?

    The thing that really made the refrigerator ads pop is adding a huge, adorable photo of our dog. What that did was move the vacation photos from foreground to background, and I think that’s good. Instead of the conscious mind weighing the pros and cons of vacation logistics, time off, air travel, etc – in…

  • Unexpected results

    Unexpected results

    Last week I wrote about making a virtual model of improvements I want to make to my front yard, and about how spending time “there” has helped me experience a future in which those changes have already happened. I also saved a picture of the model as my computer’s desktop background, and since then I…